Avsnitt
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Back in the mists of time, the Brussels Shakespeare Society put on a play at a theatre in the Schaarbeek district of the town that was, at least then, known as the Scarabaeus. A scarab is an Egyptian good-luck charm, except in the case of this theatre. It is council-owned but was then leased out to a theatrical two-hander, the principal player in which was the wife, whose name was (not) Hippolyta.
Image: the stage door to the Scarabaeus Theatre, Schaarbeek.
Hippolyta had something of a reputation among amateur theatre companies in the city, although I myself had never encountered the woman and wouldn’t have known her from the Queen of the Amazons. That was until I became a set-builder on a play being done by a group of Hispanics. One director of my acquaintance had advised that she needed treating with kid gloves and that he had experienced some awkwardness with her, but had always managed to get what he needed from her, besides her sass.
During the run of the play initially referred to above, the theatre’s management had contrived to lock a door that offered access to the far side of the stage, which they did during the actual performance. Actors piled out of the dressing room, only to find their path to the correct wing of the stage barred by this locked door. The management advised that this passageway to the far wing of the stage had not been included in the rental agreement and that use of it was therefore not allowed, failing any compensation for the facility. The Society was annoyed, shall we say.
My own familiarity with the theatre, besides a couple of miscellaneous events that I attended there, came just before Covid, when I was asked to build the set for that play put on by a Spanish theatre company—the classical El anzuelo de Fenisa (Fenisa’s Hook) written in 1617 by Lope de Vega. Part of the set would comprise a couple of magicians’ boxes, essentially two flats turning on their vertical axis, but given depth for solidity, in case someone bumped into them. To add stability, a small, offset door was incorporated into one side whereby bricks could be placed into it, thus considerably lowering its centre of gravity. It was a cool design and was very ably decorated by a brilliant Rumanian artist I knew, who produced magnificent decor on these very simple-looking but carefully designed constructions. One scene was depicted on one face, and another scene on the other face, with the sides simply being painted black, since they depicted nowhere. When it came to assembling the boxes, on the day of the dress rehearsal, it was discovered that our Rumanian friend had inadvertently painted the incorrect side of the panel with the door cut into it: it could not be reversed because of the door being offset to one side. “No matter,” I said, “before the cast arrive for the first performance tomorrow, I will come in early and paint the unpainted side panel the requisite black colour.”
Come the next day, the management of the theatre asked me what I was intending doing.
“Just painting this panel,” said I, and I explained why, with a cheery smile.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” came the reply.
“Oh?” I queried.
“You’re not opening a pot of paint in my theatre.”
“I will put down a dust sheet, no worry,” I said.
“No.”
“Then open the rear stage door and I will take the scenery out onto the street and paint it there.”
“No. I’m not opening the door and letting the heat out.”
At this point, I started to count to ten, but, unfortunately, only reached eight (I’ll leave out the expletives).
“For a week, we have been treading on eggshells to avoid crossing you or annoying you or doing anything that might be against your written and unwritten rules, and we have taken every care to make sure we smile and are pleasant and say good morning and good afternoon and goodbye and, quite honestly, you’re the same old cantankerous gorgon that you ever were, and we did it all for nothing.”
The show’s director swiftly intervened and said it would be better if I left, with which I complied. I don’t know if the scenery ever got painted as it should be, but what I considered righteous anger in his, not my, behalf was taken by him as upsetting his applecart. It was far better to not paint the scenery for his play than to upset the theatre manager. Even with the fact that a huge amount of very hard work had gone into producing these boxes, transporting them, erecting them, painting them, nobody was interested that the builder’s pride was clearly less meritworthy than the demands of the people who’d done nothing more creative towards the production than leasing out the space in which to perform the play. The story doesn’t stop there.
I would later be refused a part in another play by the first-named theatre group, on the grounds that it was to be performed at the self-same theatre; I was even asked not to buy a ticket to come and see it. Shortly after that other play had been performed, Hippolyta was evicted from the building by the council, on grounds of mismanagement of the premises. I had not been the only one to have an issue with her administrative techniques. But others in the amateur dramatic circles deemed it far more important to acquiesce in Hippolyta’s unreasonableness than to risk them not being able to rent the theatre from her at all (not even for ready money, as Wilde’s Merriman might’ve said).
These episodes demonstrate a conflict of paradigms. Some will take a stance that avoids all and any disruption because, in a small and tight-knit community, disruption is undesirable. Yet, unfortunately, there are those who precisely recognise that disruption is indeed unwanted and, being in a position of influence or control, are therefore able to set stumbling blocks and hindrances and yet never incur any true wrath by those who are inconvenienced, because the stick in the mud has a broad discretion to exercise, to which it is deemed to be in everyone else’s best interests to submit.
Disruptors, as many are perceived, call out injustices to appellate instances which, then, to the consternation of all, simply endorse perverse exercise of the prerogative. One comes to realise that complaining and protesting, far from achieving change, bring only exclusion for the protester, whose calls are unlikely to fall on the ears of anyone with any power to heed them: they are preferably silenced rather than being allowed to continue to disrupt in a manner that, in any event, others perceive as being in vain. The current student protests are a classic case in point, with somewhat graver consequences than my own being barred from an Egyptian-inspired theatre.
A year ago and more, a Russian mercenary gave a frank online interview describing in enough detail to shock how he and his comrades in arms had gathered together Ukrainian civilians in a sports centre in Ukraine and then sprayed them with bullets. They included men, women and small children aged five and less. They were all sprayed with gunfire until the cries ceased. When asked why he had complied with the order to do this, he replied that the orders had been given by Yevgeny Prigozhin and that failure to comply would not have in any way prevented the slaughter, but simply added him who refused to the final tally of the dead.
There are many definitions of what constitutes democracy, and democracy can take on a whole variety of forms. We have the philosophical definitions of freedom and equality as given by Plato and we have modern parliamentary democracy in European nations or under the American constitution, and even under questionable regimes like Zimbabwe, the Russian Federation and Iran. It can be difficult to discern which regimes are democratic and which are not.
But, when push comes to shove, the test of a democracy can transpire to be remarkably simple. It is whether the ordinary citizen, when commanded to do something by the ruling authority is entitled honestly to ask the person in command to tell him why. If authority can respond in a manner that goes beyond because it’s the law—even supposing it can do that—by explaining the rationale for the law and why the law is a good law, then, one has at least the beginnings of a democracy. But if because it’s the law is followed by enforcement of that law—even by violent means, Brobdingnagian in their execution—those who cast ballots in elections must question why they bother to play their role in a drama with such flimsy decor. And, if democracy is what we actually want, the time has, at that point, come for revolution.
Either that, or you’re simply barred from the show.
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Suppose we didn’t know why there are ructions at university campuses. Not suppose that they were having a food strike (which we did at school, and which I wrote about here), but let’s suppose we just didn’t know what the trouble was. That we’d never heard of Israel, or Gaza, or sliced white bread. What, then, would you think about what’s happening at Yale, and Columbia, and elsewhere at this time?
Go ahead: you are hereby freed from the constraints of having to judge the issue itself. You have no responsibility to judge the merits of the occupations and the encampments and the sit-ins. What is your judgment of how they are being dealt with?
Is it that protest is futile, so that to protest anything is wrong? What, then, if you received £5 less in your change than you ought to? Is it worth protesting then? Or should you simply accept that short-changing is part of life and you must acquiesce in it? I was short-changed five cents this week; I protested, and got my five cents. It was very amicable and an apology was given. It was only five cents, but they were mine, not the shop’s. Sometimes justice is easy to discern. No police were called.
Is the decision to call the police dependent on the severity of the protest, or is it dependent on other factors, like the loudness of the chanting? The vehemence of the violence? The damage to tender young shoots of grass on lawns? The loss in stock market value of whatever loses stock market value when such protests take place?
What about the decision to arrest people who use nothing but their voice to protest (aside from the unfortunate damage to pristine lawns)? Is it justifiable to arrest people for voicing their protest, or for marching? Or for just being there? For voicing their protest in the form of silent placards? Maybe we should just protest and not say why we protest. That way, no one is embarrassed. But then people would ask, would they not, “What are you protesting about?” Then, if they were told what the people are protesting about, that should be the point at which a criminal offence is committed. Would that make more sense? In Russia, they hold up pieces of white paper with nothing on, and still get arrested.
A young Jew was arrested in the UK for displaying a placard that said Jews Against Genocide. When that resulted in him being taken in by the police, he asked, “Would it have been more acceptable if the placard had read Jews In Favour Of Genocide?” to which the police officers had no answer but to treat him even more roughly.
If the students of America, and elsewhere, it must be added, are slowly, but surely, realising the inane conundrum they are living through (and growing into), the irony lies in the fact that they are being constrained in the expression of their dismay and disgust with powers that they cannot otherwise hope to influence, on a matter of conscience, by law enforcement agencies who themselves have no answer to the logic arraigned against them by those they arrest for offences that have, in many cases, not been committed or that do not even exist.
And, it is at that point that the debate between the educator and the educated ceases to be limited to the educational institution, for it is now a debate that implicates us all. Not all of us are protesters, but all of us do protest at some time or another, as my small change dispute demonstrates. And not all of us evoke protest, but the divide is opening up wide between those who aspire to a position whereby insouciance towards others is a core element of that position, and those who aspire to the position whereby protest against the insouciant is, for them, a core value. In the 1990s, clothing trends between the generations narrowed to the point where a success story arose in malls around the globe: The Gap. Sweatshirts aside, and 30 years on, a new Gap is establishing itself, and it will not be closed with just a drawstring.
It is the agencies called upon to restrain the protests that are failing to understand their complicity as tools of the authors of circumstances which youth has banded together to oppose. The agencies of law enforcement comply without question on an, at most, questionable legal basis to perform, not the will, but the whim of established authority, under laws cast so widely that you’re guilty if we say so. Laws for the facilitation of elimination. Some comply with the command to enforce with a reticence that, at least, is creditable. Others do so with a venom that recalls the Nuremberg defence of I was only following orders. Aye, some may just follow orders, and others champ at the bit, waiting for the orders, adherence to which they will later brush from themselves, as Pilate washed his hands after the flogging.
And that is why the cause of the protest is now no longer of core relevance. It is the reaction of the law enforcers that should concern, not just the college young, but the broad gamut of our societies. Our right to remain silent is becoming an obligation.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Let me tell you something: every morning, I go outside to one of the three water butts I have positioned around my house that collect rainwater off the roof. I fill two watering cans and carry them inside to the downstairs loo. And, when I want to flush the loo, I fill the cistern with my rainwater.
It saves water. In fact, rainwater collects beneath my driveway in a concrete structure holding 3,000 litres, or 800 gallons US, and the intention is at some point to install a pump in order to more easily access that water: they cost about 50 euros. I’ve learned that we must conserve water. Not splash it around—take showers instead of baths, and close the tap whilst brushing our teeth. The concern is that water is a valuable resource, and, what’s more, it costs. Around here it costs me 100 euros a quarter. If I can use water off the roof, then that cuts down the water I need to purchase. It takes a couple of minutes to fetch the water and, even if I’m on my own and my name isn’t Henry, I hear the voice of Odetta in her classic 1961 duet with Harry Belafonte: Henry, fetch the water! I can always spare a couple of minutes for some nostalgia, but, most of all, fetching the water is a Cast Away moment for me.
In the movie Cast Away (note the split between the words: Tom Hanks’s character wasn’t simply a castaway, he was in fact cast away, by the woman he had loved), we, along with his companion, a football named Wilson, accompany Hanks in excruciating detail as he tries, and finally manages, to make fire on his Pacific desert island. When he succeeds, he bounds with mighty joy and declares himself a master of the elements, dancing a dance of victory. It’s a little bit amusing, until, that is, we think ourselves into the situation. Alone, unknowing of the future, learning to survive, needing to survive, needing to invent fire: wouldn’t you, too, have danced?
When Hanks escapes back to civilisation, his company, FedEx, holds a reception for him. As the festivities end, everyone recedes outside and Hanks is left for a second alone in the party-strewn room. He spots a candle lighter on the table and lifts it in his hand. He regards the end of the stick with an air of irony, as he pulls its little plastic button. Out of the end pops a flame. It is that easy. Click. Flame. Click. Flame.
I collect rainwater for my toilet because I can, because it makes economic sense and because it has a practical aspect to it. But especially: it has a pedagogic purpose for me—it costs me very little to know the hardships of others. Some, on desert islands, collect rainwater because they must. And there are some who have no water to collect, either from the sky or from a standpipe. When you flush, think on that: three gallons of water, down the toilet, literally. That’s one heavy watering can’s worth. A functioning waste disposal system, with well maintained sewers. You know, what you whisk down the loo will soon be concrete? That’s what they do with poo: they build skyscrapers and country piles.
Thames Water is a private English water company that is now threatened with nationalisation, after being privatised in the 1980s. They were sold off, earned handsome dividends for shareholders for 40 years, seemingly underinvested, so that 25 per cent of their water was lost through mains breakages, and now overflow 17,000 litres of untreated sewage into London’s River Thames each day. Some of the Oxford and Cambridge University rowers, who compete annually in skulls on the river, went down with e-coli infections after this year’s race. There are parts of the world where people don’t die from boat racing in such pollution, but from having to drink it.
So, go fetch the water every now and then, and have your very own Cast Away moment. Realise how inconvenient it is to have to step outside in order to flush a toilet. And think how inconvenient it would be if the water poured no more: if the butt stopped.
Belgium has been battered of late with northern winds, rain storms and four degrees in the early mornings. The buds have budded, and the blossom has blossomed, but the warm envelope of the sun’s caress has been scant to date in 2024. Still, summer surely is on its way from the south, where, in the fourth month of the year, it is already baking the Sahel.
The Sahel is a band of sub-Saharan countries that stretch across the midriff of Africa, from Senegal, to Mali, to Burkina Faso, to Niger, Chad and the Sudans. Mainly Islamic in composition, how remiss the colonisers were to fail in their Christian indoctrinations, and how ungrateful of these erstwhile pearls of empires to turn against their erstwhile colonial masters and welcome to their bosoms the new, Russian sugar daddies. The rulers of roosts are in raptures; the populace, in desperation.
This image (from The Guardian) shows the up-and-coming rural middle classes of Mali. Two oxen and a wagon, replete with harvest, this man and his boy are the new local yuppies. Who knows? They may even have electrical current at home for a few hours a week. Enough to charge their mobiles, at least. And, even if they don’t own it, the farm they work on may even have water. A few drops, as, this week, the temperatures in the western Sahel, on the Atlantic coast with its balmy breezes and this cool, pre-summer taster of warmth, soar to an incredible 45°C (or 113 in American: just call him Mr Fahrenheit). Mali last week hit 48° and more, and 102 people died in Bamako in its sweltering, human-caused, climate-change furnace. It’s not a tragedy that you caused; it’s a tragedy that we’ve all caused.
Let me repeat that: it’s mid-April, in West Africa, which benefits from prevailing westerly breezes, sweeping over Cape Verde into Senegal, and the temperature is 45 degrees Celsius or more. Brikama, at the mouth of the River Gambia, is plunged nightly into darkness, the only effulgence coming with the searing sun as dawn breaks. There is no electricity for days and weeks on end. The communal water tap that serves whole blocks of primitive houses, covered with naught but corrugated sheeting for a roof, delivers not a drop of Adam’s wine. In The Gambia, even the basic amenities are switched off, without explanation, without notice, leaving the populace to fend for itself under crushing heat and in relentless poverty.
American troops are told to leave Niger, because US military support is no longer wanted there. The very support that Mr Zelenskiy would give his eye teeth for, Niger has told to “go home”. If they have nothing to do, they should fly up to Ukraine. The West send troops to control Central Africa, to pad and pamper its plump potentates, and leave in penury its impoverished peoples.
And in cool, plush, air conditioned offices in Europe, we debate migration and wonder how we can stop it, while extinguishing our fires but keeping turning our AC systems and charging our EVs. Italy rules that ships that save those in peril on the seas are not, as it happens, flouters of policy, but saviours of souls. If they can save them, so can we.
Yet still the desperate drown in our seas, and yet still they are hated by our executives and our extremists, and yet still they come. For they have nothing to leave behind them but their desperation. One step towards Algeria already fills their hearts with hope. Not for them the play of Dick Whittington, nor for them the companion pussy cat, for in them beat hearts of lions, and they look not back, but forward. Io capitano! They come, these captains of their souls, armed only with Chinese wisdom: every journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. At that point, it matters little how the journey ends, for the dreams that generate the endeavour of that one stride are already worth its risk.
I know a family that has nothing. Not a drop of water and not an ounce of power for their refrigerator to keep fresh the little food they have. Ramadan is over now, but they will continue to fast, for they have no choice in this matter. We have choices. They have no choices, and they have no options. I need you to help them. Please.
I hope that this will be no vain plea. It is a cry for alms, I make no apology. I beseech you, find it in your heart to help, if you can.
I have an existing appeal fund set up at GoFundMe, in my own name. It’s now no longer an appeal for a business start-up, but a request for help for a family of eight who don’t have any opportunities. If you have pledged anything to me for this blog, cancel it: please, give it to the Africa fund.
If you can spare anything, anything at all, it’s already a fortune for them. And you already have my thousand thanks.
The fund’s here: https://gofund.me/dc7334ab.
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A gobshite is a stupid and incompetent person. Pronounced gob-shahyt.
Realpolitik is a 19th century notion conjured by Ludwig von Rochau, which is in widespread use in today’s world. Nowadays it’s taken to mean the politics of pragmatism: achieving the possible, what is realistic, rather than attaching to high-flown, and highfalutin, moralistic goals. Realpolitik contrasts with Idealpolitik.
Rochau’s initial observation, in an endeavour to reconcile the apparent rise of power embedded in nation states and their empires in the 19th century with the liberal enlightenment that had swept across Europe in the 18th century, concluded in the oft-quoted wisdom: “to bring down the walls of Jericho, the Realpolitiker knows the simple pickaxe is more useful than the mightiest trumpet.”
The reference here is to a battle supposed to have taken place when the Israelites were conquering land in what is now the West Bank area of Palestine. It is recounted in the Bible, in the Book of Joshua, and involved the slaughter of every person and every animal in Jericho (at God’s command, mind you), except for the family of a lady of the night named Rahab, who had aided the invasion by hanging a red cord out of her window. The story is dismissed as propagandist legend by archaeologists, who have found no trace of the metropolis that was supposedly thereby conquered (seemingly using the well-known military technique of priests marching around city walls while blowing trumpets). Rochau’s view is that pickaxes would have achieved victory more quickly, but it’s hard to see how that could have been done in less than the seven days it took the trumpeting priests.
Where Rochau errs in this graphic, but facile, comparison is his assumption that trumpets will never bring down city walls. Because, according to biblical legend, they did at Jericho—it is an attested case. Our error would be to assume that pickaxes will bring down city walls at all. For that, there is not a single attested case. So, which of these is Realpolitik: pickaxes, or trumpets?
What the Book of Joshua tells us is a moral story, not an actual story of military history: by stirring up an army to do wondrous things, wondrous things can be achieved. Napoleon Bonaparte once said that the morale of a soldier is worth thrice his weaponry, and that is certainly borne out in tales such as the Battle of Hostomel Airport, which took place in the first days of the Russo-Ukrainian War. A Ukrainian National Guard unit of only 200 soldiers (most of whom had never shot a gun in their lives, and for whom the closest brush with a battlefield had been when playing video games) succeeded in repelling the initial Russian commando attack on the airfield. Shooting down combat helicopters with rifles and a simple rocket launcher instilled courage and determination in the Ukrainians, who were instrumental in saving Kyiv from being taken within the predicted 72 hours.
Twenty-five Ukrainians posted to defend a radar installation at the north end of the airport were, owing to the exposed terrain, unable to flee when outnumbered, and got taken prisoner. They were later exchanged and would report to their debriefers, in a somewhat bemused fashion, that their captors had asked them, “Why did you shoot at us?” The Russians had expected to be greeted as liberators, even though they came in with a sweep of attack aircraft. Russians generally did indeed conclude that Ukraine was to blame for the war: for firing back.
In a mood seen as echoing what all military nations do when honouring their combat dead (and with the propaganda aim of instilling respect for, and devotion to, the nation and its armies, on the part of both the Ukrainian people and foreign onlookers), Ukraine has marked significant days, such as its national day and the day of heroes, in remembrance of its fallen in the still ongoing war, to bolster morale. The conflict has been shrouded from the outset in one big question, which was posed on social media early on by an Arab student at a German university: “What is the nature of the Misunderstanding between these two neighbours?” It was he who capitalised Misunderstanding. But I wonder whether the war will be remembered as that—a misunderstanding. Is war not always the result of a fundamental breakdown of common comprehension—misunderstanding? Or do nations invade other nations because they can?
Since that fateful day in February 2022, many commentators, analysts and news folk have tried to understand. There is speculation as to how it began (NATO, insecurity, theft of assets), and as to the strategies being deployed (tank-resistant defence lines, oil refinery strikes, the Black Sea fleet) and, perhaps most importantly, as to how it will end (victory, of course; but whose?)
In the forefront we have the Idealpolitik notions of Greater Rus, the philosophical right for Ukraine (and, by implication, Estonia, Lithuania …) to exist as a sovereign nation. These are notions of idealism, albeit hardly born of enlightened thinking. As Rochau would discover, the mistake liberals made was to assume that the law of the strong suddenly evaporated simply because it was shown to be unjust. As we have come to learn, nothing could be farther from the truth. Being strong has absolutely nothing to do with morality. But holding to a moral principle can still be an element underpinning strength, albeit of a different kind: the Realpolitiker surrenders when in defeat; the Idealpolitiker fights on to the death, not because he thinks he can win, but because he believes in the ability to win of his children.
Realpolitik is vaunted by those who resort to it as being practical and pragmatic. It sees the world as it is and deals with it in terms of what it is. Idealism, on the other hand, deals with the world in terms of what it ought to be. When idealism attains the upper hand, the Realpolitiker is dismissed as cruel and amoral. The greatest danger, however, lies in assimilating the two views in one, and that is what has happened in Palestine.
Realpolitik has decreed the extermination or elimination by whatever means of the Palestinian people, a process seen as getting nowhere fast for the past 50 years, now accelerated into an end game that nonetheless fulfils an ideal, one backed by as moral a tenet as one can muster: a place of sanctuary and safety for the Jewish people, where, at last, they can find refuge and protection from their enemies around the world. For this they exert pressure on US politics, and enforce moral imperatives against Germany, which has in the past sought to eradicate their race. Whilst the Jewish left pleads for a morally sound solution in a single state that assures the freedoms and rights of all its citizens, as only, in their view, a modern, liberal society surely can, the ultra-orthodox denounce that ideal as unrealistic, and insist on their own ideal: destruction of their fellow man in the name of their own preservation: the ideal of reclaiming the land that Joshua fought for.
What Roger Casement, Padraig Pearce, James Connolly and the other great Irish nationalists wrought for Ireland was a vision inspired by idealism, backed by an achievement that was in truth realised against all the odds, which no one, least of all Michael Collins, could have dreamt would ever be feasible; which in 1910 had only the prospect of absolute and utter failure as its sole, possible outcome: ravaged Ireland taking up arms against the great British empire.
Where Ukraine has drawn its strength from to stand up with valour and dignity against its enemy I cannot tell. I am not the only one: across the world people are baffled at the Ukrainians’ tenacity in the fray of their crisis. If they lose, then the world must do them the honour of casting them as victors all the same, just as we Brits did at Dunkirk. Victors not, to be sure, of Realpolitik, for that would have demanded capitulation on the airfield of Hostomel; but, certainly, victors of Idealpolitik, for their determination to fight to the last for an ideal grounded in self-determination as a universal aspiration. Ukrainian pacificist philosopher Vlad Beliavsky put it thus: You’ve got 40 million united Ukrainians, so what will Putin do? Will he massacre 40 million people? That’s the only way he can win this war. The only way.” That from the mouth of a pacifist. That’s quite some mettle that these Ukrainians possess.
But from where was it that the Irish drew their valour? A large part of it came from something that, outside the Emerald Isle, is rarely talked about these days: the Great Famine, the Gorta Mór. Frequently portrayed as a nation’s battle against an insect-induced harvest failure, it may have had that as its root cause but it had its effects as the result of man’s untrammelled cruelty to his fellow man. Great quantities of foodstuffs were exported from Ireland whilst the laissez-faire government in London looked away uncaringly. Absentee landlords evicted families from the far reaches of the west and south of Ireland, and in some towns two-thirds of the population perished. Over a million fled abroad, mostly to the USA. And at home a million died, and were buried in the very land that could not victual them. The period 1845-1852 was a harsh period of Irish history, made harsher by rich, self-satisfied men. The Famine was not some natural disaster against which no measure was possible. The British occupiers aggravated a crisis to, as a matter of policy, make of it—there is no other word—a Holocaust.
Top left to bottom right:
The Irish Republican Youth Movement declares unity with the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
James Connolly (Scottish trade unionist and Irish republican, 1868-1916): “The British government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland and can never have any right in Ireland.”
Roger Casement (British diplomat and Irish humanitarian activist, 1864-1916): “Ireland, that has wronged no man, that has sought no dominion over others, is treated as if she was a convicted criminal. If it be treason to fight against such a fate as this, then I am proud to be a rebel.”
Pádraig Pearce (Irish barrister and political activist, 1879-1916): “You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.”
It is the ever-present memory in Irishmen’s minds of this cruel disaster wrought upon them by a wilfully insouciant foreign occupier that is surely influencing the sympathies manifested today by Ireland with Palestine. Ireland has been before where Palestine now is—succumbed by military might, starved to death, encouraged to exit. Ireland has voiced its sympathy, and Palestine must look to Ireland as a source of support, and of morale, and, if need be, of means. It is ironic that the sole other voice in Europe backing the Irish position on Palestine at this time is Spain—a nation infamous for the cruelty it imposed itself on a worldwide empire of its own. Be that as it may, it is to Spain’s credit that it sees justice in an ideal that baulks at all notion of Realpolitik in the Holy Land. I just wonder at how this all sits in the Canaries and Catalonia. Neither we, the weak, nor they, the powerful, may ever forget: the law of the strong will not evaporate simply because it is shown to be unjust.
The resolution to the Ukrainian situation will likely come at the negotiating table and a realpolitical Ukrainian position would be to preserve life and concede principle: to lay down both trumpet and pickaxe, and seek, at least, respite in justice. Some ideal may yet be attainable, but with skill and precision.
What Ireland achieved in 1927 was remarkable. The rebels of 1916 had been executed and, eleven years later, the Free State that would preface the Republic had been wrenched from the occupiers’ hands. It was an idealistic fight by which Hamas might well be buoyed, and in which—one hopes—it might not be constrained to take up further arms. On that we may defer to their opponent: will Israel recognise restraint as weakness, as Realpolitik, or as idealism?
For now, the downtrodden will contemplate what they’ve lost, consider what’s realistic, and fix on such deals, and ideals, as may assure them ... some victory. And then they may reflect: if our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.
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“How do you know the Bible tells you the truth—because we have other religions to go by?” Thus a discussion host poses a question to a believer in God. The answer comes: “Because I pray about it.” Without wanting to be dogmatic, he is right. Here’s why I think he is.
Belief is like many human emotions (if not all of them, actually—visceral). It springs from the heart. If it sprang from the head (as a rational process), there would be no such thing as belief (because we don’t physically have anything to believe in).
If I get excited at the prospect of my summer holiday, you may be pleased for me, and yet you may dismiss my choice of flying as ecologically irresponsible, or tell me that I could have got a better deal going somewhere else, or that I should choose another companion. But only I can feel the excitement of my summer holiday. Do I then allow myself to be influenced by your denigration of my holiday? Am I less excited if you challenge my vacation? And can you not feel the excitement bubbling within me? Truth is, your criticism may dismay me, or I may redouble my enthusiasm, with an attitude of “I don’t care what you think!” However, you cannot feel my excitement at my holiday. Maybe you never get excited at holidays. Maybe you just like spoiling people’s fun. Maybe you think getting excited about holidays is for little kids, and you’re a big grown-up.
In terms of visceral belief, we must distinguish between matters that are inherently provable (like the facts adduced in a court of law) and belief in a deity, which is inherently unprovable, but for the proof of which the believer adduces their own evidence (such as a vision, a dream, a set of coincidences, a sense of wonder, or a shiver down the spine). Even courts of law don’t actually determine belief in evidence: they determine only enough belief (the balance of probabilities, or beyond reasonable doubt, rules of corroboration, etc.). For the rest, with statements like “I believe the president is honest”, the evidential basis on which such so-called beliefs are based can be scant to say the least, and easily manipulated to say the most. So, what does the respondent mean when he says, “Because I pray about it”? Are we only praying that the president is honest?
Our view of our world is a view based on judgment. The allusion to courts of law is not misplaced, but law courts are the least of the institutions of judgment in our life. We ourselves are institutions of judgment. We judge value (in a food store) and we judge danger (on the road), and we judge trust (will we contract with someone, marry them?). There is as good as nothing in our physical world that we do not judge. We probably make thousands of judgments every day. Some are major ones, like a court of law makes. Some are minor, like threading a needle. We get annoyed at the judgments of others and we seek to defend ourselves against their judgments. We ask people to judge us kindly—to like us (please like this article, below).
Therefore, it’s … let’s say, attractive to know—if know we do—that there is an entity out there somewhere that we do not need to judge, and which will essentially judge us, not on what we do, however, but on what we intend to do. That is a surprising switch between our laws and our deity’s laws. Despite our analysis of law between the subjective and the objective elements of a crime, we even have laws that don’t care what you intended (like parking regulations, or even felony murder). The deity’s laws, or judgments, don’t much care what you actually do, but care what you intend to do. That’s why, in many beliefs, you can simply think to the deity that you would like forgiveness, by feeling remorse, and in your belief system, your conscience is thereby cleared. That is the whole purpose of belief; your criminal or civil liability is, of course, not affected.
Whether the deity exists, or exists in the form that the believer thinks it exists, is immaterial, and that is a major hurdle for those who challenge believers, something they cannot get their heads around. Maybe I can help.
Belief is a communion between the believer and that in which he believes. A husband can believe in his wife, even if she is poor, maladroit, ugly, coarse, uneducated. Her husband can still believe in her, because the criteria that he applies in believing in his spouse are not the criteria that those around them use in judging the lady. We say that people should look beyond the outward and see the inner quality of the person. What a believer does is to look beyond the outward manifestation of our world and think (or believe) that they perceive an inner quality. The differences are not vast, but no analogy is perfect, I know.
This is almost an application of quantum physics: if I believe the president is honest, then he is. If I later come to see that my belief was erroneous, then I will change my mind. People can change their minds, and do so all the time. So what’s wrong with that? Well, what is often wrong with that, in the physical world, is that I will be labelled as ignorant, naive, unknowing. I will be judged by those around me, for having been gullible. Even if I was right before and only now am wrong in having changed my mind. And the problem with belief springing viscerally within me or being dampened by later realisations is that I will only ever know if my belief was erroneous when I die, and non-believers want to know now, and that, unfortunately, is not in the deal when it comes to belief: it must spring from a visceral emotion of the heart, and not from a rational judgment of the head. If you don’t believe, I can’t make you believe. And nor can you make me not believe. You cannot reason belief or its absence.
What each believer sees is one of two things, however: it is something they have discovered through their own experience, or it is something that has been drilled into them by tradition and convention The moot question is whether the latter of these is even belief (any more than a court’s holding that evidence is true is a belief). In Asia, the form of what they believe there may be that of Buddhism or Hinduism and, in Europe, perhaps Christianity. These are all outward forms of religious belief. But those who penetrate the outward to recognise the inward values will frequently abandon any importance that was hitherto attached to rites and ceremonies, as being simply cultural attachments. A bit like driving a Hyundai in Korea and a Mercedes in Germany. They both work as cars, but have different forms in different parts of the world. Occasionally, a Korean will even drive a Mercedes, and a German, a Hyundai.
We know phrases like float your boat or do your own thing, and that is pretty much what belief is. The difficulties arise when one person’s conception of belief comes up against what others circumscribe as a definitive model of belief. In other words, there are those who refuse to allow an inward exploration of the deity or the substance of the individual’s belief, and attempt to constrain others to believe in the same way that they believe. This is fatuous, because belief springs from the heart. You cannot persuade another person to believe, still less induce them into believing as you do. You can force them into saying they believe, as with torture, but you cannot make them actually believe. This is an argument that non-believers often get tied up in: they cite all the harm that organised religion and fundamentalists and fanatics do, and therefore say that, because no god could condone such acts, there is therefore no God. That is a bit like saying that because some witnesses lie in court, you cannot ever trust a witness in court. Mendacity is not endemic to all judicial witnesses; and duress and manipulation are not endemic to all believers. But they are traits that can be detected in some of them, just as lying is a trait of which some judicial witnesses are guilty.
I usually sum this up as follows: God is not for everyone. He is for every one. Every one of us will conceive of our belief, or its absence, in a way that suits us, and this freedom, the absolute liberty of belief, is something that our modern world can have difficulty in appreciating, because that mode of thinking removes belief from the realm of what we like to think of as judgment, which is some people making an assessment of the conduct of other people. On the other hand, God’s judgment is where we actually make an assessment of our own intentions; not our acts, but our intentions. Not judged by others, or by God, but by us. Some people feel uncomfortable with that—that judgment should be left to us ourselves. They want to judge others, instead. They want, not to believe in God, but to be God.
However, it is precisely an absence of judgment that marks out the relationship to a deity. We often perceive deities as holders of power, and then we proceed to define power in terms that we think we understand it to be: like great empires, or missiles or guns—the ability to force others to our will. But that is not God’s power. God’s power lies instead in love, which is a nebulous concept that fundamentally comes down to the opposite of what we constantly do on Earth: judging. Love is power to force ourselves to our own will.
Love is not outpourings of kind words or acts, love is not roses and chocolates, love is not physical reproduction of the race, giving to charity or anything like that, though these can all be outward manifestations of an inward feeling we identify as love. Love is simply not judging others and, in the Christian tradition at least, it is phrased thus: “love as you would be loved” (N.B. there is not even a command to love: it’s really up to you—float your boat). The phrase means “desist from judging others in the same manner as you don’t want to be judged by them”. And that is a notion that comes from the idea that judgment comes not from others but from God. And if we obey the commandment to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, then, combining these two simple tenets, we don’t ever need to enact another statute anywhere on the world and can simply close our law courts. Now, if that’s not a powerful law, tell me what is. A law not enforced by authority, but by us ourselves. And that is why the discussion participant was right to say that his belief is right because he prays. It is his religion, and his alone. His prayer is his communing with his deity. His love, his own enforcement of his own love.
I am convinced that belief, because it springs from the heart, is something that does not need to be taught or reasoned, nor studied, nor read. It can spring spontaneously without the believer ever having heard of God. It simply springs from the ability to live without judging others. It’s like being awarded a college degree without even having matriculated at the institution. Or being given an OBE, if you like, or a military medal. God will love you even if you don’t know Him, provided you love others as you love yourself. It’s not much of a test; and it involves very little judgment. Of others.
How this love is arrived at will differ for each and every individual. There are not eight great religions in the world, not even eight hundred: there are eight billion religions. And, just as all roads lead to Rome, all religions lead to the same place, regardless of what you call them, how you dress them up, how you love. It really is all you need.
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A killing spree. Madness. Crazy. Makes no sense. Unfathomable. The judgments we hear day in, day out, about acts that seem to fit such descriptions. Time and again, in order to comprehend someone’s acts, whether in politics or in the movies or in our employment relations, we’re told to follow the money, to the point that one can almost conclude that all our problems would be solved, if only we could wean ourselves off money. If we could do that, those who commit such apparently unfathomable acts would not pursue money, and therefore such acts would never be committed. This nonetheless poses a difficulty: why is it that follow the money should be the fast track key to determining the cause for someone’s action, and yet so many actions are precisely dismissed as a killing spree, madness, crazy, making no sense or unfathomable? Either it’s not money that needs to be followed to determine motive after all; or we’re simply no good at following it.
In the film Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, we discover in the final reel that Norman Bates (who murders Marion Crane, Milton Arbogast, Bates’s own mother plus two other women) suffers from an alternate (or split) personality disorder. Although the film and the book that inspired it differ to a large extent, they both arrive at this conclusion, one that the audience will have had running through their minds as they watched: Norman Bates is crazy. What is telling is that the money Marion steals is dumped by Bates along with her car and her body in the morass: Bates doesn’t kill Marion for the money, and so we’re unable to follow the money in order to figure out why he kills her.
The money is, nevertheless, the reason why private dick Arbogast even turns up at the motel, and is the reason why Lila (Marion’s sister) and Sam (Lila’s boyfriend) even engage Arbogast’s services. It is the money and the fear of being caught that even urge Marion to buy a new car, for cash, while making her escape. A great deal of sympathy is generated around the victim of this crime (even though she’s guilty of grand larceny, don’t forget) and we all think we know why it is committed, even though the one murder in which we actually see the assailant (which is not Marion’s, but Arbogast’s, on the stairs) is not, or at least does not appear to be, committed by Bates. All we actually see of Marion’s murder in the shower is her face and other shots of her body, not the murderer.
In the final reel, then, the psychiatrist (in the book it is Sam who tells Lila, but Hitchcock didn’t find that convincing enough to persuade us) tells us that Norman is mad (to use the lay term). And we, as his audience, conclude that that is correct. Partly because of the psychiatrist’s authority as a doctor in explaining it to us in the clinical coldness of the prison; partly because of how we’ve seen Bates’s indignant reaction to Marion’s suggestion that his mother should be put into a home; but probably most of all because Bates sinks the money along with the car when he disposes of Marion’s dead body in the morass. In effect, we know that the money Marion steals gets put in the swamp, and therefore concur in the judgment that Bates is indeed crazy.
Image: theatre poster for the 1960 film Psycho. Oddly, the starring lead is squeezed in on the left and the (scantily clad) supporting actress dominates. The half-naked hunk at the foot of the poster is John Gavin, who plays Sam Loomis, a supporting supporting actor if ever there was. Public domain.
Hence, or so we conclude, there are two things, and two things only, that motivate people to act: money and madness. If it’s our own money that’s concerned, then that will generally be the preferred conclusion: they’re after my money (that is, unless we place a higher value on something else, like a third party’s affection, love or friendship). If it’s someone else’s money that’s concerned, and we are otherwise dispassionate observers, we will, by contrast, more readily acquiesce in an authoritative assessment that they’re crazy, virtually without further enquiry (Jack the Ripper, Vladimir Putin, Napoleon’s megalomania, Freddie from Friday 13th, and so on).
The title of the book, and of its film adaptation, is Psycho. That’s an abbreviation that is often expanded to mean psychopath. But what if it were expanded to mean psychology, and then not the psychology of Norman Bates, but of us, the audience? Are we duped into believing that Norman Bates is a murderer? First, by Robert Bloch, who wrote the book, and then by Alfred Hitchcock, who filmed the story (but not as it’s told in the book, in order, yet again, to distort our understanding of what’s going on)? Features of the book not found in the film are the lurid pornography that Bates reads and the fact Marion is not just stabbed in the shower, but decapitated. Norman Bates is a fictional character who can be turned and twisted into being a callous murderer, a poor troubled individual, or an utterly innocent man depending, not on him, but on who is telling his story.
Six months have passed since 7 October, and six months ought to be enough time to figure out why Hamas did it and why Israel reacted the way it did. That said, it’s been 2,000 years since Jesus did away with the Ten Commandments and instituted His own two, and people still debate why that was. Why turning the other cheek or going the extra mile replaced an eye for an eye. Perhaps it’s that bit more difficult to fathom God, who moves in mysterious ways, than it is to impute rationale to our fellow humans. But then again, there’s no money to follow with God, so He poses that bit more of a difficulty in trying to understand Him. No fear, every question you ever wanted to ask of God will one day be answered, of that you can be assured. The question that remains is whether every question you ever wanted to ask of Hamas or the Israeli state will likewise one day be answered. Of that there is a tad less assurance.
The theories that fly around concerning Hamas are that it doesn’t care a fig about civilians and knew full well that its folk would be decimated. It sees its mission as a higher calling than keeping little boys and girls in school and providing them with water, power and food. Or that Hamas sees the world pass Palestine by without a second thought for decades, and wanted to get the word Palestine back into the world’s consciousness. That’s what Black September had done with the plane hijackings and the Munich Olympics. When the British hostages were released from the three planes that landed at Dawson’s Field in the Jordanian desert near Az Zarqa on 12 September 1970 in return for the release by Britain of Leila Khaled, the bemused passengers didn’t even know what or where Palestine was. The PFLP then promptly blew up their aircraft before the eyes of the world’s press. The Brits, if no one else, wouldn’t so easily forget where Palestine is again. The action on and since 7 October has had a similar effect. It remains a moot question, though: is everyone talking about Palestine because of what the Israelis have done, or because of what Hamas did?
While it seems clear that Israel has been controlling the narrative by targeting journalists and communications and, inexplicably, aid workers, and simultaneously holing its own moral high ground below the waterline (as mixed a metaphor as is appropriate in the circumstances), the endeavours to destroy the whole breadth of Palestine and its people still leave the echo of a question mark in my mind.
Yes, having driven out the Egyptians in the 1967 war and then having pulled out of Gaza again, only to make it a prison camp, after 1973’s Yom Kippur War, one can understand the desirability of regaining Gaza, and even of eradicating the Palestinian presence in the West Bank; but at the cost of so many civilian lives? At the cost of Israel’s international reputation and standing? At the cost of their democratic credentials? At the cost of calling in a whole panoply of favours, from the UK, from the US and, perhaps even from Jordan, its erstwhile archenemy? What is it that Gaza possesses that is worth so much misery and so many favours from Israel’s international partners? Zionist principle? A distorted view of Lebensraum? A show of might for Israel’s Arab neighbours to tremble at (if mighty it is, without foreign help to repel an Iranian bombardment). Or is it simply land? Perhaps it is none of these. Not even land, but something less substantial than that: water.
Palestine is recognised as a state by 140 other states of the world. It has been recognised by the United Nations, with observer status, since it was declared in 1988 and it is thought it will soon be recognised by Ireland and Spain, whereas most other EU countries along with the UK and the US do not recognise Palestine diplomatically. Of course there is a question as to what state one recognises by recognising Palestine, since its borders are not fixed as such. But countries all across the world are involved in border disputes, and that doesn’t stop them being recognised diplomatically.
That said, one Palestinian border in particular seems consistently to be overlooked, and that is its 41-kilometre maritime border. It will not have escaped anyone’s notice of late that the Gaza Strip has a lengthy coastline to the Mediterranean Sea. Jared Kushner remarked upon it, as being an ideal location for grand hotels. Mr Kushner is, to say the least, tactless in his observation. But, I suspect that he is also disingenuous. For the Gaza Strip is less propitious as a luxury resort to rival Dubai, and far more as a gas terminal to rival Jebel Ali.
The Gaza Strip’s two hundred-nautical mile limit (or exclusive economic zone) extends for a width of 41 kilometres into the Med over and beyond the territorial waters set out under the exclusive sovereign zone (three nautical miles) and the 12 nautical miles of sovereign waters accorded under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. These provisions of international law would appear to determine ownership of the exclusive maritime area that is claimed by Palestine, except that Palestine is not a sovereign state, nor is Israel a signatory to the UN Convention. In many respects, Israel, who so wanted UN membership and was granted it, only to baulk at its obligations thereanent, blocks UN membership by Palestine, which would only too gladly assume its UN obligations. Yet Israel is more than a dog in this manger: it’s also eating the hay.
In short, the Israeli occupation of Gaza prevents Palestine from exploiting what Yasser Arafat described as a gift from God when the gas reserves were discovered in the 1990s but, even with Israeli gas exploration licences granted to a number of consortia, both Israeli and international, over gas fields including Gaza’s, ownership of the gas is nevertheless in some question (none of which stops Israel from drilling it).
Gaza’s gas could power all of Palestine and leave a surplus for sale on the world market. And that is why Israel wants it. Forget Zionism. Follow the money. To deny Palestinians a means of independence and a pathway to prosperity. To stymie Palestinian self-determination. To deny Palestinians a raison d’être in the Levant at all. To claim for themselves something that belongs to another. To steal Gaza’s gas. It’s the classic rationale for colonisation: natural resources. If gas is money, and if we follow the money, are we not better enlightened as to why Israel is pursuing its current Palestine policy?
Germany has stated clearly that unstinting support for Israel is its Staatsräson, its vocation as a state. I’m gay, and gays were exterminated during the Nazi regime. Why does Germany not have a Staatsräson that encompasses supporting me? Or a Staatsräson that encompasses supporting Roma? Or a Staatsräson that encompasses supporting Herero and Nama peoples of Africa? A Staatsräson that encompasses supporting Ukrainian nationalists, whose bodies were piled into the ravine at Babi Yar? A Staatsräson that encompasses supporting communists, political opponents of Nazism? What about all those Staatsräsons? Surely not because it—grammatically—can only have one?
Atoning for one sin is laudable. But that does not atone for all sin. Even if you make it your Räson d’être. Whilst I would never want to exact an eye for an eye against Germany for its shameful past, the irony is, I think I do know what Germany’s Staatsräson is; and it isn’t defending the weak. I’m not even sure it’s doing what it knows is right. But, whatever it is, it’s no madness, no matter how mad you might think it is.
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It’s stunning news, isn’t it? The Milky Way’s biggest stellar black hole. And, wouldn’t you know it, it was there the whole time, just 2,000 light years away. It’s called BH3 and I suppose that “BH” means ... black hole. Because it’s black; and a hole. Celestial bodies get named after numbers, letters, Greek gods, famous scientists, famous politicians, famous anythings, because there are quite a lot of them and they’re all up there. I bet there’s some comet named after Buddy Holly. BH. Bloody hell.
The Guardian newspaper has published a picture of BH3. Well, not so much a picture of it (how do you show a picture of a black hole?) but an artist’s impression. It’s what an artist thinks it looks like. Or might look like. I wonder: how would an artist know any better than anyone else what something 2,000 light years away looks like that they can’t just point a camera at and take a photograph of? Would it not make more sense to just get AI to make it up? At least AI would have a more comprehensive knowledge of what black holes looked like in the past, to be able to conjure up an image of this-here BH3. AI. Artist’s impression. Hmph. I suppose it is AI, after all.
Image: apologies to The Guardian.
If we (and, by “we”, I mean the amassed wisdom of cosmology from pole to pole of our ancient world) never knew that BH3 was there previously, then what is the benefit of having discovered it now, virtually next-door neighbour as it is? There are people who moved into a house two doors down from mine a year ago and I’ve never met them. They never moseyed up to my house to say, “Hello, we’re your new neighbours,” and I never turned up at theirs with home-baked muffins wrapped in gingham to welcome them to my very own Wisteria Lane. I have heard them occasionally operating what sounded like a sawmill at the back—all bloody day long—but, aside from that, our contact has been as close as that to BH3.
I think it’s disingenuous of the Iranians to be mad at Jordan for shooting down their Shaheds, having launched them across Jordan’s territory. It would be a bit like my new neighbour two doors down playing tennis with Gerda, who works at the chippie, two doors up, and getting mad at me for attempting an intercept as the ball whizzed over my bit of ground. Especially when it’s pretty obvious the Iranians didn’t really intend for any of them to do any harm anyway, given all the hullabaloo they were shouting about for days before the attack. If you ask me, Israel kicked Iran on the shin right and proper, and Iran, both mad and … hopping, retaliated by slapping Israel on the face with its glove. Take that, you cur!
I don’t think that that’ll be quits, though. Israel has a track record of rising early to wipe out its enemies as they sleep in their beds (7.30 am on a sunny September day was the attack on Egypt; by tea time, Moshe was already mopping up). If Israel had given Egypt half as much warning in 1967 as Iran gave Israel in 2024, I think Nasser might have got a few more of his MiGs in the air. But a pre-emptive strike will always catch someone with their pants down. Nobody had their pants down on Saturday. Iran barely scratched Israel: more a question of honour than anything else. And yet some in their war cabinet are baying for revenge. Revenge for the loss of ancient Judaea, revenge for al-Karamah, revenge for Black September, revenge for Yom Kippur, revenge for the oil embargo, revenge for Sadat, revenge for Begin, revenge for Beirut and revenge for Arafat, revenge for the intifada, revenge for the stone throwing, revenge for Oslo, revenge against Rabin, revenge for the street war; revenge for a slap in the face with a suede glove. What do I care about their revenge? What do I care about why they’re so het up about being bombed? When they come and bomb me and I can do something about it, then, I’ll care.
So, what do I care? I was once robbed, burgled, they took 400 euros and a camera. The police actually came when I called them—bloody hell!—and that was that. I think I got an insurance settlement. I bought an alarm that cost 2,500 euros and fitted window locks that cost another 2,000. I cared about the burglary, and it cost me 5,000 euros in security measures. My own little iron dome, David’s slingshot. Do I want the thief’s blood? I wouldn’t weep if he fell off a cliff. But, if the b*****d comes back, I’ll kick his head to a f*****g pulp.
And an officious police officer will clasp my wrists in handcuffs and lead me away for overreacting and being uncivilised and unworthy of living in genteel society. I’ll be branded “one of them”, the uncontrollable, vicious, rabid scum: wanting nothing but revenge.
So what is it that makes us care? The more we care, the less there is we can do about what we care. I don’t care a fig about BH3. And I really wonder if anyone else does either. Yes, science cares about it, because science is a career that depends on discovering wow things and drawing make-believe pictures to convince us of the significance of what they find out in outer space, but aside from meteorites hurtling towards Earth at a thousand kilometres a minute, what do we care what’s up there 2,000 light years away?
What we care about is our sense of justice. There is much that we can’t do anything about, not even our governments can do anything about them. But what governments and big business and our bosses and our fathers and the police can all do something about that we can’t, is justice. Not lawfulness, because laws are notoriously fickle. But what we know in our deepest insides is right and wrong. That is a place that is not two doors down from where you are, and it is certainly not 2,000 light years distant out in the sky. But it may as well be. It’s within 12 inches of where you’re reading this, the answer is. The answer to the question: what do I care?
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Some records are best not broken. Turkish Airlines flight 981 broke one by becoming the deadliest air crash to date, the date being Sunday, 3 March 1974. I can remember it, and it shocked me. It shocked the world. Paris Match asked whether the day had come to say “no” to jumbo jets. Their by-line is Le poids des mots, le choque des photos—the weight of the words, the shock of the pictures: they actually showed French firemen gruesomely collecting body parts. But, no, there would be no “no” to jumbos.
Image: two weeks after the crash, Paris Match asked “Is it necessary to eschew giant aircraft? They said, ‘A jumbo jet crashing with 450 people on board will be dreadful’.”
Ermenonville would subsequently be beaten by Tenerife, by 9/11, and by a couple of other crashes in the 80s and 90s, but what marks this disaster out from the others is the question of where the fault lay. No air crash had less pilot error contributing to it than the Turkish DC-10.
Tenerife was due to a mix of terrorism, air traffic control, weather, and pilot rest-time legislation; 9/11 was deliberate (even if controversy reigns over precisely whose deliberate act it was); the Charkhi Dadri collision was a mix-up of pilots and ATC; JAL 123 was attributed to a faulty repair; but Ermenonville was due to a faulty build: the aircraft was designed wrong.
There are nowadays no DC-10s still flying in public service, but they were a great advance in technology when they appeared in 1970 and entered service a year later, recognisable to the travelling public with their characteristic tail engine (similar to the contemporaneous Lockheed 1011, or Tristar), but never lovingly embraced by travellers, given the events of 50 years ago. They could carry as many passengers as a 747 Jumbo, but could land on a shorter runway, making them that bit more versatile. Planes have crashed with hundreds of people aboard, from which every last one of them has walked away, or in which very few have perished. The survival rate from the Habsheim air show disaster was astonishing: the three dead were a disabled boy unable to move, a small girl and a woman who bravely re-entered the wreckage to save them. The Saudi aircraft fire killed over 300 as the plane sat for half an hour being consumed by an interior fire on the runway after a successful landing in Riyadh. There is no inevitability to a plane crash. But some of them are unavoidable.
The DC-10’s doors opened inward, which was a great safety feature since the pressurisation inside the cabin pushed the doors against the frame, thus sealing the doorway completely. However, in order to maximise storage space in the cargo hold beneath the main passenger cabin, those particular doors opened outward. Without going into details, the closure mechanism for the cargo doors was inadequate: they could be forced shut without actually engaging the locks, but far enough to extinguish the cockpit warning “CARGO DOOR OPEN”.
The aircraft’s manufacturer knew of the problem. A forward cargo door had blown open when testing the DC-10 in a wind tunnel, causing massive decompression and a floor collapse in the cabin. And, in 1972, one year after entering service, an American Airlines DC-10 had suffered exactly the same problem as would occur to the Turkish airliner in 1974.
One of the problems with the ship Titanic was the shortage of lifeboats. There were not enough for all of the people on the ship. This was not perceived as a design fault (in fact Titanic had six lifeboats more than it required to have). The reason behind that was that previous incidents involving high-capacity passenger ships had shown that there was a good likelihood of the stricken vessel staying afloat for up to three days, which would be ample time in which to ferry the passengers off to rescue vessels. Hence the relatively small number of boats. No one bargained on a ship that size that would stay afloat for only two hours. “It’s made of iron, Rose—it will sink!”
American flight 96 had resulted in no fatalities, and what that fact instilled in the minds of the management at McDonnell-Douglas was a lack of urgency: moreover, they successfully communicated this to the Federal Aviation Authority in Washington, D.C. On flight 96, the rear cargo door of the DC-10 had flown open, having been inadequately closed, decompressing the cargo space and causing a loss of control to the tail no. 2 engine and the surrounding steering mechanisms. However, the crew successfully landed the aircraft with no loss of life. The skill of the pilots in that incident caused McDonnell-Douglas to assume an attitude of complacency as to the seriousness of the problem: the constructor was able to persuade its friends at the FAA not to issue an airworthiness directive, which would have grounded the entire type and caused huge embarrassment to the maker.
Instead, McDonnell-Douglas undertook to issue service bulletins to cover all the items mentioned in the incident’s final report. They downgraded the gravity of the situation. There were three bulletins:
* windows to be inserted into the cargo door so ground crew could verify from the outside that the door was properly locked;
* supports to be incorporated to prevent the connecting bar between two parts of the locking mechanism from bending under pressure, thus permitting a false “locked” signal;
* relief vents to be incorporated so that any decompression of the cargo hold would also decompress the passenger cabin (triggering oxygen masks if it happened over 10,000 feet) and thus avoid deformation of the separating floor between the upper and lower parts of the aircraft.
On flight 96, the floor had indeed been sucked down when the cargo area decompressed, but that aircraft’s layout included a cocktail bar arrangement at the rear of the aircraft cabin, which thus contained no actual passenger seating. The aircraft was carrying very few passengers that day and, despite being seriously hindered, the pilots still achieved a safe landing and evacuation.
McDonnell Douglas then went one further. After downgrading the severity of the issue, they then lied about putting it right.
With a flight crew totalling 11 and 167 pax, the 1974 Turkish flight had started in Istanbul and had a stop-over at Paris Orly. Fifty passengers left the flight there, but a huge number joined it, 216, because industrial action had cancelled connections on BEA and Air France up to London. People would be glad they were at last getting home, some having travelled to watch an international rugby game in Paris on the Saturday, since the new working week would be starting the next day—a day that would never come for them.
The flight was packed, and there was no rear bar area in this aircraft’s configuration. When the same door as had blown out in the AA96 incident blew out on THY981 at 12,000 feet over the town of Ermenonville, six passengers were immediately sucked out, still strapped to their seats. They would later be found in a field along with half of the cargo door. Because the mechanisms for the no. 2 engine and tail controls all ran through the space between the upper passenger cabin and lower cargo hold, the decompression severed them and the rudder was wrenched so as to propel the aircraft into a left bank. All control of the aircraft was immediately lost and, after continuing on a four-degree glide slope for around 15 kilometres, it struck tree tops in the Forest of Ermenonville, impacting at nearly 800 kilometres per hour. The aircraft immediately splintered into tens of thousands of pieces. So brutal was the sheer force of the impact that no fire broke out, the fuel being instantaneously atomised to nothing. Of the 346 souls on board, none survived.
McDonnell-Douglas had issued three service bulletins, which it expressly (and erroneously) confirmed had all been implemented on the aircraft in question. It wasn’t true: only one had in fact been carried out. They used their influence with the FAA to secure their financial health, and they lied on the airworthiness paperwork for the airplane in question. The only measure that had been implemented was insertion of the window into the door, and the ground crew operative who had closed the door on that day spoke only French. He had not been trained on the closure procedure, so he had not understood what he was supposed to see through this window that had been installed. The notice appended to the fuselage explaining the importance of ensuring the door’s closure was written in English and Turkish. His Turkish Airlines colleague was off duty that day.
In terms of corporate mentality, Ermenonville bears a similarity to the Ford Pinto and GM truck scandals. The cargo door had already failed in trials and on American Airways flight 96. It took the loss of 346 lives to finally put it right: to lock the door.
When Paris Match posed that question back in the March of 1974, “Is it time to say no to jumbos?” they reflected the fears fliers then had of tumbling from the skies. But with the climate emergency that is now upon us, the question I want to ask today, 50 years on from THY981, is whether it isn’t time to say no to jets altogether.
The great benefit of the jet aircraft is its ability to fly fast, quiet and high in the sky, thus aiding efficiency. Up at angels 3-1, the air is rare, breathing is hard, and travel is sleek. Many disasters and near misses have resulted from aircraft systems designed to do nothing more than allow travel at such altitudes, but that have nonetheless, for whatever reason, failed. Prop planes don’t need pressurisation, but, then again, they can’t carry the volumes of traffic that today’s aircraft carry.
Aircraft cockpits are festooned with lights, panels, bells, gongs, horns, warning displays to alert those in control of an imminent danger. Conscientious pilots, like my father back in the day, are trained for every eventuality, to take swift, remedial action, to fly their aircraft despite all injury and against all adversity, to protect the lives that have been entrusted to their care and, when all else fails, to preserve lives of third parties who stand in the path of their stricken flying machines. It is their duty and their codex: to heed the warnings and take all evasive action that is within their human power.
So why is there not a similar response to climate warnings?
3 March 1974. Forêt d’Ermenonville, France.
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Curtis Reeves and John Walters are both killers. Curtis shot a man dead at point-blank range in a cinema in Florida, and John shot a man dead on the forecourt of a petrol station in San Antonio, Texas.
Curtis was tried on a charge of second-degree murder, and acquitted. John was never charged. Never arrested. He pulled out a gun in sight of a security camera, shot a man dead on a petrol station forecourt, and then got into his car and drove away. Shortly afterwards he called the police to tell them. I reckon he realised he’d left a cadaver at the petrol station and someone might have seen his registration number.
Neither Curtis Reeves nor John Walters was guilty of a crime, however. Because the laws of Florida and Texas say they didn’t commit any crime. Because both men alleged that they were frightened of the man they shot.
Chad Oulson, who was killed at the cinema, got into an altercation with Curtis Reeves, who had demanded that Oulson turn off his mobile phone whilst the previews were being shown. Chad ended up chucking popcorn at Mr Curtis. Mr Curtis pulled out his gun and killed Mr Oulson on the spot. He had never been so frightened in all his life. Mr Curtis is a retired SWAT commander and police captain.
William Hawkins, who was killed at the petrol station, was homeless and approached Mr Walters at the petrol pumps. Maybe to ask for small change. It happens a lot to me as well, people asking for small change. Hawkins was unarmed, but Walters killed him. Didn’t even pump any gas, such a hurry he was in to leave the petrol station.
The laws that justify Mr Reeves’s and Mr Walters’s acts are called stand-your-ground laws. Back in 2007, when these laws started to be enacted, it was felt that the duty of citizens to remove themselves from confrontational situations as enshrined in the Castle Doctrine of law (playing on the notion that an Englishman’s home is his castle) heaped an undue burden on law-abiding citizens, especially if they were in a place where they had every right to be (such as their home, or, indeed a cinema or a petrol station). The law reversed the burden of avoidance, from the perceived victim of aggression having to remove themselves from the situation, to their being justified in killing the person aggressing them (thus neutralising the confrontation by removing the aggressor, rather than themselves).
There is no test of reasonableness in the stand-your-ground legislation. The killer does not need to prove their fright. Fear is a sentiment that cannot be measured. For example, anyone who says they were scared to death clearly wasn’t: otherwise they would be dead and unable to say it. But how scared they in fact were is a purely subjective question. If you drag a small child into the deep end of a swimming bath, it is quite conceivable that he might develop a blind panic, such as I once did, for which I was later ridiculed at school. Yet, we poo-poo people who climb on chairs when they see a spider or a mouse, even though the fear could be just as great.
The Scottish court case of Donoghue v. Stevenson [1932] AC 562 established liability for causing fright to someone who is reasonably within the field of contemplation as being affected by one’s acts. The case involved two ladies in a café in Paisley, one of whom bought a bottle of ginger beer for the other, who was Mrs Donoghue. Mrs Donoghue did not drink the ginger beer as such, but it was poured over ice cream as a float, and when the remainder of the bottle was poured into a separate glass a dead snail was discovered in the beverage. Mrs Donoghue had not in fact bought the ginger beer, so she had no contractual relationship either to the Wellmeadow Café or to the manufacturer of the ginger beer, D. Stevenson. We know nothing about what kind of a shock the lady treating Mrs Donoghue to her refreshment received from this event, but we know from the court reports that Mrs Donoghue herself received a shock and felt ill. The case is a landmark case in the law of tort (or delict, as it is called in Scotland) and is cited daily in cases across the common-law world. Mrs Donoghue said she felt ill and that entitled her to damages. Eventually, the House of Lords agreed. She did not require to prove her queasiness other than to say she had felt queasy.
In the criminal sphere, Scotland knows the doctrine of the thin skull rule, which provides that, if I touch the skull of someone else in such a manner as cannot reasonably be foreseen to cause harm, but, because the person in question has a thin skull, he dies from my touching it, then I am criminally guilty of the harm caused. It is no defence to say, “I didn’t realise he had a thin skull.”
I doubt very much whether this Scottish jurisprudence per se played any role in the enactment of Florida’s or Texas’s laws, or the laws of any of the other 36 US states that now have such statutes. But its pervading sentiments were, whether by coincidence or design, present in the lawmakers’ minds: whether I am afeared of you is a matter for my own, sole judgment. If I say that I am, then I am. And that alone gives me the right to stand my ground and kill you. Shoot you dead on the spot. And, what’s more, to then get into my car and drive away.
Image: screen grab from Al Jazeera, in which Mr Walters is supposedly seen walking around the dead Mr Hawkins to get into his car before driving off.
Now, I find that a somewhat astounding proposition, but John Walters and Curtis Reeves don’t. What is striking is that, in the vast majority of the 700 deaths whereby no criminal conviction of the known, named perpetrator has ensued in cases in which self-defence has been pleaded in terms of these stand-your ground statutes, the killers were white and the dead aggressors black.
And, because there is a widespread narrative that blacks are dangerous, and they also happen to represent a disproportionate number of homeless and destitute persons, and the homeless and destitute are well known for approaching strangers to ask for alms, what these laws appear to sanction is the ridding from society of homeless and destitute blacks other than through police or official action. It is as though the statutes contain a subtext: if the general public feel threatened by the mere presence of another person of an undesirable allure, no action will be taken against them if they secure said undesirable’s removal from our presence.
Now, I don’t know who all owns guns in the US and, to be sure, nor does the US. There is no central register of gun ownership in that country, whereby it bears an astonishing likeness to a similarly unregulated country: the Russian Federation. However, I do know for a fact that there are some people, some blacks even, who do own guns.
Forgive me extrapolating here, but let me just suppose: if there comes to be a general acceptance that approaching someone (to ask the time, or how to get to Alberson’s) could be deemed a threat to the person being asked, thus resulting in their pulling out a gun and shooting the enquirer on the spot, all in terms of a right generally known to have been invested in the populace at large, by dint of its having been set down in legislation expressly permitting such a course of action, then would the enquirer themselves not be entitled to shoot the person of whom they requested such information before even asking for the information?
This, on the grounds that asking the way could incite such irrational and unjustified fear in the person being asked that there is a cogent danger of that person shooting the enquirer and so the enquirer is reasonable in preempting that danger by simply killing the guy before asking him the question, or, at the very least, immobilising him to such a degree as to obtain the requested information before finally finishing him off with a slug to the temple.
And this, on the ground that giving the information might just have put the guy in such fear that he then reached into his pocket to get his gun out and shoot the thereby informed enquirer. I was frightened that asking you what time it is would frighten you so much that you might shoot me, so therefore I was justified in shooting you first. As self-defence.
If there is no test of reasonableness attached to the qualification of fright, it makes approaching another person in states that have these laws a tricky business. You step up to the teller in a bank, and they simply shoot you out of fear that you’re a bank robber. You run into a shop to get a pound of butter, and the assistant shoots you, because he’s taken aback by your haste. You arrange a viewing of a house that’s for sale, and the estate agent shoots you as you come up the driveway saying, “Good after-.”
That all may sound a little ridiculous, and I’m not sure what part is played in any of this by a constitutional need to ensure a well-disciplined militia, but, in all events, I don’t think pre-emptive shootings or engineered shootings have yet come up for discussion, let alone been put to the test. They sound outlandish. And yet, does the stand-your-ground law itself not sound outlandish?
I simply asked him what the time was and, all of a sudden, he reached inside his breast pocket.
- He was going to look at his mobile phone to tell you the time, I think.
I couldn’t know that! I was more frightened than I’ve ever been in my life! So I slugged him.
- Just like the cops do!
Yeah … hey! That’s right! Just like the cops do!
I’ll warrant you one thing: when to the test it is finally put, it’ll be the white guy who asked what time it is.
We used to have wars to trim the population, and now fentanyl is doing it for them. And homelessness is doing it for them. Caused by poverty, which is doing it for them. Boat people drowned and dead in the Med. Carpet-bombing to erase Gaza. Bullets in the brain in Ukraine. Maybe.
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My father’s old 1930s encyclopaedia contains the following illustration and attendant description.
There’s a common misconception that the caesarean operation for giving birth is named after Caesar, but this is incorrect. In fact, it is because the man himself was born thus that he was named Caesar, which means “cut”. The Book of Knowledge’s description could also give rise to misconceptions: Caesar’s Gaul was not the France of today, but Cisalpine Gaul (Gaul means the others), and the River Rubicon is still there, just north-west of the bathing resort of Rimini (Ariminum on the map, below, taken from http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/history_shepherd_1911.html—public domain).
Gaul. Means that lot, over there. Them.
If Caesar had failed in his endeavour, we’d never have coined the phrase to cross the Rubicon and there’d have been no czars, shahs or kaisers. It’s only a tiny little river for a man to cross, but it was a giant torrent for mankind.
I think Mr Netanyahu will be serious. About wiping out the Palestinians. Once he’s flattened Rafah, he’ll turn on the West Bank and kill everyone there (who he doesn’t want there).
He’s not listening to anyone, not in Brussels, not in Washington, not at the Red Cross, not at the United Nations, not at the World Health Organization. What would he do if he stopped now? Declare a holiday and put his feet up? Call back his troops and dish out some medals and tell the remaining Palestinians they can have their ramshackle strip back? Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead for wanting rapprochement. Benjamin Netanyahu would likely be in greater danger if he stopped his barrage than if he saw it through to the apocalyptic end. When there’s a knife against your throat, it can affect your assessment of what an apocalypse is.
When he fails to heed even the strongest admonitions that Mr Biden is able to muster, it’s not because he doesn’t want to. It’s because he doesn’t need to and he needs not to. They say that the AIPAC has a great deal of influence over American politicians. I wonder whether there are similar bodies that exercise the same influence and persuasion over democratically elected decision-makers in other countries.
Anyhow, Mr Netanyahu is not counting on any form of democracy to keep him in the position where he can do what he wants to do. He wants to procure living room for Jewish Israelis and, if that means wiping out the entire body of Muslim Israelis, then—I’m fairly sure— so be it. A British parliamentary candidate was chastised by his party for suggesting that the lapse of Israeli security on 7 October was engineered. I don’t know if it was engineered or not, but the callousness and disregard for human life that the victim of that attack has since then manifested would certainly allow of the conclusion that it at least is worth investigating, that it stands to reason, even if it’s a conspiracy theory (which can be taken as meaning that, if it does in fact exist, the evidence is still well hidden). But it doesn’t matter in the end whether it is or it isn’t true. Because whether the Palestinians have suffered and died in an act of justifiable retribution, an act of defence, or out of out-and-out badness, suffered and died is what they have done. The reason for the acts doesn’t change their result. It simply changes the putative state of the perpetrators’ consciences. How bitter the irony: Lebensraum achieved through annihilation and mass expulsion. Through bullets, disease, and starvation. And not a German in sight.
Democracy was a nice-to-have as long as Netanyahu needed to keep the people of Israel sweet. But he doesn’t need to do that now, and he certainly doesn’t need to toe the line as laid down by any supranational body like the United Nations—that much Israel has known since its modern foundation. He knows that it is a fundamental tenet binding every democracy: that it does not use force to achieve regime change in another democracy (except, that is, within the realm of the Monroe Doctrine). Israel is democratic, and its regime will never be changed involuntarily from outside; and, now, nor will it voluntarily change from inside. The reason why so many foreign politicians have been hesitant to call for a ceasefire is not that they don’t want a ceasefire, but because they know their calls will be ignored, and that makes them look powerless, which is worse than looking as if you support an uncompromising son of a gun. The hangers-on of bullies achieve surrogate bully status just for standing there with their thumbs hanging from their holsters.
It’s quite a sight when the public acts of a democratic regime make one realise how undemocratic it was the whole time. But, undemocratic democracy is the new dictatorship. Just like throwing a football match, the new generations have lost sight of the honour and calls for freedom that inspired the statesmen and generals of old. Yes, there was lucre and gain to be had, but the worst excesses still knew the bounds of that old, hackneyed expression it just isn’t done. Now, the game is played differently: it’s played smart. A smart footballer is one who misses the kick in return for a bundle of used fivers. If it works in football, it works anywhere. The word statesman is now redundant.
Mr Netanyahu is not counting one iota on having to win an election to stay in power. That much, if nothing else, he has in common with Herr Hitler.
to be committed to a course or undertaking from which there can be no withdrawal ... fortunately for him, he was successful
Galling.
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All my life, it’s been good guys and bad guys. Just like in The Virginian: James Drury and Doug McClure were the good guys, the men from Shiloh. And they took all the bad guys to task. Drury might’ve had a black hat and a black shirt, but his horse was white as the driven snow.
First we learned about concentration camps, which Germany invented to put Jews in. They gassed them there. Loads of them. Auschwitz was one of them. How could they, how could they be so cruel, so dastardly, so inhumane? The Jews were the good guys, the Germans were the bad guys. That’s what Steven Spielberg said, as well. Schindler’s List confirms it, doesn’t it? Liam Neeson was the bad guy turned good guy. Gandhi was the good guy, and that Rafe Feens or Fines or whatever—he was the bad guy, the really, really bad guy, wasn’t he? Nasty Germans. Jewish heroes. When we learned in class that concentration camps weren’t invented by Germans, but by the nasty British in South Africa, we didn’t want to believe it. Sure, but we British never gassed the people we sent there. Did we? We didn’t, did we? We wouldn’t do that; we are British.
First time I heard antisemitic I thought it was like anti-macassar, but I wasn’t sure, so I went and looked it up. Semitic. Like semantic, but different. But I couldn’t understand: what’s a Semite? A member of any of the peoples said (Gen. x) to be descended from Shem, or speaking a Semitic language.
So, what’s a Semitic language, then? Assyrian, Aramaean, Hebrew, Phoenician, Arabic, Ethiopic, &c. Arabic? Arabic, yes (Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary, “new mid-century version”—I was still in my youth, and the mid-century had not been so very long before; I considered the information enlightenment. Antisemitic means being against Jews and Arabs. And Syrians, and Ethiopians, and Phoenicians (who, I knew, had odd-shaped figureheads on their ancient galleys.))
Who could be anti-that? I didn’t look up Aramaean, because a boy can only do so much research in one day. I did wonder who Gen x were, but that’s since been explained.
The lessons in life have to be simple for the simple folk like me. We need to be told in unequivocal terms the things that are good and the things that are bad. Bad cowboys wear black hats, isn’t it? And good ones ... wear ponchos? Good boys are born under a wand’rin’ star; bad ones put infants to the slaughter.
I had a big collection of Matchbox cars. They’re called that because they come in what used to be designed like a big matchbox, except the sides were dark blue, instead of sandpaper. A lot of them were cars I didn’t know: American. Lincoln Continental, Pontiac Parsine, Mercury Cougar. I had a BMC Pininfarina. I never saw one in real life, didn’t even know what BMC meant. There were a few other cars, German, Italian, no French that I recall. Anyhow, I liked the American ones. We used to play with friends and we’d pick cars and then play with them, make streets and the like. Bridges, hotels, car crashes. Ker-pow!
I see from this e-Bay photo that the doors opened on the BMC, which was handy for the wee folk getting in and out. The reason I never saw one in reality was because it was never really made. A concept car from British Leyland, which was ahead of its time and styled by an Italian to look not unlike what Citroëns would look like ten years later. I thought America was great and wanted to go there. Meet James Cagney. Bang, bang! Pow, pow! “See, mama!”
In the 1980s, when I was in my 20s, I visited places like Dachau, Auschwitz, Theresienstadt. I went to Dachau about ten times. It was kind-of disappointing because it has gas chambers, but they were never used, so they say. They say no one knows why they weren’t used, which now makes me think they know full well, but are just not saying. There was a kind-of a feeling that at Auschwitz you had the full horror experience and that Dachau was sort-of playing at being a concentration camp. Then they showed you the films and you didn’t quite know whether it was better to be gassed or to be worked to death.
There was a girl I knew in school. Judith Bloom, and there was a Bloom’s the Chemist in the village and my mother said it was a Jewish name and I asked Judith if she was Jewish and she said, “Yes,” with a broad smile, and I liked her for that. Her folks weren’t well off but I liked her. I was always rooting for the underdog and, in the 1960s, the Jews were the underdogs ’round our way.
In 1985, I was at a cook-out in Ohio, and my hosts had invited many of their friends to meet the strange guy from Scotland. A woman one or two years my elder came up to me and introduced herself, by name, and then adding, “I’m Palestinian.” I didn’t quite know what to say. I had seen Yasser Arafat on the news and knew that there’s a difference between the scarfs in red and those in black. But what the difference was, I didn’t know. I thought to myself, “Aren’t Palestinians terrorists?” I felt like the woman had just said, “I’m a hitman for the mafia.”
“Every kid should be made to go and watch that film,” my Dutch buddy Mario said as we lit a well-earned fag to calm our nerves upon exiting the Antwerp Kinepolis after seeing Schindler’s List. The year was 1994. It came up, the film did, as a topic of conversation in the private English class I gave to an aristocratic attorney in the law firm where I worked. He was moved by the little girl’s red coat being seen in that pile of bodies. When Steven Spielberg says, “Weep!” the world, it doth weep. Magnificently, and rightly so.
By now the Jews were not the underdogs, they were rightly remembered, honoured. Willy Brandt at the Holocaust Memorial, on his knees, became a symbol of German contrition. They enjoyed protections against those who would attack them. They had their state and they’d been in some wars but we didn’t quite understand what these wars were about. I was too young and the Israelis all needed to protect themselves against ... well, against the Palestinians. Those terrorists. Like that woman in Ohio. Wasn’t she also a terrorist?
I’m not sure if Doug McClure ever did anything really bad in his role as Trampas in The Virginian. I don’t know if he did any bad things in Shenandoah, either. Shenandoah was about a widower farmer and his family who just wanted to bring in the sheaves in Virginia, and not get caught up in any damned war. The Civil War came, nonetheless, and James Stewart would end up losing two of his boys and a daughter-in-law to war’s stupidity, even though he wanted no part of it. Wars do that: they consume, and take life, and destroy families; even if you want no part in them.
Then, after Ohio, life continued and the Middle East became calm. We all had other things to do and the worst that Israel could do was produce a corrupt politician. In that, it was no different to anywhere else. I liked Golda Meir. Wished we could have a woman prime minister. Then, alakazam, we got one. Someone murdered its prime minister in 1995. That was different; a bit, anyway. Just because someone didn’t like Oslo.
Much later, I read an astonishing statistic: six million. I even devised a quiz about it, like “What does six million say to you?” A film about a Jewish New York doctor, or the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust, or the number of Palestinians unable to return to their homes as they should be allowed to under the by then infamous Oslo Accords?
It’s all of them. Symphony of Six Million was a film made in 1932, just before Hitler came to power. There’s an odd coincidence. The infamous figure from the Holocaust. And the number of Palestinians unable to go home. They’re all six million. However, six million is not the number of people killed in the war. It’s the number of Jews, but the number of people killed was far more: twelve million, possibly up to 30 million, if you count Russians, Poles, Romani, homosexuals, mentally ill, physically ill and anyone who got in the way of a half-track. If only six million of anyone had died in World War II, things wouldn’t have been half bad. The figure is nearer … much more.
How could it be that one signs an international Oslo accord, agrees, says, “Okay!” and then doesn’t fulfil one’s engagements? Surely that’s against the law? Had Israel not had the benefit of law all this time, so why would it break the law?
Then along came Whoopi Goldberg. She’s black and not a bad actress. But she got into some hot water in 2022. She was a host on a programme called The View from the American Broadcasting Company, and she said that antisemitism has nothing to do with race. She was suspended for a few weeks because her employer, ABC, said that that was not true. Antisemitism is a race matter. Ms Goldberg said she was sorry and I think her apology was eventually accepted and she went back to work. Here’s how Wikipedia reports the events:
On January 31, 2022, Goldberg drew widespread criticism for stating on the show that the Holocaust was not based on race but “about man’s inhumanity to man,” telling her co-hosts: “This is white people doing it to white people, so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.”
In 2024, I saw an interview between former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges and Israeli university professor Ilan Pappe, in which Prof Pappe said that Israeli passports do not describe the holder as Israeli, but rather as one of two other things: Muslim, or Jew. Clearly there is no syllogism at work here, for if there is such a thing as a Muslim holder of an Israel-issued passport, then not all Israeli passport-holders are Jews, and clearly, not all Jews are Israeli passport-holders. But those Jews who are citizens of Israel are not Israelis—they are Jews. And those Muslims who are citizens of Israel are also not Israelis—they are Muslims. I wanted to ask him about the Christians, Buddhists and atheists, but I guess I need to read his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine for that.
A lad I was at Methodist school with, his name was Ian Brown and, some time after we’d left school I got wind that he had converted to Islam and I thought that was interesting. Unlike the girl in Ohio, I did not assume that Ian had become a terrorist, but I was still young and impressionable and if everyone else thought that Muslims are terrorists, well, then, who was I to disagree with them? After all, the only Muslims that I knew of I had had but passing contact with.
Actually, that’s rubbish. I didn’t find it interesting; I was shocked silly. Yes, I was shocked silly. I can’t say I wasn’t, because I was. It’s now that I find it interesting, because I’m 40 years older and, even if I’m not 40 years wiser, my shock has been relativised into interest. If I could call two people back from my past and have a discussion with them right this instant, it would be the Ohio girl and Ian Brown. That’s the kind of thing that happens when childhood preconceptions become adult preconceptions.
So, is a nationality a race? Is there a French race? The Swiss race? The Lithuanian race? Or are we Europeans all together one race? Except for the Jews, that is, because, as Whoopi found to her cost, the Jews are a race of their own. Which must mean that the Muslims are a race. I know a Muslim, a good friend of mine. He lives in West Africa. He speaks Wolof, but not that French nonsense they speak in Senegal, because he’s from The Gambia, but he lets me speak Senegalese Wolof to him, and he finds it funny. He understands. His mum was born on Kunta Kinteh Island, in the estuary of the River Gambia, where the distance from the north to the south banks is over ten kilometres. They’re Muslim, and they’re human. They’re of the same race as I am. The human race. But if racism is to mean anything, then we cannot cast our racist net so broadly as the human race. So, what is a race? Is it just skin colour? Are the Italians the same race as the Algerians, because their skin colour is very similar? The Kenyans and the Gambians? Do you know, it is a thousand kilometres farther from The Gambia to Kenya than it is from where I live to The Gambia? My Gambian buddy is black, and I’m white, and we’re physically closer than he is to Simon, a guy I know in Kenya. So, what is race? Is race nationality? Is race our Linnaean binomial categorisation? Or is it, and has it simply always been, the means by which we designate our enemies? As if by lending our prejudices some scientific grounding, we therefore elevate our hatred to a higher plain? Whoopi was right—we don’t need race for that. We’re perfectly capable of doing that without some Swedish botanist.
We raise the Jew up as a victim of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man and identify him as a Jew to express our disgust at the gulf created by men between themselves, the superior, and others, the inferior. And the self-same race, against which such hatred was outpoured, is granted by general consent a land unto itself, that it might thrive and prosper in its racial cocoon, safe from the predations of the rest of mankind, which had hitherto treated it so unkindly. Safe from the antisemitism (that had meanwhile been redefined to exclude Phoenicians and Arabs). Safe within its new borders, cleansed of the occupiers of yore. Safe within the national boundaries within which the Israeli passport decree’d all holders to be separated by race. As Muslims and as Jews. Whereby racial segregation becomes the imprint of Israeli nationality.
May I say this? Do, tell me if I err. For I am labouring to comprehend how a nationality can be redefined as a race, as an inculcator of hatred and prejudice against a body of people who wreak disdain on those who would assert any right against them, from whatever quarter, on racial grounds, a race that figures not in the passports of millions of Jews around the world and that yet figures not in all of the passports of the people of Israel. I repeat, what is race?
When we define our discussion in terms of racial anthropology, is it deliberately that we skim over the fundamental issues that separate us, one from another: our mutual antagonism, and our mantras, and truths, and realities, and histories, and propagandas? Founding our retribution on the acts of those who went before, or those who are to us other, even if they be our brethren? Let not the children suffer for the sins of their fathers? Indeed, let the fathers suffer for their own sins. But no father is his brother’s keeper. We must desist from this attribution of sainthood and sanctity, or ancestral claim and counterclaim, of racial purity and impurity, of economic rivalry and entitlement, by words that always eventually turn upon us to defy the falsity of our own contrived definitions. Let us transcend our sophistry, and let us transcend our self-imposed boundaries, be they described upon this Earth or in our minds: we are men and women of this world. All this world is ours to share and love; and our love is ours for all to share. If we fear others enough to hate them, then we do not love even ourselves enough to be worthy of what we hope to thereby gain.
There are some who now say that Israel has done a great thing. There are some who say that Israel has contrived matters, to be able to do this great thing. And I will no longer partake of this discussion, for I have no insight into where what justification for what outrage in these matters lies, and, quite honestly, I have not the energy to fathom them. But I am in one thing certain: that he who does wrong unto his fellow man, be he of whatever race, does wrong to all mankind, by his malice, by his act, by his example, by his impunity.
A blessing be on both their houses.
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We gather here in this great hall of justice, in the Peace Palace. We are reminded of these simple words: peace through justice, peace through law.
The General Assembly brought the question of Palestine before the court because our people are in jeopardy. The clarity of the law as it pertains to this question is only matched by the evidence of its continued breach by Israel. As we address you today, this breach has reached its most inhumane levels: more than two million Palestinians in Gaza are being pushed all the way to the border, to the very brink. Palestinian children, women and men consumed by disease, despair, destruction and death, which are spreading like wildfire in the rest of occupied Palestine.
Israeli leaders no longer feel the need to hide their intentions: they speak openly of getting rid of the Palestinian people one way or another. They defy the law and the law is barely fighting back. For Palestine, the law continues to be only a measure of the severity of breaches rather than a catalyst for action and accountability. What does international law mean for Palestinian children in Gaza today? It has protected neither them nor their childhood, it has not protected their families or communities. It has not protected their lives or limbs, their hopes or homes. We are a proud and resilient people that has endured more than its share of agony. It is so painful to be Palestinian today. How could we be subjected to such loss and injustice, such lawlessness and humiliation, time and time again? What does international law mean for a nation bestowed with inherent rights but enjoying none?
It took 75 years for the UN to commemorate the Nakba, our violent displacement from our land and denial of our rights and existence; and we are seeing it happen all over again: massacres, millions forcibly driven into the unknown, intense starvation, deprivation and dehumanisation, enabling one people to impose all of this on another. Palestinians under occupation in Israel, as refugees and in the diaspora: all they asked for are their rights and to live in freedom and dignity in their ancestral land. For 75 years, the Palestinian people have faced attempts to push them out of geography and, indeed, out of history, and it goes on, and it will go on for ever, unless and until international law is upheld; unless and until the unlawful occupation of Palestine ends.
Our right to self determination was recognised in the context of a mandate 100 years ago, yet simultaneously negated by the actions of the Mandatory Power. The question of Palestine was passed on to the United Nations at the time of its inception and has remained on its agenda ever since. In the aftermath of the Nakba, the United Nations admitted Israel to membership while emphasising the need for it to respect resolutions 181 and 194 concerning the Palestinian State and the territory allotted to it, the international status of Jerusalem, and the right of return of Palestinian refugees. Israel recognised these resolutions to secure its admission, only to renegue on them as soon as it was admitted.
Ever since, Israel became convinced that the new realities imposed by the use of force would override the obligations arising from the rule of international law without any consequences. In 1967 the Security Council emphasised the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and called for the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict. Instead, Israel started to colonise the land.
The General Assembly, in resolution 3005, called upon Israel to desist [in] the annexation of any part of the occupied territories and the establishment of Israeli settlements on those territories and the transfer of part of an alien population into the occupied territories. Instead, Israel formalised its annexation of Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank and poured hundreds of thousands of settlers into our territory.
In 1974, fifty years ago, the General Assembly reaffirmed the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people in Palestine including the right to self-determination without external interference, the right to national independence and sovereignty, as well as the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced, and uprooted and called for their return. Instead, Israel denied the existence of the Palestinian people. The United Nations has consistently reiterated these calls, yet Israel has consistently rejected them, entrenching its violations rather than ending them.
So, here we are: though the law is absolutely clear, it is being trampled. Without accountability, there is no justice, and without justice there can be no peace. Israel must be made to bear the consequences of its illegal conduct rather than reap the benefits. After 75 years, justice can no longer wait for the day Israel has an epiphany and suddenly decides to reverse course and commit to the law and UN resolutions. Our journey in the search for justice has brought us before you, before the International Court of Justice, following the General Assembly’s decision to seek your guidance. We call on you to confirm that Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is illegal ... that the presence of its occupation forces and settlers is illegal and at that its occupation must thus come to an immediate, complete and unconditional end ...
This occupation has served as cover for Israel’s colonial designs: the acquisition of Palestinian territory by force. In 1980 the Security Council reaffirmed the overriding necessity to end the prolonged occupation of Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem. If the occupation was deemed prolonged in 1980, how should it be characterised today, nearly 45 years later? ... And if it was an overriding necessity to end it then, what exactly is it now, I ask you?
The United Nations admitted Israel in 1949. Seventy-five years later, Palestine is yet to be admitted as a full member of the United Nations. I sat in the General Assembly next to representatives of liberation movements, next to the ANC and SWAPO: we stood side by side with them as they achieved their independence and took their rightful places among the community of nations. They cannot accept that the Palestinian people are left behind any longer, indefinitely denied their innate rights. That is why many of those states will appear before this court in the coming days.
Based on the UN record you should have no difficulty arriving at the conclusion that the occupation is prolonged, that Palestinian territory has been annexed, that our self-determination has been denied, and that the people of Palestine have been subjected to systematic racial discrimination. The occupation itself cannot be distinguished from these breaches: they are not merely the result of the occupation but are rather the foundation upon which the occupation rests, rooted in the singular unlawful goal of maintaining permanent Israeli dominance over the occupied Palestinian territory, and relegating the Palestinians it has not been able to displace to inferior status in their own land, in perpetuity, deprived of their inalienable rights.
A finding from this distinguished court that the occupation is illegal and drawing the legal consequences from this determination would contribute to bringing it to an immediate end, paving the way to just and lasting peace ...
The State of Palestine appeals to this court to guide the international community in upholding international law, ending injustice, and achieving a just and lasting peace to guide us towards a future in which Palestinian children are treated as children, not as demographic fact; in which the identity of the group to which we belong does not diminish the human rights to which we are all entitled; a future in which no Palestinian and no Israeli is killed; a future in which two states live side by side in peace and security. The Palestinians only demand respect for their rights: they ask for nothing more; they cannot accept [any]thing less, and nothing else. The future of freedom, justice and peace can begin here and now. It is within your power to give the clearest statement possible on what the law is, what it requires, and what it means in practice, for all members of the United Nations.
We trust in your wisdom, your fairness and your dedication to justice and the rule of law.
Riyad Mansour, Palestinian envoy to the United Nations, before the ICJ on 19 February 2024.
E.o.e.: the transcript is taken from the speech as delivered. Formalities are omitted.
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When Israel attended a peace conference in Brussels on 27 January 2024, they used part of the time available to them to show a presentation of a projected rail link from Israel to India. Just to remind you, here is a map of the area between Israel and India:
The route would go through Syria or Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, perhaps also Saudi Arabia and/or Afghanistan. Looks unlikely? Of course it’s unlikely: the right-wing Hindu party in India would not countenance running a major rail link through Muslim Pakistan, obviously. So Pakistan is out.
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There are existing proposals for rail links entering Europe through Turkey or Moscow and they centre on Iran as a hub. There’s no question but that a link to Israel is a possibility, but, as this plan at least shows, India is no way near the rails, which stop in Iran. You can get to India by sea from there, but you can get to anywhere in the world from there, if it’s at the seaside.
One way to get to India without using a ship is this:
A proposed tunnel carrying freight, passengers, pedestrians (hmmm…), water and oil from the United Arab Emirates to India. That’s a lot of pipes, and, for the moment, it’s a lot of pipe-dreams. I wonder what the water pipe is for. In case it catches fire?
So, what is it, besides railway pipe-dreams, that links India and Israel? Apart from the letter “I”? Apart from them both being in Asia? Apart from them both being a bit—just a tad—right-wing? And, of course … de–mo–cra–cies? Hm? Can you guess?
One thing that links them is labour. Israel has seen fit to decimate its labour force by waging war on Palestine for five months and, because of that, there is a shortage of labour in Israel and (no joke) in the Palestinian territories as well. About 100,000 of the people who, up until October 2023, worked there no longer work there, and that is leading to a shortage of manpower.
Taking up on a pattern that has installed itself over time and was especially visible when Qatar was building the infrastructure for its hosting of a global football championship, the subcontinent is being looked to as a source of reliable, skilled and, above all, poor labourers. Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi labourers travelling abroad can make around four times the wage that they would earn at home, and this attracts many, mainly, men to travel within the broader region for work. There is, it has to be said, a great deal of infrastructure work going on in India, some of it controversial in terms of its environmental compatibility, but the work is there. However, the prospect of earning four times the Indian wage, as it was in Qatar, for instance, is an attractive proposition.
The work that needs doing in Israel is not offering four times an Indian wage, but twenty times an Indian wage. Some men will travel 1,000 kilometres to camp out and part with the equivalent of 3,000 US dollars just in order to get the chance of an interview for selection and to be taken on in Israel, so attractive is the remuneration package. That said, Israel does have something of a sketchy track-record when it comes to foreign workers’ rights, and the press was also full of scandalous reports concerning working and living conditions for migrant workers in Qatar for the World Cup (over 6,000 of them died). But an offer of five times the Indian wage would surely draw such manpower to the Middle East, would it not? So, then, why twenty times?
The shortage would appear to have arisen in the building trade, and the building trade covers two aspects: building (putting bricks together to build walls) and demolition (the reverse process), and, it seems, Israel needs both of these skills sets. There is a great deal of rubble in the western part of Israel, which needs clearing before the land can be reassigned; in use, let alone in ownership. This is one task for which Israel is looking to hire Indian manpower, and it has the encouragement of the Indian government in doing so, mostly in the states of India where the ruling BJP has a strong following (that’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party).
One way to analyse the 20x wages is to see part of that as remuneration for work done and part of it as remuneration for taking a considerable risk: danger money. Because the work needing doing is partly in Israel and partly in the Gaza Strip (besides the dream of a railway to India, there is the dream of a pop-up port off the Gaza coast). The 20x wage is clearly a hefty incentive to get civilian workers to do building and demolition work in an active war zone. That is a proposition that has incurred the wrath of Indian trades unions.
I might add that some workers are being encouraged not only to take up a pick and a shovel, but even to take up arms, and to fight alongside members of the Israeli Defence Force.
Mr Modi recently re-dedicated a former mosque in Ayodhya as a Hindu temple and seems determined to turn India from a multi-cultural democracy into a Hindu-styled monocultural, ethnocentric state, and he has turned increasingly to Israel, a paragon example of such a state, to aid him. India buys more weapons from Israel than any other country, besides co-producing Israeli armaments in factories in India. India was very reluctant to join other states in calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, and it has voiced no support for South Africa’s case against Israel in the International Court of Justice. The former staunch support shown by India for Palestine has gradually been turned around as India forges a new narrative among its people, linking the technological and infrastructural progress its sees in Israel to the great infrastructure projects that India is moving ahead with, such as in the Himalayas: the roads and settlements built by Israel portend a progress that India is persuaded it can share, by pursuing similar projects in which the expansion of infrastructure comes at the cost of culture and, especially, confessional belief. Part of India’s friendship with Israel comes from their having a common enemy. They both defend their culture, their religion, their civilisation against the bugbear: Islam. India has borrowed the by-line from Ukraine, where that country is fighting its war for the future freedom of Europe; in India, Israel’s war against Palestine is being moulded as a joint cause: Israel is fighting this war for all free-thinking people.
The BJP is modelling India on Israel, transforming it into a strong, militaristic, ethno-nationalist state, a Hindu rashtra, in which certain citizens belong more than others, and that in the state with the third-largest Islamic population on Earth. For this, India is seeking closer ties to the object of its adulation, and recasting its relationship to Palestine, by fantasising and sensationalising the threat posed by the Islamic world, just as, in its time, the threat posed by communism was blown out of proportion in the Cold War:
“The Hamas fighters were slicing open the stomachs of expectant mothers and pulling out the foetuses. They were cutting open chests and eating people’s hearts.” (Sangeet Som, representative of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttar-Pradesh.)
“Do you really think, ladies and gentlemen, that the terrorist attack that you’ve seen on Israel will never happen in India? That it’s really that far off? It is not that far off. The same radical, jihadist, Islamist, terrorist thinking that Israel is a victim of, we are a victim of as well…” (announcer on Republic TV, a mainstream Indian TV news channel after the 7 October attack.) “Israel is fighting this war on behalf of all of us. Israel is fighting this war for you and me. Israel is fighting this war for all free-thinking people across the world.”
There you are. Israel is fighting this war for you, chaps.
The Indian support in the immediate aftermath of 7 October harkened back to the reactions of Indians to a 2008 Pakistani terrorist attack in Mumbai; any parallel that associates the destiny of India with that of Israel is at this time being actively sought out and billboarded as truth and evidence of the righteousness of Israel’s battle with, not Hamas, and not even Palestine, but with the Muslim religion as a whole, giving India its cue to cry out, “Hear, hear!”
The guys queueing up in Uttar-Pradesh to get an interview for work in Israel, hoping they’ll be selected to go off there within the month, have been told that they needn’t apply if they are Muslims. It is to be assumed that this injunction comes not from the recruitment agencies themselves, who would have every interest in recruiting every last valid candidate they can find (at 3,000 dollars a whack). But their instructing principal will no doubt have imposed this condition.
If India thinks Israel is fighting this war for all free-thinking people, then the free-thinking are certainly doing their thinking as they observe this war. And, in fairness, you can hear here that there are free-thinking people across India who certainly do not agree with their leader, or with Israel’s, either. That much India and Israel also have in common: a stalwart body of opinion that is revolted by their governments’ rapprochement and mutual high-fives.
Who Israel is fighting this war for is an open question. Some say it’s for Mr Netanyahu, and none other. Some say it’s for Israel. Some say it’s for Jews, across the world. Now India says it’s for India, and even for all free-thinking people across the globe. If it’s for the free-thinking, therefore, it surely cannot be for Mr Netanyahu. Take your pick. Take your shovel. Or take up your arms.
One thing’s true: Israel is not fighting this war for Palestinians; for they are thinking people, deep in thought, whose thoughts will deepen yet more in the fullness of time, but they are not—not yet—free.
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“Love him or hate him, we all owe Snowden our thanks for forcing upon the nation an important debate. But the debate shouldn’t be about him. It should be about the gnawing questions his actions raised from the shadows.” Bernie Sanders, US Senator for the state of Vermont, on whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Edward Snowden is a criminal. He’s been tried by American courts and found guilty under various statutes of engaging in criminal behaviour. But he’s not going to prison any time soon, not so far as I’m aware. He lives in Moscow, holds dual citizenship of both the US and Russia and revealed a lot of state secrets about the American intelligence behemoth, which has earned him the aforementioned rap sheet together with the adulation of some parts of the world, as well as provoking awkward silences from others.
To sum up the Snowden revelations in a nutshell: he was very wrong to do what he did, but doing what he did made plain to all the world that the US government are shysters and that you couldn’t trust them to post a letter. To which the US government essentially responded by saying that anyone who has problems with spying by the bucketload on the US’s own population or the population of a partner country, all they need to do is escalate the matter to senior intelligence service managers, who will then sort the matter out. In response to which, the US’s federal courts have said the intelligence managers are duplicitous liars, and their data-collection scheme was, and likely still is, probably unconstitutional.
I know that that’s a pretty big nutshell, but it was a pretty big revelation. If Mr Snowden’s audacity was not in and of itself enough to take your breath away, and if the facts revealed in his disclosures to the world’s press did not take away what little breath surely remained from the shock of his audacity, then the responses by the American judicial system and its intelligence bosses certainly took the cookie.
President Obama called Snowden a “29-year-old hacker,” which revealed the president’s fundamental misunderstanding of Mr Snowden and his own intelligence services, because Snowden didn’t obtain the stuff he disclosed by hacking; he obtained it by copying what the National Security Agency (NSA) themselves had already hacked.
Essentially the intelligence services and the US courts went from denying that they ever spy on anyone (other than bad people), to saying they spy on their “partners” (like Mrs Merkel in Germany—for which she and their other friends should be grateful), to saying it’s not unconstitutional for them to do that, to saying that it might be unconstitutional, to changing the relevant provisions (of the ex-Patriot Act, now USA Freedom Act (if there’s freedom in the title, it must be about freedom, but I’m not sure whether it’s about guaranteeing it or limited it)) so that mass-collection of ordinary folks’ data is restricted.
The prime complaint against Mr Snowden appears to have been that he broke the law by revealing that the NSA was breaching the constitution and thereby breaking the law, and if he’d only tipped the wink to his line manager, the whole thing could have been sorted out without him having to get stuck in Russia and terrorists learning how America hacks and tracks them.
Senator Sanders is regarded by Edward Snowden as probably the most decent politician in America. I think so, too. But the most balanced view of all about Mr Snowden, albeit coming from the pen of Mr Sanders, promises nothing: a debate? A debate. It is in a way the fact that nothing will change in terms of the kinds of information the NSA collects that proves how nefarious the NSA’s collection of that data is. The impermeability of the intelligence services, by which nothing gets in and nothing, certainly, gets out (aside from Snowden, how many other NSA whistleblowers have you heard of?) gives good cause to regard its every denial as an admission and its every admission as a cover for a worse admission.
An acquaintance of mine of yore once opined on Facebook that she had no qualms about her data being collected by she-knew-not-who. Whether she’ll ever live to rue her lack of concern, no one will know but she. Surveillance is now so omnipresent that it’s a great temptation to throw up one’s hands and accept it all, as just the way things are. If Edward Snowden’s revelations could do nothing more than create a debate, then we can all sigh a sigh of resignation: there is nothing we can do about it. But doing something about it is not the point, not here it isn’t.
I read an article on the website of the Electoral Reform Society by one of the society’s officers, Jessica Garland, entitled What is the role of the House of Lords and could it do more? In it, Ms Garland says:
While the House of Lords is often in the press, it’s often due to the things its members should not be doing, rather than the work it does do. The chamber though has an important role to play in our democracy.
My eyes halted at the last word. The ethos of the Electoral Reform Society is as follows:
Our vision is of a democracy fit for the 21st century, where every voice is heard, every vote is valued equally, and every citizen is empowered to take part. We make the case for lasting political reforms, we seek to embed democracy into the heart of public debate, and we foster the democratic spaces which encourage active citizenship.
What Ms Garland calls our democracy is not, for all her position as its director of policy, what the ERS calls a democracy fit for the 21st century. What I’d like to ask Ms Garland is whether a democracy in which the intelligence services collect massive amounts of data about ordinary citizens’ use of telephony, Internet, transport providers, credit cards, water consumption, electricity usage, and all the other things that it is possible to do surveillance on in our modern world is democracy fit for the 21st century. Because, if it isn’t, I suggest she should stop calling it our democracy and start calling it something else.
The problem is that democracy is a philosophy—despised by Plato no less—and it’s a label—applied to how we vote, as it is also to our actual system of government: one that relies heavily on trust and cooperation and is at the same time eminently susceptible to abuse and corruption. The reputation of reliance and trust is so robust that it becomes palpably easy for the malevolent to breach the trust and either not raise so much as a suspicion that they’ve done so or to vehemently deny, with some vestige of credibility, that no such breach of trust has occurred, and thereafter to carry on regardless. From the NSA’s viewpoint, what is irksome about Edward Snowden is that his revelations were backed up by facts, which made it arduous to engage in a dialogue of his word against theirs. In many other cases, that’s a dialogue that’s so much easier to lie your way through.
What is reassuring to the NSA’s viewpoint is the fact that Snowden’s bombshell left so much that was wrong with the NSA untouched. It was a scud missile that, in many respects, once the smoke cleared, could as well have been a dud. That surely emboldened the NSA moving forward, since it was a text-book application of strong-arm tactics on partner countries actually working, for all to see and gasp at: partner countries displaying canine-like obedience when it comes to rolling over and playing dead.
When Mr Snowden filed his 21 asylum applications, I don’t think it was necessarily to find out where he might end up living, but rather to find out where he ought, above all, to avoid living: who are the US’s lap-dogs? Is it not odd that Snowden’s biggest assurance of safety lay not in the great democratic nations of the west, but in autocratic Russia? Well, Russia is no lap-dog to the USA—I don’t think so, anyway—and it’s unlikely to be one in the foreseeable future, so that is where Mr Snowden has made his home: the guarantees offered to him by Russia transpired to be far more believable than those offered to him by the land of his birth, the cradle of democratic tradition.
So, where does that leave the rest of us, who have not blabbed copious quantities of state secrets on the Internet, who drag ourselves out of bed each morning and roll into work on the 8:50, clock off at 5 o’clock and return home to our Volvo estate and 2.4 children? For the most of us, it has for a long time been sufficient if the 8:50 is actually running, if the Volvo starts on a frosty morning, if the kids get decent grades in arithmetic, and the little missus has put a braised rabbit on the table for dinner. More we do not want from life, and if the NSA finds it interesting to monitor our WhatsApp birthday congratulations, well, good luck to ’em.
Until the full shock of Snowden’s revelations came to be felt, and as long as respected politicians were talking about earnest debate, the little people cherished a hope, a confidence that the misdeeds of the past would remain in the past and that a fresh start could be made on making democracy fit for the 21st century.
But now the little people fear the rise of the right: the Alternative für Deutschland, the American Trumpists, Marie Le Pen’s National Rally, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, and they fear the right without all too often asking themselves how come the right is rising? Well, to answer that, you’d need to ask the right.
You’d perhaps get answers such as that vast sums of money have disappeared from public coffers with nothing to show for it, the enormous bale-outs of big business that those little people all had to shoulder, the equality legislation that gets flouted by local authorities, who engage high-powered counsel to defend cases raised by greedy workers instead of admitting their own failings (as ably illustrated by the Post Office Horizon scandal and the Glasgow and Birmingham care workers’ pay cases).
In short, how often does democracy need to shoot itself in the foot for it to eventually be found limping? Time after time, new faith is mustered to invest in democratic institutions, because, of course, we live in a democracy (just nip outside and check that’s what the brass plate on the door says), which, time and again, prove their disregard for the system on which they are founded, the same brass plate on the door. They hack away at the very structure of the public confidence that is essential to their existence and, when they chip a chip too far, they walk away with financial benefit and preserved reputations, leaving disaster in their wake, to move on to democratic pastures new.
That is how the right rises: it is the direction that people turn to when all else has failed them. They believe the rhetoric because the rhetoric of democracy rings all too hollow. They place faith in the right, because their faith is at a low ebb in any case: what have they to lose? A vote? An appointed second chamber packed with ex-prime ministers’ cronies? A pretend democracy? Regardless of any illusions about the right, many are asking: if this is what we have to thank democracy for, why would we want to preserve it?
They say that turning to the right is an act of suicide. It is, yes: an act of desperation.
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In his song L’Italia, Marco Masini sings, “È un paese, l’Italia, che governano loro”, which can be translated as Italy’s a land ruled by “them”. Masini sings of his homeland, but is it not something that we can say about every country?
Famously, the US Constitution begins with the words We, the people, so America is not ruled by them, it is ruled by us (by which I mean the Americans). Yet, the US Constitution was not signed by the entire population of the colonies. In fact, only 38 of the 70 members of the Constitutional Convention signed it (one of whom also signed as a proxy, making the total signatories 39 in number). Yet, I’ll warrant that, in most Americans’ breasts, there surges a sentiment of pride and honour at hearing those words, We, the people. So, here, in 2024, as America launches into its election season, who, exactly, are we, the people?
The answer to that question is as nebulous as the identification of who Masini meant when he spoke of loro—them. Who are Masini’s they? The government? Northern Italy’s industrialists? The communists? Ms Meloni’s far-right support? The Cosa Nostra? Or are loro in fact noi—us, whatever the government’s constellation might be? What do you think he means? And what do you think he ought to mean?
Italy and the US are both democracies. That ought to mean that it is indeed we, the people who are loro. But the nation state is a strange creature. In a state of anarchy, each individual is king of his own castle. Just like Englishmen are. Democracy is unrestricted freedom under the law, within the bounds of the law, exercisable by all and sundry, equally and without preference or denigration. We, the people, exercise utter and absolute freedom aside from what is proscribed by a law that applies to all of us equally. That is democracy. We ensure this by electing our own representatives in government, and abrogating to them the prerogatives that would remain our own were we to exist in that terra nullius state of anarchy. Politics can be seen as a complex structure but its complexities stem essentially from its existence as a career form. The career that politics offers makes it less than practical to step into and out of it like chairmanship of a theatrical society. It’s a full-time job, and the very election process demands fame, name-recognition, campaigning, money and promises—to those who pay the money, as to those who give their votes (which can sometimes lead to the elected parliamentarian being less than honest to one or the other). It demands keeping everyone, or as many of everyone as is possible, happy all the time. And, when the happiness factor ceases to add up (like when 70% of the British populace clamours for its elected representatives to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and government and opposition alike ignore them), that is when democracy starts to show its weaknesses. That is when it starts to show that the fairness, the universal consent on which it is predicated, no longer obtains. It is at that moment that America’s We, the people becomes Italy’s loro (at least as I believe Masini meant it).
Do the shops open on Sundays where you are? When I was in The Netherlands at the weekend, it occurred to me to do a little shopping for some Dutch specialities. I like their peanut sauce, special cheese, nasi goreng mix and atjar tjampoer for an Indonesian rice table, and other things you can’t get so easily here. But Albert Heijn was closed in the small village where I was, so I’ll need to pine for peanuts a little longer. “Ah, yes,” said my buddy, “but the shops in larger towns are open some part of a Sunday.” I think that’s right, but it got me curious. Who decides when a shop opens? (Clue: it’s not always the shopkeeper.)
In France in 2013, there was uproar about shop opening times. The legislation governing shops, les magasins, les commerces, was so multi-layered, it attracted the nickname millefeuille, a name normally reserved for a luxurious confection made of endless layers of wafer-thin pastry (French-speakers like to exaggerate: they thank you a thousand times, don’t just split hairs, but cut them into four, and use the expression “no, perhaps?” to mean “certainly!” (see note); millefeuille literally translates as a thousand leaves, but you needn’t ever count them).
Note: merci mille fois ! ; couper les cheveux en quatre ; non, peut-être ?
The millefeuille referred, of course, to the stack of rules, exceptions, special provisions, sectoral application, industry norms and so on that constituted a veritable labyrinth of legislation when all that’s really involved is (a) shops and (b) people who want to go to shops (or don’t, as the case may be).
It seemed that opponents of grands surfaces like Merlin Leroy enjoyed sauntering down high streets shuttered with roller blinds to avoid vagrant hooligans lobbing bricks through store display windows, and window-shopping at those that dared run the risk of errant vandalism, the odd car chugging past carrying its occupants to a dutiful afternoon of coffee and cream horns with Tante Béatrice, at which smartly besuited children would sit, hands exposed palm-down on their knees, being seen and not heard, as the grown-ups all remarked “Oh, comme ils ont grandi !”, and felt that no one should be desecrating their or anyone else’s Sunday pleasures by actually contracting sales and purchases with those very devils, themselves: les commerçants.
British Sunday-opening laws are also a mish-mash. Because there are none. The rules in the United Kingdom differ among Northern Ireland, Scotland, and England & Wales (hence, not British). When London hosted the Olympic Games in 2012, the Sunday trading laws were suspended for eight weeks, and I can assure you that that alone would’ve had Eric Liddell reaching for his chariot of fire, if it’d have been Paris 1924.
Whatever had been the overpowering need to introduce them in the first place back in 1930 was no longer a burning issue in 2012 as long as hordes of affluent global travellers were in town just itching to be fleeced of their souvenir budgets; once the visitors had re-departed for their own corners of the globe, England’s shop-closure laws came back into force. Some say they’re there for religious reasons, but clearly one is allowed to be a sinner for the Olympic Games. Ain’t that a slug in the rubber parts: lift-and-lay legislative morality. (Lift-and-lay what?!!)
Scotland has no Sunday trading laws, and that’s a bit surprising, since they’re all protestant puritans up there. I know, I am one. When Scotland started building its railways (the first was 1722—Tranent & Cockenzie), there were no rules against Sunday running, and yet no railway company ran trains on a Sunday. By 1850, over 6,000 miles of railway had been laid in Great Britain, and much of it was running services on Sundays. Except in Scotland. The first attempts at Sunday running of trains met with furious opposition from the church and its parishioners. You might wonder why there were therefore no laws against Sunday trading up in North Britain. Well, there were also no laws against spending all day stood on your head. Put simply: the one was regarded as unlikely as the other, and so there were laws against neither.
Sunday trading laws are the kind of laws that get introduced when the assiduously followed way of doing things ceases to be assiduously followed, and are used by those who wish to continue assiduously following the way of doing things to make sure that no one else stops being assiduous. Perhaps they think, like some French, that children should be seen and not heard. In England a child’s hands should be kept under the table. In France, it is de rigueur to place your hands on the table. France and Britain may be fromage and cheese, chalk and craie, but they both know superfluous levels of conventionality. And, changing conventionality can be an upward struggle. Even if the ultimate aim of abandoning conventionality is in fact the very democracy that it is proclaimed we all live in and need to defend.
What Sunday trading laws do in England, just to take one example, is treat different trading sectors differently. Here’s an excerpt from the web:
‘Small’ shops, which are classed as up to and including 280 square metres (or 3,000 square feet), can open any day or hour and do not need to follow Sunday trading laws. Effectively, if you run a small shop, you could be open 24 hours a day all year round.
In England and Wales, large shops (over 280 square metres):
* May open on Sundays for no more than 6 consecutive hours between 10am and 6pm
* Must close on Easter Sunday
* Must close on Christmas Day
If the above laws apply to your business, you are obligated to display your opening hours clearly in and outside of your store.
Restrictions regarding loading and deliveries may also apply to you depending on where you are based. If you run a large store in England or Wales, you should check with your local council whether you can unload goods and take in deliveries before 9am on Sunday.
Failure to comply with Sunday trading laws can result in a considerable fine.
Exemptions
Some large shops don’t have to follow Sunday trading laws. These are:
* Airport, railway, service, and petrol station outlets
* Registered pharmacies
* Farms selling only their own produce
* Motorbike and bicycle supply outlets
* Aircraft or sea vessel goods suppliers
* Exhibition stands
* Restaurants and public houses
At one level, Sunday trading is an arcane matter that doesn’t overly concern the average member of the public: if a shop is shut, they go somewhere else or wait till it’s open again. At another level, there are shops that can be open on a Sunday and shops that can’t. The shopkeeper’s option of opening or not is restricted, and, not only that, but certain trades can open on a Sunday and some can’t (an exception made for Sunday newspapers but not bookshops meant that you could not purchase a copy of the Bible on a Sunday, but could buy pornographic magazines). The inconvenience of not being able to pop into a ships’ chandler’s to buy a new rope for your mizzen mast could be more serious than the inconvenience of going without butter, but these are judgments made not by sailors or pastry-bakers, but by parliament, to whom sailors, pastry-bakers and everyone else have abrogated the power to decide what you ought to be able to buy when. It is the distinctions that those elected lawmakers have introduced into the laws on Sunday trading that create inequality under the law. And, no matter how banal you might find this example, it’s a pattern that repeats itself across the field of the economy, rights, criminal punishment, right down to the right to appoint members of parliament.
Appoint? Yes, in the UK, many members of the upper house of parliament, called the House of Lords, are appointed by a member of the lower house, called the House of Commons. A prime minister leaving office can appoint a number of members to that upper house. This is a privilege that can be, and is, exercised by a retiring prime minister, regardless of how excruciatingly awful they were as a prime minister. The fact that the occupier of that post for a mere 46 days in 2022, Liz Truss, who virtually collapsed the entire UK economy and whom even the King was moved to greet on a second occasion with the words, “Oh, it’s YOU again,” has, in the new year’s honours list, got to appoint one member of the House of Lords for every one and a half of the 50 days she was in office. Cynics (of whom I’m not one, to be sure) might opine that this list of honours was the sole reason she was elected in the first place: to pad out the upper house (just before the Conservative & Unionist Party as good as vacates the lower one). All’s fair in love, war, and political shenanigans.
I think the US president is widely regarded as the most important policymaker in the United States. Whether all his or her policies make it into the statute book is not something within his or her power, however, but rather within the power of the two chambers of Congress. When the president is elected, voters vote in favour of their preferred candidate … … … In theory.
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s campaign in 1952 was permeated with the slogan I like Ike (Ike being Mr Eisenhower, to the initiated). The 2024 campaign by … whoever it’s between … is liable to be marked by slogans such as I slightly prefer the lesser of two evils or I don’t like either and that is a product of a system that is perpetuated by money and in which there are rarely more than two runners. The US presidential election could be made to work if it were based on proportional representation; but, even with two runners (in which, logically, any election must be based on proportional representation), it is frighteningly odd to have to point out that there has never been a US presidential election that actually was based on proportional representation, because of the interposition of the Electoral College. For all We, the people is such a highly praised collocation of words, such as to accord it an honoured place on the obverse of the Federal Reserve System’s ten-dollar bill, it is in fact We, the Electoral College who appoint the US president, and not the people as such. Even if the College stringently adheres to the preferences within the states that each of the members represent, the votes they cast make no difference to whether the state itself voted a 51% to 49% preference for a certain candidate or a 100% to zero preference, the result being that, if 49% of a huge electorate in one large state votes for A and 51% of the electorates in a number of small states vote for B, it’s possible that B is elected, even if the 49% of state #1 outnumber the 51% of a collection of smaller states. That’s before the voting districts get gerrymandered. And all voting districts are gerrymandered, whether we like it or not.
For the past 30 years, two political scientists by the names of Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher have taken UK constituency boundaries as redrawn by the Boundaries Commissions and applied them to the then current administration to see what would have been, had the new boundaries applied at the election by which the current government was elected. For instance, the next UK election will be held on the basis of boundaries redrawn since the 2019 election. Applying the new boundaries to the 2019 election, there would have been small changes in the numbers of seats held by each party: Conservatives +7, Labour -2, Liberal Democrats -3 and Plaid Cymru -2.
I must quickly add that, unlike in the USA, there is no political input to this process and it is broadly accepted that the Boundaries Commissions (one for each constituent part of the UK) operate in a manner that is beyond reproach. As regards the US, it is a little disingenuous that the same political parties who fight elections get to decide—since they get to appoint the judges who decide—the districts in which they fight their elections. It’s very hard to find any aspect of life in the US that is decided in a spirit of utterly disinterested equanimity. Driving tests, maybe.
You may be thinking that the next UK election (anticipated in 2024) will, of course, produce a ballot that is very different to 2019’s, because we are five years on. But the figures produced by Rallings and Thrasher apply even if no one changes their vote: simply the position of the constituency boundary determines which party wins the seat in some, if not, in the end, all, cases. The graphic on a web page of the Electoral Reform Society illustrates this at work. Skip over there and see the same map of the same town with the same votes being cast change colour depending on where the wards are drawn. From predominantly red to predominantly blue, and flashes of yellow in between.
If you’re tempted to see this as a part of the game, as something from history that we just have to live with, or even as part of the great democratic tradition in your country, then I’ve little doubt, when you play Monopoly, you will not allow players to buy on the first round and will bankrupt your own bank by placing all fines on Free Parking, so someone gets a nice windfall at the bank’s expense. However, Monopoly purists don’t play these rules: you get your money at the start in order to buy property, that’s the aim of the game, so not buying on the first round is simply idiotic; and not circulating money back to the bank makes no sense, because Monopoly is capitalism and, for that, you need a market, and a nation state, and tax. Not anarchy.
So erecting a democratic tradition based on anything but democracy is not disingenuous. I’m sorry to say, it’s a lie. We, the people is a lie, perpetuated by 39 people to whose tune 333 million people today have to dance. First-past-the-post in a multi-party system is ludicrous, when you see what distortions are incorporated into the system ab initio. And first-past-the-post in a two-party system like the US that gets turned to a travesty by the inter-positioning of an averaging committee that owes no duty to the actual ballot results … well, it’s hardly what you’d call fair, is it?
It’s as if you had a class committee in a school, whose democratic results get filtered by the faculty, who have the final say. Tell kids that, and they’ll be outraged. Tell them that’s how their country is run, and half will say, “Okay, that’s cool,” and half will still be outraged. At that point, the half who find it cool and the half who are outraged will start flicking ink-blots at each other, and perhaps even worse. Because living with unfairness generally tends to be accepted by those in whose favour the unfairness is rigged, and it gets the backs up of those in whose disfavour it works. Meanwhile, we have the faculty busy trying to get everyone to agree it’s cool, instead of railing against its dishonesty and getting things put right.
Somewhere in the middle of this ink-blot fracas, there may be a teacher or two and a pupil or two hiding beneath the desk who say, “Please, stop the fighting! Let’s make the system fair, regardless of whether we under the desk benefit from making it so or not.” We’d sooner lose to a fair system than win to one that is unfair. Because that, in the end, is what democracy is all about. Preferring fairness to unfairness.
The time is fast coming for us to realise that, in order to save democracy, we first need to create it.
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Every school playground supervisor knows—or thinks they know—that there are two sides to every argument. That of the party who allegedly struck out; and that of the party that was allegedly struck. It’s a philosophy that I’ve long since adhered to: that, even though one might be persuaded by hearing just one side to a story, one should never be resistant to hearing the other. However, what if there are not two sides to a story, but three?
Here’s a story.
A long, long time ago, there was an honest, hardworking pharmacologist who founded a pharmaceutical company. The pharmacologist saw that, around the world were many diseases that troubled mankind, and he decided that he would do his utmost to find cures for all these diseases. He and his fellow pharmacologists worked unstintingly to find cures and, every time a disease was discovered for which there was no cure, he set to in his laboratory, to find the cure.
He patented his cures, of course, and his company grew wealthy. So wealthy that he was able to donate large sums of money to universities so that they could also engage in research to find new cures for all the diseases that kept getting discovered. He asked the government what diseases needed curing and the government told him, and he pursued cures for those diseases as well. The clever professors at the universities to which he donated funds for research became so wise that they were able to advise the government on matters involving disease and healthcare, and the government was very glad for this help, because they were mostly lawyers and landowners and knew very little about medicine.
Today, there are many pharmaceutical companies, without which many of the diseases that have plagued mankind would not have been cured. It is the devotion and acumen of these pharmacologists that have led to such great advances in curing a lot of diseases, and mankind is very grateful to them and thinks that their annual stockholder dividends are cheap at half the price. Or twice the price. Whatever.
There’s a second way to tell that story.
A long, long time ago, there was an honest, hardworking pharmacologist who founded a pharmaceutical company. After curing a lot of diseases and ensuring his company’s success, he died. Of a disease, maybe. His company merged with another pharmaceutical company, and the new company eventually merged with a few other companies to make a big pharmaceutical company. The big pharmaceutical company saw that, the more diseases there are, the more cures there need to be, and that finding cures for diseases was ultimately a bad idea, because, if they cured them all, then there would be nothing left to cure. So they decided to create some diseases, but they were keen not to be caught creating disease, because people and their governments might have found that a bad thing. So, the pharmaceutical companies decided to create diseases that they could blame on somebody else. They created things like heart disease, diabetes and obesity. These were good diseases to fit their blame requirements, because they could always blame the patients themselves, for eating too much this, or that, or whatever. Salt, sugar, fat, yellow 5, and so on.
There were some small problems that needed to be circumvented, and they were the medical profession, the government and people themselves. So, they had a wheeze. They would spend lots of money in donations to a university, and then shower the university’s professor with lots of money and gifts and, because the government was always asking for advice on what to tell people to eat, they would get their university professor appointed to advisory bodies to the government, and they could then tell the government what to tell people to eat; and what people ate would make them ill and give them heart disease, diabetes and make them obese.
If anyone came along and told them this was wrong, the company had an easy argument to shut them up: they would say that the objection was racist or sexist. And the objector would shut up. If doctors wanted to know why there was so much diabetes, or obesity or heart disease, the pharmaceutical company would show them research that proved that this was all due to the patient eating the wrong food, and it would then send the doctors on an expenses-paid trip to a conference on Maui, or wherever, where the pharmaceutical company would feed them lots of tasty food, and some more of this crap.
Eventually, people would tumble to this evil plan and blow whistles, calling the pharmaceutical company evil. And the pharmaceutical company would accuse people who did that of being conspiracy theorists, and needing to have a cold bath, or whatever. And, because the general public like hamburgers, ice cream and pizzas, the pubic would all agree—with the pharmaceutical company.
Here is the third version. There may be even more, but three will do.
A long, long time ago, there was an honest, hardworking pharmacologist who founded a pharmaceutical company. Pharmaceutical companies thrive when they have a great deal of research to do and when this research is successful in developing cures for diseases. It’s what they’re there for.
They don’t all cure all diseases, so there is enough work to go around. It can happen that certain financial decisions get made in pharmaceutical company board rooms that, contrary to the mission statement laid down by the founder, are unduly influenced by a tendency to want to secure one’s financial position for the future. Opportunities arise and the board ask themselves, when presented with them and having to decide whether or not to take advantage of them, whether they should or shouldn’t grasp them. There will be decisions that they decide against, because their founder would have disapproved. And there will be some that are decided in favour of regardless of whether their founder would have approved or disapproved.
Someone may note that a donation was given to promote research by university students and to help educate the next generation of pharmacologists, and they may ask, “Do we get any return on that investment?” and that could set minds thinking that it would be nice if the university could also help the donor. The more the donor would be helped, the more it could help the university. Because universities are hotbeds of creative investigation and thinking, they are not only a good place to do research, but they educate the best of the scientists that the pharmaceutical company needs in its ranks. If there is ever a conflict of interests in this constellation, then university professors and scientists are mature and responsible enough to resolve them on their own.
It does the pharmaceutical company no harm if, say, a university professor who sits on an advisory body says, after realistic cogitation, that it would be unreasonable to expunge sugar from everyone’s diet, given how much sugar is produced in the world and how many workers and sugar companies depend on sugar for their livelihoods, and that it is consequently reasonable for two-year-old children to have a diet that comprises 10% sugar, and that this sugar should be fairly freely available to all classes of society, regardless of wealth, including to those who receive food stamps. What better source of sugar than food additives in processed food and fizzy drinks? If fizzy-drink makers could persuade government to allow purchases of their drinks on food stamps, this would ensure that the small children all got their 10% sugar intake, and would therefore fulfil the government’s own recommendations, based on the advice of their expert advisers.
That way, the government gets sound advice, the sugared-produce industries are assured their sales, doctors are ensured research opportunities, and, if people eat too much sugar, then they should themselves adhere more to the government’s sage guidelines. If they get too much cholesterol, the pharmaceutical companies have statins for them; if they get diabetes, they have insulin for them; and, if they get obese, that’s their own fault. In fact, all these diseases are people’s own fault: can they not read the ingredients on the goods they buy?
So, three sides, to a single story, in fact. They all contain a single common element, which is the statement that a long, long time ago, there was an honest, hardworking pharmacologist who founded a pharmaceutical company. I don’t honestly think that anyone would dispute that, regardless of which pharma company one is talking of. A long, long time ago, pharmacologists founded pharmaceutical companies because they were driven by a desire to make the world better by eradicating disease. That is true of every last pharma company. And there are elements of truth in all three sides to the rest of the story. The three conclusions that can be drawn from these three sides to the story are:
(i) that pharma is evil and corrupt; or
(ii) that pharma is as honest as the day is long and devotes itself selflessly to its avowed task of betterment for mankind; or
(iii) that pharma is grounded in a valid and laudable mission statement, but takes advantage of dynamics and symbioses that proffer themselves because it makes good business sense to them for them to do so, but they never do so to an extent that is nefarious.
If you are someone who works for a pharmaceutical company, or for a university, or for a food company, or for a nutritional advisory board to the government, or for a government, or for anyone else, you may by now be asking yourself which of the three sides to the story is the most accurate.
I believe that all three of the above conclusions apply passim across the industry. Which applies to which company, and when, all depends on the case. But they are, all three, true to some extent. However, you may perhaps be asking whether you yourself have any role to play in the dynamics described in the three sides to the story and, indeed, whether, if you felt anything was wrong with any aspect that you perceived to be true, there was anything that you or anyone else could actually do about it.
If you are in any of the categories of working for a pharmaceutical company, or for a university, or for a food company, or for a nutritional advisory board to the government, or for a government, you yourself will know best where your ethical, financial, corporate and contractual duties lie. But, if you are in the category anyone else, there is indeed something that you can do about all of this. And you can do it tomorrow. Here it is:
(i) break sweat for 150 minutes a week. That means running, fast walking, cycling, running up and down the stairs. Break sweat for a total of 150 minutes a week, or about 22 minutes a day. Every day. For the rest of your life;
(ii) remove sugar from your diet. Just remove it. Don’t eat it. Wherever it is, don’t eat that. That pretty much excludes any processed food, by the way. Glucose, fructose, sucrose. Lactose is hard to avoid if you like milk, but try to get as much sugar out of your life as possible. Sugar has a very unhappy track record, all the way from Sierra Leone slave forts to the disgraceful story of La Amistad to tooth decay. And big bellies. If you have children, get it out of their diets as well. You would probably do your children less harm by feeding them hard drugs than feeding them sugar. Whatever you do yourself in terms of addictive habits, feeding children sugar is tantamount to child abuse;
(iii) remove highly processed grains from your diet. That’s corn flakes. Your intestines will thank you for the roughage;
(iv) remove seed oils from your diet: canola, sunflower, that sort of thing. I would also include olive, but won’t, for two reasons:
(a) olive has some beneficial properties; and
(b) most of the olive oil you will buy today isn’t olive oil anyway, so if you simply cut out anything that is sold as olive oil, you’ll safely remove all other seed oils from your diet.
That’s it. If you’re diabetic, this will probably be enough to cure your diabetes. If you’re overweight, this will be enough to bring your weight down and start you dating again. And, if you have heart disease, or fatty liver disease, your body will rejoice. And, if you have children, they will also rejoice, after they’ve complained they’re not getting enough junk in their diet. Thirty per cent of American children are prediabetic; and 50% of adults and 20% of teens have fatty liver disease. Eighty per cent of Americans are either overweight or obese.
If that state of affairs is all their own fault, for their having made injudicious nutritional decisions, then that is a high degree of injudiciousness among the general population of the US. But such high levels of injudiciousness tend not to a conclusion that Americans are lemmings, and all act injudiciously just because other people act injudiciously, or all act injudiciously independently of each other.
No, on the contrary, it tends to a conclusion that the injudiciousness of the American population is systemic, and that means that they have little to no choice in the matter, and that means conditions exist in which, either people are forcibly made to be injudicious (which is unlikely), or people are persuaded that their injudiciousness is not injudiciousness at all, but is wisdom, if only received wisdom. And that is even harder to swallow than canola oil.
However, there are those who contend that, especially, low-income and low-educated persons live in a vicious circle of processed food that makes them fat and liable to early death (eleven years early), whilst creating medical conditions for them that require long-term servicing with pharmaceuticals. Many such people are within racial-minority groups, and that’s where accusations of racism can in fact be used to reinforce the poor dietary habits of that particular social grouping, and act as a barrier to remedying them.
Whatever the truth is, your health is never in the hands of a confectionery company or a pizza outlet; it is in your hands and, whatever injudiciousness you may have displayed in the past, there is no better time to resolve to do things differently in the future than the start of a new year. You have the power in your own hands: the power of judiciousness, and the power to put sugar, seed oils and processed grains where they belong: out of your diet.
It is not wrong to disagree with a doctor, a pharmacologist, a government or a nutritionist. Especially one that is being paid to tell you what they’re telling you, and if what they’re telling you is siloed rather than holistic and, what’s more, is bad for you.
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In a crowded bus, giving up your seat for someone else does not reduce the number of people who are standing; nor does it increase the number of people who are sitting. So, why would you do it?
The reasons seem obvious: if a young, fit person gives up their seat to someone who is disabled, elderly, pregnant. In Paris, the rule has been that priority is granted to mutilés de guerre, the war-wounded, who carried an authorisation that allowed them to claim, not a courtesy, but a legal right.
Where the custom remains a courtesy, and not a right, it is at least feasible that an elderly man might concede his seat to a young girl. Perhaps to a young, blind girl. The pecking order for bus seats isn’t everywhere as clearly regulated as it used to be in Paris.
My art master at school once boarded a crowded bus of schoolboys and evicted one of them from his seat with the words, “You stand up and let me sit next to this ravishing young lady.” The ravishing young lady was embarrassed and said nothing, nor did the rest of us, who still grinned cheekily at Alan Clark’s cheek, nestled, as it by then was, up to hers.
But, suppose a posse of old men entered a bus and told those in the front seats that they needed to vacate those seats and find a perch elsewhere on the conveyance? And then moved to the middle section to advise those who’d settled there that their seats were needed and they were to move to the back of the bus? And then approached the rear of the vehicle and ordered the folk there to vacate those seats as well? Where, then, would the bus’s initial occupants go to? And what right would the bus’s invaders have, to order such evacuation of the vehicle? What if the passengers appealed to the driver, only to find that the driver had changed and was no longer the man at the wheel when they had started their journey? “How will we get to our work? How will we get home? What about our livelihoods? Who is it who will come and take our places on the bus? Will they be deserving of our courtesy, demanded though that courtesy now be? And will there ever be a bus for us again?”
“We needed to eliminate your driver,” comes the reply. “Your driver was our enemy, and so we have replaced the driver, and now we will replace you, because we can. For, although replacing the driver was our aim, if we can succeed in that, we can remove you from our sight as well, and this we want, because this bus is ours and always has been. You must disembark from the bus, and how you get to work and how you get home and what happens to your livelihoods does not concern us. Not in the slightest. This bus is now ours.”
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The wind may blaw, the cock may craw,
The rain may rain and the snaw may snaw,
But ye winna’ frichten Jock McGraw,
The stoutest man in the Forty-Twa’
The wind is blowing and, up in Alba, there’s even snow. Rain there is a plenty, but, Forty-Twa’ or no, is Jock McGraw afeared of Gerrit’s terrible weather?
Pledges and statements are fine. But many are backtracking on the Paris commitment, and, Kyoto ... remember that?
Activist and journalist George Monbiot was a guest on the BBC’s Question Time whilst COP 28 was in the offing, during which he spoke these words (edited for clarity):
“Leave fossil fuels in the ground. It’s so simple. There have [at the time of that broadcast] been 27 COP meetings. Twenty-five of them have been total failures. Two of them have been partial successes, 1997 and 2015. Not a single final agreement from any of those meetings has said what needs to be done, which is to leave fossil fuels in the ground, and, unless we leave fossil fuels in the ground, we have absolutely no hope of preventing climate breakdown.
“[I]t’s a bit like going on a diet and saying, ‘OK, I did eat a gigantic tub of ice cream and an enormous cake, but I did eat a salad, so why aren’t I losing weight?’ [It] doesn’t matter how many wind turbines you put up. [It] doesn’t matter how many solar panels you put up. Unless you’re retiring fossil fuel infrastructure, unless you are legislating to leave coal, oil and gas where it belongs, which is in geological strata, you are going to cook the plant. It is as simple as that.
“… [T]he highly effective and lethal fossil fuel lobbying, which has been a bugbear of these conferences from the very beginning, from 1992, and has now got to such a ridiculous point that the president of COP 28 is in his day job the chief executive of the UAE oil and gas company Adnoc, which is currently expanding its oil production, … is what has thwarted the simple things that need to be done. And while we wait and wait, the years tick by, and we’ve got so few years left now.
“We’re going to have to take drastic action if we’re going to avoid what could well be Earth’s systems’ collapse. I mean: this is the most important predicament humanity has ever faced. And as a result of the enormous oppressive power of the fossil fuel industry, we’re flunking it.”
It’s like the difference between a ceasefire and a humanitarian pause. They both involve not shooting your gun. But they say something different about what happens next. Therefore, the commitment that emerged from COP 28—if that’s even what it is—to take action by 2050 will transmute into a sense that we have till 2050 to do anything. No one in the oil & gas industries has the slightest intention of achieving climate damage limitation by 2049.
Do you tell your kids they need to be in bed at 9 o’clock?Or do you tell them they can play as much as they want until 9 o’clock? And, whichever you do tell them, are they ever in bed at 8.30? We are dealing with children here.
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This year, I attended, having received two invitations to do so, a meeting that was held at the house of someone I know. We had socialised before and I had been a guest at his home before. However, I knew that I had no great need to be at this meeting and, in fact, no entitlement. One might regard the invitations as an extension of “come one, come all” hospitality but I knew that the auspices under which it was being held were such as to disqualify me—I was no longer a member of the organisation in question. I had my own interests in being there, nonetheless, which need not detain us at this juncture, for I recount the event solely because of the hearty greeting that I was given upon crossing the gentleman’s threshold, in the following terms: “We had a grrreat snooker evening last night!”
The said game of snooker had nothing whatsoever to do with the meeting that I had decided to attend. I replied, “Really?”, and left things at that. I was ushered into the capacious kitchen, where no refreshment was offered, and I embarked on one of the quests that had brought me on this journey to his door. It all felt as if I was very welcome, and yet not very welcome, at one and the same time. It is quite one thing to play snooker with, say, the Duke of Buccleuch, and then for the Duke of Buccleuch to come up in conversation and for him who played snooker with the Duke to mention en passant, “I was just having a game of snooker with the Duke of Buccleuch the other day.” But, whichever way you put it, we has a certain ring about it, of not you, especially given that I knew pretty much who had partaken of that snookering evening. I won’t say the lack of offer of a glass of water was insult to injury, but the welcome was cool, shall we say.
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Teenagers are renowned in their years of rebellion for displaying notices on their bedroom doors, that, in a manner that is semi-tongue-in-cheek and semi-serious, is intended (much like the naval command repel all boarders!) to keep at bay those whose presence in the room is undesired (generally the parents of the youth in question). International border posts tend to be more formal, requesting travellers to show all passports. Other establishments may discreetly put up a sign with the legend private, members only or some such intimation of exclusivity. But, whilst we had a grrreat snooker evening last night! might not be expressly calculated to impart the same message as keep out, there is at least an argument that the febrile enthusiasm prompting such a verbal ejaculation was born of insouciance as to how the message would be received. At the same time, one cannot really take offence at the indelicacy of the statement, for it does not in any way contain the words keep out or equivalent and, ultimately, I wasn’t kept out anyway. Not in so many words.
I had cause today to read a 2020 piece on the web that refers to the murder in Minneapolis of, and I quote, black George Flyod. The article, which propounds some views that are, shall we say, worthy of reflection, looks to be competently written and well constructed, but contains some interesting spelling conventions. Having assumed that Flyod was a typographical error, I was more than mildly surprised to encounter the spelling a second, and even a third, time in the piece, which, moreover, does not once contain the name spelled in its more customary fashion: Floyd. The piece contains the words New Yok Times, which may, again, be a slip of the finger. The piece contains one other spelling error: Pilgrim’s Sociey instead of Society.
There was a time before spellchecks when I would regularly type comapny instead of company. So much so that I listed comapny as a word needing automatic correction to company in MS Word. So, I can’t rule out that the author of this piece has a similar tendency always to write Flyod instead of Floyd. Except that you can search the web and the spelling Flyod comes up with astonishing regularity.
Yok for York is also a common spelling glitch. Even on such erudite sites as that of The New York Times itself (one archived article about a speech by President Obama on Ebola in 2014), plus those of Forbes, and Sony Classical music recordings.
The problem with trying to discern whether a spelling error is due simply to a lack of attention on the part of the author or editor of a piece or whether it is intended to act as some sort of shibboleth, or secret sign to the initiated, is that you can just about type anything wrong in a search (or, and I tried it, seach) engine and someone somewhere will have mistyped it at some time in the Internet past. Therefore, it’s doubtful whether each and every occasion when that happens means one has stumbled upon the portal to some secret society, along the lines of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
It’s just that the piece in question has something interesting to say about egalitarian racism; I read it because I was unaware of what egalitarian racism is and am trying to decide if it’s not simply an alternative name for snobbishness. But the article also delves into the spelling conventions for the words Black and White, when used as racial references, and other articles I have located take a less conventional-wisdom viewpoint on the killing of Mr Floyd, and also misspell his name in the same manner as the article in question. If there is some subliminal message being conveyed by this transposition of the letters y and o, then I’m not as yet inducted into its finer points, but, if these finer points were there to be inducted into, I might be tempted to assume that Sociey and Yok were strategically placed to throw me off some kind of scent, even if I’m not entirely sure what the odour is that I’m smelling.
Whether it’s all throwing me off scents, leading me up garden paths or simply orthographic inaccuracy I cannot say. The article doesn’t tell me to not to read it. It’s not behind a paywall and doesn’t require me to log in anywhere. It doesn’t say keep out, so I went in. Just as I did that day to the locus of that snooker party. Because these are not events to make or break, not pivotal moments. They simply happen, and we note them along the way. Their portent may or may not reveal itself at some later date.
The web, hailed in its time as an information superhighway, has come to be feared as a source of dis- and misinformation, where discretion is advised and caution is the watchword. Far more than flagrant porkies, however, one does start to wonder to what extent the web is replete with info that the enquirer must dig for and, even when it’s believed to be found, will be retrieved accompanied by denials that are only too plausible.
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When they went to West Africa, they brought with them their ships; they brought their languages and, Dr Livingstone, I presume they brought their fine explorers. They brought their linguists and their cartographers, their spades and their drills, their craftsmen and their architects; they built cities and citadels, and then mapped out the creeks and the hinterland of the luscious empires that they erected; and they also brought chains and they brought shackles and they brought goading and incentive, inducing the native indigenous African to do the dirtiest of all their work: to dig their mines and labour in their forests, to hew timber and diamonds, gold and ores, to harvest the crops from the land; and then to harvest the men, the women and the children from his neighbours.
When they went to West Africa, they not only exploited the commodities they found there; they not only exploited the people who lived there; they turned the people who lived there to commodities, and then they exploited them. When they came to West Africa, unseen and far from their fine homes, they knew no limits, they observed no limits, and they set no limits. Their limits lay far, far away, beyond the western horizon, in the Americas. Just who did they think they were?
When they came to West Africa, they were gods, who decided who lived, who died, who worked, who was idle, who was preserved, who was drowned, who would eat, who’d be sold, who’d be raped, who’d prevail, and who would perish. And this they all did because they had one thing that the West Africans did not. Not dignity and not rifles, not chains and not manacles, not gunpowder and not vessels, not plantations and not genes, not superiority and not wealth. Not even their audacity, and not even their gall. No, what they had that the West African did not was a developed legal system.
A developed legal system legitimises crime. Authorises arrogance. Establishes rights, and takes them away. It inserts a blanket of respectability between enforcer and enforced, subjugator and subjugated, lawmaker and legal subject, the maker and the maid, the god and the child.
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When they came to West Africa, they brought a legal system that conferred legitimacy and entitlement; that created schisms and strata among humans; that proclaimed right by legal right and condemned wrong by writ of arrogance. That decreed banishment for defacing a bridge.
Image: Notice on a bridge in Sturminster Newton, Dorset, warning that anyone who damages it may be subject to penal transportation (by Steinsky: CC BY-SA 3.0).
When they went to West Africa, they shipped Africans to America, to oil the wheels of their mercantile enterprise with the sweat of African brows.
And, when their empires piously declared their trade in humankind to be an outrage to God, the God-fearing slavers demanded lucre to desist. What they’d lawfully purchased as merchantable goods were worth money’s value to be relinquished.
No man, so the writ of the law, shall be deprived of his life, liberty or property without due process of that self-same law. While a man’s life may be conferred without intervention of law, and his liberty instituted without let or hindrance at law, no property (furth of manna from Heaven) is appropriated to any man without intervention of law and, if he is only to be deprived of it with due process, then he is likewise not to be possessed of it without due process.
Show me the wage of a labouring man, on which his social security contributions and due and fair taxes have been paid as his membership of the working class, and I will show you a man who has acquired property in that wage by due process.
Show me a woman who has inherited the value of her husband’s estate, compiled from the sweat of his brow to the behoof of his wife and kin at home, and I shall show you a women possessed of her bequest by due process.
Show me a slave-owner who has wrenched native tribespeople from their African homes to set to forced labour on their American farmsteads and plantations, and I show to you a claim to property, but never by due process; for the kidnap and theft of a human being can never be deemed due process, setting them to labour under whips and shackles is no due process, and therefore dispossessing the thief of his booty is no undue process. The life and the liberty of the shackled slave is of equal worth to those of the enslaver, and the liberation of the slave is the most due process of all.
No enslaver was ever compensated by due process, for all their compensation was exacted in regard to stolen goods acquired on the blackest of markets. To present a bill of sale for a slave was to present an admission of a capital crime, for which the compensation ought rightly to have been imprisonment of the presenter.
Due process will come, mark my words. And not just to right the wrongs of centuries of iniquity, but to right the wrongs of this century of iniquity. Black Africans were shipped as goods to the Americas; the thieves were richly rewarded in terms of trade, and then in terms of abolitionist recompense. Now that Africans themselves desire to evade the climate catastrophe caused by the very likes of their former slave-owners and escape the belligerent morass that the Europeans left in the chaos of their post-colonial continent, in which colonialist hegemony has merely been supplanted by insidious debt, the African is left wondering: who are these automatons of the first and new worlds? Who come with their chains, and who steal men and women for their labour, bearing crosses on high with pious praises to their Lord? For we know not who they are; but we know who they think they are.
The full circle is turned, perpetuated by its own viciousness: when they come now to Africa, they bring their chains in the form of their aid; they induce one part of Africa’s peoples to subjugate today’s slaves, who might no longer be shipped to the Americas, but who can no more evade to Europe and could as easily be drowned with stones roped to their feet mid-Atlantic, mid-Channel, mid-Mediterranean. And the they of times past are no less than the we of times present.
It is decreed: the African must stay put in Africa, be ruled by the elites we sponsor and stay rooted to their red-dirt earth, for we in Europe will not have them, but still yearn for their labour. Exacted, now, there, where it always was: in West Africa. All by due process of law. Because nothing grants us our right more than a right granted by rule of law does.
God save Africa from the God-fearing. God save it from us.
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