Among the 38 innocent victims of last Friday's massacre in Sousse, Tunisia, were a recently retired Scottish couple, Jim and Ann McQuire. On the BBC list of victims today, it reads:
Mr McQuire had been due to attend a royal garden party at Edinburgh on his return from Tunisia.
His friend Andrew Eadie, who was preparing to attend the event with him, said: "I can't make sense of it, I just can't understand the logic of what they have done."
With all due respect to Mr Eadie, whose feelings are quite understandable, and although I share the shock that all of us are feeling in the aftermath of this horrible atrocity, I'm afraid that there is a logic behind what happened. It is sickening, brutal and inhuman, but logic nonetheless.
ISIS might be monsters, but they are calculating monsters; very few of their outrages are committed without some underlying rationale. In the case of last Friday's slaughter, I believe I can discern some purposes for this action. This is not to deny that Seifeddine Rezgui derived sadistic pleasure from his monstrous actions; I am sure he did. However, I think that ISIS had their wider evil eye on the economic harm they could do by mass killing and, at the same time, were seeking to send a message to us, the people of Britain. And they will be drawing their own sinister conclusions from last Friday's events...
But let's talk about that later. 15.2% of Tunisia's GDP comes from Tourism, providing 473 000 jobs. ISIS must have been counting on the adverse effect to the Tunisian economy that would result from terrorist activity, and we are seeing this happen already. Apart from a hardy minority, most tourists are leaving Tunisia as fast as they can. ISIS will be banking upon an increase in jobless, disaffected young people, many of whom will become sympathetic to ISIS. Besides this, Tunisia has shown signs of drawing closer to the West, and the jihadis do not like that. We can only hope that tourism recovers quickly in Tunisia.
Next, I believe that ISIS have their eye upon the 10th anniversary of the 7/7 bombings, and staged this attack by way of sending us - the people of Britain - a message. I am taking liberties here (as do ISIS, but in a more deadly way), but it seems to me that they are saying:
"Happy Anniversary! 10 years ago, we Jihadis showed you that we could kill you in the safety of your own capital city. Now, despite all the military might and resources you have, and despite all you throw at us, we can still kill you in large numbers where you think you are safe. You are safe nowhere".
It is up to us now to respond to that "message", and ask ourselves if we are going to be intimidated. Until ISIS is defeated, we will have to revive the spirit of the Blitz and carry on regardless. If we give in to ISIS on anything, the more they will attack.
And they have promised more attacks. As I said, they are a calculating organisation, and will be drawing their own conclusions about last Friday's atrocity. They will be doing some simple mathematics. For the loss of one man and one captured AK-47, they have traumatised Britain by the slaughter of 30 of our citizens (and eight other people from five different countries), dealing a massive blow to the Tunisian economy. They must be very pleased with their "result". What will make them even happier is that they claim to have infiltrated 4000 operatives into Europe. Now, if that is correct, and if every one of those infiltrators accounts for as many Europeans as Rezgui, that means the deaths of 152 000 people. That almost certainly won't happen, but I believe that ISIS are thinking this way. They have shown us they are capable of such things; they have cauterised consciences, impervious to normal human considerations. Lest we forget this, and if the Tunisian beach massacre was insufficient evidence of ISIS depravity, I refer you to an article in yesterday's Independent which quotes the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights as saying:
"– in an audit of the year since the declaration of the ‘caliphate’ – that Isis had executed 3,000 people in the past 12 months, 1,800 of them civilians, 86 of them women and 74 of them children."
I never thought that I would share the opinion of David Cameron on anything, but I think him correct when he describes ISIS as an existential threat. Even if ISIS cannot destroy Britain as a nation, they will certainly be hoping to end the existence of as many of us as possible.
The only "positive" aspect of the massacre is the way ordinary Tunisians responded to the attack by sheltering fleeing European tourists, saving many lives. Some even tried to help by stoning Rezgui, and it was a Tunisian policeman who ended Rezgui's killing spree. If any further proof was needed that ordinary Muslims do not support Jihadi terrorism, then we have it now.
Tuesday, 30 June 2015
Friday, 12 June 2015
Narrow Thoughts on a Deep Issue
Having tried reviewing films, I'd like to try reviewing a novel - and a Man Booker Prize winning novel at that. For Christmas, a friend gave me a copy of "The Narrow Road to the Deep North", by the Australian writer, Richard Flanagan. It won the Man Booker Prize in 2014, impressing the judges greatly: "...this year a masterpiece has won it" (A. C. Grayling, Chair of judges). I was prepared to be sceptical after reading that, but I need not have been. The book is a fascinating account of an Australian doctor, Dorrigo Evans, who is captured after the fall of Singapore in 1942, and becomes a hero to the Australian public after the end of the war because of the care he gives to his patients and fellow prisoners on the infamous "Death Railway" in Burma, on which so many POWs laboured, suffered and died under a brutal Japanese prison regime. Flanagan's own father was a survivor of this protracted atrocity. Arifa Akbar commented in "The Independent":
"The anguish that Flanagan felt over the PoW experience, and the need for emotional catharsis, was not solely rooted in his father's trauma. (His father in a tragic twist of fate, died aged 98, on the day the novel was completed). Flanagan also drew on his own anguish: "I felt I carried something within me as a consequence of growing up as a child of the death railway. People come back from cosmic trauma but the wound does not end with them. It passes on to others."
Reading the sections of the book that deal with Dorrigo Evans' horrific experiences in Japanese captivity, I was struck by their vividness and capacity to shock, even after having spent decades reading of War and its attendant evils. This shows that Flanagan listened long and attentively to his father and other survivors of Japanese captivity. In fact, these sections of the book bear a strong resemblance to a book by another Australian author, Russell Braddon - "The Naked Island". Braddon, like Flanagan's father and Dorrigo Evans, was captured at Singapore and endured the same treatment from the Japanese. At times, I thought I was reading the same book. Susan Lever, in the "Sydney Review of Books" notes of Flanagan's book:
"Evans’s memories are triggered by the task of writing the foreword for a collection of sketches done by Guy ‘Rabbit’ Hendricks, one of the men who died in the camps."
I wonder if Flanagan had Braddon's book in mind when he invented this character, as the cartoonist Ronald Searle was a fellow-prisoner with Braddon on the Death Railway and, after liberation, published a book of sketches about "life" in Japanese captivity. Searle, unlike Hendricks, survived.
Dorrigo Evans conducts himself heroically in the camps, treating his patients with care, skill and pitifully inadequate resources, doing his best to provide comfort for the surviving and the dying (of whom there are plenty). No wonder post-war Australia treats him as a hero.
Evans, however, is not without his faults. Before going to war, he has a passionate affair with his uncle's wife, and hundreds more adulterous affairs after he becomes famous. Flanagan is moralising here, consciously or otherwise. At least, he is telling us that light and shade exist in all people, and that good men can serve bad causes and vice versa.
He further exemplifies this by his portrayal of his Japanese and Korean guard characters, and their fates after the war. Akbar again:
"Flanagan's book does not just trace Dorrigo's inner world, but gives his Japanese "torturers" and camp commanders a voice, and a subjectivity, that incorporates humanity and tenderness, rather than a black-and-white evil."
Flanagan also points towards the post-war readiness of Allied commanders to forgive and forget some hideous Japanese atrocities, which rival any Nazi atrocities for sheer horror - the vivisection of living American airmen without anaesthetic at Kyushu University. As Sato, one of these criminals, says in the book:
"...neither our government nor the Americans want to dig up the past. The Americans are interested in our biological warfare work; it helps them prepare for war against the Soviets".
Flanagan even visited the commander of his father's prison camp, describing him as a "gentle, gracious old man". His father too:
""He brought us up not to hate, never to judge. He had no hate [for the Japanese]. What my father took out of the camps was this extraordinary sense that everything is an illusion except for what you are like with other people, and to never think other people are in any way lesser than you."
I find that very noble, and admit that I could not be like that. Nor was this view common among other ex-prisoners of the Japanese after the war. Many, if not most, soldiers of all Allied armies belonging to the nations who fought the Japanese in the front lines felt an enduring, visceral hatred. In his book on the Battle of Kohima, "Road of Bones - The Siege of Kohima 1944", Feargal Keane tells of a British veteran who could not rid himself of his loathing for the Japanese until, years later, as an ordained clergyman, he baptised an Anglo-Japanese baby.
If I have a major criticism of the book, it is that it does seem to tend towards a type of moral relativism of the "We're all as bad as one another" or"There's good and bad in all kinds" type of cliché. This is especially prevalent in "revisionist" historians of World War Two, who like to point out Allied excesses as being "as bad as" those of the Axis powers - all of which is completely wrong. As Herbert Marcuse pointed out in another context: "There is a difference between Red Terror and White Terror". Further - there is a difference between the Allied aerial bombing of Germany and the Holocaust; between the sinking of convoys to Britain and the sinking of U-Boats; between the multitudinous atrocities of the Japanese and the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In fairness to Richard Flanagan, he has not stated the moral relativist case explicitly, but the implication seems to be there.
I realise that this is not a "normal" book review, but the fact remains that, as George Orwell, Mao Zedong and Leon Trotsky said : "All art is propaganda" - and every artist of every medium has a "message". For a more literary type of critique, I point the reader to a review by Michael Hoffman in the London Review of Books. Here is a flavour of it:
"The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the novel in an advanced and showy state of dissolution. It is as though the contemporary novel – like film (4-D, coming soon to a cinema near you), like theatre, like so much else – is in competition with itself, falling over itself to offer you more interiority, more action, more understanding, more vision. But the form, the vessel, is an exploded form; it is basically rubble, fragmentary junk, debris. It’s not even leaky anymore; it can hold nothing"
Happy reading for those who like this kind of thing! Personally, I think it should be sent to "Pseud's Corner" in "Private Eye".
No, "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" is an important and moving book, well worth reading, despite its flaws (or my criticisms).
"The anguish that Flanagan felt over the PoW experience, and the need for emotional catharsis, was not solely rooted in his father's trauma. (His father in a tragic twist of fate, died aged 98, on the day the novel was completed). Flanagan also drew on his own anguish: "I felt I carried something within me as a consequence of growing up as a child of the death railway. People come back from cosmic trauma but the wound does not end with them. It passes on to others."
Reading the sections of the book that deal with Dorrigo Evans' horrific experiences in Japanese captivity, I was struck by their vividness and capacity to shock, even after having spent decades reading of War and its attendant evils. This shows that Flanagan listened long and attentively to his father and other survivors of Japanese captivity. In fact, these sections of the book bear a strong resemblance to a book by another Australian author, Russell Braddon - "The Naked Island". Braddon, like Flanagan's father and Dorrigo Evans, was captured at Singapore and endured the same treatment from the Japanese. At times, I thought I was reading the same book. Susan Lever, in the "Sydney Review of Books" notes of Flanagan's book:
"Evans’s memories are triggered by the task of writing the foreword for a collection of sketches done by Guy ‘Rabbit’ Hendricks, one of the men who died in the camps."
I wonder if Flanagan had Braddon's book in mind when he invented this character, as the cartoonist Ronald Searle was a fellow-prisoner with Braddon on the Death Railway and, after liberation, published a book of sketches about "life" in Japanese captivity. Searle, unlike Hendricks, survived.
Dorrigo Evans conducts himself heroically in the camps, treating his patients with care, skill and pitifully inadequate resources, doing his best to provide comfort for the surviving and the dying (of whom there are plenty). No wonder post-war Australia treats him as a hero.
Evans, however, is not without his faults. Before going to war, he has a passionate affair with his uncle's wife, and hundreds more adulterous affairs after he becomes famous. Flanagan is moralising here, consciously or otherwise. At least, he is telling us that light and shade exist in all people, and that good men can serve bad causes and vice versa.
He further exemplifies this by his portrayal of his Japanese and Korean guard characters, and their fates after the war. Akbar again:
"Flanagan's book does not just trace Dorrigo's inner world, but gives his Japanese "torturers" and camp commanders a voice, and a subjectivity, that incorporates humanity and tenderness, rather than a black-and-white evil."
Flanagan also points towards the post-war readiness of Allied commanders to forgive and forget some hideous Japanese atrocities, which rival any Nazi atrocities for sheer horror - the vivisection of living American airmen without anaesthetic at Kyushu University. As Sato, one of these criminals, says in the book:
"...neither our government nor the Americans want to dig up the past. The Americans are interested in our biological warfare work; it helps them prepare for war against the Soviets".
Flanagan even visited the commander of his father's prison camp, describing him as a "gentle, gracious old man". His father too:
""He brought us up not to hate, never to judge. He had no hate [for the Japanese]. What my father took out of the camps was this extraordinary sense that everything is an illusion except for what you are like with other people, and to never think other people are in any way lesser than you."
I find that very noble, and admit that I could not be like that. Nor was this view common among other ex-prisoners of the Japanese after the war. Many, if not most, soldiers of all Allied armies belonging to the nations who fought the Japanese in the front lines felt an enduring, visceral hatred. In his book on the Battle of Kohima, "Road of Bones - The Siege of Kohima 1944", Feargal Keane tells of a British veteran who could not rid himself of his loathing for the Japanese until, years later, as an ordained clergyman, he baptised an Anglo-Japanese baby.
If I have a major criticism of the book, it is that it does seem to tend towards a type of moral relativism of the "We're all as bad as one another" or"There's good and bad in all kinds" type of cliché. This is especially prevalent in "revisionist" historians of World War Two, who like to point out Allied excesses as being "as bad as" those of the Axis powers - all of which is completely wrong. As Herbert Marcuse pointed out in another context: "There is a difference between Red Terror and White Terror". Further - there is a difference between the Allied aerial bombing of Germany and the Holocaust; between the sinking of convoys to Britain and the sinking of U-Boats; between the multitudinous atrocities of the Japanese and the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In fairness to Richard Flanagan, he has not stated the moral relativist case explicitly, but the implication seems to be there.
I realise that this is not a "normal" book review, but the fact remains that, as George Orwell, Mao Zedong and Leon Trotsky said : "All art is propaganda" - and every artist of every medium has a "message". For a more literary type of critique, I point the reader to a review by Michael Hoffman in the London Review of Books. Here is a flavour of it:
"The Narrow Road to the Deep North is the novel in an advanced and showy state of dissolution. It is as though the contemporary novel – like film (4-D, coming soon to a cinema near you), like theatre, like so much else – is in competition with itself, falling over itself to offer you more interiority, more action, more understanding, more vision. But the form, the vessel, is an exploded form; it is basically rubble, fragmentary junk, debris. It’s not even leaky anymore; it can hold nothing"
Happy reading for those who like this kind of thing! Personally, I think it should be sent to "Pseud's Corner" in "Private Eye".
No, "The Narrow Road to the Deep North" is an important and moving book, well worth reading, despite its flaws (or my criticisms).
Wednesday, 3 June 2015
Heysel 30 years on
A few days ago, I heard a documentary on the BBC World Service commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Heysel Stadium disaster. It was something of a shock to realise how much time had elapsed since I'd watched that terrible event on television, but it also brought back some personal memories.I'm not much interested in football, but my father was a lifelong fan of Liverpool FC. He'd go to every home match and away game that his job and circumstances permitted, and when his work took him abroad, as it did a lot, he'd listen to crackly commentaries on the short wave radio.
In 1985, he was seriously ill, but was still looking forward to watching the European Cup Final between Juventus and Liverpool. My mother and I decided to watch the match with him. The horrendous events began to unfold before our eyes: bodies being carried away on makeshift stretchers, a Juventus fan brandishing a pistol, crowds swirling and hostile fans facing each other, or fleeing from each other. Watching it on the TV, I found it impossible to work out who was to blame.
As the situation went from bad to worse, sports commentators found themselves having to report and comment on something way outside their field of expertise. They came out with all the insights and clichés you'd expect from an opinionated pub bore. Asked what they thought should be done, one replied that we should bring back corporal punishment, another said national service. Some felt more aggressive methods of crowd control should be brought in to deal with the 70s and 80s scourge of football hooliganism. All to a man condemned Liverpool fans out of hand. When a group of Juventus fans displayed a large banner stating "Liverpool animals", one said something to the effect that they were showing what they thought of the behaviour of the Liverpool fans. It occurred to none of them that you cannot conjure up such a banner out of nothing: it must have been prepared before the match with the aim of being provocative. None of them at the time ever mentioned the Juventus fan with the pistol whom I had clearly seen on the TV. So intent were they on blaming Liverpool fans that they ignored or failed to notice any fault in the opposing supporters. One even mourned the damage to the "beautiful Heysel stadium".
Then came the most extraordinary event of the whole night: UEFA ordered the teams to play the game. In a stadium from which they were still removing 39 dead bodies and tending to hundreds of the the injured, they had to play a game of football. I felt it was the most extreme example of getting your priorities wrong that I'd ever witnessed, and I still do. Although disgusted with the decision, I watched the match, willing Liverpool to win for my father's sake, but the final score was 1-0 to Juventus.
It was the last football match my father ever watched, and he died in the following month. I still regret that my father's lifelong support for Liverpool FC should end this way.
Aftermath: for several years, English football fans, Liverpool fans in particular, were pariahs in Europe. Then gradually, it was recognised that the Liverpool fans were not wholly to blame. The "beautiful" stadium turned out to decrepit, two police officers and the head of the Belgian FA were prosecuted as well as 26 Liverpool fans and gradually a slightly more balanced view of the disaster emerged. The selling of tickets in the Liverpool part of the stadium to Juventus fans had been the height of irresponsibility, but oddly enough, in their haste to condemn Liverpool fans, none of our sports commentators had thought it worth mentioning on the night.
Unfortunately, the view of football fans as drunken, out-of-control, feral hooligans led to increasingly oppressive methods of crowd control, and fans being caged in to keep rival supporters apart. And that directly takes us to the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989 where those very cages led to 96 more deaths. Because of the low opinion of football supporters, and so powerful were the voices of the politicians, the police, the football authorities and - the biggest culprit of all - the Sun that the official lies were accepted for years afterwards.
And what were moronic sports journalists saying? I clearly recall reading suggestions that Hillsborough was some kind of retribution for Heysel: I didn't think my opinion of sports commentators could sink any lower, but I was wrong.
I'm still not much interested in football, but I feel strongly about both of these disasters because of the terrible injustices imposed upon ordinary people. Yes, some Liverpool fans behaved disgracefully at Heysel, but many of the deaths were caused by the collapse of walls that were already crumbling. I've seen no evidence that any fan arrived in that stadium with murder in mind. The wholesale vilification of Liverpool fans after Heysel paved the way for the swallowing of the lies told about Hillsborough, which is how one disaster paved the way for the cover-ups and injustices of another. Only now, 26 years later, is the truth - of Hillsborough at least - finally coming out.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
