History - How would you know...

Israel – How to Sell a Lie…

May 22, 2021May 23, 2021humanist55

Last Saturday was Nakba Day. It is no accident that there are more people in the world who do not know what that means, than there are people who do know what Holocaust Memorial Day is – the Zionist Project that is Israel has worked assiduously to make sure of that. Nakba Day is the day marking “Memory of the Catastrophe” for the Palestinian people – the day in 1948 when their society and homeland was destroyed and the majority of their population displaced. Those that remained have faced slow attrition – no let us call it what it is – Genocide and never less nakedly than right now when the stolen state of Israel is nakedly stealing more Palestinian homes in Jerusalem, invading their most holy place of worship with troops and tear gas during the holy month of Ramadan and then bombing the civilian population of Gaza in “self-defence” for their reaction to these provocative events. Meanwhile, state players around the world stand by and watch without condemning – HOW DID WE GET HERE?

How Did We Get Here?

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
[…]
And you may ask yourself, “Well… how did I get here?”
Talking Heads – Once in a Lifetime

During the recent A2Z Challenge, I encountered a fellow writer Iain Kelly who wrote about his State Trilogy. Iain lives near Glasgow which approximates to the northern capital of his future, dystopian State and in which the population live amongst other things, without alcohol. Glasgow is renowned for its drinkers of the beer known as “Heavy” if not for heavy drinking, and having bought Iain’s book, the question that constantly reverberates for me as I read it, and which he gradually answers, is how did things get there from here? How do you get people to accept what is fundamentally unpalatable?
There is an irony in the promotion of Holocaust Memorial Day by Israel as part of its justification for a Jewish homeland in Israel – several ironies. The state of Israel was avowedly secular yet it uses a religious/tribal identity to define its raison d’etre and within that irony is nestled another. Many Orthodox Jews believe that God expelled the Jews from Palestine 1500 years ago and they have no business being there until God gives them permission to return. The monstrous act which was the Holocaust (whose veracity must rightly be defended against Holocaust deniers), is another example of something so unpalatable that one must wonder, how were the German people led to that unspeakable place? Other Orthodox Jews, within Israel – the Religious Right, are calling for an ever closer equivalence to the holocaust to be perpetrated on the so-called Palestinian people and they are driving the Zionist project in a way it never intended to be driven even if the desired end result might be the same.
Why so-called?

Why the “so-called” Palestinian peoples – an exercise in Re-branding?

The state of Israel calls the Arab residents of the Occupied territories– Palestinians rather than Arab Israelis because this makes them seem like they don’t belong in the de facto state of Israel. They do! It is the mass of Jewish immigrants who have flooded into Israel that have a questionable claim to the land. The Arabs who live mixed in amongst Jewish people in the rest of Israel are referred to by Israel as Arab Israelis (or “Good” Arabs) but they prefer to refer to themselves as Palestinian Israelis in solidarity with their oppressed brothers and sisters but more of that later.
The establishment of Israel has never been ratified in International Law and was imposed on the land of Palestine by force. Before this, Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews, both rich and poor, lived in harmony. Genetic testing could not tell the difference between the two groups because there is no difference – they are both classified as Semitic people and their different languages are nevertheless both classified as Semitic languages. These facts might come as a shock to most young Israeli citizens because the state lies not only to the rest of the world, but also to its own citizens, that, is Propaganda. Israeli children are taught to regard “Palestinians” as Arabs who do not belong, as terrorists who are trying to steal the country from those to whom it truly belongs – once again, this is the opposite of the truth. Palestinians are portrayed as terrorists who oppose the noble project of Israel – but those of us on the outside must never forget that one state’s terrorists are another people’s freedom fighters. This link to a film by a Palestinian filmmaker illustrates the degree of prejudice in a 15-year-old Israeli girl…

Just as the Nazis in Germany promoted the myth of the noble Aryan, so the Zionist project has cultivated the image of the sun-bronzed, hard-working, enterprising Kibbutznik striving to wrest modern farms from the dry land alongside their indolent Palestinian neighbours who are content to subsist on their backward farms consisting of olive groves and a few goats. The Jaffa orange, though developed originally by Palestinian Arabs, was developed by Zionists into a major export brand and similarly with the development of Avocado farming. Young people from around the world, and not just Jewish young people, volunteered on Israeli Kibbutz and became a party to this propaganda view. It is worth noting that wells dug by kibbutz often sucked dry the wells of Arab neighbours for their more intensive agriculture so stealing the water as well as the land…
Now, as resistance to Israel increases as evidenced by the support for the BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions), Israeli origins of agricultural products may be concealed rather than trumpeted. I live just outside Bradford, UK which has a large Moslem Pakistani population who have vociferously embraced the Palestinian cause in recent years. Imagine my disgust then, when shopping in an Aldi supermarket, to discover that mangos which had no indication of their country of origin, were in fact from Israel. The lack of labelling made me suspicious so I examined the box – bearing in mind that fruit boxes usually celebrate their country and company of origin with colourful artwork – nothing! So I lifted the box up and on the underside, printed in very small letters, was the name of a company which when Googled, turned out to be Israeli. I complained to the store both about the lack of labelling and the origin of the mangos from occupied lands and they were swiftly withdrawn…

Truth is the first casualty of war.

The attribution of this well-known quotation is the subject of some controversy but I prefer the slightly more elaborate 1758 version by Samuel Johnson in “The Idler” – “Among the calamities of War may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.” There are two sides then to successful propaganda – interests that motivate the lies and credulous people to be deceived by the lies.

Truth is such a fundamental issue, if we do not have the correct facts about any given situation, then how can we make the correct decisions, the object of Israel’s lies about its Zionist project, is to obfuscate the facts so that, for example, if Israel cites the right to self-determination and a homeland, we think that it sounds reasonable without thinking that that is no good if it means that the Palestinians must lose their self-determination and their homeland. If Israel says rockets are being fired on innocent Israeli citizens by Hamas terrorists, we will not compare the proportionality of the response or the degree of provocation…

One central lie of the Zionist project has been to remake the very definition of Anti-Semitism. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of antisemitism extends the meaning to include any criticism of Israel. This definition has then been forced onto most countries in the world by means of bullying, threats and blackmail. Lest you think this an insignificant thing, well in Britain, this was used to assist in getting Jeremy Corbyn removed as the Labour Party’s Opposition Leader by constantly alleging that Labour Party members were making anti-semitic comments (mostly criticism of Israel) and that, under Corbyn, these were not being dealt with. This was an unwarranted interference in the democratic processes of the UK but so great was Israel’s fear of Corbyn – a supporter of Palestinian rights – being elected to the position of Prime Minister that Israel’s lobbying, propaganda and dirty tricks machine went into overdrive. Needless to say, the Centrist yes man Keir Starmer, who replaced Corbyn as leader, knows his place in relation to Israel and will not rock the boat…

In the US Joe Biden is equally hamstrung to prevent him from offering the kind of criticism one might reasonably expect from a man of his political persuasion because major Jewish donors are amongst the Democratic party’s main financial supports. Very few Americans have any idea how much money the US gives to Israel each year and would be shocked if they did although their government, no matter which party was in power, would justify it thus; Much of the “aid” to Israel is spent on American goods (for which read American arms). Israel deserves protection from its unfriendly neighbours in the Middle East and is America’s major ally in the Middle East. True that, though America’s other ally in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia reveals the true reason for US machinations in the region – oil! Saudi Arabia and America did a deal after World War 2 whereby America guaranteed not to interfere with Saudi Arabia’s religion in return for the guaranteed supply of Saudi Arabia’s oil. Saudi Arabia is an anomaly in the Islamic world since it is led by an oil-enriched royal family who has promoted a fundamentalist sect of its desert tribes to worldwide prominence whilst leading an opulent and perhaps decadent lifestyle behind closed doors. Saudi Arabia once supported Palestinian interests but as its own position in the region is increasingly threatened by Iran and more recently Turkey, and with America as a mutual ally, it should not be surprising that Israel and Saudi Arabia, whilst having no official Diplomatic relations, find their interests increasingly aligned…

Origins of an Illegitimate state…

Much is made by Israel, of The Balfour Declaration. It is the first, and one of the few unequivocal declarations of support for the idea of a Jewish homeland and was issued during World War 1, just after Britain had declared war on the Ottomans who were in league with Germany. Palestine was occupied by the Ottomans and German/Ottoman forces clashed with the (British) Egyptian Expeditionary Force in the Southern Palestine Offensive – a little known part of the First World War since the story of the Western Front has eclipsed the war in Palestine.
At the end of the war, with the Ottomans defeated, Britain was given a mandate to rule Palestine by the League of Nations and this, together with the Balfour Declaration, significantly led the way towards the creation of Israel. However, following the Second World War, with Britain anxious to please both Jewish and Arab interests, the newly formed United Nations, was unable to get its Partition Plan for Israel – Resolution 181 – across the line as although it was accepted by the Jewish population of Palestine it was rejected by the Arab population as well as neighbouring Arab countries. (See proposed Partition Map to right.)
Britain had handed control of Palestine to the UN who eventually withdrew precipitating a civil war in Palestine until the Zionists unilaterally declared the formation of the state of Israel. Surrounding Arab countries joined in the fighting – the 1948 Arab- Israeli War – but America immediately recognised Israel as a state and began lending support. It has been said that the US has regarded Britain as a static aircraft carrier at a convenient location for stopping to refuel on its way to act as putative world policeman and Israel fulfils the same role as Britain in the Middle East. When Israel purchases armaments from America, it does not have to wait for delivery – there are already massive arms stocks cached in Israel, sufficient for any imaginable war America – or Israel – might want to wage in the Middle East. Israel, firmly supported by America where the Jewish lobby had been carefully nurtured by the Zionist project, eventually achieved a secure position by means of a series of short sharp wars and by making a pragmatic peace with the Egyptians. The Palestinian Arabs who fled their homes to avoid being caught in the crossfire, were not allowed back and their land was “legitimately” seized by the new state whilst the diaspora of Palestinian Arabs were left to foment in reugee camps in neighbouring countries. Israel weathered the storms of world opinion and terrorist threat and I return to my original question – how did they do it?

Bully to Intimidate and Enforce…

If the last section implied that Britain was wholeheartedly behind the Zionist project and that Zionists gave her an easy ride of governing under the British Mandate – think again! In the run-up to the creation of Israel, many acts of terrorism were perpetrated by Zionist groups against the British administration and soldiers, against Arab Palestinians and even against other Zionist groups with different views on how to proceed towards the goal of creating Israel. One of the worst atrocities for Britain – was the bombing of The King David Hotel in which 92 lives were lost. These tactics were designed to put pressure on Britain to withdraw from Israel and so if one wants to ask from whom the later PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organisation) and their ilk learnt that terrorism might get you what you want or at the very least, get your enemy’s attention, well then, they learned it from the Zionists…

There are three main groups of Palestinians in Israel – those imprisoned in Gaza , those who farm in the West Bank and those who live intermixed with Jewish neighbours in the towns and cities. The Gaza strip is often described as the world’s largest prison since residents are completely controlled by Israeli security as to how or even whether they may leave Gaza’s confines. Goods in and out are also controlled by Israel and it has been alledged that at times, Israel has calculated exactly how much food is required by the population of Gaza and then allowed just a little bit less in. The farmers of the West Bank are the ongoing victims of land theft by illegal settlers – a thorny optic for Israel since the rest of the world has become increasingly aware of the shrinking land belonging to Palestinians and the corresponding growth of Jewish settlements. This runs contrary to the long espoused idea (by outsiders like America and the EU), of a Two-State Solution to offer both Israelis and Palestinians permanent lands but the West Bank is so riddled with illegal Jewish Settlements that this is beginning to seem impossible. Israeli “activists wield slogans like “from the river to the sea,” or “no settlement is illegal.” Israel was considerably emboldened under Trump, whose son-in-law Jared Kushner pushed Israels cause – the US controversially moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – an act of provocation to the Palestinians given that Jerusalem is sacred to Jews, Moslems and Christians and is supposed to be a neutral zone.

I have already referred to the “Good Arabs” who live in the town and the evidence that this latest conflict is different because this time, the Good Arabs are siding with their much more put upon brothers and sisters in Gaza and the West Bank and threatening or indeed committing civil insurrection.

Bullying tactics, whether they are directed at the state level or at individuals who displease the state, are designed to intimidate and enforce what the state wants and Israel is equipped with one of the world’s most assiduous secret services -Mossad who can dig the dirt and put the squeeze on individuals, groups, politicians and whole state apparatus. Israel may be too small to develop its own aircraft industry but they make up for it in other ways… Israeli firms have developed the “best” in spyware such as “Pegasus” which they now sell to other rogue governments around the world to enable them to spy on their dissident citizens via everything they can do with their phones and to record sound and video without the phone’s owner being aware of it.
Another export of Israel to those who support it and to America in particular, is the hosting of training sessions for “Law” Enforcement officers which include the technique of neck kneeling employed in the murder of George Floyd which triggered the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement. Links back to the Israeli run training courses were highlighted and questioned – unwelcome attention from Israel’s point of view and which contributes to the slow sea change in opinion of Israel and other governments (lack of) response to Israel’s actions against the Palestinians… It is fair to say that Israel leads the world in techniques of bullying from straightforward violence against the person right up to the most sophisticated forms of social enforcement…

Control the Narrative…

The tricks used to establish and maintain control of Israeli politics both internally and externally are nothing new and they exemplify perfectly that maxim “History is written by the Winners!” Up to now, the Zionist project has been winning – but will it last?

One of the tricks of controlling the narrative is not to allow a hint that there even exists opposition on a political level. However, even Jewish groups who are dismayed at the atrocities being carried out in their name are starting to coalesce in opposition to Israel.
The Jewish Voice for Peace says about Zionism that “Through study and action, through deep relationship with Palestinians fighting for their own liberation, and through our own understanding of Jewish safety and self-determination, we have come to see that Zionism was a false and failed answer to the desperately real question many of our ancestors faced of how to protect Jewish lives from murderous antisemitism in Europe.”

International, ultra-orthodox Neturei Karta (NK), “views itself as the religious Jewish authority on Zionism and Israel and claims to “pray for the peaceful dismantlement of the state of Israel.” This group is so extreme in its belief that only God can authorise the return of Jews to “their” homeland, that it is often dismissed (by Israel) as itself being anti-semitic and sharing aims and standing alongside anti-semites. There are many more moderate groups within, for example, the UK Labour Party to counter the pro-Israel lobbyists, Jews for Justice for Palestine 0r Jewish Voice for Peace, but a predominantly right-wing press assist Israel in obscuring even the existence of such dissent.

In Italy, a group of dock-workers prevented a cargo ship laden with arms and bound for Israel, from leaving port. Grassroots activism succeeds!

Indigenous people around the world are finding their voices against each and every one of their own Settler Colonialist states – not least the Native Americans and the Australian Aboriginal peoples and they are turning the property laws by which these countries are governed back on those who stole their land and with that, comes solidarity with other oppressed groups.

Israel has strenuously attempted to counter the use of words such as Genocide and Apartheid from gaining currency in relation to its treatment of the Palestinians but they are fighting a losing battle – this article in Mondoweiss details the recent blows to Israel’s propaganda and posits that Israel is beginning to face an endgame… Let’s hope…

The history of Israel is a very complex topic and I know this piece only scratches the surface in an attempt to answer the question “How did we get here?2, but I hope it gives food for thought and that the links will take anyone wanting to know more further along a search for truth and understanding. I will leave you with one final quote…

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Edmund Burke (in a letter addressed to Thomas Mercer).

VE Day – Reflections on my Mother’s War…

May 8, 2020May 14, 2021humanist55

Born in 1920, my mother was 19 when she joined the army for World War 2. Yet she had already had two phases in her life, growing up as one of six with a gamekeeper father who was bitter about lost opportunities following the First World War. His brother had emigrated to America before the war but couldn’t take my grandfather with him because he was under 16 and the family was put out at losing one potential bread-winner, let alone two. The brother said my Grandfather should enlist and that he would send money so that my Grandfather could join him after the war – which he did send the money, but the family spent it and my Grandfather had to become a gamekeeper instead of a teacher – his first choice, since with so many men killed and women having to support their parents, teaching became reserved for young women. This made my Grandfather bitter and he wouldn’t allow his children to do homework and advance themselves – instead, saying that they would go into domestic service at 14 – and that is what happened. It is sad that whatever social mobility and reduction in entitlement was brought about by WW 1, passed my Grandfather by in his disillusionment. Meanwhile, his brother in America put his upbringing on a farm to a different use, becoming a teacher at an agricultural college and marrying a Southern belle and setting his family on an upwardly mobile trajectory.

So before the Second World War, my mother had had five years of domestic service, first as a maid and then after being taken at 16, to Morocco (or maybe Tunisia, she wasn’t sure) to assist in looking after a baby during a family holiday, she became a children’s nanny. My Mother had many stories about her time in domestic service but they are not for “the day that’s in it” VE Day – suffice to say that domestic service was hard to leave and the war offered the one way which could not be frowned upon and so she joined up.

My mother quite quickly rose to be a Sergeant in the signaling corps, which for women, meant manning telephone switchboards and after working at a number of bases, she went to live and work on the island of Portland near Weymouth, where, in vast underground bunkers, the invasion was being planned. Living on Portland was as near to the front line as most women got, the island was a target for bombers and even fighters, given its strategic role and its nearness to German-occupied France. My mother told tales of having to grab her landladies children and dive for cover when a German fighter strafed the back gardens of their street and how a German bomber crashed in the High Street. The last time I took my mother to Weymouth before she died, on a beautiful sunny day with the beach thronged with holidaymakers, she pointed out a hotel where a German bomber, fleeing home after unsuccessfully reaching its mission target, loosed its bombs killing an entire wedding party that had just arrived at the station for the wedding feast. I grew up seeing my mother in tears on Remembrance Sunday, thinking of the six men, any one of whom she might have married, as well as all the others who never returned from other front lines, yet the poignancy of all that loss, and the realization of just how recent the war was, only a few years before I was born, was never stronger for me than on that sunny day in Weymouth.

There were other stories from my mother’s war, the bullying Sergeants that she took on, the girls she had to protect from untoward attention, and the spy that she prevented from stealing secrets and who was caught and shot a few weeks later. Latterly, my mother decided not to repeat these stories about the war anymore. In the run-up to VE Day, I have heard other veterans say the opposite, they had never talked about it until recently but now felt that “it doesn’t matter anymore” and so have told their tales. Everybody had their own way of dealing with their memories in the aftermath of this traumatic but highly stimulating time. I often thought that our generation, the baby-boomers, had nothing remotely to compare with the traumas of that war – until now, when once again, literally the whole world has been turned upside down. Yet still, it is nothing like WW 2, unless you are on the front-line in a hospital, for most of us, this momentous time is about “staying at home”.

It would be immoral to envy my parent’s generation for their experience of the war and yet the choices were clear for them, to literally fight a great evil – the warlike references to fighting the Covid 19 virus are a mere shadow of such events – yet the choices we face are far more complex – too complex for many people, including many of the politicians who are supposed to steer our ships. Many people just want it all to be over and things to get back to the “old” normal. I hope, in a positive way, that there is no return to rampant consumerism, unchecked, unconsidered planet-destroying growth. I hope it is the death of capitalism as we have known it – and I am very afraid that there is the possibility of the opposite happening – of those on the right using the crisis to entrench their power and mismanagement ever more firmly. So let us today, remember the sacrifices made in that other war, and the joy of it’s ending but let us not forget the long road to recovery that followed, not always fairly, and not shy away from the difficult choices that face us in our testing times.

Bread and Circuses – Metonymic, Akashic Records and Materialism

May 2, 2020May 14, 2021humanist55

A morning adventure…

Lying in bed this Saturday morning, I started checking my emails on the phone. There was an alert to a post by Deborah Weber over at Garden of Delights for the letter Y (part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge) – Yeppsen – the amount that can be held in two hands – an obsolete word as many of Deborah’s words have been, unusual, interesting words.

Then it was over to an email chain from my school friends of 47 years ago and one of them mentioned panem et circenses (yes we were posh enough to study Latin) or in English – bread and circuses. Just to check I had translated it right and to see what it originally meant, I checked it out on Wikipedia which as well as attributing it to Juvenal’s “Satire X”, told me that the phrase is an example of a metonym. Well despite the posh-ish education, I had never heard of this so it was another link on Wikipedia to find out what that means! To explain, Wikipedia (last updated on 30th April 2020 so hot stuff!) had to examine and contrast Metonyms and Metaphors as well as touching on Synecdoches and Toponyms and even Metalepsis. You see how this internet surfing goes…
Back to the meaning of Bread and Circuses – Juvenal was expressing disappointment that the mass of Roman citizens had ditched their republican ideals of taking their politics seriously and electing their, politicians, generals and officials – instead they fell for cheap bribes of grain (for bread) and circuses (entertainment). How little things have changed, we in the UK have a Prime Minister who made up the story about the European Union bureaucrats requiring straight bananas in future. He was working as journalist in Brussels and was too lazy to research real stories about the EU and later took us out of the EU – whilst in the US – well let me go no further down the critique of the political technique of distraction – you all know who I am talking about…

A depiction of Juvenal in the Nuremberg Chronicle, late 1400s. Wiki Commons

So what is a Metonym? Well, an example would be talking about The White House meaning, not the building itself, but the President and all his men and women in the West Wing who constitute that part of the US government. Now that is only part of this in-depth article in Wikipedia and if you are interested in linguistics and philosophy, then head over there pronto! I did read it all, and it was interesting to me even though I realized that I use metonymic phrases all the time without realizing it, but what I thought about it was a) you can use things without needing to understand the deep philosophical/linguistic issues and b) that this is the sort of stuff I bet Deborah Weber would love!

So I decided to go and read Deborah’s About page where I learned that Deborah is a Spiritual Guide and Alternative Health practitioner. I find myself very torn by this because – as my stepdaughter has told me – I am a materialist. I prefer rationalist, but that does not mean I do not have a spiritual view of life either. My first blog, Ripple, from which I quoted on bread, yesterday, was named for my belief that we all emanate energy and effect into the world, and even after we die, that energy and effect carries on spreading out into the world. What you do in life, for better or worse, goes on and on so that even though I don’t believe in an afterlife, I do think that how you live your life is very important not just in a karmic sense within your lifetime, but in terms of what you leave behind, how you change the world. So I really like to describe myself as a Spiritual Humanist. I think I will do a whole post on this but for now I just want to say that there is much about Deborah as a blogger and health practitioner that I love and much that I find difficult such as Akashic Records. But hey! That’s okay, things don’t have to be binary, we can handle grey areas rather than mere black and white…

So all this happened before I even got out of bed…

F is for Fighting…

April 7, 2020May 14, 2021humanist55

This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Fighting a war, fist fighting, fighting for your rights, fighting off an attacker, fighting the good fight, fighting for peace, fighting off an infection, fighting boredom, fighting flab, fighting sleep, fighting insomnia, depression, a sense of failure, fighting old age, fighting for recognition, justice, fighting to be heard, fighting an election, fighting the war on drugs, fighting terrorism, fighting for the environment, fighting for survival, the uses of the word fighting are legion but in this list, and I am sure you can think of more examples, only the first four are literal fights – the rest are metaphorical. When one activity carries such a plethora of metaphors, it must surely say something about our humanity.

It’s not exclusively a human trait to fight, animals do it to win a mate or in defense of territory and in many cases it may not even come to blows – elaborate posturing, special apparatus designed to impress may do the trick although in other cases real and sometimes mortal damage is inflicted. These are legitimate causes for fighting – reproduction and territory are about survival – short and long term but as a species, humans have raised fighting to a planet-wide, all-life-threatening status. For a species that prides itself, defines itself even, on the size of its brain, this activity does not make sense.

The United States of America, of it’s 242 years history, has been at peace with no wars ongoing, external or internal, for just 16 years. Former President Jimmy Carter allegedly pointed this out to Donald Trump in 2019 and added ” We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion [on] military spending. China has not wasted a single penny on war and that’s why they’re ahead of us in almost every way.” One imagines it made little impression on a man whose stance in life is, more often than not, belligerent. I said that animals fight in defense of territory and like the metaphor above, fighting for peace, this sounds a contradiction in terms. Just as the military wing of the government is usually called the Department of Defense or similar – rarely the Department of War as this would imply that waging war was an aim of government – not a response to potential outside aggression.

In George Orwell’s classic novel of a political and dystopian future “Nineteen Eighty-Four” we see how the use of the right terms is vital for the control of the masses by the few. “Great” Britain has become Airstrip One and is a mere province of the superstate Oceania which tells its citizens that is in (perpetual) war and exhorts them to greater effort, greater tightening of the belt (remind you of austerity?). Published just after the Second World War when the Tehran Conference had divided the world up into zones of influence, the book has as many warnings today as ever about the scrutiny we need to place on those who govern…

The other day I heard someone saying on the radio (in the plethora of discussion about Covid 19 I am afraid I didn’t clock the speaker) that we keep referring to the National Health Service workers as the frontline workers in this fight against the virus but that it would be better if the people at large regarded themselves as the front line since it will be the degree of their adherence to not going out that will determine the reduction of deaths at the final reckoning. So we should be the “Home Front” a term that came about during the Second World War to give unity and focus to a population only some of whom were experiencing the direct effects of bombing whilst for those out in the country, there was little immediate evidence of the war raging across the world. Rationing, inventive cooking, improvisation and substitution – all the things we are experiencing under lockdown.

Here is the disconnect at the heart of our mass response to Covid 19 – for most people it is not serious and even if they do catch it it will not feel serious – we can’t see the crisis in the hospitals, only empty streets, shutdown shops and we experience a sense of unreality. Even when we watch the nightly news reports with the climbing death tolls, we do not connect with the reality, over 5000 people in the UK now, that’s a stadium full! If we could have taken it seriously, then we would have started preparing earlier when we heard the reports coming out of China. Logic dictates that if you can pass on an infection before you show symptoms, a pandemic is inevitable but human beings are not notably logical and so the fact that this virus is not evenly fatal fuels the disconnect.

We find ourselves living in the movie set of a post-apocalyptic event (such as a pandemic) but there are no rotting bodies in the streets and no feral gangs of survivors breaking into shut down shops. In this respect, barring some early hoarding of toilet rolls and flour (I blame the Great British Bake-off for making everybody believe they should bake their way through the crisis) the majority of people have responded with the best that humans can be to this strange challenge. Imagine though, how things would have been without the internet to inform and entertain us, to share tips and memes and love.

In the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, things were very different. Coming at the end of the First World War, starting out, it is thought, in a military base in Kansas, the troops heading out to Europe spread it and 20 to 50 million died – more than the 17 million who died in WW1 and this may not be accurate as there was no means of testing the many victims or recording data accurately and even with all of our advanced technology this current pandemic still presents some of the same problems. We do not fully understand why Spanish Flu was so lethal and we have much to learn about why Covid 19 is so lethal for some and not for others. Incidentally, the name Spanish Flu came about because most of the countries involved in WW1 had censorship in place for military purposes and the powers that be suppressed news of the pandemic, afraid of public panic except for Spain which was neutral, had no censorship and freely discussed the disease, including the Spanish King becoming ill. I say this on the day that Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister is reported to be receiving escalating treatment in Intensive Care…

Returning to the metaphorical use of the word fighting – in the world of religion, we have “onward Christian soldiers” and we have Jihad a term which modern Moslems struggle to re-interpret as a metaphorical personal battle for spiritual development and not in its apparent, original meaning of a battle to forcibly convert non-believers. It goes to show how careful we need to be with metaphor – especially those based on images of war and fighting and we need to be especially vigilant that we do not give the latitude to right-wing leaders to take excessive powers under the cover of crisis sending us back to the future of 1984…

I am going to give the last word to that great storyteller and observer of his times – Charles Dickens in his opening to A Tale of Two Cities – almost a perfect metaphor in itself –

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

A is for Alistair Cooke

April 1, 2020May 14, 2021humanist55

Part of childhood Sunday mornings back in the 1960s, was my father switching on the radio on the upstairs landing of our house whereby everybody in the house could listen whilst having a lie-in. After “Hymns from the little chapel in the valley” – a precursor of Songs of Praise and before the omnibus edition of “The Archers” there was “Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America”. I am starting the A to Z 2020 challenge with this seminal broadcasting giant because for me, this is where my love of the blog form begins.

There may be some among you who ask how a long-running radio series which began before blogs were conceived of, before PC’s were dreamt of and in fact before mainframe computers were invented, could be considered a Blog! Well in the beginning, Blogs were conceived as a simple sequence of dated posts – ideal for say, a diary. One of the hallmarks of a truly great piece of new technology is perhaps the degree and breadth of mission-creep which accrues to it as people explore it and blogs have moved from a diary to documentary, educational tool, club forum, therapeutic vent, political rant, and blogs cover every subject imaginable. But for me, the classic form is a missive from the individual to the world which reveals their thoughts, reflections and most enjoyably, their personality and it is in this respect that Alistair Cooke is the model for the form. In 2,869 episodes over 58 years, the longest running, spoken word broadcast ever, he spoke with a mellifluous, mid-Atlantic accent that gave his observations on America, explaining it if you will, not only to Britain but to the world via the BBC World Service, but as well, to Americans themselves. They were already used to Alistair’s voice because before he emigrated to America from Britain in 1937, he had delivered “London Letter” for NBS explaining British ways to America.

You can read the quite astonishing history of this prolific broadcaster and writer here and you can listen to the best of the broadcasts here but it’s the style and tone of Alistair Cooke which I love and aspire to channel in my own writing and although he read his broadcast aloud, – his material was, in the first instance, written. You can find the scripts here. He might begin with some observations about squirrels preparing for winter and then take you around the political action in Washington, the reaction of the people before returning effortlessly to the Fall, and the squirrels. The political content would be teased out and explained for the world in a way that was comfortable, reassuring without any hint of patronage. And when you needed to hear about the gravest moments in American history, such as the assassination of JF Kennedy, there was no safer pair of hands, no more moving commentator to describe the events and the reaction of Americans.

That radio on our landing, itself an object of Americana which my father adapted to UK voltage by mounting a light-bulb on top, took us to another country each week – to Alistair Cooke’s America as we lay in bed and listened.

2,869 letters – blog that!

Published as part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge