J is for Jansson

Because the Moomins live the way people ought to be able to live. And under the ice, or in the Lonely Mountains, there is a distant echo of that same Sehnsucht I find in Lord of the Rings and so few other places.

I have always wanted to be like Snufkin. Though I am probably really rather more like Sniff.

...Snufkin continued his walk. He had arrived at a long fence. It was hung with notices at regular intervals:

ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE

The Park Keeper and the Park Wardress lived together, in the park, of course. They had cut and sheared every single one of the trees into round blobs and square cubes, and all the gravel paths were straight as pointers. As soon as any leaf of grass dared to come up it was cut off and had to start struggling over again.
The lawns were fenced in on all sides, and the fences were hung with notices telling in big black letters thaat something or other was not allowed.
...
The Hattifatteners had grown to life-size and now came swarming and moiling towards the Park Keeper from all directions, attracted by his electrified buttons. Small flashes of lightning crossed the air, and the buttons were crackling. Suddenly the Park Keeper's ears lighted up. Then his hair crackled and sparked, his nose began to glow- and all of a sudden the Park Keeper was luminous from top to toe! Shining like a full moon he scuttled off towards the park gates, followed by the army of Hattifatteners.
...
'And that's that!' said Snufkin. 'Now we shall pull down every single notice, and every single leaf of grass shall be allowed to grow as it likes to.'
All his life Snufkin had longed to pull down notices that asked him not to do things he liked to do, and he was fairly trembling with excitement and anticipation. He started off with:

NO SMOKING

Then he flew at:

DO NOT SIT ON THE GRASS

I got a parking ticket the other day, from the mysterious agency that collects parking tickets on behalf of my employer. It had been a cold morning, and the plasticky permit whatsit had been stiff and un-sticky when I moved it from the windscreen of one car to another. I saw it fall off onto the floor, and thought 'Have to stick that up properly when I get into work,' but I forgot, of course, being busy by then thinking about the stuff they pay me to think about. And though the car had been parked in a similar place all year, there was a creepy envelope under the windescreen wiper when I returned at the end of the day. I left it there for a couple of weeks so they could do the honourable thing and remove it, but of course they didn't. I wasn't going to pay it at all, but then I watched The Shawshank Redemption again and lost my nerve. It is $79 for failing to display your permit correctly. Apparently they take a picture of your car, and you have to submit any querulous pleas for mercy in writing to the faceless agency far away, so I as I had no datestamped picture of my my own of the forlorn permit lying on the floor of the car, I couldn't do anything else but pay it. It appears that the penalty for all parking infringements is exactly the same, $79. This is obviously an improvement on the one-size-fits-all penalty favoured in Stalin's later years (25 years in Siberia) or by Ante Pavelic (death), but does seem a bit disproportionate that people whose permits fall of the window must pay the same as those tricksy folks who try to park with no permit at all- though more power to them! And especially the ones who get themselves a 'F*** the Poor' bumper sticker and park in the Vice-Chancellor's spot. They are getting good value for money.

I did not get good value for money. I paid the fine and stuffed the receipt and the permit in the creepy envelope. I wrote 'Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!' on it. I left it on top of the pile of getting-a-parking-permit forms as a warning to others, then moved my car to the distant paddock beyond the edge of University property where I parked all last year. I only got bogged there once, and had one window broken, so it will be a small price to pay to stick it to the Man.

I is for Inklings

As you may have guessed, this is a transparent ruse to free up ‘L’ and ‘T’. I haven’t actually read anything by any of the other Inklings except Charles Williams. I got three of his novels at the used bookstore many years ago because C. S. Lewis said such gushy things about them, but found them unsettling. I suppose I should dig them out and re-read them. I know Charles Williams was by all account a good Christian chap, but his novels produced the same oily unpleasant feeling in my mind as the works of William Burroughs. The universe of ‘The Place of the Lion’ and ‘That One About the Grail’ is not essentially rational, unlike the universes of Hawking or Aquinas (or Lewis or Tolkien) – I am lost and motion-sick there, like I am on the 'Nova Express'. I also didn’t get the same sense of reality to the spiritual side of things that is there in Tolkien (in a melancholy, oceanic way) or in Lewis (in a more often than not paralyzingly scary way).

Williams influenced Lewis, I think, most obviously in ‘That Hideous Strength’ (here I go again, making ‘Just So’ stories about things I know not wot of) and it probably would have been better if he hadn’t. ‘That Hideous Strength’ was my favourite of the three once upon a time, but today I would be more pleased if the Space Trilogy had turned out to be:

Out of the Silent Planet
The Dark Tower
Perelandra¹

For all the blurbs one reads, or used to read, about so-and-so being ‘like Tolkien’ I don’t think anything anyone else has written is much like the Lord of the Rings at all. The widespread Tolkien-imitating movement has been a very imperfect movement that has not imitated the essential Tolkien-ness to any significant degree. My own Tolkien-mimesis has been somewhat different, in that I read the Appendices first, and immediately went off making new alphabets and chronologies of imaginary empires. This habit has stayed with me ever since. Beyond that, Middle Earth is simply the sub-created world I know of where I can hear most clearly that voice crying, ‘Balder the beautiful/Is dead, is dead…’ out of the cold grey northern skies. It is simply there in the background, the one true mythology of the fragmented culture I have grown up in.

My enthusiasm for Lewis has followed what I expect is a fairly typical trajectory. I read Narnia enthusiastically before I started high school, started ‘Out of the Silent Planet’ but couldn’t get into it, and then returned as an undergraduate to read enthusiastically verything he had written, fiction and non-fiction; since then my enthusiasm has cooled, ever so slightly, as I have grown older and more crotchedy and harder-to-please. After all this what appeals to me most is certain bits of the theology of Narnia, which are not precisely Christian and seem to me to be an improvement.

Take, for instance, the words of Aslan in the last battle to Emeth the Calormene:

“Child, all the service though hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me ... for no service which is vile can be done to me, and no service which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore, if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him.”

Emeth says that he has been seeking Tash all his days, and Aslan replies:

“Beloved, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.”

Lewis could never have written anything like this in his apologetic works, because it would have been a distortion of the ideology he had bound himself to uphold. If only it was de fide! And take the story of how evil entered the world in ‘The Magician’s Nephew’: it doesn’t explain the ultimate origin of evil, any more than Genesis does, but it is much more satisfying to my way of thinking.

My own theodicy was to a large part inspired by the footnote in the following bit of ‘Mere Christianity’ which when I have re-read it since seems to actually mean something quite different:

The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them;but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not. In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts. You have the facts (how men do behave)and you also have something else(how they ought to behave). In the rest of the universe there need not be anything but the facts. Electrons and molecules behave in a certain way, and certain results follow, and that may be the whole story.*
But men behave in a certain way and that is not the whole story, for all the time you know that they ought to behave differently.

*: I do not think it is the whole story, as you will see later. I mean
that, as far as the argument has gone up to date, it may be.

I find that C.S. Lewis scares me easily. This is because he really, really, believes in the scary things he is writing about. There is the island where dreams come true in ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’. There is the figure of Weston the Un-man in ‘Perelandra’. I once read the metaphor about the orange in Perelandra in a shed in Charters Towers, alone in a thunderstorm at night. I do not recommend this. The scariness is equally there in his non-fiction. Essays like ‘The Problem with X’ always make me feel that the things I have been putting up with and not bothering too much about are dragging my nearest and dearest- and me, too- ineluctably towards the Pit, which is too grim and horrible and Jansenist a feeling for me to carry around.

1: I am jealous; my wife once dreamed an ending to The Dark Tower, which by all accounts was excellent.

They Walk Among Us

The other day Spouse of Clam was reading this book which seemed to be perfectly mundane historical fiction when a couple of chapters in she suddenly said, ‘Hey, there’s a golem in it!’ Then the other other day I was reading this other book which also seemed to be perfectly mundane historical fiction when, at the beginning of chapter two- there was a golem! I have held off starting any other books since then, just in case.

An Outline of History, Part One

Quoth Marco: I guess my attitude with a very uncertain world is to look back in complete retrospective optimism in the decisions that were made. For instance one can pick a critical decision made (eg. invading Iraq in the way that it happened) and imagine an alternative history where that decision was the difference between our relatively stable world, and triggering a freak sequence of (unpredicted) events of such calamity that the whole of civilization would have broken down (exercise for the novel writer - write a brief outline of events to describe in an alternate history novel) Of course one can do it evenly on both sides of the debate (if 9/11 didn't happen, if the UN approved war, if Al Gore had been given the election etc.)

The man in the chair leaned back, closed his eyes, and rubbed his temples. It was 9:07 on a Friday night, and in a sane world he would have been home long ago with his family, not sitting here with two more appointments on his schedule.

My G_d, thought the President, I am so very very tired.

The desk was spread with foreign policy briefing papers. All today’s. All bad. The war- always the war- was always good for bad news, and today it had delivered in spades. In the worst single incident for the U.S. forces this year, at least twelve South Carolina national guardsmen had been killed by a roadside bomb in a region that had been designated ‘pacified’ two weeks ago. Moment by moment the news feed brought more sneers at his quixotic nation-building project from the right, more gibes from the left mocking the ‘so-called War for Justice’. ‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,’ they said, denigrating his motivation and his religion in the one glib catchphrase. It’s about justice, he told himself, as he always did. Not revenge. And Americans would not sleep soundly at home until justice was established everywhere in the world. It was not possible to just pull back the troops and pull up the drawbridge.

He knew he would not see it out to the end. That would be for others, who came after. The part he had taken upon himself was to impose the rule of law on Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan. All the dark forces of Islamo-Jacobinism had boiled out to oppose him, drawn from the ends of the earth to the wound he had made on the body of Dar al-Islam.
A verse of Kipling ran willy-nilly through his head.

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains
And the women come down to cut up what remains
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
And go to your G_d like a soldier

It had not been his war to begin with, though now his name was inextricably linked with it in the public mind. After the September 11 attacks, President Gore had been ceaseless in his efforts to build a multilateral framework to ensure its perpetrators were brought to justice. He had built a consensus, and a U.N.-mandated coalition, and after exhausting all diplomatic avenues with the Taliban regime, had launched a full invasion of Afghanistan in March 2003. Gore presided over the first, triumphant phase of the war, but by November he was gone, the first U.S. President to resign because of ill-health. Doctors said his debilitating respiratory illness was a consequence of too many morale-building visits to Ground Zero in the first terrible days after the attacks. It had been left to Lieberman, like it had been left to Johnson after Kennedy, to prosecute the inevitable escalation of the war. He had pressured Musharraf to provide full co-operation in hunting down Al-Qaida forces in the border region, and today over a hundred thousand U.S. servicemen were operating on the Pakistani side of the border, in Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier Province. Spain had pulled out of the coalition after Madrid bombings. Italy after the Palermo incident. As year succeeded year with no sign of a successful conclusion, as Pakistan became more radicalised and the flow of foreign fighters into the region intensified, so too grew disapproval of the war. There was a consensus in the media that Lieberman’s second term would go down in history as a litany of wasted opportunities. He took no notice of this. Whatever the rest of the world said, he knew that defeat was unthinkable.

Westward of the war zone, there were equally intractable problems. When he thought of all the diplomat years that had been wasted on the Kurdish problem- all those special envoys, all those flying visits to Suleimanayah and Ankara- and now the Constanta Accord for Kurdish Autonomy had collapsed in a bloody shambles. What a waste. As the net of U.N. sanctions restricting Iraq had been gradually dismantled, the Kurds in the northern no-fly zone had grown increasingly apprehensive about the future of their de facto independence, and had pressed for U.N. guarantees for continued autonomy. There had been a plebiscite, against the protests of Turkey and Iraq. The results of the plebiscite had been shelved by a U.N. committee. The Islamist regime in Turkey and the Baathists in Iraq had been increasingly open in their efforts to subvert Kurdistan. The Constanta Accord had offered a face-saving solution for everyone. There had been a timetable. There had been foot-dragging, provocations. And then these past few weeks- the stupid unilateral declaration of independence, and now the Turks and Iraqis were rolling in from north and south, ignoring the long-moribund no-fly zone. A NATO member and the ‘Butcher of Baghdad’ conniving at the dismemberment of one of the few democratic enclaves in the Middle East. Lieberman’s ambassador to the U.N. was pushing a raft of measures to rein in the aggressors: but the U.N. was so slow, so terribly slow. The reaction from the Western media had been muted: There were no comfortable hotels with broadband internet and Kentucky bourbon in convenient proximity to the warzone, and no scheduled international flights into the Kurdish enclave. And it wasn’t like there were Americans dying or killing.

In Israel even more diplomat years had been wasted. Yasser Arafat was dead, and Sharon, but whatever opportunities for hope these might have afforded were swept away by the continuing campaign of suicide bombings. Netanyahu had come back to power in a landslide and rejected any suggestion that the Jewish state hunker down between a defensive line, pushing an aggressive line in the Territories that had made it difficult for Lieberman to offer the unqualified support he would have liked to give. $10,000 a head: that was the going price for a dead Jew, offered by the Iraqi dictator through a chain of intermediaries offering plausible deniability. He had the evidence, but it was not enough to convince the international community to act: the memory of the last disasterous attempt to influence Iraq’s behaviour through sanctions was still fresh. In other countries, perhaps. For other victims, there might yet be sanctions. Not for the Jews. One of the papers on the President’s desk reported on a suicide bombing in Modi’in, the first for a few weeks. Only one person had been killed besides the bomber when he detonated himself in an IKEA checkout line, a seventeen year-old girl. Lieberman didn’t suppose her name would even be mentioned in the New York Times tomorrow morning. Poor Eretz Israel.

‘Mr President?’

He must have dozed off, just for a second. He opened his eyes, and there was Gleishner. The man looked as white as a sheet. I hope I don’t look as bad as he does, thought Lieberman.

‘Yes?’

Gleishner’s adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and it was a few seconds before he could reply.
‘Mr. President, we have a problem.’

***

Suha had taken the baby up onto the rooftop because she wouldn’t stop crying, and was rocking her on her shoulder. Already the swarming city of Gaza was beginning to stir, its residents making the most of this interlude between curfews. You never knew how long they would last, and in the first few days especially there was always a mad scramble to obtain basic supplies. Suha looked off to the east, where a pink glow through the diesel fumes promised the sun would soon be rising.

The sun rose in an instant, too far to the left. Suha was not looking at it, so was not blinded permanently, but by the time she could see again the false sun had been replaced by a tower of black cloud, higher than any thundercloud she had ever seen. The baby screamed. The sounds of traffic fell silent.

3 x 10n

It isn't strictly equitable to only quote songs from one side of the American Civil War, so here are a few lines from 'Oh I'm a Good Old Rebel':

Three hundred thousand Yankees lie dead in southern dust
We got three hundred thousand before they conquered us
They died of southern fever and southern steel and shot
I wish there were three million instead of what we got

The 1860 census for the whole United States estimated the population at a little over 30,000,000.

Today, it is just over 300,000,000.

American war deaths in Iraq are just over 3000.

This is very sad for them and for their families, but it is no excuse for war weariness in a superpower. At the same level of conflict, for instance, it would take over thirty years for one person from our local government area to be killed. Our village is not the largest population centre in our local government area. It is probably the third, and it would have been about the same a hundred years ago. There is an avenue of seventeen trees along the street in our village, one for each local man who did not come back from the 1914-1918 war.

This is the third anniversary of the Accidental Blog.

‘Anyone, no matter how ignorant, can discover what is repulsive and absurd in standards different from their own; and one’s learning, no matter how detailed, is wasted if one gets no further than that.’
-Hilaire Belloc

I was going to write a short story, and I was going to write ‘I is for…’, but I’m not doing either of those things right now. You may have noticed I haven’t written anything ‘political’ for some time, not because I have stopped thinking about ‘political’ things, not because I am not continually agitated and disturbed about ‘political’ things. I do not write because I have nothing new to say. I have no original ideas, no insights, can offer no glimmer of hope that is not but a faded shadow of a glimmer of hope I once offered in years gone by. My incomprehension of my own civilisation, which daily more and more ‘goes into exile for lack of understanding’, is near total. The number of classes of statements I am liable to hear on the ABC radio news that impel me to angrily change to a neighbouring station continue to grow. So it was that today I changed to a commercial station, and there heard half of a song called ‘Dear Mr President’ before I changed it again.

Q. Can you even look me in the eye and tell me why? (Pink)
A. Yes. To keep the barbarians from the gate, you silly bint. (suggested by Dr Clam)

Like I said, I have nothing new to say. I remain baffled by the position of the Labor Party, of the Democratic Party, of the average fellow-citizen who reads the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald, or works at the same institution as me, or- if the opinion polls can be believed- walks the streets and drives the roads of any city in the Western World. I do not comprehend their narrative. Specifically, that part of their narrative which connects and explains events in Iraq over the past twenty-five years. I cannot imagine a rational vantage point from which that narrative, as it has been communicated to me by the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald and its fellow travellers, makes any sense at all.
Since I have nothing new to say, I am going to present my narrative to connect and explain events in Iraq over the past twenty years. Please, if it offends you, offer up your counter-narrative for the same events!

Let us begin with the way the world was twenty-five years ago. It was in the last years of a titanic struggle between two great powers, and every single event that happened anywhere in the world was seen, and had to be seen, firstly and most importantly in relation to that titanic struggle. What opportunities did it afford for the advantage of our side? What opportunities for the other side? Who benefited in the long term, in the short term? It was an age of game theory in international relations, of conspiracy theories that were credible and even true, of brinksmanship and mind-numbing terror. Perhaps you do not remember it like that. This is my narrative, and I am saying how I remember things.
In that titanic struggle our side, the West, supported many unworthy allies; in a calculated fashion, because those allies were important in in the existential struggle. Hence Suharto, the Shah, Pinochet, at certain times a certain Iraqi strongman.
In the milieu in which I lived, I breathed in a certain cynicism about this titanic stuggle. Sure, our side was ours, but we were not enthusiastic partisans. Our side had high ideals, and failed to live up to them; the other side, too, professed high ideals, and likewise failed to live up to them. They were two great grey colossi locked in an interminable struggle. We were weary unto death of their fighting and wanted something, anything, to make it end.

One day it ended. We had won.

Over the next few years- the next several years- it gradually dawned on me that my cynicism had been misplaced. The other side had been, in its essence, wrong and evil, and our side was, in its essence, right and good. The crimes that had been committed by our side had been committed, rightly or wrongly, as calculated moves in a struggle against a far greater evil. The crimes of the other side had been committed as calculated moves to still all voices of opposition and dehumanise mankind.
I realise this must sound breathtakingly naïve to many people. But I think there is no other plausible reading of the historical evidence. I am prepared to justify it at appalling length in subsequent posts.

Almost the last, but far from the least evil to spring from this titanic struggle happened in the first half of 1991. A tyrant who had made unprovoked war on most of his neighbours, who had caused the deaths of upward of a million people, who was a bad egg overall, had been brought to bay by a vast alliance of many nations. He could have been cast down, as all tyrants should be cast down, with relative ease. And yet he was not. President George Bush called upon the oppressed people of Iraq to rebel against their ruler, and did not aid them as they fought and died. The vast armies were dispersed and sent back to their homes. The tyrant remained in power. Why was this allowed to happen? I believe it was the final catastrophe of the Cold War. Forged in the crucible of a Cold War spy agency like Vladimir Putin, President George Bush the Lesser could not bring himself to make a move in the great game that was beyond the bounds of precedent, that might throw out too far the balance of power, that might unleash too many uncontrollable variables. This is the first axiom of my narrative. Saddam Hussein should have been removed from power in 1991. The crimes he had committed up until then fully justified his removal by force. All that happened in the next twelve years did nothing to diminish these crimes.

I remember the removal of Saddam from power being a bipartisan policy throughout the 1990s, once the habits of thought of the Cold War began to recede. I was angry about sanctions. I was angry about the bombings of 1998. I was angry then because these things because they impacted disproportionately on innocent civilians, and they had no hope of achieving what is most precious to God, in the words of Baha’ullah, which is justice. The invasion of Iraq was carried out to make amends for the shame of 1991 and bring this long overdue justice. It was obvious that it should be done, long before 2001.

Now for the marvellous thing I have seen with my own eyes in my own time, the success of the Big Lie. Ceaselessly, everywhere, it is repeated that the leaders of the West lied to us, because they said that the Despot had Weapons of Mass Destruction, when he did not. They say this, and they say this: but it does not make it true. I was alive in 2003, and I remember. The Ministry of Truth cannot erase the following from my mind:
* It seemed quite clear from the pronouncements of George Bush et al that the goal of the invasion was what I have said above, to crush an evil despot like a weevil.
* In a move stupid in retrospect, George Bush et al sought to obtain an imprimatur from the United Nations for the invasion. This brought the Weapons of Mass Destruction issue to the forefront, because the UN resolutions that Iraq had flouted were concernd with these.
* Because Iraq had not complied with these resolutions, a murderous regime of sanctions was daily punishing the Iraqi people.
* Everyone was agreed that the Despot had Weapons of Mass Destruction: the French, the Russians, Uncle Tom Cobbley.
* The ‘fact’ that he had Weapons of Mass Destruction was a commonly used argument against invasion, and by far the best one in my opinion. You cannot bring a tyrant who has Weapons of Mass Destruction down unless the situation is desperate, because you cannot know how much he will be able to destroy in his death throes.

There was an invasion. For a little while, the unelected unrepresentative swill governing states near Iraq had trouble sleeping. Libya decided to make nice. Was the Coalition of the Willing happy to throw down the tyrant and then leave? No, that would be irresponsible. They stayed behind to reconstruct things. They made a lot of appalling mistakes while doing so. There was an election. They stayed on at the request of the elected government.
Everything in Iraq was better, except for security.
Security was absolutely appalling primarily because of the interference of unelected unrepresentative swill in neighbouring countries, primarily Iran.
I have these last two statements not from some right-wing blog, but from an actual Iraqi, unprompted and unaware of my opinions.

This is my narrative.
It is a narrative in which the role of President George Bush the Greater is, in its essence, heroic and decent. It is the narrative of a wrong and an attempt to right this wrong, an attempt admittedly limited and flawed, but an attempt that has not failed and need not fail.

I welcome alternative narratives. Any plausible counter-narrative must, however, supply a plausible alternative motivation for George W Bush to initiate, carry out, and persist with, such a deeply and widely unpopular action.



Success to the old fashioned doctrine, that men are created all free;
and down with the power of the despot, wherever his stronghold may be.
Wherever his stronghold may be, wherever his stronghold may be;
and down with the power of the despot wherever his stronghold may be.

*

‘Anyone, no matter how ignorant, can discover what is repulsive and absurd in standards different from their own; and one’s learning, no matter how detailed, is wasted if one gets no further than that.’
-Hilaire Belloc

I was going to write a short story, and I was going to write ‘I is for…’, but I’m not doing either of those things right now. You may have noticed I haven’t written anything ‘political’ for some time, not because I have stopped thinking about ‘political’ things, not because I am not continually agitated and disturbed about ‘political’ things, but because I have nothing new to say. I have no original ideas, no insights, can offer no glimmer of hope that is not but a faded shadow of a glimmer of hope I once offered in years gone by. My incomprehension of my own civilisation, which daily more and more ‘goes into exile for lack of understanding’, is near total. The number of classes of statements I am liable to hear on the ABC radio news that impel me to angrily change to a neighbouring station continue to grow. So it was that today I changed to a commercial station, and there heard half of a song called ‘Dear Mr President’ before I changed it again.

Q. Can you even look me in the eye and tell me why? (Pink)

A. Yes. To keep the barbarians from the gate, you silly bint. (suggested by Dr Clam)

Like I said, I have nothing new to say. I remain baffled by the position of the Labor Party, of the Democratic Party, of the average fellow-citizen who reads the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald, or works at the same institution as me, or- if the opinion polls can be believed- walks the streets and drives the roads of any city in the Western World. I do not comprehend their narrative. Specifically, that part of their narrative which connects and explains events in Iraq over the past twenty-five years. I cannot imagine a rational vantage point from which that narrative, as it has been communicated to me by the Devil Bunny City Morning Herald and its fellow travellers, makes any sense at all.

Since I have nothing new to say, I am going to present my narrative to connect and explain events in Iraq over the past twenty years. Please, if it offends you, offer up your counter-narrative for the same events!

Let us begin with the way the world was twenty-five years ago. It was in the last years of a titanic struggle between two great powers, and every single event that happened anywhere in the world was seen, and had to be seen, firstly and most importantly in relation to that titanic struggle. What opportunities did it afford for the advantage of our side? What opportunities for the other side? Who benefited in the long term, in the short term? It was an age of game theory in international relations, of conspiracy theories that were credible and even true, of brinksmanship and mind-numbing terror. Perhaps you do not remember it like that. This is my narrative, and I am saying how I remember things.

In that titanic struggle our side, the West, supported many unworthy allies; in a calculated fashion, because those allies were important in in the existential struggle. Hence Suharto, the Shah, Pinochet, at certain times a certain Iraqi strongman.

In the milieu in which I lived, I breathed in a certain cynicism about this titanic stuggle. Sure, our side was ours, but we were not enthusiastic partisans. Our side had high ideals, and failed to live up to them; the other side, too, professed high ideals, and likewise failed to live up to them. They were two great grey colossi locked in an interminable struggle. We were weary unto death of their fighting and wanted something, anything, to make it end.

One day it ended. We had won.

Over the next few years- the next several years- it gradually dawned on me that my cynicism had been misplaced. The other side had been, in its essence, wrong and evil, and our side was, in its essence, right and good. The crimes that had been committed by our side had been committed, rightly or wrongly, as calculated moves in a struggle against a far greater evil. The crimes of the other side had been committed as calculated moves to still all voices of opposition and dehumanise mankind.

I realise this must sound breathtakingly naïve to many people. But I think there is no other plausible reading of the historical evidence. I am prepared to justify it at appalling length in subsequent posts.

Almost the last, but far from the least evil to spring from this titanic struggle happened in the first half of 1991. A tyrant who had made unprovoked war on most of his neighbours, who had caused the deaths of upward of a million people, who was a bad egg overall, had been brought to bay by a vast alliance of many nations. He could have been cast down, as all tyrants should be cast down, with relative ease. And yet he was not. President George Bush called upon the oppressed people of Iraq to rebel against their ruler, and did not aid them as they fought and died. The vast armies were dispersed and sent back to their homes. The tyrant remained in power. Why was this allowed to happen? I believe it was the final catastrophe of the Cold War. Forged in the crucible of a Cold War spy agency like Vladimir Putin, President George Bush the Lesser could not bring himself to make a move in the great game that was beyond the bounds of precedent, that might throw out too far the balance of power, that might unleash too many uncontrollable variables. This is the first axiom of my narrative. Saddam Hussein should have been removed from power in 1991. The crimes he had committed up until then fully justified his removal by force. All that happened in the next twelve years did nothing to diminish these crimes.

I remember the removal of Saddam from power being a bipartisan policy throughout the 1990s, once the habits of thought of the Cold War began to recede. I was angry about sanctions. I was angry about the bombings of 1998. I was angry then because these things because they impacted disproportionately on innocent civilians, and they had no hope of achieving what is most precious to God, in the words of Baha’ullah, which is justice. The invasion of Iraq was carried out to make amends for the shame of 1991 and bring this long overdue justice. It was obvious that it should be done, long before 2001.

Now for the marvellous thing I have seen with my own eyes in my own time, the success of the Big Lie. Ceaselessly, everywhere, it is repeated that the leaders of the West lied to us, because they said that the Despot had Weapons of Mass Destruction, when he did not. They say this, and they say this: but it does not make it true. I was alive in 2003, and I remember. The Ministry of Truth cannot erase the following from my mind:

* It seemed quite clear from the pronouncements of George Bush et al that the goal of the invasion was what I have said above, to crush a wicked despot like a weevil.

* In a move stupid in retrospect, George Bush et al sought to obtain an imprimatur from the United Nations for the invasion. This brought the Weapons of Mass Destruction issue to the forefront, because the UN resolutions that Iraq had flouted were concernd with these.

* Because Iraq had not complied with these resolutions, a murderous regime of sanctions was daily punishing the Iraqi people.

* Everyone was agreed that the Despot had Weapons of Mass Destruction: the French, the Russians, Uncle Tom Cobbley, etc. If anyone had good evidence to the contrary, they sat on it.

* The ‘fact’ that he had Weapons of Mass Destruction was a commonly used argument against invasion, and by far the best one in my opinion. You cannot bring a tyrant who has Weapons of Mass Destruction down unless the situation is desperate, because you cannot know how much he will be able to destroy in his death throes.

There was an invasion. For a little while, the unelected unrepresentative swill governing states near Iraq had trouble sleeping. Libya decided to make nice. Was the Coalition of the Willing happy to throw down the tyrant and then leave? No, that would be irresponsible. They stayed behind to reconstruct things. They made a lot of appalling mistakes while doing so. There was an election. They stayed on at the request of the elected government.

Everything in Iraq was better, except for security.
Security was absolutely appalling primarily because of the interference of unelected unrepresentative swill in neighbouring countries, primarily Iran.

I have these last two statements not from some right-wing blog, but from an actual Iraqi, unprompted and unaware of my opinions.

This is my narrative.
It is a narrative in which the role of President George Bush the Greater is, in its essence, heroic and decent. It is the narrative of a wrong and an attempt to right this wrong, an attempt admittedly limited and flawed, but an attempt that has not failed and need not fail.

I welcome alternative narratives. Any plausible counter-narrative must, however, supply a plausible alternative motivation for George W Bush to initiate, carry out, and persist with, such a deeply and widely unpopular action.


Success to the old fashioned doctrine, that men are created all free;
and down with the power of the despot, wherever his stronghold may be.
Wherever his stronghold may be, wherever his stronghold may be;
and down with the power of the despot, wherever his stronghold may be.


[May 4th, 2012: I'm still waiting hopefully for a plausible counter-narrative.  Blogger tells me people are still visiting this page, so please, if you have one, feel free!]

"I used to think. Now I just read the Economist"

That's what flashed up as part of an ad for The Economist (pbuh) that I came across online. Maybe I didn't catch it properly. If I did, it is the creepiest advertising slogan I've seen since Wayne Goss put a flyer in my letterbox saying: 'It's good to be on the winning side.'

7.7.7

‘From far across the ocean you can hear the sound of thunder.
I listen closely but I hear no evil.
Just the sound of cities crashing as they fall into the ocean…’

- 'Hear No Evil', Hunters and Collectors


Happy 37^th birthday to Sandor! And happy 100^th birthday, wherever you are, to Robert Heinlein!

I like the way Heinlein was game enough to build The Green Hills of Earth around a bit of Kiplingesque poetry.

We've tried each spinning space mote
And reckoned its true worth:
Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of Earth.

The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
ALL HANDS! STAND BY! FREE FALLING!
And the lights below us fade.

Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps a race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet ---

We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.

I have just made, as far as I know, the first ever translation of this verse into Australian, which goes like this:

Earth! Earth! Earth! Oi! Oi! Oi!

I tried making a Gysin/Burroughs-style cut-up of Friday once. And I have managed to successfully forget the twist at the end of The Puppet Masters at least twice. But I admit that overall my grasp of Heinlein’s oeuvre is not what it could be. As his books get longer and longer and the characters spend more and more time talking about what they are going to do instead of doing it (Number of the Beast, what is that book all about? It is like a faculty meeting that just goes on and on and on) I grow less and less likely to finish them.

And I am ashamed to say that I have never read Starship Troopers. I have seen the movie, which I understand is something like saying to a fan of the original Thirtysomething Mutant Ninja Turtles comics that I’ve eaten the TMNT breakfast cereal. I did like the movie. I think I have written somewhere on this blog that it is the first great movie of the 21st century. In the director’s commentary on my DVD the director- a Dutch guy who has not been decapitated- is quite adamant that he didn’t set out to glorify miltarism. I think he is being a bit disingenuous. It doesn’t matter what he set out to do. His movie offers a very sympathetic and attractive portrait of a militaristic society. Salman Rushdie says The Satanic Verses was never intended to blaspheme Islam. Eugene Terreblanche says the logo of the AWB wasn’t intended to be reminiscent of the Nazi flag. My 2003 NaNoWriMo novel wasn’t supposed to be pro-euthanasia. But once you create something, you are not just responsible for the reading you intended it to have, but for any other obvious readings it might have. What you intended is neither here nor there. Works of art are like wandering livstock.

Unfortunately, Mr Verhoeven does not seem to be one of us ‘Earth! Earth! Earth! Oi! Oi! Oi!’ types. He is that sad thing, a self-loathing human. On my DVD he argues, apparently sincerely, for moral equivalence between Mormons and the murderous insect hordes:

The screen shows ‘before’ pictures of a shiny Mormon settlement with a golden
angel on top, then ‘after’ shots with lots of dismembered corpses scattered
about.

Federal Announcer: Mormon extremists disregarded Federal warnings
and established Fort Joe Smith, deep inside the Arachnid quarantine zone. Too
late they realised that Dantana had already been settled by other colonists-
Arachnids.

Paul Verhoeven: The rest of the scene is very interesting …
What it says, of course, in this scene, was that the war was not started by the
bugs. Like that is a very interesting political situation because in politics in
general, especially in American politics, there is a tendency to take a part of
history but not acknowledge what happened before.

See, we humans started it by constructing settlements. Boo, hiss. Bad humans.
Silly Mr Verhoeven! The bugs don’t hate us for what we do, they hate us for what we are. A race without a hivemind is like a body without a head, a shambling zombie horror lurching about erratically. Humans are the antithesis to bugdom. Our very virtues are abominable vices to them. Our decadent individualism revulses them. Our pasty mucilaginous flesh, daubed pathetically over our flimsy endoskeletons, makes them want to vomit up gouts of insectoid phlegm. They get queasy just thinking about us. Eugh, so do I. Must… destroy… humans.

No! That way lies madness.

Earth! Earth! Earth! Oi! Oi! Oi!

H is for Herbert

Has Lexifab started to reread ‘Dune’ yet? There are few questions in today’s world that interest me more.

An essential part of the appeal of Dune- at least to me- is the appendices. There is nothing like a few appendices to give the sense that a book isn’t just a story sitting there by itself, but is a fragment of a world as vast and self-consistent as our ‘real’ one, if we could only reach out into the mind of God and grab hold of it. Sadly, none of the Dune sequels have appendices, so I very rarely reread them, though I reread Dune often.

I was also very taken with the epigrams. When I first read Dune I rushed out at once and wrote a dozen or so pages of a story with stuffy epigrams at the head of each chapter. It was something like ‘Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh’, but instead of rats they were chimpanzees, and instead of just hiding they were going to take over London. I wrote this on the weekend and on the Monday I rushed up to one of my English teachers excitedly and tried to show her what I had written, but she was busy- and she was a great believer in writing multiple drafts of things- and she told me to bring her the second draft and she would have a look at that. There was no second draft. Such is (or was, I should say, in a hopeful manner) my default response to criticism real or implied. I left the pages on the floor of my room and eventually they got thrown away. I couldn’t figure out how exactly the chimpanzees were going to conquer London, anyway. I remember that the weapons the superintelligent chimpanzees used were called ‘zizurangs’ and that the lost pages dealt with their escape from a research facility somewhere near Basildon.

I can’t say, ‘stop me if you’ve heard this’, because of the asynchronous way in which this blogging medium works. But if you have read something like the following anecdote before, feel free to wander off.

Once upon a time, I used to feel intimidated by the stream-of-consciousnessy mystical bits of the Dune books, since I couldn’t make head or tail of them. Then I read ‘The White Plague’. I read it on or about Australia Day, 1988. Marco and Sandor and I were visiting Ellen in Bochum, and the book belonged to the girl she was staying with there- who was away elsewhere while we were there so I never actually met her. But I still have her copy of The White Plague. I hadn’t finished it when we left Bochum so I left some of my own books behind in a swap that I think Ellen okayed for me. This probably wasn’t such a good deal as I’m making it sound, since I’m sure at least one of the books I left behind was one a Hare Krishna gave me at Miami airport.

Anyway, now for the relevant part of the anecdote.

The relevant part of the anecdote is that The White Plague has quite a few of these stream-of-consciousnessy bits, only they’re not mystical, but scientifical, when the mad biochemist is thinking through how he is going to make his virus to kill all the world’s women. They don’t make any sense. Anyone with a smidgen of biochemistry can tell that they are just meaningless jargon. They wouldn’t really be any use in designing a virus to kill all the world’s women. (Hmm, I guess if they were, it would be irresponsible to put them in a novel. I just thought of that.) Anyway, when I realized those stream-of-consciousnessy bits were meaningless waffle, I leapt to the conclusion that the mystical stream-of-consciousnessy bits in Dune were meaningless waffle, too, and I ceased to feel intimidated by them.

Finally got those pictures off the camera!

This is our place, last November 16th.

Is this a possum I see before me?

Saw Bridge to Terebithia today. Never read the book: remember picking it up when I was ten or so and flicking it open to a sad bit, so I put it back down again.

There is this scene where the young lad Jesse gets up early to fetch the trap from the greenhouse before his father can get there, to save the beast that is making a mess of the greenhouse from its well deserved fate as a serial pest. He takes the cage out into the woods and lets the beast go. I was expecting the beast to be a raccoon. It isn't, though. It looked like a possum. Not a rat-faced Virginia opposum, such as might realistically be found rummaging through greenhouses in Virginia, but the cuddly sort of dinky-di possum that you would find rummaging through greenhouses in New Zealand, where they filmed the movie. Admittedly it was only on the screen for a few instants, but I can't think of any North American animal that would look like that. If you see the movie, please look carefully, gentle readers, and let me know what you think. Possum, or not? I haven't been able to find any references to possums (as opposed to oppossums) being introduced pests anywhere in North America, so my working hypothesis is that the movie is actually set in a parallel universe where New Zealand is part of the United States. Take that, David Lange!