Solving a problem like Korea

We’ve not long passed the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War on 25 June, 1950. The official line in North Korea, which provoked the war by attacking the South, is that it was a defensive struggle against American “aggression.” This rewriting of history was long supported by China, which intervened in the conflict in when Kim II-sung’s communist regime was in danger of being wiped out after the American victory in the Battle of Inchon.

From that time onwards the conflict, which lasted until the ceasefire of 1953, was referred to as “The War to Resist America and Aid Korea.” According to history textbooks, it began when the United States assembled a United Nations army of fifteen countries, invaded the North, carrying the war to China’s border with Korea on the Yalu River.

Now the Chinese have finally admitted the truth. On Friday the official government news agency published a special report in which it was said that “On June 25, 1950, the North Korean army marched over the 38th Parallel and started the attack. Three days later, Seoul fell.” The Global Times, a government-run newspaper, said that it was high time to renew and strengthen the efforts by Chinese scholars to “discover the truth about the Korean War.” North Korea, with no great surprise, celebrated the anniversary by trotting out the same old lies.

It’s commendable to see the Chinese dedicate themselves to a new spirit of truth and scholarship. But things are never that simple, are they, when it comes to matters like this? One should always look for a subliminal message, a sub-text of some kind.

North Korea is still China’s friend, but a more tiresome and unstable friend is difficult to imagine. The sinking of the South Korea naval vessel in March, followed by denials and hysterical war-mongering in the North, shows how dangerously unpredictable this frightful termite nation can be. I rather suspect that the Chinese are making it plain that the North can expect no aid from them in any planned or future “defence”.

Mockingbird

I read J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Nell Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, those twin classics of modern American literature, at more or less the same time in my mid teens. I remember thinking afterwards, once I had discovered something about the authors in question, that they were the best of books to have written…and the worst. The best in the sense that both were an immediate commercial and critical success; the worst in the sense that the authors’ work thereafter would always be judged to the standards set by these monoliths.

To these two books I would add Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, but at least this did not have the same impact on his life that The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird had on the lives of Salinger and Lee, both of whom more or less stopped writing altogether, both of whom became recluses, hating the fame that their work had brought. I assumed they realised, in their different ways, that they only really had one great book inside them and that any further effort was pointless. Success for them was not a blessing: it was a curse.

I haven’t entirely changed that view. I did, however, read a very interesting feature article on Harper Lee by Sharon Churcher in The Mail on Sunday (Don’t mention the Mockingbird) which has caused me to partially reassess it. Harper Lee, whose book was published almost fifty years ago, grew up in Monroeville, Alabama, in the ‘Old South’, the pre-integration South, the South of Jim Crow. The racial bigotry witnessed by Scout Finch, the six-year-old narrator in Mockingbird, was essentially that witnessed by Lee herself as she was growing up.

It’s no secret that the novel has an autobiographical element. But it seems to have been much stronger than generally supposed, so strong that she came in for intense criticism not just from the community of Monroeville, who claimed to recognise themselves in its pages, but from members of her immediate family. The suggestion is from those who knew her well that this had a traumatic effect. Mockingbird is so authentic because it is so personal; but because it is personal it has also been deeply painful. There are some things that can only ever be said once.

Satan in Gori

How are the mighty fallen

Stalin’s gone. For almost sixty years his giant statue brooded over Gori, the Georgian town where he was born, the son of a local cobbler, in 1878. It was the last survivor of an army of statues once scattered across the Soviet Union. One by one they went after Khrushchev’s denunciation of the tyrant; they all went with the exception of that in Gori, allowed to remain by special permission of the Politburo, a concession to a favoured local son, a concession to the only man in history who made Gori worthy of any note at all.

But he is favoured no longer. For Mikhail Saakashvili, Georgia’s pro-western president, the statue was an uncomfortable reminder of the past, a reminder, as he put it, of the Soviet occupation of Georgia. It’s as well to remember also, though no mention of this was made in the press reports I read, that it was Stalin who played a leading part in ending the independence of the first Republic of Georgia back in 1921.

His statue was removed without advanced warning in the early hours of Friday morning for fear of an adverse reaction by people, especially the elderly, who still revere their local hero, their own particular Satan. He is being moved to the Stalin museum, more of a shrine really. In his place Saakashvili plans to erect a memorial to the victims of Georgia’s brief war with Russia in 2008.

Commenting on the fall of their hero a spokesman for the Georgian Communist Party said that it was “in shock.” “The authority of the Georgian nation could sharply fall around the world as a result of this”, continued Soso Gagoshvili. I’m not often in a position where I feel that I am able to speak on behalf of “the world” but on this occasion I feel reasonably certain that “the world” could not care less.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Me ne freggo

A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of fascism. All the powers of new Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the Presidents of the European Commission and the Council, Manuel Barosso and Herman von Rumpuy, Swedish liberals and German socialists.

Sorry, please forgive this free adaptation of a well-known song by a communist double act but it underlines a simple truth: the Europeans can’t get fascism out of their mind. Everything they dislike is ‘fascist’ – the nation state is ‘fascist’, hostility towards the European superstate is ‘fascist’, the desire to give the people of Europe, the individual national communities, a say over their own destinies that, too, is ‘fascist.’

The fact is that the whole ghastly European project would seem to be based on two things: fear of the past and fear of freedom. Margot Wallström, the Swedish Social Democrat and European commissioner, said on the anniversary of the liberation of Theresienstandt concentration camp that “There are those today who want to scrap the supra-national idea. They want the EU to go back to the old purely intergovernmental way of doing things. I say those people should come to Terezin and see where the old road leads.”

So there you are America, there you are all of the free nations of the Earth, all those who are not part of the “supra-national idea”, you can take it from Margot where your particular road will lead. The simple truth is the woman has not got a clue what she is talking about. It was the Germans who were responsible for Theresienstandt and most of the other concentration camps of the united Nazi Europe, not the old “intergovernmental way of doing things.” But, when in doubt, when devoid of imagination, just conjure up the spectre of fascism.

Yes, people like this are afraid of the past, a European past, just as they are afraid that democracy, true democracy, will mean a return to that past. How else is one to understand the observation by Martin Schutz, head of the European Socialist group, that the Euro-sceptic MEPs made him think of Adolf Hitler? What was their offence? Were they suggesting that all freedom should be sacrificed to a central Führerprinzip, that individual nations should lose their sovereignty in the body of a particular will? Actually, no; it was because they advocated referenda on the Lisbon Treaty; advocating giving people the choice that they were promised, in the end only a choice that the Irish were allowed.

Here I’m reminded of some lines from an old Fleetwood Mac tune, words that might very well serve as the swan song of European democracy;

…don't ask me what I think of you
I might not give the answer that you want me to.

That just about sums up the whole sorry Lisbon campaign up, the whole campaign of the anti-democratic anti-‘fascists’, at least it does for me. Come to think of it people like Wallström and Schutz almost make fascism sound appealing. If it’s a choice between them and their path, if it’s a choice between a monstrous bureaucratic superstate and national freedom I know which route I will take. If that makes me a fascist all I have to say is Me ne freggo – I don’t give a damn – the original battle cry of a certain Italian gentleman and his followers. Be warned: I might even be tempted to sing Giovinezza. :-))

Bergson and the Stream of Existence

I had occasion to think recently about the philosophy of Henri Bergson, about the need to bridge the gap between life as is lived and live as it is thought. So much of what we do, so much of what I do, is caught up in rational calculations of one kind or another. So much of our existence is defined by artificial and self-imposed limits, locks on the doors of perception.

But rationality, intellect itself, is only one dimension of experience, and by no means the most important. Life itself, no matter how we approach it, is essentially irrational. It is, rather, beyond rationality; feelings, emotions, perceptions, dreams and intuitions are all beyond rationality. That’s why there is literature, that’s why there is art. Above all, that’s why there is poetry.

Bergson understood this. Try to imagine life as a stream, a constant mobility, the realm of the unforeseen, the unpredictable. It’s from this constant flux, this process, that creativity and freedom emerge. Intellect only allows a partial understanding. The whole can only be grasped by intuition. I don’t think therefore I am; I exist therefore I think; I feel therefore I am. There is no determinism; there is the pure mobility of free will. A moment comes; a moment is gone. We are carried along in a great evolutionary tide, the élan vital, as Bergson terms it, with echoes here of Schopenhauer’s will-to-live.

The vital impetus, the will to live, the will to struggle, the will to power, the will to love – it’s all the same to me.

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

In Praise of Tommy Atkins

Saturday, June 26, marked Armed Forces Day in the United Kingdom. It’s intended as a day of tribute to the men and women of the army, navy, air force, all those who preserve the security of this nation, all those who have been prepared to sacrifice themselves on its behalf.

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said recently that supporting our Armed Forces isn’t just a government responsibility – it’s a social responsibility. This is a sentiment I fully agree with. My family has a long connection with the military. My great-grandfather served in the army throughout the First World War, to begin with as a subaltern, rising to the rank of Major. He was wounded at the Somme in 1916 and won a Military Cross for his part in the Battle of Passchendale in 1917. My grandfather served with the British Indian Army both before and during the Second World War, first in what was then the Malay States, afterwards in India and Burma. My great-uncle was with the Fleet Air Arm.

So, yes, I am delighted to support our Armed Forces, not just for this historic link but for the selfless way they carry out their duty in the present day. They go where they are told to go; that’s what service people do. As far as I am concerned they are beyond criticism.

What is not beyond criticism is the actions of politicians, the way in which politicians have used and abused the armed forces. The last administration sent our forces on a series of campaigns, ill-conceived and badly executed, without proper thought given to long-term strategy; without proper thought given, so far as I can see, to any kind of strategy.

Our people are now involved in a hopeless war in Afghanistan, a place where over three hundred have died, sometimes because they were starved of resources by the government that sent them there. The war-mongering Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown thought to do it all on the cheap, expecting maximum effort for minimum cost. What was cheap for them was dear for others.

This makes me so angry, this commitment in lives to a worthless cause and a wholly unwinnable war. But I came to praise our warriors not to bury Caesar, as much as I would like to bury Caesar, as much as I would love to bury Caesar. Politicians are nothing; Labour politicians are nothing. Our soldiers are something. They will always be worthy if respect.

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's "Tommy this", an' "Tommy that", an' "Chuck him out,
the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's "Tommy this", an' "Tommy that", an' anything you please
An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!

Good Luck, England

My boyfriend is in South Africa just at the present with the rest of the barmy army. We’ve had some lengthy conversations recently, dominated, I have to say, by his growing sense of frustration and disappointment over the team’s performance. I much prefer tennis, so I was just ever so slightly bored!

No, I don’t care that much for soccer; I don’t understand the passions and the tribal mentality it induces. It seems to me to go against all of the principles of sportsmanship, or at least how I understand sportsmanship. It’s the one enthusiasm that he and I do not share. But I do care for my country, and deeply so, just as I care for him. He called after the Slovenia match in an incredibly upbeat mood. His enthusiasm, his optimism, was infectious.

Now the big battle is ahead, that with the ‘ancient’ enemy. I will be with him in spirit. I won’t watch because I simply can’t bear the tension. It may come to nothing; my sense of realism tells me that it’s likely to come to nothing. Still, like the rest of the nation, like all of us who are not there, my positive good wishes, all my best hopes, are with the team. Good luck, England; good luck, my country.