The Eagle has fallen

I read Rosemary’s Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of the Ninth when I was in my early teens. It’s a bit of a boy’s own historical yarn, though not without some female interest, based on the legend of the Roman Ninth Legion, which supposedly vanished from history into the bogs and myths of first-century Caledonia, that terra incognita in Britain beyond Hadrian’s Wall and civilization. I loved it, a gripping story, well-written, well-plotted and well-told.

Now I’ve seen The Eagle, a movie directed by Kevin Macdonald based on the book, sort of based on the book, since there are some serious departures, including all of the female interest. I understand that the name change was to stop potential American audiences assuming it was a movie about golf!

Did I enjoy it? Well, yes, on one level I did: the cinematography is superb; Scotland has never looked more beguiling, beautiful, mysterious and eerie on film, all at one and the same time. But overall the movie was stolid rather than solid; plodding, literal-minded, poorly acted, and not very inspiring. It’s also quite derivative. I was reminded of movies as diverse as Apocalypse Now, Rob Roy, Brokeback Mountain (yes, Brokeback Mountain!) and, above all, The Last of the Mohicans. The Caledonian tribe called the Seal People even looked like the Huron Indians.

It’s also a road movie with no roads. Marcus Aquila, a completely wooden performance by Channing Tatum, is a man with a mission: he needs to recover the honour of his family and Rome by recovering the golden eagle standard, lost some twenty years before when his father led the Ninth into an unknown fate in the north. Invalided out of the army after a clash with some barbarians, he sets out north with Esca (Jamie Bell), a British slave gifted to him by his uncle (Donald Sutherland).

Esca had previously been saved from death in a gladiatorial show by the intervention of Marcus, with whom he forms a bond based on honour and obligation, not liking and trust. No, Esca, does not like the Romans; Esca would far rather the Romans went home! Road movie, yes, and now buddy movie, of a sort, with the tension between the two becoming the core of the unfolding drama. This might have worked and worked well but there is no real chemistry between the two characters, between the sleep-walking Tatum and the unremittingly surly Bell.

On their journey Marcus and Esca come across one Guern, played by Mark Strong, an English actor who affects a bogus American accent. You see, all of the Romans here are Americans, which is clearly intended to give the audience a not terribly subtle message about the evolution of imperialism. So, there you have it: now you know that Guern is a Roman, one of a band of survivors of the Ninth who have made a home from themselves in this wasteland. It’s on his intelligence that Marcus finds out that the standard lost in battle is with the Seal People, the most dreaded of the local tribes.

Enter the Hurons. Actually, on further reflection, I was reminded more of a band of sinister and overgrown smurfs, given that the warriors of the Seal People have taken to painting themselves in shades of dirty blue. So, on the trek goes and the Sea People encountered, Esca helpfully being able to speak their language, Gaelic, incidentally, which did not appear in these parts for another four hundred years. No matter; some poetic licence has to be allowed, as nobody now knows the language of the people who lived in the north of Caledonia, the people the Romans referred to as the Picts, the painted ones. Gaelic serves as a reasonable substitute.

I’m beginning to tire as I write because this is turning into one big spoiler. You’ve doubtless guessed the rest; yes, the Eagle is recovered and a dash made for the Wall, punctuated by a confusing battle between the old boys of the Ninth gathered together by Guern, looking ever so much like a band of beat-up hell’s angels or hairy roadies, and the Seal people – I simply could not work out who was doing what to whom.

By the end I really didn’t care that much that Marcus with Esca, now a free man, in tow was able to bring the Eagle to Rome to the delight and surprise of a group of Ameri…sorry, Roman senators. There he was, quest complete, walking off Brokeback-style with Esca into a Roman sunset (well, I did say there were no girls!).

The movie is a disappointment, not bad just disappointing. So much more might have been achieved by better direction, frustrating knowing what Macdonald is capable of in movies like The Last King of Scotland. So much more might have been achieved with a far better lead. The Eagle does not soar, it flutters; The Eagle does not land, it plummets.

The noblest Roman of them all

Exactly one thousand eight hundred and fifty years ago this month Marcus Aurelius became Emperor of Rome. He ranks as one of my favourite figures in all of history, not just a ruler but a thinker. His Meditations, never intended for publication, are a brilliant series of stoic reflections addressed to himself, musings on all aspects of existence.

Now I have the well-thumbed Penguin edition as a companion, but I first came across the book years ago in and much older edition, published under the title To Himself, which father has in his library. To begin with (I was in my mid-teens) I did not fully understand the depth and subtlety of Marcus’ thinking, but it grew on me steadily. I would not dare to underline passages, or add marginalia, to father’s antique edition but you should see my own!

I find it so impressive that he found the time for such deep reflection, flights of thought which mark him out as one of the great stoic philosophers, because his reign was beset with all sorts of troubles, the early signs of the profound crisis that was to overtake the Roman world in the following century.

He was to spend so much time in camps, defending frontiers from the onset of hostile enemies. I would guess that the life he was obliged to lead would fill most normal individuals with a sense of weariness, cynicism, frustration and anger, or the kind of all too worldly calculations that one finds in the writings of Julius Caesar, but not him. He is perhaps the best examples ever of his own maxim that nothing happens to a man that he is not formed by nature to bear. “Do every act of your life as if it were your last”, he also said to himself, another maxim to which he remained true.

Future generations of Romans would have just cause to look back on the reign of Marcus as the last golden age. One of the greatest, most benign emperors was to be succeeded by one of the least and most malign. In place of the worthy father came Commodus, the worthless son. It showed the canker that lay at the heart of the whole system of governance established by Augustus, which time after time allowed self-indulgence to triumph over self-discipline.

Marcus Aurelius was the exception, not the rule. There was something almost superhuman about him, something of the apprehension of a god. He was the noblest and greatest Roman of them all. Ave Imperator!

Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.

Cameron plays Palmerston, plays Blair

Behold the Mother of Parliaments; behold the halls where Melbourne once faced Peel, where Gladstone once faced Disraeli. What do you see? It’s like some third-rate parody, starring two political pygmies - David ‘Tony’ Cameron and Ed ‘the Red’ Miliband. I’m a student of history, of political history in particular. It gives me no pleasure to say this but we seem to be in the final stage of senescence; the decline is over; the fall is to come. Yes, this is the way the nation ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.

There they were those two class acts, mouthing the usual mealy platitudes, a happy consensus over the intervention in Libya, over the neo-Palmerstonian approach of the Prime Minister. Yes, Palmerstonian. You see Henry Temple, Lord Palmerston, a dominant figure in British politics for a good bit of the nineteenth century, is apparently one of Cameron’s political heroes, something I found our quite recently.

What a tale there is to tell here! Palmerston, if you don’t know anything of his career, was the exponent of a particularly muscular form of imperialism, the kind that saw Johnny Foreigner as a shower of naughty school kids who needed a firm smack now and again, as well as the occasional pipe of opium to keep them placid, as the Chinese will know. Civis Romanus sum, was Palmerston’s motto, after his most famous speech, in which he argued that a British citizen should be able to walk the earth as the Romans of old, unmolested by any foreign power.

Cameron has gone that one step further: foreign citizens should be able to walk the earth unmolested by their own governments; sorry, make that unmolested by certain governments. Here we are, battering away at Libya in a mind-numbingly arrogant manner, in the pious hope that we will have peace, justice and the Western Way. But we won’t; we will have chaos; we will have death under a NATO umbrella – small wonder that Pontius Obama is washing his hands.

Here we are, a nation in the financial doldrums, a nation whose armed forces are not adequate for the task they have already let alone this new adventure, a nation now engaged in an open-ended commitment in North Africa with no appreciation of the possible outcomes. Palmerston at least had the means to enforce his will. Cameron, anxious to cut a figure on the international stage, has nothing beyond his own pathetic hubris…and a bomb or three.

I was asked in a discussion on the Libyan crisis, where I argued against intervention, if it would be OK to stay out and allow what will happen happen. Yes, I replied, with not the least hesitation; do we not have enough problems of our own without trying to attend to those of others? Does our attention make things better or worse? The world is full of bad people dong bad things. It is not our divinely-ordained task to set wrongs to right.

We are attacking Libya because we can, not because we must; we are attacking it in the same bullying fashion that Palmerston once dealt with places like Greece and China, though with considerable less self-interest involved; attacking it and ignoring the far greater danger from places like Iran and North Korea, attacking it in the name of bogus notions of justice and human rights; we are attacking it while justice and human rights are suppressed by our associates in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. Stupidity makes me angry; hypocrisy angrier still.

There is also the naïve assumption that it’s the Colonel on one side and the rest of Libya on the other, that he has no genuine supporters, no people willing to fight and die on his behalf. They are dying alright, dying in an operation which was conceived - I am convinced it was - as no more than a grand assassination attempt – NATO as Murder Incorporated.

I’m a conservative and I’m a Conservative. I was delighted when Cameron became prime minister last May and I’ve done my best to remain loyal and supportive ever since. But this murderous Blairite idiocy is just a step too far. He is claiming to act in the national interest, claiming that if Gaddafi wins then instability would spread throughout the region. But the Colonel was on the threshold of ending a rebellion. Now it’s almost guaranteed to go on indefinitely, creating the very situation that this bullying aggression was intended to prevent.

I note from tonight's news that mission creep is already creeping; I also note that there is a growing awareness of the exact political complexion of the rebels, that it was not all mad rambling from the Mad Colonel.

The last thing Britain needs in the twenty-first century is a Palmerston by way of Blair; but that is exactly what we have. Cameron, Bruce Anderson wrote recently in the Telegraph, could have ended up looking foolish if his efforts at intervention had failed to persuade our allies. He prevailed; he is going to end up looking a lot more than foolish.

The Masque of Anarchy

Decent people did well to keep out of central London on Saturday as a ghastly mob exercised their right to ‘peaceful protest’ against the present government’s cuts (cuts; what cuts?). How much more convenient it would have been if they had marched across the English Channel, the waters helpfully parted by God. How much we would have benefited if, half way across, God had allowed the waters to close again, in a moment of ennui or perhaps exercising His own peaceful right to peace.

Just think how much this country would have saved if these tax eaters, dole recipients, holders of worthless public sector jobs (Assistant Deputy Chief Liaison Officer to the Disabled Black Lesbian Caucus); student nurses, ready to learn how to abuse the elderly in lethally dirty National Health Hospitals; teachers who teach nothing in state schools to pupils too stupid to learn anything; recipients of third rate degrees from fourth rate universities, the work-shy ‘workers’, ignorant and worthless people of all sorts, had disappeared for ever. Oh, I can always dream.

No, instead they exercised their right to ‘peaceful protest’ bringing violence and chaos to the streets of our capital, summoned there by the Trade Unions Council; summoned by the likes of Red Len McClusky, a lover of Cuba, Communism and Castro (what; no peaceful right to protest?), so repellent to look at with his thick nose and his heavy features that he would win any ugly man competition nem con.



Once this mob had gathered it was given the support of the Labour Party in the person of Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition, a former member of a government, a criminally incompetent government, responsible for the financial morass this country is in at present. Oh, yes, however he may wish to distance himself from the thugs who rampaged along the city streets, sub-human orcs (sorry, I couldn’t resist that!) who relish destruction for the sake of destruction, his very presence was a spur, an indication of the true worth of his loathsome party. This rampage was planned months in advance, as a casual glance at Twitter and Facebook would have shown. Only an idiot would have failed to realise that a riot was in the offing. Oops, sorry, I’ve clearly given Ed a way out.



Only an idiot and the Metropolitan Police, apparently, who in their handling of the mayhem appeared more Keystone than ever, even more than they did in last year’s march against the increase in tuition fees. What the hell is going on? How much more pathetic can London’s police force become, not the ordinary officers, who had light bulbs filled with ammonia thrown at them, but the command, senior officers so anxious to be goody goody that that they invited civil liberties activists to monitor their softly softly approach. How are these idiots going to cope with the forthcoming royal wedding, another anarchist target?

On Saturday they probably took heed of Ugly Red Len’s admonition to keep their hands off “our kids”. I expect they planned a nice party with the anarchists, all sitting down and singing Kumbaya. What a pity it is that heads were not broken instead, what a pity that the ‘accidental’ mayhem was beamed across the world as ‘their kids’ behaved like the apes and troglodytes they are, what an impression others will have of England. How sorry I feel for the poor benighted tourists caught up in the sickening madness.

Does it get any worse? Yes, unfortunately it does. We have a government that pretends to cut public expenditure while increasing it in practice; we have a government that loses control of the nation’s capital while bombarding that of another; we have a government that last week sent six Storm Shadow rockets flying into Libya at a cost of £1million pounds ($1.4million) each. Yes, that’s quite right: £1million each! We have a government unable to read the intelligence properly, a government so besotted with ‘uman rights that it sees virtue in the ‘peaceful right to protest’ even when that ‘peaceful right’ is the prerogative of low class animals, the vermin of the inner city estates, trade unionists and other such creatures. I could suggest a better use for those rockets, another way of reclaiming the expense, just as efficacious as the waters of the Channel.

Last came Anarchy; he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

History speaks

“Don’t advance on Moscow”, is the first rule of warfare, according to the late Bernard Montgomery, a British Field Marshal and victory of the Battle of El Alamein. The second is don’t go fighting with your land army on the mainland of Asia. The time has come, I think, to reverse the order here: history has only two examples of failure before Moscow compared with the many examples of disaster in Asia; of disasters, in particular, in Afghanistan, the charnel house of empire.

I once wrote that it should be compulsory for ever new incumbent of the White House to read The Quiet American, the novel by Graham Greene set in Vietnam during the last days of the French occupation. Now another book has been published which should be compulsory reading for every western leader, every neo-con and every moral imperialist – Afgantsy: the Russians in Afghanistan, 1979-1989 by Rodric Braithwaite. Sadly it has come ten years too late. Actually I have a slight qualification here, a point I will come to a little later on.

There are few better qualified to tell the story of the tragic involvement of the old Soviet Union in Afghanistan than Sir Rodric Braithwaite, once British ambassador to Moscow. He begins with an intimate knowledge of Russia, the Russian people and the Russian sources. He also writes with understanding and sympathy for the veterans of this hopeless conflict, the Afgantsy of the title, who fought and suffered under the most appalling circumstances, often caught between the ruthlessness of the enemy and the negligent indifference of their own commanders. Put out of your mind the Red Army of 1943 to 1945. Think, rather, of the Imperial Army of 1914 to 1917.

Braithwaite’s has a tale to unfold whose lightest word harrows up the blood. It’s a story of suffering: the suffering of the ordinary Russian soldiers, mostly ill-educated conscripts, some 15,000 of whom lost their lives; the suffering of the ordinary people of Afghanistan, over a million of whom lost theirs, often in the most dreadful circumstances. It’s also a story of incompetence: the political incompetence of the Kremlin, sinking into geriatric senescence, and the military incompetence of the Russian central command.

The political and strategic incompetence goes wider, goes so far as Washington, to an administration so anxious to avenge the humiliation of Vietnam that it was willing to offer support to the most antediluvian and obscurantist forces, - the mujahideen that was to morph into al-Qaeda and the Taliban. As late as 1998, ten years after the conflict ended, Zbigniew Bzrezinski, former security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, continued to justify American support for the insurgents;

What is more important in the history of the world? The Taliban, or the collapse of the Soviet Empire? Some stirred up Muslims, or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the Cold War?

Here we have the same kind of blindness that led Francis Fukuyama to announce the ‘end of history’, just before history leapt up and bit him, and Bzrezinski, on the arse. It’s the blindness that caused Congressman Charles Wilson to describe Jalaluddin Haqqani, the mujahideen commander, as “goodness personified.” This incarnation of goodness is now number three on America’s most wanted list.

The Soviet road to hell was paved with good intentions. Although reluctant to intervene in the affairs of the country – contrary to Western perceptions at the time – they came hoping to make a difference, to bring this medieval society into the modern age. But the Afghans, in the main, have only ever wanted one thing: to be left alone. The British know this, or should know this, after some fairly disastrous interventions in the nineteenth century. In fact soon after the Soviet invasion the Foreign Office helpfully provided the deputy Soviet foreign minister with an account of past involvements, only to be told that this time it will be different.

But it wasn’t; it never could be. Afghanistan is easy to occupy but impossible to hold, a lesson that needs to be repeated time and again; the lesson that the Soviets ignored, the lesson that George Bush and Tony Blair also ignored. There might be some excuse for Bush, smarting in the aftermath of 9/11; there is none for Blair, given the Foreign Office warning, given our history. So, hence my qualification above: even if Afgantsy had been published years earlier it is doubtful if it would have made any difference to the strategic blindness of this stupid man.

We are now where we are, where the Soviets once were: the wolf is being held by the ears…just. How to let go, that’s the problem. The Russians wanted out years before their final exit. The problem was always to do so while retaining a degree of credibility, the nightmare bequeathed to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985. Barack Obama and David Cameron would do well to pay heed to this brilliant and superbly researched account of a multi-faceted tragedy. In the end Afghanistan will be left to its own devices at a waste of so many lives and so much effort. History speaks; it’s such a pity that we fail to listen.

No longer a menace

When I was little one of my favourite TV shows was Dennis the Menace and Gnasher, the adventures of a naughty schoolboy and his dog. This Dennis should not be confused with the American version – he’s not nearly as cutesy! No, the British Dennis is much naughtier, much more of a delinquent – or, rather, he was.

Dennis, with his spiky, unkempt hair and red and black striped sweater, first appeared in March 1951 in a children’s comic called The Beano. He has remained a steady feature ever since, growing in popularity, even as he moved down the generations. He was loved precisely because he was a bad boy, because he got into all sort of naughty scrapes. In so many ways he was the perfect outlet for the childish imagination, crossing all sorts of boundaries. Sadly Dennis is no longer such a menace – no, he has been sanitised, giving way to the onward march of political correctness.

I was amused by William Langley’s article in Sunday Telegraph (Why he’s no longer such a naughty boy) describing how Dennis’ standards – my God! -are improving! A timely piece now that the Menace is sixty years old, mature and increasingly rather tame. The whole thing is really quite risible and ultimately condescending, a possible intimation of an encroaching death. Children know when they are being got at – a clean and didactic Menace is the last thing they want!

There is so much irony here, things that unconsciously reveal adult concerns about children. As Langley says, an airbrushed and bubble-wrapped childhood is increasingly being demanded by TV and much of the publishing industry. So Dennis is no longer allowed to carry his catapult and peashooter; Gnasher is no longer allowed to bite people and Walter the Softie, the Menace’s pansy-like alter ego, the object of his repeated persecutions, has been given a girlfriend, Matilda, to counter any accusations that he might be gay! Remember, this is for a target audience whose average age must hover around eight years old.

In the early comics the strip apparently ended up with him being whacked by the parental slipper for his misdeeds. This was long gone, of course, by the time the TV series premièred in the mid-1980s. Langley says that the punishments sent two clear messages to the millions of children who followed the comic strip: that misbehaviour carried consequences and that corporal punishment was futile. Dennis simply became more ingenious in the pursuit of naughtiness!

It’s all gone, punishment, delinquency, all the endearing naughtiness has gone, all of the trademark things that made Dennis Dennis. Oh, no, we can’t have children being shown a bad example. And this for me is where the condescension comes in, the assumption that children are another species, that they can’t distinguish between right and wrong, that if shown a negative example they will simply follow on mindlessly; that they cannot see Dennis simply as an object of harmless entertainment.

The irony is that as Dennis and Walter merge into an anodyne oneness, safe, washed-out, harmless, real delinquency, real harm in the real world, has become increasingly malign. It’s a complete inversion of reality: speak no evil, see no evil, hear no evil, and evil will go away. It does not work like that. The menace, sad to say, is no longer Dennis.

The Peace President

I wrote the following piece for another site not long after Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. I've decided to archive it here in the light of a discussion on Blog Catalogue, and in the light of recent developments on the world stage.

Those who have read my previous blogs will know that I have little time for Obama politically. Still, I can recognise that he is a clever man, a good speaker and a public figure with a warming personality. I also thought that he had a certain degree of tactical skill. The acceptance of this award proves that he has none.

Just think: how much greater he would have looked if he had declined, if he had simply thanked the committee for its generosity but said that the goals set out have still to be achieved. But he could not, because this unexpected and quixotic decision by the Nobel people came at the end of a bad period for Super Obama, capped by a humiliating personal snub by the International Olympic Committee.

I now have a deeper understanding than ever of Obama: he is no more than a celebrity president for a celebrity age, an age where style and image have triumphed over substance and results. Having failed in Copenhagen he bounced back in Oslo. As far as the X factor stakes go he is still up there with a chance.

Now a word or two about the Nobel Committee. My first reaction on hearing the announcement-after thinking it must be a spoof- was that it says nothing at all about President Obama, nothing about his achievements, and heaps about them, about the obvious political bias of these people and, I would add, their desperate attempts at political correctness. It seems obvious to me that Obama is being awarded less for what he is and more for what he is not; he is not a Republican; he is not George W Bush. I also suspect that he was awarded because he is the first black American president, which, if true, is an act of appalling condescension.

Look back on the history of this absurd prize, to whom it was given and, just as important, to whom it was not. Did you know, for example, that Ghandi was nominated five times but never recognised? Those who were recognised included such doves of peace as Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat and Menachem Begin. And now Obama joins their company, still at the outset not at the end of his career. From this point forward he has the burden of being a peace laureate who most likely will have to take his country ever deeper into war. On the domestic stage he raised expectations that he has been unable to meet. Now on the world stage impossible expectations have been thrust upon him. Who, but a fool, would accept the role of Messiah for a day?

So, there he stands, with one disappointment laid hard upon another. He is dithering over Afghanistan while Americans die; his health reform programme slips and slips; Guantanamo Bay is still open in the face of all of the liberal hopes; he has provoked a quarrel between the politicians and the generals; he looks less and less plausible. And in the midst of all this, all the domestic and foreign problems, he and Michelle had the time to slip over to Copenhagen to put their weight behind Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics, yet another failure, another sign that ‘Obama power’ does not work.

But cast down in one Scandinavian capital he was raised up in another, a form of personal compensation. He did not get the Olympics but at least he got ‘Peace.’ I rather suspect that the celebrity President has not the wit to understand that he did not get peace either, that he is unlikely ever to get peace. It’s the triumph of pious hopes over solid achievements.