Week 24 2012 17.6.12

Tendring Topics......on Line

 ‘When will they ever learn*?

It isn’t very often that I find myself 'on the same side' as a feature writer in the Mail, but I have to admit reluctant agreement with at least some of the sentiments expressed by Peter Hitchins in the Mail on Sunday at Whitsun.

            ‘Why do William Hague and the BBC want to help Saudi Arabia set up a fanatical Islamist state in Syria?  Have we learned nothing from the failed hopes of Egypt and Libya?  Don’t we realise that the ‘activists’ we support are just as capable of conducting massacres as the pro-Assad militias.

            I had been shocked earlier when I had discovered that Saudi Arabia was among the most fervent supporters of Syria’s ‘freedom fighters’.   Surely we all know that, at least prior to the current uprising, Syria was an oasis of tolerance and liberalism compared with Saudi Arabia, with its subjugation of women, its medieval laws and punishments, and its total prohibition of any kind of religious worship other than its own extreme version of Islam.  Far from supporting ‘freedom fighters’, Saudi Arabia’s ruler had sent troops into neighbouring Bahrain to help the brutal efforts of the government there to suppress its own ‘Arab spring’ of rebellion.

            Had any other two countries been similarly involved in the suppression of popular rebellion, there would have been outrage in London and Washington. Both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain though, are not only sources of oil, they are also wealthy and reliable purchasers of armaments.   Plausible excuses can always be found for their excesses and their rulers welcomed as honoured guests when they deign to visit us.                             

Do you remember the high hopes when Saddam Hussein was overthrown in Iraq – and of their outcome?  Saddan Hussein was a cruel and ruthless dictator – but under his dictatorship Iraq was a united country in which terrorist groups like El Qaida scarcely had a foothold and in which there was a degree of religious freedom and tolerance unusual in the Middle East.  There was a thriving Christian community and well-attended Christian churches.  Our ‘victory’ (do you remember George Bush proclaiming it from the bridge of a US Aircraft Carrier?) has produced a divided country with a ruined infrastructure.  Kurds are seeking independence and Sunni and Shia Muslims are at each other’s throats. Christians are under constant attack and are emigrating as quickly as they are able to do so. There is a constant threat of terrorist bombs.

Then there was the Arab Spring first in Tunisia, then in Egypt and finally Libya.  It really seemed that parliamentary democracy would triumph, that these countries would throw off their ancient legacies of autocracy and embrace government of the people, for the people, and by the people.   I did, at the time, suggest in this blog that it was at least equally likely that a militantly Islamic government, comparable with that of the Taliban in Afghanistan, would emerge.  Currently the Egyptians have elected an Islamic parliament and are faced with the choice of an Islamic President or a representative, albeit a milder one, of the old regime.  My guess is that the Islamic candidate will win.  The moderate, liberal, secularist, and freedom-seeking Egyptians who had been the backbone of the Arab Spring have disappeared.  Their various factions had varying ultimate aims.  They were divided.  The Islamists and the Traditionalists had clear and understandable objectives and were united. It is they who have triumphed.

I am not surprised that the Coptic Christians, one of the oldest traditions of the Christian faith, established in Egypt long before the arrival of Islam, are full of foreboding.

As for Libya, where ‘the west’ played an active role, having secured a mandate from the United Nations on the dubious grounds of protecting civilians from  air strikes by the Libyan Government.  In Egypt there may have been some doubt, but in Libya we know perfectly well than among the ‘freedom fighters’ we have been supporting are terrorists trained in Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnia and  Pakistan.   At least some of them have proved themselves to be as competent as Colonel Gaddafi’s minions at torturing and murdering their captured and helpless opponents.

I have no idea when, or even if, a credible government will eventually emerge in Libya but I have little expectation or hope that it will be a freely elected, liberal and tolerant one.

Today (6^th June 2012) has been a bad one for Afghan civilians.  In Kandahar three Taliban suicide bombers have killed scores of civilians.  Elsewhere in that unhappy country, an American air strike (not for the first time) has accidentally managed to slaughter everyone at a wedding reception - collateral damage, innocent victims of our ‘war on terror’.  Can we wonder that ordinary Afghans hate us foreign infidels even more than most of them hate the Taliban?

History (the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian revolution of 1917, the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s) has shown that foreign intervention has the effect of increasing the bloodiness of civil conflict.   We should, I am quite sure, offer humanitarian aid where we can to alleviate the suffering of civilians on either side of the conflict, and mediate if and when asked to do so.  For God’s sake though (and I mean that reverently not blasphemously!) let us otherwise keep out of other people’s armed conflicts!

*’When will they ever learn?’ was the refrain of a popular protest song of the 1960s entitled ‘Where have all the flowers gone?

Secularism

         

          In the United Kingdom those of us who, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it, ‘­profess and call ourselves Christians’ have come to take it for granted that the greatest enemy of Christian faith and tradition in this country has been the apparently inexorable advance of secularism.  We no longer have a public holiday at Whitsun.  It has been replaced by a fixed-date secular late spring public holiday.  Christmas, the time at which we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, has been systematically secularised.   Happy Christmas! is being replaced on our greetings cards by Season’s Greetings or some such similarly meaningless phrase. Ask at a Post Office for the special stamps issued as Christmas draws near and you’ll be offered secular ones. However, as a rather patronising concession to a minority interest, there will be some ‘religious Christmas stamps’ kept ‘under the counter’ for those who specially ask for them! We are encouraged to speak of ‘the festive season’ or ‘the mid-winter holidays’ rather than of Christmas!   The most popular Christmas images are no longer a baby in a manger, a young mother lovingly holding her new-born child or wise men following a star, but of Santa Claus and his reindeer, holly and ivy, or young children playing in the snow.

            Easter has become a celebration of hot cross buns, cuddly bunnies, chocolate eggs and dancing daffodils, rather than of a suffering man on a cross and his glorious resurrection.

            We are encouraged to abandon referring to dates as BC (before Christ) or AD (Anno Domini or ‘Year of our Lord’) but as BCE (before Common Era) and CE (Common Era).  Determined secularists would like to see the abolition of prayers in schools or at public meetings and the departure from radio and tv of such popular religious programmes as Songs of Praise, Thought for the Day and Prayer for the Day.

            Yet, as an article in the Church Times reminded its readers a few weeks ago, while we in the UK deplore the advance of secularism, Christians in Egypt are fervently praying, probably in vain, that they may have a secular government in Cairo!

            I have listed above some of the things that proselytising secularisers have done and are doing.  It is only fair to add some of the things that even the most determined secularists, however misguided we may think them to be, don’t do.  They don’t throw bombs into religious gatherings or explode them fixed to themselves in public places, convinced that – if only they can take a few believers with them – they will be rewarded.   Nor do they persecute, ostracise, punish, or threaten to kill members of their families or communities who convert to one of the religious faiths available, or who marry into a believing family. 

            I am, of course, describing the activities of some Muslims. I know perfectly well that none of those things is compatible with ‘true Islam’ and that Jihad is really all about the struggle between good and evil within oneself.  A great many, probably a large majority, of Muslims in this country find the activities listed above as abhorrent as I do.  But some Muslims do believe they are an essential part of Islam and that jihad doesn’t mean an inner struggle but an outward war against the infidel.  When Britain and the USA covertly funded the ‘gallant mojihadin’ in Afghanistan, they hoped they would use our money to kill Russians, certainly not to conduct a struggle within themselves!  They are now realising that to the mojihadin, one lot of foreign infidels is much the same as another. 

            I am not selecting Muslims for condemnation.  Christians have been as bad, if not worse. I know that the Christian faith is one of love and compassion, of forgiveness and reconciliation.  In the 16^th century though, when Christians were torturing each other and burning each other alive in the name of Christ – who would have believed that?

            Similarly in the 17th and 18th centuries pious Puritans in New England as well as in Britain imprisoned, tortured and hanged unfortunate women denounced as witches. They would have quoted Biblical chapter and verse against any who protested.  ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’ was, so they believed, the Word of the Lord.  Even today there are those who proclaim themselves to be fundamentalist or Bible Christians, who eagerly hunt through obscure passages in Leviticus or Deuteronomy to justify their fierce opposition to practices or attitudes with which they disagree

In their enthusiasm for the small print of the Old Testament they seem to have missed the words of Jesus Christ. He told us that the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament is encapsulated in just two simple commandments – Love God with all your being and love your neighbour as much as you love yourself.  Jesus clarified that second commandment by explaining that we should treat other people in exactly the same way as we would like them to treat us.  When he reminded his listeners that they should not attempt to pour new wine into old bottles or sew new cloth onto an old garment,  he was surely referring to the many rules and regulations  of the Old Testament

How strange that some Christians prefer to live by the multitudinous prohibitions and demands of the old dispensation rather than by the two straightforward and simple commands of the new!

 Like Egypt’s Coptic Christians, I would not wish to be ruled by an ostentatiously religious government, whether Muslim or Christian (no, not even Quaker!).  I am happier with a secular government, that may well include individual Christians or Muslims;  one that is tolerant of all religions whose followers are prepared to comply with the law of the land; a Government that is always prepared to listen to and take seriously the advice of religious leaders.  Its members, religious, agnostic and atheist, should act in accordance with the reason that God has given them and in the light of the dictates of their conscience, which, as a Quaker, I believe to be inspired and enlightened by the Inward Light of Christ,  God’s gift to every man, woman and child on this earth.

‘Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’

            I am afraid that there has been nothing very cheering or uplifting in anything that I have so far written in this week's blog.  I thought therefore that I would end it with the latest picture of my ‘honorary German niece' Maja.   Isn’t she a truly beautiful child?  Although not yet six years old her eyes seem to be full of intelligence, love and trust.  It was surely such a child as this that Jesus set in the midst of his disciples and told them that this was the example they needed to follow if they wished to enter God's kingdom.

            Maja’s great grandfather was a lieutenant in the German Army in World War II.   He was killed on the Eastern Front at the same time that I and my comrades in the British Eighth Army and his compatriots in the German Afrikakorps were trying to kill each other in Libya.  My greatest hope for the .future is of lasting peace in Europe spreading throughout the world so that such circumstances may never arise again.  

           

         

   

Week 6 2012 9.2.2012

Tendring Topics........on line

 ‘Do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you’

            St. Matthew records in his Gospel that Jesus declared that single commandment summed up the whole of the moral teaching of the Old Testament.  I hope that I am not being too heretical in saying that I wish he had gone on to state the corollary, ‘Do not do anything to other people that you would hate them to do to you’.  Perhaps Jesus did say that too but it seemed too obvious to need recording.   It clearly needed to be said though, because Christians have flagrantly ignored it through the centuries.

            It could be argued that do not is even more important than the positive do. The things we like vary widely.  George Bernard Shaw wrote in his Maxims for Revolutionaries that we should not do to others what we would like for ourselves. Their tastes may be different.  I think though, that even Shaw would agree that while we may like many different things, there are dislikes that are shared by us all.  I am quite sure that every single one of us would hate the idea of being tortured or burnt to death.  We all would hate to be brought to a violent death, to be enslaved, starved, rendered homeless, or separated from those we love.

            Yet, as Lord Byron pointed out; ‘Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded that all the apostles would have done as they did’ and Thomas Hardy wrote in his poem Christmas 1924 ‘After two thousand years of mass, we’ve got as far as poison gas’.

            These thoughts came to me when I heard Barak Obama, an international leader whom I had greatly admired, defending the use of unmanned drones to find and kill in Pakistan individuals whom the CIA has decided are members of Al Quaida or some other similar terrorist organisation.   The killing of these people, he said, was justified because they were a threat to the people of the USA.  They were carefully targeted and ‘very few’ innocent civilians were accidentally killed at the same time!

            It isn’t so very long ago that convicted, not just suspected, IRA murderers could find sanctuary from British justice in the USA.  American courts refused to return them to Britain for trial and/or punishment. They were a threat to the people of the United Kingdom. What, I wonder, would have been the American reaction had British MI5 agents in the USA sought them out and assassinated them – even if they managed to do so without harming a single innocent civilian?

            Assassination, without even the semblance of a trial, is abhorrent whether carried out by Al Quaida, by Mossad, the CIA or MI5.  In human society there can be no licence to kill

Do not do to other people what you would hate being done to yourself!

 ‘In the bleak midwinter’

  

The sudden change in the weather from milder-than-normal to sub-arctic has come as an unpleasant surprise.  Old people like me are warned to wrap up well and to keep at least one room in our homes warm at all times. I am very sorry for the increasing number of people, not necessarily all old, who have to decide whether to heat or eat.  It was a choice that the unseasonably warm autumn and early winter had led us all to imagine no-one would have to make this winter.

            My mind goes back to cold winters of the past, to the winter of 1962/1963 when the sea froze over.  I was a Public Health Inspector at the time and took these two photographs near Clacton Pier.  It was a bitter winter and a cold spring.  I remember the cemetery staff complaining that when they dug graves, the frost followed them down, freezing the soil beneath their feet as they worked!

We were dressed for the Libyan Winter! No 4 Gun of B Troop, 231^st Medium Battery RA at Wadi Halfaya (Hellfire Pass) on the Egyptian Libyan border, early January 1942.  I am the one on the right – with a woolly hat!

           

                During World War II I spent one winter in the Egyptian/Libyan frontier region, one in a PoW Camp in northern Italy and two in a small working camp (Arbeitskommando) in Germany.  In North Africa it could be bitterly cold when the north wind blew in from the sea.  Some South African troops experienced snow for the first time – a light dusting over the surface of the desert that disappeared as the sun rose.

            The winter in a prison camp in Italy is one that I would prefer to forget.  We were housed in unheated jerry-built huts, wearing totally inadequate Italian army uniforms (most of us had been wearing just shorts and shirt when captured) in which we tried to sleep, pulling our overcoats and two thin blankets over our heads to try to conserve what little warmth we had.  We were permanently hungry, louse infested and bored out of our minds.  Every day in winter we shivered on parade while Italian guards counted us – often miscounting and having to start again from the beginning.  As a result I can still count in Italian uno, due, tre, quarto, cinque and so on as quickly as I can count in English!  There were between 2,000 and 3,000 of us in the camp and deaths from cold-and-starvation related conditions were a daily occurrence.                                                                             

Zittau Rathaus (Town Hall).

One of my more back-aching jobs was to carry filled sandbags to the roof of the town hall as a fire precaution!

My memories of the two winters in Zittau, eastern Germany are far less negative.  We were wearing British army uniform and greatcoats (presumably supplied by the Red Cross) as our louse-infested Italian uniforms had been burnt on arrival.  I was in a small working ‘camp’ (Arbeitskommando) of just 30 British PoWs.  Our living quarters were palatial compared with those in Italy.  We had a separate living room and dormitory with double glazed (as well as barred!) windows.  There was a tortoise stove in the bedroom and a solid fuel cooker in the living room.   We were very often unloading coal trucks on the local railway sidings – so we were never short of fuel, even if it was only inferior lignite (‘brown coal’) briquettes! We were never cold.  Working every day (with just one ‘rest day’ in three weeks) we had no time to be bored and, from mid-winter 1944/1945 we could hear the gradually increasing thunder of artillery fire as the Soviet Army advanced inexorably across Poland and into Germany, and a constant stream of refugees from the battle front trudged wearily westward through the snow-covered streets of Zittau.   Our time of captivity was hastening to an end.

           

A New Danish Invasion!

            If any one had told me a year ago that I would get hooked on a tv serial in a foreign language about high level politics in a foreign country, with dialogue subtitled in English as in the silent movies, I would have thought that they were crazy.  Goodness knows I find news reports  of English party-political point scoring tedious enough! I can though at least understand what it is all about. Political manoeuvres in a foreign land and in a foreign language would surely be much worse.

            Yet I have just watched the tenth and final hour-long episode of Borgen, a Danish political drama on BBC 4 tv, with real regret that it had come to an end.  It was the third Danish tv drama with English-subtitles that BBC 4 had given us.  The first two were detective thrillers, both with the unpromising title of The Killing, featuring the unsmiling but strangely magnetic police detective Sarah Lundt.  I thought that the first, in which we were taken into the ‘real life’ of the family of the teenage murder victim, was the better of the two. I know that they were ‘only actors’ but it was difficult to believe that the grief, sorrow and anger of her parents and younger brothers were not real!  Surprisingly, the strong intertwined sub-plot, about the election of Copenhagen’s Mayor, was equally gripping.

            Borgen was quite different.  It followed the fortunes of Birgitte Christensen, fortyish, married, mother of two, and leader of one of Denmark’s political parties. Very likeable, she was clearly highly principled – sacking her Public Relations Consultant for unfairly discrediting the then Prime Minister, one of her political opponents. 

            As a result of political manoeuvring she found herself Prime Minister of a coalition government of a number of political parties.  At first we saw her clearly ‘on the side of the angels’.  She stopped the use of a Greenland air base by United States planes engaged in the ‘rendition’ of political prisoners, thereby  incurring the wrath of the White House and the cancellation  of a Presidential visit to Denmark.   She called the bluff of a Danish millionaire newspaper magnate who threatened to leave the country if she persisted with legislation promoting women's rights.   She secured a contract to supply wind turbines to a former Soviet Republic with an appalling human rights record, outwitting the country’s president who would have liked to have made the deal conditional on the extradition of a dissident refugee who had fled to Denmark.

            Then Birgitta’s halo began to slip. She allowed the use of a recorded remark made by a former friend many years earlier at a drunken party, to justify the bugging by the Danish Secret Service of the office of the political party which that former friend now led. Her friend’s reputation and political career were shattered.  To help cover up the Defence Minister’s corrupt acceptance of gifts and hospitality in connection with the purchase of fighter aircraft, Birgitta persuaded her husband to refuse a very satisfying and lucrative job that he had been offered.   She sacrificed the cabinet post of a trusted colleague and long-standing friend and adviser to keep the coalition government intact – and she agreed to a divorce and abandoned her marriage in the pursuit of her political ambition.  At the end of the final episode we saw her after she had made on tv the most eloquent speech of her career, extolling Danish nationalism and earning the applause even of her victims!   She was Denmark’s undisputed political leader – but she had lost everything that had made her the likeable, principled political leader that she once had been.   'What shall it profit a man (or woman) to gain the whole world and lose his/her soul?'

            I am looking forward to the next tv offering from the land of the Vikings!

             

           

           

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