27th December 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

The Challenge of Islamic Extremism

            The problem of Islamic Extremism (Jihadism) is surely among the most serious facing what we think of as ‘civilisation’ today.  In this blog I have returned to the subject again and again and I can think of no easy – or even difficult – solutions to it.  I am sitting comfortably and securely at home in the safety of the UK.  Elsewhere in the world innocent men, women and little children are facing torture, slavery and death at the hands of jihadists.    A regular, and very articulate, reader of the blog has written to me over Christmas to tell me of his concerns and of a possible solution.

I see in your blog you include a comment about the dreadful killing in Pakistan. Almost as bad as the gunning down of children was the special treatment of incineration meted out to the head teacher and a class teacher who tried to protect the children. The gunmen arrived with a can of petrol for that specific purpose.  The next day the Nigerian Islamists (Boku Harran) took 100 people hostage - almost a whole village, but that didn't even make it to the headlines. The BBC calculated that over 5000 people were killed by Islamic extremists during the month of November alone, from 10 counties around the world - and that was before the Pakistan incident!

However, there seems to me to be a few issues to consider in formulating a response. The first is that both the Sydney incident and the Pakistan incident were a direct response to the action taken by those governments in seeking to crush these extremists.  That has been the pattern of so many of the atrocities- like the Spanish train bomb, the attacks on Kenya and the London Tube bombs.  There is also the very obvious threat of radicalisation within the Muslim community at home. This risk is massively increased by a foreign policy which could be seen as hostile to Islam. There may well be valid reasons for our involvement overseas and for forcefully opposing these people. Making the home nation safer (the Tony Blair argument) certainly isn't one of them.

‘Western’ governments have to recognise that jihadism is a world-wide movement, not a bit like Nazi Germany, which was the vision of a deranged man with power in his hands. The U.S. / Israeli policy of assassinating extremist leaders using Drones, just doesn't work.  Innocent people are killed, there are always other leaders to replace those killed, and illegal action of this kind in another country only perpetuates the cycle of grievance and retaliation.

I think maybe it is time to acknowledge - even if we totally disagree with it - that there is popular support in some parts of the world for an extreme Islamic nation with everything which goes with that - lack of human rights, complete rejection of Western views and democracy etc. I am thinking the thing which might eventually end the bloodshed would be the allocation of land and the establishment of Islamic Governments in prescribed areas where there is already a strong belief in that sort of regime. A peace settlement should be based on a few fundamental principles - non aggression into the "less Islamic zone", free movement of disaffected citizens out of the Islamic Zone and free movement of radical Islamists from other counties into the Zone.  Frankly the Pakistan / Afghanistan border area may as well be declared as such, because neither government  has control and the act of trying to control is a cause of endless attacks on Kabul and Islamabad. Perhaps the same should be true of Northern Nigeria where it seems to me the Government is very half hearted about dealing with the situation and has allowed that area to deteriorate economically and thereby fuelled antiwestern resentment. I suspect that a part of Somalia is the same.

It’s certainly an idea and, if jihadists were guided by reason and prepared to negotiate a peace settlement, it might work.  I don’t think they are. They are, I believe, convinced that they have been chosen by God to convert the whole world to their particularly noxious brand of Islam and to enslave and/or kill any who oppose them.  The idea that they could live at peace with people who don’t share that viewpoint would be anathema to them.  I do agree with my correspondent though, that violent attacks, air-strikes and drone assassinations only produce more enthusiastic recruits for the jihadist cause. You can’t destroy an idea, even a thoroughly bad one, by violence.

I believe that the only permanent answer to Islamic extremism must come from Muslims themselves.  I think that most Muslims instinctively prefer to live in a mainly Christian, multifaith or secular society rather than in a strictly Islamic one.  Why else did Muslim refugees from Kosovo seek refuge in western Europe rather than in Albania – the Muslim country ‘next door’?     Why do Muslim refugees seek to gain access to multifaith Australia rather than Muslim Indonesia?  When the former Archbishop of Canterbury suggested that some aspects of Sharia law might be introduced in the UK, he overlooked the fact that a considerable number of people who consider themselves to be devout Muslims had come to this country for no other reason than to escape the strictures of Sharia law.

 Islam doesn’t have an equivalent of the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury who can with authority, denounce this, that or the other practice as being contrary to the will of God.  Surely though there must be devout, respected and charismatic Muslim leaders who can publicly and convincingly declare that forced conversions, murder of non-believers, abduction and sale of young girls into sex slavery is not just un-Islamic  but is in blasphemous denial of the will of Allah, who is  compassionate, merciful and just. Those who carry out such practices can expect to answer for their actions in a higher than worldly court.   

            I eagerly await the emergence of such Muslim leaders.  Without them, I fear that the world will be condemned to an endless cycle of murder and vengeance.

A British Middle East Presence

            I didn’t think that I would ever agree with any pronouncement made by Nigel Farage, leader of Ukip.   However I do wholeheartedly agree with his opposition to the government’s massive reinforcement of the   forces already training Iraqi troops to fight the forces of Islamic State.  It’s ‘mission creep’ and it’s beginning to speed up.  How long will it be, I wonder, before one of those ‘training units’ is attacked by IS and compelled to defend itself – and we’ll be well on our way to involvement in ‘the third gulf war’?

            I don’t know what Mr Farage thinks of the government’s establishing a naval base in Bahrain but I think that, like the reinforcement of our ‘training mission’ in Iraq, it is expensive idiocy.  Britain, largely as a result of the present government’s and its New Labour predecessors’ activities, is regarded with deep suspicion throughout the Middle East – and with good reason.  Wherever we have interfered – in Iraq, in Libya and in Syria, we have managed to make a bad situation even worse.

            We no longer have an Empire.  We’re an average sized country on the western fringes of Europe.  The only way we can effectively make our voice heard on the global stage is as a leading and active member of a more-closely-knit European Union.  We no longer need a ‘presence’ east of Suez and we never have needed those  wildly expensive Trident submarines that have signally failed to deter a single one of the international acts of aggression that have occurred during the past half century.

            Now there’s a couple of ways in which George Osborne could reduce that deficit – without reducing the poor to starvation.

Making a bad situation worse

            There’s been plenty of bad news in the newspapers and on the tv and radio recently; atrocities committed by Islamic State, a terrible road accident in Glasgow, continuing Ebola epidemic in West Africa, thousands rendered jobless in Britain by the failure of a privately owned delivery service.  However there was one undoubted piece of good news on a BBC bulletin on Boxing Day.   An exchange of prisoners of war between the forces of the Kiev government in Ukraine and the forces of the pro-Russian rebels in the eastern provinces of that divided country.  As a former PoW myself I know how much that means to the individuals freed under the agreement and to their families.

                        It’s all part of an uneasy cease-fire brokered by the Russian Government some months ago.   It is a cease-fire peace initiative that ‘the west’ should be whole-heartedly supporting, urging both sides to be prepared to make concessions in the interests of a just and lasting peace.  Instead, we are offering unqualified support to the Kiev government and encouraging them to join NATO, which the Russians inevitably see as a hostile alliance with which they are increasingly surrounded.  Have we really forgotten, in the centenary year of the outbreak of World War I, that it was just such a system of alliances that led to the carnage of 1914/1918?

            The European Union’s latest initiative in the conflict is to inflict economic sanctions directly onto the inhabitants of the Crimea and Sebastapol.  Are they being punished for having wanted to be annexed by (they would say re-united with)   Russia?  Their position is not unlike that of the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands who wanted to remain British despite their geographical proximity to Argentina. Just as the UK has ensured that the will of the overwhelming majority of Falklanders has been fulfilled, so Russia has fulfilled the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Crimeans.  The only difference I can discern is that, unlike the British, the Russians achieved their objective without loss of blood.  The pro-Russian separatists are not like the zealots of the Islamic State.  They are prepared to negotiate.  We should encourage them, not make a bad situation worse.    

           Dear Blog readers.......

.I qu  ............I quite thought that the previous blog would be the last one for 2014, but here I am again.  I have had a wonderful Christmas break with my family and feel thoroughly refreshed. I have no idea when the next blog will appear but, in the meantime, I wish all blog readers (and all people of good will towards their fellow men, women and children, of whatever race, colour or creed) a very Happy New Year.  May 2015 be a year of peace and hope. 

  M

  

  

             

 

             

17th December 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

‘Lord, make me chaste and celibate…….

          but not just yet!’

            This was said to have been a prayer of St Augustine of Hippo (no, not the St. Augustine who brought the Christian faith to the heathen English) and proves that saints are 'only human'!.

            I think of St Augustine’s prayer whenever I read, or hear on tv or radio, about yet another international conference on climate change resulting from global warming.  There’s always a remarkable unanimity about these conferences.  The leaders of almost every nation accept the reality of global warming resulting in extreme weather conditions throughout the world.  The northern polar ice-cap is shrinking as are glaciers world-wide. There have been killer typhoons in the South Pacific Ocean and unprecedented monsoon floods on the Indian sub-continent. North America has had searing heat and drought as well as floods and unseasonal arctic spells that have stretched most of the way from Canada to the Mexican border. 

The Rhone Glacier, photographed by me in 1979.  There is now no ice to be seen.

Africa has had prolonged droughts and Australia has had both floods and bush fires, laying waste to hundreds of square miles of land. 

Mainland Europe has had floods, mud-slides and avalanches. During the winter of 2013/2014 the UK’s weather was unseasonably mild but heavy storms battered and broke the sea defences on Britain East Coast while elsewhere – particularly on the Somerset Levels and the Thames Valley – hundreds of acres of land, together with farms and homes, were flooded for weeks as a result of continuous torrential rain.  Last month, our government produced plans for flood prevention to be carried out in the next two or three years.  If only nature proceeded at an equally leisurely pace!

            The latest international conference on climate change was in Lima.  The world’s leaders heard scientific experts explain that a major cause of climate change is the steady increase in ‘greenhouse gases’ produced by fossil fuels; coal and coal products and fuel oils used in industry, in road transport and for warming our homes.  We must, say the world’s scientists, urgently reduce the use of fossil fuels – leaving some reserves untouched – if we want to save our planet for our grandchildren and their grandchildren

            The world’s political leaders agree.  Reducing the use of fossils fuels must be a priority – but not just yet.  The Chinese want to wait until their industrialisation has caught up with that of the USA.  The UKs leaders have got a general election coming up.  They certainly don’t want to take any precipitate action that might cost them votes – or the support of those giving generous donations to the ruling party.  Beside in shale oil, another fossil fuel obtained by ‘fracking’, the Americans are sending us cheaper fuel – and encouraging us to wreck our own countryside by producing our own.  Producing a cheaper fuel (never mind that it produces greenhouse gases) is certainly a vote winner.  There are very few votes to be gained in the pursuit of clean and sustainable energy.

            The result of the International Conference in Lima?  Well, no worth-while action will take place this year.  Next year, perhaps something positive will be agreed – but I’m not holding my breath.

        We’ll never know whether the prayer of St Augustine to be made chaste and celibate – but not just yet, was answered.  Perhaps it was.  It is the nature of the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ to forgive sins of the flesh, particularly those who have acknowledged and confessed their fault.   ‘Perverse and foolish oft I strayed, But still in love he sought me. And on his shoulder gently laid, And home rejoicing brought me’   I think God may be a little less forgiving towards those who, from greed, national pride or fear of election defeat, ignore the warnings of the wise, and are prepared to sacrifice future generations to their own self-centred interests.

‘It’s not what is done……..it’s who it is does it’

       The American Senate’s report on the conduct of the CIA in the aftermath of ‘9/11’ has brought the whole policy of the USA at that time into the limelight.  As well as the torture of suspects under interrogation, there was their ‘rendition’ to countries, Libya for instance, where torture could take place without as much as raised eyebrow, and there was the establishment at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, of a concentration camp of which Himmler would have been proud!

        I find myself interested less in what the CIA and their political masters did, but what they didn’t even attempt to do.  The outrages of ‘9/11’ were planned and carried out by El Qaeda, the dominant jihadist terrorist organisation of the day. At the head of El Qaeda was Osama bin Laden whom the CIA tracked down and killed, without so it seems, making any attempt to capture him.  It certainly stopped him from revealing, in the dock, the support El Quaeda had from the CIA in their campaign of terror against soldiers and civilians of the Soviet Union.

          Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian, so were the overwhelming number of the terrorists who had successfully planned and carried out the destruction of New York’s ‘Twin Towers’ on ‘9/11’.   There was not an Iraqi or an Iranian or a Syrian among them.  Saudi Arabia practises and preaches the noxious perversion of Islam that has been taken up by El Quaeda and their successors IS or Islamic State.  Compared with Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and President Assad’s Syria were havens of freedom and tolerance.  Furthermore, it is known that prominent Saudi Arabians helped finance Islamic State in its early bloodthirsty progress in Syria and Iraq – and possibly continue to do so today.

       

            The USA, and the UK the USA’s ‘special relation’, invaded Iraq on the pretext that the Iraqi government had been involved in ‘9/11’ and that it possessed ‘weapons of mass destruction’, neither of which claims had even a scintilla of truth.  Hundreds of British and American service-men died as a result, together with thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians.  Nor did we bring peace and prosperity to Iraq.  Since our departure Iraq has never been at peace and is currently under attack by Islamic State.  We have now sent in hundreds of British troops ‘to train Iraqi forces’.  How long will it be before those troops have to defend themselves against IS attack and we find ourselves dragged unwillingly into a third ‘Gulf War?’

       Again, in support of the USA, we went to war in Afghanistan because their Taliban government was protecting the bases of El Qaeda.  Within months El Qaeda had moved those bases to Somalia and Yemen – but the Taliban fought on.  We have, after ten years and goodness knows how many deaths on both sides of the conflict, withdrawn all our combat troops.  They may not have been defeated but I am quite sure they wouldn’t claim to have gained a great victory.  My guess is that in six months time a fundamentalist Muslim government (it may not be called Taliban) will be ruling Afghanistan and all those mini-victories, for education, for women’s liberation and so on, will have been lost.

              Meanwhile Saudi-Arabia, the inspiration and (I believe) clandestine supporter of Islamic terrorists, remains unchallenged as one of our ‘trusted allies’.   We buy their oil and we sell them our armaments and don’t ask too many questions.  As I have said before, nowadays it isn’t ‘what is done’ but ‘who did it’ that is of greatest concern to our Government and that of our American allies.  What a pity that not even the combined efforts of the CIA and MI6 can manage to establish that Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein and President Assad, conspired together to carry out ‘9/11’!

Merry Christmas?

     This will be my last blog before Christmas, probably the last blog in 2014.  It’s the season of good will and I’d very much like to wish all humankind a Happy Christmas and  New Year.

       Sadly the news seems to get worse from day to day. World-wide no early effective action will be taken place to counter climate change.  On the other side of the world, in Sydney Australia, a jihadist fanatic has held the customers and staff of a busy café hostage – a situation that resulted in the death of the fanatic, of the café’s  manager and of one of the customers, a barrister in her thirties with two children.  Worst of all was the massacre by the Pakistan Taliban of 132 children, and nine members of the staff, at a school in Peshawar in north-western Pakistan – a crime even more heinous than that of  King Herod’s slaughter of the 'Holy Innocents’ in Bethlehem two thousand years ago!

     For ‘good news’ we are told about the new vessel –  half a kilometre long! – that is being built in South Korea to exploit new fields of (greenhouse gas producing) oil that lie beneath the ocean floor off the north of Australia. The production of similar enormous vessels to extract and process submarine oil fields is planned for the future!

     It’s the ‘season of good will’ and I have to  confess that I feel very little good will towards politicians who are prepared to sacrifice future generations in their pursuit of immediate economic or political advantage.  I feel even less good will towards those who torture or murder their fellow men and women in the blasphemous belief that their crimes will earn them the favour of God, and none at all towards those, whoever they may be and whatever their cause, pretext or excuse, who harm or kill innocent children.

     That said, I do wish a very Happy Christmas and a New Year of Peace and Hope to all readers of this blog and to all those who, with love for humanity in their hearts, are striving to make this sad world a happier place, and to work towards an answer to our prayer, Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven’.

                                                                                            t   

13th December 2014

Tendring Topics…….on line

The World’s most polluted spot!

          A few weeks ago I quoted, at some length, my elder son’s concerns about air pollution, particularly in London.  Now air pollution – from motor vehicles – has become a matter of national concern. Even towns in our largely agricultural East Anglian Region are seriously affected.  It has, so it is reported, become almost as serious a killer as tobacco smoking.   Last year in the UK air pollution was responsible for nearly 20,000 preventable deaths.  In some towns pedestrians are being advised to walk along the footpaths as far as possible away from the carriageway, not because of the danger of being struck by a vehicle mounting the pavement – but because a distance of even a few feet further away from the vehicle exhausts can reduce the risk of lung damage.

            Where, do you think, is the most polluted air in the whole world?  My guess would have been somewhere in Beijing – or possibly in Rio de Janeiro or Chicago.   I’d have been wrong.  It is, in fact, London’s Oxford Street – the home of Harrods and of other quality retailers where the seriously rich do their shopping.  In Oxford Street the high-rise (by British standards) buildings create an artificial canyon to retain the polluted air while continual starting and stopping of the diesel engines of buses and taxis inexorably add to the pollution.  

            The first reaction of Mayor Boris Johnson was to question the findings of the scientists who had revealed that Oxford Street’s air was the most polluted on earth.  He now accepts the report’s validity – but hasn’t so far done anything about it.   Sadly, it’s one of those issues like climate change.  Hardly anyone now doubts that climate change is taking place, and scientific evidence overwhelmingly indicates that it is largely a result of human activity - but to take effective action would cost money, and possibly lose votes!  So would taking effective action against vehicular air pollution.

            In our free market society where everything and almost everybody has a price, short-term profit will always triumph over long-term benefit.   So polluting motor vehicles will not be banned from city centres in the near (or middle-distant) future, and we’ll carry on – and speed up - fracking!

The Consequences

          On Monday 8^th December the local Daily Gazette had the front-page headline We’ve got to build 21,000 homes by 2032.  The headline didn’t relate to the Gazette’s complete circulation area but simply to the borough of Colchester.  The adjacent authority of Tendring District – comprising the coastal towns of Clacton-on-Sea (where I live) Brightlingsea, Walton-on-the-Naze, Frinton-on-Sea, Dovercourt and Harwich and the rural hinterland of the Tendring Peninsula, has a similarly ambitious building programme with one substantial housing estate to be built immediately adjacent to the boundary with Colchester.

            Wonderful news for those of the homeless who are willing and able to buy their own homes.  I suspect though that very few of those dwellings will be ‘social housing’ – owned by the local authority or a Housing Association and available for letting at a reasonable rent.   Good news too for workers in the building industry who will have the promise of work for nearly two decades – and I have little doubt that the major supermarket chains will increase their stake in the area, providing new branch retail outlets to meet almost every need of the new home buyers and their families.

            But it will only be almost every need.  We have so far heard nothing of the provision of other essential services that do not yield an early profit for the provider, such as education and the Health Service.   21,000 new homes in Colchester and a similar number in the Tending district suggest that there may be as many as 30,000 extra children all needing education in the next decade and a half.  Are there any plans to build new schools for them?

            As for the health services in the Clacton/Colchester area; the currently available services are already proving woefully inadequate for the existing population.  They are quite incapable of dealing with perhaps an influx of perhaps 60,000 new residents.  Colchester General Hospital is under ‘special measures’.  Appointments for diagnostic examination of serious medical conditions are postponed and then delayed indefinitely because of a failure of the medical staff to be present when promised and of the administrative staff to find a locum.  Less medically serious but affecting a great many patients and their friends and relatives, is the inadequacy of the car parking facilities at the Colchester General, whether for keeping appointments at out-patient clinics or for visiting in-patients.  This has been made worse by the transfer of services from the Essex County Hospital which is to be demolished and the site used for bungalow building (more potential patients!) in the future.

            In the ‘front line’ of our health services are the many medical practices throughout the district.  It seems that the situation is much more serious in Clacton, Frinton and Walton than it is in Colchester.   I have been with the same medical practice in Clacton since my family and I moved here in 1956.  There were then two doctors (both Scots and astonishingly similar to the Dr Finlay and Dr Cameron of tv’s Dr. Finlay’s Casebook!).  Since those days the practice has doubled the size of its premises and had many changes of doctors. I have been very pleased and happy with the service that my family and I have received from them.  They have seen my two sons through their childhood illnesses.  They cared for my wife who had recurring ill-health.  I particularly appreciated the doctor who called every day as my wife’s life was ending, and (against the advice of the district nurse) supported my determination to keep her at home and to care for her to the end.   They have patiently and professionally looked after me through the health problems of old age.  

However I have seen the number of doctors grow from two to, at one time, six and then decline to the three that it is today.  I am quite sure that if I had a serious medical condition one of those three doctors would see me without delay but it is becoming increasingly difficult to get an appointment with the doctor of my choice. They badly need at least one more – preferably two more – doctors.  They are obviously quite incapable of dealing with an added influx of patients. It’ll be wonderful for there to be a home for everyone who needs one – but I hope that some thought has been given to the inevitable consequences.

The Ukraine

            The conflict in eastern Ukraine isn’t the bloodiest or the most devastating war in today’s sad world (though it has the potential of developing into World War III, if the world’s political leaders are even stupider than I think they are), but it is of particular interest and concern to me.  That’s because it is possible that  some of those on both  sides of the conflict, could be the grandchildren of the friendly ‘Ostarbeiters’ (men and women from Russia and the Ukraine) who, as 'forced labourers' were often my fellow workers when I was a prisoner of war at a small working camp in Germany from 1943 till 1945.  We shared our labours and we shared our work-breaks. Often, in broken non-grammatical German, we shared parts of our life-stories too.  We were all good friends and good comrades against our Nazi bosses.

            An uneasy cease-fire currently exists over eastern Ukraine but my interest was revived when I heard a tv commentator remark that the ill-fated Malaysian air liner, shot down with the death of all its crew and passengers, had been a victim of the ‘cross-fire’ between the warring factions. ‘Crossfire’?   It was surely flying several thousand feet above that!  The black boxes, examined by international experts revealed that  the plane had been shot down by a surface-to-air missile but that there was no way of telling which side had fired that missile.  One thing is quite certain.  Neither side deliberately shot down a Malaysian passenger air-liner.  Whoever did so had wrongly imagined they were targeting a high level enemy bomber.

            Most people in ‘the west’ probably believe that the eastern rebels (aided and encouraged by Russia) were responsible.  One snag about that idea is that the rebels possessed no ground-to-air missiles or the means of projecting them to their targets.   There were unconfirmed reports from the Kiev government that a Russian missile launcher had been seen passing surreptitiously into Ukraine. However, the American CIA found no evidence that Russia had been involved in the plane’s destruction. Had there been any such evidence I have little doubt that the CIA, with very few scruples and spies in every country, would have found it!

 The rebels are also said to have delayed the United Nations inspectors in their examination of the wreckage, mostly in rebel-held territory.  The fact is that the rebels didn’t delay the UN inspectors – it was the Kiev government’s continued shelling of the search area that did that.  The rebels found and handed the plane’s ‘black boxes’ over to the UN authorities (they could easily have ‘lost them’ had they thought they might establish their guilt).  Immediately the ‘black boxes’ had been despatched to Britain for opening and examination, a spokesman for the Kiev Government announced that they had established the rebels’ guilt.  At that stage they hadn’t even been opened!  It is clear that the Kiev Government was desperately eager to persuade the world that the rebels were guilty.    

            Suppose though that that  government, knowing that the rebels had no air force of their own to respond to their  continual air attacks, had expected them to seek Russian help.  They may well have possessed ground-to-air missiles, the means of firing them, and the skill needed to do so  As a ‘sovereign state’ they could purchase any weapons that they chose to, and train their soldiers to use them.  Those in charge of their air defences might well have been ordered to look out for high-flying Russian bomber aircraft – and have been told that any large unidentified aircraft flying in Ukrainian air space was likely to be Russian.  So – it is surely at least as likely that it was Kiev Government forces as the the pro-Russian rebels, who brought down that Malaysian air liner, believing it to be a Russian bomber. Their eagerness to blame the rebels with little or no evidence, adds credence to this idea.

              Most responsibility though for that tragic accident must surely be borne by those in Malaysia who had routed a vulnerable passenger air liner directly over a conflict zone.  Only a month or two earlier another Malaysian air-liner had been lost without a trace – and still nothing has been discovered about the cause of that air liner’s disappearance.   Nor do we know, even approximately, where the disappearance took place.  I don’t think that Malaysian Airlines would be my first choice were I to be considering long-distance air travel!  

            For the sake of Ukraine, of Russia, and of the whole world, I hope and pray that those who may be the grandchildren of my friends from long ago, will come to an agreement acceptable by both sides, stop killing each-other, and co-operate to maintain the peace and increase the prosperity of the whole region.  I wish them all a very Happy Christmas and a New Year of Peace and Hope. 

                  

           

6th December 2014

Tendring Topics………on line

‘The time draws near the birth of Christ………’

          We are in the Christian season of ‘Advent’, the few weeks before Christmas when it was customary for Christians to prepare for the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ ‘In a lowly cattle shed’ in Bethlehem some two thousand years ago.

            Sadly, except in churches and chapels, there’s little evidence of the celebration of one of the most important events of the Christian year, though there are plenty of reindeer, toboggans, Christmas Trees, Christmas fairies and Santas to be found.  It is though, difficult to find unequivocally Christian greetings cards in the shops. News bulletins on tv and radio tell us that primary school children nowadays perform in ‘mid-winter festival’ plays at Christmas time instead of the traditional Nativity Plays that have been part of the pre-Christmas life of primary schools for generations. Ask at any post office for Christmas stamps and you’ll be shown the, admittedly very attractive, secular ones.  You have to make a special request for some of the ‘Madonna and Child’ first or second class stamps that are now available every year.  They’ll be found for you, though it may be made clear that it’s an unusual request.

            It is said that the female partner (at one time I’d have said ‘the wife’) of a young couple on a pre-Christmas shopping trip was attracted to a particularly bright display in a shop window.  She returned disgusted to her partner, ‘D’you know; over there, they’re even trying to drag religion into Christmas!’   All of this is said to be because we are a multi-faith and multicultural society and public celebration of a Christian festival might cause offence to those of other or no faith.  I’m convinced that that is total nonsense.   It’s a strange religion that takes offence at the story of a young woman who takes shelter in a cattle-shed to have her baby on a cold winter’s night in Palestine.   In any case we don’t mind Jews, Muslims and Hindus observing their holy days.  It is surely patronising and insulting to suggest that we Christians respect the faith of others and they do not.

            The real enemy of the Christmas story is the spirit of consumerism and greed which does its best to replace the real Christmas with an artificial one of greed, selfishness, gluttony and booze – one in which folk of any faith (but preferable of none!) can take part wholeheartedly.  I find it useful to personify that anti-faith spirit as the great god Mammon, manifest to us mortals in his unholy trinity of productivity, profitability and cost effectiveness.  Mammon’s Christless festival is centred on 25^th December but its true unholy days are appropriately named Black Friday the last Friday in November, and the week following 25^th December, when devotees queue for hours, then riot and quarrel with each-other in their eagerness to acquire the very latest consumer-desirables a little cheaper than they could get them at any other time of the year. Meanwhile the thousands rejected by Mammon (he is quite arbitrary in his choice of favourites) have to queue at Food Banks to keep themselves and their families from starvation and, as they shiver in the December winds, have to choose daily  between eating and heating.

             Sixty years ago former Poet Laureate the late Sir John Betjeman wrote a satirical poem Advent 1955 about the commercialisation of Christmas in those days. Here are a few lines from it:

We raise the price of things in shops,
We give plain boxes fancy tops
And lines which traders cannot sell
Thus parcell'd go extremely well
We dole out bribes we call a present
To those to whom we must be pleasant
For business reasons. Our defence is
These bribes are charged against expenses
And bring relief in Income Tax

 The devotees of Mammon have learned a trick or two since those days.  They no longer ‘raise the price of things in shops’.  They temporarily reduce them and call it a pre-Christmas Sale.   There’s more profit on lots of things sold at a lower price than on just a few things sold at a higher one!  And those who manage to persuade potential customers that there’s a special, ‘pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap, day called ‘Black Friday’ are on their way to becoming  millionaires.

Chancellors of the Exchequer have also learned a trick or two!   I began spare-time freelance writing in the early ‘50s and by the end of the decade had acquired several regular clients. In those days editors would send regular contributors a bottle of single-malt whisky, or something equally worth-while, as a Christmas present.   When such presents became no longer ‘tax deductable’ those annual editorial offerings dwindled to ‘a really nice Christmas card’ or perhaps ‘a useful commercial calendar’!   Sir John finished his poem with a rhyming verse that has stuck in my memory as summing up, not only the real meaning of Christmas, but what it is that is unique – and very special – to the Christian faith:

The time draws near the birth of Christ,

A present that can not be priced,

 Given two thousand years ago.

And if God had not given so,

He still would be a distant stranger

And not the baby in a manger.

Our God is not a distant stranger.  He is still to be found in the baby in the manger and in the suffering man upon a cross - and today, in those who serve and love their fellow men and women, who prefer co-operation to competition, and who make peace not war.  We Quakers believe that everyone in the world of whatever race, colour or creed, has ‘that of God’, a divine spark, within his or her soul.  It is that within us that leads us towards kindliness, forgiveness and peace and away from anger, vengeance and greed. That divine spark is, says St. John in his Gospel, ‘the true light of God’ that shines in the darkness and cannot be overwhelmed by it.