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   

Week 29 2014

Tendring Topics……on Line

First – the Bad News

            For years the UK has had nuclear Trident submarines roaming the world’s oceans as a so-called Independent Ultimate Deterrent to aggressors. Like NATO it is a relic of the cold war and of the ‘defence policy’ aptly described as Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD); ‘You dare to threaten me with your nuclear missiles – and I’ll threaten you with mine. If you dare to attack me with them, then I’ll attack you.  We’ll both be totally destroyed and (it's unfortunate about the collateral damage) large areas, perhaps the whole, of planet Earth will be made uninhabitable.

            Well, neither the Soviet Union nor NATO were stupid enough to use nuclear weapons.  The ‘cold war’ ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The UK ran down its full-time professional army, navy and air force in response to our economic situation – but Trident remained sacrosanct, untouchable.  In the meantime acts of aggression took place and it became abundantly clear that our ‘ultimate deterrent’ deterred no-one at all in the real world.  It didn’t deter Argentina from invading the Falklands.  It didn’t deter Turkey from invading Cyprus.  It didn’t deter the USA and its Caribbean allies from invading Grenada.  When, quite recently, Russia annexed and recovered its lost province of Crimea ‘the west’ blustered and threatened but – thanks to God and common sense – nobody even mentioned that ‘ultimate deterrent’.

            In the meantime the real threat to us all comes not from aggressive sovereign nations but from terrorists who have been inspired by a perversion of Islam to believe that they’re fighting God’s battles for him on earth.  They don’t yet possess nuclear weapons but the danger of their acquiring them is a natural consequence (or perhaps God’s punishment!) for our continuing to develop them, instead of banning their manufacture world-wide and destroying every single exiting nuclear weapon.  We have learned recently that chemical weapons can and have been banned world-wide.  It must be possible to do the same with nuclear weapons.

  I believe that much more dangerous than the possibility that Iran may develop a nuclear armoury, is the very real possibility that the nuclear weapons that we know Pakistan possesses should fall into the hands of terrorists.  NATO sent forces to Afghanistan to destroy the bases of Al Qaeda that had been protected by the Taliban government.   All they succeeded in doing was persuading Al Qaeda to move its bases elsewhere, notably the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, and Yemen in the Arabian peninsula. In those tribal areas of Pakistan, Al Qaeda, the Taliban and those who sympathise with them, are a considerable force possibly with a ‘fifth column’ in the Pakistan armed forces.  It is by no means impossible that they may one day overthrow the present Pakistani Government, acquire those nuclear weapons and threaten to use them

            Would our ‘independent ultimate deterrent’ then reveal its true value?  I doubt it.  Are people who tie explosives round their bodies and blow themselves up in crowded market places in the conviction that thereby they’ll go straight to Heaven as holy martyrs, likely to be deterred by the possibility that the victims of their nuclear weapon may respond in kind?

            And the bad news?  The independent cross-party Trident Commission, set up by the British American Security Information Council, has decided that there is no credible alternative to Trident.  I’m glad to note that British Quakers – but there are so few of us – are opposing this decision.  Here’s a copy of a report in The Friend, an independent Quaker weekly:

 The assertion that ‘these are weapons of mass destruction……….which have proved to be a poor deterrent against acts of terror or against recent political events’ must be an example of Quaker fear of making exaggerated statements.  They haven’t proved to be a poor deterrent, but have been no deterrent whatsoever!

…..and the not-quite-so-bad news!

          When I first heard it, in fact, I had thought that it was really good news.  It all began a few months ago when we learned that, to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, the Royal Mint was going to strike a memorial £2.00 coin with an image of Lord Kitchener on it.  The image was taken from an army recruiting poster in which the general (the hero of Corporal Jones in Dad's Army!) was assuring anyone viewing the poster that  Your Country needs YOU!

            I was one of thousands who felt that a war that had cost millions of British, French, Russian, Austrian and German lives, fought for reasons that were far from clear, and which had led to another bloody world-wide conflict  only twenty-one years later, was not best remembered by an image of a  luxuriously   moustached General urging young men to become cannon-fodder.  We petitioned the Royal Mint and the government to use instead an image of Nurse Edith Cavell.  The daughter of a Norfolk parson, she had been nursing the wounded of every country in a hospital in German-occupied Belgium.  She also helped two hundred wounded and captured British service-men escape to neutral Holland.  She was detected and arrested by the Germans, court-martialled and shot.

            In 1947 I worked briefly as a Public Health Inspector for the city of Westminster.  Quite near the office was a statue of Edith Cavell.  It bore the words for which she is best remembered.  ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone’, which she said to the pastor who visited and prayed with her on the eve of her execution.    She was obviously a much more appropriate image for a memorial coin than that of a past-his-best general beckoning other men to their deaths.

            Last week I was elated when I learned that there would be a Nurse Edith Cavell coin struck in commemoration of the World War I centenary.  We had won!   Or so I thought until I read the ‘small print’ of the news item.   The Nurse Cavell coin is not to be struck instead of, but as well as, the Lord Kitchener one.   What’s more the Kitchener coin is to be a £2.00 one for general use – apart from the image it’ll be exactly like the £2.00 coins in use today.  The Nurse Cavell coin, on the other hand, will have a nominal value of £5.00 and is intended for coin collectors.  Unlike the Kitchener coin, they won't be in daily use.  Most of us will probably never see one.

             

                                                           

 Here are enlarged pictures of the two coins.  It is likely to be all that most of us will ever see of the Nurse Edith Cavell coin!

                                                                          

Week 36 2013

Tendring Topics……..on line

SURELY NOT AGAIN!

Britain’s involvement with the Islamic Middle East and North Africa

          For more than two centuries the United Kingdom has again and again been involved in armed conflict in North Africa and the Middle East. Empire building during the 19^th century we twice tried, and failed, to occupy and subdue Afghanistan by force.  In that same century we were involved with Egypt and the Sudan as well as with southern Africa.  During World War I, since Turkey was an ally of Germany, we were involved with the whole of the Near and Middle East from the Balkans and Egypt to what was then called Mesopotamia (now Iraq).  Conflict during World War II involved both the whole of the Middle East and the whole of North Africa.  During that war I was a gunner in the Royal Artillery and was in action in the frontier area of Egypt and Libya throughout the winter, spring and early summer of 1941 and 1942.  My active military career came to an abrupt end when Tobruk in Libya fell to Rommel’s Afrikakorps on 21^st June 1942!

            In recent years the pace has accelerated.   To our shame the UK and the USA supported the ‘gallant Afghan Mojihadin’ in their armed resistance to Soviet occupation in the 1980s – thereby financing, training and encouraging the ‘terrorist extremists’, still killing ‘our boys’ in Afghanistan who for the past ten years have been engaged in a mission similar to that of the Soviets in an earlier decade.   All British and other NATO troops are to be withdrawn in the near future.  My guess is that, after an initial blood-bath of Afghans who are considered to have helped the NATO forces, within a year Afghanistan will be as it was before either the Soviet or the NATO interventions.

The Gulf Wars and Iraq’s ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’

            In the meantime the UK has been involved in two Iraq or ‘Gulf’ wars.  We became a combatant in the second bloodier one as a result of false claims that the Iraqi government had been somehow involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack, and that they possessed concealed ‘weapons of mass destruction’ threatening the peace of the region and of the whole world.  What nonsense!  And I believe that those who deceived Parliament and much of the Press into supporting the invasion of Iraq were well aware that both claims were nonsense!   On the eve of the invasion millions of Brits protested – in vain!  I am proud of the fact that both my sons and daughters in law, and my grandchildren (by then, children no more!) were among the protesters.

            Could it be said that the end has justified the means?  Our invasion gained hundreds of recruits for El Qaeda, who had been responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack and who had hardly had a foothold in Iraq prior to our action there! Nowadays scarcely a week goes by without news of a terrorist bomb attack by one or other of the country’s warring factions killing scores of innocent Iraqi civilians.  The Iraqi Christian community, once an influential and tolerated minority, has been subject to constant attacks by Islamist zealots.  Those of them who can get out of the country have done so.   It would surprise me if today there are not thousands of Iraqis who look back on the rule of Saddam Hussein as a golden age!   There’s certainly no sign of any benefit that might have arisen from that ill-considered and illegal invasion.

‘The Arab Spring’ – in Libya and Egypt

            Next came Libya.  Our involvement started innocently enough with the enforcement of a ‘no fly zone’ to prevent Colonel Gaddafi’s forces from bombing innocent civilians.   Soon we were offering every kind of help short of of troops on the ground, to the rebels. Any bombing of innocent civilians was being done by us! The government forces were defeated and Colonel Gaddafi murdered.  At least that prevented him from telling the world at his trial all about Tony Blair and the other dear friends in ‘the west’ who had supported him while it had suited them to do so!

It is now over a year since Gaddafi was overthrown and the elected government hasn’t yet managed to rule and control the country effectively.  Corruption is rife.  Benghazi, where the rebellion against Gaddafi began, is said to be ruled by armed militia and militant Islamists.  Cemeteries of our dead from World War II have been vandalised and desecrated, and Libya isn’t considered to be a safe destination for British travellers.  It is hardly the outcome for which Cameron, Haig and Co did battle from their comfortable Whitehall armchairs!

Then there’s Egypt.   There, many people in Britain who wished the Egyptians well had high hopes.   A bloodless revolution of ordinary people overthrew an unpopular autocratic President and democratic elections were held. The new elected President represented the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest single political party but by no means representative of the majority of the Egyptian people.  A great many Egyptians  (in particular Egypt’s Coptic Christians, long established - longer than Islam in fact - and ten percent of the total population) feared the outcome.

They did so with good reason. Just like Hitler (who also was democratically elected in the first instance) Morsi, the new President, began to appoint members of his own party, the Muslim Brotherhood, into positions of power and influence and to transform Egypt from a tolerant liberal multi-faith democracy into an Islamic State, introducing the Muslim Brotherhood’s version of Sharia law.  Attacks on Christian Churches and individuals increased, though the British Church Times records that other Muslims, not members or supporters of the Brotherhood, attempted to defend their Christian neighbours against these attacks.

This was emphatically not what those tens of thousands of Egyptians who had toppled the Mubarak regime had wanted.  They gathered once again in their thousands to protest at the democratically elected President whom they believed was abusing his position of power.  At the same time there were mass demonstrations supporting President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.  The Egyptian Army came down on the side of those opposing a Muslim Brotherhood takeover.  They arrested President Morsi and created a new interim Government.  Demonstration sit-downs by thousands of Muslim Brotherhood supporters threatened to bring life in Cairo to a stand-still..  The army claims, probably truthfully, that they tried to persuade the demonstrators to disperse peacefully – and failed.  They then resorted to what armies are best at – the use of force! They opened fire on the demonstrators, killing or wounding hundreds of them.  The demonstrators were dispersed.  They had achieved their objectives though.  Scores – perhaps hundreds – of innocent victims were proclaimed to be ‘martyrs’. The Muslim Brotherhood gained the sympathy and verbal support of the Western World.

And that’s where the situation remains today. I can’t see any solution.  I am sure that supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood will refuse to accept the result of any new election producing a non-Brotherhood President, and they are sufficiently numerous and resolute to sabotage any attempt to liberalise Egypt into a freedom-loving parliamentary democracy.  Fortunately there has so far been no suggestion that the UK, the USA, or NATO should intervene in this conflict.

SYRIA

I am delighted that Britain will not now be joining the USA and France in bringing even more death and destruction to unhappy Syria in the guise of ‘punishing a war crime’.   Thursday 29^th August 2013 will surely go into the history books as the day when, through their elected MPs in the House of Commons, the British public made it clear that the UK had meddled militarily in Middle East politics long enough.  Since the beginning of the armed rebellion against the Syrian government our government has been giving moral and practical support to the rebels, despite the fact that among them are committed terrorists including members of El Qaeda. Would the revelation, on our tv screens, of a particularly horrifying incident in which scores of civilians – men, women and little children - had died in agony as a result of what appeared to be a ‘chemical weapons attack’ provide justification for British military intervention together with the USA and France?.

The Prime Minister recalled MPs from their summer holidays to consider the issue. At first he had hoped to get, on 29^th August, approval from parliament for immediate military action.  That was modified so as to delay a final decision until after the report of the United Nations’ Inspectors, currently investigating the incident, had been received.  Our Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary were quite sure that a chemical attack had taken place and that the Assad government was responsible.  Many others were far less certain.  Yet others believed that, even if all the allegations were true, our military intervention would be more likely to add to the toll of slaughtered innocent civilians than to stop the killing.

Was the Syrian government responsible for that particular atrocity?  I don’t know.  It is difficult to believe though that, at the precise moment when UN weapons inspectors had arrived in Damascus to investigate alleged chemical attacks, the Syrian Government would launch a very conspicuous and well-publicised attack of the very kind the inspectors were investigating.  As George Galloway, Respect MP, said at the debate – President Assad may be bad but he’s surely not mad! Even if the Syrian government was wicked enough to launch such an attack upon civilians, can they possibly have been so stupid as to provoke the righteous anger of the whole world without gaining any discernible military advantage?

 Certainly it is the rebels who have benefited from the attack.  It seems probable that the USA and France – even without the UK – will launch punishing blows on their enemies, possibly altering the course of the war and bringing defeat on the Syrian government..  It has been said that it couldn’t possibly have been the rebels who used the lethal substances because they don’t possess the capability of manufacturing or buying them and, in any case, they would surely not use them against civilians who may have been their supporters.

Perhaps they couldn’t have bought or manufactured those materials themselves, but they undoubtedly have powerful and wealthy friends and allies (Saudi Arabia for instance and other of the Gulf States) who could have obtained them and smuggled them into Syria.  I don’t think they’d have been deterred by the thought of causing a few score – or even a few hundred – civilian deaths.  They would be just collateral damage on the way to final victory – and in any case, they’d all be martyrs and, as such, assured of a place in Heaven.

Much has been made of the claim that prior to the latest most serious attack there had been 14 other incidents in which chemical weapons had been used by government forces.  Did those alleged incidents occur before or after President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron had publicly declared that the use of chemical weapons would change their whole attitude towards the conflict?   If after then the rebels are clearly suspect.

  In the end the debate back-fired spectacularly onto the government. Parliament didn’t decide to postpone a final decision until the weapons inspectors had made their report.  They made a decision there and then that they didn’t want military action – and the Prime Minister, however reluctantly, has accepted that decision.

Will the UKs decision not to join with the USA in a punitive action against the Syrian government reduce Britain’s status in the world and harm the ‘special relationship’.  It is surely more important to do what is right – and refrain from doing what is clearly wrong, than to gain international popularity. As for the ‘special relationship’ it has always surely been understood that the USA and the UK do not necessarily always have identical objectives and priorities.

 Despite the ‘special relationship’ Britain did not join with the USA in its campaign in Vietnam.  In Harold Wilson we had a Prime Minister with sufficient strength of character to refuse Britain’s support for what proved to be a disastrous American adventure. Neither did the USA support Britain in the Falklands.  In October 1983 (almost exactly twenty years ago) the USA led an unprovoked invasion of the Caribbean island state of Grenada to unseat an elected socialist government that was in danger of setting a good/bad (delete as preferred) example to its south and central American neighbours.  The USA President (Ronald Regan) didn’t even bother to notify Grenada’s Head of State of his intention to invade that island and enforce a ‘regime change’. Grenada was part of the British Commonwealth and its Head of State was our Queen, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.  Mrs Thatcher was her Prime Minister.  She seems to have been more of a ’tinfoil’ than an ‘iron lady’ on that occasion!

Since those incidents don’t appear to have damaged transatlantic friendship I  don’t see why our present disinclination to join with the USA in its ‘punishment’ of the Syrian Government should do so.

  

           

           

 

Week 4 2013

Tendring Topics......on line

‘When will they ever learn?’

          This was the refrain of a protest song ‘Where have all the flowers gone’, written by Pete Seeger in the 1950s and sung by the author and by, among others, Joan Baez and Marlene Dietrich.  Type that title into Google and you can read all about it – and hear it sung on YouTube by its author!

          When will we ever learn?   It might have been thought that we Brits have had a surfeit of military adventures in North Africa and the Middle East.  It was, no doubt, an achievement to have toppled Saddam Hussein - but at what a terrible cost! Iraq was laid waste, its infrastructure and public services destroyed.   Tens of thousands of Iraqis were killed and many thousands more maimed and permanently disabled.   And, of course, there were scores of British and American dead and wounded. What's more, our illegal intervention provided El Qaeda with a powerful recruitment incentive.

 The war against Saddam is over but Iraq is far from being a country at peace with itself.  The sectarian hatred and violence that we continue to see in Belfast, is trivial compared with that between Iraq's Sunni and Shia Muslims.   In the north of the country the Kurds yearn to be part of an independent Kurdistan incorporating the Kurdish minorities in Turkey and Iran. Members of Iraq’s Christian community, under Saddam Hussein a free and influential minority, are now subject to violent persecution and physical attack. Those who can get out are doing so.  Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, Christians, identified with ‘interfering infidels from the west intent on destroying our religion and historic culture’, are suffering increasing persecution from militant Islamists.  A worker at the Algerian gas plant caught up in last week’s terrorist attack and hostage taking, told us on tv that he had explained to the terrorists who had captured him that he was an Algerian and  Muslim.   ‘You’ll come to no harm’, his captors had assured him. ‘We’re after these crusaders!’

British, American and other NATO forces have been engaged in Afghanistan for a decade.  We are constantly being told how this that or the other area, that two years earlier was ruled by the Taliban, is now under the control of the Afghan government and its NATO allies.  Yet the Taliban still remains capable of launching attacks within Kabul itself and there have been an increasing number – 60 last year – of allied soldiers killed by members of the Afghan forces whom they have been training.  Within a couple of years all NATO combat forces will have been withdrawn and it is confidently believed that the forces of the Afghan government will by then be capable of engaging the Taliban fighters themselves.  They may have the capability will they, I wonder, have the inclination?  Does the ordinary Afghan soldier or peasant really see much difference between NATO forces and the forces of the Soviet Union that, a decade or so ago, the Taliban and other insurgents (with the covert support of the UK and the USA!) managed to oust?

Syria, like Iraq, once had a thriving Christian minority that worshipped freely and without fear.  Now, identified with the tyrannical regime that had allowed them to survive, they find themselves under attack from the rebel forces that we and our allies recognise as Syria’s legitimate government.   Can it really be the intention of ‘the West’ to cleanse the Middle East of Christian minorities and to support governments of militant Islamists from whence recruits for Al Qaeda and similar terrorist organisations spring?   Whatever our intentions may be, that is the effect our actions are having.

Now the French are sending troops to Mali, a former French colony that is under attack from Islamist Arabs in the north of the country supported by Algerian jihadists and armed former supporters of Colonel Gaddafi who have found their way into Mali from Libya*.  The UK is helping transport troops and supplies but is not (so far!) otherwise playing an active part in the conflict.  The French troops, supporting Malian government forces, are expected to make short work of the rebels.  So, of course, were the allied forces in Afghanistan.  They have been there for ten years – and they’re not out yet!

Isn’t it time that we in ‘the west’ paused and gave a little more thought to whom we are supporting, whom we are opposing – and why we are doing either?   The British National Party is totally abhorrent to me and I am reluctant to give the slightest credence to any of its declared policies.  I do think though that their demand that we should withdraw our troops without delay from any country where the majority of the population is Muslim is worth consideration.  Is our military presence wanted there by most of the ordinary people?  Is it harming or helping minorities holding another religious faith? Is it discouraging terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda, or is it encouraging recruitment for them?  Is it closing – or widening – existing sectarian and/or ethnic divisions? Whatever our hopes or intentions for those countries may be, are they really worth even a single human life?

*Was the terrorist attack and subsequent hostage situation on the gas installation in the remotest part of Algeria a consequence of that French action?  The experts insist that it was a well-planned attack that couldn’t possibly have been organised on the spur of the moment.   I think it possible that the attack had been planned to take place  some time in the future but that the French action had provided a useful propaganda reason for bring it forward.

‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be…..’

                   Such was the advice that, in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Polonius  gave to his son Laertes before he set sail for England.  This suggests to me that even in Shakespeare’s time, England was known as a country in which it was all too easy to fall into the hands of the moneylenders.  It certainly is today – and I’m not referring to ‘the deficit’ and the national debt that worries politicians so much.  I am talking about the burden of personal debt carried by far too many of my fellow Brits.   It is a burden that leads to domestic violence, breaks up marriages, renders families and individuals homeless, can motivate criminal activities and  can lead to suicide.

 The local daily Gazette records that research has found that in the first fortnight of 2013, seventeen percent of us were still paying off bills incurred before Christmas 2011!  Richard Aldridge, Chief Executive of Colchester’s Citizens Advice Bureau told a reporter that he wasn’t surprised by that figure. He said that, ‘Last year Colchester CAB debt specialists helped clients to write off more than £3.6 million.  The average debt was about £8,000.   One of the highest debts was more than £200,000 – and that was excluding a mortgage loan’.

            National figures reveal that one in five consumers started the New Year with more than £5,000 credit card debt and one in seven people in the east of England  struggles to keep up rent or mortgage payments.   Mr Aldridge warns (as I have done in this blog) that the increasingly popular ‘pay day loans’ are  a short-term fix and that interest can get racked up to ridiculous levels, as much as 4,000 per cent a year!   The CAB helps people to understand their income and expenditure and to look at priority debts such a keeping a roof over their heads and paying fuel bills.  ‘We know the situation is going to get worse when welfare benefits change in April.  The sooner the CAB is contacted the sooner there can be help to resolve the crisis.  There is no magic wand, but help is at hand’.

          Meanwhile the Government, that never lets us forget about national debt, seems able to regard  remarkably philosophically. debts incurred by hundreds of thousands of British citizens.   For the past two years the number of applicants for places in Universities has fallen sharply.  The reasons are painfully obvious; the huge burden of debt with which graduates are burdened and the difficulty they have in finding appropriate employment.   A government spokesperson says plaintively that, ‘They don’t seem to realize that they have to pay nothing up front and that they only have to start reducing that debt when they’re in a well-paid job’.  I can well imagine that that kind of argument might satisfy the thoroughly irresponsible and the ‘shirkers and scroungers’ about whom we read in the national press.  It doesn’t appeal to people who, like me, were brought up with a horror of debt and who try to live within their means, avoiding it at all costs.  Had students depended on loans instead of means-tested grants in the early 1970s, we would certainly not have encouraged our elder son to become an undergraduate at Cambridge.  It is all very well to say that graduates don’t have to begin repaying their loans until they are in a well-paid job; that is just when responsible graduates want to start buying a home in which to settle and raise a family. For many of them that student loan debt is likely to be hanging over their heads for the remainder of their working lives.

            Then there’s this urge – encouraged by the government and by the popular press – to buy your own home.  All young couples in a stable relationship (oh dear – only a few years ago I would have written ‘all young married couples’!) are assumed to want to ‘get their feet on the home ownership ladder’.  I have just heard on a commercial radio station a property developer urging that ‘with interest rates at a record low level, now is the time to buy!’    Interest rates undoubtedly are at a very low level but house prices aren’t.   Nor are the deposits required by banks or building societies before granting a mortgage loan.  Furthermore few working people nowadays are in a position  to say with confidence that they’ll  be able to keep up the mortgage repayments for the twenty or thirty years that will elapse before they hold the deeds of their home. It is only then that they will be truly home owners, and not just home buyers liable to be rendered homeless if they default on those mortgage repayments.

            Napoleon is said to have remarked with contempt that ‘the English are a nation of shop keepers’.   We’re certainly not that these days.  The most profitable shops are part of nation-wide or international enterprises, probably with their headquarters and their controlling ownership overseas.  What we are nowadays is a nation of debtors and – increasingly – a nation of debtors who are not only unable to repay their debts, but even to pay the interest on them.

           

           

Week 11 2012 15.3.2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

‘Some corner of a foreign field…………’

          Shortly after the outbreak of World War I, Rupert Brooke wrote his best-known poem The Soldier, which begins with the lines;

If I should die, think only this of me

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

These assume that in that corner of a foreign field, the poet’s remains will at least be left in peace.

          By no means the worst or the most tragic image shown on tv last week, but the one that has remained most persistent in my memory, was that of the vandalised and broken tombstones of British war dead in Benghazi’s British military cemetery and the desecration of the stone crucifix that had been provided there.

            The spectacle filled me with deep sadness – not for those buried there (they are past caring about such things), nor because among those war dead are former comrades of mine who died in a PoW transit camp in Benghazi in the late summer and autumn of 1942.  Nor even was it because of the desecration of the image of Christ, the Prince of Peace, and of the cross on which he had been executed. It was a cross that a fellow-countryman of the vandals, Simon of Cyrene, had helped him carry to Golgotha, the place of execution.                 

            What made me saddest was the thought that, anywhere in the world, there were people who harboured such a hatred of Britain, British values, and of the Christian faith, that they were prepared to vent it even on the dead and on the sacred symbols of their faith.  Such unreasoning and implacable hatred cannot be overcome by force of arms. Nor, I think, can it be defeated or brought to acceptable compromise by reasoned argument and discussion.

            It is for that reason that I see no possibility of an end, either by  military victory or agreed compromise, to the war in Afghanistan that continues to take a toll of our young men and, of course, of an unknown number of Afghan civilians. I have no doubt at all that exactly the same implacable hatred motivates our Taliban opponents there.  Last week six young British men died in just one incident, an event that brought renewed calls for an immediate withdrawal of British troops.

            It is a new experience for me to find myself on the same side as much of the popular press, but there really is no point in waiting a couple more years in the hope that by that time we’ll have had a miraculous victory or that the Taliban will have accepted a reasonable compromise.  Nor do I think that we can rely on the NATO trained and equipped Afghan Army to have either the ability or the inclination to step into the role currently held by our troops.   What is certain is that in that time there will be yet more pointless deaths of young men, more weeping widows and children, and more sorrowing parents.  I am sorry for the Afghans – and particularly for the Afghan women and girls – who have acquired western ways and embraced western values. I can only hope that they will be able to escape from their benighted country before the hate-fuelled  retribution of some of their fellow-countrymen catches up with them.

Later Developments

          Since I wrote the above there have been further disturbing developments, none of which encourage me to change my general view of the situation in Afghanistan.

            Last Saturday 10^th March I learned that the Afghanistan Religious Council, funded by the Afghan Government (and thus, indirectly, by us!) whose decrees had already resulted in Afghan women tv news readers having to wear a head scarf while working, has now decreed that Afghan women and men should not work or be educated together, and that women should not go out in public unless accompanied by a male member of their family.   This decree doesn’t yet have the force of law but it is certainly a straw in the wind, and an indication of the probable fate of Afghan women and girls when NATO forces depart.

            Then, on the following day I heard the appalling news that a United States soldier (a staff sergeant in fact) had gone alone into two Afghan villages in the dead of night and deliberately massacred at least sixteen people, including a number of women and children.   The perpetrator of this horrific crime must obviously have been either insanely drunk or simply insane at the time. This though is unlikely to be regarded as an excuse by those who will demand vengeance.

            Back in Essex, on the same day came news of the vandalising and desecration of a churchyard memorial to British troops who had died in Afghanistan.  Is this evidence of the same implacable hatred, now in England, that resulted in the violation of British war graves in Benghazi?

.

‘A Bridge over Troubled Waters’

            Opening my newly delivered copy of The Friend, a Quaker weekly journal, last week, I was surprised to see a photograph that reminded me of a very happy period of my life.  The picture was of the old Turkish packhorse bridge in Mostar, Bosnia; the ‘old bridge’ (or ‘stari most’) that gave the town its name.  I remembered it from the late summer of 1980 when my wife Heather and I had toured what was then a united Jugoslavia in our motor- caravan.

Here is a picture that I took at the time.  Young men were demonstrating their machismo by diving from the apex of the bridge into the turbulent waters of the fast-flowing River Neretva beneath. It was a peaceful scene and, throughout our visit, we saw no sign of the suspicion, hatred and resentment that were so soon to lead to bitter civil war.

A casualty of that civil war was that beautiful old  bridge, destroyed in conflict between Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims.  It was rebuilt with funding from the Turkish Government (sadly there is no way of similarly restoring the thousands of human lives lost in that conflict!)  The picture in The Friend on International Women’s Day, 8^th March, was published as a symbol of peace and reconciliation.

Did you, by the way, know that 8^th March was International Women’s Day and that women  were holding demonstrations on bridges round the world, hoping, says a spokesperson for Women for Women International, that they will represent ‘bridges of peace and hope for the future’?  The organisation declares that ‘Women are forced to bear the burden of war and are targeted for mass rape, mutilation and torture as a tool of war’ and that ‘Eighty percent of wartime refugees are women and children’.

I am only sorry that International Women’s Day wasn’t more widely publicised beforehand.  The campaign reinforced my own idea (for which no-one else seems to have much enthusiasm!) that there should be an all-embracing ‘Civilian Victims Day’, a companion of Remembrance Day on which we remember the war dead of the armed forces.  On that day there would be special religious services of remembrance and of repentance and we would all be urged to wear white poppies as a symbol of our desire for peace.   The proceeds of the sale could be used to help civilian victims of conflict. in a similar way to that in which the proceeds of red poppies on Remembrance Day are used to help wounded and disabled members of the armed forces.

Perhaps the reason that this idea hasn’t caught on is the fact that while virtually every nation of the world has civilian war dead to mourn, very few indeed have no need to repent the suffering they have inflicted  on the civilian victims of other nations, other creeds or other ethnicities.

‘Inasmuch as ye have done these things unto even one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done them unto me’, said the Prince of Peace.

A Boost to the Economy – and Solution to Britain’s Housing Problem?

            I am referring to the Government’s recently announced initiative to underwrite loans from Banks and Building Societies for purchases of new-built homes to enable those lenders to require a deposit of only 5 percent of the total purchase price.  This, it is claimed, will give a boost to the building trade, and thus to the country’s economic recovery. It would also make it possible for thousands of potential purchasers, who could afford the monthly repayments on their loan but were unable to find the all-important deposit, to get their feet on the first rung on the property ladder.

             Will give a boost to the building trade?   I think that it is the sort of idea that could only emanate only from a government of millionaires, remote from the world most of us live in! Even 5 percent of the price of a new home would be well beyond the reach of many would-be purchasers.  It was in 1956 that my wife and I bought the bungalow in which I am now writing these words.  We did – in those distant days – have the offer of a loan with a deposit of only 5 percent. We had been married for ten years.  I had an adequate salary, but   our two young sons, and a loan to repay on the cost of the car I needed for my job, ensured that we had very little money saved.  We had to sell some of our furniture – and my wife’s engagement ring (a transaction for which I have felt guilty ever since!) – to raise that deposit.

            We did manage to pay the monthly repayments unfailingly. I was a Public Heath Inspector employed by Clacton Council.  In those days local government salaries were lower than comparable ones in the private sector, but they were secure and part of that salary was contributing to a pension.  Nowadays salaries in the lower reaches of the local government service are still low but the jobs, like all jobs these days, are anything but secure.  What is more, pension contributions are going to be higher and today’s local government officers are going to have to wait (and work) longer for a lower pension.  Jobs in the private sector are scarce and certainly no more secure.  With all of this in mind prudent home seekers should surely think twice – and then again – before incurring a debt that, like the student loans, is going to be a burden for decades to come, and for which any change of circumstances could make it impossible to keep up the repayments.

            We are, thanks to those ‘brilliant brains’ in the banking and financial services sector, already a nation in debt.  The government seems determined to make us also a nation of debtors!

A Moment of Remembrance – and foreboding.

          I am an early riser.  Last Sunday (11^th March) I switched the tv on to BBC 1 at about 5.40 a.m.   Usually at that time there is a discussion about the European Union in progress.  Last Sunday was different. Unknowingly I had switched on just before the exact moment at which, on that same day a year earlier, the devastating earthquake and Tsunami, followed by a catastrophic nuclear energy emergency, had taken place in eastern Japan.  I was watching a memorial event, presided over by the grey-haired Japanese Emperor and Empress, in an enormous crowd-filled arena. There were recorded scenes of the earthquake, of the subsequent enormous ‘tidal wave’ engulfing all before it – and of the radiation polluted landscape that remains devastated to this day. Then, at the anniversary of the moment the earthquake struck, came a minute of silence As one, the enormous audience fell into silent mourning for the tens thousands of dead, many of whose bodies have never been recovered.

            We are fortunate in this country in that we rarely experience a damaging earthquake and never, so far, a tsunami.  We have had devastating tidal floods though (one on this coast as recently as 1953), and we too have nuclear plant in locations liable to flooding.  A recent survey predicted that within this century, there is a strong probability that both Bradwell and Sizewell nuclear plants, neither very far from us and one very near, will suffer dangerous flooding as a result of the inexorable progress of global warming. 

We have been warned!

           

                       

           

           

                                                 

Week 9 2012 1.3.2012

Tendring Topics........on Line


The Cost of Weddings ………

            One of the biggest changes in public attitudes that have taken place during my lifetime is that relating to love and marriage.  In my childhood and youth the idea of an unmarried couple living together as man and wife evoked shock and horror.  It was ‘living in sin’.  The woman in such a liaison was regarded as ‘fallen’, any children were ‘illegitimate,’ a designation that could prove to be a lifelong disadvantage. As late at the early 1950s a popular song announced that, ‘Love and marriage, love and marriage, They go together like a horse and carriage.  You can’t have one without the other’.  Well, that was certainly what I - and many thousands like me – took for granted.

            How different things are in the twenty-first century.   It is considered perfectly normal – even wise – for a young couple to live together, and perhaps have one or two children before getting married or, in many cases, deciding not to marry at all.   Sometimes they’ll say that they are ‘saving up to get married’ by which they usually mean saving up to be able to afford the kind of lavish wedding reception and honeymoon that will be the envy of their friends, neighbours and work colleagues.

            Recently I was quite shocked to discover that many couples may have to ‘save up’ to pay for the actual ceremony. It was something with which I had never been involved.  Traditionally it is the bride’s parents who pay for the wedding, though that too seems to have changed nowadays. Heather and I were married in the Methodist Church of which she was a member with a (teetotal!) wedding reception in the church hall.  One of my sons was married in a Roman Catholic Church and the other in a Registry Office.  Obviously there was a charge for the Registry Office but it didn’t even occur to me that there would be a charge for the actual wedding in a church – except for the services of the organist and, if there was one, the choir.  I thought it was just ‘a service’ like any other service at which the priest or minister officiated.  I have also been peripherally involved in several Quaker weddings – and for them there is definitely no charge.

            I now learn that there has been a charge of £262 for a Church of England wedding and that this has recently been raised to £400.  That is quite a lot of money to a great many people today; quite enough to make an impecunious young couple who had been thinking of ‘tying the knot’ think again.  They may be facing a lot of other expenses including furnishing a home!

            I would never have expected the Church to deter couples from the sacrament of marriage and am not surprised at the fact that at least some members of the clergy are rebelling against this latest charge.  One such is Fr. Richard Tilbrook of St Barnabas’ Church, Colchester.  He intends to stick to the former fee of £262.   He is reported as saying, ‘In this economic climate in poor parishes this is a huge increase which is not acceptable.  We work very hard to encourage people to come to church and to get married in church and I worry that this will turn people away.          Fr. Richard has the support of Colchester’s recently knighted MP Sir Bob Russell who has promised to raise the matter in parliament.

…….and of Funerals

            Charges for Church of England funerals have also been increased to £160, not quite so much, but quite enough to add worry to a great many hard up new widows and widowers faced with the other inevitable funeral costs.

            Oddly enough, I have had some direct experience here.   It must have been about twelve years ago that an occasional attender at our Clacton Quaker Meeting who, like me, had been a POW in Germany during Word War II, asked me if I would officiate at his funeral service when the time came.  No – he didn’t want a Quaker funeral, but he would like me to take it.  I didn’t feel that it was the kind of request that I could refuse, though I didn’t take my promise all that seriously.  There was no certainty that he would predecease me – and in any case, it would be his relatives who would decide on the form that the funeral would take.

            However, eighteen months later I had a phone call from a local funeral director. He had died and his desire that I should officiate at the funeral had been included in the will.  I was given the name and address of his son and daughter-in-law, and I went to see them.  Yes, they would like me to officiate at the cremation.  No, they didn’t want a Quaker funeral.  They didn’t want long Quaker silences.  No, none of the relatives wanted to speak at the funeral, though they were happy enough to tell me all about the deceased. No, they didn’t want any hymns.   

            A crematorium funeral service lasts only 20 minutes but that can seem quite a long while when it has to be filled with talk and prayer!  I managed it, including a reading of the 23^rd Psalm and Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar, in which the poet compares dying with passing through the turbulent water at a harbour’s outlet. I pressed the button that brings curtains round the bier as I asked for a blessing on us all at the end of the service.  My ordeal was over and the relatives were pleased.

            They were even more pleased when I waived the £80 that the Funeral Director told me was ‘the usual fee’.  £80 for twenty minutes work, perhaps an hour and a half in all if my preparation was taken into consideration!   Still pretty good payment – but I wouldn’t have accepted any payment.  Quite apart from the fact that to do so would have been considered unquakerly, I felt that I had simply been fulfilling a promise made to a former comrade; a straightforward not-all-that-difficult task dictated by friendship.

            If the ceremony had taken place in a church that had to be maintained, kept clean at all times, and warm when required, it would, I suppose, have been reasonable to make a small charge for the use of the premises, but £160? – hardly.  Once again Fr Richard Tillbrook of Colchester’s St Barnabas’ Church is sticking to the old fee of £105 for a funeral – and I think that he is right.

             Unjustifiable charges play into the hands of the National Secular Society and others who would like to separate religion from every aspect of what they regard as ‘real life’.

 Some thoughts on Taxation

          Did you notice the story last week about Civil Servants whose salary was being paid into a limited company to reduce their tax liability?  There was a tremendous fuss about whether or not they really were civil servants – or were they just contractors to the civil service. 

            Whether or not they were civil servants is surely beside the point.  What was to the point was that due to a loop-hole (one of many I fear) in the law, the Inland Revenue was deprived of tax to which it would otherwise have been entitled and which the rest of us will now have to pay.  The exact employment status of those concerned should not have mattered in the least.

            It is tax loop-holes of this kind that the government needs to seek out and close with at least the same vigour and enthusiasm that it seeks out Benefit Scroungers,  if it is to persuade even the most gullible that ‘we’re all in this together’.

            Then there was the promise last week by the opposition  that, if they were elected, they would take those with the lowest incomes out of the income tax system altogether because it had been found that extra money in the pockets of those with the lowest incomes tends to be spent, thereby helping Britain’s economic recovery.  Extra money in the pockets of better off people tends to be saved – however wise that may be personally it isn’t going to speed national recovery.

            I understand that argument but, though raising the level of income tax liability would certainly be to my advantage, I don’t think that it is the right way to achieve that objective.  I believe that we need to reverse the transfer of direct taxation (income tax, death duties, national insurance and so on) to indirect taxation such as VAT and customs duties on alcohol, petrol and diesel fuel.  This was initiated during the governments (I nearly said the reign!) of Mrs Thatcher and continued enthusiastically during those of Tony Blair.

            VAT is paid by rich and poor alike (‘we are all in this together’) but it is a much larger proportion of the total income of the poor.  Its imposition and removal therefore affects the poor more than the rich.   Reducing the cost of goods by cutting VAT would make it possible for the poor to buy goods that would otherwise have been beyond their reach – and help economic recovery.

            I have personally had an example of that during the past few weeks.  I have recently self-published part of my autobiography as a 65 x A5 page booklet entitled ‘Zittau….and I’, relating to my association with that small German town both during World War II and more recently.  I had 250 copies printed to give to friends, family and anyone who may be interested.  Printing work of this kind is not subject to VAT – so I was able, within my means, to have the work done and thus help keep the printing firm functioning.  Had the work been subject to VAT I couldn’t have afforded it, and probably many of the firm’s other customers wouldn’t have been able to either.

            As for income tax – well, it is the one tax that could be levied on all of us according to our ability to pay it.  Properly graded, so that we all paid a similar proportion of our incomes, it could make sure that we really were all in this together.

           

I believe that even the poorest should pay a small amount in income tax.  They too could then claim to be tax payers and free themselves of the jibe that others have to pay for public services that they enjoy.  Those – like me – who are a little better off should pay a larger amount but the same proportion of our income in taxation and so on, with the very wealthy paying a much larger amount, but the same proportion of their incomes.  It seems blindingly obvious to me that that is the path towards fairness and the creation of a true Common Wealth.

            I should add that I don’t think that there is the least possibility of the present, or any currently-possible alternative government, pursuing that path in the foreseeable future!

Provoking ‘The Wrath of God’

          It is becoming more and more certain that NATO’s adventure in Afghanistan will end in the same way as the two British incursions into that country in the 19^th century and the Soviet one in the 20^th century - in humiliating departure.  I have little doubt that within months of the final withdrawal of our forces, Afghanistan will be ruled by an extreme Islamist clique, its schools (except of course those indoctrinating boys in the most extreme Muslim traditions) will be closed and its women and girls again reduced to the status of ‘goods and chattels’. There will have been a massacre of those Afghans who co-operated with the ‘Western Infidels’ and were foolish enough to imagine that we would protect them.

            This opinion has been reinforced by recent events.  A population that supported, or meekly endured without protest, the outrages of the Taliban was raised to hysterical fury by the accidental burning of some copies of the Koran by American troops.  There have been days of frenzied rioting and hate-demonstrations against NATO and ‘western values’ generally, culminating in the murder of top American Army Officers in what should have been the most secure compound in the most secure city in Afghanistan.  The murders are believed to have been committed by interpreters or other Afghans trusted as being ‘on our side’.  We may succeed in training Afghans in the use of modern weapons and in the skills of modern warfare – but we can’t dictate against whom those skills and weapons will be used!

            How extraordinary that all the violence and killing has been done in the name of God.  The God in whom I believe knows very well that books, however significant and sacred may be the words that they contain, are made by human hands and, when destroyed, can easily be replaced with identical copies.  Every single one of our fellow humans, on the other hand, is (as our Quaker Advices and Queries assert) unique and a child of God, created by God in his own image and irreplaceable.  My God, learning that sacred books dedicated to his worship and service had been destroyed, would metaphorically shrug his shoulders and say, ‘My servants will make many more to replace them’.  I believe though that nothing would be more likely to arouse his anger than learning that someone had killed even a single fellow human, one of his children, and had claimed to have done so in his name