Week 30 2014

Tendring Topics………on Line

The Day of the Assassin

            I think that I may have referred before in this blog to the story that at the very beginning of the Battle of Waterloo a gunner officer reported to the Duke of Wellington that Napoleon himself was squarely in the sights of one of his cannon.  ‘Should he open fire?’ ‘Certainly not!’ the Duke is said to have replied, ‘We’re soldiers, not assassins’.  Yet if that cannon had been fired and had hit its target, thousands of lives would possibly have been saved.  Without its charismatic leader the French Army would surely have crumbled and the Battle of Waterloo would have been won and lost before it had even started.  Perhaps – but no-one can be quite sure of that.  The final effect of acts of violence is rarely predictable.

            Who for instance, in 1914 would have imagined that an assassin’s bullet fired in Sarajevo would trigger the activation of a series of alliances that would lead to the mass slaughter of World War I?  In the 19^th Century a Russian aristocrat declared that the Russian system of government was autocracy tempered by assassination. American President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.  So was John F. Kennedy, one of his successors. Not one of those assassinations made any progress towards the end for which the perpetrator had hoped.  In her autobiography Hons and Rebels Jessica Mitford expresses regret that she didn’t seize her opportunity to assassinate Hitler – her sister Unity was in love with him and her father, the Earl of Redesdale, was a pre-war sympathiser.   It wouldn’t have been too difficult to have contrived a meeting.  Perhaps in the late 1930s the assassination of Hitler would have changed the course of history.  But there would have been others eager to step into his shoes.  No-one can be sure of what would have happened.  When in 1944 an attempt was made on Hitler’s life, the attempt failed and scores of suspects were cruelly executed or, as in the case of folk-hero Field-Marshal Irwin Rommel, forced to commit suicide.

            Do governments arrange assassinations of those they consider to be their enemies? Until recently they have always denied it but, if there is any truth at all in the popular James Bond novels, during the ‘cold war’ both the Soviet Union and ‘the West’ did assassinate or attempt to assassinate individuals among their opponents.

            In recent years though, the US government at least has admitted – declared triumphantly in fact – that it has used and is using a form of assassination to eliminate known terrorists and terrorist leaders. Unmanned, but lethally armed drones – robotic pilotless and crew-less aircraft – can be directed from a control room thousands of miles away to hit a human target.  It’s true, of course, that as well as ‘taking out’ their intended target they may also accidentally kill a few innocent civilians standing nearby but that’s just unavoidable collateral damage.  Drones offer a means of assassination without risk to the assassin, who is sitting safely in a control room far from the scene of action..

            During World War I battle-weary soldiers in the trenches would say fatalistically that if a bullet’s got your number on it (or a shell has your name on it) it’ll get you, no matter what you do.  The number was, of course, the army number engraved on the identity discs that every soldier wore round his neck. It is a number that, so it is said, is never forgotten. That may well be true.  It’s nearly 70 years since I marched out of the army into ‘civvy street’ but, although I’ve forgotten most other things, I have never forgotten my army number – 912411, or my POW identity number 229456!  The ‘shell’ would, of course, have had room on it for several names!

      
                That, of course, was nonsense. It does seem possible though that assassins of the future may, in effect, be able to put the identity of their victim on their bullets and fire their weapons with a certainty that they’ll find their target!  A US military agency has conducted its first successful tests of guided bullets which can track a target regardless of external factors or even where the sniper rifle is aimed. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an arm of the Department of Defence, is developing a smart .50-calibre bullet which can hit a moving target, rather like a guided missile.   The agency, which researches new technologies for use by the US military, announced its fruitful trials with a YouTube video demonstrating the in-flight guidance of the bullets.

It is being developed as part of the organisation’s Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) project, a programme tasked with improving “sniper effectiveness and troop safety” and to “revolutionise rifle accuracy and range by developing the first ever guided small-calibre bullet,” the government department says.  The bullets have fins and on-board computers to direct them towards laser-marked targets as far away as 1.2 miles.  The work is being carried out by a subsidiary of Maryland-based private defence firm Lockheed Martin and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging.   In 2010 Teledyn received $25.5 million in funding from the US government.

      
        I suppose that I ought to be pleased at a development that should reduce the ‘collateral damage’ of the slaughter of the innocent when a government has decided, without any pretence of a trial, that some individual is an ‘enemy of the state’ and have ordered their assassins to ‘take him out’.  It saddens me though, to see so much effort, intelligence and money devoted to finding more efficient means of killing our fellow humans.   If only the same amount of effort and finance could be devoted to the prevention of war and conflict!

‘A plague on both your houses!’

            So said the dying Mercutio, of the Montagues and Capulets in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  I sometimes feel much the same about the one-sided struggle that is going on between the Israelis and the residents of Gaza.

It is one-sided because the Israelis have overwhelming fire power, a disciplined and well equipped army, navy and air force at their disposal and the knowledge that, no matter how blatantly they ignore the pleas and injunctions of the United Nations, the USA will always support them.  Their missiles, their air raids, their bombardments from the sea, and now the invasion of their army, are reducing the towns of Gaza to rubble and the land to shell-scarred desert.  The toll of the dead – men, women and little children – rises daily.

Instinctively, I think, we support the underdog and the Palestinians clearly are the underdogs.  I am sure that the tragic civilian population of Gaza do need and deserve our support but I am beginning to think that they need protection from their own HAMAS government as well as from the Israelis.

It is clear to me that the present Israeli offensive is a violent and disproportionate response to continual rocket attacks from HAMAS.  If the constant hail of rockets towards Israeli targets ceased, the Israeli bombardment would cease too.  This wouldn’t solve all Gaza’s problems but it would put a halt to the daily toll of civilian deaths.  That would surely be a start.

HAMAS knows this but persists with its futile rocket attacks.  Militarily they are a total failure.  Something like half the rockets are intercepted by the Israeli defences and the rest, for the most part, explode harmlessly.  They are not, in any case, properly targeted.  The sole Israeli civilian casualty in the current flare-up was killed by an ‘old fashioned’ mortar bomb.  I reckon that the ordinary Israeli civilian going about his daily business, is more likely to be killed in a traffic accident than by being struck by a rocket from Gaza!      

Why then, does HAMAS persist in firing them on Israel?  The only explanation that occurs to me is that those deciding HAMAS policy are jihadist fanatics of the same nature as those who are ravaging parts of Syria and Iraq, are kidnapping schoolgirls and murdering Christians and anyone who does not subscribe to their own perversion of Islam, in Nigeria.  They provoke the Israelis into violent, disproportionate – and all too effective – reprisals because they know that Israeli slaughter of the innocent will persuade angry young Muslims round the world to enlist in or support ISIS, Al Qaeda or whatever local jihadist movement exists in their area, and will swing world-wide public opinion to their support.

They’re no doubt sorry about the civilians, women and children who die in the Israeli onslaughts but can console themselves with the thought that, as Muslim martyrs, they’ll go straight to Heaven – as, so they believe, will those who provide the Israelis with an excuse for their murderous reprisals.  Those who hope to bring peace and security to Israel and peace and justice to the Palestinians, must cast away the conviction that because one side in the dispute is clearly in the wrong – their opponents must be ‘in the right and deserving of our support’.  Both sides need to cast aside thoughts of vengeance, of exacting ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’, and heed the message of the local boy who, as an adult, taught that we should love our enemies, bless those who curse us, and do good to those who seek to do us evil.

It’s about the only option that hasn’t yet been tried!

That Airliner

Like everyone else, I am appalled at the loss of that Malaysian Air Liner and all its passengers and crew.  I think though that I'll wait till a little more is known before deciding who was to blame. One thing that is quite certain (unless it was the work of a jiihadist suicide bomber) is that it was an accident.  Not one of the groups involved, not the Ukrainian separatist rebels, not the Kiev government, nor the Russians, could possibly have intended to destroy a airliner loaded with passengers.

The separatist rebels and/or the Russians are being blamed - and they may well be guilty of an appalling misjudgement.  The rebels had succeeded in bringing down lower flying Kiev government military aircraft and may possibly have imagined that that government was sending in a high altitude bomber to attack them.

I don't understand the current furore about the international inspectors being denied access to the crash site.  I have seen on tv pictures of lots of foreign (to the Ukraine) press and tv folk examining and taking pictures of the site.  Why can't those international inspectors get there?  Could it possibly be that it's because they insist on coming via Kiev and the Kiev Government - despite the crisis - continues to shell rebel-held towns and villages?

The site has been unsecured?  Reports say that the airliner's wreckage is strewn over a corridor a mile wide and several miles long.  Securing that, in the middle of a civil war, would surely be an impossible task.  The rebels are in possession of the 'black box''?   We should surely be pleased that it has been removed from the site and is, presumably, being kept safely. It will be time to protest when the separatist rebels decline to hand it over.

Already 'the west' has passed judgement and is busily deciding what extra sanctions it will impose on Russia.  In the meantime Israel has invaded Gaza and the civilian casualties - men, women and little children already outnumber those on the airliner.   The 'west's reaction' - they've asked for a cease-fire!

Years ago, there was a popular song; 'It ain't what you do - it's the way that you do it'.  Perhaps nowadays that should be changed to, It ain't what's done - it's who it is does it!.  

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Week 26 2012

Tendring Topics.....on line

Quite Legal……but Immoral!

          That, you may have thought, was an accusation that might be made about some of the activities of money-lenders, bookmakers, escort agencies, massage parlours and similar dubious individuals or institutions.  They though are all just small fry compared with the big operators who (obviously for a reasonable fee) can make sure that the rich and famous, the great and the good, get away with paying only a fraction of the income tax of us lesser mortals.

            I have been protesting about the iniquity of legal tax avoidance for years. A particularly flagrant case has at last caught the attention of David Cameron our Prime Minister. His shock/horror at finding that a well-known comedian’s financial arrangements had the perfectly legal effect of reducing the percentage of his income-tax payments  to lower than that of the council employee who empties his dustbins, spurred him into making his judgemental statement about the morality of income tax avoidance.

            I’m not going to pretend that I understand the details of the tax avoidance scheme with which this individual was involved but I understand that his income was first paid into an off-shore account from which he received no income but ‘borrowed’ all the money that he needed.  He, of course, was just the one tax avoider who was singled out and pilloried (and has, as a result, withdrawn from the scheme), but there are scores, perhaps hundreds, of others involved in the same or other similar schemes.  I suspect that if all the tax avoidance loopholes were closed, we would be well on our way to solving the deficit problem that is responsible for so much of the austerity that the government has imposed upon us during the past two years.

            My own solution to the problem would be to tackle it from its source.  I would make the principal source of the national revenue a ‘citizenship tax’, a percentage of the gross income of every single one of us without exception or exemption, as our payment for the very considerable privilege of being a citizen of the United Kingdom. Evading, by any means at all, that basic ‘membership fee’ would be considered to be as irresponsible and antisocial as drink-driving is today! I think it likely that fifteen or twenty percent of income overall would be more than adequate.  This percentage would amount to a very small sum from the very poor (just as percentage increases to their income are very small) but a very large sum from the seriously wealthy.   Once that citizenship tax had been paid, what happened to the remainder of the taxpayer’s income (which, for the seriously wealthy would still be a very large sum) would be no concern of the state.  It could be paid into an off-shore account, donated to charity, used to buy a football team, a yacht, or a home on the shores of the Mediterranean, frittered away on extravagant living – or saved for ‘a rainy day’.

 No - it isn’t going to happen – not this year, not in this decade, probably not in this century.

In the meantime I hope that our Prime Minister and government will cease wringing their hands at the immorality of tax avoidance and close the legal loopholes that make this avoidance possible.  If they can’t do it then it is time they were replaced by a government that can – and will!

A Forgotten Anniversary

            I am often awake at about 5.00 am.  I usually listen to the 5.30 am news headlines, weather forecast and Prayer for the Day on Radio 4, before getting up at 5.45 am with the arrival of Farming Today.  Just before Prayer for the Day listeners are reminded of news items that made the headlines on that day in bygone years.  Last Thursday  (21^st June) for instance, we were told that Prince William had been born on 21^st June in 1982 and that it was therefore his thirtieth birthday, and that on that date in 1945 American forces had finally succeeded in taking the Pacific Island of Okinawa from the Japanese.  There were one or two other anniversaries that I have forgotten but there was one, certainly front page news at the time, which was conspicuously ignored.

            It was the capture of Tobruk by General Rommel’s German Afrikakorps in 1942; not quite as disastrous as the fall of Singapore to the Japanese earlier in that same year, but certainly the nadir of British fortunes in North Africa – a situation that was to be dramatically reversed a few months later with the Battle of El Alamein.

            The fall of Tobruk was seventy years – a lifetime – ago, but it is not an anniversary that I shall ever forget. I was one of the 30,000 British and allied troops taken prisoner on that day and destined to spend the remainder of World War II as a PoW.

            The eight-gun Medium Artillery Battery of which I was a lowly member had been in almost continuous action from the day in late May (a few days after my 21^st birthday) when Rommel had launched his offensive in the neighbourhood of Gazala, some forty miles west of Tobruk.  Continuously on the move, we had in mid-June become part of the Tobruk garrison, defending the perimeter in a position to the south-east of the town and port.

            On 19^th June we learned that we were cut off from the main British forces but were assured by ‘Military Intelligence’ (we used to say cynically that, in descending order, there were three kinds of intelligence – human, animal, and military!) that the main German forces were by-passing Tobruk and moving eastward towards Cairo and the Nile delta.  We settled down for the night expecting a long siege.

            We were woken before dawn by the thunder of artillery fire, the roar of low-flying aircraft, the rattle of machinegun fire and explosion of bombs.  The enemy attack had begun – and it was clearly concentrated on our sector of Tobruk’s perimeter!   We manned the guns and, for several hours, fired at unseen targets, our guns directed by an Observation Post Officer and Assistant in a forward position. Our 4.5mm gun/howitzers were designed and built to batter down fortifications, not to be aimed at relatively small, moving targets like armoured cars and tanks. Our guns targeted the terrain over which the enemy tanks were advancing – but if the tank commander made sure that they were well separated as they advanced he could be certain that some, probably most, would come through unscathed.

            Meanwhile Stuka bombing aircraft were flying without opposition overhead (on that fateful day we had no support either from the Royal Navy or the RAF) and enemy shells were falling all around our gun position.  ‘Airburst’ shells exploding overhead were particularly deadly.  Much of the force of those bursting on impact was absorbed by the desert sand.

            Our targets were getting closer and closer.  Before we could be over-run we were ordered to ‘limber up’ our guns and withdraw to a new position to the north-west from which we could see, in the distance, enemy tanks heading toward the town and port.  Again we opened fire, this time within sight of our targets.  The dust and smoke of battle made it impossible to see whether our shells were having any effect.

            As darkness fell, the firing on both sides subsided. The air reeked of burnt cordite and of smoke from burning vehicles.  It was painfully obvious to us that Rommel’s attack had succeeded and that the centre of Tobruk was already in enemy hands.  We laid down to sleep beside our guns on the desert sand with the prospect of death, maiming and/or captivity on the following day.  Exhausted, we all slept soundly anyway!

            With the dawn a German spotter plane flew low overhead.  We reached for the captured Italian rifles that most of us had acquired and fired an ineffective volley.  We ‘stood to’ on the guns awaiting an order to fire. We fully expected to be ordered to make a heroic ‘last stand’ and no doubt we would have done so. Fate though, decreed otherwise. A radio message from the garrison commander, a South African, General Klopper ordered us to disable our guns, set fire to our transport and await our victors’ orders.  He had surrendered the garrison to avoid further pointless bloodshed.

            Thus, I became a PoW.  I spent the next almost–three-years, first in a large PoW camp in Italy and later in a small working camp in Germany. When the Third Reich collapsed in May 1945, I liberated myself (with a great deal of help from the Soviet Army!) and made my way through Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia ultimately to the British army – and home!

            There was an unexpected sequel to my capture at Tobruk and my subsequent life as a PoW.  Years later (it must have been in the early 1970s) my wife and I, with our two then-teenage sons were enjoying a camping holiday in Austria.  Taking a  trip to the summit of the Muttersberg near the small town of Bludenz in Vorarlberg province, we found ourselves sharing a cable car with an almost identical German family.  I commented on the father’s very good English.  ‘Yes’, he said, ‘I was a PoW in England for three years and worked on a farm there’.  Shaking hands I told him that I too had been a PoW but had spent 18 months in Italy and 18 months in Germany – that accounted for the fact that his English was much better than my German.  I then asked him – what one PoW always asks another! – ‘Where were you captured?’   He replied, ‘Tobruk’ adding, in case I had never heard of the place, ‘that’s in North Africa!’    I had been captured there on 21^st June 1942.  He had been captured a few months later, subsequent to the Battle of El Alamein!

            It’s a small world!

 A minor banking crisis!

             Nat.West, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulsterbank are banks which last week spectacularly failed to perform what most of us see as their main purpose – looking after our money, adding incoming sums to our accounts, paying our bills, and repaying, promptly and efficiently when we need it, the money we have entrusted to their care.  I wonder if those banks are managed by some of those brilliant financial supermen who need  a salary of millions of pounds a year  to persuade them to turn up at their offices, plus the promise of further five-figure bribes (or bonuses) if they’re to give us their very best?   Offer them less, so we’re told, and they’d go elsewhere.

            When my family and I first moved to Clacton in 1956 I signed on with the Co-op Bank, largely because they imposed no bank charges on those who kept their accounts in credit, and they had a branch office on the corner of Rosemary Road and the Grove, just a couple of hundred yards from the office in the Town Hall where I worked.  That was over half a century ago.  The Co-op Bank is not one of the UK’s largest and most prestigious, but it has never needed to be ‘bailed out’ by us taxpayers. It has never let me down and it has an ethical investment policy that allows me to be confident that my money, entrusted to their care, isn’t used to buy armaments, to exploit the poor, or to help prop up dodgy enterprises or autocratic regimes. The nearest branch is in Colchester but the bank is easily accessible by phone or on the internet. I can pay cheques into my current account at any post office and, again from any post office or cash machine, I can use my Co-op VISA debit card to withdraw cash from that account.  Using the internet I can instantly check the state of my current account and details of payments and withdrawals.  I have no complaints.

The Weather!

          This is a subject on which, this year, words almost fail me; a winter drought that the water companies assured us would take months of steady rain to remedy, followed by a late spring and early summer of high winds, torrential rain (some areas have had a month’s rainfall in two or three hours), floods, high winds and – just occasionally – warm sunshine!   We are just at the beginning of my ninety-second summer and I have never seen another like it! It’s true that I can’t remember much about my first two or three summers I but have been credibly informed that in the year (1921) in which I arrived, the summer was particularly warm and dry.

            Surely no-one can now deny that we are in the midst of a period of world climatic change and fewer and fewer can possibly believe, as our MP does, that human activity has no responsibility for it.  Our ancestors would have been convinced that we had incurred the anger of God (or perhaps of ‘the gods’) and so perhaps, in a sense, we have.   If not God, then certainly Nature is reacting to our selfishness, greed and our profligate use of fossil fuels.

            I am only thankful that Clacton and the Tendring District generally have, as is often the case, escaped the flooding and devastation that has occurred elsewhere - and we have had more than our fair share of the occasional warmth and sunshine!