THE NEED TO FORGIVE

Paul Ince - saved by football

The now retired footballer Paul Ince once said that, if it had not been for football, he would have probably ended up in prison. He came from a deprived background, ran with a rough crowd and, being black, he could not have expected favourable treatment from the justice system. Football, however, gave him direction and kept him straight.

Good for football, most people would think. People of colour often find that they stand their best chance of succeeding in life through sport because, being largely a meritocracy, they suffer less from discrimination than in other areas where prejudice holds them back. There is no shortage of racism in football but coaches who select teams simply cannot afford to be racist because so many top players now are black. Black former players are now moving into coaching, as Ince has done, albeit with painful slowness.

 

I use Ince as an example because any crimes he might have been tempted to commit would probably have been financial – robbery, drug dealing, burglary, etc – and not of a sexual nature. I am not saying that he is a saint in sexual matters. Like most young footballers he was probably tempted and may have fallen once or twice.

 

Other footballers have been tempted and caught taking advantage of their position as alpha males. Their crimes are unsavoury and I have no intention of defending them. What I think, however, is that they need to be allowed to re-enter society once they have served their punishment. If they do the crime they have to do the time but, once that has been completed, they have the same right to rebuild their lives as those found guilty of stealing money from old ladies or breaking and entering. 

 

Yet forgiveness seems to be in short supply when it comes to sexual crimes. Partly because it is such a horrible act and partly because it has been (and still is) so easy to get away with, rape is seen as the unforgivable crime. Those deemed guilty of it are cast into outer darkness and cannot be admitted back into normal society.

 

I have said before that one of the main reasons that it is so hard to gain a conviction for rape is that it is a crime that, almost by definition, takes place without witnesses who can corroborate one person’s story. Therefore, it tends to come down to one person’s word against another’s. That introduces doubt into the process and, inevitably, the accused tends to be given the benefit of this doubt. Add the sheer horror of undergoing cross-examination in court and many women are reluctant to even report instances of rape. 

 

This has resulted in the rise of settlements of the type used by Prince Andrew and his team of lawyers when he was accused of sexual exploitation by Virginia Guiffre (then Roberts, one of the many young women groomed by the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and offered up as gifts to men like Prince Andrew, whom he wanted to cultivate with “free’ sex.

 

This sex, of course, turned out to be anything but free. The prince denied even meeting his accuser but was not willing to go to trial. He was probably advised that she would be the one to benefit from any doubt around this case. The temptation to give a bloody nose to a privileged British royal might have been overwhelming for a jury in republican America so he settled and is now supposedly in the clear as a result.

 

Except that 'the clear' is anything but from now for a man accused of rape or sexual exploitation and who chooses to settle. A Scottish footballer called David Goodwillie was ordered to pay a woman who had accused him of raping her. He was not convicted of any crime but she sued him in a civil action and the judge ordered him to pay her the not inconsiderable sum of £100,000. That may seem like loose change for a big-time player but not for a lesser one like Goodwillie.

 

The incident in which he was accused of rape took place in 2011 when he would have been about twenty one. That is not an excuse – both accused and accuser were above the age of consent – but it does show how mistakes you make as a young man can come back to haunt you years later. The writer Val McDermid, who supports Raith Rovers, withdrew her sponsorship of the club after they signed Goodwillie.

 

McDermid said that the sight of Goodwill playing for her team made her 'sick to the stomach'. This seems to say that there is no way back for a man deemed to be a rapist. His previous club Clyde had said that he was entitled to rebuild his life after the court had ordered him to pay for what he had done to the woman who accused him. He had a good career there and was mostly left alone until he signed for Raith and McDermid had her say. Then all hell broke loose.

 

Men accused of rape do not help themselves by failing to show remorse for their acts. However, showing remorse is akin to admitting guilt in the eyes of a lawyer and they are probably discouraged from doing so as a result. This reluctance to admit guilt is probably increased by the intransigence of women like McDermid who seem determined to deny them a chance to rebuild their lives. They act as though Goodville and his like should be cast into outer darkness forever. 

 

Yet, if we are not to condemn all men deemed guilty of rape to a life sentence without parole, they have to return to society sooner or later. I use the word 'deemed' deliberately, as Goodwillie was never convicted of a crime, but judged responsible for a rape by a judge. Whatever happened with him and with Ched Evans, with Prince Andrew and Marvin Greenwood (who also faces charges of rape) there does not seem to be any way back for them once “deemed” guilty.

 

But every criminal who will be released needs to have the chance to rebuild their lives after they get out. Raith Rovers would surely not have cancelled the signing of Goodwillie if he had been found guilty of burglary, had gone to prison and then gone straight. Why should sexual crimes be treated differently to other ones? 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE

Neil Young - an early photo from the 1970s
(By Mark Easterbrook from WikiCommons)

I remember talking to someone who turned out to know what he was talking about.  He said that vinyl would outlive the compact disc. I pshawed the idea, sure that the convenience of those small CDs would prove more useful in the long run than the more cumbersome vinyl. It now turns out that that he was probably right. The geekiness of music collectors who prefer vinyl and the arrival of streaming have combined to isolate old-fashioned CDers like me, who want to be able to touch the medium we listen in. CDs, like us, may survive for a bit but not for long.

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are two singers who I grew up with and whose CDs I have, as well as their songs on vinyl and cassette. Artists like Young and Mitchell now depend on streaming and new artists cannot become established without it, the ultimate democratic medium.

Spotify is the main streaming company these days. It started in Sweden in 2006 with very good intentions - diversity, inclusion and so forth - but has rapidly become a huge business with about 6,000 employees, offices all over the world and an annual revenue measured in billions of dollars. Their main dispute now is with artists over how much they should pay in royalties. 

Spotify also makes money from podcasts and one of their biggest earners is Joe Rogan who signed a contract worth $100 million with the company and has a large number of loyal listeners prepared to cough up enough to fund his lavish lifestyle. (He is based in California, as are Mitchell and Young.) This involves him promoting what is often called 'misinformation' in which verifiable truth is well behind what appeals to people's prejudices. One of his guests was Alex Jones, who says that the Sandy Hook shootings were staged in order to impose gun control on Americans and has been successfully sued by the families of those who children were killed.

  

Now Neil Young – followed by Joni  Mitchell – is objecting to having to share a platform with Rogan. He has told Spotify that ‘you can have Rogan or me – but not both’. Unsurprisingly, the company opted to stay with their popular podcaster instead of a couple of aging rock stars. Young and Mitchell have moved and Rogan has stayed on Spotify, which has tried to keep them all happy and has promised to weed out any 'misinformation' but has found that protecting free speech means making money even (especially?) if that speech involves spouting utter rubbish. 

I have never listened to Rogan and have no time for the ideas he promotes. I got Covid jabs as soon as I could, test myself about once a week (always negative) and still listen to my Neil Young and Joni Mitchell CDs occasionally. Yet, I am not in favour of taking any of them off Spotify. They all contribute something and should be heard by all their various fans.

 

This is a classic example of freedom of speech versus the fight against misinformation. People who think that vaccines save lives are keen to promote the idea against those who think that they have been introduced in order to control the people. Edward Jenner was a pioneering scientist who introduced vaccines in England in the eighteenth century and they have saved millions of lives since then by protecting people against small pox, polio and other illnesses. He was a rebel, pioneer and experimenter whose work is now accepted by most of the world.

Except for those who think that vaccines are evil incarnate and were designed to control and manipulate us and will believe almost anything in support of their idiotic conspiracy theories. Let them think that way if that is what they want. I would probably not be much good at stopping them and find it almost impossible to have any sympathy for those who refuse vaccines and get sick, sometimes asking to be injected when it is already too late to save them form their stupidity.

Rogan once said he would endorse Bernie Sanders for US president because he had always been ‘consistent’. Young probably feels the same way. In a way, they are similar, both perfectionists who think that solutions to the world's problems are easy to identify and put into practice.  In fact, solutions to our problems are often difficult. They involve disagreement, debate and discussion, which are the mainstays of democracy. This means allowing people to talk rubbish because it suits their mindset not the facts. Allowing people to believe 'pizzagate' theories - that the world is controlled by a well-hidden and secretive elite of paedophiles.

This is not to say that you can say anything you like. There are laws to protect minorities, mainly but not exclusively ethnic ones. If you promote hate speech, you may find yourself being prosecuted. I agree with this although we should err on the side of caution when it comes to restricting ideas. I would, for example, like to be able to hear a well-balanced argument in favour of racial discrimination. Not because I agree with it, but because I want to hear it. And to refute it.

The crux of the problem, as far as Spotify is concerned, is whether it should be neutral or partial. Should the medium control the message? Should people be free to tout any ideas they want and see which ones take hold or are companies that allow freedom of speech responsible if that leads to widespread misinformation that ought to be taken down? Moreover, who decides what is misinformation and should be controlled and, effectively, censored, and what is not?

No-one is suggesting that we should ban books because it leaves people free to write rubbish. Yet the character of a company determines who it gives shelter and space to. Is it compatible to have Neil Young and Joe Rogan on the same platform? Young thinks not. Rogan and Spotify are quite prepared to share space with him. Let them all speak and then make up your own mind. Sure, some people will believe anything that fits with their views rather than what is true. Better to let them think what they want and argue dispassionately and convincingly than to try and prevent them from thinking that way in the first place. Freedom should triumph over censorship.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

 

BLACK, WHITE AND GRAY

Jacinda Arderrn, New Zealand
Prime Minister, a country on the
point of banning cigarette buying

New Zealand has gone too far.  That is not I thought I would ever write, thinking of the land of the Kiwis as being a sensible, even slightly dull, country.  Yet the country's government is now proposing a ban on people buying cigarettes.  The law has not been passed yet - and I hope it never is - but it proposes to stop people buying tobacco products if they were born after 2008. 

But not everywhere.  For simplicity I divide substances we consume into black, white and grey:

 

Why am I opposed to this move when I only ever smoke an occasional cigar and have not done so for months?  If all the tobacco in the world disappeared tomorrow (which is what happened in the film Yesterday, along with the Beatles’ songs) I would not be that worried and, although I was sceptical at first of its value, I accept and agree with banning smoking in pubs, restaurants, etc.

1.     Black ones are obviously and immediately toxic, sometimes poisonous, things like cyanide and sulphuric acid, and access to them needs to be strictly controlled for the sake of safety.

2.     White substances are harmless and usually nutritious, food and drink essential for the continuance of life – things like water, basic foodstuffs and oxygen.

3.     Grey substances come last, things we do not absolutely need to survive and which will not kill us immediately but often provide pleasure, yet can also be dangerous and addictive.  

You can classify everything into one of these categories.  Sugar, for example, is grey.  Human beings can – and have – managed without it but many people (myself included) have a sweet tooth and, as the song goes, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.  Yet too much sugar can make you obese, cause your teeth to rot and can possibly cause cancers.

 

No-one is suggesting that we ban putting sugar in tea or coffee, yet most of us accept that it is a good idea to discourage people from consuming too much of it.  Hence government advertising to that effect.  Likewise alcohol.  People ruin their lives by drinking too much but that is not considered a good reason to stop me enjoying a pint of beer, a glass of whisk(e)y* or wine..

 

The one attempt by a country to ban alcohol completely - Prohibition in the USA, which lasted from 1920 to 1933 - is usually accepted as a failure now and actually contributed to the problems caused by drink by encouraging people to consume badly made and unpurified booze because there was no legal control over the production and sale of it.  If it is illegal in the first place there is no way that you can stop the bad stuff being produced and sold.

 

A similar process is happening with soft drugs now, which are gradually being decriminalised in many countries.  The UK lags behind in this process, so scared are the politicians of alienating those newspapers, such as The Daily Mail and The Times, which are dead set against legalising it. The British government is denying itself tax revenue and encouraging crime as a result.

 

Politicians regularly use drugs – residues of cocaine have been detected all over the Palace of Westminster (see here if you doubt this) and a senior figure like Michael Gove has admitted using it – yet they do not allow others to consume it legally and propose ever more draconian punishments for recreational drug users.  The blatant hypocrisy is almost breath-taking.  Don’t do as I do, but do as I say instead in the usual formula.

 

I believe that all drugs should be in classed in the ‘grey’ area.  Whether you take sugar in your tea, enjoy a drink and/or a smoke or inject yourself with mind-altering substances is up to you as an individual and not up to the state.  What you do when you drink, smoke or take drugs, however, needs to be controlled by legislation.  So you cannot drink and drive, smoke near others or operate machinery if you are high, or your concentration is lessened, in any way

 

The other side of the coin of allowing people to decide whether or not they consume these ‘grey’ substances is that they then have to take responsibility if the harmful side-effects come through at a later stage.  If you develop lung cancer or sclerosis of the liver because you have smoked or drunk too much, that is not the fault of the person or company that sells you the stuff but your fault for buying and consuming it in the first place.

 

Buyer beware.  We have all heard the phrase and warnings are plastered on the side of cigarette and cigar packets these days, so no-one can be unaware of the dangers of smoking.  Likewise drinkers are encouraged to ‘Please Drink Responsibly’, that ‘please’ presumably being put there as the drinks industry attempts to keep the code of restraint voluntary, rather than prohibitive, as it has long been for tobacco.

In the USA it is fashionable to sue tobacco companies for selling a product that is addictive.  This results in the absurd situation of executives denying the obvious - that tobacco is addictive - in order not to admit to peddling something potentially dangerous.  Yet all grey substances can be addictive for the simple reason that they provide pleasure.  If an individual decides to go ahead and smoke/drink/take drugs that is their decision and suing a company for enabling them to do so is merely passing the buck.

 

Government prohibition of tobacco is now set to become absolute in New Zealand, the reason being that people from indigenous communities (Maoris) still smoke heavily and need protection from the evils of tobacco.  Yet, by removing the voluntary element from the inevitable reduction of consumption, the country’s government is now trying to move tobacco from the grey to the black category.

I am sure this is wrong. Cigarettes do not kill everyone who smokes.  Healthy people can die from cancer, which is notoriously random in the way it strikes. Sometimes those who abuse their bodies lead long and even healthy lives until they inevitably die  Let them have some fun on the way in their consumption of the grey stuff – as long as they take responsibility for doing so.  

* Whisky is from Scotland. Whiskey comes from the USA, Canada or Ireland, where I am writing.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL READERS WITH HOPE FOR A PANDEMIC FREE 2022

Edwin Lerner

A CATHOLIC CHRISTMAS

 

James Ussher, Bishop of Armagh
(who calculated dates in the Bible)

We will be in Ireland for Christmas this year, so it will probably be a Catholic event.  By one of those quirks of history The Church of Ireland is Protestant while the older Roman Catholic church uses more modern buildings.  Catholics were second class citizens in Ireland for centuries and were not allowed to build their own churches.  Now the boot is on the other foot and, in the South at least, Roman Catholicism is in the ascendancy.  

 

That is not to say that the Catholic church does not have its problems.  While the Anglican church seems to have plenty of applicants for the priesthood – particularly since they have started accepting women – the Catholic church has been beset by sexual scandals and is having difficulty attracting men to become priests, particularly as they are still expected to embrace celibacy in an increasingly sex-obsessed age.

 

We now know that for years Catholic priests satisfied their sexual urges by exploiting children they had power over and could enforce silence from.  Victims of exploitation, however, will not keep quiet any more.  Neither will loyal Catholics turn a blind eye to the ‘housekeepers’ who helped priests satisfy their all-too human needs.  It is no longer a case of ‘hate the sin, love the sinner’ but ‘hate the sin, expose the sinner’.  

Anglicans today are having problems getting people into their congregations while Catholics find it difficult to find men (exclusively) who are prepared to lead their services.  It might make sense to combine the two churches but common sense and religion are not comfortable bedfellows and the tendency as religion declines in importance is for the greater fracturing of churches rather than greater unity.

 

Faith, of course, is not based on reason.  The very word implies accepting something which cannot be demonstrated.  I have a friend who is trying (unsuccessfully) to turn me into a Jehovah’s Witness.  His faith leads him to believe that the Bible is literally true and that one day we will live in a world of plenty rather than the one we are stuck with, which is beset by war, famine and climate change.

 

There was not always this huge gap between science and religion.  Men like the monk Gregor Mendel and the parish priest Gilbert White used their thinking time and powers of observation to make great scientific discoveries.  Even Charles Darwin was set for a career in the church until evolution got in the way.  Together with the geologist Lyell, he showed that the world was much older than the Bible said it was.

 

Another priest, the Irish Protestant Archbishop James Ussher, calculated the age of the earth in the seventeenth century and showed that God had created the world at around six o’clock in the evening of the 24^th October 4004 BC.  I hate sneering at the past, by the way.  Ussher’s was at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge at the time and was the Charles Darwin of his day, even if his exactitude seems charming but unrealistic now.

 

However, you can still find people who believe that the world is just six thousand years old, rather than the four to five billion which the scientific evidence shows it to be.  There is little point in arguing with them.  Belief like this is not based on scientific measurement but on acceptance and no more amount of logic will shake it.  And churches built on blind faith gain more converts than those that accept science. 

 

I think it is a shame that science and religion are now considered enemies rather than allies.  Samuel Coleridge Taylor, who was himself a preacher in the newly created Unitarian Church, said that intelligence was being able to hold two different ideas in your head at the same time.  He also gave us the concept of ‘suspension of disbelief’, the knowledge that something is false but also that it holds a truth inside it.  

 

We know when we go to see a play that the person on the stage is an actor who lives in Hampstead or Hackney (more likely these days) who has a mortgage to pay and possibly a family to support.  He or she is portraying the Prince of Denmark or the Empress of Egypt and we accept that fact and are transported into another world by the power of Shakespeare’s words and by the actor’s performance of them.

 

Something similar is needed for us to embrace religion.  I enjoy singing hymns, reading the Bible and taking communion at church services, not because I believe that the belief system embraced by Christianity is true but because it is good.  This is a way to lead to lead your life that is worthwhile, not an accurate version of how the world – and the universe – was created thousands, millions or billions of years ago.  

 

So, I will continue to cling to a doubtful, sceptical kind of religious belief, not one which provides all the answers.  Science does not provide a reason to get out of bed in the morning, it merely answers factual questions.  While I do not want to ignore or reject the answers given by science, neither do I want to base my life on them.  So, I will stick with the sensible church rather than one based on faith alone.

 

May you have a joyful and - maybe just a slightly religious - Christmas this year.  

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

BOND AND THE BADDIES

Daniel Craig as James Bond 007
(If he looks waxy it is because it is
a model from Madame Tussauds)

According to a recent report, people do not go to the cinema unless there is a fair bit of killing in the film.  We do not fight large scale wars anymore so we watch our killing on screen instead.

A case in point is the latest James Bond film No Time To Die, which we went to the other day.  It is, of course, Daniel Craig's last outing as Bond.  (Inevitable if you watch to the end, but I will not say why and give away the ending.)  Craig offs more bad guys than previous Bonds and is officially the most violent incarnation of the man with a licence to kill, a nonsensical idea which is nevertheless a fundamental part of his identity as shown by that fictional 00 prefix.

Computer programmes tell people who put their money into films that, in order to recoup their investment, lots of people have to be killed on screen.  With interest payments alone at a million pounds a month because of its delayed release, it is hardly surprising that the Bond film ends up being one where an army of anonymous baddies line up to be killed by the hero, usually in a variety of ways, often with him making a pun or quip as he does so.  None of the gunmen think that a concerted rush at the lone saviour of humanity might work but come out one or two at a time, giving him the opportunity to kill them.  And none of them can shoot straight either.

At the same time, war films are increasingly realistic in showing us what it is actually like to kill someone - bloody, messy and long-winded.  I caught a little of Hacksaw Ridge a war film directed by Mel Gibson (who has done his fair share of killing on screen) and it showed just how dangerous and bloody it was to fight in a real war with actual weapons.

Relax, I hear you say, it is only a movie, a few hours entertainment that should not be taken too seriously.  Well, yes, but I often wonder how the chief baddie (who also cannot shoot straight) gets hold of his army of men who are prepared to die for him and the pay-packet he presumably offers them in the end.  There is a section in one of the Austin Powers films, which are spoofs on Bond, in which the families of Powers' victims mourn their loss while he makes terrible puns about how he killed them.  It is the most interesting part of a not always effective satire.

It all started off quite innocently with Craig-Bond learning to kill at the beginning of Casino Royale.  He becomes quite expert and enthusiastic at it by the latest film which follows the formula that, in order to make the world a better place - or simply to save it - you have to kill a bunch of people.  It is a tempting proposition but a huge oversimplification.  People act from all sorts of motives, sometimes in the belied they are doing something worthwhile, sometimes just to pay their bills and make a living.  That these sometimes come with a death penalty attached if they end up on the wrong side of the moral fence is not usually factored into their calculations.

All o this comes at a time when Alec Baldwin is in deep trouble for actually killing someone and wounding someone else on the set of a western he was making.  There is no suggestion that he knew it was loaded with live rounds rather than blank ones but he pulled the trigger in a pretend killing that turned into a real one with a real victim.  Why were a real gun and bullets used rather than fake ones?  Time and an investigation will presumably tell but a pretend killing turning into an actual one shows how reality and fantasy sometimes get mixed up - with fatal results.

Films often have in their credits a note saying that no animals were harmed in its production but that will ring a little hollow if it is appended to Rust, the film Baldwin was making, when two real human beings were injured, one fatally, when he was working on it.  People are bound to ask awkward questions when and if the film is eventually released and will expect answers.

Asking awkward questions is one of the freedoms we fight for when we try to protect freedom and it is one that assorted villains are only too eager to suppress when it comes to gaining world domination, an idea that keeps popping up in James Bond films.  Well, it is not too much of a spoiler to say that he saves the world from domination by the forces of evil in the latest movie. He also has a five year old-daughter who appears in the film.  Bond, however, is about taking life not creating it.  Where, I wonder, do they put the bodies of all the people he kills in his work?

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com 

Edwin Lerner

WAS BOMBING DRESDEN A WAR CRIME?

Guernica by Pablo Picasso (Wiki Commons)
On display at Renia Sofia Museum, Madrid

After the Second World War the Royal Air Force was given a church of its own in London.  You probably know the name of this church from the nursery rhyme:

‘Oranges and Lemons say the bells of Saint Clements.’ 

You can see St Clement Danes as you enter Fleet Street from Westminster.  At the front of the church stand statues of Hugh Dowding, head of Fighter Command and Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris whose nickname indicates clearly what role he played in the war. 

The Queen Mother, who unveiled the statue of Harris, was reportedly upset by the hostility shown to him, the statue having to be protected from vandalism and often covered in graffiti.  She had lived through the Blitz and said that she was glad when Buckingham Palace was bombed as it meant she could look east enders in the face, they having suffered the brunt of the bombing,in reality far worse than anything the royal family had to endure.

Harris was not a diplomatic man and always maintained that the bombing of German cities, which he was well aware would result in the deaths of many civilians, was a justified tactic.  It was practiced by the Germans and would be practiced on them until they finally realised that the war was unwinnable.  I have often called the bombing of Dresden the Hiroshima of Europe, a hammer blow that would convince an opponent that they were beaten, something they had previously refused to concede.

This is not entirely accurate because Dresden was bombed in February 1945 and the Nazis did not surrender until three months later.  The bombing of Hiroshima and later Nagasaki had a more immediate effect in making the Japanese quickly admit defeat.  Both they and the Germans had showed a stubborn determination in continuing to fight a war that had obviously long since been lost.  It was as though Hitler was punishing his people for losing the war, his own suicide finally allowing them to surrender.

This refusal to admit they were fighting for a lost cause meant that allied forces had to work their way slowly and bloodily towards both Berlin and Tokyo, overcoming their enemies and losing lives as they did so.  If you think that the bombing of cities like Dresden and Hiroshima was unforgivable, you would have to be prepared to say to the parents and loved ones of the men who fought that it was possible to end the war quickly but their lives would continue to be lost as it was fought slowly.

I would not be prepared to do that, so I cannot call the bombing of Dresden (or the dropping of the atom bombs) war crimes.  Killing thousands of civilians who were burned to death as bombs rained down on them from above was obviously a horrible thing to do but it effectively saved the lives of the many soldiers who would otherwise have died on the battlefield as they advanced towards the heart of enemy power.  Life is about alternatives not absolutes and this is a choice that I would have made.

It is thought that about 25,000 people were killed at Dresden, a pretty city with a population of about a million.  The Nazis claimed it was ten times that number and described the bombing as mass murder.  If anyone knew about mass murder, it was the Nazis who were shipping millions of Jews as well as gays, gypsies and disabled people off to the gas chambers.  They were the real experts in the process of the wholesale killing of defenceless people.

Although the bombing of towns and cities had begun in the First World War, with the Kaiser initially and rather quaintly forbidding the Luftwaffe from bombing London lest they hit Buckingham Place, it was in 1937 that the Nazis conducted what is still probably their most notorious air raid.  This was during the Spanish Civil War when the Condor Legion bombed a Spanish republican town called Guernica.

Again, an unofficial competition grew up between the victims, who claimed a larger loss of life, and the perpetrators, who estimated a smaller one.  The number was probably around 300, way below that of Dresden or those killed by the atom bombs, which was over 100,000.  The bombing is (in)famous mainly because of Pablo Picasso’s famous painting of it, which was returned to Spain, after democracy was re-established there.  

There is a story that a Nazi confronted Picasso, who was living in Paris during the Second World War, and saw either the painting or a sketch of it in his studio.  The Nazi said, ‘Did you do this?’ (knowing full well that he was the painter) to which the artist coolly replied, ‘No. You did it.’  The implication was that fascists had perpetrated the atrocity while the artist had merely shown the world what they had done.

When it comes to doing, we were bombers as well.  In my tourist guiding days I had an elderly American client who seemed mild-mannered but who quietly admitted to me that he must have been responsible for the death of thousands during his time in Bomber Command when he helped drop bombs on German cities and the helpless citizens down below who had no way of defending themselves.

Blanket bombing of civilians is no longer considered acceptable but it was how war was waged in the twentieth century.  Although it was probably just as dangerous for the men involved, it did not involve the kind of individual gallantry shown by fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain so it did not attract the heroic status the fighters enjoyed. Bombing was not nice but it was necessary and it should not be called a war crime.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

M AND M

Malala Yousafzai - wearing a veil

Irish president Mary McAleese

I am writing this having just returned from Ireland.  The local people extended more goodwill towards us in just over a week than any of our British neighbours have done in years.  This comes from living in a rural location where people are more likely to greet strangers but it is also a part of the Irish character.

You get a good sense of this Irish character by reading Here’s the Story, the memoir of the former Irish president Mary McAleese, which I did while over there.  She was brought up in the north of the country, where I spent most of the first ten years of my life, moved to the south and said that, as president, she would represent all Irish people, Protestant and Catholic, unionist and nationalist, those who considered themselves British first and Irish second and those who thought they were Irish only.

Ireland was divided in two because of the irreconcilability of these two sides.  The British parliament had recognised Ireland’s right to independence in 1914 and said that it would have its own government – something like the Scottish parliament today – but that there was the small matter of defeating Germany in the meantime.

That was not enough for the Irish rebels who, following the old adage that England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity, tried to overthrow British rule by force in the Easter Uprising of 1916.  This was both a total failure and a huge success.  Militarily the Irish rebels were no match for the British army which sailed into Dublin harbour to regain control of the city.  The leaders of the uprising were forced to surrender at the Dublin Post Office and were taken to Kilmainham Gaol where they were executed, thus becoming heroes and martyrs of the Irish freedom movement.

The long and short of this was that Ireland was divided in two a hundred years ago and Mary McAlese, growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland, had plenty of early experience of the resulting sectarian violence.  She, however, had the sense to know that the way to respond to violence is with non-violence and made sure that the men who had terrorised her youth were made to feel part of the peace process once it began.  They were involved in the talks that led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement and she made sure that they were invited when the Queen came to the Irish Republic on a state visit.  The republican movement Sinn Fein boycotted the visit while the Ulster paramilitaries fell over themselves to sit at (or near) the same table as Her Majesty.  

No prizes for guessing who came out of that one better.  The Sinn Fein mayor of Cashel defied his own organisation to greet the Queen when she went there.  He had cancer and only two months to live so he did not care what happened to him.  Sinn Fein realised they had missed the boat and their leader Martin McGuiness later went to Windsor Castle for a state banquet with the queen and McAlese’s successor, Michael Higgins.

As we were in Ireland, Afghanistan fell to the Taliban.  The fact that they took over the country and its capital Kabul with such ease as soon as, almost before, the Americans had withdrawn their troops was both predictable and infuriating.  The promises that Afghanistan would be a safe place for emancipated women and western values seemed like so many empty vacuous promises detached from reality, just the sort of things our Prime Minister Boris Johnson would - and has - said since.

The Taliban shoot and kill teenage girls who have the temerity to try and gain an education.  That is what they did to Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan before her life was saved and she came to Britain with her family, one place where she could hope to live safely.  In Taliban eyes females should not only be covered up and confined to the home but illiterate and permanently pregnant – that or they face death by men brave enough to shoot an unarmed teenage girl.

I have no faith in the promises that the Taliban will change their ways and that they will show compassion and understanding towards the thousands of women who have started to enjoy freedom from oppression.  They can expect as much or as little mercy as the men who worked for the western powers when they held Afghanistan.  

The soldiers who were needed to prop up this version of an enlightened society are leaving now.  That is the problem with occupying a foreign country.  Eventually the men sent abroad get fed up and want to come home.  The occupied may not have the firepower to defeat the occupiers but they just have to wait until the invaders decide to leave because they feel guilty, frustrated or just plain homesick.  The British army eventually left Ireland, the Americans left Vietnam and we are both now abandoning Afghanistan.  The rebels only needed to wait, having nowhere else to go.  

Hope is not lost entirely.  As we found in our time in Ireland, the people are very friendly now that the British are visitors rather than invaders.  Likewise, Vietnam has now adopted a western style economy and shrugged off communism.  It may have been the best means to defeat America but in the end capitalism is more fun to live under than communism (or fundamentalism) and provides a better standard of living.  We can only hope that the people of Afghanistan come to the same conclusion.

Both Mary McAleese in Ireland and Malala Yousafzai have looked down the barrel of a gun held by men who fear female power and independence.  Both survived traumatic events and now represent a version of female emancipation that is not automatically anti-male but recognises the desire and needs of a woman to think for herself.   Here is to them – M and M. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide