Not in the national interest

Posted on 5th March 2022 by 192.168.1.1

“Sir, why all this fuss about Ukraine? Why didn’t anyone make the same fuss about Afghanistan, or Syria, or Yemen? Don’t those people matter?”

The honest answer to the student’s question would have been to say, “No, they don’t,” for the explicit message of European foreign policy is that it is Europeans who matter much more than anyone else. There is no attempt at placing an equivalent value on human lives.

The film Hotel Rwanda was condemned by Romeo Dallaire, commander of the United Nations forces in Rwanda for its “repulsive untruthfulness” in its depiction of the central character, but its dialogue encapsulates a sense of the attitude of the United Nations.

An order comes for the UN to evacuate all Europeans from the country. The UN officer explains to the hotel manager what this means:

Colonel Oliver: You’re dirt. We think you’re dirt, Paul.

Paul: Who is we?

Colonel Oliver: The West. All the super powers. Everything you believe in, Paul. They think you’re dirt. They think you’re dung. You’re worthless!

Paul: I am afraid I don’t understand what you are saying.

Colonel Oliver: Oh, come on, don’t bullshit me, Paul. You’re the smartest man here. You got ’em all eating out of your hands. You could own this frigging hotel, except for one thing: you’re black. You’re not even a nigger. You’re an African. They’re not gonna stay, Paul. They’re not gonna stop this slaughter.

In 1979, in my days as a first year undergraduate at the London School of Economics, David Owen spoke at a student meeting. The British government in which he had been Foreign Secretary had lost power in the general election of the previous May and Owen felt free to express his own views.

“The first duty of the Foreign Secretary”, he asserted, “is to protect the national interest”.

No high principles;, no doing what was right for the sake of it; no asking what is good and what is true; the national interest, plain and simple.  Realpolitik, as Bismarck would have called it.

Perhaps it was always thus, perhaps self interest and profit have always been the determinant of policy; even the religious wars of the Middle Ages, fought for supposed reasons of “faith” were deeply motivated by the belief that if one engaged in such conflicts it would bring tangible temporal as well as eternal rewards.

Genocides may pass in Darfur and in China while the world discusses appropriate responses and a blind eye is turned because anything else would not be in the national interest.

Winston Churchill may have been an heroic figure, but it is the politics of Neville Chamberlain that have triumphed. In 1938, he described the Czechoslovakia crisis as “a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing”.

Even the response to the invasion of Ukraine will ultimately be shaped by David Owen’s dictum.

 

Posted in This sceptred isle | Leave a comment

In solitary

Posted on 3rd March 2022 by 192.168.1.1

The billboard always caught my eye. The poster pictured an old man sitting alone in a house and the caption said, “After three days without seeing a single person, the last thing that he wants is some “me” time.”

Perhaps it was an advertisement for an age-related charity, perhaps it had been placed by a government agency. Whatever its origin, the poster seemed to capture an essence of a feeling of loneliness. It is loneliness where one is aware of being alone, it is not a solitude that has been chosen, but an isolation that has been accepted out of necessity.

Friday has become a day to dread. It means the arrival of the weekend and at least one day in which there will probably be no-one else to see. The joy around me at it being Friday afternoon is not reflected by any inner sense of happiness. Of course, there is a football match to attend tomorrow night, but then there was a football match to which I went on Monday night.

No matter how bad the day has been in school, and some of them are very difficult, a day at school is better than a day of solitariness. There will be chat, banter, a sense of purpose, a sense of being part of something, a sense of trying to achieve something.

The prospect of having to retire in eight years’ time, when I am 70, is one that is truly appalling. I tried to explain to a colleague today how difficult I would find it not going to work each day, not having the rhythm of routine, timetables, calendars, rotas. The worst thing of all would not be seeing people. I sent the staff an email at Christmas saying what a delight it was to be with them, I sincerely meant every word I wrote.

My supervisor for my doctoral studies has written extensively on solitude and there would perhaps be benefit in reading some of his work. Perhaps there is a possibility of turning a negative sense of loneliness into a positive sense of solitude. Perhaps.

It is not that I cannot find plenty to do at the weekends. Sometimes there will be two sporting fixtures to attend.  There will be lunch with my son.  There will be shopping and washing and ironing. If I get out of bed, there will be Mass to attend. On top of which, there should be at least ten hours of academic reading and writing.

It is not a lack of activity. It is just the emptiness at the end of the day.

Posted in The stuff of daily life | Leave a comment

Worried by Kooks

Posted on 2nd March 2022 by 192.168.1.1

John Creedon played David Bowie’s Kooks. It seemed unsettling.

David Bowie belonged to a different world, a world that seemed strange and threatening. It is odd that someone who was the antithesis of violence seemed to have such a capacity to disturb.

Kooks came from a 1971 album called Hunky Dory. I would have been ten years old when the album was released. It was an album that would have been among the collections of some of the boys at school, some of whom would have had listening tastes beyond their years to be buying such records.

The most troubling aspect of Bowie was the next album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. The album cover, a street scene at night, had about it an ominous air, it seemed menacing.

It was incomprehensible to a twelve year old boy.  Why could he not sing songs about things that were ordinary, things that were within the ken of someone who had grown up in a small village deep within rural England?

Of course, there was the absurd an unspoken fear that creatures from Mars had a more corporeal reality, that they were not just something within the lyrics of a song. Warminster, in our neighbouring county of Wiltshire, was said to be the UFO capital of the country. The prospect of an encounter with aliens caused a deep sense of fear that could not be articulated if I were not to be thought mad by those around me.

And there was something more about Bowie. His hair and mode of dress were altogether other from the traditional and the conservative with which I was familiar. Of course, there was no threat implicit in the garish outfits and the extravagant colours of the make up and the hairstyles, it was just that they were different.

If the child is the father of the man, then the fears and anxieties of those times become internalized, they become lodged deep within the memory, lingering there unremembered until there is some catalyst that brings a sudden shiver-inducing recollection.

There was a moment’s inclination to turn off the radio and to drive on in silence, but thoughts that arise cannot be unthought.

The song passed and John Creedon continued with his programme.

The likelihood of encountering Kooks again is slim. If there were to be a next time, the song’s capacity to prompt an irrational sense of apprehension would be much reduced.

Posted in Unreliable memories | 6 Comments

Long words

Posted on 27th February 2022 by 192.168.1.1

My all-time favourite piece of theological reflection comes not from a book, nor from a film, nor from a television programme, nor from any sermon or meditation I might have heard. Instead, it comes from a poster I first saw on the door of the room of a fellow theological student in the mid-1980s.

Many variants of the poster can now be found online, but none for me would have the impact of that first reading of the lines when walking down the college corridor one afternoon:

Jesus said unto them: Who do you say that I am?

And they replied: ‘You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our interpersonal relationship.’

And Jesus said: ‘What?’

I have never stopped to consider the content of the answer that was given to Jesus’ question. The answer may be coherent, but it does seem to contain some unlikely combinations of terms. However, not having read any theology for some time, I have to say I don’t know whether it makes sense.

It is Jesus’ answer that always makes me smile.  It is a contemporary equivalent of the short answers he would sometimes have given in the Gospel stories to those who confronted him with theological challenges. It is the sort of answer that could be disarming to someone who set out to impress with their words. How would you recover after Jesus said “what?” in response to your attempt at sounding learned and at being profound?

The poster probably expressed the feelings that many of us felt as we struggled to cope with academic theology. There was one writer whose work was so difficult to understand that I started counting how many words were in each sentence. I remember there were one hundred and fifty-six words in one sentence, more than a few of which I did not understand.

At school we were taught not to commence when we could begin and not to begin when we could start, it seemed a wise piece of advice. There seemed little point in clouding communication or causing confusion.

I remember once being told at a communications conference that The Sun newspaper had a working vocabulary of around nine hundred words which journalists were expected to use in imaginative and inventive ways.

Trying to write a paper on ontology and epistemology, I wondered how Jesus would have defined them.

Posted in The stuff of daily life | 2 Comments

Child careless

Posted on 25th February 2022 by 192.168.1.1

The little boys were perhaps three and four years old. Sure of foot and determined to go their own way, they ran from the tarmac path towards the park’s playground. The sun was shining on a mild spring morning and the swings and slides of the playground seemed to exercise a magnetic pull on them.

The tranquility of the day was disturbed by the shouts of the woman with them. “Daniel, come here! Daniel, I said we weren’t going to the playground.”

The younger of the boys continued his run towards the gateway of the fence that enclosed the playground. The older boy, presumably Daniel, stopped and turned back to face the woman, who had not left the path.

“I told you that we were not going to the playground. I told you we could not go there until we found Hannah. We have lost Hannah and we need to find her.”

Walking on, thinking about the conversation, there was a sense of alarm.

Who was Hannah? Was she a sister of the boys? Was she an older sibling whose determination matched that of her younger brothers?

If Hannah had to be found, she could not be very old. Hannah was not thought to be someone who might find her own way to find the woman and the boys at the playground.

Was Hannah perhaps six or seven years old? Was she somewhere in the park by herself?

The woman and the boys set off in the direction from which I had come. Perhaps the woman knew where to find Hannah. Perhaps Hannah was not in the park at all. Perhaps the woman’s words were simply a ruse to persuade the boys not to delay at the playground. Perhaps the woman had other things to do and wanted to hurry them along.

Doing the shopping, reflecting on the encounter, there seemed two possible conclusions. One was that Hannah had actually been lost, but how careless does one have to be to lose a little girl in a park? The other conclusion was that Hannah was not lost but that the suggestion of their sister being lost was a way in which the woman controlled the behaviour of the boys. Neither of the conclusions suggested very good child caring skills.

The most alarming thought was that the woman might not have been the mother of the boys, but a child minder who had been entrusted with their care.

Imagine going to work and someone not knowing where your daughter had gone.

 

Posted in Out and about | 3 Comments