Sacrifice?

Sacrifice?

Can we just say to all the politicians who pompously intone the word “sacrifice” over the freshly dead bodies of Australian soldiers:

 

BULLSHIT!
WEASEL!
UNSPEAK!

 

Rudd

“ His sacrifice will not be forgotten.”

Turnbull:

“ All Australians are indebted for this, the greatest of sacrifices in our name.”

Let’s be really clear.

They didn’t “SACRIFICE”.

Sacrifice requires an intention. Death wasn’t their intention. Their intention was to stay alive.

To sacrifice is, roughly literally, to perform a sacred rite.

There was nothing ritual about the Australian soldier being killed in Afghanistan yesterday. Nor was there anything ‘sacred’.

Soldiers don’t “sacrifice”.

They get killed,

blasted,

blown to pieces,

in an obscenity we call war.

Blood splatters everywhere.

Pieces of shattered bone, skull, leg, liver, brain fly around.

Soldiers scream and groan in agony before they lose consciousness and leave their families without a husband or wife, father or mother, son or daughter, or friend.

To glorify and sanitise this as “sacrifice” is a willful, disingenuous and deliberate misrepresentation of the truth and an abomination in the language.

It is an attempt to make death in war acceptable or even good, somehow holy and blessed instead of admitting the horror, the awful, the dreadful, truth that people who have actually been there almost invariably describe — if they have words they can even bring themselves to speak.

Instead of being honest, the politicians go on to stitch the poor dead soldier onto the false myths of the faded, fraying, Anzac fabric.

“ He was a fine and courageous soldier in the great Anzac tradition,” Mr Rudd said.

And when they show images on television, they show PR footage of the Aussies dashing around with their rifles and hi-tech helmets being macho.

They never show pictures of their guts being sprayed everywhere.

Then there is the other nonsense.

At a time like this thoughts, prayers, condolences and sympathies are thick in the air like a flock of pigeons on crystal meth.

Rudd:

“ On behalf of the Australian government I extend my condolences to the family of this soldier, his friends and to his loved ones.” The thoughts and prayers of the entire nation were with the soldier’s family at this most difficult time, he said. “I would like to convey my deepest sympathy to his loved ones,” he said.

Mr Rudd and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull have extended sympathies to the soldier’s family.

Turnbull:

“ The thoughts and prayers of all Australians are with the soldier’s family.”

Air Chief Marshal Houston:

“ On behalf of our nation and the Australian Defence Force, I convey our deepest sympathies to his loved one.”

Our question is:

when the PM sends, conveys, or “extends” his thoughts, prayers, sympathies and condolences to us, how exactly do they get here?

How can we tell they have arrived?

What do they look like?

Should we keep the wrapping paper?

How big are they – will they all fit in my sock drawer?

If they are “deepest” sympathies, do I need a bigger drawer?

When someone’s “heart goes out” to us, do we have to have a special jar to keep it in?

What actually are these things?

What do they mean?

What actual value are they to us?

How much did they cost?

The answer to the last four questions are:

nothing,

nothing,

fuckall

fucking nothing.

Talk is cheap and mealy-mouthed words and pompous forms of words are empty and meaningless.

So, for a politician, the price is right.

They serve the speaker, not the supposed recipient who gets precisely nothing in fact. But at least the PM looks and sounds good and solemn and, who knows, might be a slightly better chance for re-election one day.

And by the way, how can Houston speak on behalf of “Our Nation”? The answer is, he can’t. The nation is not defined by the military. Neither his authority nor his remit extend beyond the military. He is unelected and cannot speak for anyone except his constituency, much as he might feel moved to by the occasion.

 

 

SECOND THOUGHTS

This cynical, political treatment of real human sadness is, we think, an example of what we like to call “Flashcard Politics”. The masters of this technique are Obama’s media team (greek columns, Lincoln monument, cheap emotional triggers etc. covering up the same old same old).

Rudd and his writers do it without shame

 

Kev’s Massive Package

Kev’s Massive Package

 

It takes Balls to Punish the Jobless

 

The thing about the unemployed is that, well, they’re powerless; or rather, they’re disempowered, particularly by the feeling of being unemployed in a culture in which what you do, not to mention how much you make, pretty much defines who you are and what you’re worth.

On top of that they’re disempowered by the restrictions of poverty – the limitations on food (especially healthy food) and travel.

Unemployed people in Australia are placed by government and its proxies, the Job Networks and ancillary services, under stricter control orders and behavioural requirements than the most oppressed employed people.

What has to be understood is that unemployment in Australia is not so much a political, nor an economic, issue as it is a moral issue.

Unemployed people are suffering.

> Suffering is punishment.

> Punishment is retribution for sin.

> Therefore:    > The unemployed have only themselves to blame.

As my (thankfully ex)-father-in-law would have said, “If they want a job why don’t they just bloodywell get off their arse and go out and get one?”

The unemployed are not just lazy; they’re devious in their determination to avoid work.

Because unemployment is a moral issue and the jobless are immoral (obviously) the attitude towards them and treatment of them by the employment service industry is justified.

The patronising and sometimes almost bullying attitudes of (some , not all)  “case managers” towards the trapped victims — off whose misfortune they feed — is justified by their demonstrated inferiority.

And so it was easy for Rudd and the rest of the increasingly hideously Howard-like government to “overlook” the unemployed in their gladhanding stimulation. They’ve got no power, no comeback and no voice.

If anyone needs a boost, it’s the unemployed.

Those who participate in work for the dole activities receive a fortnightly income boost of … $20.80. This is supposed to compensate them for the additional transport costs required by their attendance up to four days a week and any additional costs associated with travelling to interviews up to 90 minutes away. At a maximum of $1.30 each way for a full-time work for the dole participant, you can see how very generous this feels for people who are struggling to both pay rent and eat food in the same week.

If Rudd wants a bit of instant stimulation, if he wants the money he provides to go immediately into the ‘economy’ rather than being saved and hoarded, then if he gives it to the unemployed it won’t even touch the sides.

Kevin is aware of the problem (the electoral problem, anyway) with the punishment of the jobless his massive package means.

“ The Prime Minister said yesterday the next COAG meeting would develop a plan to deal with 300,000 more people who would be out of work by 2010, in a dramatic upward revision of the unemployment figures that means an extra 100,000 people jobless by June.

“At the top of our agenda we’ll be dealing with the whole question of the problem of unemployment, the problem of labour market programs, the proper co-ordination of commonwealth and state labour market programs … in the most seamless and sophisticated way possible,” Mr Rudd said yesterday.

As the Government tries to create 90,000 jobs in labour-intensive industries across the nation – building schools and homes to slow the expected rise in unemployment – the latest economic and fiscal outlook predicts joblessness will surge to 7 per cent in 2009-10, up from 4.5 per cent at present.

So far the Government has provided no additional assistance for those without jobs, promising it will have more to say on labour market programs in coming weeks. Welfare groups are angry that the unemployed received none of the handouts in Tuesday’s stimulus package, and the dole was kept at its current level. Mr Rudd said he and Employment Minister Julia Gillard had been looking at options to help the unemployed but had not made a final decision.

“We’re going through a whole range of options, dealing with kids just coming out of the school system who are going to find it difficult entering the labour market, dealing with the challenge of people who are in jobs who may lose their jobs, the geographical concentration of that, the adequacy of the information flow, and the adequacy of supporting labour market programs for all the above, and the existing social security network as well,” the Prime Minister said.

Yes, Rudd is going to do what he has always done. Develop a plan, have more to say later, look at options, assess information flow, manage programs, make a ‘final decision’ in the fullness of time.

Sounds a lot like Peter Garrett, doesn’t it.

The jobless don’t really care how shiny the solution is. They don’t really care whether or not it’s bureaucratically-acceptably seamless, shiny and ‘sophisticated’. The Rudd government — like many before it, it’s true — is hopelessly out of touch with the reality of human experience. But then, you can’t expect more from a Sirhumphreybot MkII.

The trouble for Uncle Kev is that giving money to the supposedly profligate, the wasteful, the idle, the smelly, the drug-raddled, the diseased, the incompetent, the incontinent – the, you know, unemployed – is not electorally attractive and they won’t suffer too much backlash from the good voters – the, you know, employed. Not until there are so many unemployed and pissed-off voters that they might look like losing an election.

The sleaze of the government, the proof that it is politicking all around this, was shown in the interview, with Albanese we think, where the subject of the disenfranchising of the unemployed from the Big Splurge was brought up. The Minister claimed that the unemployed had not been left out. They would benefit, he said, from the job creation efforts that would flow from increased infrastructure spending. This on a day when unemployment is supposed to be about four and a half percent and is expected to grow to over seven per cent over the next year.

Explain again to us how the unemployed are going to benefit from job creation schemes which will at best only slightly slow the increase in unemployment.

If you imagine that the Turnbull Costello party would be any better, you haven’t been around much, have you.

They are unremittingly awful.

Just awful.

The only thing still in Kevin Rudd’s favour is that he is not them.

Not quite.

Not yet.

The coalition’s only role, as they say, may be to serve as a warning to others.

Heather Ridout wants the unemployed to be trained up in readiness for the boom times that will follow the recession [SORRY – REALLY VERY SORRY. SORRY.]

The unemployed ALREADY get trained all the time. All sorts of programs; for example: how to write an application letter that looks exactly like all the others (and tells exactly the same lies and is full of precisely the same bullshit) to an employer who is considering two hundred other identical applications, and is totally over it. For instance.

Hundreds of thousands of Australians are already being trained for jobs that simply don’t exist and won’t for a long time.

In fact, the boom industry for the next few years is going to be … TRAINING!

Wait!

That’s the magical solution!

An endless loop of the unemployed employed to train each other to train each other.

Get your Cert IV now!

 

 

Happy Birthday

Happy Birthday

Today was a dual anniversary – the 221st anniversary of the birth of (European) Australia and the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robbie Burns.

The two are related. Burns was a fierce advocate of Enlightenment principles and the fight for the rights of citizens against the arrogated and entrenched power of aristocracy, royalty and privilege. The result of the fight of which he was a part is the democracy which we enjoy here in Australia and in all other liberal democracies.

If we want to keep our freedoms and our rights we need to remember how very recently that fight was fought and how many try to subvert them and take ownership of them and even simply fail to understand them – most recently, in this country, various members and operatives of the Howard government (Ruddock, Andrews, Keelty for instance) and even of the NSW Iemma government; in the US, Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez, Ashcroft, Card. The appalling Yoo of course.

 

As we mentioned in a previous post,

“ Burns himself could have been transported to Botany Bay, as fellow Scots Thomas Muir, Thomas Palmer and William Skirving were in 1794.

Muir escaped in 1796 on an American ship which had been sent to rescue him. He fled to France, still in the midst of its Revolution. America had only recently won its own independence from Britain.

In France Muir worked with the famous Thomas Paine who had agitated for American Independence. Paine famously wrote “Common Sense” and “The Rights of Man – a guide to the ideas of the Enlightenment”.

(Muir had been a student of John Millar, Scottish philosopher and historian and author of “The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks; or, An Inquiry into the Circumstances which give rise to Influence and Authority in the Different Members of Society [1771]¹). ”

According to Wikipedia,

“ The Scottish Enlightenment was … characterised by an outpouring of intellectual and scientific accomplishments…

Sharing the humanist and rationalist outlook of the European Enlightenment of the same time period, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment asserted the fundamental importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority which could not be justified by reason…The Scottish Enlightenment had effects far beyond Scotland itself, not only because of the esteem in which Scottish achievements were held in Europe and elsewhere, but also because its ideas and attitudes were carried across the Atlantic as part of the Scottish diaspora which had its beginnings in that same era.

Here is the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.

 

2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

 

3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.

 

4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.

 

5. Law can only prohibit such actions as are hurtful to society. Nothing may be prevented which is not forbidden by law, and no one may be forced to do anything not provided for by law.

 

6. Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents

 

7. No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by law. Any one soliciting, transmitting, executing, or causing to be executed, any arbitrary order, shall be punished. But any citizen summoned or arrested in virtue of the law shall submit without delay, as resistance constitutes an offense.

 

8. The law shall provide for such punishments only as are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one shall suffer punishment except it be legally inflicted in virtue of a law passed and promulgated before the commission of the offense.

 

9. As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner’s person shall be severely repressed by law.

 

10. No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views, provided their manifestation does not disturb the public order established by law.

 

11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.

 

12. The security of the rights of man and of the citizen requires public military forces. These forces are, therefore, established for the good of all and not for the personal advantage of those to whom they shall be intrusted.

 

13. A common contribution is essential for the maintenance of the public forces and for the cost of administration. This should be equitably distributed among all the citizens in proportion to their means.

 

14. All the citizens have a right to decide, either personally or by their representatives, as to the necessity of the public contribution; to grant this freely; to know to what uses it is put; and to fix the proportion, the mode of assessment and of collection and the duration of the taxes.

 

15. Society has the right to require of every public agent an account of his administration.

16. A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all.

 

17. Since property is an inviolable and sacred right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity, legally determined, shall clearly demand it, and then only on condition that the owner shall have been previously and equitably indemnified.

Not a bad start.

Robbie Burns put it in a nutshell:

To crouch in the train of mere stupid wealth and greatness . . .

I hold to be prostitution in anyone that is not born a slave. 

Happy Birthday Robbie. (And colonial Australia)

 

Only Thus?

Only Thus?

 

Let’s get one or two things clear:

  1. We are not against Jewish people in general.
  2. We are opposed to the actions of some individuals in particular.
  3. We are not opposed to their religion in particular.
  4. We are opposed to all religious belief (except, of course, the Flying Spaghetti Monster) in general, all religious practice and especially all religious coercion.
  5. We are not opposed to the State of Israel.
  6. We are opposed to some Israeli politicians, apparatchiks and apologists, their actions and their dishonesty.
  7. We are not pro-Hamas or pro-Palestinian
  8. …except in the sense that we are pro-humanity and pro-human beings.
  9. We are opposed to the killing and harming and exploitation of human beings by any person or any group in the pursuit of political agendas.

So that said…

There is an Israeli election coming up. Tzipi Livni is up against Netanyahu.

Also, George Bush, well-known for being the easy pushover for American Zionists, is about to be stop being President.

Livni has had one last window of opportunity. And, coincidentally enough, she is now claiming that the “Gaza job” is almost complete. Just in time to be over for Obama’s inauguration.

So who is Tzipi Livni? [Most of this from Wikipedia]

Tzipi Livni is a child of the Jewish struggle for a homeland, the daughter of Eitan Livni (born in Poland) and Sara Rosenberg, both prominent former Irgun members.

Irgun was a militant Zionist group that operated in Palestine between 1931 and 1948. It was established as a militant offshoot of the earlier and larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah.

The Irgun was the armed expression of the nascent ideology of Revisionist Zionism founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky. He expressed this ideology as

“every Jew had the right to enter Palestine; only active retaliation would deter the Arabs and the British; only Jewish armed force would ensure the Jewish state”.

Some of the better-known attacks by Irgun were the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946 [killing 92 people] and the Deir Yassin massacre (accomplished together with the Stern Gang) on 9 April 1948.

In the West, Irgun was described as a terrorist organization by The New York Times newspaper, The Times of London, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry, and prominent world and Jewish figures, such as Winston Churchill, Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, and many others.

Irgun attacks prompted a formal declaration from the World Zionist Congress in 1946, which strongly condemned “the shedding of innocent blood as a means of political warfare”.

Irgun was a political predecessor to Israel’s right-wing Herut (or “Freedom”) party, which led to today’s Likud party. [And Kadima, Livni’s party, is a splinter from Likud.]

“ The symbol of the Irgun, with the motto “Only Thus” alongside a hand holding a rifle in the foreground of all of mandatory Palestine (both sides of the Jordan River), symbolized the striving for Hebrew independence over the entire land of Israel, to be achieved only by the power of Hebrew weapons.

In 1948, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other prominent American Jews signed a Godwin’s-Law-compliant letter that began:

“ Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.

Soon after World War II, Winston Churchill said “we should never have stopped immigration before the war”, but that the Irgun were “the vilest gangsters” and that he would “never forgive the Irgun terrorists.”

Are we drawing too long a bow, or is the spirit of Irgun alive in Israel today?

The Times:

“ British anger at terror celebration

July 20, 2006

The commemoration of Israeli bombings that killed 92 people has caused offence.

The rightwingers, including Binyamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister, are commemorating the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the headquarters of British rule, that killed 92 people and helped to drive the British from Palestine.

In 2006, Simon McDonald, the British Ambassador in Tel Aviv at the time, and John Jenkins, the Consul-General in Jerusalem at the time, wrote in response to a pro-Irgun commemoration of the King David Hotel bombing:

“ We do not think that it is right for an act of terrorism, which led to the loss of many lives, to be commemorated.”

They also called for the removal of plaques at the site which blame the deaths on “ignored warning calls.” The plaques read:

“ For reasons known only to the British, the hotel was not evacuated,”

but McDonald and Jenkins asserted that no such warning calls were made, adding that even if they had,

“ this does not absolve those who planted the bomb from responsibility for the deaths.”

It is hard to think that Livni’s politics are not deeply influenced by her family’s past and by the history, politics and culture of Irgun. There are scarily striking echoes here. To Livni and the Israelis, Palestinians who act militarily for what they believe are their rights are “terrorists” who, along with their children and families, need to be shot, bombed and killed. Israelis, in stark contrast, are “freedom fighters” whose deeds deserve commemoration.

Livni this week blamed the Palestinians for their own deaths, for the very same reason that her political forbears blamed the Brtitish for their deaths at the King David Hotel 62 years ago: the Palestinians had been phoned to warn them that their homes were about to be bombed. It was up to them to evacuate. Ah, yes. The good old game of “blame the victim”.

How would Israelis react if people said of the Holocaust, “Well, you know, you have only yourselves to blame. If you weren’t jewish….” Of course they’d be outraged, and rightly.

“ A military spokeswoman, Maj. Avital Leibovich, said Monday that the army had “no intention of harming civilians.”

The height of the disingenuousness of the Israelis comes in saying they don’t “intend” to kill civilians, while knowing that they certainly will, and proposing that, since they didn’t ‘intend’ the inevitable casualties they will certainly cause, they are not therefore accountable for them. In fact they go further and sheet the responsibility home to Hamas. Or accident. In this way, of course, they kill and maim any number of innocents without, supposedly, troubling their conscience at all. The Israelis seem to be proposing that ‘lack of intention’ is exculpatory. It is not.

Whether they ‘intend’ the deaths of innocent civilians or not, the Israelis are responsible for them and accountable for them. Their squirming avoidance of responsibility and their refusal to admit blindingly obvious agency is the real awfulness in the matter and the true indication of the national character flaw. Not to mention their retreat behind the magic mirror of the past — you know, the one that makes everyone who looks into it turn into an anti-semite at the slightest suggestion of criticism of their ruthless, immoral, bloodthirsty 21st century politicians.

The awfulness doesn’t stop there. Israeli spokesperson, sleazy — and unfortunately and shamefully Australian — Mark Regev, said wtteo “we are sorry a UN truckdriver was killed. We don’t know if Hamas was operating in that area on that day and the UN trucks got accidentally caught in the crossfire, but it is terrible that they were”, sliding from barely plausible scenario to probable fact in the course of a single sentence.

All the people who have acted to shed blood, or failed to act to stop it – Israelis, Hamas, Bush, Tony The Fixer Blair, the UN – must be called to account for the consequences of their actions and inaction, particularly given their sleazy attempts to avoid accountability.

The greatest lie may have been that told by Condolleeza Rice, that a ceasefire was desirable but that it must be sustainable and must include disarming Hamas.

No! That is not what was required.

What was required was for Israel to stop killing people.

That’s all.

Stop killing innocent people, children, babies, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. The rest can be worked out later. It’s like someone saying, “The Indians are attacking, they’re firing arrows at us. Quick, find some wood and nail it across the windows,” and you say, “No, no, if you’re going to alter the appearance of the windows first we need to discuss colour, and call in the interior decorator to make sure it’s done nice. And I want frilly curtains.”

Just stop killing each other. That is not difficult. At all.

The stupidity of the Israeli action in Gaza is that it is blindingly obvious that it ensures that hostility towards Israel and Israeli citizens is perpetuated and increased and not just amongst Palestinians.

Anti-Israeli feeling is growing globally. People are impatient with Israel’s politicians. They are over its immature tantrums, its childish emotions and bullying excesses.

The Israelis have lost much of the grassroots international support they had and it is going to be increasingly difficult in the future for liberal-democratic regimes around the world, – or even America – to carry their populations with a pro-Israeli stance.

But surely that is not what Israelis want – permanently to play the role of self-inflicted victimhood.

If the Israelis should listen to anyone, I plead with them, listen to the great souls amongst you, past and present.

Listen to Daniel Barenboim. Watch what he does; see how he reconciles Israeli and Palestinian. Hear what he says and listen to the music he makes with his Israeli/Palestinian, West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

 

 

UPDATE:

Oops! Wonder what Regev (née Freiberg) will say about the Israeli shelling of the UN compound in Gaza. How will he blame Hamas for this one? Will it be another case of crossfire or did the gunner swallow a muslim-sympathising fly just as he was pressing the button?

Israeli Defence Minister, Ehud Barak, said it was a “grave mistake” and he took it “very seriously”. He assured Ban Ki-Moon that “extra attention” will be paid to U.N. facilities and staff and this will not be repeated.”

Unfortunately the Israeli track record is not good on the “never again” scale. They killed the UN truckdriver just the other day, and during their glorious fight against Lebanon recently, remember they shelled a UN observation post killing at least two UN officials.

“Oops, sorry, I’ll try not to do it again,” isn’t really good enough, is it.

Pinter

Pinter

Study of Pinter by Reginald Gray, 2007

Vale! you grumpy old genius

10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008

 

An enormous loss to literature, the stage, the arts, to humanity and to breaking all the rules.

We think the best way we can to express our gratitude and to honour his life is to share his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech; the video and the transcript:

Art, Truth & Politics

“ 
In 1958 I wrote the following:
‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did.

Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image. I shall give two examples of two lines which came right out of the blue into my head, followed by an image, followed by me.

The plays are The Homecoming and Old Times. The first line of The Homecoming is ‘What have you done with the scissors?’ The first line of Old Times is ‘Dark.’

In each case I had no further information.

In the first case someone was obviously looking for a pair of scissors and was demanding their whereabouts of someone else he suspected had probably stolen them. But I somehow knew that the person addressed didn’t give a damn about the scissors or about the questioner either, for that matter.

‘Dark’ I took to be a description of someone’s hair, the hair of a woman, and was the answer to a question. In each case I found myself compelled to pursue the matter. This happened visually, a very slow fade, through shadow into light.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.

In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), ‘Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don’t you buy a dog? You’re a dog cook. Honest. You think you’re cooking for a lot of dogs.’ So since B calls A ‘Dad’ it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn’t know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.

‘Dark.’ A large window. Evening sky. A man, A (later to become Deeley), and a woman, B (later to become Kate), sitting with drinks. ‘Fat or thin?’ the man asks. Who are they talking about? But I then see, standing at the window, a woman, C (later to become Anna), in another condition of light, her back to them, her hair dark.

It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man’s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort.

So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, perhaps, occasionally, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In my play The Birthday Party I think I allow a whole range of options to operate in a dense forest of possibility before finally focussing on an act of subjugation.

Mountain Language pretends to no such range of operation. It remains brutal, short and ugly. But the soldiers in the play do get some fun out of it. One sometimes forgets that torturers become easily bored. They need a bit of a laugh to keep their spirits up. This has been confirmed of course by the events at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad. Mountain Language lasts only 20 minutes, but it could go on for hour after hour, on and on and on, the same pattern repeated over and over again, on and on, hour after hour.

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves, dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there, either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections, floating; the woman a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.

But as they died, she must die too.

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

But before I come back to the present I would like to look at the recent past, by which I mean United States foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. I believe it is obligatory upon us to subject this period to at least some kind of even limited scrutiny, which is all that time will allow here.
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the US crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States’ actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America’s favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as ‘low intensity conflict’. Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued – or beaten to death – the same thing – and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in US foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

The tragedy of Nicaragua was a highly significant case. I choose to offer it here as a potent example of America’s view of its role in the world, both then and now.

I was present at a meeting at the US embassy in London in the late 1980s.

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: ‘Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity.’

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer.’ There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: ‘But in this case ‘innocent people’ were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?’

Seitz was imperturbable. ‘I don’t agree that the facts as presented support your assertions,’ he said.

As we were leaving the Embassy a US aide told me that he enjoyed my plays. I did not reply.

I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: ‘The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.’
The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about ‘a tapestry of lies’ which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a ‘totalitarian dungeon’. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. ‘Democracy’ had prevailed.

But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’, as in the sentence, ‘I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.’

It’s a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it’s very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US.

The United States no longer bothers about low intensity conflict. It no longer sees any point in being reticent or even devious. It puts its cards on the table without fear or favour. It quite simply doesn’t give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain.

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days — conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what’s called the ‘international community’. This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be ‘the leader of the free world’. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally — a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anaesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticise our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You’re either with us or against us. So Blair shuts up.

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading — as a last resort — all other justifications having failed to justify themselves — as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they’re interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don’t exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. ‘We don’t do body counts,’ said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. ‘A grateful child,’ said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. ‘When do I get my arms back?’ he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn’t holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you’re making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm’s way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda:

‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.
Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.
And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!*

Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda’s poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as ‘full spectrum dominance’. That is not my term, it is theirs. ‘Full spectrum dominance’ means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don’t quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity — the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons — is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government’s actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force – yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man’s man.

‘God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden’s God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam’s God was bad, except he didn’t have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don’t chop people’s heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don’t you forget it.’
A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection — unless you lie — in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.

I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called ‘Death’.

Where was the dead body found?
Who found the dead body?
Was the dead body dead when found?
How was the dead body found?
Who was the dead body?
Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?
Was the body dead when abandoned?
Was the body abandoned?
By whom had it been abandoned?
Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey?
What made you declare the dead body dead?
Did you declare the dead body dead?
How well did you know the dead body?
How did you know the dead body was dead?
Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror — for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man.

 

________________________________________
© THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2005

* Extract from “I’m Explaining a Few Things” translated by Nathaniel Tarn, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, published by Jonathan Cape, London 1970. Used by permission of The Random House Group Limited.

Now LOOK ….

Now LOOK ….

 

 Not this bloody time

 

W e have held it in for a very long time but today was the last straw.

For seeming ages journalists have been describing people who defend themselves against legal allegations, or who mount arguments against legal charges, as “defending the charges”. This form of words actually means that they are supporting the charges, arguing for the charges, defending the charges from attack.

It makes as much sense as saying that someone who protects themselves while being mugged is “defending the mugging”.

Now, you know…we’ve put up with it. We’ve sucked it up. We know English is a “living language” and that the education leaders in Australia succumbed to whacky theories and utterly abdicated their responsibility in the 80s, which has led to spiralling, terminal dumbing down and trashing of the language, and that today’s young reporters are, unavoidably, products of an awful and ignorant 80s education and we all just have to learn to live with it. We know that. We can pretend to be okay with that.

We almost didn’t blow our coffee to the other side of the room when we heard even Jennifer Byrne on First Tuesday Book Club talk about someone being “Nobelled” a few of months ago. That’s even worse than an athlete “medalling”. [What is wrong with “winning a medal”, except for how “cool” it makes a sports jock feel to say “medalling”?] We can pretend we didn’t hear that ugliness for whole minutes at a time.

BUT WE BLOODY WON’T TAKE THIS ONE LYING DOWN!!!!

Some bloody policeman told journalists today, after a pair of rottweilers had attacked a woman in the street, that “we’ve infringed the owner”. But you can’t “infringe a person”; you can only infringe their rights. You can infringe a law, say, or a moral standard. We think he meant that the owner had committed an infringement of the law and that he had therefore been served with an Infringement Notice.

Well, we’ll bloody tell you what you’ve bloody infringed, you knucklehead! You’ve bloody infringed our bloody right to hear people in responsible positions use the bloody language correctly, and with some respect, you ignorant bloody bonehead!

Aaaah…..That’s better…..