Palestine through the perceptive eyes of novelist Selma Dabbagh

Out of It

By Selma Dabbagh

Pubs. Bloomsbury  Pbck £7.99  (2012)

312pps

Palestine from a Palestinian persepective does not receive the coverage it deseerves. This novel goes some way in addressing that deficit. It is one of those rare birds: a good political novel. First published in 2011, now, gratifyingly published in paperback, it is Dabbagh’s debut novel and what a debut it is. In the affluent north and west the mainstream canon consists largely of novels about existential problems, individualised dilemmas and psychological analyses; politics are either non-existent or play a small, subsidiary role. Dabbagh puts politics firmly centre stage. But, she is no primitive propagandist or evangelist, and is able to see both the Israeli oppressors and the popular movements of her own people through un-tinted spectacles.  She gives us a moving portrait of a family torn apart by the post-war developments that have taken place in Palestine. The fate and fortunes of the members of this family reflect the political developments that impinge daily and determine the trajectory of the people’s lives. It is a Palestinian family torn asunder by the post war developments that have shattered Palestine and imposed the state of Israel on a country where its historical inhabitants – the Palestinian Arabs - considered it their home. She cleverly and subtly interweaves this historical process into the fabric of the family, their friends and relatives. Through the individual fates of each family member we are helped to comprehend the way the struggle for one’s rights against an intransigent and brutal enemy so often also distorts and maims the protagonists themselves, and how a once united struggle became fragmented, pitting Palestinian against Palestinian. With the gradual corruption of the PLO leadership and the movement’s loss of momentum and clear leadership after the Intifada, we can comprehend the reasons behind the rise of Hamas. What began as a largely unified and secular struggle became split, first between small, ultra-left guerrilla groups and the mainstream PLO and then later, after their extinction, between a fundamentalist, religious rebellion in Gaza against the rump of the old PLO.

Iman, a young woman with a twin brother, Rashid, is the central figure of the novel and we hear much of the story through her telling. After experiencing the viciousness of Israeil attacks on Gaza and losing several friends to Israeli guns and bombs, she and her brother Rashid soon find themselves in temporary exile in London. Their father, previously a committed member of the PLO leadership, now lives in one of the Gulf states in relatively comfortable exile, alienated from his people’s struggle.

Dabbagh vividly portrays the pain and destructive influence of exile - the feelings of rootlessness, anger and frustration. While Palestinians are being massacred by superior Israeli missiles and air raids, in London, travelling on the Tube or on the busses, she and her brother are obliged to overhear the small talk of their fellow passengers whose problems revolve around where to go abroad on holiday, their marital tiffs or which furnishings to choose for their homes; in their minds Palestine and the suffering of its people simply doesn’t exist.

Dabbagh’s language is sculpted and sharp, at times poetic, always laconic and often with a light touch of irony. Her descriptions of London, through the eyes of a foreigner, a temporary visitor, go deeper beneath the patina and surface glitter than an ordinary tourist would; her viewpoint is coloured by her people’s history, British colonialism and world domination – here vision is politically tinted.

She watches TV avidly to soak up all and every bit of news from the Middle East, but is disgusted by the Orwellian double-speak of the ‘embedded’ reporters: talking of Israeli ‘surgical strikes’, their ‘tactical incursions’ or understandable ‘responses’ to Hamas provocations.

Out of It is extremely well-written, with a well-developed storyline, believable, three-dimensional characters, and is a gripping read that draws you into the daily trauma that passes as normality for most Palestinians.

Assange on the web - new book

Cypherpunks – freedom and the future of the internet

By Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann
OR Books
Pbck £11
With the release of the first batch of WikiLeaks secret data in 2006 the online site rapidly gained a reputation for investigative journalism, and for revealing classified data from anonymous sources. WikiLeaks is a non-profit  organisation with the goal of bringing "important news and information to the public,’ and ‘to publish original source material alongside news stories so readers and historians alike can see evidence of the truth.’ Another of the organisation's goals is to ensure that journalists and whistleblowers are not jailed for emailing sensitive or classified documents. The online ‘drop box’ was designed to ‘provide an innovative, secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information’ to its journalists.’
In 2010 WikiLeaks collaborated with the Guardian, Der Spiegel and New York Times to release a whole batch of classified US State Department diplomatic cables in redacted format. This created an international éclat and brought down the whole vindictive fury of the US government on Assange’s head as well as severe censure from its allies. As the founder and chief spokesperson of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, overnight was thrust into world-wide prominence. By those on the Left he was revered as a revolutionary icon and by the Right viewed as a heinous criminal who had overstepped the accepted norms of journalism. But many throughout the world considered that what he had done was a genuine contribution to media freedom and openness. WikiLeaks became the winner of the 2008 Economist Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression award and the 2009 Amnesty International human rights reporting award (New Media). However, shortly after all the accolades, Assange the hero became a demonised fugitive.

In August 2010 Assange was invited to Sweden on a speaking tour and apparently had sexually relations with two women who, three days later, accused him of ‘rape and sexual molestation’, leading the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office to issue an arrest warrant for Assange. Whatever the truth about these allegations, Assange saw them as a means of trapping him in Sweden and eventually facilitating his extradition to the US. Unfortunately, whatever the truth of the matter, Assange suddenly became a figure of controversy, not to say one of revulsion, for alleged activities that had nothing to do with his role as the founder and advocate of WikiLeaks. In one sense his enemies had been partially successful: he had not as yet been put on trial in the USA but his name and that of WikiLeaks had been irredemably besmirched.

I am one of those who remains sceptical of the Swedish allegations of sexual transgression, despite the gravity of the accusations, and I certainly remain an admirer of what he has done as a journalist to expose Western government hypocrisy and unnecessary secrecy. I remain convinced that in revealing the contents of diplomatic exchanges and emails, demonstrating the hypocrisy, deviousness and indeed criminality of the US and other governments, he has done us all a vital service.

This latest book, despite accolades from highly respected individuals like John Pilger, Slavoj Zizek, Naomi Wolf and Oliver Stone is often more irritating than illuminating, but it is also certainly a provocative and fascinating read. Written mainly in the form of a dialogue between Assange and his co-authors, Appelbaum, Müller-Maguhn and Zimmermann, it explores the proposition that the internet has become more of a big brother system of surveillance than a great new means of free and democratic communication.

It is written in a loose conversational style with much anorak jargon, rather than attempting to offer a clear distillation of ideas for a wider readership. However, it does provoke reflection.

Like all inventions, the internet is only a tool to be used or misused. With the concentration of all main servers in the USA, it does provide the corporate and political ruling elite enormous access to every user’s profile and personal details. It is a secret service agent’s dream come true. And we, its naïve and unwitting useers provide these governmetn and corporate agencies all the information they want through our facebook, Twitter and Google pages and non-encrypted electronic exchanges.

While his enemies will call Assange simply paranoid (even though he has good reasons to be), he does argue persuasively that we are all too-readily handing over to the powers that be data about ourselves for free. He argues that only be utilising methods like cryptography to encrypt all the information we send out over the internet can we keep government and corporate noses out of our affairs.

Certainly the vitally important questions of who controls the internet and how we can ensure that it remains/becomes a genuine democratic source of inforamtion and exchange are of fundamental importance to freedom and democracy worldwide. Assange’s book is a wake-up call about a possible dystopian future. Jeremiahs, like Assange, are as Pilger says, ‘always met at first with hostility and even mockery, history shows that we disregard such warnings as these at our peril.’ While this book is certainly not the definitive treatise on the role of the internet, it is a stimulating and thought-provoking read.

Reply to William Boyd 'The Price of Betrayal' in Guardian Review 22 December 2012 on the Cambridge spies

What William Boyd, like so many other Western commentators who discuss the Cold War period, fails to comprehend properly is the political climate of the Thirties and how it profoundly affected workers and intellectuals alike in their political outlooks. Fascism, as demonstrated in Spain and Italy and Moseley’s Black Shirts here in the UK, was on a seemingly unstoppable onward march. Many at that time joined the Communist Party or sympathised because they recognised that their own ruling classes were either sympathetic to or incapable of resisting fascism. Only the Communists demonstrated that they were prepared to mount the barricades to stop fascism in its tracks. This is the context in which Philby, Blunt etc. threw in their lot with Communism.

Boyd relishes in calling them all ‘traitors’ to their country and ‘aiding the enemy’. The term is more usually used in times of war for those who pass on secrets to a real enemy. Russia was our ally for the war years and certainly never threatened the West in any way, but was soon cast aside again once nazi Germany was defeated; it never called Britain or the US the ‘enemy’. It was determined to ‘defeat’ capitalism in the economic sphere certainly, but by peaceful struggle. It was we who demonised Russia as ‘the enemy’. Those with short-term memory forget that it was the US General McArthur who, even before the nazis had capitulated, called for the war to be  carried forward into Russia and thus defeat both the nazis and the communists.

It can be convincingly argued that the role Philby, Burgess, McLean et al played in passing on information of (mainly) US military intentions and weapons development played a key role in stabilising the post war world and helped maintain the edgy balance of power.

Boyd also argues that Philby and the other spies ‘had to live in a world where there was no trust’ in order to ‘be successful’. They certainly did not trust the ruling elites in the UK and US – they knew first hand how devious and dangerous they could be – but they did trust their Soviet colleagues who protected them and offered them refuge when they needed it.

Press Ownership

Letter to Guardian 30 November 2012

Harold Evans is bang on target (A clever solution – but why the silence on ownership? - Guardian 30 November). In all the howling and squealing about the need to ‘maintain the freedom of the press’ hardly anyone is addressing this key issue. Freedom only has meaning if equal access and diversity is guaranteed. For Cameron et al to cry wolf about ‘state interference’ and the danger of overthrowing a long and proud tradition of a free press displays a lack of knowledge of history. The press throughout its short history has been censored by the ruling elite with, fines, bans and stamp duties imposed to prevent the publication of popular, usually,working class newspapers. Only since the increasing concentration of ownership in the hands of the wealthy has the state ceased hounding the press. Leveson’s modest suggestion is, in any case, not calling for state regulation, simply giving a putative regulatory body statutory powers; otherwise it would remain a toothless poodle like the present Press Complaints Commission.

Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day

Once again, as every November, we go through the ritual of Poppy Day. For the days around 11^th Nov it becomes obligatory for our politicians and public figures to sport their poppies conspicuously, lay wreaths at cenotaphs and observe a two-minute silence. Wearing a poppy has become like wearing a Stars and Stripes badge in the USA or, in the old Soviet Union, a Party badge – an outward symbol of one’s loyalty to the nation; those who don’t wear one are treated like heartless traitors. It has little to do with true remembrance.

We are the only country that has such a ceremony. The justification for it is that we are remembering those in the armed forces who ‘sacrificed’ their lives for the national good. The ritual grew out of the horrors of the 1914-18 ‘War to End All Wars’.

The many Remembrance Day commemorations have not been an iota of use in preventing subsequent wars nor have they taught us any lessons about how to avoid the killing of young men and women on the battlefield. It has become a meaningless and momentary outpouring of national awareness and celebration of the victories of Britain’s armed forces. Once over, it’s back to war games as usual.

While many of my fellow citizens will wear their poppies out of a genuine sense of remembrance for those who have died in past wars, they will be blind to the way the annual event has been hijacked by the political elite for anything but remembrance.

The only constructive way to commemorate those who have died fighting is for us, the living, to struggle more forcefully for an end to all wars and for a deeper understanding of what causes wars. Most, if not all of the wars Britain has been involved in have been for economic and political reasons, not for ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’ despite those fig leaves the politicians and historians might give them. They have been instigated by the ruling elites to protect or expand their power and influence; no altruism has been involved.

Remembrance Day should be used to reflect on what horror war causes and how we can best avoid such conflicts. The immense loss of life in Iraq and Afghanistan, the millions displaced and the widespread destruction caused are only the most recent reminders of war as an abomination.

Why don’t we make Remembrance Day a time when schools and colleges devote a lesson to learning about how to avoid wars and to work for world peace? Our politicians could use the day to lay before us what action they intend taking to further disarmament and peace throughout the world. Now that would be remembrance.

the dilemma of capitalism

Tinkering with the system won’t solve the fundamental contradictions

If anyone is in debt, they need to be helped to climb out of it. And the best way of doing this is to provide them with the means of earning sufficient income and ensuring repayment stages are realistic and feasible. Seems common sense, doesn’t it? But the IMF and the European Bank are doing exactly the opposite in their treatment of the chief debtor nations of the Euro-zone. This can only make a bad situation worse.

The main reason these countries are in big economic trouble and why most of the developing countries are too is the result of lax banking regulation. Priority number one should be for governments worldwide to impose proper regulation on banks’ lending and investment policies. Once that has been done, you’d think the next priority would be to redirect investment to public infrastructure projects. This would create employment, increase tax revenues and be a second step on the road to paying off the enormous debts. It would also ensure social cohesion. These are the sort of policies Roosevelt pursued in the thirties and what the Labour government did after the end of the war. These aren’t socialist solutions, they’re a means, if there are any left, of saving capitalism. But the dogma of neo-liberalism has penetrated so deeply into government psyches and economic thinking that such suggestions are viewed as the worst form of apostasy. Their view is that it would tantamount to admitting that ‘free market capitalism’ has not worked.

It is one of the central contradictions of capitalism that profits are most easily increased by reducing wage bills and cutting jobs through ‘efficiency’ savings, but the corollary of this is that workers have less income to spend, or little at all if they are unemployed. Thus there is less money in circulation to buy manufactured goods, so company profits are reduced yet further and the vicious circle continues. This is exactly what is happening in Europe and in the wider world now.

Taking the examples of Spain, Greece and Portugal, the austerity measures demanded by the bankers have meant drastic wage reductions, rises in unemployment to unheard of levels, while at the same time cut-backs in public spending are imposed. Young people are queuing up to leave these countries simply to find work. There is social breakdown, mass poverty and anger. There is no chance in hell of these countries being able to emerge out of the present mess through such policies. Where can the impetus come from? Who will invest in such unstable and volatile countries? Why can’t even the wise capitalists see this? The main reason is that the ruling elites are locked into a neo-liberal way of thinking, and also because, despite the chaos brought about by the financial institutions, and the flak they have taken for this, they are still calling the shots. The global financiers can only see Pound, Euro and Dollar signs in front of their eyes and can’t relate to real production, manufacturing and society. They want to squeeze interest out of the indebted countries come what may.

The increased financialisation of the whole capitalist system over recent decades has also meant that investors have sought more rapid returns on their money and bigger and bigger profits than can easily be obtained by investing in manufacturing or sustainable agriculture. This has accelerated the take-over frenzy, asset-stripping and closures. It is short-termism gone insane. It has meant companies are no longer able to undertake long-term planning as investments are now made on the basis of short-term profitability potentials. The insatiable greed of the big banking institutions means that they are demanding big returns now, and don’t care what happens a few years down the line. This attitude has been behind hedge fund casino economics, the derivative markets and price movement speculation in raw materials, shoddy building projects and internet bubbles.

These are the central contradictions and unless the leadership of the Labour Party is prepared to address them, no amount of tinkering at the edges, as Ed Balls appears to be suggesting, will help.

END

Fascism and police collusion

Fascism and police collusion

It has just been revealed that the Greek police have been advising citizens who are victims of crime to seek help from the Golden Dawn neo-nazi party. This party won 21 parliamentary seats the first time it contested national elections in 2012, and now has 18. Like our own home-grown neo-fascist parties, Golden Dawn recruits its supporters among the poorest sections of the population – those hit hardest by the recession. Those most desperate will always be more susceptible to simplisitic explanations for their situation and will be avid for easy solutions. Whether Jews, foreign immigrants or ‘leftist intellectuals’, there will always be a ready target. Human rights Watch reports that immigrants interviewed in Greece recently said they no longer go out at night for fear of assault and attack by ‘often black-clad groups of Greeks intent on violence.’

Fascist parties are always lurking in the wings, ready to take advantage of social breakdown. And, history shows us clearly that in times of economic crisis such as we are experienced at present, there is an increased danger from such parties. In stable times they are little more than irritants, even though one should never underestimate their role in promoting incidents of racist violence.

What is most disconcerting is the readiness of police forces in so many countries to give tacit or overt support to such organisations. We’ve even seen it here in Britain. In the thirties police gave protection to Oswald Mosleys blackshirts when they attempted to march through the East End, and in the heyday of the National Front, during the seventies, they did the same. In 1979 a policeman killed Blair Peach in Southall while he was demonstrating against the National Front. I have yet to hear of a fascist being hurt, let alone killed by the police.

In 2008 Merseyside Police investigated whether a serving constable was a member of the British National Party (BNP).  The name of PC Steve Bettley, a serving officer with the force, was one of thousands on a leaked BNP membership list, posted online.

Detective Chief Superintendent Adrian Tudway, national co-ordinator of the police’s domestic extremist units, claimed police had to walk a ‘tightrope’ when targeting small groups which they believe are bent on violence. However, he claims that the neo-fascist English Defence League (EDL) is not his problem; it is ‘not a far right group’, he asserted. He clearly sees environmentalists and students as much more of a threat.
Last year it was reported that a suspected member of the EDL had been collecting names and of serving Muslim police officers. An investigation found addresses and surveillance videos of Muslim officers on his computer, along with fireworks and other explosive devices. However no charges were pressed. Concerned Muslim officers were told the man was a ‘lone wolf and not linked to any organisations,’ but a few minutes of Googling soon revealed his links with the EDL and details of his attending EDL rallies and meetings. All this demonstrates how institutionally right-wing our police are.

In 2003, on the tenth anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the then head of the Metropolitan police's anti-racism unit, Commander Cressida Dick said she believed the Met was still ‘institutionally racist’. Although, under concerted political pressure, police forces in the UK have attempted to tackle racism in their ranks, there remains much to be done. Our police forces do have a written policy stating that no serving police officer should be a member of a far-right or fascist party, but this is easily circumvented, and it doesn’t prevent police sympathising with right wing organisations.

The police, as the imposers of law and order in society, are almost by definition willing tools of the ruling classes. Clearly the recruiting and training policies favour those with a rightwing and militaristic mentality. We only need to see with what relish the police mete out gratuitous violence to those on progressive demonstrations in comparison with the kid-glopve handling of those organised by the rightwing.

This pattern can be seen in other countries too.  In Germany it has long been known that the Verfassungschutz (BfV) – the equivalent of our MI5 – had infiltrated right wing and neo-nazi organisations, but it became increasingly unclear how far the police were actually promoting and supporting the right wing or whtehr they were investigating it. This year it was disclosed that the Italian security police gave detailed information to its German counterparts of cross-border pan-European neo-nazi collaboration, but the Germans did nothing about it.

In a recent series of neo nazi murders of immigrants, the German security police again came under fire for doing nothing despite having infiltrated the organisation. It also come in for severe criticism after destroying official documentation concerning this case.

As in Hitler’s Germany, fascist parties only gain political traction when capitalism is seriously under threat and the ruling class lends them support to prevent the left gaining ascendancy. Invariably police forces play a key role in how far fascist parties are tolerated or, indeed, are given support. There is no doubt that democratic forces will have to maintain continuous monitoring of police behaviour and pressure on them to root out right-wing mentality, but it will be an uphill struggle.

END

Love and Information at Royal Court

Love and Information
Royal Court
6 Sept-13 Oct 2012

This isn’t a play in the usual sense, but over 50 mini-vignettes, played inside a small cube of white, tiled walls, reminiscent of a laboratory or institution. As the title suggests, it is about how we communicate and use or misuse information and how information can inform or undermine our love for each other. Churchill is clearly using this form to imitate, and simultaneously as a critique of, the sound bite world we live in; how information comes to us randomly in fragments. The actors play out their scenes, sometimes only seconds long or at most a few minutes, with verve, wit and intensity. We are taken on a rapid-fire kaleidoscope of snapshots from daily life, from a geriatric ward to a cocktail bar, from a mental health hospital to a beach, bedroom or gym. Each vignette focusing on an aspect of communication or understanding, as well their lack. There are strong resonances of Pinter and Becket; you’re continually confronted with existential questions.

What is disappointing is that the many parts don’t really add up to anything more substantial. While Churchill raises questions about genetics, mental health, how the brain works and the use of language, each of her miniscule scenes gives the audience little chance to reflect on the issues raised, before the next scene begins. She also fails to provide any deeper understanding or discussion of the issues she raises. Churchill is a socialist and an intelligent commentator on social and political issues, yet here she appears to have difficulty grappling with the big issues. We are living through the deepest economic crisis any of us can remember, we face environmental catastrophe, and are living through a technological revolution that is transforming the way we relate, yet she treats these fundamental issues with timidity.

While her writing has true wit, and the production does her proud by milking it for all its worth, one is left dissatisfied.  It feels more like titillation, a rehearsal rather than the real thing.

Caryl Churchill is one of Britain’s most innovative as well as progressive playwrights. Drawing strongly on Brecht’s ‘gestus’ idea, she again here uses non-naturalistic techniques and places ideas at the centre. Her intention is to provoke her audience to think, but she has to offer a greater stimulus than this.
James Macdonald has done a great job directing this difficult piece and the actors demonstrate an admirable versatility and flexibility in a situation where they only have seconds to develop any character or personality.
The audience on the opening night gave the production ample applause, but I would have liked fewer nibbles and more meat.
END

Yours for the Asking at Orange Tree

Yours for the Asking
Orange Tree, Richmond London
5 Sept-6 Oct 2012
The Orange Tree has again pulled off a coup with the UK premiere of this play by Argentinean-born Spanish playwright Ana Diosdado, one of Spain’s leading writers. This play was completed in 1973 only two years before the dictator Franco’s death. It dramatises the insidious effect of mass media advertising and news manipulation on the lives of ordinary people. Although these concepts are no longer new, the play has retained its relevance. With the Murdoch hacking scandals, the rebranding of mass-murdering company Union Carbide as Dow Chemicals, sponsor of the Olympics, and the ubiquitous use of sex for advertising, its message is still powerful today.
Juan, a stressed and jaded hack is sent by his celebrity gossip magazine to interview Susi, a young model, who’s been transformed into the image for a new perfume – a ruse by the chemical company to mask its culpability for the deaths of several children, after using one of its a drug products. The ruse is exposed and Susi, an icon of beauty and purity, overnight becomes a vilified outcast. Juan and Susi fall in love, but she is already at the end of her tether and contemplating suicide. But in a clever twist at the end, she fails to go through with it, but he does. I was strongly reminded of the Arthur Miller/Marylyn Monroe relationship. As Juan says: ‘It is the system we live in’ that is to blame for so many messed up lives.
Once again, director Sam Walters presents us with a tightly woven drama, teasing out its deep humanity and dramatic possibilities to the limit, and designer Katy Mills manages, with only a table and a couple of chairs, to transport us into a newsroom, a bedroom, a lift and a living room. A tremendous cast led by Mia Austen as the innocently vulnerable model and Steven Elder as the journalist, are ably supported by Rebecca Pownall as Juan’s wife Celia, David Antrobus and James Joyce.
Perhaps a little too earnest (Dario Fo’s ‘Death of an Anarchist’ with less humour) and at times didactic, but certainly gets under the skin.
END

Support Julian Assange

Not since the height of the Cold War with its synchronous anti-Soviet rhetoric has there been such an overwhelming consensus of the media around a single issue. Julian Assange is the new bête noir, the man to be vilified, smeared and slandered. In all the media hysteria about the rape allegations made in Sweden against Assange by two women he slept with, the real issue is being conveniently buried. Last week with Assange’s short speech from the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy and an unrelated off-the-cuff remark by George Galloway in his defence, Assange’s alleged rape again became front page news in all the papers and was at the top of broadcast media news bulletins. Even papers of the liberal left like the Guardian and the New Statesman were fervently part of the bandwagon to demonise Assange as a sexual predator and eccentric misfit. Only the Morning Star, among the dailies, remained rational and focussed. Seumas Milne in a Guardian feature did courageously challenge his paymaster’s editorial line and encouraged readers to look behind the headlines, but he was the only one on the paper of a whole number of other hacks who willing toed the Guardianista party line. George Galloway, normally ignored by the media unless he has just won or lost an election found himself pilloried as a misogynist ‘loud mouth’ (Guardian editorial) and an ignorant clown. Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador which has generously given Assange asylum was likewise portrayed as a ‘banana republic dictator’, only seeking publicity for himself and his ‘tin-pot republic’. Here I don’t want to get enmeshed in the furore around Assange’s alleged sexual misdemeanours or definitions of rape. Anyone who is progressive and aware of what it means to a woman would be loath to offer a fig leaf to anyone who engaged in sexual violence. And Galloway is right in emphasising that rape is too serious an issue to be trivialised in the way the media are now doing around the Assange case. It is, though, not a question of whether Assange is guilty of a sexual crime in Sweden, whether he is a paragon of virtue or a despicable philanderer that is at issue here. He gained fame/notoriety and is now being persecuted because he and his website WikiLeaks made public classified cables sent by US diplomats. The Guardian, New York Times and German magazine Der Spiegel willingly and lucratively collaborated with Assange in publishing a selection of his WikiLeaks documents. Bradley Manning, a British-born US army soldier who allegedly provided WikiLeaks with copies of the classified documents has been languishing in a US military jail without being charged and under conditions described by Juan Méndez, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, as such ‘harsh treatment that may amount to torture’. His plight is being ignored by the media which prefer sordid stories about Assange’s alleged rape. Manning’s treatment is certainly inhumane and shames a state that calls itself ‘democratic’ and ‘just’. It amounts to persecution of the most vengeful sort. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks with their release of these documents pulled off a journalistic coup and performed an incredible public service by revealing the often criminal behaviour of the US government and its agencies throughout the world and the arrogant and supremacist attitudes of its diplomats. Assange and WikiLeaks appear to have few supporters at present, even though a number, like Daniel Ellsberg (whistleblower who released the Pentagon Papers detailing US mendacity on Vietnam), John Pilger, Jemima Kahn, Bianca Jagger and George Galloway are several of some big-name supporters. It is essential that he also receives unqualified support of the left for what he has done in the name of freedom of information, not for anything he might have done or not done in his personal life. If he is extradited to the USA it will be a victory for the very powerful over the least powerful and his case will be used, as it is already being used, to intimidate and discourage any one else who dares to challenge the powers of imperialism. Make no mistake, the rape allegations in Sweden, true or untrue, as well as the threat of extradition are being used solely to undermine his credibility as a journalist and whistleblower and to ensure he faces trial in the USA to be given a draconian sentence; a fair trial there would be impossible. END

Vultures’ Picnic A Tale of High Finance and Investigative Reporting Author: Greg Palast Pubs Constable & Robinson (London) Pbck. £9.99 Greg Palast needs little introduction to Star readers. His uncompromising investigative journalism and his unmasking of corporate sleaze and corruption are second to none. Here we are provided with a selection of his recent writings on the issue of international corporate criminality in the oil industry. What he reveals is a horror story of corporate criminality and political connivance at the highest levels. Unfortunately the collection has been put together with the hurried carelessness of a thief leaving the scene of his crime, with the result that it confusingly hops about from country to country and story to story. However, Palast is witty, fast-paced and sharp. His writing here is often reminiscent of a Dashiel Hammett gumshoe novel, in which he, with his curvaceous assistant Miss Badpenny, is Sam Spade. For my taste, Palast’s writing overdoes the fictional style at the cost of his factual investigations, and this tends to undermine the serious meat of the story beneath. He is clearly a man on a mission, but his adventurous anecdotes about himself as well as his rather cavalier attitude to sources can provoke sceptical questioning of some of his ‘facts’. Certainly he stays on the trail of our corporate and government gangsters with the tenacity of a leech and what he uncovers must make their trigger fingers very itchy. His revelations of BP’s was involvement in paying big bungs to Azerbaijani officials to obtain control of its rich oil resources is an eye-opener. The money, apparently carried in the plane that took Margaret Thatcher to Azerbaijan on an official visit, accompanied by then-BP boss Lord Browne. He also relates how Hilary Clinton became a legal adviser for a big US oil company keen to exploit oil reserves in Arkansas while hubby Bill was governor. Palast goes to great lengths to help untangle the complex web of the political-industrial complex of global oil. Some of his revelations may sound far-fetched, but if they are, why aren’t the accused suing him through the courts? A revelatory read. END

Communism – has its time come? It wasn’t too long ago that Francis Fukuyama was declaiming ‘The End of History’. Communism and Marxism had been conclusively defeated. How history can so easily upset the applecart of complacent thinking is now clearly emerging. Only a few years since that iconic statement was pronounced, global capitalism is in deep crisis, there are mass demonstrations on the streets, corporate bosses are reeling on the back foot As Al Jazeera recently reported, Marxism and the discussion of a communist society are back in fashion and Marxism is again at the centre of intellectual discussion. New editions of Marx's texts have returned to our bookstores accompanied by new introductions, biographies, and interpretations of his thinking. In our universities, too, we are experiencing a sea-change. Not long ago, few academics who valued their status and their funding would be willing to admit to being Marxists, now they seem to be queuing up to do so. A whole number of renowned philosophers (among them Judith Balso, Bruno Bosteels, Susan Buck-Mors, Jodi Dean, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, and Slavoj Zizek), have began to envision how society could be constructed to avoid the pitfalls and injustices of capitalism and are looking at it in communist terms. Here in Britain too, there are a number of Marxist thinkers who are openly challenging the ethical and philosophical basis of capitalism. Not only celebrated academics like Terry Eagleton, but from the mainstream too, like professors Swyngedouw, Ben Fine, Sean Sayers, Terrel Carver and sociologists like Danny Dorling, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett are all challenging capitalist ideology. Recently, Turner short listed artist Phil Collins’s showed his video compilation ‘Marxism Today’ at London’s South bank on the teaching of Marxist economics in the GDR. It received enthusiastic reviews and avid public interest. There are new websites like ‘Marx and Philosophy’ and ‘Historical Materialism’. Recent conferences in London, Berlin, Paris and New York have been attended by thousands of academics, students, and activists around the ideas of Marxism and communism. There is a plethora of best-selling books such as Negri and Hardt's Empire, Badiou's The Communist Hypothesis and Vattimo's Ecce Comu, as well as new biographies of Engels, essays by the Peruvian Marxist Mariategui, and new publications on Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg and so on. What is happening? Although not all these thinkers consider themselves communist, the fact that communist thought is now back at the centre of economic, political, sociological and philosophic research is highly significant and encouraging. Why is all this happening now? It is not simply a reaction to the global financial crisis, but has been brewing for some time. Facing the seemingly incapability of capitalism to address the problems of environmental catastrophe, climate change, over-population and social breakdown, more and more thinkers are looking to alternatives. And Marxism still offers the most useful pointers and potential solutions to these seemingly intractable problems Clearly, at these conferences and in these books, communism is not being proposed as a programme for political parties to repeat previous historical attempts to build communist societies, but more an existential response to the current neo-liberal global condition. Politics, economic planning and government policies should be based ideally on the goal of bettering the human condition, rather than, as at present, simple subservience to the chaotic meanderings of rampant and feral capitalism. To achieve this, we sorely need the input of academic research and innovative ideas. The Al Jazeera report, mentioned above, says: ‘But today, things are not that different if we consider the latest effects of neo-liberalism - apart from our current financial crisis, where differentials in material well-being have never been so explicit - slum populations are growing by an shocking 25 million people a year, and the devastation of our planet's natural resources is causing dire ecological consequences throughout the world, and in many cases it is too late to correct.’ Even the ruling class is recognising the ‘danger’ of a resurgence of Marxism. A recent UK Ministry of Defence report predicts not only a resurgence of, ‘anti-capitalist ideologies, possibly linked to religious, anarchist or nihilist movements, but also to populism and the revival of Marxism’. Of course the word ‘communist’ is loaded with different meanings, but in the minds of most people in the west it is associated with Eastern European attempts to build new societies. It is not only considered a remnant of the past but seen as a political system where everything is controlled by an all-powerful state. In this context, Zizek comments in his inimitable dialectical style: ‘If state communism didn't work, it's primarily because of the failure of anti-statist politics, of the endeavour to break out of the constraints of State, to replace statal forms of organisation with “direct” non-representative forms of self-organisation.’ Communism, as an anti-statist concept has today become the best idea, hypothesis, and guide for non-governmental and international political movements, such as those that arose from the protests in Seattle (1999), Cochabamba (2000), and Barcelona (2011), as well as in the World Social Forum movement, and in experimental new forms of governing as seen in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Kerala, India and in Latin America. Although each of these movements fought for different specific causes (against injurious economic globalisation, the privatisation of water supplies, and harmful financial policies) their enemy was the same: Western democracy's unjust system of property distribution under capitalism. As the increasing poverty and slum populations in the world demonstrate, this model has left behind all those who do not succeed within capitalism’s parameters, and this is generating new communists. What is still missing is a sufficiently strong mass movement of working people to force through the changes that are now becoming increasingly possible; however this situation can change very quickly. END

Jonathan Freedland is right to warn of the probable protracted emasculation of the BBC World Service (Guardian 14 July 2012: This world class institution explains Britain to the world). Its role has been vital in providing those living in countries where news and information was scarce or distorted with a more objective picture. It knew that it had to report broadly and truthfully to maintain credibility, and it used journalists who knew first hand the countries on which they reported. It is a pity, however, that British listeners of the BBC are provided with a much more bland and tendentious news and information service than the better informed World Service listeners. It is also true that, despite its worthy reputation, it also pursued an establishment political agenda. Broadcasts to communist countries were also aimed at undermining. Blacklists were used to filter those employed by the BBC and, certainly in the case of broadcasts to East Germany, the Corporation was not averse to making up their own ‘listeners letters’ as they received so few! I only wish we here in the UK could receive World Service news bulletins instead of the superficial fare we are invariably fed.

A Buddhist take on Marxism I have often thought that while Marxism is a wonderful tool for analysing society and its various processes, but with its overemphasis on classes it largely ignores the question of individual morality and ethical behaviour as determining factors in the historical process. This ‘missing link’ in Marxism may partially explain why the communist project went badly wrong. Professor Richard Winter readily admits that his suggestion of connecting Marxism and Buddhism could appear ‘surprising or even downright bizarre’ to many. When I realised that he is suggesting this as a way of countering the denigration of our humanity under capitalism, I too thought he must be a little ‘off-beam’. However, his lucidly and concisely argued case completely disabused me. Far from being an ‘odd ball’ he is a man with a deep comprehension of the ills of our present system and he has a thorough understanding and appreciation of the value of Marxism as an analytical tool. He has his feet firmly on the ground, based on his wide experience working in our educational system, and he sees education as a potential tool for change. His desire for radical change, together with his strong sense of compassion and justice led him to examine Buddhism as a means of individual self-enlightenment, and as an additional means of bringing about the sort of social change many of us desire: first by changing ourselves. Buddhism is often seen about being about ‘enlightenment’, but it is really more concerned in reshaping character and behaviour than mystical experience; younger Buddhists are more likely to be fired by social action. I remain sceptical of those who suggest answers to our pressing problems can be found in ‘exotic’ cultures, whether Indian Hinduism, North American indigenous traditions or Chinese Confucianism, even if they can offer us new and valuable insights. But Winter is not suggesting this. He is attempting to address Marxism’s underplaying of the role of the individual by suggesting a combination of Marxist theory with a meditational approach derived from Buddhism. However, while I can go a long way with him and even accept that aspects of Buddhist teachings have much to offer us in the West; I doubt such ideas could be easily adopted. Yes, it might be a good idea, but is it feasible or even imaginable that one could persuade a sizable proportion of people not steeped in a Buddhist tradition to adopt such a Buddhist approach to their lives? That is always the dilemma for those who want to change society without being able to obtain a majority electoral mandate: where can you effectively start? Winter argues that one of the keys lies in education. ‘Without changes in our individual awareness and behaviour our attempts to make our institutions more just and more compassionate are doomed in the long run,’ he says. His advocating meditation is basically suggesting a series of straightforward actions that anyone can engage in. Meditation is a method of personal change, he says, and he demonstrates how it can refine our personal and ethical responses to practical situations and how it could support the effectiveness of our attempts to change political and economic structures. Meditation as ‘pure awareness’ can have merely the general and familiar meaning of sustained purposeful thought, he says.’ It involves a heightened state of concentration, derived from being a wholly absorbed awareness of the present. ‘This methodology,’ he argues, ‘helps us resist our spontaneous ego-orientation and thus our assimilation into the stress-filled responses of our exploitive culture, whose ramifications penetrate so deeply into our lives.’ Meditation practice is inseparable from ethical awareness. Winter is not suggesting that we adopt Buddhism as the new religion or see it as a magic solution. But using Buddhist ideas, particularly that of meditation could help us understand ourselves and help us better comprehend and deal with our society in terms of its pressures, stresses and consumer demands. Buddhism places an emphasis on the present and on those things in life that are vital to a meaningful and happy existence, that represent enduring reality. In other words, all the ephemeral trappings of wealth and fame, of vanity and worries about the future or preoccupation with the past, only distract us from the real question of the here and now, and dissipate our creative energies. ‘For Buddhism in its origins and most of its contemporary versions meditation is the primary practice; its teachings are, above all, a rationale for the validity and power of meditation as an individual path of self-transformation,’ he writes. It also helps overcome self-doubt and encourages our creativity. What is certainly true, and something few would deny, is that if we wish to change the world we have first to change ourselves; and in our own behaviour we have to encapsulate the type of society we aim to create. Both Marxist and Buddhist perspectives also emphasise that ‘our spontaneous experiences are frequently based on misperceptions of reality; what Marx called ‘false consciousness’. That is why, Winter argues, that any education curriculum needs to go beyond simply involving students’ personal experience in the learning process: a ‘curriculum for transformation’ is needed to help students engage in a radical critique of their experience.’ He says, perceptively, that behaviour, which constitutes part of the ‘ethics’ of capitalism, is not really endorsed by the general population: rather it is seen as a regrettable compromise. He realises that simply putting forward yet another ‘vacuous plea’ for a ‘change of culture’ is pointless. He knows that such pleas avoid the crunch question: through what agency could the changes we desire be brought about? That’s why he argues forcibly that we are all potentially ‘agents for change’. One might not agree with much of Winter’s argumentation, but his ideas are certainly thought-provoking and deserving of close attention. (Prof Winter’s recent book: Power, Freedom Compassion; Willow Tree Press; £10)

US murdered head of UN but culprits remain unpunished

Buried History CIA and MI5 linked to assassinations in the Congo in sixties With the recent scandal of ‘destroyed’ Foreign Office documents in connection with Britain’s bloody colonial past and more recent revelations of our secret services’ murky complicity with Gadafhi’s security services it is perhaps worth recalling Britain’s role in the nefarious conspiracy in the Congo after it gained independence from Belgium in June 1960. The Belgians had done nothing to prepare the country for independence, and it quickly degenerated into chaos, providing a motive for the Belgians to keep troops there. While the Belgians favoured Joseph Kasavubu to lead the new nation, the Congolese chose Patrice Lumumba as Prime Minister. Lumumba asked the United Nations, then headed by Dag Hammarskjöld, to order the Belgians to withdraw, and the UN voted to send a peacekeeping mission to the Congo. Impatient and untrusting of the UN, Lumumba threatened to ask the Soviets for help in expelling Belgian forces. He was no communist, but was interested in getting aid from wherever he could, including from the Soviet Union. He’d also sought and, for a time, obtained American aid. Civil war broke out four days after independence, and local leader Moise Tshombe announced copper-rich Katanga's secession in July. In 1959 Lumumba had visited businessmen in New York, and stated unequivocally, ‘The exploitation of the mineral riches of the Congo should be primarily for the profit of our own people and other Africans.’ The country had rich deposits of copper, gold, diamonds, and uranium. Asked whether the Americans would still have access to uranium, as they had during the Belgian occupation, Lumumba responded, ‘Belgium doesn’t produce any uranium; it would be to the advantage of both our countries if the Congo and the US worked out their own agreements in the future.’ The US, though, didn’t trust Lumumba to protect their interests. Investors in copper and uranium in the Congo at that time included the Rockefellers, the Guggenheims and C. Douglas Dillon, who participated in a National Security Council meeting where the removal of Lumumba was discussed. In September, only twelve weeks after his election, his government was indeed overthrown in a western-backed coup by the military, and he was allegedly shot while escaping custody in January 1961. The CIA was not satisfied solely with the death of Lumumba. One of the barriers to completing the takeover of the Congo remained the United Nations, and more specifically, the Swede Dag Hammarskjöld who was UN Secretary-General. Hammarskjöld was killed only nine months after Lumumba in September in a mysterious air crash. Allegations were immediately made of a link between the two and of Western involvement, but firm evidence was difficult to come by. His death was part of an attempt to prevent Katanga's mineral wealth falling under the control of a progressive government. He was flying aboard the Albertina to the Ndola airport at the border of the Congo in Northern Rhodesia, where he was to meet with Tshombe to broker a cease-fire. The pilot of the Albertina filed a fake flight plan in an attempt to keep Hammarskjöld’s ultimate destination hidden. Despite this and other measures taken to preserve secrecy, less than 15 minutes into the flight the press was reporting that Hammarskjöld was en route to Ndola. Hammarskjöld and 15 other people were killed when their aircraft crashed entering what was then Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, where the UN head was due to meet rebel leader Moise Tshombe to negotiate a truce in the Congolese civil war. Newspapers at the time alleged British involvement in a plot to kill Hammarskjöld to prevent UN support for Tshombe and his diamond-rich Katanga province. However, in 1998 Reuters reported that South Africa's Truth Commission chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu Wednesday had released documents which suggested a Western plot was behind the death of the head of the United Nations in 1961. Tutu said his Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was investigating crimes committed during the apartheid era, had decided to release the documents although it could not verify their authenticity. Commission investigators stumbled across the documents by chance while researching an unrelated issue. They link South African agents to the death of Dag Hammarskjöld. The papers also revealed that the project was plotted at the highest levels of the CIA and MI5. The alleged plot was revealed as the brainchild of at least two British security agencies - MI5 and the Special Operations Executive, together with the CIA - as these top-secret documents show. A series of messages between a ‘commodore’ and a ‘captain’ point to a plot hatched on South African soil by a group which had access to large sums of money and the ability to muster mercenary forces to protect Western investments in turbulent post-colonial Africa. The letters, with South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR) letter-heads, include references to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the British MI5 security service [SAIMR was a front company for the South African military]. In addition to outlining Operation Celeste - the plan to get rid of the ‘troublesome’ Hammarskjöld - the documents also implicate the SAIMR and international intelligence agencies in the death of Patrice Lumumba and they also implicate then CIA chief Allen Dulles. They claim that the explosives used for the bomb that downed the aircraft were supplied by the Belgian mining conglomerate, Union Minière. The company had extensive interests in copper-rich Katanga, and was known to have backed Tshombe's use of mercenaries, including the group led by South Africa's Colonel ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare. The most damning document, marked ‘Top Secret’, refers to a meeting between MI5, Special Operations Executive, the CIA and the SAIMR at which it was recorded that Dulles ‘agrees ... Dag is becoming troublesome and ... should be removed’ and ‘…I want his removal to be handled more efficiently than was Patrice.’ These documents have predictably been dismissed as fakes by both MI5 and the CIA who still deny any involvement in Hammarskjöld's death. However, they bear a striking resemblance to others emanating from the SAIMR seven years before, when it was headed by ‘commodore’ Keith Maxwell-Annandale and had developed links with both South Africa's military intelligence and the National Intelligence Services. These documents also show that the SAIMR masterminded the abortive 1981 attempt to depose Seychelles president Albert René, and that it was also behind a successful 1990 coup in Somalia. The CIA later opened its files on Cold War assassinations and admitted it had ordered the murder of Patrice Lumumba, but it still denies any involvement with that of Hammarskjöld. The former UN Representative in Africa under Hammarskjöld, Conor Cruise O’Brien, said, ‘I do not think there was anyone there who believed that his death was as accident.’ He and another of Hammarskjöld’s close associates, Stuart Linner, had both been targets of assassination attempts. Interestingly, in 1976 a long-time CIA operative, Bud Culligan, a man with a grudge against his former employer, claimed he personally shot down Hammarskjöld’s plane. He had kept a detailed journal of every assignment he had performed for the CIA. He had dates, names, places - he was a professional assassin. He clearly worked for the CIA in Africa but the extent of his involvement is impossible to prove. We may never be able to uncover the real truth behind Hammarskjöld’s death, but there is certainly no shortage of precedents for CIA involvement in other successful and unsuccessful assassinations of progressive leaders, from Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, to Omar Torrijos and Bishop Romero. END

Cats are sociopaths!

Psychopaths in the garden It's almost like admitting publicly that you are a paedophile. But I'll admit it anyway: I hate cats! Cats are the world's greatest and most cunning opportunists. They are, in their essence, wild animals that have opted to accept human propinquity because it guarantees ready meals and a dry bed for the night. Cats are unlike any other domestic pet; they cannot be properly tamed or confined, so are free to wander anywhere they want, including into my garden. If my neighbours or even their dogs were continually trespassing on my property I could undertake measures to stop them, even resorting to the courts if necessary. But with cats I have no redress whatsoever - they are a law unto themselves. They can come and go as they please, bury their faeces in my vegetable patch, sunbathe on my patio and hide under the hedge, waiting to pounce on any bird foolhardy enough to hop within range of their vicious claws. In the UK we have 10.3 million cats - that's one for every six people! Just imagine the mountains of food and the tonnage of cans needed to package it. Our supermarkets dedicate metres of shelving to satisfy feline taste buds; cats are offered almost as much choice of food as we humans. Then there are the vet bills, the expensive catteries to park these creatures when their owners go on holiday. This is a multi-million pound industry supporting a vast army of killing machines – a feline-industrial-complex so to speak. Cats are serial killers and they are allowed to murder with impunity. The most recent figures from a British Mammal Society report (2012), estimates that the UK's cats catch up to 275 million prey items per year, of which 55 million are birds. This is the number of prey items that were known to have been caught; we don't know how many more the cats caught, but didn't bring home, or how many escaped injured and subsequently died. On a world scale the figures are even more mind-numbing. Jonathan Franzen in his novel Freedom also lays it on the line about cats through the words of the environmental activist Lalitha: ‘Kitty cats,’ she said. "C-A-T-S. Everybody loves their kitty cat and lets it run around outside. It's just one cat - how many birds can it kill? Well, every year in the U.S. one billion song birds are murdered by domestic and feral cats. It's one of the leading causes of songbird decline in North America. But no one gives a shit because they love their own individual kitty cat.’ I like most animals, but particularly birds. I relish their songs in spring, their animated activity in the nesting season; I like watching them bathe in the water bath and grub for worms on the lawn. But the omnipresence of my neighbours' cats means that their numbers are rapidly reduced and they are driven from my garden. It's even worse in the breeding season when the young hatch, as they have no experience of the wicked wide world outside the nest and no previous contact with those louring beasts of the urban killing fields. Last week a pigeon was pounced on as he strutted calmly around my lawn; only a pile of feathers drifting in the breeze was left behind as evidence. My neighbour’s children told me how their cat brings home dead frogs on a regular basis – culled from around my pond! Cats don't need to catch other animals for food; they do so merely out of instinct. Whereas most town dogs have had their hunter instinct largely bred out of them or can be suitably controlled by their owners, cats are averse to training of any kind. The enormous wastage in terms of the lives of birds and other small animals, due entirely to cats, is mind-boggling. The cat population, I would argue, needs to be seriously reduced if we are to save the remnants of our wildlife. We cull pigeons, foxes and other pests, so why not cats too? Cat-owners should be obliged to make their cats wear bells on their collars or contraptions to prevent their killing. Because they are always well nourished, cats can spend hours simply lounging, grooming themselves, just waiting for any bird, frog or mouse to appear within their vision, before pouncing, just for the sheer hell of it. In conclusion, I can find no better words than those of Franzen’s protagonist in Freedom: ‘Walter never had liked cats They’d seemed to him the sociopaths of the pet world, a species domesticated as an evil necessary for the control of rodents and subsequently fetishized the way unhappy countries fetishize their militaries...’ END 735 words John Green

The Last to Fall
(the life and letters of Ivor Hickman – an International Brigader in Spain)
by John L. Wainwright
Pubs Hatchet Green publishing
Pbck £10.99

This book’s cover displays a somewhat faded, sepia-coloured photograph of a sunburnt, handsome young man staring out at the onlooker with unflinching determination. Immediately you feel the urge to read about who he is and what he did.

The author had a long history of interest in the Spanish Civil War and had even written a film script about it. But the only facts he had to go on when he began researching this biography of Ivor Hickman was a small memorial plaque on a wooden bench outside Peter Symonds College school in Winchester with Hickman’s name engraved on it and a modest memorial to several International Brigaders in Southampton. He was determined to find out more about this enigmatic man. After a friend was able to establish contact with the two daughters of Hickman’s former wife and asking if they knew anything about him, they discovered a dusty parcel of faded letters in the attic of their old house. These turned out to be letters Hickman wrote to Juliet MacArthur, his girlfriend and later wife. Slowly Wainwright was able to piece together Ivor’s short life story.

It is a fascinating tale and a glowing symbol of the idealism and commitment which persuaded between 30-40,000 young men and women, among them over 2,300 from Britain, to volunteer to fight fascism in Spain. Wainwright writes about this key historical juncture with lucidity, imagination and insight.

Ivor Hickman was a bright student who went up to Cambridge, joining the Communist Party there, before going on to work in Manchester, in 1936, as a mathematical engineering apprentice at Metropolitan Vickers, a big engineering factory. At Cambridge his lecturers included C.P. Snow and Ludwig Wittgenstein, with both of whom he corresponded after finishing his degree. At university he also met the love of his life, Juliet MacArthur, who was studying psychology.

In that same year he married Juliet before immediately departing for Spain. His newly wedded wife was left behind, and although they both hoped she would be able to join him out there, it never happened. That, though, didn’t prevent her playing an active role in looking after refugee Basque children in Norfolk, who had been evacuated from the fighting.

His early letters to Juliet, while at university or from Manchester, are full of youthful passion and sexual desire, like those of any normal young man. His dispatches from Spain were, of course, censored, but provide a vivid picture of the harsh reality of that unequal struggle.

The cause of the Spanish Civil War captured the imagination of left wing youth throughout the world as hardly any other cause has done, before or since. They were prepared to sacrifice their lives for a cause the passionately believed in and, if the pusillanimous western powers had given sufficient support to the legitimate Spanish government, fascism would have experienced its first defeat and the Second World War in Europe may have been avoided.

All this is now ancient history, but it is does provide a vivid and salutary illustration of how some individuals time and time again can and will rise above their peers to fight selflessly for justice and a better life for their fellow human beings. Unlike today, ideological issues then were perceived as black and white: you were either anti-fascist or a reactionary; you were either a communist and supporter of the Soviet Union or an upholder of out-dated bourgeois values. It was a time when many realised that Europe was on the cusp of cataclysmic change and traditional values were being seriously challenged.

Wainwright cleverly interweaves the essential history of the Spanish Civil War around Hickman’s life. He includes interviews with other veterans of the International Brigades, including Sam Lesser (Sam Russell) the former Daily Worker/Morning Star reporter. These give added weight and colour to that war that took the lives of so many valiant comrades in the prime of their youth.
END

A Buddhist take on Marxism
I have often thought that while Marxism is a wonderful tool for analysing society and its various processes, but with its overemphasis on classes it largely ignores the question of individual morality and ethical behaviour as determining factors in the historical process. This ‘missing link’ in Marxism may partially explain why the communist project went badly wrong.

Professor Richard Winter readily admits that his suggestion of connecting Marxism and Buddhism could appear ‘surprising or even downright bizarre’ to many. When I realised that he is suggesting this as a way of countering the denigration of our humanity under capitalism, I too thought he must be a little ‘off-beam’. However, his lucidly and concisely argued case completely disabused me. Far from being an ‘odd ball’ he is a man with a deep comprehension of the ills of our present system and he has a thorough understanding and appreciation of the value of Marxism as an analytical tool. He has his feet firmly on the ground, based on his wide experience working in our educational system, and he sees education as a potential tool for change. His desire for radical change, together with his strong sense of compassion and justice led him to examine Buddhism as a means of individual self-enlightenment, and as an additional means of bringing about the sort of social change many of us desire: first by changing ourselves. Buddhism is often seen about being about ‘enlightenment’, but it is really more concerned in reshaping character and behaviour than mystical experience; younger Buddhists are more likely to be fired by social action.

I remain sceptical of those who suggest answers to our pressing problems can be found in ‘exotic’ cultures, whether Indian Hinduism, North American indigenous traditions or Chinese Confucianism, even if they can offer us new and valuable insights. But Winter is not suggesting this. He is attempting to address Marxism’s underplaying of the role of the individual by suggesting a combination of Marxist theory with a meditational approach derived from Buddhism.

However, while I can go a long way with him and even accept that aspects of Buddhist teachings have much to offer us in the West; I doubt such ideas could be easily adopted. Yes, it might be a good idea, but is it feasible or even imaginable that one could persuade a sizable proportion of people not steeped in a Buddhist tradition to adopt such a Buddhist approach to their lives? That is always the dilemma for those who want to change society without being able to obtain a majority electoral mandate: where can you effectively start?

Winter argues that one of the keys lies in education. ‘Without changes in our individual awareness and behaviour our attempts to make our institutions more just and more compassionate are doomed in the long run,’ he says.

His advocating meditation is basically suggesting a series of straightforward actions that anyone can engage in. Meditation is a method of personal change, he says, and he demonstrates how it can refine our personal and ethical responses to practical situations and how it could support the effectiveness of our attempts to change political and economic structures.

Meditation as ‘pure awareness’ can have merely the general and familiar meaning of sustained purposeful thought, he says.’ It involves a heightened state of concentration, derived from being a wholly absorbed awareness of the present. ‘This methodology,’ he argues, ‘helps us resist our spontaneous ego-orientation and thus our assimilation into the stress-filled responses of our exploitive culture, whose ramifications penetrate so deeply into our lives.’ Meditation practice is inseparable from ethical awareness.

Winter is not suggesting that we adopt Buddhism as the new religion or see it as a magic solution. But using Buddhist ideas, particularly that of meditation could help us understand ourselves and help us better comprehend and deal with our society in terms of its pressures, stresses and consumer demands. Buddhism places an emphasis on the present and on those things in life that are vital to a meaningful and happy existence, that represent enduring reality. In other words, all the ephemeral trappings of wealth and fame, of vanity and worries about the future or preoccupation with the past, only distract us from the real question of the here and now, and dissipate our creative energies. ‘For Buddhism in its origins and most of its contemporary versions meditation is the primary practice; its teachings are, above all, a rationale for the validity and power of meditation as an individual path of self-transformation,’ he writes. It also helps overcome self-doubt and encourages our creativity.

What is certainly true, and something few would deny, is that if we wish to change the world we have first to change ourselves; and in our own behaviour we have to encapsulate the type of society we aim to create.

Both Marxist and Buddhist perspectives also emphasise that ‘our spontaneous experiences are frequently based on misperceptions of reality; what Marx called ‘false consciousness’. That is why, Winter argues, that any education curriculum needs to go beyond simply involving students’ personal experience in the learning process: a ‘curriculum for transformation’ is needed to help students engage in a radical critique of their experience.’

He says, perceptively, that behaviour, which constitutes part of the ‘ethics’ of capitalism, is not really endorsed by the general population: rather it is seen as a regrettable compromise. He realises that simply putting forward yet another ‘vacuous plea’ for a ‘change of culture’ is pointless. He knows that such pleas avoid the crunch question: through what agency could the changes we desire be brought about? That’s why he argues forcibly that we are all potentially ‘agents for change’.

One might not agree with much of Winter’s argumentation, but his ideas are certainly thought-provoking and deserving of close attention.
(Prof Winter’s recent book: Power, Freedom, Compassion is published by Willow Tree Press £10)

Alfred Russel Wallace socialist and co-founder of evolutionary theory
Next year will see the centenary of the death of Alfred Russel Wallace. Simultaneously with Darwin the discoverer of evolution due to natural selection, but history has obscured him under Darwin’s immense shadow.

Wallace came from a lower middle class background - his father was a provincial solicitor, at that time a lowly occupation. He left school at 14 to work as an apprentice surveyor with his brother William in order to supplement the family income. This itinerant job took him all over the country and engendered in him a love for the countryside, science and nature.

While carrying out this work, Wallace talks of being forced to travel in the ‘wretched third class’ carriages where passengers in open trucks were transported like cattle. After one such journey with his brother William, they took cheap lodgings in a damp room in Bristol, which led to his brother consequently dying of pneumonia.

Wallace’s mental development was grounded in the provincial, industrialising countryside, where he would mix with weavers, factory inspectors, railway workers and farm labourers. He was completely self-educated in the sciences and became an early socialist, greatly influenced by lectures he heard in the Hall of Science in Tottenham Court Road, given by Robert Owen. He said: ‘I have always looked upon Owen as my first teacher in the philosophy of human nature and my first guide through the labyrinth of social science.’ He, like Owen, took a prominently anti-Malthusian line (put crudely, Malthus argued that disease and early death were necessary among the working masses to keep the population down). Darwin, given his class background, was much more sympathetic to Malthus’s views than Wallace was.

During his wanderings throughout the country Wallace’s avid curiosity and thirst for knowledge led him to attend many lectures at the local Mechanics’ Institutes –in Victorian Times places where ordinary working men and women could listen to prominent and learned speakers on a whole range of subjects. He also made full use of the free libraries for his studies.

Although his family was ‘old fashioned Church of England’, Wallace very soon shed all shreds of religiosity, developing advanced secularist views on society and human nature. Like almost all Victorian naturalists, he also began his career by collecting - in his case beetles and butterflies. At one of the Institute lectures in Leicester he met hosiery apprentice, Henry Walter Bates, who’d also left school early, at 12, and also embarking on his own self-education. He, too, was an enthusiastic naturalist and the two began making excursions together. From this time on Wallace began reflecting on the origins of the human race and the idea of continuous change of species.

Ironically, because of his radical political views Wallace was, from the outset, a more likely candidate than the conservative Darwin to come up with such a radical hypothesis as evolution. 14 years younger than Darwin, he was a likeable, mild-mannered man full of visions for a reformed society. His friend E.B. Poulton (later to become a professor of zoology at Oxford) described Wallace as a man of great ‘personal magnetism’ and ‘lofty ideals’. But he undoubtedly lacked the self-confidence that comes with a public school education and affluence.

In 1847 Bates and Wallace discussed travelling abroad and earning their living collecting specimens along the River Amazon. Unlike Darwin who was easily able to organise and finance his own long voyage on the Beagle, Wallace and Bates had to beg money for their trip. The mania of Victorians for collecting natural history specimens gave them the opportunity. In the end, Stevens, a natural history agent, advanced them money for the trip. In 1848 they sailed for Brazil and spent several years there, enduring disease, hardship and catastrophe. Their experiences were physically as far removed from Darwin’s relaxed and comfortable Beagle voyage as could be imagined. Unfortunately Wallace’s return voyage ended in shipwreck and the loss of all his meticulously recorded notes and arduously collected specimens.

In 1853, despite vowing never again to return to sea, Wallace again set sail, but this time for Malaysia with the same aims as before in the Amazon. He also wished to investigate primitive tribes and pursue his ideas on human origins. His readings of the anonymously published book ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’ had convinced him that humans were descended from apes, possible from an orang-utan like animal as found in Malaysia. This was a dangerous expedition for a lone adventurer, and he lived for some time among the Dyaks - the notorious head-hunters of European legend. Before he left Sarawak he dispatched a short theoretical paper that Darwin and his friends Edward Blyth and the renowned geologist, Charles Lyell read, in which he speculated about how varieties of species arise and how geography was key in determining origins. His ‘betters’, including his agent Stevens, felt he should not waste his time with such pointless speculation, but concentrate on obtaining specimens for their collections. However, Darwin wrote him a warm and encouraging letter complimenting him on his paper. In 1858, after a bad bout of Malaria Wallace wrote another paper setting out, for the first time, his basic idea of natural selection and evolutionary development. He was completely unaware that Darwin had been secretly working along similar lines. He sent it to Darwin and asked the latter to forward it to his friend Lyell. The way his seminal paper overlapped with Darwin’s thinking on the same issue was remarkable.

Darwin had also collected a mass of fascinating data during his trip on the Beagle and through diligent correspondence with other naturalists was leisurely developing his own draft ideas of evolution. He was, though, a naturally cautious man and also very aware of how his ideas, once in the open, would undoubtedly cause outrage among the deeply religious. Wallace’s paper, arriving out of the blue, hit him like a thunderbolt. He’d fleetingly met and then corresponded with Wallace, but the two men hardly knew each other. Darwin was aghast and shattered that someone had apparently beaten him to it. The idea of ‘losing’ the letter or ignoring it crossed his mind, but in the end he followed the honourable road and forwarded it to his friend, the renowned geologist Lyell as Wallace had requested.

Darwin was, in fact, about to write to Wallace congratulating him and had almost decided to throw in the towel on his own projected publication, but was dissuaded from doing so by his two close friends and Linnaean fellows, the botanist Joseph Hooker and Lyell. To give Darwin his due, he was in the genuine sense of the words an ‘honourable gentleman’ and felt he no longer had the right to publish his own views before Wallace’s now that he’d read his paper. He was, though, persuaded by his two friends not to give way and to publish a paper of his own alongside Wallace’s in the prestigious Journal of the Linnaean Society. His friends suggested this in the full knowledge that, as a renowned fellow, Darwin’s views would take precedence over the ‘mere collector’ who had no standing in scientific circles. Hooker and Lyell implied that Wallace should be grateful for being given publicity on Darwin’s coat tails. They did this without Wallace’s permission and in a manner unprecedented among scientific colleagues. But Wallace, far away in Malaysia, was in no position to protest.

Wallace, unlike Darwin, had no independent means, was not a member of the gentry nor was he university educated. Darwin and his colleagues viewed Wallace as a useful purveyor of information and specimens, but would not have considered him a philosopher or thinker on their own level. That’s also why Wallace’s paper hit them with such force.

Neither paper caused even a ripple of excitement or outrage at the time of publication, but Darwin, realising the danger to his own work if Wallace developed his ideas further, put his head down and worked like a man possessed to finish and publish his later world-renowned ‘On the Origin of Species, a year later in 1859. This was the book that shook the world. Priests began apoplectically raging from their pulpits, fine ladies had fainting fits at the idea of being related to monkeys, and the popular papers never tired of ridiculing the idea of evolution as if a new flat-earth theory were being propounded.

These historical events again, demonstrate how class invariably determined an individual’s fortune and later historical status. The strictly stratified Victorian society left Wallace little chance of entering the hallowed halls of the elite scientific community of which Charles Darwin was already a respected member. However, after his return from his travels and with selfless support from Darwin, he did eventually gain acceptance, becoming a revered member of those elite scientific circles. Unlike Wallace, Darwin came from a moneyed upper middle class family - his father was a wealthy doctor and financier - and he lived in ease and comfort in the Kent countryside with all the time in the world to pursue his research and write. After studying at Edinburgh and Cambridge, followed by his five-year voyage around the world on the Beagle, Darwin quickly established his credentials as a leading naturalist.

Wallace had to do it the hard way, but humble and modest as ever, he subsequently accepted Darwin’s pre-eminence and his own secondary role in developing the theory of evolution. Darwin actually told him: ‘…you would, if you’d had my leisure, done the work just as welll, perhaps better, than I have done it.’ Undoubtedly Wallace deserves more prominence than history has granted him.
END

2 March 2012 Letter to Guardian


Dear Sir
Simon Jenkins spells out what we on the left have always maintained, but mainstream historians have strenuously denied: the Soviet Union, even under Stalin’s tyranny had no aim of conquering the West by force. (‘An ignorance that started the cold war now targets Islam’; Guardian March 2 2012). However, Jenkins and the man he praises, Andrew Alexander, leave out the key factor in the equation. It is not only, or even primarily, ignorance of other countries that fuels such myopic and belligerent policies. As Eisenhower warned, just after the end of the Second World War, it is the military industrial complex that we have to beware of. The arms industries are the most profitable worldwide, but particularly so in the US. The need to conjuror up an enemy or a few wars at regular intervals, are essential if taxpayers are to continue footing the enormous and penurious bills. It is also a truism that without a globally dominant weapons arsenal and enormous army, the USA would not be able to play world policeman and ensure its economic interests are maintained. It’s time we realised that continuous rearming and international weapons trading are paving the way to the world’s destruction not to its security.
Yours faithfully

Leon Trotsky – a revolutionary’s life
By Joshua Rubenstein
Pubs. Yale University Press
Hdbck
Trotsky was a man much traduced, and his reputation has not been enhanced by the ideas and actions of many of his devoted followers. This new biography, in the series Jewish Lives, is written neither by an admirer and follower like Deutscher nor by a denigrator like Robert Service. It is a view very much coloured, as the series indicates, by the idea of ‘Jewishness’ and a Jewish self-understanding, but manages to give a fairly objective and useful, if very brief, portrait.

Trotsky was a tragic figure of mythical proportions. A dedicated – one could say fanatical – devotee of the ideas of Marx and the Russian revolution, which consumed his whole life. He was persecuted unmercifully by Stalin, who had all his immediate family killed, alongside his many associates and former comrades.

Once expelled from the Soviet Union, Trotsky’s intransigence and unremitting calls for world revolution left him marooned in a no-mans-land without safe refuge.

Alongside Lenin, he was indisputably the most capable and influential figure of the Bolshevik revolution. He was broadly educated, an eloquent writer and magnetic speaker. Ironically Stalin, after Lenin’s death, was able to outmanoeuvre and sideline him because of his lack of ambition and refusal to conspire or join in political intrigues. While he undoubtedly had serious flaws in his character and could be just as callous as Stalin if he felt it furthered the ends of the revolution, he was a selfless and dedicated revolutionary.

In retrospect it beggars belief that such a key figure could have been reduced to a pathetic and isolated renegade in such a short space of time and that Stalin’s clever propaganda machine was able to convince not only communist parties throughout the world, but also many leading liberals and left-wingers that Trotsky was a malevolent cancer in the international communist movement. As this book reveals, this denigration was facilitated by a virulent and entrenched anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe as well as by its more genteel form in the West.

Once again, back in the USA!
Buffalo NY Jan 2012
Every visit to the USA only seems to confirm my already prejudicial viewpoint. I promised myself that I would never fly long distances again, and certainly not to the USA. But Siski’s impending birth gave me little choice; she needed help in the immediate post-parturition phase, at least. Although the plane across ‘The Pond’ was not full, and I could bag a couple of seats to myself, the flight seemed interminably long and tedious.
Arriving at JFK in New York, I had to join the long queue through immigration and customs. The notices informed passengers that the officials who vetted them would be their first experience of the US, and they would be friendly and courteous. Well, the latter maybe, but with the former they must be expressing a sense of irony after all: the officials seem bored out of their minds and singularly lack any vestige of humour; try cracking a joke at your peril.
After an hour, I was through unscathed, but still faced a four-hour wait for my connection to Buffalo. Although this is the most prestigious US airport, it had the distinct feel of a rather outdated post war building; not exactly scruffy, but slightly shabby at the edges. The shops and cafes all seem to have been transported from one of those small town urban shopping malls, with the attractiveness of aged prostitutes. I forewent the culinary joys on offer and stilled my hunger with a stale roll I’d brought off the plane. There was nowhere I could sit and be out of earshot of the ubiquitous ceiling mounted TV screens or the regular announcements warning everyone not to take items from strangers into our luggage etc. Nevertheless, I tried to doze. The time approached for my flight, but we were then told that it had been delayed – oh the joys of flying! Eventually, I arrived at around 11.00pm local time, 3.00am home time.

Siski and Jose live on the outskirts of Buffalo. Not an unpleasant place, but like almost any other ‘middle class’ suburb in the USA: long streets of large, clapboard houses in ‘colonial style’, with largish gardens (actually just grassed areas) with no fences or hedges, and each house plonked alongside the next, as if on an open stage with no privacy from each other.
Although their little street is quiet, the nearby main street, with all the shops, is a six-lane highway with continual traffic and with no central reservation – a nightmare to cross. Apart from the odd jogger or dog-walker, you see no one out and about; only cars. No wonder there is so much obesity. Apart from the numerous pizza outlets and other fast food joints to cheaply satisfy your hunger, there are drive-in pharmacies and drive-in banks, so why bother getting out of your car at all?
They have so much land in the USA, that towns just spread out, which means not just acres of monotonous suburbia, but shopping streets that go on for ever as well. It’s impossible from Siski’s place to simply walk around the corner and do most of your shopping; the main street goes on for miles and miles.
The local supermarket is just that – super sized – like an enormous factory warehouse with so much choice that you are mesmerized by the superfluity. There are even British and German sections where you can buy specialist products. However, they sell beer but no wines or spirits. And even to buy a couple of bottles of beer you ‘may be asked to provide and ID’ to show you are an adult, but rather than be selective, everyone is challenged, so Jose and I, both with greying hair, are asked to show that we are over 18!
Walking past the bakery department in the store, I saw all the staff doing synchronised group exercises on the spot – felt for a moment I might be in North Korea.
As I’ve said previously the US is a land of incredible contradictions. The house on the corner near Siski’s has Ron Paul posters in their garden – he’s the right-wing libertarian Republican presidential hopeful. People might be right wing politically, but can be as friendly as apple pie on a personal level. One neighbour offered to lend Siski their car and offered to take Lili while Siski was in hospital; the couple across the road just popped in to ask if it would be Ok for them to cook a meal and bring it across tomorrow, so that Siski wouldn’t need to cook. That would be rare in Britain, I suspect. The same family has their own personal, petrol-driven snow blower to clear their small drive! Almost everyone greets you and even tried to strike up conversation – great if you want contact, but can be annoying when you just want your own peace and quiet.
Williamsville, the Buffalo suburb where Siski lives, prides itself on being ‘a village’ and relishes the connotation, displayed on every shop and sign, although it is really only a suburban corridor between Buffalo proper and elsewhere.
Lili loves her new little sister and spends long periods just gazing at her and holding her hand or stroking her. I have now become demoted to second-best friend. She trots off to bed obediently for her nap every midday even though she is not at all tired, and can spend half an hour or more ‘reading’ aloud to herself. Constanza sleeps most of the day and night and only seems to be discomfited if her nappy is full. You would hardly know she is here most of the time; she just sleeps quietly in her cot in the living room, oblivious of the daily noises around her.
Weather here now seems like in Britain – after heavy snowfall the other day and very cold temp., today is drizzly and very mild and the snow is melting rapidly. Despite rain, went for a short walk. Despite tis being built-up suburbia, only five minutes from Siski is a ‘creek’ i.e. small but fast-flowing river, and some rough woodland. This morning had lovely views of three large deer at the edge of the wood – they stood for a few moments just watching me – then excellent views of blue jays, cardinals, song sparrows and black-capped chickadees; also mourning doves, an American robin and excellent views of a lovely belted kingfisher. There were plenty of woodpeckers about: northern yellow-shafted flicker and hairy woodpeckers. Lots of grey squirrels, of course, and rabbits. So no shortage of wildlife, despite it being part of a big city.
Today the belted kingfisher was on a small pond in the park and flew back and forth with annoyance once we approached. We got excellent views. A number of American goldfinches with song sparrows and chickadees in the park. It’s trying to snow again and the temperature has dropped. Lili and I went for a short walk but couldn’t walk along the river because it is now in full flood after the melt and has flooded the path. Lili is good company and sings songs along the way and makes no complaints.
Yesterday afternoon Becky, Siski’s friend (her son used to go to the same nursery as Lili) popped in. She immediately offered to clear the snow from our driveway, while her daughter played with Lili. She then came inside for a drink and chatted, or should I say kept up a fast flow of chatter, almost a monologue. Why do so many US-Americans talk so much, and in such loud voices and at such a speed that you have a headache afterwards? Siski reckons they talk so much and so loud because they are mostly full of self confidence, engendered in school from an early age by being encouraged to talk to the class. Even Lili does it in nursery – every child has to bring something in each week and talk about it.
Then the neighbour popped in and brought us our evening meal, plus presents for Lili and the baby! They’d cooked us chicken pie with broccoli and brownies as a desert. It’s surprising what they spend on presents, too, 40-100 dollars is not excessive; very generous.
Friday 20 Jan. Had a good fall of snow once again yesterday evening. Today bright and sunny so Siski let Lili miss school and we both went tobogganing. We had the little park and slope all to ourselves and had great fun sledding up and down. Lili even ventured down by herself. Tomorrow I will have the dubious pleasure of accompanying Lili to a friend’s birthday party at ‘Rolly Polly’s.
Rolly Pollys turns out to be a great place for children, founded by an entrepreneurial couple (one a former teacher) who found that children didn’t know what to do when they had break-time at school and had become so sedentary, so they came up with this idea of making a business out of giving children exercise. It is a spacious children’s gym with bouncy castle, trampolines, pits full of foam rubber, ladders and swings etc, so the children spend an hour really expending physical energy, then have a piece of birthday cake and watch the birthday girl opening her presents before going home. The birthday cake looked like something out of a science fiction book – a large slab of dark, gooey cake covered in the most vile multi-coloured icing. The children all get given a bag to take home with a sugar lolly and bits and pieces! No wonder they all grow up to be obese. The birthday girl got given numerous presents – Barbie dolls, dressing up clothes and other assorted ‘cheap’ toys. She was totally overwhelmed by it all.
The bottle recycling point at the supermarket is called the ‘Beverage container redemption centre’. Sound like a place on a Biblical college campus!
Today, Sunday, we all drove out to the Iroqois wildlife reserve, but apart from a far-off view of a bald eagle and a few more Am. Goldfinches and Am tree sparrows, nothing to be seen or heard!
Lili is fascinated by the song that Siski maintains my mother sang to her and Gali at bath time (can’t imagine it!). It’s an amusing Cockney music hall song, called, ‘Your baby has gone down the plughole’ or as it is really sung (and Lili does a great imitation to the amusement of all): Yer baeby ‘as gorn daan the plug’ole!
Monday 23rd, the day before my return to London, and my toothe ache was getting worse, so decided to visit Siski’s dentist. It was about a mile away, the weather was dry and mild, so I walked not that I had much option, as Jose was at work and there is no public transport on this route). I didn’t see another walker all the way. The dentist was very friendly, wanted to know where I was from and then spoke about Dickens. He did three x rays and located a rotting wisdom tooth which he recommended extracting, so I decided to wait till I got home. He said he could email the x-rays to my dentist if they wished and then gave me a photo copy of the x ray and refused to take any payment!
On my way home, again no one else about, I heard a police siren and the cop car slid alongside me and the bullet-headed cop got out. I thought I was going to be questioned again simply because I was walking – an odd thing to do in this country – but he wanted to know if I’d been ringing on someone’s door bell. I said, ‘no’ but I did see two dubious-looking characters who were ringing a door bell, a block down the road. He replied that they weren’t there when he drove by. Not my problem, I thought, but didn’t say so, as his face had a distinctly unhumorous mien. He demanded my ID and where I lived, then to back in his car and drove off, without so much as a thank you. The contrast of the USA once again: generosity and friendliness vs. stony-faced officialdom.
At the check-in desk at the airport in Buffalo I asked if I could check my bags through to London. The lady said OK but could I tell her where London is!