What Happened to Great Fimmakers?

Tags

art, Bergman, culture, David Lynch, Fellini, film, Hollywood, United States

When I was in my late teens – we’re talking fifty years ago here – there was an enormous interest in what was then known as avant-garde cinema. This essentially – though not exclusively – meant films that were not in English; and it particularly meant the works of two directors: the Swedish Ingmar Bergman, and the Italian Federico Fellini. In a manner that was somehow analogous to the progression, increasing sophistication and complexity of successive Beatles’ albums, each new film by these directors pushed the envelope of what film could do and was about. These were not films you could see only once. By now I have watched many of them over twenty or thirty times, finding, each time – the way one does with a Shakespeare play – an entirely new work of art, which speaks to you at the level of a heightened comprehension coming, presumably, with age and experience. I find this to be rarely true of anything in contemporary cinema. David Lynch is a notable exception, with works like Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive being easily comparable to the masterpieces of Bergman and Fellini. There are a few other directors – Russians, Koreans, Vietnamese – whose names and films will be largely meaningless in North America, since they are hardly ever screened in any form – unless they happen to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film; and even then they will mostly be available as DVD.

When I first came to America, in the seventies, I recall being astounded that most people with whom I spoke about cinema had no knowledge of Bergman or Fellini, less still seen their films. For a time, it seemed as if Woody Allen was the only filmmaker who recognized the genius of these men, and his clever, astute parodies of their work reveal the depth of his understanding. Allen is someone who has never made a bad film; yet he has also never made a great one. The reader may have noticed that he is, in addition, one of the very few American directors whose credit always reads Written and Directed by Woody Allen. This implies that he also gets what they call in Hollywood ‘final cut’ – in other words, he gets to decide what the finished and edited version of his own film will look like. As a writer – although I have worked, and often happily, with editors – I cannot imagine the final manuscript of a book being anything other than one of which I approve. David Lynch always has final cut of his movies – with the one exception of Dune, an unmitigated box-office disaster – and has said that allowing anyone else to determine what a finished work should be is like a painter allowing some total stranger to daub whatever he or she feels like onto a finished canvas. Being a painter himself, Lynch knows whereof he speaks. Yet this system, of denying a filmmaker the right to make his own film, is what prevails in Hollywood, which is little more than a gigantically expensive machine for churning out the kind of entertainment most people want. The budget for Big films today is equivalent to an investment in some kind of sizable industry. Advertising budgets often exceed production costs – frequently a sign of desperation over what test-screenings have proclaimed to be a likely dud. There is even a list of actors and directors organized in order of their box-office and DVD potential. One assumes that a downward movement on this list is as catastrophic an event in Beverly Hills as a bad credit-rating or school report. But when someone has emptied studio coffers of hundreds of millions of dollars into a project, I suppose you cannot be too careful.

I have my own experiences of Hollywood – which I shall save for posthumously-published memoirs, in order to avoid the litigation that seems an even larger business there than movie-making – and one experience, common enough to be safely mentioned, is that producers, who wield all the power, are incapable of reading film scripts. This is odd, since by far the least expensive way of making a bad film into a good one is at the script stage. If you cannot read a script, however, imagining it as a movie in your mind, you will have trouble conveying to the writer what further work needs to be done to the 120 stapled pages lying on your uncluttered desk. What a producer requires of the writer and/or director is a ten-minute summary of the project, ideally on the lines of what is termed ‘high-concept’ – something easily grasped by an imbecile, such as ‘my mother is a car’. Another popular query is ‘what does the poster look like?’ In other words, how facile will the marketing campaign be? I cannot imagine Bergman or Fellini subjected to such treatment, just as I cannot picture the New York literary agent presented with a manuscript of James Joyce’s Finnegans’ Wake…and then reading it, wondering who would be the optimum publisher for such an unusual work.

At least most literary agents can read, and also have some respect for writers. In Hollywood, the writer is very far down the food chain, often regarded by producers as an irritant, somehow necessary, yet soon to be replaced, like other irritants – actors, directors, etc. – by computers. Often, a script will be passed on to other annoying writers; and, as a last resort, to that most annoying of all writers: the one who wrote a very successful film. This writer will be paid a fabulous sum just to add some pizzazz to the dialogue, or maybe to concoct a few new scenes. Such writers frequently decline to have their name included in the credits – possibly from shame at tampering with a colleague’s work, or from embarrassment over being associated with a venture that nothing can save. The money was good, though. And the producer, who has no idea whether the script is good, bad, or even a little better than it was, feels he has done everything in his power to make this blueprint for a film a masterpiece, now turns his attention to attracting major stars and top-notch directors for the project. Since many agencies handle actors, directors, and producers – even the occasional writer – the ‘package’ is not infrequently put together under one roof. It is not difficult to envisage the pressure, abuse, and rampant mediocrity that such an arrangement is heir to.

It is, thus, no coincidence to find that the few auteurs – a word for which, curiously, there is no English equivalent, and meaning ‘writer-director-and-final-cutters – in American cinema find their financing and autonomy abroad. David Lynch, for example, mainly in France and Italy. Jim Jarmusch – whose Dead Man ranks as a masterpiece – apparently all over the place, from Latvia to Japan. I have no idea where the great Russian director, Tarkovsky, gets his funding, but I am certain it is not in Hollywood. A place where final-cut is rarer than a good film is not a place where cinema is regarded as an art form. It is that simple. A place where the tribulations faced by Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock are infamous is not a place where film is regarded as an art form. A place where Aldous Huxley – then the preeminent English novelist of his day – has to be interviewed regarding his suitability to adapt a Jane Austen novel is not….etc. A place where a producer insists that his writer give Romeo and Juliet a ‘happy ending’ is not…etc.

Yes, there are indie films and festivals for them, whose reviews and prizes do much to assist their transit to DVD form. Rarely are they screened by the major cinema chains. Many are good, but, I suggest, few, if any, are great. The independent cinemas that do screen them will also soon be out of business, since distributors are now insisting on a change to digital projectors, which means a cost outlay of some $200,000 for high-quality equipment – far beyond the reach of most, if not all, small cinema owners. It also means that we shall not be able to watch many films as they were supposed to be viewed, on celluloid film. You might well wonder why someone who is legally blind would give a damn about films. I do, in fact, own a digital projector, which, with its ten-foot screen, enables the 5% of vision I have in one eye to derive some pleasure from DVDs – usually, I confess, of films I saw when I could see. Subtitles are, however, impossible; and dubbed versions vary horrifically in quality.

My concern here is more with films that I do not see, rather than with those I do, or did. The extremities of violence and imbecility afflicting big box-office attractions clearly knows no bounds. The old maxim of no one ever going broke underestimating the stupidity of the public has always proved itself true. Yet filmmakers in other countries than the U.S.A. have managed a degree of restraint with the depths they are willing to plumb. As a result, Europeans, for example, have developed a far more sophisticated taste in movies than Americans. The Cannes Festival, for instance, generally awards its top prize to a film that is, by any standards, good, at the very least.

The 17^th century essayist, Francis Bacon, wrote an essay on theatre, regarding it as a means of educating the common man through entertaining him. Shakespeare’s plays – with a few exceptions, such as, surprisingly, Hamlet – were extremely popular. It is no exaggeration to say that one could acquire a reasonable, if not profound, education simply by studying Shakespeare’s works alone. The same cannot be said of the thousands of films ever produced by Hollywood.

The issue is intrinsically related to the difference between the esoteric and the allegorical. In the West, we understand allegory, which is generally fairly obvious, possibly thanks to the New Testament. When Jesus talks of a man and his vineyard, we know he is not offering agricultural advice. The esoteric is not so straightforward, proffering a wisdom or insight beyond any easy summation; indeed, often beyond the grasp of words at all, yet, nonetheless, comprehended directly by the heart or soul. This is why Shakespeare’s plays always seem new and different with every performance or reading. This is why Grimm’s Fairy Tales seem to reveal ever-deeper depths when read from seven to seventy. It is also why David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive constantly unveils levels of deep and spiritual mystery previously unnoticed; and why Bergman’s Persona or Hour of the Wolf continually present the viewer with nuances and complexities unnoticed in any number of earlier viewings. Such works do not tell us what to think, but rather that we should think. They are mindful entertainment, as opposed to the mindless variety, through which Hollywood performs society an immense disservice; indeed, one amounting to a crime against humanity.

David Lynch, who was, to me, the great hope for American cinema, seems to have abandoned traditional filmmaking altogether, initially concentrating on productions for his old website–which now seems to be entirely given over to the sale of music CD’s that he appears to be making. Inland Empire, which still baffles me, although I know it contains riches somewhere, was shot with $300 non-HD digital cameras, with no formal screenplay. Presumably Laura Dern comes a little more pricey than that. But, Mr. Lynch, I think you have proved conclusively that a film does need a script – but I may be missing the point.

The avant-garde in film probably began with things like Le Chien Andalou, a collaboration between Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, and containing what I always considered the most terrifying sequence in any film – a razor blade slicing into a human eyeball – even before I personally witnessed it during the five operations on my own eyes (yes, friends, you cannot have anaesthesia during such operations – a fact they omit to tell you the first time – which means you actually see the scalpel coming down). The esoteric developed more slowly and later, however, reaching its apogee with Bergman, whose only film in English is The Serpent’s Egg, is still the most profound statement on the Nazi Holocaust ever made. A little like Lynch, Bergman stopped making films later in life, preferring to direct for the stage and opera instead. He had done all he could do with film. I sincerely hope that David Lynch does not abandon us in such a fashion quite yet. If he does, it has still been an exhilarating ride. Even Dune is not as bad as he imagines it is – although one wonders where the Director’s Cut has got to.

 

A FILM I REMEMBER AS REMARKABLE YET HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO FIND IN DVD:

Herostratus : written and directed by Don Levy. It was a contemporary update on the legend of Herostratus, who burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in order to gain fame. Ironically, the Judges decreed that his name be struck from all records, as if he had never existed. He is only remembered because Alexander the Great invaded on that same day. This director also made another film called The Experiencer, which I never managed to see. I believe that Levy taught film at the London Royal College of Art, or somewhere equally prestigious. Any information on him and his films would be most gratefully received.

 

With love, as always, Paul William Roberts.

American Racism & Revolution

Tags

politics, race, revolution, United States of America

^{“To be young and Black in America today is to be in a constant state of rage.” –James Baldwin}

Baldwin, one of America’s greatest Black writers, wrote those words some fifty years ago. What has changed? There’s a half-white, or token-Black president – so what? In all of the embarrassments of his lame presidency, Ferguson, Missouri, is looking like the most humiliating of all failures in leadership for Mr. Obama. If he were a voice for Black America – which he has never been – he would be standing in the front line, hand in hand with the protesters, telling the police, “Here I am, shoot me.” That is where Martin Luther King, or any man of principle, would be at this moment.

Anyone who has visited an America beyond New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, knows that the nation is as shamefully divided over the issue of race as it was in 1861. It ought to be viewed as a class and poverty problem, yet the curious thing about the U.S. is that the white poor, generally, cannot see themselves as brothers-in-arms with poor Blacks – indeed, their fidelity to right-wing politics reveals an imbecilic tendency to vote consistently against their own interests. Blacks have mostly voted in vain for a Democratic Party which espouses social egalitarianism yet has made few genuine steps towards it.

Not for many years has the time been more ripe for Black Americans – and anyone else ardent for a massive restructuring of political and social institutions – to press their demands upon Washington. Where are the great Black voices of the past, the real women and men who knew something was rotten in the state of the States? Every Black man and woman able to do so – all the millions of them – should now be marching peaceably on Washington. Every Black soldier or policeman should be deserting his or her post to join in a protest to choke the current system into submission to its demands for a government truly by the people and for the people.

We all know the statistics: 1% of Americans control 95% of the wealth and with it the politics. This is not democracy. Who occupy the prisons, slums, and ghettoes? We all know. 20 million dissidents, Black or White, surrounding the phony monuments to American idealism in Washington could change all this. But civil disobedience must be peaceful; you must be willing to be dragged off to jail. One act of violence would justify – certainly on Fox’s alleged-News – a massively violent reaction; but not if the police and military refused to kill their own people, people whose interests in fact coincide with their own. It happened during the French Revolution, and it has happened since. Now is the time for any American realizing he or she lives in a corrupt and debased, non-egalitarian society to act. Not to exploit the tragedies of Ferguson, but to use them as examples of a system which violates its own Constitution and Declaration of Rights, while pretending to protect these vapid documents, largely written by a man who owned a hundred-odd slaves himself at the time. Native Americans also ought to seize this day, which portrays for the whole world American reality as it has not been glimpsed since Hurricane Katrina.

Guardsmen, soldiers, police, throw down your weapons and join hands with those who are genuinely your fellow Americans. Yes, 1% of your population will lose most of the money they have stolen from you, and they will not like it. What they like is the neo-slavery into which they have chained you all – and for their benefit, not yours. Riots and looting are class and poverty issues, not social evils. With wealth more equitably divided, and true evils like stock and commodities trading abolished, peace and plenty will reign in the land, which will once again live up to the great dream it once represented. That, I believe, is the dream which Dr. King would be expounding today. For the goals of Civil Rights have not yet been attained; there is no ‘Justice for All’. The podium upon which the Statue of Liberty stands ought rightly to read: Promises, Promises, Promises.

Nothing short of a revolution will change the greed and corruption afflicting the U.S. political system. It cannot be fixed from within – ask anyone running for office (a hurdle race). Yet the lessons of history teach that it can be demolished and rebuilt from without – although it will ever require constant vigilance, since scum tends to rise to the surface of any pool.

Citizens of Ferguson, my heart goes out to you tonight. To the thousands of highly-educated Black Americans wondering what their role ought to be in this: remember Ghandi; remember Dr. King – they won, yet not without risking a price which included everything they had. Is that not worth its real goal of ceasing to “live in a constant state of rage”?

With love, as always,

Paul William Roberts.

Deschooling Society

Tags

Canada, education, England, Quebec

Regarding the article by Catherine Solyom in The Montreal Gazette for August 16th, I was surprised to find no mention in Ms. Solyom’s intriguing article, Class Dismissed, of Ivan Ilyich’s seminal work on this very subject, Deschooling Society, in which he tackles all of the issues raised here, though with more archaic sagacity and insight. I attended an all-boys’ school in England afflicted by all the ills of which Ilyich complained: the division of time and the nature of study by bells; the emphasis on conformity in dress; the enforced deference to black-gowned teachers; the obedience to often arbitrary rules; the vital importance attached to marks, grades, and who was ‘top of the class’, etc. I read Ilyich’s book while at that school, agreeing with every word of it. However, after winning a scholarship to Oxford University, I found myself in an environment of academic and social freedom much like the one advocated in Deschooling Society; and I was extremely ill-equipped to deal with it. Suddenly, my time was my own, governed merely by two one-on-one tutorials a week, for each of which I was expected to produce a paper of some 20 to 30 pages in length. There was also a one hour group seminar for the eight or nine men reading the same subject – English Literature and Language – as I was in my college. There were lectures open to all university students, yet these were not obligatory. The management of my time was a matter solely of my own concern. My college in those days was all-male; its gates were closed at midnight, although there were ways of climbing in, providing one was not caught by ‘Bullers’ – bowler-hatted university police or enforcers, who roamed the streets after midnight in search of errant scholars. For there were a few women’s colleges; and when one’s life has been spent in an all-boys’ environment, the presence of young ladies was a confusing novelty, which interfered greatly with management of time.

Fifty years later, reading of the vagaries associated with ‘unschooling’, in Ms. Solyom’s piece, I find myself both grateful for and critical of my own pre-university schooling. Without it, I should never have had the advantages of studying Greek, Latin, and numerous other subjects holding no attraction for a child of eleven. I would never have had the opportunity to act in and direct plays; nor to learn carpentry and pottery. Yet, on the other hand, the school, with its encouragement of robotic conformity and its rigidity of structure, in no way prepared me for the boundless freedoms of Oxford. I felt there ought to have been at least a year’s transition period preparing us for a life that was more like Life. But Ilyich’s point had in fact been that such a school system did prepare its students for Life. Most of my friends did not go on to Oxford and a life of leisure in the Arts; they went into the offices and dark satanic mills of bureaucracy or commerce, where their robot-training was immediately continued in various ad hoc forms.

When my own children came of school age, I seriously considered home-schooling, partly because I had the time and qualifications for conducting it, and partly because I considered 80% of time spent at school wasted upon pointless activities and the seemingly impossible task of maintaining discipline without the means to do so. In my school, discipline was strict; pupils were quiet and well-mannered – because corporal punishment existed. There was always the threat of caning, whose effect lay far more in the threat, the possibility, than it did in the actual practice. Admittedly, there were a couple of sadists, who meted out their own forms of physical punishment – a couple, and incidents were rare. The threat created the discipline.

From my experience of my own children’s schools, discipline was an impossible dream, and it took merely one loud-mouthed kid – who had worked out that teacher had no power – to turn any classroom into mayhem. I disapproved of almost everything about the system, from the abolition of competition – everyone must get a prize – to the absurdity of lessons. Reading, writing, and arithmetic appeared to have been abandoned in favour of non-subjects, like ‘social studies’, and projects involving glue, macaroni, wooden skewers, and so forth. Parents complained if their child received poor grades; yet teachers never complained that parents ought to spend more time talking and reading to their kids, rather than letting them watch TV or play video games.

Home-schooling plays a major role in any kind of schooling, and always has done. But it involves time and discipline – and I don’t mean beating; I mean punishments and rewards that actually mean something to a child, and are not idle threats.

When I read in Ms. Solyom’s piece of the notion that children should be left to discover for themselves where their interests lie, I shuddered, recalling how my own childish interests had ranged from piracy, through train-driving, to geology and astronomy. Without forced exposure to history, literature, Latin, and so forth, I would never have arrived at the areas in which my interests truly do lie.

The subtext of this entire article seemed to me to be a severe dissatisfaction regarding what is taught in our schools, and how it is taught. Over the past few decades, teachers seem to have rearranged curricula to suit their own lazy concerns. As my own children ascended the educational ladder, the matter they were studying increasingly appalled me. Were I not so opposed to private education as the most obnoxious form of classism, one which no society ought to sanction, I would have packed my kids off there, along with half my income. For I once gave a talk to students at Upper Canada College – probably the best of Canada’s private schools – and was startled by the good behaviour, attentiveness, and intelligent questions emanating from the boys assembled in my classroom there. Leaving the pleasant buildings and grounds of the school, however, I was overcome by a sadness: why should such an educational environment only be available to the rich? The author John Le Carre recently said the same thing to the CBC’s Eleanor Wachtell; that, as long as Britain’s public schools (the English term for ‘private schools’) exist, the class system will survive to the detriment of all. A far superior education, conducted among one’s peers, inevitably leads to a two-tiered society, where the princes and peasants know their places, yet the middle-class are squeezed, by their own ambitions to climb the social rungs, out of existence. These, it may be recalled, were the very conditions that sparked the French Revolution.

To stem this capricious tide of anti-schooling, I would suggest a complete overhauling of curricula, more money spent on – and more excellence required of – teachers; the abolition of private schools, religious or otherwise; far smaller classrooms (20 children to one teacher at the very most); and a return to real teaching, not the reliance on video and computer aids, which only incite hypnotic disinterest in pupils. Subjects taught – after reading, writing, and math have been mastered – ought to include both official languages, though in an oral form, so that students can talk them first, then perhaps read them; an overview of world religions, to encourage multicultural mutual respect and understanding; a firm grasp of world history, rather than the Euro-centric version current; a course on Canadian political institutions and citizens’ rights; and then, after the age of sixteen or so, specialisation by choice in the sciences or humanities. All of this would be accompanied by real work, not risible projects, and students falling behind would be assigned special help in consultation with their parents, who must be made aware of their own vital role in their child’s progress. In special cases, where a parent is clearly incapable of providing more guidance, special provisions ought to be provided, even involving tuition during the long holidays that adequately-reimbursed teachers could hardly expect to continue enjoying. Yes, it will involve public money; but what better cause than the education of future generations can there possibly be?

The opting out of a system gone awry is, it would seem, a savage criticism of that system which is being truculently ignored by the system itself, one that has always chosen to place the blame for its own failures on other factors or persons. Ms. Solyom has written a fascinating and insightful article, one that ought to worry everyone who cares about education, both in Quebec and in Canada as a whole.

Sincerely,

Paul William Roberts

What You Aren’t Told About Islamist Terrorism

Tags

Islam, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, United States of America

There are some conspiracy theorists who claim the sad deaths of Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall were ‘black operations’ designed to distract media attention away from events in Ferguson, Missouri. While obviously this is stultifying nonsense, there are very valid questions to be raised regarding what the media choose to treat as news, and how they choose to treat it.

I, for one, am growing heartily sick of media refusal to provide a context for both the current situation in Iraq, and so-called Islamist terrorism in general. What I am about to say has been said before, and not just by myself, but in numerous                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     far more-learned and densely-foot-noted books. Yet the information has been largely ignored by a media curiously reluctant to provide viewers or listeners with any context for events, which thus seem to exist in a disconnected void, much like a television series where each episode is a complete story, not reliant upon any knowledge of previous episodes.

With Iraq this entails no mention of the American invasion of 2003 – covered first-hand in my book A War Against Truth – which violated international law, and was predicted by many to result in the current factional chaos. As I predicted here some weeks ago, the threat to U.S. oil interests would oblige America to respond with lethal force. The situation will further deteriorate, and I shall not be surprised to see U.S. boots on the ground soon enough – particularly since they are already on the ground in remote desert bases, stationed there purely to protect oil concerns. The reader ought to remember that America has never closed a base – they still exist in Japan, Italy, Germany, and other defeated victims of World War II; as well as in the numerous objectives of American imperialism, from Indo-China to the Philippines, the Caribbean, and Central America. Although such bases are occasionally mentioned in connection with U.S. operations requiring their use – Weisbaden, for example – I have never heard any media pundit question their existence seventy years, in some cases, after the war which justified their initial construction.

This, however, is not my point here – although it does remain a question demanding both to be asked and answered. My point here is going to be stark, unembellished, and profoundly offensive to some – and those ‘some’ are profoundly offensive to me. I am tempted to state the case in point form as an aid to comprehension, and to add emphasis that this is fact, not opinion:

01: Wahhabite Islam is responsible for all Islamist Terrorism. It is the sole form of Islam officially sanctioned by Saudi Arabia.

02: Wahhab, the founder, was an 18^th century Muslim with delusions of grandeur that appealed to Ibn Sa’ud, who was then attempting, through a prodigious campaign of inter-tribal marriages, to make himself ruler of Arabia – then an ill-defined area of nomadic peoples. Wahhab – whose own parents regarded him as insane – saw himself as greater than the Prophet Mohammed, aspiring to be Caliph of a vast Islamic empire. This meshed in nicely with Ibn Sa’ud’s own plans, giving them a religious sanction. Thus, a partnership was formed between priest and prince – not unlike that advocated by ancient Hebrew texts – dividing control of the inchoate Saudi Arabia between an hereditary monarchy and an hereditary priesthood, which exist to this day, splitting the fabulous oil wealth – undreamt of in the 18^th century – between Wahhabite priests and Saudi royalty.

03: Many of Wahhab’s heretical interpretations of Islam were suited to Ibn Sa’ud’s specific needs: for example, Islam forbids Muslims from attacking other Muslims. Ibn Sa’ud badly wanted to raid the rich merchant caravans travelling west from Persia, yet, Iranians being Muslim, he could not do. Thus Wahhab proclaimed the Shia form of Islam practiced in Persia to be un-Islamic, thereby justifying Ibn Sa’ud’s raids, which increased pre-oil wealth handsomely.

04: In order to increase the power of his own sect, excluding other Islamic influences, Wahhab also declared Sufis, and other branches of more mystical forms of Islam, to be un-Islamic. He also banned music and dancing.

05: Wahhab effectively reduced his form of Islam to something approaching a prison code, which merely existed to be obeyed.

06: When Ibn Sa’ud conquered the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, putting himself in charge of the lucrative Haj pilgrimage, which all Muslims able to do so are encouraged to perform at least once, he was faced with a large group of Egyptian pilgrims singing their traditional Haj songs. On the advice of Wahhab – for whom music was anathema – all these Egyptians pilgrims were slaughtered.

07: Wahhab, to further his own ambitions of becoming global Caliph, began emphasising passages in the Koran urging Jihad against infidels as a divine injunction. Some scholars even suggest that Wahhab himself embellished such passages to make them sound more like a physical, rather than a spiritual war.

08: The Koran can only be read in Arabic, since more than an third of it is impossibly difficult to comprehend, due to the antiquity of the language. All translations are thus interpretations, and Wahhabi translations are among the most prevalent, and the most suspect, in their presentation of Jihad as a literal war, rather than the inner, spiritual struggle it is – much like the war referred to in the Bhagavad Gita.

09: It has been well known what the Saudi royalty spent their half of the sudden and unexpected torrent of oil dollars on; yet few seem aware of what the Wahhabi theocrats did with their share. We are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. From the 1970s on, Wahhabi money was poured into free schools, built all over the world, and not merely in nominally Islamic countries. Africa has been a major target. The form of Islam taught in these schools was the heretical doctrine of Wahhab, preaching a violent Jihad as one of its major tenets. This has not gone unnoticed – a friend of mine in Zambia tried to close down such schools – yet free education has proved hard to argue against, especially when it is accompanied by such perquisites as free loans for agricultural equipment, clothing, and so on.

10: Except in nations where school curricula are carefully monitored, the Wahhabi heresy is now being taught as Islam, encouraging, among many monstrosities, the glories of martyrdom in all its hideous forms. Furthermore, through a complex network of banking facilities, Wahhabi money is financing Jihadi movements everywhere, providing weapons and expertise.

11: Ask yourself why the only airplane allowed to fly on 9/11 carried members of the Saudi royal family out of the U.S.A. Then ask yourself if the C.I.A., with all its resources, is unaware of Wahhabi involvement in international terror.

12: Hardly any average citizen understands the Sunni-Shia schism in Islam – why is this not explained by the media? Is one person in a million aware of the Wahhabite heresy co-ruling Saudi Arabia, and dividing its wealth? How many ‘news junkies’ know that Wahhabism is solely responsible for the current fear of Islam as a threat to world peace? Why should this be?

One possible answer to such nagging questions is that the current situation suits someone with the power to keep it going for their own interests. By far the most barbaric and backward of wealthy world states, Saudi Arabia remains unscathed by tribulations afflicting much of the Arab world. They even have a secret yet widely acknowledged pact of mutual cooperation with Israel. Besides the Wahhabi menace, one would expect a little more pressure brought to bear on the Kingdom by western feminists. Yet the descendants of Ibn Sa’ud and Wahhab seem to dwell within a titanium time capsule, within which they are free to run a society on 12^th century lines, as well as to sponsor and espouse movements and activities which are by far the most disturbing, lethal and disruptive in the world where dwell the rest of us. Harass your senators, congressmen, and members of parliament, I suggest. Ask these questions, and demand answers. No one more than I would be happier to learn that answers are available. I would post them here, without doubt. In the meantime, wait for U.S. efforts to safeguard the oil that most Iraqis still imagine is theirs; and, of course, do nothing for Syria – neediest of needy spots – because Syrians don’t have to imagine they own oil; they know they do not. It is up to us to make this planet a better place, and forcing the media to provide a little context for its discombobulated and hysterical content would be a good place to start.

With love, as always,

Paul William Roberts.

The First World War

Tags

war, WWI

I grew up with WWI. Lacking a father, my grandfather was paterfamilias in our house, and he had fought with the cavalry in that appalling war. He was stationed in the Somme, which was not a battle, but rather a series of battles scattered over a wide area. It is hard to imagine horses in a war with such novelties as tanks, poison gas, and cannons the size of sewer pipes. I was only four or five when Granddad told me some of his stories, so the details are dim, but the horror is not. The piles of bodies stacking trenches knee-deep in mud; the confusion and lack of communication with generals, safely ensconced in comfort far behind the front lines; the death-agonies of terrified horses, some floundering wounded in barbed wire. My grandfather went out, like many a young man, convinced that he was saving his country from a dreadful foe. He returned disillusioned, certain the war had been unnecessarily prolonged, and had been about nothing. He loathed the monarchs and politicians responsible for it, and for the fifty million slaughtered, not to mention the millions more crippled, limbless, and terminally shell-shocked (the mot du jour for PTSD). He remembered the Christmas truce, when Germans and British exchanged gifts, like tins of bully-beef, and celebrated together, before returning the next day to the business of killing, all of it to gain a useless hill or copse. He remembered the bitter cold, when, if a horse died, soldiers would slit open its belly and stick their boots inside the steaming guts to warm their frozen feet. He remembered the orders to charge through six-foot gaps in barbed wire, the men in lines of three, and easily mown down by enemy machine-gun fire, as the officers still ordered them on. He remembered how unpopular officers were often shot by their own men during a battle – although he never said whether he had been such a shooter. I remember his scorn for the Treaty of Versailles, which, he said, dealt unfairly with the Germans and caused the rise of Hitler, along with the next war, which he did feel was necessary, and he was even dismayed to find himself too old to serve in. I expect that he spared me the worst of his memories, but, nonetheless, I gathered that this so-called ‘war to end all wars’ was a hell on earth without any justification. He cited the many poets and intellectuals who had openly opposed it, calling for an end as early as 1915, and often imprisoned for their pains. “If you don’t think a war is just,” he often told me, “then you are morally obligated not to fight in it, and to oppose it, no matter what the cost.” I have never forgotten those words, and still feel obliged to separate the just from the unjust wars, and state my case in writing. Just because our technology spares us the muddy Hades of trenches, it still does not mean that war has become sanitized. It destroys worlds and lives on both sides, leaving the labour of ages in rubble, and once-healthy minds shattered. Our soldiers still come home in pieces, mentally and physically. They still often feel their sacrifices were for nothing. The lessons of history are clear: war, and the means to wage it, need to be eradicated from this planet; and anyone opposing such an idea ought to be regarded as an antisocial criminal, in dire need of rehabilitation. It is never too late to build a better world. With love,

Paul William Roberts

Politocrisy

Tags

9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Osama bin Laden, Palestine, politics, Saddam Hussein

After the travesty of 9/11, the United States attacks Afghanistan ferociously, and then invades. Many civilians are killed; nothing is achieved. The twin-towers terrorists are Egyptians and Saudi Arabians, not Afghans. But the U.S. is after Osama bin-Laden, who they believe to be the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. He is not, as it turns out, but he’s also not entirely innocent. Eventually he’s found, in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, and murdered, or, rather, executed without a trial. In 2003, the U.S. invades Iraq, having shamelessly concocted a flimsy excuse, not to mention persuaded many, if not most, Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. He was not, yet Iraq is reduced to chaos and rubble, both of which conditions still persist over a decade later. The civilian death-toll exceeds one million; nothing is achieved, although America pretends to build schools, etc., none of which are completed.

The political world does not really protest these unwarranted and criminal actions.

Israel responds savagely to rocket attacks from Hamas militants in Gaza, however, and the world is appalled because many civilians are killed – a result of them being used by Hamas as human shields. Israel is merely defending itself, as it has a right to do, and as you or I would do if attacked. America was not defending itself in Afghanistan or Iraq. This is political hypocrisy – politocrisy.

Imagine the fuss there would be if Israel attacked Jordan and invaded Saudi Arabia, using some flimsy excuse about national security!

If Quebec separatist militants fired rockets into Ontario, how would Ottawa respond? With diplomacy? Through the U.N.? Unlikely. The army – or the Anglophone portion of it – would go in heavy, as they say, and take out the militants and their launchers. Pierre Trudeau suspended habeas corpus during the F.L.Q. crisis, which was a barroom rumpus compared with what Israel is currently enduring.

Naturally, one grieves for the innocent victims; yet one senses less grief for innocent Israelis than one does for innocent Palestinians. The Israelis can only defend themselves, however; but the Palestinians can vote Hamas out of existence, if they so choose. Knowing, as they must, that Hamas militants deliberately put civilians at risk, by launching rockets from heavily-populated zones, it is only a wonder that Palestinians do not produce a Ghandi, someone capable of achieving all their desired goals through non-violent means.