The International Caucasian Court

Tags

Afghanistan, gambia, international criminal court, Iraq, Israel, syria, war crimes

 

Gambia has threatened to withdraw its ratification of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, citing concerns over racial bias. So far, South Africa is the only African state to actually withdraw. Are these concerns of bias valid? Well, no – the Court only indicts at the request of involved nations. But, on the other hand, yes – because the most notorious potential villains are senior politicians in the UK, Israel and the United States. Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine remain areas where the most egregious of apparent war-crimes have occurred. Why, then, have individuals or groups in the countries implicated not brought forward relevant charges for the Court? It is a good question, and one for which nobody seems to have an answer. Tony Blair, G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz – after Hitler and the Nazis, these are the most appalling war-criminals the world has ever known. And they also know it. I will be most surprised to learn that any of them has ever left his cushioned continent since 2001. It is the same with that arch-demon, Henry Kissinger. He cannot travel far from home, because there are warrants for his arrest all over the place. You have not heard this? Read my dear late old friend, Christopher Hitchens’ book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger. And, while you’re at it, read his book on the Clintons. The contents are deeply disturbing, and, since neither book was ever sued, one must assume that these diabolical accusations are true. In Hilary’s case, this is who America will elect as President – and that, perhaps, explains why none of its previous criminal leaders were suggested for the ICC’s prosecution? In the West, we have an intrinsic bias – but only because we no longer know our own history. There is nothing to be proud of in it. For America, there is a vast delusion, going back to the Beginning and those most grandiose of documents. “All men are born equal and independent”? I don’t think so. Do the black slaves, or the Indigenous – or, for that matter, women – have certain “inalienable rights”? Or certain unalienable ones? Evidently not. And who exactly are, “We the people”? It would seem that they are the signees to this ridiculously pompous, self-aggrandizing screed: the cabal of oligarchic, land-owning faux-aristocrats who had managed to steal the British colonies before the Motherland knew they’d done it. Much as I hate to admit Donald J. Trump is right, he is right in claiming this election to be stolen. Confessedly, I would also steal it from him if I controlled America. But the hordes who will wail when Trump loses – as he will – ought, perhaps, to wonder why they have not dispatched their alleged war-criminals to the ICC. It is, as Gore Vidal used to say, because of the United States of Amnesia. Just going back to Vietnam, I could name a dozen people who deserve a criminal trial – if only to clear their names. Yet American – or really global – media focus their concerns on the present moment. All that seems to matter today is November the 8^th. Yet, when that arrives, and Hilary is the next President, these concerns will change. No one will ever resurrect past worries, because we are not supposed to dwell on those. Thus, the lame ICC is left prosecuting tribal malfeasants, or possibly the odd east European despot. The world, however, is always left wondering if real justice is ever going to be served.

 

Pondering this perpetual calamity, I am left thinking about what might be truly interesting to readers. Would it, perhaps, be a glimpse of what goes on, much of the time, in the writer’s head? If such is the case – and I do not insist it is – then a new novel begins like this:

 

When I died, things really got interesting. Which is to say they were definitely not interesting before this. I had been a scientist, an expert in earthworms, and a teacher of my expertise. It was even said, at one glorious point, that I was the 5^th most knowledgeable person on earthworms in the world. I objected to this attestation. McFinn was far less knowledgeable than I. But, after death, there was much to distract me from petty concerns. I must say that death was unexpected – who knew that lorry was skidding out of control on the icy road ahead? Not me. But, instead of this, I found myself wondering about all the lives I had previously lived. I must admit I had never, not for a moment, believed in reincarnation – and I did not now. I was forced to accept it, though, because it was true. In the same way, I was obliged to accept all the musings and ponderings I had ever had regarding the past. Amongst these – and I scarcely recalled it – was the questioning of Shakespeare’s identity. In my youth, I imagine, I had become obsessed, for a week or a month, with the specious issue of who wrote those plays. To be frank, I don’t think I had cared about this in half a century. Yet there I was, moments after death, plunged into the London of a very late 16^th-century. Of course, it had never crossed my mind that one of my earlier selves had been involved in the Globe Theatre, and in Shakespeare’s life. Admittedly, I was not that involved – but I was there. And this revelation was not without its vast surprises. As I find my diary records: September 9^th, 1593, Deptford, London:

 

And so it goes…

 

Paul William Roberts      

Leonard Cohen New Album

Tags

leonard cohen, music

You Want It Darker?

 

Readers have made me feel guilty after my Bob Dylan hagiograph. It is true that I have purchased every Leonard Cohen album, not since 1963, but since 1967’s Songs of Leonard Cohen. At 33, he then seemed so much older than me, Dylan, or indeed anyone on the music scene. Now he’s 82, and doesn’t seem so old. It is one thing writing great songs into the twilight years, but it is something else altogether to produce one of your very greatest songs on your 82^nd birthday, or thereabouts. I have not yet heard the whole album, but I have heard the title track, You Want it Darker? One of his fine lapidary constellations of balefully evocative and irreducibly concise poetic images precedes the chorus:

 

You want it darker?

We kill the flame…

 

If possible, the rumbling thunder of his hypnotic voice seems to drop an octave, as a series of arresting word-pictures streams out to catch this moment in time in its fascinated web. The song begins with heavenly choirs, and concludes with the ululating cantor’s soulful cry, and the heartfelt phrase, “I’m ready, Lord…’ I heard it for the first time moments ago, and the hairs on my neck are still standing up. This is one of the classic songs – and Cohen has so many – yet it is hard to imagine anyone else venturing to sing such personal lyrics – “Lord, I’m ready…”

I worked with Leonard years ago on the 30-minute video of I Am A Hotel, which we shot in Toronto’s King Edward Hotel at a time when his career had reached an apparent nadir. Recent albums had been lacklustre, with musicians who sounded like Sunday afternoon in Greece. Leonard seemed preoccupied, more concerned with his practice of what he termed “Zen-Judaism” than with his future as a singer-songwriter. A new album even contained the hauntingly exquisite refrain:

 

If it be your will

That my voice be still…

 

He was very concerned that songs like Suzanne – the goose that laid golden eggs – be presented in the video correctly. He tried his hand at editing the tape himself, only to find the task required skills he did not have. I felt certain he was about to retreat to his monastery forever. Yet he came back with a vengeance, and an updated sound at the lip of a leading edge, and lyrics capturing the zeitgeist, be it universal or deeply personal. He has never really left the crest of that wave, although people have been speculating about his retirement for nearly twenty years.

Indeed, he may have been looking forward to it himself, but, some ten years ago, something happened to dash any hopes of a mellow old age. His manager of many years – one of those career women who sees her role as surrogate wife as well as business associate – ripped off all of his money. Possibly, she imagined she’d been jilted? Whatever the cause, the money was gone, and Leonard found himself in his seventies back on the road.

Like Dylan, and many other mediocre instrumentalists, he had always shied away from skilled musicians, feeling it would be embarrassing to display his musical ignorance in front of such people. But now, as Dylan would also do, he started recording and touring with exceptional talents, soon realizing he did not even have to play guitar poorly himself. Someone else could play it well. He could concentrate on singing. He once told me he was so nervous about performing live that he needed a handful of quayludes just to go on stage. Those performances were notorious for the maudlin depths of weeping grief shared by both audience and star. But with a band able to carry his wonderful voice – rather than depend on it to carry them – the last decade or so has been extraordinary, with concerts on DVD as exceptional as any in the history of popular music.

What is most remarkable, though, is the calibre of lyrics. As it was with Yeats, and very few others – in fact, none spring to mind – the later poetry exceeds in richness and depth the earlier work. And this – presumably – very late song is up there with the very best, which, in Cohen’s case, is saying a lot.

Many of his songs seem to speak from two places at once – the universal, a kind of Overlord, and the particular, usually a lover. My Secret Life goes from the ex-lover’s reminisces to:

 

And the dealer wants you thinking

It’s either black or white –

My God, it’s not that simple

In my secret life…

 

Just as You Want it Darker? goes from the kind of observations it is very tempting to see as excruciatingly current, to “I’m ready, Lord,” a poignant call to the very terminal event, one which it is difficult not to hear as the singer’s quietus. Just as First We Take Manhattan goes from apocalyptic instructions from a Dark Force to the memory of “I don’t like what happened to my sister…”

I could rummage through Leonard Cohen’s superlative material for hundreds of pages, but that is not my job. On his glorious 82^nd birthday, I just want to say, “Happy birthday, Lenny, and thanks for a lifetime of heart and soul-stirring songs, and their bittersweet soundtrack to my life. “I’m ready, Lord”? I do hope you’re not too ready, sir…

 

Paul William Roberts

 

Bob Dylan

Tags

bob dylan, literature, nobel prize, poetry

In 1963, at the RCA store, in Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey, England, I bought my first Bob Dylan album. I was not yet thirteen. It was his first album too. Since that long-distant date, I have purchased every Dylan album, in vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, and DVD. I must have bought many two or three times in various formats. I have dozens of bootlegs too, as well as rare recordings – like Dylan singing Hard Rain with the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra – and acetates of such things as the acoustic versions of Like A Rolling Stone, and Just Like A Woman, from one of the great recording sessions, Blonde on Blonde. So you could say I am a fan. And, as such, I am utterly delighted to hear that Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

It is a little less than delightful to hear some of the responses to this news, however. The author of Trainspotting, whoever he is, termed it a sop thrown to the festering prostates of “senile, gibbering hippies”. Well, as a senile, gibbering hippy (whose prostate is still, God willing, still in a pre-putrefaction condition), I can only say: What’s wrong with that? CBC News, on the radio at least, seemed uncertain whether or not listeners were acquainted with Dylan – too young or, improbably, too old? They played snatches of songs, the most current of which was from the late sixties – nothing wrong with that, they are great songs. But the point is this artist has been writing superb songs for well over fifty years. Also on the CBC, an alleged Dylan authority, one David Kinney, suggested the Nobel Prize people were misguided. Dylan is a musician, he said. His songs were not meant to be read as literature on a page. We’ll get to this in a moment, but Kinney was also questioned about Dylan’s supposed plagiarising from numerous sources. Having been accused of so-called plagiarism myself, I was fascinated to hear Mr. Kinney characterising Dylan’s allusions or borrowing as a “re-purposing” of the original text. I must remember “re-purposing”, I thought, since all writers are literary magpies, taking whatever they need from whatever place it’s found – even the faintest memory of a text. I could cite hundreds of examples of Dylan plunderings from all over literature. But his own album, Love and Theft, best exemplifies the reality of literary resonance. Dylan’s very roots are in the hoary tradition where an old song continually became a new one. The question-reply structure of Hard Rain, for example – “O, where have you been, my blue-eyed son…I’ve been out on the side of twelve misty mountains…etc.” – goes back into antiquity. Songs of lost love echo poems of lost love, by Blake, Poe, Yeats, and so on. Literature breeds literature – you cannot write it unless you read it, and, when you read it, notes of beauty, poignancy, sheer love remain as part of you forever. Love and Theft plays with the love of and theft from songs – most of them in public domain – that go back to when the Blues was tangled up in Gospel, Country, Jug, and when Rock ‘n Roll was the bastard child. A more recent album, Tempest, even begins with what sounds like an ancient recording from that early period – although it turns into a contemporary version of the same urgent sound, and a song about the Dukane Whistle, whatever that is. One would have to wade through the Smithsonian Museum’s extensive archives of early American music to gain even a hint to the provenance of many Dylan songs. Anyone who listened to his radio show on the Satellite Channel will be well aware of the depth and scope of his expertise in musical history. As the droll, and sometimes silly DJ, half the songs he played each week were by people I’d never heard of – some from wax-cylinder recordings made when the nation was still mostly legend, still young and hopeful. No artist will say, “I took this from here and that from there”, because it doesn’t work that way. First comes the love, and then comes the theft. But, if Dylan is indeed nostalgic – by no means certain – it is for a time when musicians were just entertainment, and no big deal.

As his memoir, Chronicles, reveals in rather harrowing detail, however, Dylan’s life has been an oppressively big deal. His book vies with Miles Davis’ autobiography for the accolade of best musical reminiscence. In particular, it shows what went on behind the scenes during that most mysterious, and hence most-speculated-on period in Dylan’s life. To this day, it fascinates pundits, critics, et al – who seem unwilling to take the man’s word for what happened. There were two albums – Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde – which single-handedly changed the course of so-called pop music. Then there was silence. Some said drugs. Some said a bad divorce. Others said a nervous breakdown, and/or a motorcycle accident. Whatever happened, the long silence was broken by Nashville Skyline, an album of country-inspired music, that even featured a duet with country legend Johnny Cash. Fans were somewhat perplexed, but in the end they loved this record, which included the now-classic Lay Lady Lay, with a syrupy-voiced Dylan sounding…well, unlike Dylan. The result was a huge interest in country music – until then regarded as a redneck backwater by hipsters – and the emergence of a new country-rock genre, with people like Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young, and, eventually, the Eagles. What had happened to Dylan during that long period of silence? Well, the way he tells it in Chronicles, the pressure from drug-addled fans convinced he was the messiah, or some such, began to destroy his life. He had retreated to a farm in New York State, to spend time with his children and rebuild a crumbling marriage. But the fans and the media would not leave him alone. In print, the wildest allegations were entertained – heroin, space aliens – sometimes by a crackpot calling himself a “Dylanologist”, who rummaged through Dylan’s garbage in search of clues (a candy bar wrapper, a blackened teaspoon – must be junk!). Fans in various states of derangement trespassed on the farm property. None of the few statements Dylan made to the media helped disabuse obsessed monomaniacs of whatever bizarrely idolatrous views they held. He was like poor Brian, in The Life of Brian, who cried out “I’m not the messiah” – but everyone responds, “Only the true messiah would say that!” To which Brian says, “Okay, I am the messiah,” and everyone yells, “You see – he is the messiah!” Dylan says his response was more practical: he would record an album in the most despised current genre – Country. That would surely work? But no, it didn’t, and Dylan resigned himself just to making music, writing songs, and exploring every genre that took his fancy – Blue Grass, Rockabilly, Gospel, Reggae, Rap, you name it. But he made each style uniquely his own. Those who can’t abide his inimitable voice and his own versions, can enjoy his songs in renditions by every imaginable artiste, be it Aaron Neville, Mavis Staples, even Frank Sinatra – right up to Lady Gaga, and no doubt beyond, probably forever.

For the fact is that Bob Dylan is now the most prolific songwriter in history – some say 1500, some far more, and no one knows, perhaps not even Bob. It is one of the most effusively pullulating displays of creativity in all of civilization, and it has continued, seemingly unabated, for over half a century.

David Kinney says Dylan’s songs were “not meant to be read on a page”. Perhaps not, but neither was most poetry and prose until 500 years ago, when a “page” was invented. As a lady on the Nobel committee pointed out, Homer and Sappho’s work was designed to be heard, not read. Most early lyric poetry was sung to music. More people probably heard Thomas Wyatt, and even William Blake sing their poems than ever read them in books. It is obvious from whence the term “lyric” springs. As echoes in his songs show, Dylan has always been well aware of lyric poetry’s European origins in the Troubadours, Arnaut Daniel, and Dante, as well as their continuation in Verlaine and Rimbaud. It is easy to deduce he is a great reader. And a highly eclectic one, effortlessly turning from a book about Japanese gangs to an account of the Titanic’s sinking. Many try to pinpoint what material induced his greatest songs – is it anger and broken love, or spiritual yearning? – but this is like trying to impose your favourite dish on someone else at a grand banquet. Perhaps every dish is good – how will you know if you don’t taste it?

I met him on a few occasions – shy, very funny, reticent, and ultimately enigmatic. We played chess and he was astoundingly good. I later learned he had paid Bobby Fischer to give him lessons. We talked purposelessly of current issues. We deplored the advent of the personal computer – he was something of a Luddite, and perhaps still is. But it was clear to me he had devised a persona that was not easy to know. As Yeats said of Eliot, “That man will not let me look into his soul”. Dylan would not even let me look into the left side of his face. He kept it averted, like someone with a hideously scarring disease, and looked sideways. I was not trying to be his friend – it was a creative venture he liked for a while – but I did get a sense of how difficult that would be, of how enclosed and private he had made himself. I imagine the Nobel Prize is a mixed blessing to someone who loathes any intrusive media attention. For a man who still performs some 200-odd concerts a year – and has done for decades – he has achieved a remarkable degree of anonymity. His own band-members only get to meet him on stage. His tour bus, the penthouse on wheels, pulls up near the stage door. Typically, Dylan walks out at 8 p.m., or whatever, and launches into the first song without a word to the audience. Fans may not even see him – these days he often plays an organ to the side. But I once saw Miles Davis play with his back to the auditorium. When the set is over, Mr. Dylan returns to his bus, no encores, nothing. It’s a job. His few close friends know better than to reveal a down-time Dylan. Jack Nicolson has referred to his sense of humour, which I found marked, and which is evident in Martin Scorcese’s masterful documentary – where Dylan seems to loosen up with a talent he has always envied, sometimes with disastrous results.

Besides his deliberate attempts to sabotage his own career, Dylan is extraordinary for the number of times he has failed calamitously at something in which he evidently wished to succeed, and yet survived with his reputation intact. There was the spree of typing known as the novel, Tarantula – about which the less said the better. There was the twelve-hour movie, Reynaldo and Clara, in which all one could discern was a very fat man playing Bob Dylan, and Bob Dylan playing someone called Reynaldo, whose role in the film was obscure. Joan Baez played Clara. They rode in a carriage with white horses at one point. At another point, Allen Ginsberg had his beard shaved off and looked…well, like his own Yiddisher bubba. It was hard to say what the story was about, or even if there was a story. I saw the savagely-edited eight-hour version in LA, and found nothing helpful missing. The project was only saved by its plethora of concert footage, in which a Dylan wearing whiteface headlines a concert featuring such vaudeville curiosities as Tiny Tim – ukulele, shopping bag, Tiptoe through the Tulips… This was around the period when Dylan released the album Hurricane, whose songs were largely co-written with a New York theatre friend. The lyrics are unusually tight and very literary, with Dylan’s voice soaring like a cantor at times. The title song concerned the wrongful imprisonment of Ruben “Hurricane” Carter, a black middle-weight boxing champion, arrested for a murder of which he was innocent:

 

But Ruben sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell

An innocent man in a living hell

But one time he coulda been

The champion of the world…

 

In point of fact, Ruben Carter probably couldn’t have been the champion of the world, and, while almost certainly innocent of the murder for which he’d been convicted, was definitely guilty of others, and of various horribly violent crimes. Dylan visited him in jail. Many people did. He was a cause celebre for the white guilt then surfacing for the first time in America. Some Canadians lobbied for Ruben’s release, and achieved it. A movie was in the works – eventually made a decade later by Norman Jewison. But what everyone who’d had any contact with the free Ruben Carter found – including Dylan – was that the man was an astonishing pain in the ass, pushy, boastful, greedy, and, according to the cops, very guilty of something. Jewison used Dylan’s song for his film’s credits, and it summed up in ten minutes the fable of Hurricane far more succinctly than two hours of rambling celluloid. Long before, though, Dylan had decided Ruben Carter was dubiously bad news, and thus, seemingly, so was the co-written album – which many have said was his best. Ignoring the truth about Ruben, Hurricane is still a tremendously good song, as are many other co-written songs on the album. Dylan never sings any of them live. He’s had other successful collaborations too. Brownsville Girl, written with playwright Sam Sheppard, is a remarkable kind of talking Blues, a very quirky story:

 

The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter was that his name wasn’t Henry Porter…

 

Other ventures are with Willie Nelson, George Harrison, and Roy Orbison. With the last two, Dylan even formed a band, The Travelling Willburys, under the watchful eye of Tom Petty. Their albums are extremely good, and Dylan’s contribution is markedly brilliant. Yet no matter how successful these collaborations have been – include here Daniel Lanois as a superlative producer – Dylan moves on and moves off, seeking new ground. Many new albums are produced by “Jack Frost”, a Dylan pseudonym, whose basic principle for a session is do it in a day, one take a song. Yet this somehow suits the raw feeling of his later work, where he sounds like a superb band in a small club with a singer afflicted by laryngitis, or worse. But to dismiss Dylan now as “a nostalgia act” is not to hear the new songs – and not to observe his current audience.

As I write, my daughter, age 23, is about to attend a concert in LA with Dylan and the Rolling Stones. She has been to previous concerts as well, and views Bob as the marvel he is. The songs are ageless, the music now flawless – it didn’t used to be.

Whatever remains of western culture in 200 years, if anything or anyone remains, Dylan will be a giant. All by himself, he took popular music from “I wanna hold your hand” to:

 

In the dime-stores and bus stations

People talk of situations

Read books, repeat quotations

Draw conclusions on the wall…

 

In 1963 no song had lyrics like:

 

Twilight on the frozen lake

A cold wind about to break

Old footsteps in the snow

The silence down below –

You’re beautiful beyond words

Beautiful to me…

 

You had to live through those times to appreciate the enormity of Dylan’s contribution to the course of musical history. He may have now found the plateau as “song and dance man” he always claimed he was, but no Dylan album has ever disappointed me. His recording of Christmas songs, five years ago, would have been preposterous in the late sixties – and the first track was somewhat risible – yet it is ultimately notable for the sincerity with which he sings these simple, perennially-popular ditties. Similarly, his take on the Great American Songbook recently – a lounge act in essence – presents some finely-crafted material sung by someone who clearly loves it, and loves the whole idea of being an entertainer. This was evident when Bob played at Frank Sinatra’s 80^th birthday party too. Half the audience looked shocked when his name was announced, expecting disrespect perhaps, but Dylan sang a simple traditional ballad about a lovable outlaw, said, “Happy Birthday, Mr. Frank,” and was gone. It was a tribute from one great entertainer to another. During the 1991 Gulf War, when Dylan received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy, everyone wondered what he would do. There had been no celebrity protests as there had been during Vietnam. Many were yearning for someone to condemn George the First and his bombing. What would Dylan do or say? Surely he couldn’t ignore this travesty? With an awful band, Dylan played what only aficionados could have discerned was Masters of War – a very powerful protest songs from 25 years earlier. You couldn’t hear a word of it, and I wondered why. The answer, I concluded, was that anyone who didn’t know the song by now wouldn’t be moved by it anyway. Dylan was saying, “I’ve done that, been here before, and now it’s all noise…” His speech was similarly calculated. Shifting a hat back and forth on his head, like Chaplin, he said, “My Daddy used to say to me, he said, son…well, he said a lotta things….” He paused for so long the audience was laughing, and then nhe added, “Sometimes you can do things so heinous they burn your soul, but just remember there’s a power always ready to forgive you if you are sorry…Thank you very much…” It seemed ad libbed, but it wasn’t, not any of it. He’s not someone who leaves things to chance. The only time I have ever seen him off-guard in public was when he won an Oscar. He was in Australia via videolink. He clearly did not expect to win. The prize was for Things Have Changed, a cynical twist on The Time’s They Are A-Changin’ — and an incongruous soundtrack for The Dead Poet’s Society. Wearing his bizarre lounge-lizard’s pencil moustache, he hardly knew what to say when told he’d won, yet was charmingly grateful all the same. So many moments of Bob, so many years…

In some ways I have measured out my life with Dylan albums. I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard a new record. In Kathmandu for Blood on the Tracks. In LA for Slow Train. Oxford for Hurricane. Hundreds of songs now float around my brain, emerging at times, appropriately or otherwise. My first love was to a Dylan album – Bringing it all Back Home – and my last love has now been serenaded by a number of recent albums. Like any great work, I can return to Dylan at any of his many periods and always find something new – and always think, “My God, this is a great song.” It makes me feel grateful. Only Leonard Cohen continues to do that as well. It was thus heartwarming to find that my gratitude was expressed by the Nobel Committee, on behalf of all who have had cause to find solace, love, comfort, inspiration, and sheer joy in the work of Bob Dylan. Thank you, Mr. Bob, and congratulations. It is eminently well-deserved.

 

Paul William Roberts

 

Patriotism

Tags

Canada, patriotism, politics, trump, United States of America, war

What is it? Well, some – including Bob Dylan and Sam Shepherd – say, “It’s the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings.” I am bound to concur. It’s at the core of currently-floundering Trump’s message (believe me, he won’t go down so easily), just as it was rooted in the barking of Adolf Hitler, whose principal appeal was one of national and ‘racial’ solidarity. The Fuhrer’s ranting demands for lebensraum merely consisted of a call to expand the Fatherland and reintegrate bits that had been carved off by history – German-speaking bits, on the whole. So the hollering for nationalist fervour – which is patriotism, after all is said and done – seems not to be a good thing? If the Nazis are too extreme and polarizing an example, take Napoleon. His vision for a United States of Europe – an idea currently crumbling into dust – was in reality one of an engorged France controlling many servile satellites. Paris was to be the capital of this ‘union’, which was the French Empire under another name. From Frederick the Great all the way back to the Romans, patriotism meant the expansion of a local ideology to incorporate thinking in the most far-flung regions. Rome extended to Persia. Great Britain included China, and still, psychologically, includes Australia and some Pacific islands. But patrimonies, homelands, now seem to feel threatened, insecure. Hence the appeal of patriotic hectoring in various forms.

Is this, one asks, why the Angus Reid organization last week conducted a poll to gauge the level of emotional attachment citizens had to Canada? Putting aside the value and rectitude of polls in general, this one evidently noted that so-called ‘millennials’ – apparently people aged 18 to 35 – showed a marked lack of emotional attachment to their country. This strikes me as a good thing. Ever-jingoistic, the media thought otherwise, with baleful comments about the shortage of national pride. It may just be me, but I keep hearing politicians talking about Canada as, “the best country in the world,” these days. It almost sounds like part of the nation’s name, like “America the Wonderful”, or Alexander the Great. Don’t get me wrong, I have great affection for my adopted country, and certainly consider it a better place to live than most others. But to say it is the greatest country in the world has grimmer implications. If we weren’t such a small place, in terms of population – the tiny British isles have three times as many people – we would be hauling these nationalistic fantasies into a far more dangerous place, and we would be…well, America.

Can a vast country, built by immigrants from everywhere on the backs of a crushed indigenous peoples, ever claim the uniqueness of being, “One nation under God”? We are forced to admit that ‘the West’, wherever it is now located, is largely a product of European economic migrants. With its disgraceful thousand-year history of endless petty wars, Europe can hardly lay claim to the virtues of peaceful coexistence. And thus Europeans have an ingrained tendency to seek hostile solutions, where other erstwhile nationals – the Chinese, for example – look to a more innate rectitude of purpose to overcome problems. China has five thousand years of continuous civilization – the Chi’in state is the world’s oldest political union – where the USA barely has 300 years. While the Chinese have a strong sense of cultural identity, it has never translated itself into imperial designs. The state has merely reclaimed territories lost during periods of internal weakness. The American model, aped now so often by Canada, involves an incapacity to see the world as not, or – God forbid! – even anti-American. Historically, the United States has either been xenophobic and enclosed, or else imperialistic, seeking to impose itself on vulnerable nations or peoples. With the current enthusiasm for world-cop-like missions, I see a danger in Canada pursuing this path. It is logically impossible, however.

The Angus Reid poll, seeking to measure the levels of national idolatry, fails to take into account the increasing number of Canadian citizens who can never claim to love this country more than any other – usually the one of their heritage. Thirty-five years away from it, I would still have to choose England over Canada, if the countries were ever at war. No doubt, the same is true for many if not most immigrants. Culture, heritage, language, whatever it is – they bind us. To hear “God bless America”, or “Canada, the greatest country in the world”, is thus alienating. It implies that some of us are Canadians, and others are not, when, in truth, only the abused First Nations have a right to that claim. The Quebecois have been here four centuries, yet many of them still identify themselves as other than strictly Canadian, or ‘Anglo’. Patriotic fervour – the military, the heroism! – may not be so apparent a disease here as it is in America, yet deadly diseases grow and spread.

The Trump groan, to “Make America great again” is – besides making one wonder when exactly the USA was ever great – a call to arms. Crush dissent! Muslims and Mexicans out! We’re the global cop and the world will now pay us for the task, whether or not anyone wants it! For people who have nothing or know nothing, it may incite some form of identity or pride. Yet for the rest it’s obnoxious. And patriotism is truly obnoxious. The One God’s on our side – everyone else is wrong, or with Satan. That’s how it works, and it has been the single greatest cause of human misery for all of recorded history. You love your country, you fight for it – no matter how right, wrong, or indifferent the casus belli may be. As studies of the human genome show, we are all the same. Even the idea of races is ill-founded. As the greatest photograph in history shows, we all live on one beautiful little blue planet – and we’ll have to share its bounty equally, ,or else perish, like many incompatible species before us. Old maxims are rarely incorrect: Patriotism? It’s the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings.

 

Paul William Roberts

US-IS? Does the Most Un-Islamic State Have a Future?

Tags

ISIS, Islam, Middle East, religion

 

Many blog-readers have asked me this. How to respond? The easiest and most honest answer would be to say, Who knows? Because no one can tell. The question does, however, raise some interesting issues. For example, how curious is it to find yourself thinking of Al-Quaeda as ‘moderate’? For, in the face of Desh, Taliban, and other enormities, such is evidently the case. It leads one to think of who controls these organizations. And, on the anniversary of the US attack on the Medecins Sans Frontiers hospital at Kundun, Afghanistan, a year go today – in which many innocent patients and staff were slaughtered – it reminds you of the valid grievances shared by some members of some anti-western groups. Al-Quaeda, since the assassination of Osama bin-Laden, has been headed up by Dr. Aiwan Zawahiri, a spectacularly uncharismatic leader, also very adept at hiding himself from US assaults. A surgeon by profession, he presumably has, or so one would imagine, the kind of educated mind able to look through ideological blather and perceive the political realities of his organization’s current and future situation. This may well account for Al-Quaeda’s recent low profile.

The current situation vis a vis West Asia, from Iran and the Gulf to Syria, is about as uncertain and turbulent as that troubled stretch of the world has ever been. The catastrophe in Iraq, and now the chronic vacillation regarding Syria, have made it clear to those two-thirds of the planet never enthusiastic about western hegemony that the United States is a waning power. Where once a phone calls from any Secretary-of-State would have made rebels and dictators alike jump, now there is only a scornful silence, as everyone proceeds with their  bloody work of imposing someone’s brutal will upon others. Within this fiasco are, somewhere or other, the many voices supposedly representing an ‘Islamic State’. But who exactly do they claim to represent? It certainly isn’t most of the planet’s billion-odd Muslims.

The African factions, like al-Shebab – and which proliferate faster than one can recall their grandiose names – scarcely represent any form of Islam at all. They comprise mostly recent Muslim converts whose allegiances are principally tribal. Conflicts in Africa are invariably hostilities between tribes dating back into the mists of time, and only nominally religious wars. Groups sympathetic to an ‘Islamic State’ south of Syria are extremist Palestinian factions financed by the Wahhabite clergy of Saudi Arabia – just as Bashar Assad’s Shiite regime is backed by hardline Iranian clerics. The Syrian rebels seek a Sunni government at Damascus – some indeed probably a secular one. The forces of Desh – in a three-way civil war (something the US is prone to get involved in, despite military advice to the contrary) – are in reality led by officers of the old Iraqi Republican Guard. They may have grown beards and become adept at spouting nonsense bowdlerized from the Koran, but their sole interests are carving out a territory for themselves from parts of Syria and Iraq. One can hardly blame them. A vast majority of the Sunni and Christian Iraqis with whom I am still in sporadic contact say the same thing: no matter how bad things were under Saddam, there was peace, stability and prosperity. Now there is just conflict, chaos and poverty. It ought to have been very clear to the brain-trust in Washington that overturning Saddam’s Ba’athist rule would leave the oppressed Shia majority in power, and everyone else running for their lives. It is another measure of America’s waning power than no one appears to have advised against the war. Long-used to being in power, Iraqi Sunnis, and some of their Christian subordinates, would have not only felt mistreated, but would also have also possessed the know-how, and some of the means, to fight back – to carve out part of Arabia for themselves. At the end of the day, it is the post-1919 dividing-up of West Asia by western powers which decided on the artificial frontiers seen on any map today. The inhabitants of these vast areas – much of them desert – have never viewed the boundary-lines as legitimate. As a glance at the atlas will show, they are all straight lines – a sure sign of the mapmaker’s work. A sign too of the viability a theorised ‘Islamic State’ presents to many living in the proposed area for such a state.

Israel sits unhappily at the centre of this maelstrom, unable or unwilling to voice her many valid complaints and suggestions. To Jerusalem, the only feasible solution to Syria’s dilemma is the continuation of Assad’s regime. It may not be just or likeable, but it will still be easier to deal with than any kind of Sunni democracy, let alone – God forbid! – any kind of Islamic state. A situation in which no one is happy certainly seems like no solution at all.

But should such a bastion of pseudo-Islamist ideals manage to cut itself a portion of West Asia, what prospects would it have for a thriving future? Precious few, I would say. Israel’s potent military would be ever-watchful. Iran would arm and finance Shia rebels. The Saudis would meddle. And the African factions would demand help with their endless inter-tribal belligerence. On top of all this, the Internet and social media would force the Future into these time-trapped regions and, just perhaps, their denizens would then ask themselves and their leaders what all the horror, hostility and bloodshed were about, Perhaps?

 

P.S. Whoops! I have just learned that the US have blmed Russian interference for all the problems in Syria. Now doesn’t that just go to show you that an old unresolved squabble is better than

 

Paul William Roberts