Well, with global warming on the go, spring
has really sprung, despite a recent cold spell, in fact the
spring is probably a month in advance of where it was a half
century or more ago. 1937 was a particularly cold 'spring'
with a very cold snap and heavy snow in March [you seem to
remember it well - Ed] [just watch it or you'll get a cold
snap - Billy], so that daffodils were only in full bloom more
than half way through April. Admittedly that was very late
even for those times, but now at the start of March 2004 they're
fully on the go in the northern part of the country, which
is on average two degrees centigrade colder than the south.
Nothing to complain about here yet but if the Gulf Stream
changes course we can all go skiing at Easter - and it would
also be the end of Irish agriculture as we have known it.
But what a month it has been [yes, last month
was February - Ed]. On the same day, 18th February, Norn Iron
broke two records, one internal, and one world record. The
same day as the Republic drew 0 - 0 with Brazil, Northern
Ireland's football team scored one goal against Norway, in
a 4 - 1 defeat, ending the longest time an international football
team has gone without scoring a goal (Northern Ireland was
1,299 minutes on the pitch without scoring). The other record
the same day was an internal Northern record for the intimidation
out of their home of the oldest person recorded; a 105 year
old woman had to leave her home when a brick was thrown through
the window of the front downstairs room she was sleeping in,
in north Belfast, and she was badly shaken as well as being
showered with glass. In the latter case it mattered which
foot she kicked with, at least to her attackers; in the former
case, it seems that they hadn't really been kicking with either
foot very well.
War as entertainment
How as a pacifist/believer in nonviolence do
I end up watching 'war films'? Not very frequently and usually
by accident as I channel surf. I think there should be three
categories for war [oh, so only a short one of your Liszts
- Ed] or highly violent films (from the Board of Violence
Classification): 1) Glory, glory, glory - the Sly Rambo/Arnie
the Governator type of films which glory in violence, whose
redemptive qualities buy at least a pyrrhic victory if not
blazing glory for a small cluster of very violent men. There
is no indication of the cost of violence. 2) Glory and gory
with a story - There's a lot of so-called 'action' (= graphic
violence), again glorifying violence and redemption through
violence, but there is enough of a personal story about relations
between 'real' people (on the same side, or across sides)
to make it partly watchable, and suffering through violence
is not totally expurgated. 3) The personal story - War is
the backdrop but this is really a film about individuals dealing
with adversity, violence, hate, filthy conditions, and comradeship,
and living to tell the tale, or dying in tragedy. This last
is about the survival of the human spirit in terrible conditions
more than it is a 'war film' of the conventional genre. The
most recent example of the last that I watched was 'No Man's
land', a drama set in exactly that spot during the war in
Bosnia; relations within, and across sides (including journalists
and the UN as 'sides') are explored in brutal detail, and
the conclusion is one of ineffectualness and hopelessness.
Type 1) I detest. Type 2) I could probably watch,
even if partly to see how it comes down, though in fact I
usually don't bother or make the time to bother. Type 3) I
could be easily drawn into. But more generally what is it
about war and violence that makes us - particularly and usually
peculiarly men - see it as 'entertainment'? Thereby hangs
more than a few PhD theses. My understanding (cf Walter Wink,
'Engaging the Powers', and indeed some feminist theory) is
that violence and its acceptability goes back to the roots
of modern culture a number of thousands of years ago; the
nation state is predicated on violence, and men have often
got their sense of identity from their willingness to engage
in violent acts. We have not overcome this primitive stage
of human evolution. The women of the species have always been
rather more sceptical even if the modern nation state tries
to mould them in their armed forces; if there is such a thing
as a 'chick flick', then war films are a 'prick flick', and
while that isn't a term which is used it does seem highly
apt for a kind of film which appeals exclusively to men. When
did you hear about women actively choosing to go off to a
war film or one with a lot of violence in it? In this, the
female of the species certainly has more sense, and men are
still stuck in the Neanderthal period (this is probably being
highly unfair to Neanderthals, who I think cared for their
elderly and infirm, but you get my drift).
How can we change the culture of violence? Slowly.
Can we change it? Yes. But this needs tackled at so many different
levels (school, home, commercial interests, state interests,
the static nature of some aspects of culture when other things
are changing rapidly, etc) that we can easily be put off.
The longest journey begins with a single step. We can challenge
the culture of violence but it's a task which will be ongoing
for centuries. The alternative would be that there are no
centuries left to challenge it.
Eric Campbell
'Eric Campbell' (not his real name as the inverted
commas will hopefully have told you, though the real name
was similarly Scottish sounding) was a neighbour when we moved
to where we are, though he's dead some time now. He worked
as a security man in a Protestant/State educational institution
here in Belfast. A bachelor coming up to retirement age when
we met him, he must have been used to fall asleep with the
dinner on the stove at times because you could hear him outside
in his garden banging his pots to try to get the burnt bits
off. He was from the country, but just outside Belfast, he
indicated, from the Castlereagh hills, good Prod country.
Eric Campbell was a pleasant man, gentle enough,
good at keeping the neighbours' hedges cut. He would pass
the time of day readily when we met, discussing this, that
and the other. His rather elderly small house needed a large
amount of work done but he was putting it off, he said, until
Labour was back in power in Britain and grants for house repairs
would be increased. As this was in the heyday of Thatcherism,
and he was dead before Blairite Labour got in - with its continuation
of Tory spending policies - it was not what you would call
brilliant crystal gazing. Unless of course he was also happy
with his somewhat ramshackle abode and needed a reason to
explain not doing anything with it.
He died suddenly, of a heart attack during a
discussion with relations over what he reckoned was his entitlement
to a slice of family property, I won't go into details, and
I don't really know the details anyway. But after his death
I got speaking on the phone to a friend of his who lived in
the Castlereagh hills. As it turned out, 'Eric' wasn't from
there, he was a Catholic from a Catholic rural area of Norn
Iron, a considerable distance from the Castlereagh hills,
who had adopted the persona of being a Prod when he moved
to Belfast nearly two decades before he died. Coming to Belfast
around the peak of the Troubles, he could have become a 'Prod'
for security reasons, or employment, or both, or he may just
have wanted to shed an old skin he was tired of and grow a
new one. His friend did say he enjoyed pulling the wool over
people's eyes regarding his identity and background. Whether
everyone was fooled is another matter - maybe people with
a keener sense of Northern accents might well have sussed
him out, and an altercation with police which he related to
me but I didn't really understand may have been an indication
of this.
The case of Eric Campbell for me encapsulates
a relatively benign but nevertheless serious aspect of the
sectarian situation in Northern Ireland. He may have enjoyed
the deception but he could not be true to himself by even
saying where he was from because that would have immediately
identified him as other than how he presented himself. And
so a neighbour lived a decade or more, and died, without us
knowing, in Northern Ireland terms, the first thing about
him. That is a sad commentary both on Northern Ireland in
particular and divided societies in general, even if he himself
was fairly happy with his lot. He was what he was but he also
wasn't.
Political vandalism
Political vandalism is not new. There is an
interesting 1920s example of it on the Antrim coast road at
Garron Point. The Antrim coast road, which runs from Larne
to Cushendall, in the Glens of Antrim, was only built well
into the 19th century and follows the coast around at just
above the sea; being so level it is a great road for cyclists,
particularly when the wind isn't blowing. And the February
weekend we followed it once again, both ways, was perfect
two-wheel weather (the motor-bikers who frequent the road
thought so too) with the beauty of the sea and the land, and
even some sunshine to make our venture to and from Cushendun
where we renewed our acquaintance with the friendly and idiosyncratic
McDonnell's pub in the harbour.
At Garron Point/Garron Tower we came across
a large limestone rock which had quite a long inscription.
It was commissioned by Frances Anne Vane, Marchionness of
Londonderry, in 1849. The rock is at a slight bend on the
road and with traffic which could be passing at a good speed
we did not linger very long, but I sent an e-mail to the Glens
of Antrim Historical Society which within a few days had garnered
me a response from Bernie Delargy, a copy of an article about
the rock (I was impressed with the service). The intriguing
thing about the rock for me was partly that someone had taken
a very considerable amount of time to chisel out some of the
lines of inscription; not for them the hasty pot of paint
that you see so often 'decorating' political statements in
Norn Iron with the intention of obliterating the sentiments
expressed.
The first part of the inscription is about the
erector of the stone inscription. "Frances Anne Vane,
Marchioness of Londonderry, being connected with this province
by the double ties of birth and marriage, and being desirous
to hand down to posterity...." Rather sounds as if she
was living up to her family name.
My initial thought had been, as it referred
to "Ireland's affliction" in the Great Famine of
1846, and had some lines in Irish at the bottom, that it had
been loyalists/unionists who had done the vandalism. I was
wrong. The inscription had continued from above "An imperishable
memorial of Ireland's affliction and England's generosity
in the year 1846-47, unparalleled in the annals of human suffering,
hath engraved this stone...." Nationalists in the 1920s
had chiselled out "and England's generosity" along
with subsequent lines which referred to "England's love
and Ireland's gratitude".
When strong feelings collide there is a natural
desire to 'best' the other by attacking their symbols. The
early part of the recent Troubles in Norn Iron included Paisley's
challenge to police to take down an Irish tricolour in West
Belfast - or he would, with resultant escalation in feelings.
But if you look at it from different angles, and partly a
sociological one, the desire to express identity is natural
but one which reveals a lot about those concerned. Were republican
struggles really the same as those waged by Palestinians or
the ANC in South Africa, as republican murals attested? A
statement about how people felt should have led to a real
comparison of situations. And the more Ulster loyalists fly
Israeli flags or British symbols the more they show they are
not just the same as the British across the water in Britain.
Anyway, this was all started by seeing an intriguing
monument and its vandalism which took place in the 1920s,
the Famine Stone at Garron Point. Plus ça change....though
I think these days it would be more likely the pot of paint.
Vandalism isn't what it used to be.
She'll be coming round the mountain
She arrived by black taxi at our small Belfast
terrace house. It was a fine summer evening but already getting
late. The connection was Servas, the traveller/host system
(see news section, this issue), though as we had no phone
then she couldn't even check if anyone was in. This was around
1977 when the worst of the Troubles had already passed but,
alas, much more was to come.
In her late 30s and from the US of A, she was
a single parent who for the first time, with her daughter
well into teenage years, had the opportunity to travel. In
her European tour she had already been to the Republic, and
had then crossed over to Britain. Travelling somewhere in
Scotland she had failed to get off the train at the right
place and had ended up in Stranraer. And somehow in Stranraer
she had ended up on the ferry to Larne or Belfast. All this
was rather strange given that she had had no intention of
putting one foot one centimetre inside the boundaries of Norn
Iron, so I suppose it was all a bit of a Norn Irony.
But what was even stranger was that on arrival
she then proceeded to tell us all about Northern Ireland,
the Orange Order etc. To be told about the place you live
in by someone who has never been before and in fact had no
intention of visiting was quite surreal. Maybe she was nervous,
maybe it was the fact she had never travelled outside her
home country before, I don't really know how she perceived
herself in the situation. But she was a very pleasant, bubbly
person, maybe just naïve or feeling that way being abroad
for the first time. It was impossible to dislike her. Others
might have said what she said and it would have come across
as cultural superiority or arrogance - 'I know all about your
situation'. There was an element of that but rather it more
felt strange, which was to her credit in the sense that her
personality softened the ridiculousness of what she was saying
(the content of what she was saying was not so ridiculous,
it was the fact that she was saying anything, or if saying
it not asking "Is that correct? Is that how you see it?").
Whether travel broadens the mind or the arse
is up to the approach of the traveller. I would like to think
that as she mellowed in the role of traveller she would have
ceased to rush to judgement beforehand, but I don't know.
Maybe she went home to tell how much she learnt about Northern
Ireland on her visit there. She was gone to get the first
boat out, back to Scotland, the next morning before we got
up.
But another time around the same era I did take
pleasure in a comment to three young USA travellers on the
Belfast to Dublin train. They were expecting everything to
be as it was At Home. Now, personally I feel travellers and
tourists are entitled to be critical, there is nothing wrong
with that, God knows there is more than enough to be critical
about in Ireland, North or South, and so long as they try
to show some cultural understanding they are perfectly entitled
to display their critical faculties. But the litany of faults
seemed to go on and on. The fact that the train was travelling
so slow became the latest topic of put down for this western
western European island. At this stage we were travelling
very slowly, near the border, and I leaned over to inform
them that the reason the train was going so slowly was that
we were just then passing over a bridge which had been blown
up by the IRA about a week before. This was true, in the era
when the IRA tried to unite people by dividing them and cutting
links between different parts of the island. Anyway, the result
was silence. Blissful. I'm afraid I rather took pleasure in
that.
D is for Delta
Eventually the UK is to get back 5 of its citizens
detained at Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. What is shocking
is that it took two years for the USA's best friend in all
the world to get just some of its citizen detainees released
- so much for a 'special relationship' between US and UK -
four still remain, one of whom there is very severe worries
about on the grounds of his psychiatric health. A profile
in the London Guardian (20th February) revealed the shocking
'terrorist profile' of one of those to be transferred back
to Britain - he wore a 'Stars and Stripes' cap - "He
set off for Pakistan in a Ralph Lauren Polo cap with a stars
and stripes emblem on the front." Definitely an anti-USA
'terrorist' then. The favourite speaker of another "was
Hamza Yusuf, a white American convert who has advised George
Bush on Islam and who condemned the attack on the Twin Towers".
Speculation about other nationalities transferred to the USA's
colonial outcrop in Cuba was that they were more likely to
be transferred if they spoke English - this made it easier
for the CIA interrogating them.
The photo in the feature on Camp Delta had the
inscription "CAMP DELTA JTF GUANTANAMO "HONOR BOUND
TO DEFEND FREEDOM" " Do you know what it reminded
me of, and I'll qualify this in a minute - the 'ARBEIT MACHT
FREI' above the gate at Auschwitz and also featuring at other
Nazi extermination camps. Very different circumstances and
certainly the USA hasn't actually practised genocidal-type
activities since the Vietnam war (including bombing surrounding
countries), despite being involved in intervening militarily
in lots of other places since. The Nazis had race (and other)
death-hatreds. The USA does not but it does have a cultural-economic
model and hegemony which it is trying is promote and export,
inappropriately, around the world. The reason "Honor
bound to defend freedom" reminds me of "Arbeit macht
frei" is that both are dirty and despicable lies which
were put in prominent positions on concentration camps (that
is what Camp Delta is). 'Defending freedom' is ostensibly
what Camp Delta is about, according to the US government;
in fact it is about denying freedom (or even, to date, free
trials) to the inmates, and the tip of a repressive approach
to conflict. Conditions and uncertainties are so grave there
have been almost thirty suicide attempts among 680 internees
at Camp Delta. So much for US American freedom and democracy.
As the joke goes about the Statue of Liberty in New York;
"What's a nice girl like you doing in a country like
this?".
Guests and restorative justice
So what's the opposite of serendipity? [Rotten
bad luck, that's the opposite - Ed]. Next time we meet I'll
say - 'Drop this restorative justice thing, it's not doing
me any good' but it'll be a joke. It's just that right at
the time the social and community affairs committee that I
act as secretary of [that's the day job is it, Billy? - Ed]
was discussing restorative justice, something I had set up,
there was an uninvited guest or guests busy on our house,
kicking in the back door, ransacking our bedroom, and getting
the likes of an MP3 player, a bit of cash and plastic cards.
The talk we had was very good though, Tom Winston of Northern
Ireland Alternatives which along with Community Restorative
Justice is working to have both sides of the Norn Iron community
covered with alternatives to the conventional justice system.
It's interesting, and I was quoting the fact (as in the Nonviolence
- the Irish Experience - Quiz, on our website) that the ancient
Gaelic Brehon laws (from breitheamh, a judge) were very much
into restitution/restoration.
Anyway, back to what was happening at home.
When the PSNI arrived, one constable did the practical bit
(the woman) and the other the empathy (the man). The empathetic
one was trying hard but in fact we didn't feel the invasion
of privacy thing so much as just the hassle of cancelling
cards, clearing up and repairing, and getting back to normal
in what is already an over-busy life. A couple of days later
a call purporting to be from our bank tried to get details
which, we soon realised, were for the benefit of whoever now
had the cards and not for our bank in processing our frozen
accounts or cancelled cards. And that was a bit unsettling,
in a kind of way, a bit like the hand from the grave in the
horror film, someone so brazen as to try and inflict further
damage to our finances and wellbeing by chancing their arm
in phoning to illicitly elicit details which might have made
the cards useable or found out which might still be useable.
As the big contract firms employing cleaners at low wages
must say, grime pays.
BUT (and that's a big but) restorative justice
is making its way forward. There's a nice little card from
the (North American) Mennonite Central Committee on ten Restorative
Justice Signposts which is worth quoting (it's written by
Harry Mika and Howard Zehr) [this makes a change - someone
else's Liszt instead of your own! - Ed]. Here it is:
We are working toward restorative justice when
we...
1...focus on the harms of wrongdoing more than
the rules that have been broken,
2...show equal concern and commitment to victims
and offenders, involving both in the process of justice,
3...work toward the restoration of victims,
empowering them and responding to their needs as they see
them,
4...support offenders while encouraging them
to understand, accept and carry out their obligations,
5...recognize that while obligations may be
difficult for offenders, they should not be intended as harms
and they must be achievable,
6...provide opportunities for dialogue, direct
or indirect, between victims and offenders as appropriate,
7...involve and empower the affected community
through the justice process, and increase its capacity to
recognize and respond to community bases of crime,
8...encourage collaboration and reintegration
rather than coercion and isolation,
9...give attention to the unintended consequences
of our actions and programs,
10...show respect to all parties including victims,
offenders and justice colleagues.
Well, sín é, I'll leave
you now for another month, the month named after the god of
war - though you may remember in our interview with Mars (NN
113) the old guy seemed to have mellowed rather and actually
be rejecting violence, so it just goes to show you can teach
an old god new tricks. See you soon,
Who
is Billy King? A long, long time ago, in a more
innocent age (just talking about myself you understand),
there were magazines called 'Dawn' and 'Dawn Train'
and I had a back page column in these. Now the Headitor
has asked me to come out from under the carpet to write
a Cyberspace Column 'something people won't be able
to put down' (I hope you're not carrying your monitor
around with you).
Watch this. Cast a cold eye on life, on death, horseman
pass by (because there'll almost certainly be very little
about horses even if someone with a similar name is
found astride them on gable ends around certain parts
of Norn Iron).
