17/10/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Here and there – Some terrorists from God: I

[A note comparing the Gunpowder Plot to the 2001 attacks on the US appears in four parts.]

1 The scene

They are all male. They may not be young, but they are of a fighting age. They are certainly of an age to plot. Their community is proud of them. They are deeply religious, too deeply. They are in truth fanatics – religious fanatics. The old word was ‘zealots.’ Their religious zeal is their tragic flaw. They are so zealous that they are ready to kill and die for the cause of their faith. The mainstream members and clerics of their faith say that their zeal and readiness to kill are contrary to the express tenets of their faith, but the zealots have more faith in their own zeal than in the teaching and discipline of their elders. Their faith has a high place for martyrs and if they die in defence of their faith, they will do so in the firm belief that paradise awaits them. Their clerics are not involved, at least directly, with their plans and plots, but they are there to give general guidance to the zealots, such that some others believe that the clerics are behind all actions undertaken in the name of their faith.

The zealots want to attack a ruling power that they believe is insulting to their religion, and cruel to those who practise it. At least some of their clerics condemn the regime. In truth, the zealots wish to bring down the whole order. For that purpose they are ready to kill or wound men, women, and children who are on any view innocent – ‘innocent’ at least in the sense that they have done nothing to deserve to die. The zealots do not acknowledge that acting out of hate rarely ends well. They are tunnel visioned.

To start their campaign they want to strike terror into the regime by a strike that is so daring and so vengeful that it will give the zealots a complete propaganda victory and provoke division and despair in their enemy. They are ultimately driven back to the maxim that was the first refuge of the fascist and of lawless, godless and cruel dictators like Stalin and Hitler – the ends justify the means. In short, they are terrorists – exemplary terrorists – the worst and most frightening kinds of terrorists. They commit their acts of terror in the name of and on behalf of God. Their claim is nothing less than that they act in the service of God.

Are we speaking of Muslims who attacked the twin towers in New York in 2001? Yes. Are we speaking also of the Catholics who attempted to blow up the English House of Parliament in 1605? Yes. And the comparison is instructive.

2 The background

The movement known to history as the Reformation involved a schism in the religion called Christianity. The Catholic Church was no longer the one church. Kant would later say that wars between different versions of the one faith were far worse than wars between those of different faiths. Heresy is lethal. The Reformation caused untold evil and misery for centuries – something that tends to be forgotten by those who want to teach or preach about the place of the Reformation in the ‘values’ of western civilisation.

The split in Germany was mainly about religion. It led to the Thirty Years War that laid waste to so much of Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century. The split in England was mainly about politics. It led to vicious persecution and recrimination on both sides. It also led to a foreign invasion, the Spanish Armada. England’s defeat of Spain left the Protestants in control, and it left the Catholics subject to persecution and suspicion.

On the death of Henry VIII, Queen Mary had taken the Church of England back to Rome and she had burnt Protestants as heretics. On her death, Queen Elizabeth took the Church back to the Protestants and executed Catholics. Her schismatic death toll was far smaller than that of her half-sister (a point made in the trial we are coming to).

But the loathing that many English felt for Rome led to a split among Protestants. The people we know as Puritans wanted to put the Church of England further away from Rome. The purity of their consciences, and their God-driven sanctimony, would help to lead England into the agony of its Civil War. Before the English tired of the lot of them, the Puritans would reach their frightful apotheosis in the bloodbath conducted by their champion in Ireland – Oliver Cromwell.

The Society of Jesus was formed by a former captain in the Spanish army. It was to be part of the Church militant. The level of its ambition is evident from its calling itself after Jesus, something that gave offence to many. Membership was open to those wishing to serve as soldiers of God and for the defence and propagation of the faith. The Society came to the fore in opposing the Protestants, and in the movement known as the Counter Reformation. It started in Spain, the nation that invaded England in order to bring it back to the Catholic faith. Protestants would therefore not trust the Jesuits, as they were called, and Jesuits had been banned from England and they would come to be expelled from France and other countries. The Jesuits enjoyed an aura of secrecy that the Masons would copy. They also exuded intellectual self-satisfaction.

An idle if mordant observer in London who had a sane view of the place of God may have thought at this time that the Puritans and the Jesuits deserved each other. On any view, they were supremely well equipped to get up each other’s noses – and so to wreak havoc on the rest of us. (And the worldly triumph of the Puritans in America would be testimony to the proposition that men who are assured that they are to inherit heaven usually find ways of presently taking possession of the earth.)

The cornerstone of the English reformation was the Act of Supremacy of 1559. In 1570, the pope published a document (a bull) in which he excommunicated Queen Elizabeth and absolved her subjects from paying allegiance to her. The bull declared ‘Elizabeth to be deprived of her pretended title to the aforesaid crown’. English sovereignty is in the news now, but it is hard to imagine a more open violation of it than this act of the Holy See – short of invasion.

The King of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor disagreed with the pope. They believed that the English would react against Catholics in general and Jesuits in particular. They were dead right. But a dissident English cardinal, the founder of the Douai seminary in France, wrote of the ‘filthy lust’ of ‘an incestuous bastard, begotten and borne of an infamous courtesan.’ In Douai, the missionaries were imbued with a sense of martyrdom – it was glorious to die trying to wrest England from the grip of heresy. The English government became alarmed at the numbers fleeing overseas and legislated against it. Douai would have been a much softer spot for what we now call radicalisation than those of the caliphate. The Oxford History of England says:

The via dolorosa that led from Douai to Tyburn [the Golgotha of London] could not have been trod by men who were not profoundly imbued with the spiritual character of their worth….under the guise of saving souls, the priests were really acting as executors of the bull.

In 1580, the papal secretary told English Jesuits that ‘whosoever sends her [Elizabeth] out of the world with the pious intention of doing God service, not only does not sin but gains merit.’ This was not a time for calmness. Their pope had impaled the Catholics of England on a hopeless conflict of interest and ensured that religion would remain at the forefront of English politics. English Catholics would pay a dreadful price over many generations.

3 Disaffected Catholics and the plot

The accession of James I on the death of Elizabeth led to hopes that things might get better for Catholics. They did not. James I had a personal interest in keeping the peace – his father, the unlamented Lord Darnley, had been taken out by an explosion that made a revolting form of assassination – even by Scottish standards. For that matter, the mother of James I was a Catholic queen who was beheaded for trying to kill the Protestant queen that James succeeded. These were fraught times.

A group of Catholic gentry, who were described by one observer as ‘gentlemen hunger-starved for innovation,’ came up with a scheme of ‘devastating insurrection’. They sought to vindicate their faith and the adherents of their faith. They planned to overthrow the government by blowing up Parliament with the royal family in it, and leading an uprising from the Midlands after kidnapping a young member of the royal family. They wanted to start a civil war. Each conspirator resolved to die rather than be taken; there was more than a whiff of suicide in the venture from the start. They had collected more than enough gun-powder under the parliament to achieve that result, but the plot was uncovered.

There were thirteen in the plot. They were led by a man called Catesby, but the best known now is Guy Fawkes. (His continuance in his appointed role after he was on notice that they had been discovered is very hard to distinguish from suicide; it at least looks like a faith-driven embrace of death.) Those terrorists, for that is what they plainly were, that were not killed in the pursuit were executed. For the most part, they did not repent. Indeed, one observer reported that during the trial, the ‘defendants were taking tobacco as if hanging were no trouble to them.’ Some cracked and asked for mercy at the end. Not so, Catesby – his sword was engraved with the passion and death of Christ.

Immediately after the plot was revealed, the Catholic clergy denounced it as ‘intolerable, uncharitable, scandalous and desperate.’ It was clearly against Catholic doctrine for ‘private subjects, by private authority, to take arms against their lawful king’, even if he was a tyrant. Private violent attempts could never be justified. Catholics must not support them in any way.

Passing bull 170 – Religion and politics

16/10/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

At least two prime ministers have said that they would not allow their religion, or faith, to interfere with their politics. What nonsense. Politics is about how we get on with each other. So are morals. It would be absurd to say your morals are irrelevant to your politics.

But people who are religious commonly draw heavily on their religion for their moral views. Indeed, some people of religion have been heard to say that is difficult to envisage a biding moral code without the backing of a religion (putting to one side the difficulty of settling on which one?) If a person’s religion is vital to their morals, it is equally vital to their politics. Next time you hear some people say that their faith does not affect their politics, ask them whether that means that they can put to one side the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount. It is pure bullshit.

Although, to be frank, some people worry that some politicians ignore the demands of their faith far too much. Some take that view about the way we deal with refugees. They say, for example, that everything we do on Nauru violates almost every part of the Sermon on the Mount. That position is gaining support – from at least 6000 doctors who have their own moral position to advance. For them, there is nothing new about finding a position adopted by both major parties to be immoral.

Now, it is suggested that our current prime minister is considering getting us to join Guatemala in recognising Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in the moral lightweight championship of the world. He will abandon principle to seek a vote. How much lower do we have to sink before something snaps?

Then there is the reaction of President Trump to the apparent murder of a journalist by Saudi Arabia. He says that any sanction will not include limiting the sale arms (that are used for the butchery in Yemen). He says that such a sanction would cost the U S too much in money and jobs. The Great Republic, it seems, cannot afford to be decent. How is Trump’s position different to that of a bank robber who tells the judge that he needed the money to feed and clothe his children?

There may then be something to be said for the proposition that politicians do not give full faith and credit to their religion. But, then you look at the Kavanagh catastrophe, and you call for the bucket.

Bloopers

Readers must be in turn fascinated, confused and astounded by the increasingly lurid fiasco surrounding the US Supreme Court confirmation hearing of judge Brett Kavanaugh. When I read that this 53-year-old man with a seemingly unblemished character and all the right credentials in jurisprudence had suddenly been accused by a woman of molestation when he was 17 and she 15, and that despite years “recovering” her memory of the incident, she still couldn’t remember any concrete facts about it, and what’s more, no one else could confirm her accusation, I laughed. Not the standard feminist response but this episode had turned into the theatre of the absurd.

Angela Shanahan, The Australian, 29 September.

Well, at least the contributors to that paper never claim that their faith does not affect their politics. But it is sad when someone claiming adherence to the Beatitudes laughs off attempted rape. That is worse than bullshit. It is cruel.

Passing bull 169 – The myth of religious freedom

11/10/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

If I say that I want the freedom to do something, I mean that I want there to be no law against my doing it. But if I want to be able to do something that is against the law as it is, I am asking for something more. I want my case to be excluded from the law – like when a charity is exempted from paying tax. What I am asking for is a privilege – ‘A right advantage or immunity granted to or enjoyed by a person, or class of persons, beyond the common advantages of others.’(Shorter O E D.) The two notions are very different, and obviously different, but this difference is usually ignored, especially in The Australian, when people talk about some chimera called ‘religious freedom.’

Generally speaking, Australians can follow what religion they like, but not in a way that is against the law. A cleric gets no immunity from the laws of libel, racial discrimination, or treason just because he is speaking in a pulpit.

There are laws against discriminating against people on the ground of their sexuality. There is a suggestion that some religious schools should be exempted from complying with this law to the extent that it makes it unlawful for a school to send a child away because of his or her sexuality. A religious group seeking to acquire such a right is seeking a form of privilege. But they prefer the word freedom because it is harder to deny a claim to be free as opposed to a claim for a privilege that puts someone above and beyond the law. This is one time when labels matter. We are not talking about freedom of religion but privileges of churches.

The law allows certain kinds of clubs exemption from some laws about sexual discrimination. It is lawful for the Melbourne Club not to allow female members. Different considerations of policy would arise for the Melbourne Cricket Club or Victorian Racing Club because of their standing in public life.

There are at least two grounds of policy difference when considering exempting a school from obeying the law relating to sexual discrimination. One is that the Melbourne Club consists of consenting adults. That is not so with a school. Schools are there to benefit children who have not reached the age of consent. The other difference is that one way or another, a private school is likely to receive public money. In my view those two differences distinguish the case of a school from that of a club, and entail a rejection of the claim for privilege.

At the very least, any government agreeing to grant such a privilege should make it transcendentally clear that any such school will never receive one cent of my taxes.

Finally, may I say that in the present climate of opinion, any religious group seeking to put itself above the law is showing a level of hardihood and obtuseness that verges on the sublime.

Bloopers

Now the enthusiasm gap has disappeared. Republicans are as intense as Democrats. This mutual loathing, by the way, is very bad for America.

Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 11 October 2018

The headline referred to ‘Kavanagh persecution.’ Two things. It would be as hard to imagine a clearer instance of a spoiled child who is a flower of the Establishment, or of a man more unsuited for the judiciary because of his political views and failure of temperament – leaving Doctor Ford out of the question altogether. American senators should dress in character and turn up in togas.

MY TOP SHELF – 6

10/10/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

MY TOP SHELF

[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book published in 2015 called ‘The Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’. The extracts are as originally published, and they come in the same order.]

FOUR QUARTETS

T S Eliot (1968)

We had the experience but missed the meaning.

Folio Society, 1968, printed by permission of Mrs T S Eliot and Faber and Faber Limited; bound in natural canvas small f’scap quarto with titles superimposed on parchment labels on spine and upper board (with spare title label) and matching ribbon, in card slip-case.

There is something unavoidably intellectual, antiseptic even, about T S Eliot. You wonder at times if the problem is worse in the poetry or the prose. What do you say of a writer who prefaces a book of poetry with the following, in upper case: ‘I wish to acknowledge my obligation to friends for their criticism, and particularly to Mr John Hayward for improvements of phrase and construction’? And he then follows that with fragments in ancient Greek from Heraclitus (in the old Greek spelling) from a German source, Die Fragmente der Versokratiker. What do you say of a poem that has these lines?

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion.

Don’t tell me your problems, Digger – you are supposed to be the bloody poet. This is about as moving as watching a desiccated Anglican prelate treat himself for constipation with castor oil. In the name of heaven, how precise is his feeling, or how undisciplined is his emotion, when he is on the nest? Could a man like this give himself to a woman or to God? It comes over you with all the charm of an etherized hand upon a table. Bring your own scalpel. And what happens to the ‘inarticulate’ after it has been raided?

Why is this book there then? This is a beautiful edition to read. This book would not be there in another form – another reason for doubting that you cannot judge a book by its cover.

Then, the author stands for me as a warning of our withering imagination and that Anglo-Saxon aversion to emotional giving, much less surrender. Twentieth century writing can be far too intellectual. Eliot and Joyce can look like show-offs. Someone wisely said that Milton had so much learning that it was a miracle that his imaginative drive had not been crushed. It is ironical that Eliot, whose imagination barely survived, should have led a reaction against Milton – to whose literary and political genius Eliot could not hold a candle. (And they both had trouble with women.)

But, then, like a Wagner opera, some light breaks through and you think that the effort may have been worthwhile. It is a book to be taken with an aperitif on an autumn evening, or, better, before a fire in winter with a bottle of red and the book read by the incomparable Paul Scofield.

From East Coker:

……………..There is, it seems to us,

At best, only a limited value

In the knowledge derived from experience.

…………..Do not let me hear

Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,

Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,

Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

………………………..They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,

Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,

And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha,

And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,

And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,

Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.

I said to my soul, be still, and let the darkness come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God.

This is from The Dry Salvages.

We had the experience but missed he meaning,

And approach to the meaning restores the experience

In a different form beyond any meaning

We assign to happiness. I have said before

That the past experience revived in the meaning

Is not the experience of one life only

But of many generations – not forgetting

Something that is probably quite ineffable:

The backward look behind the assurance

Of recorded history, the backward half-look

Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.

I thought enough of the lines from East Coker to use them on the face page of a book. It was not a wildly romantic book. It was a book about the law – for company directors. The poet had earned a living working for a bank. He said: ‘The end is where we start from.’

Passing bull 168 – Sense about the ABC

04/10/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / 5 Comments

The dismissal of the CEO of the ABC raises issues of governance. Are the directors and journalists at the ABC subject to different obligations to those at Fairfax or News?

The ABC is funded by public money. So are News (Murdoch) and Fairfax. There are at least two differences. First, all citizens contribute in one way or another to the ABC and all have rights to get the services provided by the ABC for free. They do not have to acquire shares in News or Fairfax or pay for any of their products. Secondly, the functions of the ABC are set out in an act of parliament. Those of News and Fairfax are set out in the constituent documents of the relevant corporations and the history of the role of a free press in a democracy like ours.

When considering that role, two questions may arise. Are the journalists allowed to practise their profession independently? What professional standards must those journalists apply? The answers to those questions reflect the integrity of the corporation as a member of the press. If you look at the two differences between the ABC on one hand and News and Fairfax on the other hand, is there anything there that may dictate different answers to either of those two questions?

Some people refer to the charter of the ABC in its act (section 6). It contains motherhood statements, but three things can be said. First, the obligation to ‘contribute to a sense of national identity’ might make people other than me feel queasy. (Is that not the precise mission of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Pauline Hanson?) Secondly, the words ‘independent’ and ‘balanced’ appear in the context of broadcasting programs that are specialised or of wide appeal. Thirdly, the obligation in broadcasting overseas to ‘encourage awareness of Australia and an international understanding of Australian attitudes on world affairs’ is one of straight propaganda.

Another provision (section 8) provides that the board must ‘maintain the independence and integrity’ of the ABC and ‘ensure that the gathering and presentation…of news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism.’

But the same obligations attach to the directors of News and Fairfax. In neither provision – section 6 or 8 – do I see any basis for saying that there is any difference between the ABC, News and Fairfax on their need to preserve editorial independence or their standards of journalism – that is, their integrity. If that is right, much of the commentary on the ABC is based on false premises.

The essential difference is that the ABC is susceptible to political interference in a way that News and Fairfax are not. As part of the free press, the ABC has to investigate and report on government. In other words, it has to do things the government will not like. You have only to look at the role of the press in investigating and reporting on our finance industry to see how fundamental this function of the press is to our democracy. But for the reporting by the ABC and Fairfax, the Royal Commission, which was opposed to the last by government and News, would never have taken place, and we would be far, far worse off. The press had to be good because government was so bad.

So, the ABC has to get stuck into government, and government must keep its hands off the ABC. There must, therefore, be conflict. In my view, the ABC generally handles that conflict much better than the government.

In The Australian, a News publication, Chris Kenny, a former Liberal Party staffer, said of the fracas about the ABC chairman:

And anyone with knowledge and experience of journalism, politics and public broadcasting should realise how unwise and improper it is to convey even the perception of political interference.

May I make two comments about The Australian? First, in my view, too many of its journalists accept instructions to attack the ABC. That conduct is unprofessional and it directly contradicts the need for editorial independence. Secondly, too many of those journalists are too close to people in government. The friendship between Messrs Abbott and Sheridan is just one example – and it shows, at both ends. Journalists generally might follow the example of judges and steer clear of politicians. A fortiori, they should not be pawns in political coups. People at News go out of their way to suggest that they do just that.

What is the upshot? Any suggestion that for either editorial independence or the standards of journalism or integrity generally the ABC is in some way inferior to, say, News, is at best just bloody laughable.

Bloopers

What’s your leadership style?

Collaborative, decisive, authentic and passionate. Leadership requires tremendous amounts of positive energy. Energy to inspire your people to be their best, to drive change in a rapidly evolving world, and to ensure we deliver superior outcomes.

Cindy Hook of Deloitte. Australian Financial Review 18 September, 2018

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

02/10/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

This is an enigmatic little novel written by Muriel Spark in 1961 – Miss Brodie may be primed, but primed to do what?

Miss Jean Brodie teaches in a school in Edinburgh in the 1930’s. She attracts followers, like queen bees do among young girls. The novel follows this group’s attachment from their time in junior school, when Miss Brodie taught them, through senior school and to adulthood. She exercises a power over them that might seem unhealthy to a reader who has brought up girls, and which does seem unhealthy to the headmistress, who is out to get her. As the girls get older, Miss Brodie has affairs with the art teacher and the music teacher and, dangerously, she contrives to get one of the girls to succeed her as the mistress of one of them. But it is not sexual licence that brings Miss Brodie undone. Rather, her favourite informs on her (and denies that her informing is an act of betrayal). Miss Brodie is a fascist, and not just in the closet – she warmly endorses Mussolini, Franco and Hitler to her charges. By the end of the decade, that was more than enough to warrant her being fired. Well, if the alternatives were Joseph Stalin or Neville Chamberlain, was not Miss Brodie’s preference at least understandable?

Dame Muriel Sarah Spark DBE, Clit, FRSE, FRSL, had a very European face. She had an interesting ancestry – Lithuanian Jewish father and Scots Presbyterian mother. After a failed marriage, she had a full life spent in Rhodesia, New York and London before, like Jeffrey Smart, going to live in Italy with someone of her own sex. (The nature of that relationship fascinates most commentators, but it really is none of their bloody business.) Her correspondence with the one child of the marriage is not good to read, but it is the certain fate of prolific writers of quality to have every aspect of their life combed over by those of second rate.

This novel is probably based on the experience of the author in her own education at Edinburgh. It is the work of a naturally confident and composed writer. Here is a discussion early in the novel of the forces attacking the heroine.

‘Who are the gang this time?’ said Rose, who was famous for sex-appeal.

‘We shall discuss tomorrow night the persons who oppose me’, said Miss Brodie. ‘But rest assured they shall not succeed.’

‘No,’ said everyone. ‘No, of course they won’t.’

‘Not while I am in my prime,’ she said. ‘These years are still the years of my prime. It is important to recognise the years of one’s prime, always remember that. Here is my tram-car. I daresay I’ll not get a seat. This is nineteen thirty-six. The age of chivalry is past.

Miss Brodie oozes Calvinism, but she follows Loyola and Freud – get a child young enough and you have them for life. Here is her plotting. (Teddy Lloyd is the art teacher.)

It was plain that Miss Brodie wanted Rose with her instinct to start preparing to be Teddy Lloyd’s lover; and Sandy with her insight to act as informant on the affair. It was to this end that Rose and Sandy had been chosen as the crème de la crème. There was a whiff of sulphur about the idea which fascinated Sandy in her present mind. After all, it was only an idea. And there was no pressing hurry in the matter, for Miss Brodie liked to take her leisure over the unfolding of her plans, most of her joy deriving from the preparation, and moreover, even if these plans were as clear to her own mind as they were to Sandy’s, the girls were too young.

Now this coolness can sound cold and sinister in a world ashamed of the abuse of young people by older people in power. The obituary of the author in The New York Times included the following:

Her work, unlocked from her innermost memories of her experiences before and after her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1954, built a canon of short, sometimes macabre, sometimes humorous novels that sought to pare away the absurdities of human behavior.

Ms. Spark’s first novel was published when she was 39, and after that she supplied a stream of slender novels and enigmatic short stories peopled with such curiosities as narrators from beyond the grave, flying saucers, grandmotherly smugglers with bread bins full of diamond-studded loaves, and individuals of so little substance that they disappear when the door closes.

In her writing, evil is never far away, violence is a regular visitor and death is a constant companion. Her themes were generally serious but nearly always handled with a feather-light touch.

It is this lightness, and a contrived detachment toward her characters, that became the target of the harshest criticism of her work…

So, it is not Rose but Sandy who gets into bed with the artist, acts as Judas toward Miss Brodie, and then takes the advice of Hamlet and gets herself to a nunnery.

Muriel Spark was one off and had a fine nose for our dark side – that is somehow reflected by the illustrations in the Folio edition of the book, for the film of which Maggie Smith won an Academy Award. But the novel is like oysters – some like it more than others. The author might bring to mind the image on the front cover of The Godfather – a puppeteer who on a bad day might do you some real harm.

My Top Shelf – Chapter 5

02/10/201802/10/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

MY TOP SHELF

THE DAM BUSTERS

Paul Brickhill (1953)

Folio Society, 2015. Quarter-bound in cloth with cloth sides, and slip case; blocked with a design by Richard Sweeney, with a Lancaster on the spine.

In the early 1950’s, not long after the war, the parents of my mother Norma lived in what even then looked to me to be an aging weatherboard house in Orlando Street Hampton. It was a quiet street. Not a lot happened in it – there was quite a stir when the former Australian cricket captain Lindsay Hassett moved into a ‘cream brick vanilla’ flat, as we were starting to call them, in Hampton Street, overlooking our back fence.

My grandfather, Les, was called an engineer. I think that meant that he was a tool-maker, or metal-worker. When Les left Humes after forty years’ service, they gave him a mantel clock that chimed. It sat on the kind of sideboard that people had back then, when the whole house seemed to chime. Les had a perfectly kept tool-shed, with designs traced for each tool. He kept something of wonder there. It was a shanghai, or ging – not roughed out of eucalypt, and powered by rubber bands, but made out of forged steel, and powered by springs so taut that we could hardly pull them back. One day a cousin and I screwed up our courage and lifted it from its designated space to give it a test fire from the ti-tree overlooking the bay. The first shot hit a ti-tree just in front of us and nearly took our heads off; the second took off on a high trajectory in the general direction of Williamstown. We shot through in mortal fear, and we never touched the ging again.

Les and Liza were frugal. All those who had survived the depression, a word muttered in a subdued tone, were. It was, I recall, quite an occasion when they signed up for the Herald-Sun Readers’ Book Club. I cannot recall seeing books in the house before. The series may have followed on a six volume encyclopaedia that we later inherited – with some gratitude. The series proper consisted of novels and memoires. Many of those were of the war just finished, like Two Eggs on my Plate, Wingless Victory, or Boldness be my Friend. (Everybody had already read The Cruel Sea.)

The first book in the series proper was, I think, The Dam Busters. At any rate, I have a clear recollection of looking at the one in front of me now at the left end of a growing collection – in a red dust-jacket with HS on the spine, an image of a dam wall on the front cover, and on the rear a photo of the author. As befitted a chap who wrote that kind of book back then, Mr Brickhill was photographed with nonchalantly brushed back hair, a pencil moustache, a hound’s-tooth check jacket, an open-necked shirt – with a cravat, in navy polka dot set in the spacing dictated by Winston Churchill – and with the rather imperious sidelong glance of a man not used to difficulty with skirt. The first review in the blurb says ‘In all the history of arms there is no finer epic.’

It was therefore a major event when the movie came to Hampton in 1955. As I recall, the excitement was as great as that which later greeted the start of television or the Olympic Games. Les took me to a matinee on Saturday arvo at the Hampton Cinema in Hampton Street, about five hundred yards from home. We got there early, which was just as well, because the place was chockers. Later events make it hard to recall my first reaction, but I believe that I was entranced from beginning to end. It was miles better than going to ‘town’ on the train with Liza – she and Les never had a car – and eating donuts at Downyflake.

Two things were beyond magic. The leader of the raid had my name! And my initials! Guy Gibson. And one Australian when they were practising low flying said, in a flat Australian accent, ‘this is bloody dangerous.’ How shockingly grown-up – the word ‘bloody’ on the screen, and out loud! It was truly bliss to be alive that day.

I walked back home with Les in a state of exaltation. He took me to see it again on two more occasions. Then it came to TV and video and DVD. I lost count of how many times I have seen it about thirty years ago, but you can proceed on the footing that I watch it about once a year, in varying states of composure or decency. I only ever saw the dog get killed once.

If you do not know the story, you have a major problem. In 1943, a squadron formed especially for that purpose, 617 Squadron, attacked the Moehne and Eder dams in Germany using a bouncing bomb especially designed and made for that purpose by an immensely gifted scientist named Barnes Wallis. Both the book and the film contain two stories of great character and courage – that of Barnes Wallis for the courage of his conviction in his own skill and judgment, and the dedication and courage of the young men who delivered the bombs. Fifty-six of those young men, whose whole and gifted life still lay before them, did not come back. Wallis, a man of peace, was distraught. It took him a long time to recover. The scene of Wallis standing under the hawk-like gaze of Bomber Harris and the blank coldness of Cochrane is still wrenching.

They had to fly as low as possible to beat radar. Power lines were a real threat, and I think one plane was lost this way. The bomb had to be delivered from sixty feet, the length of a cricket pitch. The pilot had to hold the aircraft steady at that altitude in the face of enemy fire. The only way that they could do that was by using spotlights on the water to illuminate their target. From time to time, modern crews try to replicate the feat for TV, and they then find out how hard it is. Among other things, someone might have to pick up a compass and protractor.

The cream of Bomber Command, and therefore the nation, went into 617, and not just from England. They had all completed full tours. Apart from Gibson, the pilots included at least three Australians – Mickey Martin, Dave Shannon, and Les Knight.

Martin (played by the late Bill Kerr in the film) commanded ‘P’ Popsie. He delivered one of the bombs that hit the Moehne. Although hit on his starboard wing, Martin then accompanied Gibson on the next attacks to draw the flak. Gibson was later awarded the VC for his part in the raid. When the Moehne was finally breached, Martin and Gibson accompanied Shannon and Knight to go to the Eder. They had trouble finding it. Having sat up there watching all the attacks on the Moehne, Dave Shannon then watched the first attack on the Eder fail – in a blazing explosion.

There were only two bombs left, and they were both to be delivered by Australians. It was a very tricky target – fatally tricky. Dave Shannon eventually found a way to deliver his bomb on to the target. Gibson ordered Knight in with the last bomb. Brickhill described it this way.

Knight tried once and couldn’t make it. He tried again. Failed. ‘Come in down moon, and dive for the point, Les’, Shannon said. He gave more advice over the R/T, and Knight listened quietly. He was a young Australian who did not drink, his idea of a riotous evening being to write letters home and go the pictures. He dived to try again, made a perfect run and they saw the splash as his bomb dropped in the right spot. Seconds later the water erupted, and as Gibson slanted down to have a look he saw the wall of the dam burst open and the torrent came crashing out.

Knight, more excited than he had ever been, was yelling over the R/T, and when he stopped he left his transmitter on for a few seconds by mistake; the crew’s remarks on the intercom were broadcast, and they were very spectacular remarks indeed.

Some time after all this, Dave Shannon celebrated his twenty-first birthday, and then married an English lass in the service. The last of the pilots, Les Munro from New Zealand, died earlier this year (2015). Mickey Martin never forgave Churchill for allowing Gibson to fly one more mission. I have made the pilgrimage to the grave in Holland.

The devotion and courage of all those involved, from Wallis and Gibson down, defy belief. It comes from another time. They are all real and true heroes. They are my absolute heroes. I brought my children up on this story and I look forward to doing the same with their children. Both the heroes and the children deserve no less.

Passing Bull 167 –False choices

25/09/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

The other day, I was discussing with a friend the decline in public life here and in the U S and the U K. The question arose whether people like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson were causes of the malaise or symptoms of it. I wondered why they could not be considered as both causes and symptoms if we were looking at one version of the chicken and egg conundrum.

A dilemma occurs in an argument when one party is driven to a position of having to choose between two courses that are equally unattractive. It is like having two pieces attacked by one in chess – being forked – or being snookered: whichever way you try to get out, you are in trouble.

A dilemma is false if it says that there are only two choices when there are more. What you generally get is that if you do not do A, you will have to go with B, which will be truly awful. The truth is that there are other possibilities, but you face an attempt to induce you to believe that you have no real choice. Naturally, it is a weapon of choice among politicians.

As often as not, people say that you have to choose between two factors when you do not. In his history, From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun says ‘True opera is a kind of music rather than a kind of play …’ Putting to one side the question of what a false opera might look or sound like, opera is both music and drama. The joining of the music and drama defines what opera is. We do not have to make a choice about what we like more or regard as the more important. This is one occasion when you might truly say that it all depends on how it goes on the night.

This fallacy – that is what it is – might be compared to one that we might call that of ‘unnecessary choice.’ In a promo on CNN, Christiane Amanpour says that she insists on being ‘truthful, not neutral’. That is plain silly. Any journalist should aspire to be both. Our Code of Ethics speaks of ‘scrupulous honesty’ and not allowing ‘personal interests to influence them in their professional duties.’ If the converse of ‘neutral’ is ‘passionate’ ‘committed’ or ‘partisan’, Ms Amanpour is in deep trouble.

These things matter when we get told that you are either for us or against us. That is bullshit’ of a repellent tribal variety.

Bloopers

There’s an old political slogan you might remember … the public get the politicians they deserve. Through all the political turmoil over the past decade I can’t help but draw your attention to your own culpability. It’s at least partly your fault. And there’s every danger you are about to make the whole situation worse.

That sounds tough. Our political narrative assumes the public is always right. No elected official should blame the public for an adverse election outcome. When Hillary Clinton described the Trump voters as the ‘deplorables’ we all knew she was finished. You can’t say that in public life.

But still, the collective electorate can be wrong. They can make decisions that make governance harder, not easier. Let me give you a couple of examples.

First, let’s take our old friend climate change. The public overwhelmingly want Australia to contribute to lowering greenhouse emissions. At the very least they want us to make a proportional contribution to the global task of CO2 mitigation.

Alexander Downer, Australian Financial Review, 24 September, 2018.

What is terrifying is that the writer believes it.

My Top Shelf 4

16/09/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

MY TOP SHELF

LETTERS AND PAPERS FROM PRISON

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1945)

Folio Society, Enlarged Edition, edited by Eberhard Bethge, 2000; rebound with marbled boards, quarter in biscuit leather with sage label with gilt lettering.

Are we still of any use?

If the Almighty and I were to get back on first-name terms, it would most likely be through the agency – or grace, perhaps – of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. What a man!

Bonhoeffer was born, with a twin sister, to a family of culture and privilege that knew that the things that count come from the home. His father was a doctor who became a professor of psychiatry; his mother was a teacher who became the nerve centre of a family of eight children and seven servants. The family performed simple rites at home, but they were not regular church-goers. When Dietrich found God and decided to go into theology, his family warned him against ‘a poor feeble, boring, petty bourgeois institution.’

Dietrich became involved in the ecumenical movement and he had his eyes opened in the UK and the US. He heard the black Christ preached with ‘rapturous passion’. But also, ‘not just separate railway cars, tramways, and buses south of Washington, but also for example, when I wanted to eat in a small restaurant with a Negro, I was refused service.’ Karl Barth called him back home in 1933: ‘You are a German…the house of our church is on fire.’

When Hitler came, Bonhoeffer said that the church had to stand up for victims whether they were baptized or not. When the Nuremberg Laws came, he proclaimed that ‘only those who shout for the Jews are permitted to sing Gregorian chants.’ The role of those who followed Jesus was not ‘just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself.’ He preached that the church had the right to engage in direct action against the state. That is a complete repudiation of the relevant teaching of Martin Luther. Bonhoeffer took his moral stand on the Sermon on the Mount.

On 1 February 1933, he was on the microphone at the Potsdammerstrasse Voxhaus in Berlin. He was speaking of ‘The Concept of the Führer’. Two days after Hitler came to power – a calamity for the Bonhoeffer family – Dietrich Bonhoeffer told the German people that a leader could be a misleader. ‘This is a leader who makes an idol of himself and his office, and who thus mocks God.’ Before he could get these words out, they had switched the microphone off. Here, then, was courage to take your breath away. Bonhoeffer was 26 years old.

This man of God, this pacifist, was true to his word. He was in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler. He wanted to put a spoke in the wheel. He was arrested, and imprisoned in various places, like Buchenwald and Tegel, after first being taken to the Gestapo Headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht Strasse. (At this site, you can now visit a frighteningly moving museum called the Topography of Terror.) Our book comes from his time in prison.

This book is on my shelf because of what the man did more than for what he said – as is the case with some others who are there. We know what history tells us of the Nazis, but we can have no idea of what it was like to live under their Terror. They regarded the church with the kind of contempt that they felt for non-Aryans. They put Mein Kampf in place of the Bible, and the sword in place of the cross. Hitler told Goebbels: ‘Let the churchmen dig their own grave. They will surrender their kind little deity to us. They will give up anything just to preserve their pitiful junk, rank, and incomes.’

We have debased privacy with a welter of laws and bureaucrats and wall-eyed zombies telling the whole carriage the awful story of their lives. Bonhoeffer saw it coming. He spoke of ‘respect for reticence’, ‘of a willingness to observe people more or less cautiously from the outside, but not from the inside’. He referred to a ‘revolution from below…Anything clothed, veiled, pure and chaste is presumed to be deceitful, disguised, and impure; people here simply show their own impurity. A basic anti-social attitude of mistrust and suspicion is the revolt of inferiority.’

We have become scared to face up to inferiority, and we are in thrall to mediocrity. Bonhoeffer, as ever, resisted. He was prepared to take on those ‘below’ as well as those ‘above’. He could do so with a smile. ‘Don Quixote is the symbol of resistance carried to the point of absurdity, even lunacy…Sancho Panza is the type of complacent and artful accommodation to things as they are.’

He knew our limits. ‘Uneducated people find it very difficult to decide things objectively and they will allow some more or less fortuitous circumstance to turn the scales.’ Did he only learn this in jail? No. He saw something that Keats famously remarked on in one of his letters – ‘how few people there are who can harbour conflicting emotions at the same time.’ While he feared that ‘man becomes radically religionless’, he was fond of reading Kant (‘a very rationalist rococo psychology’) and Spinoza (‘emotions are only expelled by stronger emotions, and not the mind’). Standing by the Sermon on the Mount, he observed that ‘unlike the other oriental religions, the faith of the Old Testament is not a religion of redemption.’

At Easter 1944, Bonhoeffer spoke of Bach and Beethoven, and went on: ‘Easter? We’re paying more attention to dying than to death. We’re more concerned to get over the act of dying than to overcome death. Socrates mastered the art of dying; Christ overcame death as the last enemy…There is a real difference between the two things; the one is within the scope of human possibilities: the other means resurrection.’ The previous year, Bonhoeffer had said: ‘We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; we have been drenched by many storms; we have learned the arts of equivocation and pretence; experience has made us suspicious of others and stopped us being truthful and open…Are we still of any use?’

At Flossenberg at dawn on 9 April 1945, the SS hanged Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was a round-up before liberation. The Fatherland stripped one of its greatest sons of his clothing so that it could put him to death naked, but they used hemp rather than piano-wire. They burned his corpse. He was as guilty of a capital crime as was the man whose life and teaching he had sought to follow. It might fairly be said to have been an accident of history that one crime was defined as treason and the other as blasphemy – it was nigh on inevitable that the mission of each would end in his execution.

Perhaps Bonhoeffer inherited his great strength and power of resistance. His mother, Paula, wrote to him in jail: ‘I have always been proud of my eight children and I am now, more than ever when I see the dignity and respect they maintain in such an indescribable situation.’ She signed off: ‘All the best, my good boy. Your old Mother.’ Her last letter added after those words: ‘We are staying in Berlin, come what may.’’ The whole family was tough.

Paula’s mother Julie had died in 1936. She was a resister, too. She just walked passed the Brownshirts to shop at Jewish shops. On the way out she gave them that in-your-face attitude that we see in people in New York and Berlin – ‘I shop where I always shop!’ When Dietrich spoke at Grandma Julie’s burial, he used words of surpassing beauty that keep coming back to us. ‘She came out of a different time, out of a different spiritual world, and this world will not shrink into the grave with her. This heritage, for which we are grateful to her, puts us under obligation.’

What a family! Other members were in the resistance and they too were executed. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a great hero of resistance, is as good case of noblesse oblige as you will see.

Here and there – A war book: The Fighters

16/09/2018 / Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

When people criticise President Barack Obama for failing to commit American troops in conflicts in the Middle East, they often forget that the President was giving effect to the wishes of the people of the United States at the time. They had had enough of American death and destruction overseas with no apparent purpose or benefit. And even if Americans had not learned the lesson that you do not go into a war unless you have a good plan for getting out of it, their president had. You need to have an ‘off’ button. The US is still looking for one in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the meantime, the world generally is worse off; a whole new threat became manifest; as a result, Syria is a disgrace to humanity; and no one has the faintest idea how to even start trying to fix the mess – humanitarian and strategic – in Iraq or Afghanistan. And we don’t look to have heard anything like an apology from those leaders in the western world that are responsible for bringing all this destruction and misery. Nor do we even look like learning from the mistakes – of a kind that have been repeated so often in history.

All this is made wrenchingly clear in the book The Fighters by C J Chivers published this year by Simon and Schuster. Chivers is a New York Times correspondent who has served in the army in the Middle East.

This book traces the history of six American servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their story is told in immense detail and in a manner that commands, among other things, trust. It is therefore a very hard, wearing book to read – like revisiting the scene of a horrible war crime. The detail compels conviction – as it did for Michael Herr in Dispatches and Erich Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front. Those books are classics that have helped to shape our horror of war. In my view, the book The Fighters is of that ilk.

Before looking at some of this wonderful book, can we reflect on two elementary lessons from the history of the world?

First, when the Persians invaded Greece, when Spain invaded Holland, when England invaded America, when Napoleon invaded Spain and then Russia, and when America invaded Vietnam, all the invaders soon came to the same conclusion. They were on the losing side – militarily and morally – from the start. I will look at some of the reasons for this obvious fact, but let me now mention the second lesson.

When both royalists and republicans (or, perhaps, democrats) each for their own reasons wanted France to go to war on Austria, Maximilien Robespierre, seen by many as the Father of Modern Terrorism, swam bravely, intelligently, and vigorously against the tide. He said this to the feverish Jacobins Club.

Our generals are to be missionaries of the Constitution; our camps are to be schools of public law; and the satellites of foreign princes, far from putting obstacles in the way of this plan, will fly to meet us, not to repel us by force, but to sit at our feet. No one likes an armed missionary, and no more extravagant idea has ever sprang from the head of a politician than to suppose that one people has only to enter another’s territory with arms in its hands to make the latter adopt its laws and its Constitution.

Napoleon would spread the bones of five million dead over Europe to affirm that simple truth. It is – word for word – the error relied on by George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard when they decided to go to war on Iraq, and it should be engraved on their headstones. Was a man or woman ever born who, while being bayoneted or raped by an invading soldier, stopped to ask that soldier what ideological mission had driven him to commit this crime against humanity?

To go back to the first point, I sought elsewhere to list the problems facing the British when they took on the American colonists on their own soil.

Although the Americans like to see themselves as having been the underdogs, they won the War of Independence, as they call it, and it is not hard to isolate some of the reasons why their position was eventually so much stronger than that of the English. You can apply the following criteria to the American War of Independence – or to the Vietnam War, the Russian war in Afghanistan, the second Iraq war, or the present military operations in Afghanistan. The phrases ‘home team’ and ‘away team’ are used for convenience and not to detract from the significance of the wars, or the valour shown and losses taken by those who actually fought them and are fighting the present one.

The away team is the biggest in the world, or as the case may be, the only empire in the world, or the second biggest.
The away team is a regular professional army while the home team consists of amateur irregulars.
The professional soldiers in the away team have no advantage over the amateurs in the other team because they have not been trained for this kind of war and people who fight for the cause are more reliable than those who do it for money.
People defending their own soil are far more motivated than those who cross the world to try to bring them into line.
The away team has massive resources and advantages in population and war matériel (such as the navy) and technology, but the home team has local knowledge.
The home team can move more quickly, avoid pitched battles, and use guerrilla tactics, which are sometimes referred to as terrorism, and which, as we saw, the British objected to as not being fair play.
The away team has problems with morale and supplies that just get worse as time goes on.
The away team finds that winning requires more than just winning battles – they may beat the army of the other side, but they will not beat the country, which has widespread support among its people (even if the people are otherwise split).
The away team has a hopeless dilemma – it has to hit hard to win, but every time it hits hard it loses more hearts and minds.
The home team finds it is easy to generate heroes and leaders; the away team finds it is easy to sack losers.
The home team out-breeds the others – the result is just a matter of time.

12 The war becomes one of exhaustion and attrition, which in turn exaggerates the above advantage of the home team.

Because of its felt superiority, its actual ignorance, and its sustained frustration, the away team resorts to atrocious behaviour that it would never be guilty of in a normal war, or against an enemy of its own kind.

In short, the American colonists felt that they were fighting on the moral high ground, a position that they have never surrendered. Appalling crimes were committed on both sides, especially in the civil war in the south between the Patriots and Loyalists. There were, Churchill said, ‘atrocities such as we have known in our day in Ireland.’

The family of Dustin Kirby, later called ‘Doc’, lived in Powder Springs, Georgia. They were ‘unflinchingly patriotic and unshakably Christian’ – and God bless them for both. After the attack on the twin towers, young Kirby wanted to fight for his country. He joined the navy. His mum told him he would be safe there. To get more action, Dusty tried out for the Marines. Sailors wanting to go the Marines were first put through medical training – well, at least they would not go into battle not knowing the worst. The Doc became what Americans call a corpsman – a medic, whose job it was to be what we call ‘the first responder’ to badly wounded Marines. You might think it would be hard to get a more brutal, dangerous and testing job.

In Iraq, Doc attended a Marine who had been shot in the back while talking to a little boy – who most probably had been used as a decoy. Then in a substantial engagement, Doc had to look after a Marine named Smith who had been shot clean through the head. Doc tended Smith whose brains were dripping over Doc. By a combination of valour, grit and luck, Doc got Smith to a medical helicopter. There was at least a chance that radical surgery might save Smith’s life. But what kind of life? Doc fretted over this.

Some weeks later Petty Officer Kirby was asked to take a phone call at his base. The father of Smith was on the line from the Naval Hospital at Bethesda.

The voice on the other end was breaking. Bob Smith was talking through tears. He pushed on. ‘My son would not be alive if not for you,’ Smith said. ‘As long as I am breathing, you will have a father in Ohio.’

Later it would be Doc’s turn. He got shot full in the face. By a similar combination of valour, grit and luck, they kept him going until surgery saved his life. Then there was surgery after surgery. Doc was sent home. This was the return of a hero to the U S from the war in Iraq.

It had been almost four years since Bush left office and nearly seven since Kirby had been shot. Time had been kinder to the former commander in chief than to the corpsman. Kirby had endured more than two dozen surgeries. His jaw had been rebuilt with a bone graft, screws and plates. The work had not set him right. His bottom teeth did not align with those on top, and a section of his mouth was a food trap that he often had to clear with his index finger when he ate. He was in constant pain and self-conscious about his appearance. He had gained fifty pounds. He was medically retired, unemployed, divorced, and disfigured. He was also on probation in the state of Georgia for a reckless driving conviction. Years of drinking had left their mark.

The family was invited to the home of the former president. By this time, Doc had tried to kill himself while driving a car. Gail Kirby, Doc’s mum, was determined to let Mr Bush know of the agony that she had endured as a mother.

She stared at the president, and held his gaze. He looked back. She plunged on.

‘Now picture that baby [the grandchild of Mr Bush] being out in a car seat and put in the middle of a highway, with hundreds of cars that are zooming past him all day long.

You know in your heart that that baby will be safe as long as no cars swerve even just a little bit. You pray every minute of every day that those cars stay away from that yellow line….But to make it harder, we will put you in an office with a TV that is playing the footage of those cars driving past your baby every minute of every day, for weeks on end.’……

Gail did not care. Her son had been shot. She had not come here for ceremony, or to be denied her agency or right to speak.

Bush’s demeanour was gentle. He leaned forward.

‘That’s quite an analogy’, he said.

‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I am responsible, I know. I sent him there.’

That is only a part of one of the seven stories in this book. The only other story I will mention is Commander Layne McDowell. He flew an F/A-18 Super Hornet from a carrier on bombing missions over Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. He got his wish. He never dropped a bomb over Afghanistan.

I can’t bear the thought of injuring anyone who doesn’t deserve it, especially if a child were injured during an attack. I think back to the house I accidentally bombed in Kosovo and wonder who was in it…I hope no one. But I don’t want that kind of haunting anymore. I’m glad it is over. I hope my days of flying in combat are over.

I mean no disrespect to the Commander when I say that the first sentence may beg the question. Which Afghans ‘deserved to die’ because Osama got lucky with the twin towers? The ‘enemy’ of the Americans in Afghanistan is throughout the book referred to as the Taliban. Most of them probably were. But were not all of them also probably Afghans responding to a foreign, and infidel, invasion in exactly the manner that Robespierre had predicted? Why don’t we see the Afghans as fighting their own war of independence against invading foreigners?

The question raises two other truths identified by the author. ‘The battlefield did not care about reputations, appearances or wishes.’ And, the ‘Taliban could fight as it pleased, but the Americans were bound by rules.’

Earlier, I referred to two other classic books on war. I hope I have said enough to show why I think this book belongs in that group.

Three other books on war occurred to me throughout. You get the same relentless but arbitrary bloodletting that you get in the Iliad. And you get the same aimlessness. You also get brought back to earth by the effect on the families. The spirit of the plea of Priam to Achilles underlies so much of this book – so little has changed in the intervening millennia.

Then there was the comment of John Keegan in The Face of Battle about studies undertaken in the U S about behaviour in combat. They found a truth long known to football coaches, and hammered home in the book of Mr Chivers.

Foremost among them was the revelation that ordinary soldiers do not think of themselves, in life and death situations, as subordinate members of whatever formal military organisation it is to which authority has assigned them, but as equals within a very tiny group – perhaps no more than six or seven men.

What is the relevance of Catch 22? When looking at the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, how do you avoid the notion of madness wherever you look? There is something timeless and universal about soldiers saying ‘We’re here because we’re here.’ Doubtless, the Achaean warriors said the same as they paced between their boats and the walls of Troy; and just as Australian diggers said so thousands of years later just across the water at Gallipoli.

May I then come back to the analogy of the redoubtable Gail Kirby? It would have made Dostoyevsky weep. Doc’s mum did Powder Springs, Georgia proud, and she did all of us parents and grandparents proud. Could we not ask the Almighty to grant us a universal law that before any politician sends any of our children or grandchildren off to war, they must read through that analogy in public and in full, and then with their hands on their heart say that they personally will accept full responsibility for every baby that gets run over as a result of their decision?

Finally, may I say that that anecdote has caused me to think better of Mr Bush? He actually said that he was sorry. That made Doc’s mum think that Mr Bush was ‘not like so many people. He respects us.’ That’s what saying sorry does for you. ‘Sorry’ is not a word that I have heard from any of the others who were also responsible for sending all those men to die in those God forsaken holes in the earth – and all for nothing.