2006 and All That

Intended as a guide for prospective citizens on all matters of British culture and history a new Government booklet "Life in the United Kingdom: a Journey to Citizenship," has faced a barrage of derision from historians on account of its litany of historical errors and glaring misquotes.
According to the guide Winston Churchill thanked the heroes of the Battle of Britain with the words: "Never in the course of human conflict have so many owed so much to so few" and not "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few" as we were previously led to believe
We are also told that Great Britain includes Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man (This is actually the United Kingdom), Charles II was recalled from exile in France (Holland, actually) and Queen Mary "came to the throne with Spanish support” (err while she may have married the king of Spain her supporters were most definitely English).
Professor Sir Bernard Crick, who wrote the history section, defended his work: "There are errors in it because it was done fairly quickly because we didn't want to keep immigrants waiting for their citizenship.”
I know this is hardly an earth shattering story but there is no excuse for such a slipshod approach to historical fact.Perhaps it would have been better if every prospective citizen was provided with a copy of 1066 and All That. At least they would have had a few laughs while learning bad history!

Life in the United Kingdom: a Journey to Citizenship is available from the Stationery Office for £9.99. 1066 and All That is rather cheaper.

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The Joys of the Gower - La recherche du temps perdu?

My friend Siani has a wonderful blog about the Gower Peninsula with many images of what is a beautiful part of Wales.

I have only visited the Gower once myself and that was on a Zoology field trip while still at school. Although I do remember being taken by the beauty of the place, the trip was more memorable for mishaps such as being caught by the tide on Mumbles Head and having to wade back to the shore in steel capped boots in waist-deep water against a nasty riptide. Other memories include having to be dragged out of a mudflat after getting stuck fast (at the Burry Inlet I think) and coming within an ace of planting my fist on one of my teachers.

I have resolved to go back and look at it through the eyes of a forty-something unencumbered by the baggage of taxonomy and teachers.

The Euston Manifesto

Nothing seems to have created as much controversy (and generated a fair bit of hostility) on the left in recent months as the Euston Manifesto The work of a grop of prominent journalists (including Nick Cohen and Francis Wheen) , academics and political bloggers it intends to create a new democratic progressive alignment including not only the demoracatic left but also progressive non-socialists.

While I personally do not agree with everything in the Manifesto, in the main it accords with my own political outlook and as such I am happy to support it.

A Brewhaha over Ben and Jerry's?

Ben and Jerry's is noted for its unusually named products but their new Stout flavoured ice cream, Black and Tan, has created a minor stir among Irish Americans. The name was inteded to celebarate a drink made from equal portions of Stout and Pale Ale, unfortunately the Black and Tans were also an auxillary force created in 1920 to counter IRA activities in Ireland. This force soon gained a reputation for violence and were guilty of several atrocities, including the first Bloody Sunday

Given that Ben and Jerry's have no plans to bring out a "No Surrender" flavour (Orange of course) it can be assumed that there was no ill intent behind the choice of name. Given also the marked absence of a storm of controversy in the Irish press one can assume that the whole story was seen for what it is..... just a storm in an ice cream tub.

Worth Reading: Koba the Dread

Martin Amis is not an author I am particularly fond of: The two novels of his I have read (London Fields and Times Arrow) left me rather cold. Koba the Dread, however, is in a different league: it isn't a conventional biography of Stalin rather it focuses on the madness of the Stalin era. It is also an assault on the myths surrounding the revolution and its leaders. Many on the Left will say that Stalin was a bastard who perverted the good works of Lenin and Trotsky. The reality was that he used their "good works" as the bedrock of his own terror. The book reminds us that Stalin was evil but so were Ulyanov and Bronstein, the only key difference being a matter of scale.

Another key element of this book is the culpability of intellectuals across the world who chose to swallow the romantic image of the USSR, perhaps because the truth was simply to awful to contemplate. There is a major personal element to this - his father Kingsley was a card carrying communist from 1941 right up to the effective death of Communist Party of Great Britain in the aftermath of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956

The new totalitarianism

Published in Iranian.com and elsewehere on 3 March.

MANIFESTO: After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.

We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all. The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man's domination of woman, the Islamists' domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.

We reject "cultural relativism", which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of "Islamophobia", an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.

We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas.
We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

12 signatures

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, from somilian origin, is member of Dutch parliement, member of the liberal party VVD. Writter of the film Submission which caused the assasination of Theo Van Gogh by an islamist in november 2004, she lives under police protection.

Chahla Chafiq

Chahla Chafiq, writer from iranian origin, exiled in France is a novelist and an essayist. She's the author of "Le nouvel homme islamiste , la prison politique en Iran " (2002). She also wrote novels such as "Chemins et brouillard" (2005).

Caroline Fourest

Essayist, editor in chief of Prochoix (a review who defend liberties against dogmatic and integrist ideologies), author of several reference books on « laicité » and fanatism : Tirs Croisés : la laïcité à l'épreuve des intégrismes juif, chrétien et musulman (with Fiammetta Venner), Frère Tariq : discours, stratégie et méthode de Tariq Ramadan, et la Tentation obscurantiste (Grasset, 2005). She receieved the National prize of laicité in 2005.

Bernard-Henri Lévy

French philosoph, born in Algeria, engaged against all the XXth century « ism » (Fascism, antisemitism, totalitarism, terrorism), he is the author of La Barbarie à visage humain, L'Idéologie française, La Pureté dangereuse, and more recently American Vertigo.

Irshad Manji

Irshad Manji is a Fellow at Yale University and the internationally best-selling author of "The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith" (en francais: "Musulmane Mais Libre"). She speaks out for free expression based on the Koran itself. Née en Ouganda, elle a fui ce pays avec sa famille musulmane d'origine indienne à l'âge de quatre ans et vit maintenant au Canada, où ses émissions et ses livres connaissent un énorme succès.

Mehdi Mozaffari

Mehdi Mozaffari, professor from iranian origin and exiled in Denmark, is the author of several articles and books on islam and islamism such as : Authority in Islam: From Muhammad to Khomeini, Fatwa: Violence and Discourtesy and Glaobalization and Civilizations.

Maryam Namazie

Writer, TV International English producer; Director of the Worker-communist Party of Iran's International Relations; and 2005 winner of the National Secular Society's Secularist of the Year award.

Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen is born in Bangladesh. Doctor, her positions defending women and minorities brought her in trouble with a comittee of integrist called « Destroy Taslima » and to be persecuted as « apostate »

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is the author of nine novels, including Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses and, most recently, Shalimar the Clown. He has received many literary awards, including the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, Germany's Author of the Year Award, the European Union's Aristeion Prize, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Premio Mantova, and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He is a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres, an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T., and the president of PEN American Center. His books have been translated into over 40 languages.

Philippe Val

Director of publication of Charlie Hebdo (Leftwing french newspaper who have republished the cartoons on the prophet Muhammad by solidarity with the danish citizens targeted by islamists).

Ibn Warraq

Ibn Warraq , author notably of Why I am Not a Muslim ; Leaving Islam : Apostates Speak Out ; and The Origins of the Koran , is at present Research Fellow at a New York Institute conducting philological and historical research into the Origins of Islam and its Holy Book.

Antoine Sfeir

Born in Lebanon, christian, Antoine Sfeir choosed french nationality to live in an universalist and « laïc » (real secular) country. He is the director of Les cahiers de l'Orient and has published several reference books on islamism such as Les réseaux d'Allah (2001) et Liberté, égalité, Islam : la République face au communautarisme (2005).

Stereotypes

My attention was drawn recently to a site called Muslim Wakeup! An article by Raheel Raza made me stop and think again about Islamic stereotypes:

" During the height of the Danish cartoon controversy, Canadian media interviewed male Muslim leaders exclusively, without bothering to seek out leaders among Muslim women. It’s a given that Muslim leaders are men, preferably with beards. Haideh Moghissi, Professor of Sociology, York University, says that rigid, unforgiving and sexist voices are considered voice of authentic Muslims by Western media. When a Muslim woman speaks out or assumes a leadership role, she’s called militant. Yet the struggle for sexual equality and leadership among Muslim women is gaining strength around the world."

Why does the media choose the bearded autocrat over any other strand of Islam? Is it because it comforts us to see Islam in this narrow way? We have cerrainly seen this in the Sun and other British gutter press where Abu Hamza (see above), a pretty vile character admittedly, was not that far away from being the new bogeyman. But it is not just the media that looks on Islam this way: all too many on the left lionise fundamentalists for their stance on the iniquities of the USA yet they turn a blind eye to their intolerance and misogyny. We need to look at Islam in a different light but where should we look to for positive images? From what little I do know perhaps RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, or Shirin Ebadi would be good starting points.

RAWA

Shirin Ebadi

Muslim WakeUp!

A joke with a sting in its tail

For so many years the "Stupid Irishman" joke featured in the repertoire of just about every fifth rate stand up comedian. Not a few tv sitcoms would make use of a stereotypical "bog trotter" for cheap laughs. Mercifully this more PC age has seen the back of much of such rubbish but perhaps Britain is laughing on the other side of its face due to the rise of the "Celtic Tiger". which has seen the transformation of the Irish Republic over the last 20 years from a depressed exporter of people into a vibrant, self confident nation (more on this transformation at a later date).

There is still one Irishman joke I do enjoy because of the sting in its tail:

An Irishman was looking for work in London. He goes to a building site where the Foreman says to him that he can have a job if he can answer this one simple question:

"What is the difference between a girder and a joist"

The Irishman looks the foreman in the face and says:

"That's simple. Girder wrote Faust and Joist wrote Ulysses"

I know that this joke has little to do with the Celtic Tiger but any excuse to tell it!

Remembering the boy from Tralee

By Robert Fisk (from the Irish Independent 17/04/06. Click entry title for link to original article)


MORE than 15 years ago, I travelled to the Belgian city of Ypres with an Irish friend.
She was from a good Fine Gael family which nursed a healthy disrespect for the amount of romantic green blossom draped around Padraig Pearse's neck for the militarily hopeless but politically explosive Dublin Easter Rising of 1916.
But she displayed an equally admirable suspicion of British - or "English" as she would have put it - intentions towards Ireland, north and south. Her mother once recalled for me a British military raid on their home in County Carlow. "I was a little girl and one of the soldiers patted me on the head and I told him: 'You keep your hands off me.'"
But at Ypres one evening, beneath the great Menin Gate - upon which are carved the names of 54,896 First World War British soldiers whose bodies were never found - my friend faced a real political challenge.
She had noted, among those thousands, the names of hundreds of young Irishmen who had died in British uniform while their countrymen at home were fighting and dying in battle against the same British Army. She looked at one of the names. "Why in God's name," she asked, "was a boy from the Station House, Tralee, dying here in the mud of Flanders?"
And it was at this point that an elderly man approached us and asked my Irish friend to sign the visitors' book.
She looked at the British Army's insignia on the memorial volume with distaste. There was the British crown glimmering in the evening light. And the Belgian firemen who nightly play the Last Post beneath the gate were already taking position. There was not much time. But my friend remembered the young man from Tralee.
She thought about her own small Catholic nation and its centuries of suffering and she realised that the boy from Tralee had gone to fight - or so he thought - for little Catholic Belgium. She decided to inscribe the British Army's book in the Irish language. "Na tiortha beaga," she wrote "For little countries."
All this happened years before an economically powerful and self-confident Irish Republic would face up to the sacrifice its pre-independence soldiers made in British uniform; the estimated 35,000 Irishmen who died in the 1914-18 war wildly outnumber the few hundred who fought in the Easter Rising.
The total of dead, wounded and missing among Irish Protestants in the 36th (Ulster) Division on the Somme and at Ypres came to 32,180. The same statistics among soldiers of the 10th and 16th Irish Divisions - most of them Catholics - amounted to 37,761.
My own father was to fight alongside the Irish on the Somme in 1918 although - a fact I used to keep quiet about when I was 'The Times's' correspondent in Belfast in the early 1970s - he was originally sent to Ireland in the aftermath of the Rising.
I have a faded photograph of Bill Fisk, then in the Cheshire Regiment, kissing the Blarney Stone, and some pictures he took of the front gate of Victoria Barracks - now Collins Barracks - in Cork, its stonework plastered with appeals to Irishmen to join the British Army.
It was only when I was invited to give the annual Bloody Sunday memorial lecture in Derry - the first Brit to be asked to honour the memory of the 14 people who were killed by a Parachute Regiment in 1972 - that I talked about my dad's fight against Sinn Fein.
If Padraig Pearse had not raised the flag over the Dublin Post office in Easter Week of 1916, I told my audience, Bill Fisk might have been sent to die in the first Battle of the Somme three months later - and his son Robert would not exist. So did I owe my life to Pearse? I'm still not at all sure how to regard the men of 1916.
The very best book on the Rising - George Dangerfield's magnificent 'The Damnable Question' - proves that the "rebels" (as my father called them) were very brave as well as very dismissive of their own and others' lives. They were not to know the deviant way in which their "blood sacrifice" - which was not exactly the first in Irish history - would be adopted by later armed groups who sought their mandate in blood shed before those 1916 British execution parties.
Had they not been so cruelly shot down as punishment for their armed assault on British power, would they have been so honoured in the long, dark, stagnant Ireland of the 1920s and 30s and then in the terrible and much later years of the civil conflict in Northern Ireland? Do you have to be a martyr to have honour?
I was much struck by this thought five years ago when I was searching through the British National Archives at Kew for details of the execution of a young Australian soldier in the British Army whom my father was ordered to shoot at the end of the First World War.
Bill Fisk refused, so another officer performed the dirty deed. But there in the documents of British military executions - routinely filed under 1916 - were the names of Pearse and Connolly and McBride. The exemplary punishment accorded to them and their comrades in Dublin turned public scorn to sympathy and admiration. But to the Brits, it was just another act of military law.
And now the minister for defence tells us the military Easter Rising pomp in Dublin this weekend symbolises the end of the war in the North. Maybe.
But who will remember the boy from the Station House, Tralee? ©Independent news service

Addendum

The Photograph above is the Island of Ireland Peace Park Memorial Messines, Belgium opened jointly by President McAleese, Queen Elizabeth II and King Albert II of Belgium in 1998, Messines was the site of the only major engaement in WWI where soldiers from all parts of Ireland fought and died together.

President McAleese's comments at the opening are quite poingnant for someone such as myslef whose father and grandfater served in WWII and WWI respectively:

"Today’s ceremony at the Peace Park was not just another journey down a well-travelled path. For much of the past eighty years, the very idea of such a ceremony would probably have been unthinkable. Those whom we commemorate here were doubly tragic. They fell victim to a war against oppression in Europe. Their memory too fell victim to a war for independence at home in Ireland."

Click here for more information on the Memorial Park

Two views of the Easter Rising Celebrations

National day of pride

The Irish Independent

YESTERDAY Ireland marked the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising with dignity, solemnity and style. The military parade in Dublin, and the mood surrounding it, were a world removed from the sometimes bitter and petty arguments about the revival of the event after a lapse of more than three decades.

Ninety years is a long time. The Rising is for most, and should be for all, a matter of history, unrelated to current politics. Sadly, the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein have consistently tried to appropriate it along with other nationalist symbols. Yesterday Bertie Ahern reclaimed it.

He did not reclaim it for the Fianna Fail Party - though he might have chosen a better occasion than a Fianna Fail ard fheis to announce the reinstatement of the parade. He reclaimed it for everyone. If he thought to achieve some party advantage, there was no indication at yesterday's impressive and carefully orchestrated ceremonies.

For the all-embracing nature of the event, for the dignity and solemnity, the organisers are to be congratulated. For the style - which also had a tremendous bearing on the meaning conveyed - the military authorities deserve the congratulations.
Probably more than half the population took no interest in the closeness of the drill, the proficiency of the marching bands, or the efficiency of the armaments. But nobody could have failed to notice the emphasis placed on the most impressive activities of our defence forces in half a century.
In that time, they have served with the United Nations around the world. They have made themselves a reputation as supreme peacekeepers. They have proved their courage and professionalism in the cause of humanity.

That is perhaps the best answer for those who doubt if a military parade was an appropriate means of commemorating 1916.

Now a discussion has begun on whether the celebrations should be expanded in the years of more "dress rehearsals" for the centenary in 2016. It is a tempting thought. It may be more to the point to ask if we should also commemorate the First Dail in 1919, the 1921 truce, our formal independence in 1922 . . .

But commemorations cannot be multiplied endlessly. For now, we can take pride in the spectacle of an army that threatens nobody, in a country committed to settling every political question by democratic means.

1916 commemoration - Rising can inspire the new Ireland

The Irish Examiner

THE commemoration yesterday of the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising was, in the words of Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, “a day of remembrance, reconciliation and renewal”.

It was also, he reminded his listeners, about discharging one generation’s debt of honour to another.

There is, indeed, a prodigious debt to discharge, one whereby the ultimate sacrifice of the men and women of Easter Week bequeathed an Ireland which ranks independently, and not without influence, today among the community of nations.

Despite the pomp and ceremony of wreath laying at Kilmainham Jail and the GPO by the Taoiseach and President Mary McAleese, and the trappings of the 2,500 members of the Defence Forces, Navy, Air Corps, Garda and United Nations veterans, it was not a day of triumphalism.

Rather it was an occasion to publicly regain and acknowledge the memory of Ireland’s inheritance from those patriots of 1916 for the modern day inheritors of their sacrifice, and to honour it.

Apart from the official functions carried out to mark the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising, tens of thousands of ordinary citizens gathered in Dublin for the military parade to commemorate it.

As such, it was the first Easter Sunday parade by the Defence Forces in the capital in 35 years. When it was proposed to hold this year’s parade, debate about the period and how Ireland should acknowledge its anniversary was sparked.

During the early 1970s, because of the Troubles, the military parades were abandoned and official commemorations became more low key, because the commemoration recalled the 1916 Easter Rising attempt to seize the capital from British imperial forces.

British troops put down the rebellion and many of its ringleaders were captured and executed.

From that anguished genesis emerged the nascent Ireland, which the rest of the world has witnessed ascend to command its own sovereignty and sit with other nations to influence the course of world history.

The country has, indeed, matured politically and socially. The spirit of 1916 and the ideal of a united Ireland now resides in the reality of the Good Friday Agreement and the implementation of what it seeks, which is peaceful coexistence along mutually accepted lines and institutions of cooperation.

It is the will of the majority on this entire island that those objectives be achieved through constitutional and inclusive politics and without the indulgence of divisive and entrenched sectarianism.

Irrefutably, this country has progressed immeasurably during the previous nine decades, and because of them.

It has achieved a highly successful economy which is a model for others to emulate, especially in emerging countries in the European Union, whose enlargement to 25 nations this country presided over.

That is not to say that the men and women who helped found this State would give their imprimatur to all aspects of Irish society, were they able to revisit it today.

There are blemishes on the face of modern Irish society wherein inequalities are allowed to flourish because many people have not had the benefit of the Celtic Tiger.

It would be a fitting tribute to those men and women honoured yesterday if injustice and poverty were eliminated - or at least pursued - in this modern and pluralist Ireland of today.