Back in the mists of time, the Brussels Shakespeare Society put on a play at a theatre in the Schaarbeek district of the town that was, at least then, known as the Scarabaeus. A scarab is an Egyptian good-luck charm, except in the case of this theatre. It is council-owned but was then leased out to a theatrical two-hander, the principal player in which was the wife, whose name was (not) Hippolyta.

Image: the stage door to the Scarabaeus Theatre, Schaarbeek.

Hippolyta had something of a reputation among amateur theatre companies in the city, although I myself had never encountered the woman and wouldn’t have known her from the Queen of the Amazons. That was until I became a set-builder on a play being done by a group of Hispanics. One director of my acquaintance had advised that she needed treating with kid gloves and that he had experienced some awkwardness with her, but had always managed to get what he needed from her, besides her sass.

During the run of the play initially referred to above, the theatre’s management had contrived to lock a door that offered access to the far side of the stage, which they did during the actual performance. Actors piled out of the dressing room, only to find their path to the correct wing of the stage barred by this locked door. The management advised that this passageway to the far wing of the stage had not been included in the rental agreement and that use of it was therefore not allowed, failing any compensation for the facility. The Society was annoyed, shall we say.

My own familiarity with the theatre, besides a couple of miscellaneous events that I attended there, came just before Covid, when I was asked to build the set for that play put on by a Spanish theatre company—the classical El anzuelo de Fenisa (Fenisa’s Hook) written in 1617 by Lope de Vega. Part of the set would comprise a couple of magicians’ boxes, essentially two flats turning on their vertical axis, but given depth for solidity, in case someone bumped into them. To add stability, a small, offset door was incorporated into one side whereby bricks could be placed into it, thus considerably lowering its centre of gravity. It was a cool design and was very ably decorated by a brilliant Rumanian artist I knew, who produced magnificent decor on these very simple-looking but carefully designed constructions. One scene was depicted on one face, and another scene on the other face, with the sides simply being painted black, since they depicted nowhere. When it came to assembling the boxes, on the day of the dress rehearsal, it was discovered that our Rumanian friend had inadvertently painted the incorrect side of the panel with the door cut into it: it could not be reversed because of the door being offset to one side. “No matter,” I said, “before the cast arrive for the first performance tomorrow, I will come in early and paint the unpainted side panel the requisite black colour.”

Come the next day, the management of the theatre asked me what I was intending doing.

“Just painting this panel,” said I, and I explained why, with a cheery smile.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” came the reply.

“Oh?” I queried.

“You’re not opening a pot of paint in my theatre.”

“I will put down a dust sheet, no worry,” I said.

“No.”

“Then open the rear stage door and I will take the scenery out onto the street and paint it there.”

“No. I’m not opening the door and letting the heat out.”

At this point, I started to count to ten, but, unfortunately, only reached eight (I’ll leave out the expletives).

“For a week, we have been treading on eggshells to avoid crossing you or annoying you or doing anything that might be against your written and unwritten rules, and we have taken every care to make sure we smile and are pleasant and say good morning and good afternoon and goodbye and, quite honestly, you’re the same old cantankerous gorgon that you ever were, and we did it all for nothing.”

The show’s director swiftly intervened and said it would be better if I left, with which I complied. I don’t know if the scenery ever got painted as it should be, but what I considered righteous anger in his, not my, behalf was taken by him as upsetting his applecart. It was far better to not paint the scenery for his play than to upset the theatre manager. Even with the fact that a huge amount of very hard work had gone into producing these boxes, transporting them, erecting them, painting them, nobody was interested that the builder’s pride was clearly less meritworthy than the demands of the people who’d done nothing more creative towards the production than leasing out the space in which to perform the play. The story doesn’t stop there.

I would later be refused a part in another play by the first-named theatre group, on the grounds that it was to be performed at the self-same theatre; I was even asked not to buy a ticket to come and see it. Shortly after that other play had been performed, Hippolyta was evicted from the building by the council, on grounds of mismanagement of the premises. I had not been the only one to have an issue with her administrative techniques. But others in the amateur dramatic circles deemed it far more important to acquiesce in Hippolyta’s unreasonableness than to risk them not being able to rent the theatre from her at all (not even for ready money, as Wilde’s Merriman might’ve said).

These episodes demonstrate a conflict of paradigms. Some will take a stance that avoids all and any disruption because, in a small and tight-knit community, disruption is undesirable. Yet, unfortunately, there are those who precisely recognise that disruption is indeed unwanted and, being in a position of influence or control, are therefore able to set stumbling blocks and hindrances and yet never incur any true wrath by those who are inconvenienced, because the stick in the mud has a broad discretion to exercise, to which it is deemed to be in everyone else’s best interests to submit.

Disruptors, as many are perceived, call out injustices to appellate instances which, then, to the consternation of all, simply endorse perverse exercise of the prerogative. One comes to realise that complaining and protesting, far from achieving change, bring only exclusion for the protester, whose calls are unlikely to fall on the ears of anyone with any power to heed them: they are preferably silenced rather than being allowed to continue to disrupt in a manner that, in any event, others perceive as being in vain. The current student protests are a classic case in point, with somewhat graver consequences than my own being barred from an Egyptian-inspired theatre.

A year ago and more, a Russian mercenary gave a frank online interview describing in enough detail to shock how he and his comrades in arms had gathered together Ukrainian civilians in a sports centre in Ukraine and then sprayed them with bullets. They included men, women and small children aged five and less. They were all sprayed with gunfire until the cries ceased. When asked why he had complied with the order to do this, he replied that the orders had been given by Yevgeny Prigozhin and that failure to comply would not have in any way prevented the slaughter, but simply added him who refused to the final tally of the dead.

There are many definitions of what constitutes democracy, and democracy can take on a whole variety of forms. We have the philosophical definitions of freedom and equality as given by Plato and we have modern parliamentary democracy in European nations or under the American constitution, and even under questionable regimes like Zimbabwe, the Russian Federation and Iran. It can be difficult to discern which regimes are democratic and which are not.

But, when push comes to shove, the test of a democracy can transpire to be remarkably simple. It is whether the ordinary citizen, when commanded to do something by the ruling authority is entitled honestly to ask the person in command to tell him why. If authority can respond in a manner that goes beyond because it’s the law—even supposing it can do that—by explaining the rationale for the law and why the law is a good law, then, one has at least the beginnings of a democracy. But if because it’s the law is followed by enforcement of that law—even by violent means, Brobdingnagian in their execution—those who cast ballots in elections must question why they bother to play their role in a drama with such flimsy decor. And, if democracy is what we actually want, the time has, at that point, come for revolution.

Either that, or you’re simply barred from the show.

Suppose we didn’t know why there are ructions at university campuses. Not suppose that they were having a food strike (which we did at school, and which I wrote about here), but let’s suppose we just didn’t know what the trouble was. That we’d never heard of Israel, or Gaza, or sliced white bread. What, then, would you think about what’s happening at Yale, and Columbia, and elsewhere at this time?

Go ahead: you are hereby freed from the constraints of having to judge the issue itself. You have no responsibility to judge the merits of the occupations and the encampments and the sit-ins. What is your judgment of how they are being dealt with?

Is it that protest is futile, so that to protest anything is wrong? What, then, if you received £5 less in your change than you ought to? Is it worth protesting then? Or should you simply accept that short-changing is part of life and you must acquiesce in it? I was short-changed five cents this week; I protested, and got my five cents. It was very amicable and an apology was given. It was only five cents, but they were mine, not the shop’s. Sometimes justice is easy to discern. No police were called.

Is the decision to call the police dependent on the severity of the protest, or is it dependent on other factors, like the loudness of the chanting? The vehemence of the violence? The damage to tender young shoots of grass on lawns? The loss in stock market value of whatever loses stock market value when such protests take place?

What about the decision to arrest people who use nothing but their voice to protest (aside from the unfortunate damage to pristine lawns)? Is it justifiable to arrest people for voicing their protest, or for marching? Or for just being there? For voicing their protest in the form of silent placards? Maybe we should just protest and not say why we protest. That way, no one is embarrassed. But then people would ask, would they not, “What are you protesting about?” Then, if they were told what the people are protesting about, that should be the point at which a criminal offence is committed. Would that make more sense? In Russia, they hold up pieces of white paper with nothing on, and still get arrested.

A young Jew was arrested in the UK for displaying a placard that said Jews Against Genocide. When that resulted in him being taken in by the police, he asked, “Would it have been more acceptable if the placard had read Jews In Favour Of Genocide?” to which the police officers had no answer but to treat him even more roughly.

If the students of America, and elsewhere, it must be added, are slowly, but surely, realising the inane conundrum they are living through (and growing into), the irony lies in the fact that they are being constrained in the expression of their dismay and disgust with powers that they cannot otherwise hope to influence, on a matter of conscience, by law enforcement agencies who themselves have no answer to the logic arraigned against them by those they arrest for offences that have, in many cases, not been committed or that do not even exist.

And, it is at that point that the debate between the educator and the educated ceases to be limited to the educational institution, for it is now a debate that implicates us all. Not all of us are protesters, but all of us do protest at some time or another, as my small change dispute demonstrates. And not all of us evoke protest, but the divide is opening up wide between those who aspire to a position whereby insouciance towards others is a core element of that position, and those who aspire to the position whereby protest against the insouciant is, for them, a core value. In the 1990s, clothing trends between the generations narrowed to the point where a success story arose in malls around the globe: The Gap. Sweatshirts aside, and 30 years on, a new Gap is establishing itself, and it will not be closed with just a drawstring.

It is the agencies called upon to restrain the protests that are failing to understand their complicity as tools of the authors of circumstances which youth has banded together to oppose. The agencies of law enforcement comply without question on an, at most, questionable legal basis to perform, not the will, but the whim of established authority, under laws cast so widely that you’re guilty if we say so. Laws for the facilitation of elimination. Some comply with the command to enforce with a reticence that, at least, is creditable. Others do so with a venom that recalls the Nuremberg defence of I was only following orders. Aye, some may just follow orders, and others champ at the bit, waiting for the orders, adherence to which they will later brush from themselves, as Pilate washed his hands after the flogging.

And that is why the cause of the protest is now no longer of core relevance. It is the reaction of the law enforcers that should concern, not just the college young, but the broad gamut of our societies. Our right to remain silent is becoming an obligation.

Let me tell you something: every morning, I go outside to one of the three water butts I have positioned around my house that collect rainwater off the roof. I fill two watering cans and carry them inside to the downstairs loo. And, when I want to flush the loo, I fill the cistern with my rainwater.

It saves water. In fact, rainwater collects beneath my driveway in a concrete structure holding 3,000 litres, or 800 gallons US, and the intention is at some point to install a pump in order to more easily access that water: they cost about 50 euros. I’ve learned that we must conserve water. Not splash it around—take showers instead of baths, and close the tap whilst brushing our teeth. The concern is that water is a valuable resource, and, what’s more, it costs. Around here it costs me 100 euros a quarter. If I can use water off the roof, then that cuts down the water I need to purchase. It takes a couple of minutes to fetch the water and, even if I’m on my own and my name isn’t Henry, I hear the voice of Odetta in her classic 1961 duet with Harry Belafonte: Henry, fetch the water! I can always spare a couple of minutes for some nostalgia, but, most of all, fetching the water is a Cast Away moment for me.

In the movie Cast Away (note the split between the words: Tom Hanks’s character wasn’t simply a castaway, he was in fact cast away, by the woman he had loved), we, along with his companion, a football named Wilson, accompany Hanks in excruciating detail as he tries, and finally manages, to make fire on his Pacific desert island. When he succeeds, he bounds with mighty joy and declares himself a master of the elements, dancing a dance of victory. It’s a little bit amusing, until, that is, we think ourselves into the situation. Alone, unknowing of the future, learning to survive, needing to survive, needing to invent fire: wouldn’t you, too, have danced?

When Hanks escapes back to civilisation, his company, FedEx, holds a reception for him. As the festivities end, everyone recedes outside and Hanks is left for a second alone in the party-strewn room. He spots a candle lighter on the table and lifts it in his hand. He regards the end of the stick with an air of irony, as he pulls its little plastic button. Out of the end pops a flame. It is that easy. Click. Flame. Click. Flame.

I collect rainwater for my toilet because I can, because it makes economic sense and because it has a practical aspect to it. But especially: it has a pedagogic purpose for me—it costs me very little to know the hardships of others. Some, on desert islands, collect rainwater because they must. And there are some who have no water to collect, either from the sky or from a standpipe. When you flush, think on that: three gallons of water, down the toilet, literally. That’s one heavy watering can’s worth. A functioning waste disposal system, with well maintained sewers. You know, what you whisk down the loo will soon be concrete? That’s what they do with poo: they build skyscrapers and country piles.

Thames Water is a private English water company that is now threatened with nationalisation, after being privatised in the 1980s. They were sold off, earned handsome dividends for shareholders for 40 years, seemingly underinvested, so that 25 per cent of their water was lost through mains breakages, and now overflow 17,000 litres of untreated sewage into London’s River Thames each day. Some of the Oxford and Cambridge University rowers, who compete annually in skulls on the river, went down with e-coli infections after this year’s race. There are parts of the world where people don’t die from boat racing in such pollution, but from having to drink it.

So, go fetch the water every now and then, and have your very own Cast Away moment. Realise how inconvenient it is to have to step outside in order to flush a toilet. And think how inconvenient it would be if the water poured no more: if the butt stopped.

Belgium has been battered of late with northern winds, rain storms and four degrees in the early mornings. The buds have budded, and the blossom has blossomed, but the warm envelope of the sun’s caress has been scant to date in 2024. Still, summer surely is on its way from the south, where, in the fourth month of the year, it is already baking the Sahel.

The Sahel is a band of sub-Saharan countries that stretch across the midriff of Africa, from Senegal, to Mali, to Burkina Faso, to Niger, Chad and the Sudans. Mainly Islamic in composition, how remiss the colonisers were to fail in their Christian indoctrinations, and how ungrateful of these erstwhile pearls of empires to turn against their erstwhile colonial masters and welcome to their bosoms the new, Russian sugar daddies. The rulers of roosts are in raptures; the populace, in desperation.

This image (from The Guardian) shows the up-and-coming rural middle classes of Mali. Two oxen and a wagon, replete with harvest, this man and his boy are the new local yuppies. Who knows? They may even have electrical current at home for a few hours a week. Enough to charge their mobiles, at least. And, even if they don’t own it, the farm they work on may even have water. A few drops, as, this week, the temperatures in the western Sahel, on the Atlantic coast with its balmy breezes and this cool, pre-summer taster of warmth, soar to an incredible 45°C (or 113 in American: just call him Mr Fahrenheit). Mali last week hit 48° and more, and 102 people died in Bamako in its sweltering, human-caused, climate-change furnace. It’s not a tragedy that you caused; it’s a tragedy that we’ve all caused.

Let me repeat that: it’s mid-April, in West Africa, which benefits from prevailing westerly breezes, sweeping over Cape Verde into Senegal, and the temperature is 45 degrees Celsius or more. Brikama, at the mouth of the River Gambia, is plunged nightly into darkness, the only effulgence coming with the searing sun as dawn breaks. There is no electricity for days and weeks on end. The communal water tap that serves whole blocks of primitive houses, covered with naught but corrugated sheeting for a roof, delivers not a drop of Adam’s wine. In The Gambia, even the basic amenities are switched off, without explanation, without notice, leaving the populace to fend for itself under crushing heat and in relentless poverty.

American troops are told to leave Niger, because US military support is no longer wanted there. The very support that Mr Zelenskiy would give his eye teeth for, Niger has told to “go home”. If they have nothing to do, they should fly up to Ukraine. The West send troops to control Central Africa, to pad and pamper its plump potentates, and leave in penury its impoverished peoples.

And in cool, plush, air conditioned offices in Europe, we debate migration and wonder how we can stop it, while extinguishing our fires but keeping turning our AC systems and charging our EVs. Italy rules that ships that save those in peril on the seas are not, as it happens, flouters of policy, but saviours of souls. If they can save them, so can we.

Yet still the desperate drown in our seas, and yet still they are hated by our executives and our extremists, and yet still they come. For they have nothing to leave behind them but their desperation. One step towards Algeria already fills their hearts with hope. Not for them the play of Dick Whittington, nor for them the companion pussy cat, for in them beat hearts of lions, and they look not back, but forward. Io capitano! They come, these captains of their souls, armed only with Chinese wisdom: every journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. At that point, it matters little how the journey ends, for the dreams that generate the endeavour of that one stride are already worth its risk.

I know a family that has nothing. Not a drop of water and not an ounce of power for their refrigerator to keep fresh the little food they have. Ramadan is over now, but they will continue to fast, for they have no choice in this matter. We have choices. They have no choices, and they have no options. I need you to help them. Please.

I hope that this will be no vain plea. It is a cry for alms, I make no apology. I beseech you, find it in your heart to help, if you can.

I have an existing appeal fund set up at GoFundMe, in my own name. It’s now no longer an appeal for a business start-up, but a request for help for a family of eight who don’t have any opportunities. If you have pledged anything to me for this blog, cancel it: please, give it to the Africa fund.

If you can spare anything, anything at all, it’s already a fortune for them. And you already have my thousand thanks.

The fund’s here: https://gofund.me/dc7334ab.

Thank you for reading The Endless Chain. This post is public so feel free to share it.

A gobshite is a stupid and incompetent person. Pronounced gob-shahyt.

Realpolitik is a 19th century notion conjured by Ludwig von Rochau, which is in widespread use in today’s world. Nowadays it’s taken to mean the politics of pragmatism: achieving the possible, what is realistic, rather than attaching to high-flown, and highfalutin, moralistic goals. Realpolitik contrasts with Idealpolitik.

Rochau’s initial observation, in an endeavour to reconcile the apparent rise of power embedded in nation states and their empires in the 19th century with the liberal enlightenment that had swept across Europe in the 18th century, concluded in the oft-quoted wisdom: “to bring down the walls of Jericho, the Realpolitiker knows the simple pickaxe is more useful than the mightiest trumpet.”

The reference here is to a battle supposed to have taken place when the Israelites were conquering land in what is now the West Bank area of Palestine. It is recounted in the Bible, in the Book of Joshua, and involved the slaughter of every person and every animal in Jericho (at God’s command, mind you), except for the family of a lady of the night named Rahab, who had aided the invasion by hanging a red cord out of her window. The story is dismissed as propagandist legend by archaeologists, who have found no trace of the metropolis that was supposedly thereby conquered (seemingly using the well-known military technique of priests marching around city walls while blowing trumpets). Rochau’s view is that pickaxes would have achieved victory more quickly, but it’s hard to see how that could have been done in less than the seven days it took the trumpeting priests.

Where Rochau errs in this graphic, but facile, comparison is his assumption that trumpets will never bring down city walls. Because, according to biblical legend, they did at Jericho—it is an attested case. Our error would be to assume that pickaxes will bring down city walls at all. For that, there is not a single attested case. So, which of these is Realpolitik: pickaxes, or trumpets?

What the Book of Joshua tells us is a moral story, not an actual story of military history: by stirring up an army to do wondrous things, wondrous things can be achieved. Napoleon Bonaparte once said that the morale of a soldier is worth thrice his weaponry, and that is certainly borne out in tales such as the Battle of Hostomel Airport, which took place in the first days of the Russo-Ukrainian War. A Ukrainian National Guard unit of only 200 soldiers (most of whom had never shot a gun in their lives, and for whom the closest brush with a battlefield had been when playing video games) succeeded in repelling the initial Russian commando attack on the airfield. Shooting down combat helicopters with rifles and a simple rocket launcher instilled courage and determination in the Ukrainians, who were instrumental in saving Kyiv from being taken within the predicted 72 hours.

Twenty-five Ukrainians posted to defend a radar installation at the north end of the airport were, owing to the exposed terrain, unable to flee when outnumbered, and got taken prisoner. They were later exchanged and would report to their debriefers, in a somewhat bemused fashion, that their captors had asked them, “Why did you shoot at us?” The Russians had expected to be greeted as liberators, even though they came in with a sweep of attack aircraft. Russians generally did indeed conclude that Ukraine was to blame for the war: for firing back.

In a mood seen as echoing what all military nations do when honouring their combat dead (and with the propaganda aim of instilling respect for, and devotion to, the nation and its armies, on the part of both the Ukrainian people and foreign onlookers), Ukraine has marked significant days, such as its national day and the day of heroes, in remembrance of its fallen in the still ongoing war, to bolster morale. The conflict has been shrouded from the outset in one big question, which was posed on social media early on by an Arab student at a German university: “What is the nature of the Misunderstanding between these two neighbours?” It was he who capitalised Misunderstanding. But I wonder whether the war will be remembered as that—a misunderstanding. Is war not always the result of a fundamental breakdown of common comprehension—misunderstanding? Or do nations invade other nations because they can?

Since that fateful day in February 2022, many commentators, analysts and news folk have tried to understand. There is speculation as to how it began (NATO, insecurity, theft of assets), and as to the strategies being deployed (tank-resistant defence lines, oil refinery strikes, the Black Sea fleet) and, perhaps most importantly,  as to how it will end (victory, of course; but whose?)

In the forefront we have the Idealpolitik notions of Greater Rus, the philosophical right for Ukraine (and, by implication, Estonia, Lithuania …) to exist as a sovereign nation. These are notions of idealism, albeit hardly born of enlightened thinking. As Rochau would discover, the mistake liberals made was to assume that the law of the strong suddenly evaporated simply because it was shown to be unjust. As we have come to learn, nothing could be farther from the truth. Being strong has absolutely nothing to do with morality. But holding to a moral principle can still be an element underpinning strength, albeit of a different kind: the Realpolitiker surrenders when in defeat; the Idealpolitiker fights on to the death, not because he thinks he can win, but because he believes in the ability to win of his children.

Realpolitik is vaunted by those who resort to it as being practical and pragmatic. It sees the world as it is and deals with it in terms of what it is. Idealism, on the other hand, deals with the world in terms of what it ought to be. When idealism attains the upper hand, the Realpolitiker is dismissed as cruel and amoral. The greatest danger, however, lies in assimilating the two views in one, and that is what has happened in Palestine.

Realpolitik has decreed the extermination or elimination by whatever means of the Palestinian people, a process seen as getting nowhere fast for the past 50 years, now accelerated into an end game that nonetheless fulfils an ideal, one backed by as moral a tenet as one can muster: a place of sanctuary and safety for the Jewish people, where, at last, they can find refuge and protection from their enemies around the world. For this they exert pressure on US politics, and enforce moral imperatives against Germany, which has in the past sought to eradicate their race. Whilst the Jewish left pleads for a morally sound solution in a single state that assures the freedoms and rights of all its citizens, as only, in their view, a modern, liberal society surely can, the ultra-orthodox denounce that ideal as unrealistic, and insist on their own ideal: destruction of their fellow man in the name of their own preservation: the ideal of reclaiming the land that Joshua fought for.

What Roger Casement, Padraig Pearce, James Connolly and the other great Irish nationalists wrought for Ireland was a vision inspired by idealism, backed by an achievement that was in truth realised against all the odds, which no one, least of all Michael Collins, could have dreamt would ever be feasible; which in 1910 had only the prospect of absolute and utter failure as its sole, possible outcome: ravaged Ireland taking up arms against the great British empire.

Where Ukraine has drawn its strength from to stand up with valour and dignity against its enemy I cannot tell. I am not the only one: across the world people are baffled at the Ukrainians’ tenacity in the fray of their crisis. If they lose, then the world must do them the honour of casting them as victors all the same, just as we Brits did at Dunkirk. Victors not, to be sure, of Realpolitik, for that would have demanded capitulation on the airfield of Hostomel; but, certainly, victors of Idealpolitik, for their determination to fight to the last for an ideal grounded in self-determination as a universal aspiration. Ukrainian pacificist philosopher Vlad Beliavsky put it thus: You’ve got 40 million united Ukrainians, so what will Putin do? Will he massacre 40 million people? That’s the only way he can win this war. The only way.” That from the mouth of a pacifist. That’s quite some mettle that these Ukrainians possess.

But from where was it that the Irish drew their valour? A large part of it came from something that, outside the Emerald Isle, is rarely talked about these days: the Great Famine, the Gorta Mór. Frequently portrayed as a nation’s battle against an insect-induced harvest failure, it may have had that as its root cause but it had its effects as the result of man’s untrammelled cruelty to his fellow man. Great quantities of foodstuffs were exported from Ireland whilst the laissez-faire government in London looked away uncaringly. Absentee landlords evicted families from the far reaches of the west and south of Ireland, and in some towns two-thirds of the population perished. Over a million fled abroad, mostly to the USA. And at home a million died, and were buried in the very land that could not victual them. The period 1845-1852 was a harsh period of Irish history, made harsher by rich, self-satisfied men. The Famine was not some natural disaster against which no measure was possible. The British occupiers aggravated a crisis to, as a matter of policy, make of it—there is no other word—a Holocaust.

Top left to bottom right:

The Irish Republican Youth Movement declares unity with the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

James Connolly (Scottish trade unionist and Irish republican, 1868-1916): “The British government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland and can never have any right in Ireland.”

Roger Casement (British diplomat and Irish humanitarian activist, 1864-1916): “Ireland, that has wronged no man, that has sought no dominion over others, is treated as if she was a convicted criminal. If it be treason to fight against such a fate as this, then I am proud to be a rebel.”

Pádraig Pearce (Irish barrister and political activist, 1879-1916): “You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.”

It is the ever-present memory in Irishmen’s minds of this cruel disaster wrought upon them by a wilfully insouciant foreign occupier that is surely influencing the sympathies manifested today by Ireland with Palestine. Ireland has been before where Palestine now is—succumbed by military might, starved to death, encouraged to exit. Ireland has voiced its sympathy, and Palestine must look to Ireland as a source of support, and of morale, and, if need be, of means. It is ironic that the sole other voice in Europe backing the Irish position on Palestine at this time is Spain—a nation infamous for the cruelty it imposed itself on a worldwide empire of its own. Be that as it may, it is to Spain’s credit that it sees justice in an ideal that baulks at all notion of Realpolitik in the Holy Land. I just wonder at how this all sits in the Canaries and Catalonia. Neither we, the weak, nor they, the powerful, may ever forget: the law of the strong will not evaporate simply because it is shown to be unjust.

The resolution to the Ukrainian situation will likely come at the negotiating table and a realpolitical Ukrainian position would be to preserve life and concede principle: to lay down both trumpet and pickaxe, and seek, at least, respite in justice. Some ideal may yet be attainable, but with skill and precision.

What Ireland achieved in 1927 was remarkable. The rebels of 1916 had been executed and, eleven years later, the Free State that would preface the Republic had been wrenched from the occupiers’ hands. It was an idealistic fight by which Hamas might well be buoyed, and in which—one hopes—it might not be constrained to take up further arms. On that we may defer to their opponent: will Israel recognise restraint as weakness, as Realpolitik, or as idealism?

For now, the downtrodden will contemplate what they’ve lost, consider what’s realistic, and fix on such deals, and ideals, as may assure them ... some victory. And then they may reflect: if our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.

“How do you know the Bible tells you the truth—because we have other religions to go by?” Thus a discussion host poses a question to a believer in God. The answer comes: “Because I pray about it.” Without wanting to be dogmatic, he is right. Here’s why I think he is.

Belief is like many human emotions (if not all of them, actually—visceral). It springs from the heart. If it sprang from the head (as a rational process), there would be no such thing as belief (because we don’t physically have anything to believe in).

If I get excited at the prospect of my summer holiday, you may be pleased for me, and yet you may dismiss my choice of flying as ecologically irresponsible, or tell me that I could have got a better deal going somewhere else, or that I should choose another companion. But only I can feel the excitement of my summer holiday. Do I then allow myself to be influenced by your denigration of my holiday? Am I less excited if you challenge my vacation? And can you not feel the excitement bubbling within me? Truth is, your criticism may dismay me, or I may redouble my enthusiasm, with an attitude of “I don’t care what you think!” However, you cannot feel my excitement at my holiday. Maybe you never get excited at holidays. Maybe you just like spoiling people’s fun. Maybe you think getting excited about holidays is for little kids, and you’re a big grown-up.

In terms of visceral belief, we must distinguish between matters that are inherently provable (like the facts adduced in a court of law) and belief in a deity, which is inherently unprovable, but for the proof of which the believer adduces their own evidence (such as a vision, a dream, a set of coincidences, a sense of wonder, or a shiver down the spine). Even courts of law don’t actually determine belief in evidence: they determine only enough belief (the balance of probabilities, or beyond reasonable doubt, rules of corroboration, etc.). For the rest, with statements like “I believe the president is honest”, the evidential basis on which such so-called beliefs are based can be scant to say the least, and easily manipulated to say the most. So, what does the respondent mean when he says, “Because I pray about it”? Are we only praying that the president is honest?

Our view of our world is a view based on judgment. The allusion to courts of law is not misplaced, but law courts are the least of the institutions of judgment in our life. We ourselves are institutions of judgment. We judge value (in a food store) and we judge danger (on the road), and we judge trust (will we contract with someone, marry them?). There is as good as nothing in our physical world that we do not judge. We probably make thousands of judgments every day. Some are major ones, like a court of law makes. Some are minor, like threading a needle. We get annoyed at the judgments of others and we seek to defend ourselves against their judgments. We ask people to judge us kindly—to like us (please like this article, below).

Therefore, it’s … let’s say, attractive to know—if know we do—that there is an entity out there somewhere that we do not need to judge, and which will essentially judge us, not on what we do, however, but on what we intend to do. That is a surprising switch between our laws and our deity’s laws. Despite our analysis of law between the subjective and the objective elements of a crime, we even have laws that don’t care what you intended (like parking regulations, or even felony murder). The deity’s laws, or judgments, don’t much care what you actually do, but care what you intend to do. That’s why, in many beliefs, you can simply think to the deity that you would like forgiveness, by feeling remorse, and in your belief system, your conscience is thereby cleared. That is the whole purpose of belief; your criminal or civil liability is, of course, not affected.

Whether the deity exists, or exists in the form that the believer thinks it exists, is immaterial, and that is a major hurdle for those who challenge believers, something they cannot get their heads around. Maybe I can help.

Belief is a communion between the believer and that in which he believes. A husband can believe in his wife, even if she is poor, maladroit, ugly, coarse, uneducated. Her husband can still believe in her, because the criteria that he applies in believing in his spouse are not the criteria that those around them use in judging the lady. We say that people should look beyond the outward and see the inner quality of the person. What a believer does is to look beyond the outward manifestation of our world and think (or believe) that they perceive an inner quality. The differences are not vast, but no analogy is perfect, I know.

This is almost an application of quantum physics: if I believe the president is honest, then he is. If I later come to see that my belief was erroneous, then I will change my mind. People can change their minds, and do so all the time. So what’s wrong with that? Well, what is often wrong with that, in the physical world, is that I will be labelled as ignorant, naive, unknowing. I will be judged by those around me, for having been gullible. Even if I was right before and only now am wrong in having changed my mind. And the problem with belief springing viscerally within me or being dampened by later realisations is that I will only ever know if my belief was erroneous when I die, and non-believers want to know now, and that, unfortunately, is not in the deal when it comes to belief: it must spring from a visceral emotion of the heart, and not from a rational judgment of the head. If you don’t believe, I can’t make you believe. And nor can you make me not believe. You cannot reason belief or its absence.

What each believer sees is one of two things, however: it is something they have discovered through their own experience, or it is something that has been drilled into them by tradition and convention The moot question is whether the latter of these is even belief (any more than a court’s holding that evidence is true is a belief). In Asia, the form of what they believe there may be that of Buddhism or Hinduism and, in Europe, perhaps Christianity. These are all outward forms of religious belief. But those who penetrate the outward to recognise the inward values will frequently abandon any importance that was hitherto attached to rites and ceremonies, as being simply cultural attachments. A bit like driving a Hyundai in Korea and a Mercedes in Germany. They both work as cars, but have different forms in different parts of the world. Occasionally, a Korean will even drive a Mercedes, and a German, a Hyundai.

We know phrases like float your boat or do your own thing, and that is pretty much what belief is. The difficulties arise when one person’s conception of belief comes up against what others circumscribe as a definitive model of belief. In other words, there are those who refuse to allow an inward exploration of the deity or the substance of the individual’s belief, and attempt to constrain others to believe in the same way that they believe. This is fatuous, because belief springs from the heart. You cannot persuade another person to believe, still less induce them into believing as you do. You can force them into saying they believe, as with torture, but you cannot make them actually believe. This is an argument that non-believers often get tied up in: they cite all the harm that organised religion and fundamentalists and fanatics do, and therefore say that, because no god could condone such acts, there is therefore no God. That is a bit like saying that because some witnesses lie in court, you cannot ever trust a witness in court. Mendacity is not endemic to all judicial witnesses; and duress and manipulation are not endemic to all believers. But they are traits that can be detected in some of them, just as lying is a trait of which some judicial witnesses are guilty.

I usually sum this up as follows: God is not for everyone. He is for every one. Every one of us will conceive of our belief, or its absence, in a way that suits us, and this freedom, the absolute liberty of belief, is something that our modern world can have difficulty in appreciating, because that mode of thinking removes belief from the realm of what we like to think of as judgment, which is some people making an assessment of the conduct of other people. On the other hand, God’s judgment is where we actually make an assessment of our own intentions; not our acts, but our intentions. Not judged by others, or by God, but by us. Some people feel uncomfortable with that—that judgment should be left to us ourselves. They want to judge others, instead. They want, not to believe in God, but to be God.

However, it is precisely an absence of judgment that marks out the relationship to a deity. We often perceive deities as holders of power, and then we proceed to define power in terms that we think we understand it to be: like great empires, or missiles or guns—the ability to force others to our will. But that is not God’s power. God’s power lies instead in love, which is a nebulous concept that fundamentally comes down to the opposite of what we constantly do on Earth: judging. Love is power to force ourselves to our own will.

Love is not outpourings of kind words or acts, love is not roses and chocolates, love is not physical reproduction of the race, giving to charity or anything like that, though these can all be outward manifestations of an inward feeling we identify as love. Love is simply not judging others and, in the Christian tradition at least, it is phrased thus: “love as you would be loved” (N.B. there is not even a command to love: it’s really up to you—float your boat). The phrase means “desist from judging others in the same manner as you don’t want to be judged by them”. And that is a notion that comes from the idea that judgment comes not from others but from God. And if we obey the commandment to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, then, combining these two simple tenets, we don’t ever need to enact another statute anywhere on the world and can simply close our law courts. Now, if that’s not a powerful law, tell me what is. A law not enforced by authority, but by us ourselves. And that is why the discussion participant was right to say that his belief is right because he prays. It is his religion, and his alone. His prayer is his communing with his deity. His love, his own enforcement of his own love.

I am convinced that belief, because it springs from the heart, is something that does not need to be taught or reasoned, nor studied, nor read. It can spring spontaneously without the believer ever having heard of God. It simply springs from the ability to live without judging others. It’s like being awarded a college degree without even having matriculated at the institution. Or being given an OBE, if you like, or a military medal. God will love you even if you don’t know Him, provided you love others as you love yourself. It’s not much of a test; and it involves very little judgment. Of others.

How this love is arrived at will differ for each and every individual. There are not eight great religions in the world, not even eight hundred: there are eight billion religions. And, just as all roads lead to Rome, all religions lead to the same place, regardless of what you call them, how you dress them up, how you love. It really is all you need.

A killing spree. Madness. Crazy. Makes no sense. Unfathomable. The judgments we hear day in, day out, about acts that seem to fit such descriptions. Time and again, in order to comprehend someone’s acts, whether in politics or in the movies or in our employment relations, we’re told to follow the money, to the point that one can almost conclude that all our problems would be solved, if only we could wean ourselves off money. If we could do that, those who commit such apparently unfathomable acts would not pursue money, and therefore such acts would never be committed. This nonetheless poses a difficulty: why is it that follow the money should be the fast track key to determining the cause for someone’s action, and yet so many actions are precisely dismissed as a killing spree, madness, crazy, making no sense or unfathomable? Either it’s not money that needs to be followed to determine motive after all; or we’re simply no good at following it.

In the film Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, we discover in the final reel that Norman Bates (who murders Marion Crane, Milton Arbogast, Bates’s own mother plus two other women) suffers from an alternate (or split) personality disorder. Although the film and the book that inspired it differ to a large extent, they both arrive at this conclusion, one that the audience will have had running through their minds as they watched: Norman Bates is crazy. What is telling is that the money Marion steals is dumped by Bates along with her car and her body in the morass: Bates doesn’t kill Marion for the money, and so we’re unable to follow the money in order to figure out why he kills her.

The money is, nevertheless, the reason why private dick Arbogast even turns up at the motel, and is the reason why Lila (Marion’s sister) and Sam (Lila’s boyfriend) even engage Arbogast’s services. It is the money and the fear of being caught that even urge Marion to buy a new car, for cash, while making her escape. A great deal of sympathy is generated around the victim of this crime (even though she’s guilty of grand larceny, don’t forget) and we all think we know why it is committed, even though the one murder in which we actually see the assailant (which is not Marion’s, but Arbogast’s, on the stairs) is not, or at least does not appear to be, committed by Bates. All we actually see of Marion’s murder in the shower is her face and other shots of her body, not the murderer.

In the final reel, then, the psychiatrist (in the book it is Sam who tells Lila, but Hitchcock didn’t find that convincing enough to persuade us) tells us that Norman is mad (to use the lay term). And we, as his audience, conclude that that is correct. Partly because of the psychiatrist’s authority as a doctor in explaining it to us in the clinical coldness of the prison; partly because of how we’ve seen Bates’s indignant reaction to Marion’s suggestion that his mother should be put into a home; but probably most of all because Bates sinks the money along with the car when he disposes of Marion’s dead body in the morass. In effect, we know that the money Marion steals gets put in the swamp, and therefore concur in the judgment that Bates is indeed crazy.

Image: theatre poster for the 1960 film Psycho. Oddly, the starring lead is squeezed in on the left and the (scantily clad) supporting actress dominates. The half-naked hunk at the foot of the poster is John Gavin, who plays Sam Loomis, a supporting supporting actor if ever there was. Public domain.

Hence, or so we conclude, there are two things, and two things only, that motivate people to act: money and madness. If it’s our own money that’s concerned, then that will generally be the preferred conclusion: they’re after my money (that is, unless we place a higher value on something else, like a third party’s affection, love or friendship). If it’s someone else’s money that’s concerned, and we are otherwise dispassionate observers, we will, by contrast, more readily acquiesce in an authoritative assessment that they’re crazy, virtually without further enquiry (Jack the Ripper, Vladimir Putin, Napoleon’s megalomania, Freddie from Friday 13th, and so on).

The title of the book, and of its film adaptation, is Psycho. That’s an abbreviation that is often expanded to mean psychopath. But what if it were expanded to mean psychology, and then not the psychology of Norman Bates, but of us, the audience? Are we duped into believing that Norman Bates is a murderer? First, by Robert Bloch, who wrote the book, and then by Alfred Hitchcock, who filmed the story (but not as it’s told in the book, in order, yet again, to distort our understanding of what’s going on)? Features of the book not found in the film are the lurid pornography that Bates reads and the fact Marion is not just stabbed in the shower, but decapitated. Norman Bates is a fictional character who can be turned and twisted into being a callous murderer, a poor troubled individual, or an utterly innocent man depending, not on him, but on who is telling his story.

Six months have passed since 7 October, and six months ought to be enough time to figure out why Hamas did it and why Israel reacted the way it did. That said, it’s been 2,000 years since Jesus did away with the Ten Commandments and instituted His own two, and people still debate why that was. Why turning the other cheek or going the extra mile replaced an eye for an eye. Perhaps it’s that bit more difficult to fathom God, who moves in mysterious ways, than it is to impute rationale to our fellow humans. But then again, there’s no money to follow with God, so He poses that bit more of a difficulty in trying to understand Him. No fear, every question you ever wanted to ask of God will one day be answered, of that you can be assured. The question that remains is whether every question you ever wanted to ask of Hamas or the Israeli state will likewise one day be answered. Of that there is a tad less assurance.

The theories that fly around concerning Hamas are that it doesn’t care a fig about civilians and knew full well that its folk would be decimated. It sees its mission as a higher calling than keeping little boys and girls in school and providing them with water, power and food. Or that Hamas sees the world pass Palestine by without a second thought for decades, and wanted to get the word Palestine back into the world’s consciousness. That’s what Black September had done with the plane hijackings and the Munich Olympics. When the British hostages were released from the three planes that landed at Dawson’s Field in the Jordanian desert near Az Zarqa on 12 September 1970 in return for the release by Britain of Leila Khaled, the bemused passengers didn’t even know what or where Palestine was. The PFLP then promptly blew up their aircraft before the eyes of the world’s press. The Brits, if no one else, wouldn’t so easily forget where Palestine is again. The action on and since 7 October has had a similar effect. It remains a moot question, though: is everyone talking about Palestine because of what the Israelis have done, or because of what Hamas did?

While it seems clear that Israel has been controlling the narrative by targeting journalists and communications and, inexplicably, aid workers, and simultaneously holing its own moral high ground below the waterline (as mixed a metaphor as is appropriate in the circumstances), the endeavours to destroy the whole breadth of Palestine and its people still leave the echo of a question mark in my mind.

Yes, having driven out the Egyptians in the 1967 war and then having pulled out of Gaza again, only to make it a prison camp, after 1973’s Yom Kippur War, one can understand the desirability of regaining Gaza, and even of eradicating the Palestinian presence in the West Bank; but at the cost of so many civilian lives? At the cost of Israel’s international reputation and standing? At the cost of their democratic credentials? At the cost of calling in a whole panoply of favours, from the UK, from the US and, perhaps even from Jordan, its erstwhile archenemy? What is it that Gaza possesses that is worth so much misery and so many favours from Israel’s international partners? Zionist principle? A distorted view of Lebensraum? A show of might for Israel’s Arab neighbours to tremble at (if mighty it is, without foreign help to repel an Iranian bombardment). Or is it simply land? Perhaps it is none of these. Not even land, but something less substantial than that: water.

Palestine is recognised as a state by 140 other states of the world. It has been recognised by the United Nations, with observer status, since it was declared in 1988 and it is thought it will soon be recognised by Ireland and Spain, whereas most other EU countries along with the UK and the US do not recognise Palestine diplomatically. Of course there is a question as to what state one recognises by recognising Palestine, since its borders are not fixed as such. But countries all across the world are involved in border disputes, and that doesn’t stop them being recognised diplomatically.

That said, one Palestinian border in particular seems consistently to be overlooked, and that is its 41-kilometre maritime border. It will not have escaped anyone’s notice of late that the Gaza Strip has a lengthy coastline to the Mediterranean Sea. Jared Kushner remarked upon it, as being an ideal location for grand hotels. Mr Kushner is, to say the least, tactless in his observation. But, I suspect that he is also disingenuous. For the Gaza Strip is less propitious as a luxury resort to rival Dubai, and far more as a gas terminal to rival Jebel Ali.

The Gaza Strip’s two hundred-nautical mile limit (or exclusive economic zone) extends for a width of 41 kilometres into the Med over and beyond the territorial waters set out under the exclusive sovereign zone (three nautical miles) and the 12 nautical miles of sovereign waters accorded under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. These provisions of international law would appear to determine ownership of the exclusive maritime area that is claimed by Palestine, except that Palestine is not a sovereign state, nor is Israel a signatory to the UN Convention. In many respects, Israel, who so wanted UN membership and was granted it, only to baulk at its obligations thereanent, blocks UN membership by Palestine, which would only too gladly assume its UN obligations. Yet Israel is more than a dog in this manger: it’s also eating the hay.

In short, the Israeli occupation of Gaza prevents Palestine from exploiting what Yasser Arafat described as a gift from God when the gas reserves were discovered in the 1990s but, even with Israeli gas exploration licences granted to a number of consortia, both Israeli and international, over gas fields including Gaza’s, ownership of the gas is nevertheless in some question (none of which stops Israel from drilling it).

Gaza’s gas could power all of Palestine and leave a surplus for sale on the world market. And that is why Israel wants it. Forget Zionism. Follow the money. To deny Palestinians a means of independence and a pathway to prosperity. To stymie Palestinian self-determination. To deny Palestinians a raison d’être in the Levant at all. To claim for themselves something that belongs to another. To steal Gaza’s gas. It’s the classic rationale for colonisation: natural resources. If gas is money, and if we follow the money, are we not better enlightened as to why Israel is pursuing its current Palestine policy?

Germany has stated clearly that unstinting support for Israel is its Staatsräson, its vocation as a state. I’m gay, and gays were exterminated during the Nazi regime. Why does Germany not have a Staatsräson that encompasses supporting me? Or a Staatsräson that encompasses supporting Roma? Or a Staatsräson that encompasses supporting Herero and Nama peoples of Africa? A Staatsräson that encompasses supporting Ukrainian nationalists, whose bodies were piled into the ravine at Babi Yar? A Staatsräson that encompasses supporting communists, political opponents of Nazism? What about all those Staatsräsons? Surely not because it—grammatically—can only have one?

Atoning for one sin is laudable. But that does not atone for all sin. Even if you make it your Räson d’être. Whilst I would never want to exact an eye for an eye against Germany for its shameful past, the irony is, I think I do know what Germany’s Staatsräson is; and it isn’t defending the weak. I’m not even sure it’s doing what it knows is right. But, whatever it is, it’s no madness, no matter how mad you might think it is.

It’s stunning news, isn’t it? The Milky Way’s biggest stellar black hole. And, wouldn’t you know it, it was there the whole time, just 2,000 light years away. It’s called BH3 and I suppose that “BH” means ... black hole. Because it’s black; and a hole. Celestial bodies get named after numbers, letters, Greek gods, famous scientists, famous politicians, famous anythings, because there are quite a lot of them and they’re all up there. I bet there’s some comet named after Buddy Holly. BH. Bloody hell.

The Guardian newspaper has published a picture of BH3. Well, not so much a picture of it (how do you show a picture of a black hole?) but an artist’s impression. It’s what an artist thinks it looks like. Or might look like. I wonder: how would an artist know any better than anyone else what something 2,000 light years away looks like that they can’t just point a camera at and take a photograph of? Would it not make more sense to just get AI to make it up? At least AI would have a more comprehensive knowledge of what black holes looked like in the past, to be able to conjure up an image of this-here BH3. AI. Artist’s impression. Hmph. I suppose it is AI, after all.

Image: apologies to The Guardian.

If we (and, by “we”, I mean the amassed wisdom of cosmology from pole to pole of our ancient world) never knew that BH3 was there previously, then what is the benefit of having discovered it now, virtually next-door neighbour as it is? There are people who moved into a house two doors down from mine a year ago and I’ve never met them. They never moseyed up to my house to say, “Hello, we’re your new neighbours,” and I never turned up at theirs with home-baked muffins wrapped in gingham to welcome them to my very own Wisteria Lane. I have heard them occasionally operating what sounded like a sawmill at the back—all bloody day long—but, aside from that, our contact has been as close as that to BH3.

I think it’s disingenuous of the Iranians to be mad at Jordan for shooting down their Shaheds, having launched them across Jordan’s territory. It would be a bit like my new neighbour two doors down playing tennis with Gerda, who works at the chippie, two doors up, and getting mad at me for attempting an intercept as the ball whizzed over my bit of ground. Especially when it’s pretty obvious the Iranians didn’t really intend for any of them to do any harm anyway, given all the hullabaloo they were shouting about for days before the attack. If you ask me, Israel kicked Iran on the shin right and proper, and Iran, both mad and … hopping, retaliated by slapping Israel on the face with its glove. Take that, you cur!

I don’t think that that’ll be quits, though. Israel has a track record of rising early to wipe out its enemies as they sleep in their beds (7.30 am on a sunny September day was the attack on Egypt; by tea time, Moshe was already mopping up). If Israel had given Egypt half as much warning in 1967 as Iran gave Israel in 2024, I think Nasser might have got a few more of his MiGs in the air. But a pre-emptive strike will always catch someone with their pants down. Nobody had their pants down on Saturday. Iran barely scratched Israel: more a question of honour than anything else. And yet some in their war cabinet are baying for revenge. Revenge for the loss of ancient Judaea, revenge for al-Karamah, revenge for Black September, revenge for Yom Kippur, revenge for the oil embargo, revenge for Sadat, revenge for Begin, revenge for Beirut and revenge for Arafat, revenge for the intifada, revenge for the stone throwing, revenge for Oslo, revenge against Rabin, revenge for the street war; revenge for a slap in the face with a suede glove. What do I care about their revenge? What do I care about why they’re so het up about being bombed? When they come and bomb me and I can do something about it, then, I’ll care.

So, what do I care? I was once robbed, burgled, they took 400 euros and a camera. The police actually came when I called them—bloody hell!—and that was that. I think I got an insurance settlement. I bought an alarm that cost 2,500 euros and fitted window locks that cost another 2,000. I cared about the burglary, and it cost me 5,000 euros in security measures. My own little iron dome, David’s slingshot. Do I want the thief’s blood? I wouldn’t weep if he fell off a cliff. But, if the b*****d comes back, I’ll kick his head to a f*****g pulp.

And an officious police officer will clasp my wrists in handcuffs and lead me away for overreacting and being uncivilised and unworthy of living in genteel society. I’ll be branded “one of them”, the uncontrollable, vicious, rabid scum: wanting nothing but revenge.

So what is it that makes us care? The more we care, the less there is we can do about what we care. I don’t care a fig about BH3. And I really wonder if anyone else does either. Yes, science cares about it, because science is a career that depends on discovering wow things and drawing make-believe pictures to convince us of the significance of what they find out in outer space, but aside from meteorites hurtling towards Earth at a thousand kilometres a minute, what do we care what’s up there 2,000 light years away?

What we care about is our sense of justice. There is much that we can’t do anything about, not even our governments can do anything about them. But what governments and big business and our bosses and our fathers and the police can all do something about that we can’t, is justice. Not lawfulness, because laws are notoriously fickle. But what we know in our deepest insides is right and wrong. That is a place that is not two doors down from where you are, and it is certainly not 2,000 light years distant out in the sky. But it may as well be. It’s within 12 inches of where you’re reading this, the answer is. The answer to the question: what do I care?

Some records are best not broken. Turkish Airlines flight 981 broke one by becoming the deadliest air crash to date, the date being Sunday, 3 March 1974. I can remember it, and it shocked me. It shocked the world. Paris Match asked whether the day had come to say “no” to jumbo jets. Their by-line is Le poids des mots, le choque des photos—the weight of the words, the shock of the pictures: they actually showed French firemen gruesomely collecting body parts. But, no, there would be no “no” to jumbos.

Image: two weeks after the crash, Paris Match asked “Is it necessary to eschew giant aircraft? They said, ‘A jumbo jet crashing with 450 people on board will be dreadful’.”

Ermenonville would subsequently be beaten by Tenerife, by 9/11, and by a couple of other crashes in the 80s and 90s, but what marks this disaster out from the others is the question of where the fault lay. No air crash had less pilot error contributing to it than the Turkish DC-10.

Tenerife was due to a mix of terrorism, air traffic control, weather, and pilot rest-time legislation; 9/11 was deliberate (even if controversy reigns over precisely whose deliberate act it was); the Charkhi Dadri collision was a mix-up of pilots and ATC; JAL 123 was attributed to a faulty repair; but Ermenonville was due to a faulty build: the aircraft was designed wrong.

There are nowadays no DC-10s still flying in public service, but they were a great advance in technology when they appeared in 1970 and entered service a year later, recognisable to the travelling public with their characteristic tail engine (similar to the contemporaneous Lockheed 1011, or Tristar), but never lovingly embraced by travellers, given the events of 50 years ago. They could carry as many passengers as a 747 Jumbo, but could land on a shorter runway, making them that bit more versatile. Planes have crashed with hundreds of people aboard, from which every last one of them has walked away, or in which very few have perished. The survival rate from the Habsheim air show disaster was astonishing: the three dead were a disabled boy unable to move, a small girl and a woman who bravely re-entered the wreckage to save them. The Saudi aircraft fire killed over 300 as the plane sat for half an hour being consumed by an interior fire on the runway after a successful landing in Riyadh. There is no inevitability to a plane crash. But some of them are unavoidable.

The DC-10’s doors opened inward, which was a great safety feature since the pressurisation inside the cabin pushed the doors against the frame, thus sealing the doorway completely. However, in order to maximise storage space in the cargo hold beneath the main passenger cabin, those particular doors opened outward. Without going into details, the closure mechanism for the cargo doors was inadequate: they could be forced shut without actually engaging the locks, but far enough to extinguish the cockpit warning “CARGO DOOR OPEN”.

The aircraft’s manufacturer knew of the problem. A forward cargo door had blown open when testing the DC-10 in a wind tunnel, causing massive decompression and a floor collapse in the cabin. And, in 1972, one year after entering service, an American Airlines DC-10 had suffered exactly the same problem as would occur to the Turkish airliner in 1974.

One of the problems with the ship Titanic was the shortage of lifeboats. There were not enough for all of the people on the ship. This was not perceived as a design fault (in fact Titanic had six lifeboats more than it required to have). The reason behind that was that previous incidents involving high-capacity passenger ships had shown that there was a good likelihood of the stricken vessel staying afloat for up to three days, which would be ample time in which to ferry the passengers off to rescue vessels. Hence the relatively small number of boats. No one bargained on a ship that size that would stay afloat for only two hours. “It’s made of iron, Rose—it will sink!”

American flight 96 had resulted in no fatalities, and what that fact instilled in the minds of the management at McDonnell-Douglas was a lack of urgency: moreover, they successfully communicated this to the Federal Aviation Authority in Washington, D.C. On flight 96, the rear cargo door of the DC-10 had flown open, having been inadequately closed, decompressing the cargo space and causing a loss of control to the tail no. 2 engine and the surrounding steering mechanisms. However, the crew successfully landed the aircraft with no loss of life. The skill of the pilots in that incident caused McDonnell-Douglas to assume an attitude of complacency as to the seriousness of the problem: the constructor was able to persuade its friends at the FAA not to issue an airworthiness directive, which would have grounded the entire type and caused huge embarrassment to the maker.

Instead, McDonnell-Douglas undertook to issue service bulletins to cover all the items mentioned in the incident’s final report. They downgraded the gravity of the situation. There were three bulletins:

* windows to be inserted into the cargo door so ground crew could verify from the outside that the door was properly locked;

* supports to be incorporated to prevent the connecting bar between two parts of the locking mechanism from bending under pressure, thus permitting a false “locked” signal;

* relief vents to be incorporated so that any decompression of the cargo hold would also decompress the passenger cabin (triggering oxygen masks if it happened over 10,000 feet) and thus avoid deformation of the separating floor between the upper and lower parts of the aircraft.

On flight 96, the floor had indeed been sucked down when the cargo area decompressed, but that aircraft’s layout included a cocktail bar arrangement at the rear of the aircraft cabin, which thus contained no actual passenger seating. The aircraft was carrying very few passengers that day and, despite being seriously hindered, the pilots still achieved a safe landing and evacuation.

McDonnell Douglas then went one further. After downgrading the severity of the issue, they then lied about putting it right.

With a flight crew totalling 11 and 167 pax, the 1974 Turkish flight had started in Istanbul and had a stop-over at Paris Orly. Fifty passengers left the flight there, but a huge number joined it, 216, because industrial action had cancelled connections on BEA and Air France up to London. People would be glad they were at last getting home, some having travelled to watch an international rugby game in Paris on the Saturday, since the new working week would be starting the next day—a day that would never come for them.

The flight was packed, and there was no rear bar area in this aircraft’s configuration. When the same door as had blown out in the AA96 incident blew out on THY981 at 12,000 feet over the town of Ermenonville, six passengers were immediately sucked out, still strapped to their seats. They would later be found in a field along with half of the cargo door. Because the mechanisms for the no. 2 engine and tail controls all ran through the space between the upper passenger cabin and lower cargo hold, the decompression severed them and the rudder was wrenched so as to propel the aircraft into a left bank. All control of the aircraft was immediately lost and, after continuing on a four-degree glide slope for around 15 kilometres, it struck tree tops in the Forest of Ermenonville, impacting at nearly 800 kilometres per hour. The aircraft immediately splintered into tens of thousands of pieces. So brutal was the sheer force of the impact that no fire broke out, the fuel being instantaneously atomised to nothing. Of the 346 souls on board, none survived.

McDonnell-Douglas had issued three service bulletins, which it expressly (and erroneously) confirmed had all been implemented on the aircraft in question. It wasn’t true: only one had in fact been carried out. They used their influence with the FAA to secure their financial health, and they lied on the airworthiness paperwork for the airplane in question. The only measure that had been implemented was insertion of the window into the door, and the ground crew operative who had closed the door on that day spoke only French. He had not been trained on the closure procedure, so he had not understood what he was supposed to see through this window that had been installed. The notice appended to the fuselage explaining the importance of ensuring the door’s closure was written in English and Turkish. His Turkish Airlines colleague was off duty that day.

In terms of corporate mentality, Ermenonville bears a similarity to the Ford Pinto and GM truck scandals. The cargo door had already failed in trials and on American Airways flight 96. It took the loss of 346 lives to finally put it right: to lock the door.

When Paris Match posed that question back in the March of 1974, “Is it time to say no to jumbos?” they reflected the fears fliers then had of tumbling from the skies. But with the climate emergency that is now upon us, the question I want to ask today, 50 years on from THY981, is whether it isn’t time to say no to jets altogether.

The great benefit of the jet aircraft is its ability to fly fast, quiet and high in the sky, thus aiding efficiency. Up at angels 3-1, the air is rare, breathing is hard, and travel is sleek. Many disasters and near misses have resulted from aircraft systems designed to do nothing more than allow travel at such altitudes, but that have nonetheless, for whatever reason, failed. Prop planes don’t need pressurisation, but, then again, they can’t carry the volumes of traffic that today’s aircraft carry.

Aircraft cockpits are festooned with lights, panels, bells, gongs, horns, warning displays to alert those in control of an imminent danger. Conscientious pilots, like my father back in the day, are trained for every eventuality, to take swift, remedial action, to fly their aircraft despite all injury and against all adversity, to protect the lives that have been entrusted to their care and, when all else fails, to preserve lives of third parties who stand in the path of their stricken flying machines. It is their duty and their codex: to heed the warnings and take all evasive action that is within their human power.

So why is there not a similar response to climate warnings?

3 March 1974. Forêt d’Ermenonville, France.

Curtis Reeves and John Walters are both killers. Curtis shot a man dead at point-blank range in a cinema in Florida, and John shot a man dead on the forecourt of a petrol station in San Antonio, Texas.

Curtis was tried on a charge of second-degree murder, and acquitted. John was never charged. Never arrested. He pulled out a gun in sight of a security camera, shot a man dead on a petrol station forecourt, and then got into his car and drove away. Shortly afterwards he called the police to tell them. I reckon he realised he’d left a cadaver at the petrol station and someone might have seen his registration number.

Neither Curtis Reeves nor John Walters was guilty of a crime, however. Because the laws of Florida and Texas say they didn’t commit any crime. Because both men alleged that they were frightened of the man they shot.

Chad Oulson, who was killed at the cinema, got into an altercation with Curtis Reeves, who had demanded that Oulson turn off his mobile phone whilst the previews were being shown. Chad ended up chucking popcorn at Mr Curtis. Mr Curtis pulled out his gun and killed Mr Oulson on the spot. He had never been so frightened in all his life. Mr Curtis is a retired SWAT commander and police captain.

William Hawkins, who was killed at the petrol station, was homeless and approached Mr Walters at the petrol pumps. Maybe to ask for small change. It happens a lot to me as well, people asking for small change. Hawkins was unarmed, but Walters killed him. Didn’t even pump any gas, such a hurry he was in to leave the petrol station.

The laws that justify Mr Reeves’s and Mr Walters’s acts are called stand-your-ground laws. Back in 2007, when these laws started to be enacted, it was felt that the duty of citizens to remove themselves from confrontational situations as enshrined in the Castle Doctrine of law (playing on the notion that an Englishman’s home is his castle) heaped an undue burden on law-abiding citizens, especially if they were in a place where they had every right to be (such as their home, or, indeed a cinema or a petrol station). The law reversed the burden of avoidance, from the perceived victim of aggression having to remove themselves from the situation, to their being justified in killing the person aggressing them (thus neutralising the confrontation by removing the aggressor, rather than themselves).

There is no test of reasonableness in the stand-your-ground legislation. The killer does not need to prove their fright. Fear is a sentiment that cannot be measured. For example, anyone who says they were scared to death clearly wasn’t: otherwise they would be dead and unable to say it. But how scared they in fact were is a purely subjective question. If you drag a small child into the deep end of a swimming bath, it is quite conceivable that he might develop a blind panic, such as I once did, for which I was later ridiculed at school. Yet, we poo-poo people who climb on chairs when they see a spider or a mouse, even though the fear could be just as great.

The Scottish court case of Donoghue v. Stevenson [1932] AC 562 established liability for causing fright to someone who is reasonably within the field of contemplation as being affected by one’s acts. The case involved two ladies in a café in Paisley, one of whom bought a bottle of ginger beer for the other, who was Mrs Donoghue. Mrs Donoghue did not drink the ginger beer as such, but it was poured over ice cream as a float, and when the remainder of the bottle was poured into a separate glass a dead snail was discovered in the beverage. Mrs Donoghue had not in fact bought the ginger beer, so she had no contractual relationship either to the Wellmeadow Café or to the manufacturer of the ginger beer, D. Stevenson. We know nothing about what kind of a shock the lady treating Mrs Donoghue to her refreshment received from this event, but we know from the court reports that Mrs Donoghue herself received a shock and felt ill. The case is a landmark case in the law of tort (or delict, as it is called in Scotland) and is cited daily in cases across the common-law world. Mrs Donoghue said she felt ill and that entitled her to damages. Eventually, the House of Lords agreed. She did not require to prove her queasiness other than to say she had felt queasy.

In the criminal sphere, Scotland knows the doctrine of the thin skull rule, which provides that, if I touch the skull of someone else in such a manner as cannot reasonably be foreseen to cause harm, but, because the person in question has a thin skull, he dies from my touching it, then I am criminally guilty of the harm caused. It is no defence to say, “I didn’t realise he had a thin skull.”

I doubt very much whether this Scottish jurisprudence per se played any role in the enactment of Florida’s or Texas’s laws, or the laws of any of the other 36 US states that now have such statutes. But its pervading sentiments were, whether by coincidence or design, present in the lawmakers’ minds: whether I am afeared of you is a matter for my own, sole judgment. If I say that I am, then I am. And that alone gives me the right to stand my ground and kill you. Shoot you dead on the spot. And, what’s more, to then get into my car and drive away.

Image: screen grab from Al Jazeera, in which Mr Walters is supposedly seen walking around the dead Mr Hawkins to get into his car before driving off.

Now, I find that a somewhat astounding proposition, but John Walters and Curtis Reeves don’t. What is striking is that, in the vast majority of the 700 deaths whereby no criminal conviction of the known, named perpetrator has ensued in cases in which self-defence has been pleaded in terms of these stand-your ground statutes, the killers were white and the dead aggressors black.

And, because there is a widespread narrative that blacks are dangerous, and they also happen to represent a disproportionate number of homeless and destitute persons, and the homeless and destitute are well known for approaching strangers to ask for alms, what these laws appear to sanction is the ridding from society of homeless and destitute blacks other than through police or official action. It is as though the statutes contain a subtext: if the general public feel threatened by the mere presence of another person of an undesirable allure, no action will be taken against them if they secure said undesirable’s removal from our presence.

Now, I don’t know who all owns guns in the US and, to be sure, nor does the US. There is no central register of gun ownership in that country, whereby it bears an astonishing likeness to a similarly unregulated country: the Russian Federation. However, I do know for a fact that there are some people, some blacks even, who do own guns.

Forgive me extrapolating here, but let me just suppose: if there comes to be a general acceptance that approaching someone (to ask the time, or how to get to Alberson’s) could be deemed a threat to the person being asked, thus resulting in their pulling out a gun and shooting the enquirer on the spot, all in terms of a right generally known to have been invested in the populace at large, by dint of its having been set down in legislation expressly permitting such a course of action, then would the enquirer themselves not be entitled to shoot the person of whom they requested such information before even asking for the information?

This, on the grounds that asking the way could incite such irrational and unjustified fear in the person being asked that there is a cogent danger of that person shooting the enquirer and so the enquirer is reasonable in preempting that danger by simply killing the guy before asking him the question, or, at the very least, immobilising him to such a degree as to obtain the requested information before finally finishing him off with a slug to the temple.

And this, on the ground that giving the information might just have put the guy in such fear that he then reached into his pocket to get his gun out and shoot the thereby informed enquirer. I was frightened that asking you what time it is would frighten you so much that you might shoot me, so therefore I was justified in shooting you first. As self-defence.

If there is no test of reasonableness attached to the qualification of fright, it makes approaching another person in states that have these laws a tricky business. You step up to the teller in a bank, and they simply shoot you out of fear that you’re a bank robber. You run into a shop to get a pound of butter, and the assistant shoots you, because he’s taken aback by your haste. You arrange a viewing of a house that’s for sale, and the estate agent shoots you as you come up the driveway saying, “Good after-.”

That all may sound a little ridiculous, and I’m not sure what part is played in any of this by a constitutional need to ensure a well-disciplined militia, but, in all events, I don’t think pre-emptive shootings or engineered shootings have yet come up for discussion, let alone been put to the test. They sound outlandish. And yet, does the stand-your-ground law itself not sound outlandish?

I simply asked him what the time was and, all of a sudden, he reached inside his breast pocket.

- He was going to look at his mobile phone to tell you the time, I think.

I couldn’t know that! I was more frightened than I’ve ever been in my life! So I slugged him.

- Just like the cops do!

Yeah … hey! That’s right! Just like the cops do!

I’ll warrant you one thing: when to the test it is finally put, it’ll be the white guy who asked what time it is.

We used to have wars to trim the population, and now fentanyl is doing it for them. And homelessness is doing it for them. Caused by poverty, which is doing it for them. Boat people drowned and dead in the Med. Carpet-bombing to erase Gaza. Bullets in the brain in Ukraine. Maybe.

My father’s old 1930s encyclopaedia contains the following illustration and attendant description.

There’s a common misconception that the caesarean operation for giving birth is named after Caesar, but this is incorrect. In fact, it is because the man himself was born thus that he was named Caesar, which means “cut”. The Book of Knowledge’s description could also give rise to misconceptions: Caesar’s Gaul was not the France of today, but Cisalpine Gaul (Gaul means the others), and the River Rubicon is still there, just north-west of the bathing resort of Rimini (Ariminum on the map, below, taken from http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/history_shepherd_1911.html—public domain).

Gaul. Means that lot, over there. Them.

If Caesar had failed in his endeavour, we’d never have coined the phrase to cross the Rubicon and there’d have been no czars, shahs or kaisers. It’s only a tiny little river for a man to cross, but it was a giant torrent for mankind.

I think Mr Netanyahu will be serious. About wiping out the Palestinians. Once he’s flattened Rafah, he’ll turn on the West Bank and kill everyone there (who he doesn’t want there).

He’s not listening to anyone, not in Brussels, not in Washington, not at the Red Cross, not at the United Nations, not at the World Health Organization. What would he do if he stopped now? Declare a holiday and put his feet up? Call back his troops and dish out some medals and tell the remaining Palestinians they can have their ramshackle strip back? Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead for wanting rapprochement. Benjamin Netanyahu would likely be in greater danger if he stopped his barrage than if he saw it through to the apocalyptic end. When there’s a knife against your throat, it can affect your assessment of what an apocalypse is.

When he fails to heed even the strongest admonitions that Mr Biden is able to muster, it’s not because he doesn’t want to. It’s because he doesn’t need to and he needs not to. They say that the AIPAC has a great deal of influence over American politicians. I wonder whether there are similar bodies that exercise the same influence and persuasion over democratically elected decision-makers in other countries.

Anyhow, Mr Netanyahu is not counting on any form of democracy to keep him in the position where he can do what he wants to do. He wants to procure living room for Jewish Israelis and, if that means wiping out the entire body of Muslim Israelis, then—I’m fairly sure— so be it. A British parliamentary candidate was chastised by his party for suggesting that the lapse of Israeli security on 7 October was engineered. I don’t know if it was engineered or not, but the callousness and disregard for human life that the victim of that attack has since then manifested would certainly allow of the conclusion that it at least is worth investigating, that it stands to reason, even if it’s a conspiracy theory (which can be taken as meaning that, if it does in fact exist, the evidence is still well hidden). But it doesn’t matter in the end whether it is or it isn’t true. Because whether the Palestinians have suffered and died in an act of justifiable retribution, an act of defence, or out of out-and-out badness, suffered and died is what they have done. The reason for the acts doesn’t change their result. It simply changes the putative state of the perpetrators’ consciences. How bitter the irony: Lebensraum achieved through annihilation and mass expulsion. Through bullets, disease, and starvation. And not a German in sight.

Democracy was a nice-to-have as long as Netanyahu needed to keep the people of Israel sweet. But he doesn’t need to do that now, and he certainly doesn’t need to toe the line as laid down by any supranational body like the United Nations—that much Israel has known since its modern foundation. He knows that it is a fundamental tenet binding every democracy: that it does not use force to achieve regime change in another democracy (except, that is, within the realm of the Monroe Doctrine). Israel is democratic, and its regime will never be changed involuntarily from outside; and, now, nor will it voluntarily change from inside. The reason why so many foreign politicians have been hesitant to call for a ceasefire is not that they don’t want a ceasefire, but because they know their calls will be ignored, and that makes them look powerless, which is worse than looking as if you support an uncompromising son of a gun. The hangers-on of bullies achieve surrogate bully status just for standing there with their thumbs hanging from their holsters.

It’s quite a sight when the public acts of a democratic regime make one realise how undemocratic it was the whole time. But, undemocratic democracy is the new dictatorship. Just like throwing a football match, the new generations have lost sight of the honour and calls for freedom that inspired the statesmen and generals of old. Yes, there was lucre and gain to be had, but the worst excesses still knew the bounds of that old, hackneyed expression it just isn’t done. Now, the game is played differently: it’s played smart. A smart footballer is one who misses the kick in return for a bundle of used fivers. If it works in football, it works anywhere. The word statesman is now redundant.

Mr Netanyahu is not counting one iota on having to win an election to stay in power. That much, if nothing else, he has in common with Herr Hitler.

to be committed to a course or undertaking from which there can be no withdrawal ... fortunately for him, he was successful

Galling.