Tag Archives: history

SUING FOR WAR

Posted on by
6

The sight of a parliament, normally embroiled in savage personal attacks, speaking as one and showing a remarkable unity of purpose, ought to be one that should cheer our hearts and restore our faith in politicians.  Strangely it has the opposite effect. When sworn enemies suddenly become friends and join in a common cause it is often more worrying and seldom for the good. I cannot ignore the deep suspicion of this temporary marriage of convenience and I wonder who is the common foe. It reminds me of the second Psalm where the Kings of the earth gather together in their futile and laughable attempt to plot against God.  In Westminster there was the unity at the start of the first and second wars in Iraq and there was the unity over Covid. History has shown where these have led.

So I took no comfort from the concocted harmony on display in the palace of Westminster this week, when the Prime Minister gave his report on the momentous events of the past days. I didn’t feel proud to be British then. What was on open display was a commitment to support with cash and lives (boots on the ground is a nice way of talking about real people who will be wearing these boots) the continuation of a war that has been going on for three years and shows no sign of stopping. I wanted to hear from the Peace Movement from Stop the War Coalition from the Anti-Nuclear campaigners, but in Westminster there was silence. And here is one of the biggest conundrums: our money, our taxes are paying for the terrible weapons that maim and kill thousands every week on our doorstep and we seem to be ok with that. This is not theoretical. This is not about weapons of mass destruction that have killed no-one for the past 80 years, this is about weapons manufactured in our land, today, that are being sent to blow up young men and women in a land not that far away from us and our politicians seem to be all for it.

It is hard to get your head round that one.

They are united in their condemnation of the one person, the one world leader who is screaming for peace. He is desperate to bring the terrible carnage to an end. He is using the massive power and influence of his office and his own skill in making deals for that purpose and our pathetic little parliament doesn’t like it. They want this war to go on, when it as plain as day that it cannot be won, unless, of course, it finally triggers the third world war when these weapons held in their silos for 80 years will finally be unleashed.

So now as I’m leavin’
I’m weary as Hell
The confusion I’m feelin’
Ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And they fall to the floor
That if God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war

IT’S NOT DARK YET BUT I’TS GETTING THERE

Posted on by
Reply

I fully identified and completely understood King Charles, some weeks ago, when he was confronted with the pitiful pile of children’s shoes, on Holocaust Day, and said it was something he would never forget. I had visited the holocaust gallery at the British War Museum and the Yad Vashem remembrance centre in Jerusalem, but it was being in Auschwitz, Oświęcim in 2012 that did it for me. I saw the railway carriage, the mountain of shoes and false teeth, the bullet ridden wall, I stood in the chamber with the ovens when the young Polish guide asked us to be silent out of respect for those who were incinerated there and I stood at the end of the rail line, when she told us to be careful where we stood, because the ground was covered with the powdered bones and dust of the million souls murdered in this place. It was April, but there was no sign of Spring. The trees were dark and bare and there was no bird song to lighten the awful silence. The bottom dropped out of my stomach and I realised then, in a way I had never understood before, that there was no end to evil. Given a free reign, evil in the human heart descends further and further into an abyss of total darkness. It was like looking over a pit and knowing there was no bottom. Any faith I had in humanity could never be recovered. I too would never forget.

All these memorials are helpful but we really don’t need reminders. We saw it, just this week, on full display to all the world, the abomination of naked evil. The choreographed parade, the giant displays, the stage, the mock signing of documents, the celebrating crowd, the cameras and in the centre the bodies of the murdered family, the mother, the nine year old son and the four year old child lying on the platform locked in black coffins. All was black and grey even the sun couldn’t bear to look at the scene and hid it’s face. The sky was embarrassed. This too I will never forget.

The holocaust, however, was then. This is now. That was our “never again”. This is the now reality of evil. There can be no rational, political or sociological explanation for the utter depravity on view. And its roots are in the oldest of hatreds morphed, as Jonathan Sachs lucidly explained, from hatred against the religion through hatred against the race to hatred against the nation and it comes from the very pit of hell.

The main-line news has to sanitise their reports, of course. It has to fit the narrative and so every effort must be made to soften the impact and whiten what is, in reality, irredeemably black. They don’t show you the crowds of men, women and children, some in their father’s arms, shouting cheering and singing over the bodies of the murdered children and later dancing on the stage as if it was their graves. This is a new level of wickedness. The Nazis’ tried to hide their crimes, here they are openly celebrated. And this is what is truly sickening.  When, what looks like, ordinary folk with families of their own, taking part, joyfully it seems, in such a macabre spectacle, any sense of humanity goes down the drain. And I wonder if those who protest on our streets every Saturday actually know who they are supporting.

Terrible as it may sound, I have no faith in humanity. If I had, I lost it and nothing could restore it now. But I do have faith in the one who created humanity, who became humanity, who lived perfect humanity and by his sacrifice made it possible for us unhuman: murderers, liars, cheats, mockers idolators, adulterers, abusers, thieves, slanderers, swindlers, or just decent folks to be made truly human, in him.

This is what history looks like

Posted on by
2

It was something Douglas Murray said. He of the “The Strange Death of Europe” and “The Madness of crowds” and one of the few people who seem to have a handle on where we are.  It was in the course of an interview, when he was describing a story from Tolstoy’s “The death of Ivan Ilych” when the judge thought he was dying and remembered being on a train, convinced it was going one way, when it was always going the other way. “How on earth could something like this happen”, he was thinking, followed by the realisation that it was happening.  It seemed to sum up the way Murray wasfeeling about our present crisis. There was no end and no limit to the absurdity, the irony and the crazy happenings. The thought that “This can’t be happening. This is not what happens” quickly followed by a second thought “Yes this is what happens, this is history, this is what history looks like.” 

It was also something that David Starkey said about history. We think history changes gradually and morphs smoothly into different phases. He said it didn’t. Things slowly build up and then explode. History pivots on one small event. A bullet takes the life of a Duke and the World is catapulted into a war when million are slain. A plane flies into a tower and hundreds of thousands die in a land far away. A cartoon is published in a newspaper and gunmen are on the rampage. A mobile phone video is released and statues are thrown into the sea. History it seemed, turns on a pin and in the case of the current crisis, in a matter of a few days, over a weekend, when the nightmare of lockdown was birthed.

We have seen the build-up, for a long time now. This was best explained for me in the two most incisive studies that I have read on the subject: “Dominion” by Tom Holland which showed how we have what we have and “The strange death of Europe” which showed how we are throwing it all away. The dismantling of marriage and the dismembering of the family, the relativity of truth, the fluidity of reality, the replacing the real with the material, the worship of the gods of health and wellbeing instead of the one true God. David Robertson in “The wee flea” has at the same time consistently shown that by destroying the root we eventually destroy the fruit. In one of his more recent and devastatingly pertinent posts (https://theweeflea.com/2020/06/09/a-free-peoples-suicide-the-end-of-law-and-order-in-the-west/) he suggests that law and order itself is on the point of collapse.   

So with each day as the news become more and more bizarre, it is genuinely quite hard to believe if it is all true, if this is actually happening. Whether it is the sudden obsession with statues, the police kneeling before protestors, the laws clamping down on individual’s liberties but winking at thousands on the march. the insanity of social distancing in schools, or the prime minister mumbling about bubbles. And I was recalling a conversation with one of my siblings recently, when we were wondering about the world and the seismic changes that have taken place in recent years. Could our parents have possibly imagined that this was at all possible? No, they simply would not have believed it.  Truth be told, I would not have believed it either. I would have thought “this is not what happens” but now I realise, when I recognise the sound outside my window, the sound of our world crumbling, I realise “Yes, this is what happens”. This, it turns out, is what history looks like.

And I imagine a history class in a future era where the pupils are studying “The rise and fall of Western Civilisation”. The reasons for the fall were clearly documented and now very obvious but the curious thing is what actually tipped it over the edge. It was a tiny invisible organism that travelled from the East.

Crawford Mackenzie