Leaves caution behind

I have in the last few days had an exchange of thoughts, impressions and views on the Gaza crisis with a Jewish friend in the UK. We’ve not actually seen each other in the flesh for over five years, so have taken special pains to avoid Read the rest of this entry »

War is horrible: Bodies outside the Hamas police headquarters in Gaza City, following an Israeli air strike on 27 December.

Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, who has written in the Guardian of the effects of Israel’s policies and attacks on Gaza.

“I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line.”

“Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.”

“In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion’s share of the scarce water resources.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I dreamt of someone I knew at school. He has not entered my conscious mind in nearly twenty years, probably because before that I didn’t like him very much. In the dream he offered me a bite of a roast potato, while my car was burgled. Hmm. But the potato, the car and the burglary are not the point of this excursus (thanks for that word, Nadia; perhaps blogs should rather be called excursions).

Joseph Paton’s Study for the quarrel of Oberon and Titania.
Pic: Wikimedia Commons

For on waking I remembered how very different people seemed to me as a child. When I was six, in a school in Johannesburg, bathed in the (then) comfortingly bright light of fluorescent tubes as the deep gloom of thunderstorms battered around us, as beans grew behind blotting paper in glass jars and potatoes surrendered to the hands of early Gutenbergs, the forms of people around me shifted immensely. If children of 11 or 12 entered the classroom, there seemed to my eyes to be very little difference between them and the teacher. All were huge, infinitely wise and worldly, inhabiting a remote domain I could only dream of entering. Of my peers, who to adult eyes would have seemed then almost uniformly innocent, some were saints and some literally almost as threatening as trolls; and indeed, some would waylay me on the road home.

It seems possible then, given these huge variations in perception, that the realm of fairy tales is perhaps not so much one originally conjured by those who wished to spin tales for the entertainment of the young, but a function of the medieval tribal mind boggled by encounters with merchants and nobles; encounters which for many, isolated by geography, must have been far, far more occasional than we imagine. And if I, as a medieval peasant remote even from the feudal system, somehow entered the world of these “elves and fairies”, and for a few years lived a vastly different and more prosperous life away from my people, then on my return to those left behind, they would indeed have been aged by grueling lives, while I in turn would feel comparatively untouched by time.

We do not know how dark are the depths from which we have sometimes clambered. (I say sometimes, for I do not believe the minds of all pre-feudal peasants were dark; while many of us remain in the dark.) These fixed forms, our bodies, are more instantly mutable than we imagine; they shift and change in the minds of others. The shape of the world we see is far more a function of our minds than we imagine. The gloomy insistence of science that there is an objective, “standard” reality to which we should shape our perceptions and conform, is rather totalitarian. Sure it’s helpful, when we’re conducting open-heart surgery, or casually obliterating children and their mind-cloud-blossoms of light and thought with high-tech weaponry, but it’s totalitarian.

Reality is a language we speak to each other.

(Or shout at each other. Or broadcast with stadium-scale speakers. So blogging, the willingness, most often, to speak only to the few – or none – is many times an advance.)

[There are a number of retrospective postings on this blog.]

How do you fix elections in a first-world country? Quite openly, it seems, because you know that the desperate (and inaccurate) collective fantasy that “we’re the world’s leading democracy” will end up outweighing the facts.

Al Gore for president. But will they let him win? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reading some letters my great-great grandfather (mother’s father’s mother’s father), Alexander Millar, wrote from Clapham Common in London to his grandson Brian Kelly (my grandfather), when Brian was just four or five, and living on a farm near Harrismith, in the Free State, South Africa. The letters are mostly typed but in caps so that young Brian, who’d obviously not yet learned small letters, could read them. Alexander makes more than one reference to suffragettes.

May 3, 1913

My dear Brian

I wish you had been here yesterday. I took Hilda and Nora to Hampton Court. It is a great big palace where the king of England used to live long ago. Now it is full of pictures, and people are allowed to walk through and see them but yesterday it was closed for fear a lot of wicked women called suffragettes who go about burning houses should set fire to it.

It’s not clear how Alexander felt about the suffragette’s cause, but it’s quite clear he abhorred their tactics. He was not, however, a complete social conservative.

May 9, 1912

(To Brian’s elder brother, Patrick)

All the men who work in the mines to get coal to burn in the fires have left off working and if they don’t soon begin again there will be no coal for the fires or anything. I hope they will begin again soon, for if they don’t perhaps the steamers will have to stop running for want of coal, and then we could not send you any letters. But I don’t think it will come to that. The miners want more money for their work, and they have such a hard life, working in dark holes under-ground I think they ought to be well paid.

I went to see a lot of pictures the other day painted by grown-up men and some of them were not as well done as yours and Brian’s. A lot of ladies who ought to know better have been going about London breaking windows with hammers. They have been put in prison for it and now they won’t eat any food and hope they will be let out lest they should starve to death. So things are going on very queerly.

Alexander wrote letters every week to his grandchildren. Whatever his politics were, his love for his family was obviously great.