The Sad, Mad World we Live in

Do you know the feeling, that feeling of anger and disgust at the amount of fucked-up stupidity, evil and hopelessness in the world?

Today a couple of (almost certainly) Islamicist fanatic terrorists attacked the offices of the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo, killing twelve people. There is video coverage online of two gunmen shooting a policeman down in the street and then finishing the execution with a headshot, even as the man on the ground raises a hand, possibly in a last plea for mercy. It’s horrific in its brutality so I’m not going to post a link to the video itself here. The photo shows enough.

Charlie Hebdo is not a particularly pleasant newspaper; but that’s not what its makers want it to be. It is relentlessly satirical, regards nothing as sacred, and is prepared to lampoon anyone and anything in the news, be they pope, prophet or president, moron, mullah, or messiah. That’s their job as they see it. And it’s their right in a free, pluralistic, secular society. If you don’t like what they publish you don’t have to buy it or read it. If you feel personally damaged by something they publish you can sue them. That’s the way a civilized society works, particularly a civil society which sees freedom of expression and the press as a basic value.

One result of this barbaric event will certainly be calls from the populist (partly proto-fascist) right in France (led, no doubt, by Marine Le Pen and the Front National) and worldwide for clampdowns on Islam, and Islamic foreigners, and foreigners generally; migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. The usual cacophony of ignorance, fear- and hate-mongering. Indeed, this may have been one of the perverted, calculated aims of the mad, evil bastards who planned and carried out the attack.

Here in Germany in the past number of weeks we’ve been treated to the dubious spectacle of thousands of ignoramuses marching every Monday night in the streets of Dresden under the banner of a strange organisation calling itself PEGIDA [Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West]. According to the Saxon Interior Ministry in 2010 0.1% (around 4,000) of the population of Saxony (of which Dresden is the capital) describe themselves as Muslims [Source: Spiegel Online]. Biiiiig threat. Last Monday night, as a sign of some hope for sanity in my adopted home-country, thousands of people marched in Cologne, just a few miles down the road from me, in favour of tolerance and an open society. Cologne has 120,000 Muslims out of a population of around a million. For those who can’t do the math, that’s 12%. Around a hundred times higher than in Saxony.  

Personally, I’m not a great fan of Islam. But then, I’m not a great fan of evangelical Protestantism, traditionalist Catholicism, neo-liberal free-market capitalism, or Justin Biber either. This nevertheless doesn’t mean that I would ever contemplate or tolerate any calls for or moves to forbid people their right to believe whatever they want to and to freely profess and express those beliefs, however idiotic I may consider them to be. This freedom is one of the constituting principles of a humane civil society. It goes further; even people who profess beliefs abhorrent to these constituting principles – like, I am forced to conclude, quite a number of those marching in Dresden – have a guaranteed right to do so, as long as they don’t resort to violence, or incitement to violence, against others. That’s what a humane civil society has to be able to tolerate and, I have no doubt, any healthy civil society is well able to withstand the irritation caused by such misguided fools.

Of course, that does imply that those of us (the vast majority, I like to think) who value these basic principles of humane civility sometimes have to speak out for them and defend them.

A journalist friend just told me the story of an initial interview she did this afternoon. It was with a young man who’s been in Germany for four years now. He was born in one of those war-torn countries we frequently hear of in the news but his family fled terror and conflict when he was a child, finishing up in Iran. He spent seventeen years there and managed to obtain a degree in computer-programming before realising that, as a stateless person with no official identity-papers, he had no future in the mullah-dominated Islamic Republic. His mother sold the last of her jewels to provide the necessary money and he (alone of his family) made a long, dangerous, illegal journey, culminating in a frightening boat-trip across the Aegean from Turkey to Greece before finally ending up here in Germany four years ago.

In Germany he has the status of a tolerated (but not recognised) asylum seeker. He still has no legal papers, so that his “official” status, such as it is, can be described as stateless. Inquiries at the embassy of his native country have resulted in no practical prospects of ever getting a passport. He is given enough to live on – barely – in Germany. He is not allowed to work, although he has good training in a field where his skills are demanded everywhere. His freedom of movement here in the country is extremely uncertain, since he has no official papers. Without them he cannot open a bank account or make a contract for telephone and internet access with a telecommunications provider. He spends his life in fear of police controls, of suddenly being thrown out of the country. He has little hope for the future and has been suffering – increasingly – from depression.

No wonder.

This is one of those people the fools in Dresden seem to be protesting about. This is one of those people who will be regarded with increased suspicion and even hatred as a result of the brutality of the terrorists in Paris today.

This is someone who only wants to live an ordinary life, someone with the skills and potential to offer a positive contribution to any society which would welcome him.

The way our world is so screwed up, it doesn’t look like he’ll be welcomed anywhere.

That humane civil society I was defending earlier in this essay still has a long way to go.

Picture source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/charlie-hebdo-french-satirical-magazine-paris-office-attack-leaves-casualties/  

Ukraine: Conflicting Narratives

“Narrative” has become one of those buzz-words or buzz-concepts which one cannot avoid nowadays. At its most basic, it simply means “story”; in the more precise cultural context in which it is generally used, it is a story told or shared within a group as an instrument to define a common reality, or at least perception of reality (whether in fact there is any difference between these two is a more complex philosophical question I have no intention of going into here). The following is an attempt to analyse the current situation in and around the Ukraine with the help of this concept.

The Conventional Wisdom Narrative

This is the one that that is prevalent in the West – in the US and (maybe somewhat less stridently) Europe. The Ukraine is a democratic post-Soviet country where the majority of the population wants more distance from an aggressive, powerful neighbour, which used to be its imperial master, and therefore wants to orientate itself more towards the West. In this, the Ukrainians are simply following the course already taken by other former parts of the Soviet Empire in the past twenty five years. All the former Warsaw pact countries, as well as the three Baltic republics, are now members of both the EU and NATO. They have been able to take advantage of the freedom they (re)gained following the collapse of the USSR at the beginning of the nineties to reposition themselves as part of the “free” world, developing and deepening their democratic, economic, political and social structures to integrate themselves into the new European model which has brought such prosperity, stability, and democratic standards to those countries which have embraced it since WWII.

All the majority of Ukrainians want is to follow the same course. But Russia won’t let them. It has been consistently trying to destabilise (with varying degrees of success and failure) every attempt the Ukraine has made in the past twenty years to position itself in the western camp. Putin sees the Ukraine as an essential part of the Russian sphere of influence and is not prepared to accept, under any circumstances, a reorientation of the Ukraine towards the Western block.

During the chaos following the fall of the pro-Russian Yanukovych government at the beginning of this year, Putin judged the situation favourable for more direct action and, basically, annexed the Crimea. Though the West condemned this, there seems to have been a fair deal of international understanding for this move. The majority in the Crimea is pro-Russian, Russian-speaking and ethnic Russian. The Crimea is of major strategic importance for Russia – particularly with regard to naval emplacement in the Black Sea – and there had been special status agreements regarding Russian military interests there ever since Ukrainian independence.

Encouraged by the Crimean experience (which, he judges, he had basically got away with), Putin has now decided to repeat this process for the whole of the Eastern Ukraine, where there is much stronger (possibly even majority) support among the population for a pro-Russian course. As a result, he has been covertly – and increasingly overtly – supporting separatists in this area, who have declared the independence of the region from the Ukraine. This support has included weapons and weapons-systems, (almost certainly) military advisors, and (probably) troops. This is the kind of stuff that’s difficult to control tightly. On July 17 a group of separatists almost certainly used a military-grade anti-aircraft system to shoot down a Malaysia Airline jet, killing 298 innocent people, probably because they thought it was a Ukrainian Air Force fighter. Put bluntly, they fucked up, probably because they weren’t sufficiently trained, weren’t patched into the intelligence air-traffic control systems which would have told them that the plane they were aiming at was a civilian one, and/or were possibly even drunk.

This put Putin in the position of the sorcerer’s apprentice; he never wanted this. Damage control swung into place, the Buk anti-aircraft battery used to shoot down the plane was swiftly disappeared back into Russia, jubilant posts on the web were quickly deleted (though not quickly enough), and a whole plethora of smoke-screening diplomatic, media, and PR-spin measures have been put into place.

Following the conventional wisdom narrative, my take on Putin’s tactics is this: The Crimea is essential to Russian interests, he wanted it, he got it, and he’s going to keep it. I also feel that the West (and even the Ukraine) has generally been prepared to accept this. As far as the Eastern Ukraine is concerned, my suspicion is that, while he might like to have it, he’s not set on it. Keeping some low-level conflict going there, stirring the pot, keeping the general chaos level up, is probably sufficient for him. It keeps the whole Ukraine unstable, blocks any real movement to cement the country into the Western alliance and means the levels of tension with the West won’t rise above a controllable volume. The US and EU will scream and complain and will do some little PR-spin economic sanctions (which will hurt Russia a bit, but they’re worth it from his point of view). The situation remains fluid, so he still has some freedom to act and react, depending on the way the situation develops. The downing of Flight MH17 disturbs this strategy, it ups the ante for him to a level which is uncomfortable. So I would expect the Russian position in the wake of this murderous disaster in the next weeks and months to be a mixture of obfuscation, half-assed cooperation, talking things up, playing things down, introducing red herrings and pink elephants; generally muddying the waters and judiciously stirring the shit until things simmer down.

Of course, all of this is set within the Conventional Wisdom Narrative. It’s even all true. But it’s only one narrative.

The Russian Counter-Narrative

There was a Cold War and Russia (in its Soviet iteration) lost. The whole of the Eastern European buffer-zone (aka Warsaw pact) and the Baltic Republics, which the Soviet Union occupied to protect the Rodina [the “Motherland”, a Russian expression of identity, almost mystical in its cultural and nationalist meaning], are now all firmly part of the Western sphere of influence. Russia has historically suffered on an almost unimaginable scale as a result of aggressive invasion from the West. Tens of millions of Russians have been killed and huge destruction has been wrought on them, from Napoleon to Hitler. The basic Western attitude to Russia historically has been to regard them as sub-human, Asiatic barbarians, who don’t really belong in what Gorbachev (in his boundless naïveté) called the “Common European House”.

The West simply cannot be trusted. Its leaders speak in fulsome tones about values such as freedom, democracy, and self-determination and then aggressively proceed, under cover of these phrases, to follow their deeper instinct to keep Russia weak, perhaps even destroy it completely.

In the negotiations about German reunification, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the West made solemn promises to the Soviets.  "The Americans promised that Nato wouldn't move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted." (Michael Gorbachev, 2008).

But the losses following the end of the Cold War go far deeper. Not only were the strategically necessary Soviet conquests in Eastern Europe gone, the losses were even greater. From Peter the Great onwards, Russia had followed a consistent path to push Christian civilization and values eastwards, in the Caucasus, Central Asia and further. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Siberia were all conquered, settled and civilized by the Tsarist Empire. What the United States had seen and realised as Manifest Destiny to the west, Russia had done eastwards. Only (unlike the US), this had never been accepted by the rest of the residents of the Common European House. Russia was not seen as expanding European values eastwards, rather as building up a dangerous barbarian Asian-infested imperium to threaten the real Europe from the East. All these 18^th and 19^th Century Russian conquests, with the exception of Siberia, are now lost. The scale of the secession of all these former Soviet Republics from Russian hegemony has only one modern historical parallel; the attempted secession of the Confederate States of America from the Union in 1861 (and we all know what that led to).

And that’s not all. The original heartland of Russia is not just Moscow-based Russia, but rather, from the very beginning, a kind of federation of three closely-related proto-nations; Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine. The origin of later Muscovy and subsequent Russia, is, historically, Kievan Rus’ (9^th Century). In an exercise of (from the Russian point of view) desperate damage limitation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belarus could ultimately be stabilised under the firmly pro-Russian dictatorship of Lukashenko (1994). Despite continuous Russian attempts, a similar stabilisation of the Ukraine within the Russian orbit has not been possible.

From a Russian point of view, the role of the West in all this has been deeply suspect. At best, the West has been cheering on all the centrifugal tendencies within the former Soviet/Russian Unity from the side-lines. There is a widespread – indeed almost general – perception among Russians that the West has actually been actively encouraging and fomenting every possible movement towards fragmentation, when and wherever they occur. This is not simply paranoia; the involvement of a plethora of Western groups (with clear pro-Western agendas) within the former Soviet hegemony, and particularly the Ukraine, is generally accepted and well documented. To this has to be added the enthusiastic involvement of all sorts of Western business (and state-supported) interests in the massive garage-sale/robbery of practically all the national resources of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the chaos of the Yeltsin years, which led to a transformation from a state-owned to an oligarchy-owned economy in less than a decade, the consequences of which Russia is still attempting to deal with – or just live with.

This is the background to the Putin era and is essential to any understanding of where Russians are today. It explains a lot about how Putin understands himself and the goals he sets for the country he rules. It explains why Russians tend to perceive anything coming from the West (apart from consumer goods which you can buy and own) with the deepest suspicion and cynicism. It also explains Putin’s enduring popularity with the great majority of Russians. Faced with a collective psyche deeply traumatised by what his people experience as defeat, humiliation, and betrayal by the West, he’s giving them back their dignity; a sense of strength. And worth. Balm for a badly wounded soul.

Is it then any surprise that ordinary Russians are willing to believe the spin/propaganda put out by the overwhelmingly state-controlled media in their country since the current Ukrainian crisis gathered momentum? That they accept the official line that the present regime in Kiev is fascist? That dark, abstruse conspiracy theories about sinister US-agency involvement in the downing of flight MH17 are given widespread credence?

Such narratives of cultural identification are immensely powerful. For those who identify with them they supply a coherent world-view, they provide a conceptual framework which allows both  individuals and groups to define themselves and relate to the chaotic, complex wider world in which they find themselves. We all have our narratives, for the simplest and most fundamental of all is the individual personal biography, merging into family narratives, the stories which express the experiences of particular communities, moving into all sorts of larger-scale instruments of group identity such as religions and nations. They bind stories of the past, value systems and questions of the present, shared vocabularies, dialects and languages, common ways of seeing the world and interpreting individual and shared experiences to provide those contextual structures of meaning which we all need at a basic level to define our very identity.

 Narratives are also wonderfully and necessarily flexible. They are not monolithic. We all identify with and buy into multiple narratives, which – and this is centrally important – need not be consistent with each other. So, to give just one example, there are many people who manage to combine a particular fundamentalist Christian world-view with a scientific one, so that they can simultaneously work, say, as molecular biologists while denying evolution.

This particular example also offers a good illustration of how important and powerful narratives can seem to be completely resistant to what others, who do not subscribe to them, regard as self-evident “facts”. No matter how much “evidence” you bring, you will not be able to bring a creationist, whose world-view is based on a particular religious narrative which is a central element in that person’s self-identification, to abandon his position in favour of an understanding of the world based on evolutionary processes going back for billions of years. And such considerations also help to explain just how difficult it would be to persuade the majority of Russians that their perception of the “realities” of the current Ukrainian conflict, and particularly the destruction of MH17, is “wrong”.

The Realpolitik Narrative

This is the starting point and context for those who regard themselves as illusionless realists. They are adherents of a narrative encapsulated by such expressions as, “Politics is the art of the possible” (Bismarck), “France has no friends, only interests” (de Gaulle, paraphrasing Lord Palmerston on England), or “Those who have visions should go to the doctor” (Helmut Schmidt). It tells the story of a world where the ultimate reality is a social-Darwinist one, going all the way back to Thucydides’ famous description of the Athenian position in the History of the Peloponnesian War, “the strong do as they can and the weak suffer as they must”.

Certainly this narrative is one of those which inspires Vladimir Putin. Following its premises, the most likely future scenario looks much better for the Russian position than the Ukrainian one. For all the platitudes being spouted in the EU about the primacy of international law, its members will do nothing serious to change the current status quo, one in which Russia has grabbed the Crimea and may even possibly go on to occupy additional territory in the Eastern Ukraine, or at least control it by proxy through a Russian-supported separatist regime.

There are already some indications of this. Despite economic sanctions being talked-up at the moment, France is still going ahead with the delivery of Mistral amphibious assault ships to the Russian navy. But the real test of principles against interests will develop in the coming months, particularly if Russia maintains its current aggressive position. At the moment, the EU imports around a third of its natural gas and oil from Russia. Germany’s dependence is even greater (36% of natural gas and 39% of oil). Expanding sanctions to cover this area – something that would genuinely hurt Russia – would mean the EU would have to put its money where its mouth is. Higher prices at filling stations would certainly be one result. Literally hundreds of millions of EU citizens heat their homes and power their workplaces with natural gas, a significant amount of which is imported directly by pipelines from Russia. (Just to make the situation even more complicated, the most important pipeline runs through the Ukraine.) Would anyone like to bet what would happen to Angela Merkel’s currently high popularity ratings in Germany if home heating prices rise sharply this winter or (worst-case scenario) the situation so deteriorates that no gas flows from Russia, the winter is particularly long and cold, the gas reserves are used up, and rationing has to be introduced? And this doesn’t even address the question of what consequences real economic sanctions on Russia (and Russia’s reactions to these) would have on a world economy still in a state of precarious, fragile recovery from the disaster of the Crash of 2008.

Are the leaders of the western democracies, compelled as they are to win elections at regular intervals, prepared to gamble their popularity and positions for the sake of principles? How important are the international rights of a former Soviet republic to the citizens of the West, compared with their economic well-being and comforts? How long will the shock and indignation at the killing of a few hundred plane passengers last before our short attention spans are diverted to the next crisis or scandal, driven as we are by a continuous, ubiquitous media frenzy for the next new big story?

The Realpolitik narrative teaches that interests always trump principles, that bread and circuses are always more important to the masses, and that public opinion is always infinitely malleable. The reality of the world is that it spins, and the only thing you really have to do is to make sure that your spin works.

And, anyway, nearly all the real power in the world belongs to a tiny elite of the super-rich who use their wealth to consolidate, maintain and increase their position and privileges. This is also part of the defining reality of human existence; it has always, basically, been this way and there are no good reasons to assume that it will ever substantially be different. Revolutions and upheavals may sporadically occur, but such wobbles in the basic spin of the world correct themselves relatively quickly and everything reverts to business-as-usual.

Awareness of multiple narratives

The narratives I have outlined here are not the only ones relevant to the current crisis in and about the Ukraine; I have not, for example, delineated the Ukrainian Narrative, a central one for any complete understanding of the situation there. There is also a Polish Narrative which has some significance.  I have especially avoided the Moral Narrative (which is related to but not identical with the International Law Narrative) since the complexity of that particular story would at least double the length of an essay which already threatens to be too long.

The important point is that in every complex human situation, particularly where differences and conflicts are involved, there are multiple narratives and that these narratives can be (and usually are) simultaneously contradictory and true. A realisation of this is essential for any attempt at conflict resolution. It also moves the work of conflict resolution beyond the search for simple compromise on the level of a lowest common denominator towards a search for some kind of metanarrative which can encompass the most important elements of all the narratives involved.

Writing this as I do in the summer of 2014, my thoughts inevitably turn back a hundred years, to the summer of 1914. Anyone reading Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, a magnificent account of the beginning of World War I, cannot fail to be struck by the parallels between the aftermath of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, and the aftermath of the downing of Flight MH17. Very few people, particularly those who were responsible for making the crucial decisions, really wanted war in 1914. They all thought that they could manage a situation of brinkmanship. That the world stumbled into a cataclysmic conflict was in no small part due to the inability of the major responsible actors to realise the strength of all the other narratives which were not their own.

It is a lesson we would do well to remember.

Images retrieved from:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/07/19/article-2698106-1FCCB86300000578-472_634x423.jpg
http://escapekappertisle.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/putin-in-mother-russia-poster-2322.jpg?w=640
http://i.cbc.ca/1.2710270.1405693912!/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/16x9_620/image.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/518lVu-hASL._SY300_.jpg

   

Ireland's Abortion Legislation Mess

It is not an easy thing to say, particularly to say publicly in a forum like this for the whole world to read. But it is the way I have been feeling for the past week or so.

At the moment, I am ashamed to be Irish.

On November 14, the Irish Times published an article telling the story of Savita Halappanavar, who died in an Irish hospital on October 28. The immediate cause of death was septicaemia, more commonly known as blood poisoning, resulting from the miscarriage of a foetus in the 17^th week of pregnancy.

A tragedy. Something which commonly happened a hundred years ago, which – thankfully – seldom happens now, at least in developed countries with a generally well functioning health system.

The massive septicaemia was able to take hold because Savita spent three days in a condition of cervical dilation with amniotic fluid leaking. There is an overwhelming medical consensus that in such a situation the foetus is not viable and will inevitably die. The basic medical procedure is, therefore, to terminate the pregnancy as quickly as possible in order to avoid the kind of complication which killed Savita. As a medical professional (a dentist), Savita was well aware of this and repeatedly over the three days begged that the birth be induced so that her life could be saved – a procedure which is, technically, an abortion. According to her husband, she was told that this was not possible, because Ireland was “a Catholic country.” Savita spent three days in great pain until the foetal heartbeat finally ceased without outside assistance and the dead foetus was removed. In all probability, the septicaemia had gained such a hold during this time that it was impossible to combat.

In all probability, Savita need not have died.

Abortion has always been illegal in Ireland (well, at least since 1867). Around thirty years ago, a number of right-wing Catholics decided that this was not enough. They argued that there was a danger that the elected politicians might some day decide to change the law, that, as they saw it, the right to life of the unborn child needed to be copper-fastened in the Irish constitution. In Ireland, the constitution cannot be changed by parliament; any amendment must be approved by a popular vote. A well-orchestrated public campaign began.

I remember it well; it was extremely sophisticated and very nasty. Anyone who expressed doubts about the wisdom of such a course was immediately accused of being pro-abortion, politicians were put under pressure, questions of the wisdom of trying to constitutionally regulate such a complex area of law, morality and religious belief were swept aside. Though I was a member of the Dominican Order of the Catholic Church at the time, I remember feeling very uncomfortable about the whole thing; even leaving aside my (perhaps for a “professional” Catholic unusual) personal doubts about the moral clarity of a blanket condemnation of abortion, and my deep reluctance as a man to take a definitive position on something which I regarded as really being a women’s issue, I felt that changing the constitution was no way to deal with the subject.

I voted against the amendment. Not that it mattered – it was passed by a two-thirds majority. Four years after the pope had come to visit, the Irish people felt a need to express how Catholic they were. The fact that any Irish woman who had the courage, the necessary information (and the money) could easily travel to Britain to have an abortion was generally known, accepted, disapproved of, ignored, and conveniently forgotten. Holy Catholic Ireland had won a famous victory against the menacing forces of godless international liberal left-wing secularism.

Nine years later that victory came back to haunt the self-proclaimed “pro-lifers.” The wording of the eighth amendment had been framed to try to comprehensively express Catholic teaching in a positive formulation:

“The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.” (Irish Constitution, Article 40.3.3°)

The parents of a 14 year old girl who had been raped by a neighbour planned to take their daughter to England for an abortion (the so called X case). Their principle reason for this was because the victim had threatened suicide should she be forced to give birth to the child. Before going to England, the authorities were asked whether DNA from the aborted foetus could be used as evidence against the accused rapist. The state applied for a court injunction to prevent the girl from leaving the country, the issue quickly landed before the Supreme Court, which ruled that it was constitutionally permissible for the girl to obtain an abortion as the danger of suicide constituted a threat to her life and so was a case which fell under the category of “due regard to the equal right to life of the mother.” Ironically, the danger of the amendment actually providing a constitutional ground for abortion in certain circumstances had been pointed out by its opponents during the campaign leading up to the referendum (among others by Alan Shatter, who is now the Irish Minister for Justice), but this opinion had been dismissed by its proponents. (In the event, the girl had a miscarriage before she could travel to England, the rapist was subsequently convicted.)

Justicia, ironically, is female

In a wider context, the eighth amendment, the X case, two further attempted (and rejected) “pro-life” amendments, as well as a number of other cases taken through the courts all the way to Europe, can all be seen as part of an ongoing transition of values in Ireland, particularly with regard to the waning influence of the Catholic Church in the country. But this provides only part of the background to Savita’s tragic and scandalous death a few weeks ago.

In the course of the past twenty years, the judges in the Irish Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights have been explicitly critical of the failure of the Irish Dáil (parliament) to legislate concretely for the whole area of the termination of pregnancies, even within the extremely limited circumstances they have defined as existing according to the eighth amendment to the constitution following the X Case. The judges have pointed out that it is their job to interpret the law; it is the duty of legislators to make it, to give practical form to the consequences of the interpretations provided by the courts. For twenty years now Irish governments (containing every significant political party in the state with the exception of Sinn Fein [the radical left-wing party which has historically been the political wing of the IRA] in one coalition or another) have frequently promised action and done … nothing.

As a result, doctors, counsellors, and other care professionals have no clear legal guidelines when it comes to dealing with specific situations. It is possible that the doctors in Savita’s case were reluctant to terminate the hopeless pregnancy because they could not be sure that they might be acting illegally and thus exposing themselves to possible (however unlikely) judicial consequences. This is all the more ironic, given that that the termination of her pregnancy could even possibly be justified by a line of argument following traditional Catholic moral philosophy using the Principle of Double Effect (a line of reasoning which has always struck me as being just a little too clever; casuistry, in other words).

Whatever. Why have Irish politicians failed to legislate to regulate such cases, to provide legal certainty for all involved? There are two possible reasons, both reprehensible.

It may be that they are just indifferent. The situation of pregnant women with health or serious mental conflict issues just isn’t important enough for them.

Or, more deeply, perhaps they are simply afraid. Afraid of the negative image of them the vituperative groups calling themselves “pro-life” are capable of and expert in projecting of them. Any politician who supports any legislation to legalise abortion, even in the most limited of cases, will be open to be portrayed as “anti-life,” “murderer,” promiscuous, irreligious, anti-Catholic, even, somehow, not truly Irish. An exhibition of honesty and backbone might well be toxic at the ballot-box, especially if the well-organised and well-funded (there are reasons to believe that large sums flow from the religious right-wing in the USA) anti-abortion groups decide to run negative campaigns against them.

The horrible thing about it is that they may be right. I have a sneaking fear that large numbers of my compatriots are still deeply influenced by a self-righteous, holier-than-thou picture of themselves as “pro-lifers,” secure in a reality-denying mindset made possible by the fact that any woman who really wants an abortion can easily go to godless England and get it there. And we won’t talk about it honestly. A nasty Irish version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Maybe I am too pessimistic. Maybe the erosion of that particular narrow-minded hypocritical version of Catholicism which dominated Ireland for a large part of the past century has finally reached a stage where my countrywomen and men are finally prepared to be honest with themselves, to face up to hard truths and harder realities about their collective responsibility for the society they want to make for themselves in a world in which moral opinions about the rights and wrongs of what people do (especially in the whole complex area of relationships, sex and reproduction) are informed more by humility, tolerance, compassion and honest doubt than simplistic expressions of religiously grounded infallibility.

There are all sorts of things I could write here about the difficult question of abortion. About the women I know who have had one and have told me about it. About the agonising they went through concerning their decision, both before and after. About serious moral arguments in favour of abortion. About the dangers of black-and-white absolutist arguments and the use of horrible emotive language and images to browbeat those who may not agree with you. About the fundamental truth that women become pregnant and men can’t and that, therefore, this is one issue where women should be leading the discussions and decisions on the subject and men should be playing a subordinate role.

But precisely because this is primarily a women’s issue, I, as a man, won’t go into any of these points more deeply here. I will only hope that the Irish will become more honest with themselves, that their politicians will face up to their responsibilities and at least legislate for the very limited, specific cases of abortion allowed by the present constitution. Of course, ideally I would like to see a more general debate leading to the replacement of that misbegotten 1983 amendment to the constitution, but I honestly don’t think that’s going to happen in the near future.

But Savita’s case may just have started a ball rolling. The pressure of public opinion, both within Ireland and worldwide, will probably twist the politicians’ arms enough to make them legislate for cases like hers. Then this beautiful, vibrant woman won’t have died completely in vain.

And perhaps then, my feeling of shame at being Irish will start to fade.

This is not a great version of the song, but the Boomtown Rats' music is as inaccessible on YouTube as that of Bob Dylan - at least here in Germany. But it really did have to be this song!

Images retrieved from:

http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/poplife/files/2012/11/savita.jpeg

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Pussy Riot

On February 21 this year, a group of women, wearing brightly coloured dresses, tights, and balaclavas, rushed into the sanctuary area of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow and for around two minutes performed a protest song in front of the altar, parodying the Christian Sanctus prayer, calling the patriarch of Moscow a “bitch,” and praying to the Mother of God to deliver Russia from Vladimir Putin. The women were members of the political punk group, Pussy Riot.

In March, three alleged members of the group were arrested and – having spent the time since then in custody – were brought to trial on July 30, charged with “premeditated hooliganism performed by an organized group of people motivated by religious hatred or hostility,” the Russian criminal code legalese for what would more commonly be called blasphemy, an offence for which the accused, if found guilty, can be punished with up to seven years in a labour camp. While admitting to participation in the action, Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Ekaterina Samutsevitch have pleaded not guilty, insisting that the action was not meant to be offensive.

In terms of the usual judicial ballet, the womens’ plea and their officially stated motivation is understandable, the standard public position for the legal record. It is, of course, also patently untrue. The whole point of actions like this is to be offensive. In fact, seen from this point of view, the courageous action of these women has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. An action in the course of the election campaign which saw Putin elected as president in Russia in March, protesting against the complex manipulation which is the order of the day in Russian society, to ensure that particular tiny elites retain control of all the major areas of politics and economics, has brought the whole Putinist system into the uncomfortable glare of the global public spotlight.

Faced with structures within which the letter of the law is always scrupulously adhered to, even while its spirit is routinely trampled under foot by those who possess power, this kind of provocation is one of the few avenues of protest open to those who have the civil courage to really challenge established systems which strive to disempower and silence any significant criticism. And the Pussy Riot performance has certainly achieved results. The video of the action which they uploaded to YouTube five months ago has had over 1.5 million clicks, and a quick search of the web reveals many other versions of the same, some of them with hundreds of thousands of views. And the course of events since then has put them firmly at the centre of a worldwide publicity storm, with regular reports and op-eds in practically all the major newspapers and TV channels around the globe, from the New York Times to Al Jazeera.

Agit-art, seen as political provocation, follows the same basic rules as most other acts of public civil disobedience. As much as making your own statement, the whole thing is about getting your opponent to react in a particular way, hopefully overreacting to your initial action in such a fashion as to focus much wider attention on the issue which inspired you to act in the first place. If you do it right, if you’ve gauged your opponent properly, he’s the one who’s going to pick up the ball you placed and run with it. Of course, like any other act of public disobedience, the price you have to pay is measured in your capability to suffer. The Pussy Riot girls have got all this spectacularly right and have managed to manipulate the Russian authorities – on all sorts of levels – to multiply the effect of the initial protest. Moreover, the course of the whole affair and, in particular, almost every action taken by the powers-that-be have served to demonstrate many of serious defects in post-Soviet society about which they are protesting. Like a good judoka, following the principle of seiryoku zen'yō [精力善用, maximum efficiency, minimum effort], they use the strength, speed and momentum of their opponent to bring him to a fall.

The opponent here is clearly Vladimir Putin, but also the whole system which he controls and which supports him and keeps him in power. And there is, indeed, quite a lot to oppose.

Thirteen years ago this month, the increasingly erratic Boris Yeltsin appointed the then almost unknown Putin as Prime Minister and made it known that he regarded him as his successor. Putin became President in 2000 and served two terms until 2008. Constitutionally barred from a third consecutive term, Putin moved sideward for the next four years, serving as his successor’s, Medvedev, Prime Minister, and keeping the reigns of power firmly in his own hands. At the end of last year, Medvedev let it be known that he did not intend to stand for a second term and nominated Putin as a candidate for the presidency[i]. The plan was obvious and it was implemented; Putin would resume the presidency, another two terms would be open to him and thus he could remain the unquestioned strong-man in Russia until at least 2020 (in which year he will still be only 68 years old, still young enough to possibly pull the whole trick off again). And it’s all perfectly legal, perfectly constitutional.

And stinks to high heaven.

Giving him the benefit of some quite serious doubts, I don’t think that Putin is a sociopathic megalomaniac like Kim Jong Il, Stalin or Mao. Oh certainly, he’ll always make sure that his own ass is well covered and he can’t be described as a committed constitutional democrat. He is, above all, a pragmatist and he seems to really believe – with some justification – that he is by far the best at the very difficult job of cat-herding which is governing post-Soviet Russia. Of course, after over a decade of plenitude of power, he is definitely showing major signs of that increasing dissociation from reality which is the endemic sickness of any politician who makes his way to the top, and this is likely to get worse rather than better over the next eight years.

Putin, like all of us, is a product of his experience. He spent his young years as a KGB apparatchik during the last declining Brezhnev years and during the frothy, chaotic reform period of Gorbachev he was stationed in East Germany where he experienced at first hand the implosion of the Soviet imperial system. His rapid climb in the political system took place during the anarchy of the nineties under Yeltsin. And anarchy it was; the Soviet system had collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and no-one knew what should follow. While others were still debating it, an unprecedented wave of criminality rolled over Russia, at the end of which a few hundred men had succeeded in – basically – stealing everything worth taking from the Russian people, including all the natural resources. And being legitimised by the Yeltsin regime while doing so. These are the so-called oligarchs, men like Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky, Potanin, Malkin and Abramovich. A level further down, criminal Mafia syndicates had filled most of the niches in the post-Soviet vacuum and were operating in ways which make Tony Soprano look like an altar-boy. At the end of the millennium, Russia was characterised by crime, corruption and incompetence on all levels of society, from an unstable, increasingly incompetent, alcoholic president downwards.

When Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned the presidency at the end of 1999, Putin (who had been Prime Minister for less than five months) basically succeeded him as last man standing. He was determined to put Russia back on its feet and was, according to many yardsticks, pretty successful at it too; getting things working, dealing firmly (even brutally, as in Chechnya) with separatists, finally growing the economy. He did a basic deal with the oligarchs, leaving them a generally free hand in business as long as they kept out of politics. Those who weren’t prepared to accept this were also dealt with – today Berezovsky lives in exile in the UK and Khodorkovsky is in jail.

Well, right, you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs … and Tsar Vladimir the Competent was making a pretty big omelette. One of those eggshells which was troublesome was the whole area of a free, independent press, particularly in an era where the internet was exploding. During the Yeltsin years, the old Pravda monopoly had become a thing of the past, and in the chaotic anarchy of that time the free press bloomed. More, the Fourth Estate became the one part of society which really worked, and there were lots of people in Russia prepared to watch those in power closely, to dig around and find out what was going on, and to publish or broadcast it.

An uncomfortable group for someone trying to bring a huge chaotic country under control … under his control. All sorts of measures have been taken to bring the media under control, some legal, some semi-legal, some … remember that omelette? Journalists digging around what had been going on in Chechnya were coming up with some serious dirt, and most of them were extremely critical of Putin. Many of them have been killed, most prominently Anna Politkovskaya. While, of course, nobody will ever find any direct connections, there are whispers of Henry II’s comment about being rid of a certain turbulent priest, particularly in a society where there is a strong tradition of absolute obedience to the wishes of political bosses, irrespective of legality, and a still prevailing culture (from the Yeltsin years) of ruthless lawlessness.

And, even while the Pussy riot case is drawing ever more publicity, a new case is developing, with a Putin-critical blogger, Alexei Navalny, being bizarrely charged with stealing timber.

Though there can be no real doubt that Putin enjoys a lot of popularity in Russia, and that his majority in the last election probably reflects the wishes of the majority of Russians. But Tsar Vladimir and his henchmen didn’t get where they are – and don’t remain where they are – by leaving things to chance. So potential opponents are discredited or worse, long before they can pose a real threat, and the free press has been continually pruned back in the past decade.

All of this, but particularly the transparent power-swap deal with Medvedev, forms the background to the Pussy Riot protest in February. The reaction of the Russian authorities has simply served to prove the point the courageous young women were making.

It is absolutely clear that this is a politically motivated prosecution, and the harsh treatment the women have been subjected to since their imprisonment proves it. It is a clear attempt to break them, something confirmed by the fact that they have been offered lenient treatment if they plead guilty. But this they will not do. They are adamant that they had no blasphemous intent, though they were extremely annoyed that the patriarch of Moscow had openly called on believers to vote for Putin this was a political protest. You can read a comment from Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of the three, here. 

And all the publicity, all the pressure both from within Russia and from abroad, looks like it is finally working. The hard hand of the authorities has boomeranged and on Friday Putin himself was reported to have commented that the women should be treated “leniently.” The consensus seems to be growing at the top of the political pyramid that the overreaction of the authorities has been counterproductive and even Patriarch Kyril of Moscow has also become more moderate in his tone. Already the women of Pussy Riot have won a great deal and, if they remain true to themselves – despite the mistreatment, the fear, the uncertainty, all the cruel implements of a state judicial system – they can win even more. What they already have is the respect of hundreds of thousands world-wide. If you want to show them your support and solidarity, you can sign the Amnesty International petition here. In this case, international outrage does seem to be working. And I feel, somehow, that knowing that all these people support them will give the girls strength too.

In the West, we can regard all this with a warm feeling of moral superiority. We have a free press, we have fair and free elections, our presidents retire when their constitutional time is up …

Hmmmm – I wonder whether the difference is really so great. We have our oligarchies too, our 1%, and they seem to be able to manage society so that they remain in control, so that their fortunes can continue to grow, secure and untouched. If you have to blackmail the taxpayers of sovereign countries to guarantee your investment losses, well, that’s just too bad. And if you come from a privileged background but feel you have to make your millions by asset-stripping working companies, putting thousands out of jobs (like a certain US presidential candidate) … that’s more elegant than simply burning their factory down because their bosses have fallen behind with their protection money.

And if some are perceived to pose a real threat to those in power? Ask Julian Assange. Or Bradley Manning.

I wonder whether the only real difference between the West and Russia is that our potentates have had more time to develop real finesse when it comes to protecting their positions. In the relatively young post-Soviet Russia they’re still a little crude about such things. They like to show off their wealth, often with tasteless ostentation. Look at the oligarch, Abramovich, buying Chelsea FC, for chrissakes. It’s so … well … nouveau-rich, darling. Real money, real power has learned to be more careful. Let the masses believe they have control. The reality is different.

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[i] Medvedev has, inevitably, become President Putin’s Prime Minister – musical chairs in Moscow.

Pictures retrieved from

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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vladimir_Putin_beefcake-2.jpg

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Schland: Football and National Identity

In the course of the current European football championship, the exclamation, “Schland, o Schland!” can be heard and read frequently here in Germany – most commonly as an exclamation of joy by generally younger people on Facebook – after the German team has scored or won a game.

The word Schland was invented six years ago by the German TV comedian and personality, Stefan Raab. Raab is a difficult phenomenon to explain to non-Germans. He’s like a cross between Jon Stewart (though without Stewart’s absolutely biting political side) and Conan O’Brien, and is immensely popular, particularly with people between fifteen and thirty five. From his beginnings as a clown with an MTV-clone in the early nineties, he has become involved in all kinds of media projects, including a number of attempts at the Eurovision Song Contest, which his protégée, Lena Meyer-Landrut, won with the song “Satellite” in 2010.

In the course of the World Cup in Germany in 2006, Raab coined Schland as an abbreviation for Deutschland, as spoken by a drunk. When Meyer-Landrut won the Eurovision four years later, a student group from Münster, who called themselves Uwu Lena, covered her song in a spoof version as a statement of national pride in the German team playing at that year’s World Cup in South Africa. They replaced Lena’s lyrics “Love, o Love,” with “Schland, o Schland,” and landed a surprise hit.

All right, so now I’ve presented you with a load of trivia about German pop culture and you’re starting to wonder about where I’m going with all this. Actually, I see it as exemplary for the development of a new kind of national identity in Germany – an identity of a new generation which has finally managed to liberate itself both from the abomination of megalomanic Nazi racism and the cringing, ashamed self-doubt of the post-war generations.

I’ve lived in Germany for over a quarter of a century now. In many respects I feel completely at home here, yet there is a part of me which clings to my essential Irishness, that part which refuses to apply for German citizenship (though I would be entitled to do so), that part which still chooses to see myself as an outsider, an observer of the culture in which I today probably feel more comfortable, if I am to be completely honest, than in the Ireland I left in my mid-twenties. It is a Germany which – in common with most Western European countries – is becoming ever more multi-racial and multi-cultural, even if this process is (also in common with most Western European countries) accompanied by persistent teething troubles. Certainly there are nationalities and cultures which contain significant proportions who have major problems with integration into modern western societies (particularly those with an Islamic component), but the statistics now claim that nearly a third of all those living in Germany today have a migrant background of some kind, and in many areas the majority of children being born have migrant roots. If you look at the German national football team currently competing in the European Championship, five of the eleven players at the beginning of each game up to now have had a migrant background of some kind.

I’m back to football again. And this is no accident, for – in a very strange way – football has been one of the major catalysts for the formation of this new German identity.

By football I mean, of course, soccer – in common with most of the world. Sport seems to be an area in which the USA travels a different road. America may cling to that strange ritual involving quarterbacks, line-outs, touchdowns and other incomprehensible terms surrounding what seems to be some arcane form of rugby; most of the rest of the globe regards it as a weird eccentricity. And as for baseball … well, there’s no accounting for tastes, I suppose.

For Germans, at any rate, football (soccer) is very definitely a part of the national soul, and an important one at that. It is a generally accepted fact that the Football God moves in mysterious ways which cannot be divined by his countless millions of worshippers worldwide, but, in the case of Germany, football has played a significant role in the history of a country trying to redefine its national identity in the wake of the indescribable catastrophe of Nazism.

In 1954, the German Federal Republic (then in its initial West German iteration) was in its infancy, and very much under probation. The decision to grant a generous peace, to allow a rebuilding of Germany was controversial; while the American line, championed above all by Secretary of State George Marshall, prevailed, there were many among the allies (especially in France) who would have preferred to see Germany permanently politically and economically annihilated. And most Germans themselves were deeply traumatised; after having followed the ghastly Nazi chimera for over twelve years, they were profoundly defeated, dazed with guilt, uncertain as to their capabilities regarding the future, insecure about their very identity. Millions had died, millions more been made homeless and turned into refugees, hundreds of thousands of young men had disappeared as prisoners-of-war into the Soviet gulags. Numb, they had started to tidy up the rubble and take refuge in two of their most familiar qualities, their ability to work hard and organise well. The result was the beginning of the Wirtschaftswunder, the Economic Miracle.

As part of the post-war normalisation, a German team travelled to the World Cup in Bern in 1954. Against all expectations, they reached the final and defeated the highly fancied Hungarians 3-2. The Miracle of Bern became one of the defining moments of the fragile new (West) German identity. Suddenly, nine years after the end of the war, it became possible to be momentarily proud to be German. In the midst of all the guilty confusion there was an instance where there was a collective feeling of national oneness, one that was allowed, legitimate. It was a signal that things could move on, that the past – while not forgotten, never to be forgotten – could perhaps be surmounted; that whatever it meant to be German need not be exclusively, definitively and eternally defined by jackboots and swastikas, by fanaticism and Auschwitz – by shame.

It was, of course, only football. But football can be a lot – a channel where national pride, competitiveness, the innate, almost crazy human impulse to prove one’s group/clan/tribe/nation to be and be recognised to be the best, the greatest, can be ritualised, played out and expressed in a way in which nobody is hurt, exploited, made homeless, enslaved or killed. In the words of Peter Gabriel, “games without frontiers, war without tears.” In 1954, balsam for the traumatised German soul.

Thirty-six years later, in a period of less than a year, the post-war European (and world) settlement, stabilised and set in a concrete balance of fear between two blocs was swept away. In a historically unprecedented peaceful revolution, the hegemony of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe had basically dissolved and even in the USSR the Soviet system was winding itself up. The most concrete symbol of the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, had been torn down and the reunification of the divided Germany had been agreed and was in the last stages of preparation.

1990 was once more a World Cup year and in Rome West Germany, playing in their final tournament before the accession of the GDR to the federal union established by the western allies in their zones of control after the war, once more became the world champions. Those were months of euphoria in Europe, and especially in Germany, where anything seemed possible, where everything seemed positive. Germany winning the world cup appeared, as it happened, to be almost inevitable, the Football God for once in accord with all the other portents and tendencies of history. The icing on the cake, the unity of heaven and earth.

Yet 1990 also marked the end of an era. The World Cup of that year was the last major global event in which West Germany appeared as a separate entity. It was not only the GDR which disappeared; though formally the states making up the former territory of East Germany simply joined the already existing Federal Republic of Germany, in fact this accession factually also meant the end of that entity in which Germans had proved that they could be good European democrats, what German historians today are increasingly beginning to call the Bonn Republic. Seen from this aspect, the victory of the West German team in the 1990 World Cup can be regarded as a final accolade, a way of proclaiming to a brave new world, “Mission Accomplished!”

These brave new world moments tend not to last. In the euphoria of unification, the elder statesman, Willi Brandt proclaimed, “Now let what belongs together grow together!” That growing together has not always been an easy process, economically, socially, culturally, and it is by no means complete. But in 2006 an event occurred which became a moment of coalescence, when a new kind of German identity first expressed itself.

In the months before the World Cup began in Germany there was a lot of the usual public worrying about the whole affair. No nation or culture (except possibly the Jews – that itself some kind of statement about the complex, close, fateful relationship between these two cultures) is as good at public worrying as the Germans. The opening ceremony had to be completely cancelled because of a row. There were warnings about possible dangers for blacks and orientals in particular areas of the former East Germany, because of neo-Nazi gangs.

And then the competition started and a month-long spontaneous party broke out. For the first time since the war, Germans started waving their flags, decorating their cars and themselves in the national colours of black, red and gold, simply cheering the fact that they were German – just as the visitors from all over the world were cheering the fact that they were Italian, Portuguese, Brazilian, Australian. The German team reached the semi-finals, with every game being watched by literally millions in public viewings in the major squares of every German city. The event became known as the Sommermärchen, the Summer Fairy Tale.

The phenomenon has been repeated biannually ever since, whenever the European Championships or the World Cup take place. And it has become even more than just a celebration of being German; the other nationals resident in Germany also celebrate their identities and German towns become a multicoloured carpet of German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Croatian and Turkish flags – with good-natured rivalry and ribbing between the various nationalities.

Sixty years after the end of the war, young Germans finally seem to have become comfortable with their own identity – and the vehicle they choose to express it is football.

They could do worse.

* * *

This is all, of course, a very particular view. It is true but it is not the whole truth, for reality is more complex. Nationalism, in all its expressions, has a dubious pedigree and is, arguably, the most destructive ideology the world has seen in the past two hundred years. And German economic nationalism is a major component in the current complex of financial and economic problems currently facing Europe.

In an ideal world, I would hope we could go beyond those bloody, sterile, exclusivist expressions of nationality which have so shaped and malformed the world in the past centuries, to a more inclusive, sharing vision of our common solidarity on this planet which so many of us share. More and more thinking Europeans are beginning to see these deeper questions as a positive possibility resulting from the current Euro debt crisis. (Angela Merkel, the current German chancellor, seems unfortunately completely ignorant of these deeper questions.) But the need to belong, to feel part of a nation, and to express that identity seems to be very deeply rooted in us – probably part of our primate hard-wiring. And, for as long as a deeper feeling of fundamental human solidarity remains in a (hopefully growing) state of development, I’m prepared to see those expressions of nationalism like the German one I’ve described here as basically positive. Better by far than pogroms, marching armies and terrorist bombs anyway.

Pictures retrieved from:

http://www.website-marketing.ch/wp-content/uploads/euro-2012-website-marketing.jpg

http://cdn.worldcupblog.org/www.worldcupblog.org/files/2010/10/1954-World-Cup-Final.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/World_Cup_2006_German_fans_at_Bochum.jpg