Ideas, philosophy, politics, current events and happenings, music, literature, art and simple incidents out of my everyday life; Reflections and observations which, I hope, might just get you thinking ...
When life is hard and the going gets tough, there's one recipe which I can guarantee will make almost anyone feel better and even get you chuckling – anything by the Monty Pythons. This was something the British geniuses of comedy were themselves well aware of and, in fact, lampooned in the legendary end of The Life of Brian where a large number of people being crucified happily sing Always look on the Bright Side of Life, pointed by Eric Idle's legendary comment, “Cheer up Brian, worse things happen at sea ...”
The Monty Pythons, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle and Michael Palin, first appeared as a group with Monty Python's Flying Circus on the BBC in 1969 and their final major common project was their third film, The Meaning of Life, released in 1983. During this time they produced a body of work which must rank as the highest quality comedy produced during the 20th Century and setting a standard for all who have come after them, a standard which may often have been momentarily reached, but never with the consistent surety of touch achieved by the British troupe.
The British have always had a particular sense for comedy, especially a particular kind of clever, anarchistic, surreal, intelligent mayhem, which no other nation has quite managed to reach; one of the first major proponents being a certain Mr. Shakespeare from Stratford-on-Avon. The Pythons understood themselves as being part of a longer tradition, taking inspiration from the Goons (a group which contained Peter Sellers and Harry Seacombe), and particularly their artistic motor, the Irish comedy genius, Spike Milligan – John Cleese once said that “Milligan is the Great God to all of us.” During their time with the Pythons, and subsequently, all the members (with the exception of Chapman, who died in 1989) have had successful individual careers, variously in comedy, acting and film direction and production – Cleese's TV series Fawlty Towers is one of my personal favourites and a true comedy gem.
Good comedy always pushes at the boundaries and the Pythons were certainly no exception. The Life of Brian, a hilarious lampooning of all sorts of issues, using the New Testament as its template, was banned in my own country, Ireland, as blasphemous for many years; although this sobriquet was always rejected by the Pythons, who made it very clear that it was the story of the guy “born in the stable next door,” and the two brief appearances by Jesus in the film (at his birth and with the Sermon on the Mount) make this quite clear. In my own biography, my enthusiasm for the film led an older Dominican confrère to initiate an attempt to have me expelled from the Order during my student days in the early 80s – an attempt quashed by my wiser and more understanding religious superiors. Their irreverence led to some problems getting funding for some of their film projects, problems thankfully overcome with the help of rich rock musicians; Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin backing The Holy Grail and George Harrison putting up the production money for The Life of Brian.
But there was something completely authentic and honest about the Python's irreverence, something inevitable and absolutely necessary. Nowhere does this become clearer than after the death of Graham Chapman – perhaps the saddest of the Pythons, a man tortured by alcoholism and the strain of coming to terms and going public with his homosexuality, something much more difficult thirty years ago than it is in our more tolerant times, at least in this respect (Freddy Mercury is another example of this). The following account is taken from Wikipedia:
The five surviving Python members decided to stay away from his private funeral, to prevent it becoming a media circusand to give Chapman’s family some privacy. They sent a wreath in the shape of the famous Python foot with the message “To Graham from the other Pythons. Stop us if we’re getting too silly”. They held a private memorial service in St Bartholomew's Hospitalin London on the evening of 6 December 1989, with a chorus of the Chineseversion of the hymn "Jerusalem" ("… Bling me my speal, oh crowds unford, bling me my chaliot of file…"). Cleese delivered his eulogy, which began as follows:
Graham Chapman, co-author of the "Parrot Sketch”, is no more.
He has ceased to be. Bereft of life, he rests in peace. He's kicked the bucket,
hopped the twig, bit the dust, snuffed it, breathed his last, and gone to meet
the great Head of Light Entertainment in the sky. And I guess that we're all
thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, of such capability for kindness,
of such unusual intelligence, should now so suddenly be spirited away at the
age of only forty-eight, before he'd achieved many of the things of which he
was capable, and before he'd had enough fun.
Well, I feel that I should say: nonsense. Good riddance to him, the
freeloading bastard, I hope he fries.
And the reason I feel I should say this is he would never forgive me
if I didn't, if I threw — threw away this glorious opportunity to
shock you all on his behalf. Anything for him but mindless good taste. ...
Cleese continued after a break from laughter in the audience, claiming Chapman had whispered in his ear the night before, when he was writing the speech, saying:
All right Cleese. I know you are very proud of being the very first person
ever to say 'shit' on British television. If this service is really for me: Just
for starters, I want you to become the first person ever at a British memorial
service to say 'fuck'.
Palin also spoke, saying that he liked to think that Chapman was there with them all that day — "or rather, he will be in about 25 minutes," a reference to Chapman's habitual lateness when they were all working together. Idle, choking back tears, stated of Chapman that he had thought that Palin talked too much and had died rather than listen to him any more. He also led other surviving Python members along with Chapman's family and close friends in a rendition of "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" from the film Monty Python's Life of Brian. Not to be outdone by Cleese, Idle was heard saying during the song's close: "I'd just like to be the last person at this meeting to say 'fuck'. Thank you very much, God bless you, Graham."
YouTube has loads of Python sketches and excerpts. After much deliberation, I've chosen one of the early classics – the “Dead Parrot” sketch John Cleese referred to in his eulogy for Graham Chapman.
I've just finished reading Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith; set in the USSR in 1953, the year of Stalin's death. The book is an excellent thriller, using as a factual inspiration the serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, also known as “the Rostov Ripper”, who was actually active during the 1980s.
What makes the book so good is the fact that it works on so many different levels. Behind the packing thriller/detective story, Smith explores and exposes the ghastly horror of life in the Soviet Union under Stalin and looks deeply at fundamental questions of individual morality and personal, existential redemption within such a gruesome, dehumanising system of terror.
Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known publicly as “Stalin” [man of steel], (1878-1953) achieved supreme power in the Soviet Union in the years following Lenin's death in 1924; by 1928 he had pushed all his rivals (the most prominent being Leon Trotsky) aside and basically ruled the USSR alone for the next quarter of a century. It became a period in which the people of the USSR suffered and died on a scale unprecedented before and since, even when compared to the years of civil war and chaos following the October Revolution. Apart from the 35 million Soviet citizens killed during World War II (still preferably known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War, which, incidentally did not begin until 1941), experts reckon that somewhere between 10 and 20 million more lost their lives as a result of famines, purges, forced labour and comprehensive mistreatment and torture in the Gulags (the widespread network of prisons and labour camps, mostly in Siberia), compulsory collectivisation and forced relocations of whole ethnic groups. How could such horrors happen (even leaving World War II aside) and how could a whole people accept it?
There are many complex answers to these questions – the most hair-raising being the old saw that the Russian people (and the nations dominated by Russia up to the early 1990s) has always been one of ignorant, passive, lazy peasants who understand nothing but the whip and the cudgel. This is, of course, ridiculous, but one sometimes gets the feeling that even the present-day Russian elites still have this attitude. From an historical perspective, it can be argued that the former Soviet empire has little of a democratic tradition and that autocracy and rule by decree rather than law are deeply rooted in its tradition and history. This is true, as far as it goes, but the same could be said for a lot of European countries (including many Western European ones) as recently as a hundred years ago. No, I believe that the Stalinist system, building on the Leninist system, which is itself quite a particular perversion of Marxist themes, formed a diabolical structure within which terror was not only possible but predicated and which was so ideologically refined and practically organised that any dissent, or even the possibility of potential dissent was ruthlessly and effectively eradicated. In this sense, apart from all the millions of dead and the hundreds of millions condemned to living for decades in grey distrust, fear and deprivation, Marxism itself is a victim of its Stalinist perversion; enduringly discredited by the horrors carried out in its name.
Marx saw society as being in a state of evolution, a development in which structures arose and became more complex until they self-destructed under their own internal contradictions, the result being new societal structures in which the whole process began once more. This, admittedly drastically simplified, is what he called dialectics, or, more properly, dialectical materialism. Analysing society in the second half of the 19th Century, Marx posited that the most developed nations of Western Europe and North America – as a result, basically, of the Industrial Revolution – had entered the capitalist phase of societal development, following more primitive forms such as mercantile, feudal or slave-based structures. But capitalism itself was not and could not be the final, optimal form of society; in itself capitalism contained too many contradictions, contradictions which were growing and deepening. Capitalism had brought forth a new class of people, the workers, those who possess nothing other than their children – the proletariat.
As capitalism develops, the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (the class of the capitalists) increases because their interests are ineluctably opposed. Eventually the tension becomes too great, the proletariat rises in rebellion, taking the means of production into common collective ownership, wiping out capitalism and inaugurating the perfect society, communism. Perfect, because there are no more contradictions to be overcome. It is the end of alienation and in this condition the state itself withers away because it has become superfluous.
The period of revolution and the eradication of capitalism is a transitional state, socialism, characterised by what Marx calls “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” a state in which hard measures and difficult positions must be taken to protect the revolution against the reactionary forces of bourgeois counter-revolution. The logic of Marx's thinking led him to expect that the revolution would begin in the most highly industrialised societies, where the tensions between capital and workers had reached their extremes – areas like Britain, Northern France, the Low Countries, Western Germany or the North Eastern United States. But it was obviously the duty of all enlightened people who had accepted the truth of his analysis to work to hasten the coming workers' revolution, which was historically inevitable.
This, in a vastly simplified summary, is the kernel of Marx's theory of society and the march of history. In its application to Russia, Lenin, the leader and chief ideologue of the Russian communists was faced with a major problem. Russian society, still dominated by agriculture and an aristocrat/peasant society, was – according to Marxist categories – still primitive, with capitalism still in its infancy there. Much would have to happen before it had developed enough to become an arena for a workers' revolution. Lenin and many other Marxists were, understandably, not prepared to wait. Lenin worked out a theory which would allow the revolution to take place in Russia; it would take an elite, a group of people who understood the processes of history and its inevitable development, who could – on the basis of this understanding – confidently decide which the next steps to be taken were and be sure that these decisions were always correct. A group which would form the “vanguard of the proletariat,” which could guide and lead the workers through the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, through the transitional phase of socialism to true communism. The Party.
In Leninism the Party is infallible – even more so than the pope, for the Party is infallible in every area of life and society. Nothing is too unimportant or trivial to escape its scrutiny, for the project during the socialist phase and the dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing less than the purification of society of all remains of bourgeois influence, the practical perfection of communist humanity. The wishes and rights of the individual are insignificant compared with the importance of this project; “the individual is nothing, the collective is all.”
Stalin succeeded in gaining total control of the Party and so attained an unparalleled position of infallibility and power within Soviet society. He did this by a combination of cunning political manoeuvring and absolute ruthlessness. Having achieved ultimate power, he kept it by a combination of the same political manoeuvring and ruthlessness, accompanied by an indomitable will and a terrifying unpredictability. Terrifying is the only applicable word, for terror was Stalin's basic tool and he used it with an unerring instinct, refined probably over years of criminal thuggery prior to the 1917 Revolution.
In much of this, Stalin appears as a mirror-image of his greatest adversary, Adolf Hitler. Perhaps the only real significant difference between them is that Stalin won. There were some who appeared to have realised his dangerous nature; in the last months of his life, Lenin tried to warn against him but by that stage Stalin had already established too much control within the Party and Lenin's misgivings went unheeded or, at least, not heeded enough – Trotsky seems to have recognised the danger, but Trotsky had already been outmanoeuvred by the Man of Steel. In the course of the Second World War, Churchill also seems to have realised it, but was basically powerless to do anything about it; exhausted by the war, the western allies had no stomach for an immediate continuation of the war and Roosevelt in particular, tired and ill, consistently underestimated the Soviet leader. And so, Eastern Europe was handed over to Stalinist domination and the people of the Soviet Union were left in their purgatory. The allies failed the nerve and the strength, the ruthlessness and the stomach for carrying on the war against a new enemy – and given the situation in May 1945 who can blame them? France was in ruins, Britain exhausted and US concentration was now focussed on the Pacific theatre. In practical terms, defeating the Stalinist USSR would probably have entailed the use of atomic weapons on a scale far beyond that used against Japan (and in May 1945, the US still hadn't perfected the bomb).
As far as we can tell, Stalin seems to have believed in the political ideology of the Party he so completely dominated. And it was indeed the widespread genuine belief in Marxist-Leninism within the Soviet system which made his tyranny so effective. Even many of those denounced as dissidents and enemies of the Revolution who were subjected to show-trials and subsequent execution during the thirties accepted their fates as being justified, since the judgement of the Party was the judgement of history and could not err. Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon is a wonderful depiction of this mindset. The personal journey of Leo Demidov, the hero of Smith's Child 44 also has much to do with this viewpoint and its results for those who hold it. Demidov is an officer of the NKVD (the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), Stalin's public and secret police organisation. His position has involved him in the observation and prosecution of thousands of people suspected of subversion or anti-Soviet actions or opinions. At the beginning of the book, he has no problem with any of this; such actions are necessary to protect and advance the development of Soviet society toward true Communism. The Party and the Soviet state cannot err – those suspected of illicit thoughts and activities are probably guilty because otherwise there would be no reason to suspect them of illicit views and actions and are treated accordingly. His problems begin when he comes across evidence that a serial murderer may be at large. This puts him into an ideological quandary because the Party position does not allow for the existence of such a pathological criminal within socialist society; such deviants can only exist in the corrupt, decadent society of the bourgeois west.
It was this unquestioning belief in the rightness of the Party – and its great leader, Comrade Stalin – which gave his absolute power such a firm foundation. In this context, Stalin's cynical question about the number of battalions commanded by the pope becomes almost modest, for he might also have boasted that he himself commanded more unquestioning fanatical believers than the pope. But, having moved beyond automatic faith in the infallibility of the Party line as defined and determined by the all-wise Comrade Stalin, Demidov is faced with the deepest question of all; what are the options for any decent person who is willy-nilly part of an all-pervasive structure which is fundamentally evil and corrupt? When resistance or even the smallest acts of non-compliance – even the private, internal choice to doubt the system – almost inevitably means his own death and the destruction of the lives of all those he cares for?
This is the final, infernal subtlety of the Stalinist system; the victims themselves are co-opted as perpetrators, everyone becomes implicated and there are no innocents. But, lest we become too thankful for the fact that we do not have to live within such structures, perhaps we should ask ourselves if we would rather not know where the wonderfully cheap jeans, pair of shoes or laptop we bought recently were made and how much human suffering, misery and exploitation were involved in their manufacture? How much are we implicated in, perverted by the many-layered, complexly woven, corrupt systems in which we daily find ourselves? Is it possible for us to free ourselves from these structures at all, without becoming ascetic monks? And how much of the cogent criticism non-dogmatic Marxist-inspired thinking and critique might bring to such questions has been irrevocably sullied by by its deadly Stalinist parody?
Stalin's legacy lives on. Others learned from him, his use of terror, propaganda and the cult of personality; Mao, for example, Enver Hoxha in Albania, or the still-ruling Kim dynasty in North Korea. And even today in Russia, Stalin still enjoys considerable popularity, the darker basic truth airbrushed away in favour of the man whose indomitable will pushed through industrialisation and modernisation in the Soviet Union and whose stubborn refusal to surrender led the Red Army and the Soviet people to victory against Hitler's Germany in the Great Patriotic War (never mind that the USSR was a passive ally of the Third Reich up to 1941 - passive, that is, with the exception of Poland). But then, Vladimir Putin sometimes seems to have learned a thing or two from his predecessor (looking at the way the independent press has been treated in Russia in the past years, for example) and he did, after all, begin his career in the KGB …
Well, it’s finally over. Our company, represented by yours truly, completed our final shift with Luis at eight o’clock this morning (I’ve posted about this already here http://francishunt.blogspot.com/2010/08/completely-unplanned-and-fully.html). It finished as I was more than half afraid it would, in an atmosphere of icy, almost completely silent hostility, accompanied – if it’s not just my paranoid fantasy working overtime – by a few small, subtle attempts at half-hearted, insignificant sabotage (suction pump not plugged in, material not in its usual place, that sort of thing). The parents demonstratively did not say goodbye this morning. Oh well …
It didn’t really worry me. I hadn’t let myself be provoked, it was Saturday morning, the sun was shining and I was out. And I have the next four days free, my first shift with my new patient is on Wednesday. So, with a light heart, I drove home, stopping on the way to buy fresh breakfast rolls. Breakfast, check my mails, have a look at a few of the papers on-line and then to bed.
When I come off the night-shift I try not to sleep for too long, three to four hours at most. If a bit brutal, it’s the best way I’ve found to kick my body and brain back to a normal day/night pattern. Admittedly, I’m not at my scintillating best after such an action but I’ve got nothing planned for today so I figured I could spend it just pottering around, hanging out, chilling … call it what you will. Besides, it’s just a shame to spend too much of such a beautiful late summer/early autumn Saturday in bed.
Ninety minutes after falling asleep, I was wakened by the angry buzzing of a fucking chain-saw only a couple of metres from my bedroom window. All right, I didn’t want to sleep for too long, but I had planned for a bit more sleep than this! One of my neighbours had decided to use the fine weather to trim a tree in his garden. Although “trim” is a harmless description of what he’s actually done; he’s cut the thing back to within an inch of its life. I liked that tree! To be fair, it stands at the edge of a traffic junction, very close to his house and it probably had to be cut back for safety reasons. Oh well …
I got up.
The most weird and wonderful thing this week was what happened with the last essay I posted here, the one about Salvador Allende and September 11th. It was picked up by a friend of mine, Chris Jenkins, in Florida, a friend whom I have never met. The internet is truly amazing. Chris and I have known each other for a couple of years now and have in the course of this time discussed all sorts of issues, agreed and disagreed about any number of things. He’s an important member of the small group of people I’ve got to know online who I would truly describe as friends, even in a world in which – due to facebook and other social networks – the word has been the victim of colossal inflation. If you want to pimp your website, or, more seriously, generally improve your online presence, Chris is your man; just let me know and I’ll put you in touch with him.
Chris liked my essay and posted links on a couple of networks in which he is involved. As a result, in the past 48 hours, this blog has been clicked around 6,500 times. As I said, the internet is truly amazing. It’s almost certainly a one-off thing, having to do with the topicality of the subject, but it’s still very flattering while it lasts (and I will admit that there’s a tiny part of me that’s still waiting for the e-mail from The Huffington Post, inviting me to blog for them J…). Oh well ...
That chain-saw is still buzzing outside. Cherish the picture here, folks, that last bit of leafy crown is now gone and it looks like that tree has been sentenced to death. Oh well …
If you find this post somewhat strange, put it down to acute sleep-deprivation. Here’s Fleetwood Mac in their original formation with the legendary Peter Green and … what else … “Oh Well” …
As the ninth anniversary of the World Trade Center attack rolls around, accompanied by an infamous Koran-burning project, I was reminded recently that the fall of the Twin Towers is not the only horrible event which took place on September 11th.
At the beginning of September 1973, Salvador Allende had been president of Chile for nearly three years. A doctor by training, he was a cofounder of the Socialist Party of Chile in 1933, the same year he qualified as a doctor at the age of twenty-five and had spent his whole life as a left-wing politician, including periods as health minister and president of the Chilean senate. He was democratically elected president in 1970 and started to carry through a radical programme of nationalisation of industry and natural resources (particularly copper mines) and continued the process of the transfer of land from large landowners to the peasants begun by his Christian Democrat predecessor.
The opposition of the Nixon administration to Allende remained steadfast, and there were various attempts to destabilise Chile, including a long-running truckers strike in 1972. The description of the strike as that being of truck-drivers is somewhat misleading, as it wasn’t so much the drivers (few of whom owned their trucks) who striked as the truck-owners. Henry Kissinger presented the US position clearly with the comment; "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
So, was Allende a communist? He was certainly strongly influenced by Marxism and was generally described as a Marxist. He admired Mao’s China and Ho Chi Min and was friendly with Fidel Castro. Politically he came to power as leader of a broad Popular Front movement, including communists, socialists and social democrats. When in power he vigorously pursued classic socialist/communist themes, such as nationalisation of the means of production and the precedence of the working class. But Allende had also been deeply influenced in his political formation by anarcho-syndicalist ideas and he was always a convinced democrat. He rejected the fundamentalist Leninist theses of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the primacy of the communist party and the need for the leadership of the socialist revolution to establish secure control over all the machinery of the state, particularly the military. Although the Soviets supported Allende, that support was less than whole-hearted, probably because of his unwillingness to use force against his opponents.
Something which, seen in terms of realpolitik, finally led to his downfall. The tension in Chile, fuelled massively by destabilising measures originating in the US, continued to grow. The “golpe” (coup) was increasingly seen by observers both within Chile and abroad during the summer of 1973 as ever more likely. A first putsch attempt in June failed. On September 11, 1973, the armed forces, under the leadership of General Augusto Pinochet, moved to take power in the country and depose Allende’s democratically elected government.
The president and his supporters took refuge in the presidential palace, La Moneda, which was attacked by armour and infantry and bombed by the air-force. With the palace in flames, Allende made a last emotional farewell speech by radio, telling the nation of the coup and his refusal to resign his elected office under threat, and his supporters surrendered. Allende himself (most sources today agree) committed suicide as the military stormed the building.
It appears that Pinochet’s coup was not directly instigated by the CIA, although they knew that it was coming. They didn’t have to – the numerous acts of destabilisation in the previous three years had come to their logical fruition. Forty eight years of democratic constitutionalism (a proud record for Latin America) ended. Pinochet’s junta ruled for 17 years. In the aftermath of the coup, around forty thousand people were impounded in the National Stadium and thousands were killed or disappeared. Many more were tortured.
Today, Chile is a democracy again, but many Chilean commentators observe that the country has yet to really deal with what happened under the junta – there are parallels here to Spain and the massive skeleton Franco left in the Hispanic closet. A marvellous exception is the great novel by Allende’s cousin, Isabel, The House of the Spirits.
So, this Saturday the press will be full of calls to remember the Twin Towers, and rightly so. But we can also think of September 11, 1973 and the bloody death of a dream of decency and dignity and all the horrors which followed.
“Ihave faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this gray and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Keep in mind that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society. Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!”
(Salvador Allende, Final radio speech, September 11, 1973)
A new discussion over the integration of immigrants has broken out in Germany in recent days; set off by a book published by a social democrat member of the board of the Bundesbank (Germany’s central bank). In it, Thilo Sarrazin argues that Germany is facing major problems because of immigration, in particular because of Muslim immigrants. They are not interested in integration, they form a counter-culture which has no interest in accepting the values of the country in which they live, are interested in taking as much as they can while giving as little as possible and are going to outbreed the Germans.
Sarrazin’s arguments are badly researched and many of them are just plain wrong – for example, his thesis that intelligence is genetically determined, more, that this genetic determination has a racial basis. He has been roundly condemned by the whole political and public establishment, it looks like the German president, Christian Wulff is going to fire him from the board of the bank (something that’s legally complicated) and the social democrats (SPD) are getting ready to throw him out of the party.
There’s one problem with the whole affair. Opinion polls reveal that somewhere between a third and a half of all Germans agree substantially with the man, or at least feel that his opinions don’t warrant him being sacked. Obviously Sarrazin has touched a nerve among ordinary Germans. This is one of the things which makes established politicians so nervous about him and which has caused near unanimity to break out between all the main political parties. The shadow of the swastika is long indeed.
So, is Germany experiencing a reawakening of Nazi sympathies? I don’t think so. Uneasiness about immigrants with an Islamic background is widespread throughout Western Europe; in December last year the Swiss approved by referendum a prohibition of minarets, France has banned the hijab in schools and hospitals, and the party of the Dutch populist, Geert Wilders, running on a radical anti-Islam programme won over 15% of the vote in the recent general election, becoming the third biggest party in the Netherlands.
So what we are seeing is a general European phenomenon, rather than a resurgence of Nazism in Germany. And, if I am to be honest, spiting my deeply held liberal principles, there’s a part of me that understands it, dare I say, even sympathises with it.
Remscheid, the town in which I live, has around 15% non-Germans, by far the largest group being Turkish and this figure does not include the large number of second and third-generation Turks who have German passports. There is a sizable area of the town frequently called “Little Anatolia,” where the proportion is much higher, and walking the main streets you sometimes have the feeling that every second woman is wearing a long coat and a headscarf.
I don’t think that Germany has a general problem with the integration of immigrants. The repeated waves of Gastarbeiter since the late fifties, who came to work and stayed to live from countries like Italy, Spain, Greece, former Yugoslavia, Portugal, have largely fitted into German society, the second and third generations mostly feeling completely at home here. The last wave of immigrants, those claiming some kind of German ancestry, from Eastern Europe and the former USSR in the 80s and 90s is also – with a few exceptions – finding its place within society. Many Turkish immigrants have also integrated themselves into the wider German society; Lower Saxony recently got its first government minister (a woman at that) with a Turkish background, and Cem Ösdemir, the son of Turkish immigrants, is the chairman of the Green Party. Such examples, as well as the thousands of lawyers, journalists, engineers, businesspeople, etc., make a nonsense of Sarrazin’s racial intelligence theories.
But there is also a large group of Turkish (and, to a lesser extent, Arab) immigrants who are not integrated and my view is that much of this has to do with cultural factors, where Islamic identity seems to play a large part. Most of these come from areas in Eastern Anatolia where the culture is deeply traditional, conservative and patriarchal. Arranged marriages are common in this group, frequently involving a spouse from the native village back in the homeland.
This can, and often does have worrying consequences. Young men, who have grown up in Germany, are married by their families to younger women, who come to Germany without any knowledge of or preparation for life in a very different, complex, western society. They don’t speak the language and are completely dependent on others for survival. Their children grow up in households where little or no German is spoken and the main child-rearer knows nothing of the culture in which they all live. The children start school and are immediately at a disadvantage because they don’t speak or understand the language well and their mothers are unable to help them with homework – are, indeed, frequently unaware of the problems which are growing. The kids perform badly at school, have increasingly meagre prospects in our competitive societies and, by the time they are teenagers, already have the feeling that they are losers. And this, in their view, is the fault of the host society, which discriminates against them, which offers opportunities but then says that they are excluded from them. And so a pool of angry young men forms, full of wounded pride, machismo and inferiority complexes – fertile ground for extremist Islamicist recruiting agents. Remember the recurring riots in the Paris suburbs? The three Al Qaeda members convicted in London last year in relation to the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot all grew up in the UK.
This is only one description of the many mechanisms behind alienation and failed integration for, as Oscar Wilde once commented, “the truth is rarely pure and never simple.” In fact, this is one of the major problems in most of the public discussions concerning Islam and integration, the subject is complex and many-layered, with failures, prejudices and misunderstandings on both sides. In this respect, simplified and simplistic sound-bite discussions such as those sparked off by Sarrazin are – at the very least – counterproductive.
But I have stated that part of me even sympathises with some of the critical popularising theses being bandied around with relation to Islam, immigration and integration, and I feel the need to explain this. There are aspects of Islamic teaching, or at least the cultures with an Islamic background, many of whose immigrant representatives claim are Islamic teachings, which I find both personally offensive and incompatible with basic values of western societies – values such as secularism, pluralism, separation of church/mosque and state, equality, respect for the positions of others, the rights of women. There is a difference between a grudging acceptance of secular values in society in which one is a minority and the positive affirmation that the separation of religion and state is superior to systems regulated by Sharia – including societies in which Muslims form the majority. I find it offensive as a man to be told that a woman should cover herself in swathes and layers of clothing and veils so as not to arouse my baser instincts. I do not think that it is right for a first-grade boy to tell his teacher that she has no right to tell him to do anything because she is only a woman and I do not like the fact that children are being brought up with such attitudes in thousands of families in the society in which I live and whose values I cherish. I find it reprehensible that teenagers are married off to others who they do not know because their fathers order it. I have little sympathy with attitudes which do not place a high priority on obtaining basic competence in the language of the country in which one lives. I actively dislike a religious teaching which denies basic rights to non-believers (apart from some exceptions for Jews and Christians, the other “peoples of the book” – and what is my position, as an “apostate” ex-Christian in such a world-view?).
Western society poses a major challenge for Islam. But that challenge is not to the existence of Islam as such, but rather to develop an enlightened, sophisticated, modern view of itself as part of the contemporary world, in confident, secure dialogue with society; contributing to its richness but also learning from its diversity and insights. This process is not easy for any religion; although the Enlightenment (the intellectual source for most of the agreed values of modern western society) originated within Christian culture, the Christian religions have themselves had major difficulties in finding their place within pluralist, secular systems – the Catholic Church needing around 200 years before finally making general peace with “liberal” views of society with the publication of Gaudium et Spes, “The Constitution on the Chruch in the Modern World” as part of the Vatican II process in the 1960s (and there are not a few voices, within both Protestant and Catholic fundamentalism which continue to reject secular values).
If people with an Islamic cultural background are to find an enduring comfortable place within societies which are predominantly non-Muslim, then there is an urgent need for an enlightened, moderate, open interpretation of Islamic teaching, which can represent them and enter into dialogue with their host societies, which can claim authority and the high moral ground in speaking for Islam and not leave this position free for simplistic, fearful, aggressive fundamentalism. There is a challenge to western society to critically examine itself with relation to questions like tolerance, prejudice and openness to others – but this is a continual challenge to open societies everywhere with respect to all sorts of issues; the challenge to self-examination and continuous critical dialogue. But the challenge to Islam is just as great – to show that it can be a part of complex modern society, to positively affirm tolerance, multiplicity and the other Enlightenment values and find justification for them within its own religious context. And to take on and defeat in argument and debate the simplistic, simple-minded fundamentalists who claim to represent the teaching of Muhammad and the Muslim traditions. A moderate, open expression of Islam which speaks for, and is seen to speak for the vast majority of Muslims.
Sarrazin continues to make waves in Germany. In a poll published today, 18% of Germans said that they would vote for a new right-wing populist party led by him (such a party, fortunately, does not yet exist). This tendency to simplistic, slogan-driven, right-wing populism is worrying. It has broken out in many European countries, including the Netherlands and the UK in their most recent general elections and can be seen as the European expression of the Tea Party movement in the USA. We need them all about as much as we need a repeat of 9/11. And if the majority of decent people world-wide don’t resist their siren calls, promising easy solutions appealing to our baser nature, we’ll get both. Or worse.
Completely unplanned and fully unforeseen, more than a month has now passed since I've posted something here and even now I'm not sure whether I'll complete this piece. So what happened?
Put simply, something occurred which I wouldn't have believed possible; I was ambushed by my job. I've written a couple of posts here already where I've described the circumstances – that since the middle of June I've been trying to build up a team to care for a very sick ten-year-old boy who has been in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for the past seven years, eighteen hours daily in his own home. This has involved a lot of overtime (which, incidentally, I don't get paid for, instead this is “time off” which theoretically I can take at some as yet undefined time in the future when things aren't as hectic), working nights, weekends, etc. It has frequently meant subordinating my free time to a very fluid work situation, with sudden changes in rosters, constantly changing plans and the ordinary chaos which life brings. And certainly this wasn't conducive to the retention of a basic personal balance. But, as anyone familiar with the nursing profession knows, such circumstances are not unusual in our job and they're something you get used to. No, there was more to it than that and to explain it I'll have to be a bit more specific – although I'll immediately add the disclaimer that I am changing many of the incidental details here to protect the anonymity of my patient and his family.
Luis is the son of parents who immigrated to Germany from Southern Europe twenty years ago. Following a viral meningitis at the age of three, he suffered extensive generalised brain damage which left him dependent on a respirator, completely paralysed, subject to epileptic fits and in a state of consciousness which is … indefinable. The advances in medicine in the past decades has made it increasingly possible for doctors to save many people who would have formerly died, but have also meant that ever more people have been brought back from the brink of death – however, not all the way back. They remain in a condition which is not coma and not brain-death, conventionally known as PVS, also sometimes called apallic syndrome. In German it's referred to asWachkoma, waking coma. Karin Quinlan and Terry Schiavo had PVS, the former Israeli president, Ariel Sharon, has been in a PVS since January 2006.
PVS raises huge ethical questions which are very difficult to answer, hinging as they do on very basic questions regarding the relationship between cognition and the nature of human life, the right to life, the right to death, the right to basic human dignity, etc. I don't want to go into these here, will just comment in passing that the extent to which people in a PVS perceive their surroundings and experience themselves is an issue about which there are very different views … and very little certainty.
Luis' parents have lots of certainty. As far as they are concerned, their son is in contact with his environment; they interpret his every movement and facial gesture, every reaction to touch and stimulus and find meaning in all of them. They may be right. Or partly right. Or it may just be wishful thinking. Their viewpoint is shared by the majority of the relatives of those in PSV that I have encountered – and I have worked in this area, with occasional interruptions, for nearly a decade.
Luis is the first patient I have cared for at home. It is, in many ways, the ideal nursing situation. You have only one patient to care for, there are none of the usual pressures of the normal everyday hospital or nursing-home routine. It is a marvellous fact that the costs of this intensive care (in cases such as Luis' costing, according to my calculations, more than a quarter of a million Euros annually) are covered by the German public health system – even if this increasingly means - in a world where the number-crunchers are gaining ever more influnce in the health-care area - that relatives, care companies, social workers and others have to fight quite a bit to obtain it.
Luis' room opens directly into the family's living room. The door has been removed so that they have him in sight all the time. This of course also means that they also have the nurses who are caring for their son in sight all the time. Over seven years they have learned the best way to doeverything for him, they have learned to interpret the tiny signals which he sends (a small change in the sound of his breathing over the respirator, a rise in his pulse, continually signalled by the monitor). Over seven years they have had six or seven care services, not all of whom were serious and professional. Over seven years they have learned mistrust.
Luis' mother is a full-time housewife. She must be there for her son, as she sees it. When new nurses come, she must be sure that they can care for Luis properly before she is prepared to leave them alone with him. And so, every new colleague has to accept the fact that every move they make will be observed, judged, and any action seen as being less than optimal will be immediately critically commented on and corrections demanded. During the day, from Luis' mother, in the evening and at weekends from his father as well.
If you start to work here, you have to accept this. You have to accept that there is very little scaling of priorities.Everythingis important in the eyes of Luis' family, from the way you disinfect your hands, to the way you turn him over, to where you place a towel, to how you use the suction machine to relieve bronchial congestion, to what lights you turn on and off. Sometimes the tone can be pretty tough, although this frequently has to with linguistic inadequacies. And you'd better get used to the fact that every action which doesn't come up to standard is a subject for discussion as well as something which will probably be reported to me (as team coordinator) and subsequently by telephone to our general coordinator at our company's central office.
We are there eighteen hours a day; the day shift from eight in the morning till three in the afternoon, the night shift from nine in the evening until eight in the morning. The family stays up late, generally till after midnight and the door of the parents' room is left slightly ajar after that. Should an alarm sound for too long in the middle of the night, you have to reckon with the possibility that one of the parents will come to see what's wrong.
Of course, this is all only one side of the story. Since Luis' illness began seven years ago, the family has been living in a state of more or less constant stress. That the marriage of his parents has survived and that their relationship is still strong, that the father has kept his job and that neither of them has become an alcoholic distinguishes them from many other families faced with a similar situation. This family is living with a continuous open wound and we nurses are strangers, continuous intruders present in their private family life for eighteen hours every day, helping to keep that wound open. Because that is what they want. Because other alternatives, like, for example, institutional care, are not acceptable to them.
I knew this assignment would be difficult before I took it on. What I had, in retrospect, underestimated was the strain it would put on my own psyche. It came to a head for me on Saturday, three weeks ago, when I had worked ten nights out of the previous fourteen and finally had two days free before switching to day duty. I had slept for only two hours that day, attempting to force my body back to a normal night/day rhythm. My phone rang late in the afternoon. It was our chief coordinator, telling me that the colleague who was supposed to work that night had suddenly called in sick. Could I take over the shift?
For the first time in my professional life, I simply refused. I realised that I just was not capable of going there that night, even if it meant being fired. Luckily, after a brief discussion, she realised the situation I was in and together we found another solution for the problem.
But at that stage, change was in the air anyway. A new colleague had joined the team at the beginning of August, a middle-aged nurse with twenty-five years professional experience. After two days, she'd requested a different assignment. There was a meeting at head office on the Monday and an appointment was made with Luis' family for the following day. We informed them that we would be terminating our contract on September 10.
It wasn't an easy meeting.
Personally, I was prepared to continue the assignment, but it was also clear to me that I couldn't do it on my own. From the point of view of the company in general, the risk was too great that continuing the job could result in experienced, qualified nurses quitting their employment completely - and it is already difficult finding enough suitable people to cover the fifteen individual patients our intensive home-care nursing department looks after in the whole Rhine-Ruhr area.
Ironically perhaps, the work has been somewhat easier since. Luis' parents had already begun to trust me and, after they had forgiven me personally for our firm's betrayal of them, that growth in trust has continued. They'll even leave me alone with their son now. And I have also shared some wonderful moments with them. The family has a small allotment garden where they spend a lot of time at the weekend and I've spent some great Saturday evenings there with them and their friends. They are more relaxed there, there's a lot of laughter and singing and joking, and even packing Luis into his wheelchair, loading it into the family van and driving home at one thirty in the morning is more of an adventure than a chore.
I find myself frequently feeling very sorry for them ... and often feel like a complete bastard as a result. But that doesn't change anything. For various reasons, many completely understandable, they lack the flexibility and capacity for compromise which would have made our continuation of the assignment possible.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
So that's why I haven't been posting for the past month or so. The fact that I've finished this is a sign for me that I've managed to free my head again ... at least partly. Luis' mother told me today that she has found another nursing company to take over from us. I wish them all the luck in the world. They'll need it.
As for me, after I finish our last shift with Luis at eight in the morning on September 11, I have a few days off and then ... well, the next assignment is already lined up; a four-year-old in another neighbouring town. Colleagues who have worked there say that it's abiteasier ...
