Apocalypse 60 Years ago

Last summer I was down in Killarney saving Ireland's natural oak forests with a group of international volunteers. Generally the craic down there is fairly mighty and there's plenty of wit flying around the place, but someone took it upon themselves to take the piss out of people of a certain nationality for their alleged lack of humour, with slightly disturbing consequences.

When the German girl told us that she had a German joke she got our attention fairly pronto. I think that although The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass and Felix Krull by Thomas Mann are two of the funniest books I've ever read, the stereotype of Teutons as being humourless isn't without a modicum of truth, so I was intrigued to hear the joke as well.

Unfortunately for almost everyone concerned, the joke went a little like this.

The Pope goes into a supermarket somewhere in Germany. He takes his goods to the checkout and the girl there tells him the price. He takes a €10 note out of his pocket, and the girl looks really stunned. His Holiness asks what the matter is. She replies:
"That's the first time I've ever seen a Pole pay for anything."

Everyone responsed with a pointed silence, but the German girl, bless her dear little heart, assumed that we'd just not gotten the joke.
She started off explaining, "You See..." and I shouted out "No!" as loudly as I could, guessing that she was going to dig herself deeper into a hole, which she pretty much did by explaining zat zey have all zese Poles coming over to zeir country und stealing stuff.

The Year before I was on a trip through Halong Bay in Vietnam, when I overheard this big, fat, German discussing the Euro with an English woman. I wasn't eavesdropping, HE VAS TALKING REALLY LOUD ZE VAY SOME GERMANS DO. He wanted to know which parts of the UK had accepted the Euro. He'd heard that IRELAND had accepted the Euro, and then he shook his head disgustedly, and said "ALWAYS WITH ZE FIGHTING", with a total lack of irony.

This week the German nation is being reminded that they have a bit of history of being with ze fighting and stealing stuff from Poles, for example, Oh, I don't know, their land, their freedom, their dignity and, in the cases of those of semetic origin or left-wing views, their lives.

Let me declare an interest by saying that I'm part German-Jewish on my mother's side and that if my ancestors hadn't left Germany then the man who became my grandfather would probably have been enslaved and then gassed.

There are those who think that Germans have suffered enough for the holocaust and that they should be able to put it behind them, that their past doesn't matter all that much. I think this would be a reasonable argument if they were willing to knock down every building over the age of 50 years and never listen to Beethoven, Bach or Wagner or read Goethe or look at paintings by Durer or Friedrich or watch movies by Murnau or Fritz Lang ever again.

Of course the past matters; the past is what makes us what we are. It's ironic that many of those right-wing brits who criticised Tony Blair for aplogising for the famine are the same people who want to preserve their ancient institutions like the Monarchy and the House of Lords.
It's also wishful thinking to imagine that Germans have learned the lessons of Auschwitz. Though in many ways the Modern German state is as liberal as any, when you see even the sort of Germans who go trekking in the jungle in Vietnam or working in woodland conservation express the sort of attitudes that led to the Holcaust, you wonder how much they've really changed.

In one respect the Germans are treated unfairly as they're hardly unique in committing acts of genocide. At the same time the Nazis were gassing six million Jews the British were deliberately starving at least two million Bengalis to death, yet they don't go through a periodic ten-year guilt fest. At the same time around double the amount were being slughtered in Russia, and in the United States, a country many of whose citizens have the same belief in their own infallibilty that gripped Germany in the 30's, it was only 30 years before that native Americans were granted basic civil rights, up till then the constitution protecting Caucasian Americans from "the savage Indian" by giving them the right to murder them if they felt threatened. It's also been pointed out by Daniel Goldhagen and in a recent BBC Documentary that many occupied nations were extremely complicit in the genocide.

For many, though, it's the clinical, industrial efficiency of Auschwitz that makes it so shocking, that so many people could be so cold-blooded as to make murder their 9-to-5 job. Yet in virtually every industrial country today there's a thriving arms industry where people who may appear to be decent fathers and husbands build weapons that kill and maim innocent people around the world.

Many people see the holocaust as an aberation which is why every ten years you get people platitudinously insisting that it must never happen again. Ten years ago this week, the editor off the UCC college mag used this exact same cliche, I mean phrase. If only Slobadon Milosevic, Robert Mugabe, and the junta in Indonesia had read that. If only! Still waiting for the UCC pubs officer (1994-95) to come and sort out those tyrants in whatever way she deemed fit, though.

Yet it should hardly surprise people that as people have been slaughtering each other since time began, that people people would do it in an ordered, efficient way on more than one occasion, or that slavery was used by Europeans so recently. Yet we still utilise slavery, except these days we call it "outsourcing", promtoting such massive population growth in Asia and Latin America that people have to work twelve hours a day to make the basic amount of money to live on.

I see Auschwitz not as an aberation, but as the apex of industrial civilistion. As a vegetarian, I'm aware that the death camps were modeled on Fordist Mass Procution factories, which were in turn modelled on Chicago stock-houses. But when I tried to explain this to my mum, she replied "I know the difference between a cow and a jew. Maybe you don't but I do." Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

Vegetarians are often accused of sanctimony but I'm not going to claim that just because I eat meat that the Holocaust has nothing to do with me. I'm the sort of person who can never stop realising that all the wealth and security that I enjoy, like the computer I'm writing this on right now, are the product of theft and opression. Sitting in a nice, warm library reading the Cambridge History of SouthEast Asia, I learned that when Europeans first arrived in those countries the people were just as well developed as themselves, yet as Europeans gradually took over their countries we became fitter happier and more productive while the exact opposite happened the victims of colonistion.

This is why periodic guilt-fests like the current Holocaust jamboree annoy me. But at least they piss off the holocaust-deniers no end. I've never understood why these people bother. They must imagine that everyone would think those nazis were absolutely spiffing chaps if it wasn't for that awful slaughter-of-six-million business. They cite the "evidence" of people like Fred Leucther, a non-German speaker who went to a gas chamber and said it looked more like a bomb shelter to him, then sent a big chunk of the wall for examintion and when it showed no signs of gas, concluded that there was no holocaust. The thing is, that after 50 years only a minute trace of gas would have been left on the surface of the walls and the fucking idiot crushed a huge chunk of wall into dust before sending it for analysis. That neo-Nazis use the work of such a plonker to justify their arguments shows how weak they are. The funny thing is that many neo-nazis actually call themselves nazis, when "nazi" is a bavarian word roughly equivilant to the Cork term "langer" (according to Micheal Burleigh). So every time someone says they're a nazi, their actually saying that they're a langer.

But I see the second world war like I did the last American election, not as a Manichean struggle between good and evil, but between the greater and the lesser of two evils. In the sixty years the less-evil countries that won the war have, variously, napalmed 5 million people in Asia, started dozens of other proxy wars all over the world, pushed the Earth to the brink of environmental catastrophe, given more money to feed cows at home than starving people abroad, and invented boy-bands. And yet the people they defeated were even worse. So if you call yourself a nazi, I guess the word "langer" is actually a compliment.

Turkey Coming home to Roost?

I had a fairly trippy experience over Christmas, when I was reading Snow by Orhan Pamuk. It's an amazing novel, combining journalistic immediacy with literary grandeour, as if Tolstoy had written War and Peace in 1813, though in many ways it reminded me more of The Plague by Albert Camus, though he can switch effortlessly from existential angst to dark, Murakami-like humour effortlessly.

What made my experience with this book so exceptional was that I turned on my TV about an hour before I finished reading it. My TV doesn't work so well and it takes about an hour to heat up and as I was reading this novel set in Eastern Turkey I gradually started seeing blurry images coming through of the news that Turkey was being accepted for talks to join the EU. It was like I had two different windows into history at once, as if I'd been reading Rousseau or St-Just and next thing I saw live images of Louis XVI getting his head chopped off.

No-one can express the soul-searching going on in Turkey at the moment better than Pamuk. It's country that genuinely doesn't seem to know whether it's future lies with Asia or with Europe, with Islam or with securalism.

When EU leaders agreed to invite Turkey for accesion talks, someone in Copenhagen protested by draping the little mermaid statue in a Burqa. I wonder if our Danish friend was aware of the ironies. It's pretty obvious that The Mermaid legend is just as much about desexualising women as much as the headscarves that women are forced to wear in many Moslem countries. However, Turkey isn't one of those countries. In fact, wearing a headscarf has been banned there for quite some time. In Pamuk's novel, a group of girls in Eastern Turkey rebel against this law and their leader plans to commit suicide in a stage performance. The area has a particularly high suicide rate and the protagonist in the novel is a journalist sent from Istanbul to find out why this is so, but he never quite does.

My issue with Turkey is not that they treat women badly, but that they treat their Kurdish minority badly. One of the reasons that the US and Britain attacked Iraq was that the Baathists had allegedly killed 100,000 kurds in the 80's, mainly with chemical weapons supplied by Britain and the US. Yet they were willing to use Turkey, where at least 30,000 kurds have been killed, as a base for their invasion, citing the enormous strides Turkey had made towards democratisation. When Turkey told Uncle Sam that he wasn't allowed to use their bases, America suddenly changed it's tune, claiming that it wasn't really that democratic, because if it was, their goverment would support the US.

It's a little ironic that the US, many of whose citizens think the EU is the antichrist, is pushing for Turkey to be accepted as a recipient for our kinder, gentler form of imperialism. I'd be a little disturbed if George Bush really thought that people in places like Georgia and Belarus would prefer to have the crap bombed out of them and then have their shattered countries rebuilt by Halliburton than get the massive strucural grants the EU offers, but EU expanision is a form of imperialism nevertheless. One of the funny things about this form of Imperialism is that countries have to change before they are colonised rather than after, which is why headscarves have been banned for a while.

It's also ironic that the most anti-EU nation in the EU is Turkey's biggest chearleader within the Union. It's intriguing that there's a debate within the UK as to whether giving sterling the heave-ho and joining the Eurozone will lead to Britain becoming more social democratic or the continent Thatcherising. I think this debate might be a bit redundant as Gerhard Schroeder has gotten so Thatcherite that I expect him to start growing his hair and quiffing it back and carrying a handbag round the place. The debate on whether letting Turkey into the EU will make Turkey more secular or the EU more Islamic is a bit more pertinant.

Poor Old Europe. It seems so nice in here right now, with our governments exceptionally generous welfare states, our short working hours and many public holidays, we can go anywhere we want in the world and everybody loves us because we're rich and aren't Americans. But our demi-semi-paradise isn't going to last forever, as on either side of us are fundamentalist religous forces bent on imposing their way of life on us, whether it's the dog-eat-dog Calvinist hyper-capitalism of the US or the bleak, life-denying dogma of Islam.

Birth rates are so much higher in the US and the Moslem world that Europe is eventually going to get squeezed. In Europe many women have careers and don't marry that early and use contraception and have smaller families. In moslem countries, they're generally not allowed work so have bigger families. In the US, many are marrying early and having more kids, spurred on by sinster, Republican-funded abstinence programs even though many of them still have to have jobs to make ends meet, and pay someone else to take care of their kids. It's this sucking of every aspect of life into the cash ecomomy that is responsible for Americans economic pre-eminence.

Faced with this problem, it seems the EU's leaders are trying to secularise the Islamic countried on our fringe, not just Turkey but Morocco and Tunisia as well. Apparently, Morocco asked to join the EU a few times but there never seems to be anyone there to return their calls, though if there was, they'd probably say really slowly, that Morocco was in A-fri-ca. It's a pity, because Morocco is probably a more democratic and open society than Turkey. Whether Turkey is a European country or not is a more complex question. Up to the first world war, it was considered part of Europe because it had a big empire like most Western European nations. Two world wars and quite a few world cups later, the definition of being a European nation has changed radically.

Many in the EU, especially France, are sceptical as to whether Turkey really wants to be a tolerant, democratic nation or whether they're just pretending so they can get lots of money out of us. This debate is familiar to many of us in Ireland because we've had to do our own soul-searching over the years about whether we wanted to be an isolationist nation where everybody danced at the crossroads but not to any of that nasty rock'n'roll stuff or an outward-looking, progressive European nation. The difference is that while we were looking inward, to a fantasy, catholicised version of our own past, the conservatives in Turkey have more extreme nations to their East to look to. I think that we realised that the fantasy de Valera was feeding us was just that, whereas the emperor does have some clothes in the fundamentalist muslim nations, and the empress has even more clothes.

There are analogies, though; the irony that a culture that created Sheela-na-gigs becoming a fundamentalist theocracy replicated in the culture that gave the world harems and belly-dancing forcing women to cover up their faces in public.

My own feeling is that while many people in Turkey, especially the west, are willing to sign up to the whole tolerance thing, many in the East and in rural areas would rather die than admit that their narrow world view might not be the only way of looking at things. Then again, while the oracle at Delphi imprecated us to "know thyself", how many of us really do? I'm sure inside every muslim fundamentlist there's someone who'd prefer an iPod (especially one of the ones that plays videos - they are so cool) in this life to the promise of 40 virgins in the next. So in a way Turkey's plight is all of our plight. None of us know for sure whether the scientific view or the religous view of the world is right, and the more people insist they do, the more they reveal their inner doubts.

What? The Land of the Free? Whoever told you that was your enemy!

Since George Bush made his evil second inaugural speech last week, everyone columnist who lives in the reality-based universe has been shaking their fist at it (See Here).

Although I can sense a great deal of anger at his hypocrisy, sanctimony and righteousness, I've yet to come across a piece that can express the bile I feel towards this monster who's undoubtedly the worst thing to happen to the human race since Hitler.

The conventional view on the two figures is that the guy with the moustache was an evil genius while the one who inherited the presidency is a bit of a buffoon, but George Bush, or whoever it was that wrote his speech, knows one thing that slipped Adolf One-Ball by, and that's that if you're trying to take over the world, the very, very last thing you do is tell people this, which the Nazis did in extremely unsubtle ways.

By doing this the Nazis only won a few allies, mostly among countries that had little choice but to support them until they lost the war, like the perverted old Italian man in Catch-22. In contrast, if you tell people that you're on a mission to spread freedom, some leaders of other countries might be gullible enough to believe you.

This is why George Bush mentioned the words "Freedom" and "liberty" so many times in his speech, without ever mentioning any specifics. It's hard for anyone to disagree with the notion that freedom is, generally speaking, a good thing, but it's sickening for anyone who's aware of what an opressive country the United States is in many ways to hear it's leader telling the world he's on a divine mission from God to spread freedom around the world.

According to Dubya, all Americans eventually hear the call of freedom in their soul. This is a good thing for many of them, as the soul is about the only part of their being in which they can enjoy freedom.

Lots of Americans are in jail. Some of them are on death row, many of them in increasingly brutal, privitised boot camps. In fact, at any given time, one out of every 100 Americans is in jail at any given time. For Ireland, the corresponing figure is one out of every thousand. One of the archly ironic things is that it's one of the few unique freedoms that America enjoys, that right to bear arms, that causes crime to be so high. What's even more ironic is that many of those in jail are in there for things that aren't a criminal offence in many European countries, like smoking marajauna. Even more bitterly ironic is that in many states, anyone who's ever been to jail can never vote, a key factor in Dubya's first election win. Many of them are never allowed to leave the state in which they were incarcerated. Of course, you're far more likely to be put in jail if you're a part of an ethnic minority, which is why so people listening to Dubya quoting Lincoln to the effect that those who deny freedom to others do not deserve it for themselves will have been so sickened.

Americans love to boast that there's complete freedom of speech in their country, but this right, allegedly protected by the first amendment, is being increasingly eroded by legislation like the Patriot Act and increasing consolodation of the media. Astonishingly, in the so-called land of the free people have been arrested and put into jail on the mere suspicion that they might be terrorists, and people have been barred from boarding a plane for carrying left-wing books. I hope these people were able to smile when Bush claimed that when the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said, "It rang as if it meant something." In any case, whatever freedoms they do have in this regard are more honoured in the breech than in the observance, as a survey shows that most Americans would rather get their news from TV than from independent media.

I normally put up hyperlinks just to make myself look web-savvy, but that survey from people press is well worth checking out. Flick through it and you'll find out astonishing stuff, like that 15% of Americans don't always have enough money to buy food, and 26% don't always have enough to pay for health care. In the Czech republic, country with around a fifth of the US' GDP per capita, the corresponding figures are 8% and 6% respectively. Even more staggeringly, only about twice as many people in the Ivory Coast, a country wracked by civil war, say they often don't have enough food as Americans. Of course, there's many in America who'll tell you that by protecting us from starvation and disease, European goverments are meddling in the lives of their citizens, and that the fact that more of them are dying of starvation or preventible disease is a sign that their society is more free than ours.

But there's the rub. Freedom means different things to different people. To an American, the right to buy a gun to protect yourself from other people who exercise the same right might be genuinely more valuable to right to smoke Marajauna or have an abortion, a freedom American women are soon going to lose. During the American Civil War, both sides sang a song called Battle Cry of Freedom. The Yanks claimed they were trying to free Negroes from slavery, the rebs to free themselves from a federal government that imposed it's abolitionist laws on them.
Dubya never tires of telling the American people that "Terrorists" hate "freedom" but does he really think that Arabs see it that way, or is he smart enough to realise that many of them see Americans as occupiers in their land and themselves as the forces of liberation? That's what's so scary to the rest of the world about Bush's speech, the idea that they have a monopoly on the definition of freedom, and that many of them genuinely don't appreciate that other nations may not want to have a social system that results in so much excess, inequality and incarceration imposed on it. Trying to downplay the scale of the conflict in Iraq, one fox news reporter pointed out tha the homicide rate in California was higher. To which people might legimately ask, why are the Americans trying to export such a flawed social model, though the only answer they're likely to get is "Shut Up!"

Meanwhile, Cheney and Condoleeza Rice are busy filling the rest of the world in on the specifics of Bush's policy. It's hard to argue with Rice when she claims that the Burmese government aren't so nice, but where is the criticism of places like Uzbekistan, where around 30,000 people have been brutally murdered? It's possible that when America no longer needs that country's bases to attack Iran and Iraq, they'll become part of the Axis of evil as well.

Cheney, as is his forte, has been coming out with more scaremongering. Apparently he's been lecturing European leaders on the danger from Iran. Apparently we don't understand these dangers ourselves, as Europe has never been attacked by anyone from Asia in the course of it;s history. Cheney says that Europeans tell him that Russia was pointing nuclear warheads at them for forty years and we're all still here to tell the tale, but he insists that Iran is different.

Of course it is, as Russians are people with low pigmentation who practice a form of Christianity, while Iranians are hot-headed, dark-skinned people who're willing to attack countries with independent nuclear deterrents at the possible risk of annhilation.

I wish there was a European leader brave enough to ask Cheney to his face what a fat, bald Wyoming hick is doing lecturing Europeans on their security, especially when his information on Iraq was so blatantly false. He has his work cut out, though. Scaring Americans is like shooting fish in a barrel, as fear was the thing that led many of their ancestors to leave for America in the first place, and scaredy-cat genes have been reinforced and strengthened over the generations. Even the religous people there describe themselves as being "god-fearing", which is fair enough, I'd be fairly shit-scared of any transcendental deity that would do something like that tsunami as well.

We're not that easily scared over here, knowing that if there was an attack of 9/11 magnitude in Europe, our chances of being killed would be infintissimal. In any case, Europe has had enough real theaths to it's peace and security to know the difference between danger and irrational fear-mongering. And to paraphrase Rosie O' Donell, I may not know that much about Cheney, but as A European, I know he's lying.

One final statistic from that survey which really astonished me. One freedom Americans really do have more than most countries is the freedom to borrow money to invest, which is why they lead the worlds of music and movies. Yet it seems other nations enjoy the fruits of this freedom more. Asked if they enjoyed American movies and TV, as much as 80% of people in various countries in Europe, Asia and Africa said they did. In America the figure was a mere 48%. 37% said they didnt, a little lower than the figure that said they were concerned with "moral values". How many of these people want more censorship? Quite a few, I'd wager. And yet Dubya wants us to believe that all Americans are bound in Unity and Frienship

The adventures of Red Ahern in Red China

About a year and a half ago I came across this book called Who will Feed China? in a second-hand bookstore in Kathmandhu. Though I'd heard of it before, I looked up some reviews on Amazon, which kind of gave away the ending. This is often the case with non-fiction books, when I was a second-year history student I came across this fresher reading The Origins of the Second World War by AJP Taylor and I snuck up behind him and said "Guess what happens at the End? Germany invades Poland!" but he didn't seem remotely fazed.

The author of this book, who'd obviously done a lot of research into the subject, didn't know any better than I where China's growing, urbanising, westernising population were going to get the meat or the grain to feed their animals. The book was a wake-up call to the dangers of exporting the Western way of life to Asia, though the people who run the IMF and the World bank still seem asleep to me.

Since this book was written in the mid-nineties China has grown exponentially, in almost every sense of the term. Their appetite for grain and oil has grown, their skylines have grown, their waistlines have grown. Most of all, their economy has grown, so much so that at least in part, the answer to the question posed by that book is, um, us.

Bertie Ahern has been in China trying to drum up some business for the Irish economy. China is doing so well that soon there might be an Irishtown in Shanghai with an arch with Celtic Crosses and Sheela-na-gigs.

It's apposite in some ways that Bertie is doing business with the Chinese. Both Ireland and China are ancient civilisations that more recently have been victims of imperialism and then some disasterous, self-imposed socio-economic systems. Now we're both "Tiger" economies, though of course in China they actually do have some real, honest-to-god tigers.

Bertie is doing a little better than George Bush Senior in his efforts to drum up business in East Asia, which is to say he hasn't thrown up on anyone yet. That's a little surprising, because it appears that they have much stronger to stomachs than us. Apparantly we don't eat offal in this country, which leads me to wonder if Bertie has been in the English Market in Cork any time lately. Those Chinese can't get enough of it, though, so we're going to be sending bucket loads of the stuff over there.

Ah, yes, the noble Irish tradition of feeding tyranous regimes. We fed Sadamm Hussein's soldiers at the same time they were gassing the Kurds, now we're going to be feeding the Chinese army who've been occupying Tibet for the last 50 years. It's a pretty safe bet that Bertie hasn't used the T-word in his time as a guest of the Chinese government. Tibet is a sort of cause celebre for hippy types like myself, who walked way up into the mountains outside Darjeeling to visit a refugee sanctuary for those lucky enough to have escaped the Chinese jackboot. I bought a big, colourful, wooly jacket, which I still have and, oddly enough, has turned out to be a total babe magnet. I think of it as positive karma. I saw an old woman knitting something similar on an old hand loom, she tols me that she fled Tibet in 1959 and will neve be able to go back.

But she's one of the lucky ones. Those ethnic Tibetans that remain face gradual ethnic cleansing as Chinese move into their land and do what they do best - breeding. Many try to flee to India where they can practice their religion in peace, though an awful lot of them get stuck in a Nepalese limbo.

None of this is going to bother the likes of Michael McDowell. His heart was bleeding on Monday for the victims of IRA crimes, but he's able to overlook the destruction of monasteries, slaughter of innoncent men, women and animals as long as we can send the Chinese some pigs bellies and make ourselves some more money and buy bigger houses and SUVs.

He's not going to worry about the environmental impact of importing grain and soya from Latin America, force-feeding it to pigs and then sending their innards all the way to China. The minds of those of us who worry about the future of the planet boggle at this profligacy, though I'm unsure whether all the oil consumed in this process count towards the nations CO2 emissions.

Complying with Kyoto has never been a priority for our government, though, when it was revealed that we were 3rd worst nation in the EU for doing so, Fatty Harney told the EU that they could ram that fucking Kyoto accord up their asses (I'm paraphasing slightly)

The best thing to do for the people of Tibet is to boycott Chinese products, which is incredibly hard as almost every manufacturing concern has outsourced there. I'd like best if our athletes organised their own boycott of the next olympics. After all, we never win anything, and China has a bitter history of Westerners bringing drugs over there.

It's all a bunch of Bush-huggin crap, godammit!

When South Park came out first, I was a big fan. It seemed like a quantam leap in terms of what broadcasters could get away with, something that even people who'd been brought up on stuff like the Simpsons might shirk at.

It seemed like few people could watch it who'd been born more than 30 years before, whereas the appeal of the Simpsons and King of the Hill was more universal. I liked the fact that I was still young enough to get the jokes and not be offended. For a while there at the turn of the last century I was doing more Cartman impressions than I was making Simpsons references.

But somewhere along the way my entusiasm waned. I noticed that episodes didn't stand up to repeated viewings the way Simpsons episodes did. After the initial shock value dissapted, it seemed there wasn't much to laugh at. These days, while I still wait eagerly for every Simpsons episode, I only casually watch South Park when channel-surfing.

Nevertheless, I caught up with the South Park teams latest cinematic offering, Team America: World Police, the other day. I figured I had little to lose, apart from an hour and a half of my time and €5. It got reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, but what made me want to see it was that either Parker or Stone had said that he found it was easiest to satirist the extremists on both sides. One of the things I used to love about their show was that they showed no-one any mercy. It's easy to offend the religous right in America, and to be fair, a lot of people here found the Uncle-Fucker song a tad risquee as well. Offending the left takes a bit more effort, as we're generally open-minded sorts who belief in freedom of speech, but that time they went to the Amazonian rainforest and Stan and Kyle concluded that biodiversity wasn't worth saving did rankle a bit.

But usually the Colorado setting of the show made it perfectly placed to satarise the growing split between left and right in the contemporary US. As I found out from reading Fast Food Nation, Colorado is a state that used to be populated largely by alternative types in towns like Boulder but is experiencing an influx of Right-Wing suburbanites fleeing the growing multiculturalism of places like Orange County. In the TV show they were just as good at portraying the right, in the shape of the two hunters who'd been to the 'Nam and one of whom needed a voice-box, as the left, in the shape of the politically correct mayor.

Post-9-11, this seemed to change. The attacks on what they percieved as PC intensified while the right seemed to get an easier ride.
In an episode dealing with protests against the Iraq war, Cartman ended up concluding that America could accomodate both shades of opinion, which was fair enough, but that the Hippy, Rock-music loving protestors needed the red-meat-eating, fox-news-watching country music fans to protect them from "terrorists... or China". I thought this was really irresponsible as I would have thought that the authors would have known better than to suppose that the war in Iraq had anything to do with terrorism. It made me think differently about how they'd portrayed Sadamm Hussein in the past, especially in the first big-screen movie. I thought when I first saw it that they were satirising America's demonisation of the Iraqi dictator by comically exagerating how evil he was, the man who wore the pants in a gay relationship with Satan. I began to think, to my horror, that they'd been helping to soften up America for an attack on Iraq all the time.

Still, I was willing to give the new movie a chance, especially after promises that the extremists on both sides would be satirised. I don't take the Manichean view that seems to have taken hold of much of the world at the moment, and I'm of the opinion that a war can be between two sets of bad guys. I really don't thinkl the Christian Right in the US are that much better than the people that they wage war against. Their "moral values" seem incredibly twisted to me, a person that thinks attacking a country with the loss of 100,000 lives is worse than having two men who love each other get married. I was looking forward to having them have the piss taken out of them.

Some people are fed up with Bush-bashing, not even opening the latest email attatchment that portrays Dubya as a monkey. Me, the first thing I do when I open the paper is look for an article that tells me the latest thing that his gang of thugs and idelogues have done to the planet so I get can indignant and thankful that I don't live in the US.

Unfortunately, Team America did nothing to satiate my addiction for anti-GOP invective. Despite the promise that they were going to satirise the extremists, it was actually the moderates in the US that took the brunt of their humour. An inordinate chunk of the movie was spent taking the piss out of supposedly self-regarding Hollywood stars who opposed the war. What sort of intellectual gymastics allow Parker and Stone to regard anti-war Americans as "Extremists"? They're clearly not in favour of a victory for Islam in the supposed Clash of Civilisations, and their opposition to the war is based, at least I'd hope, on a knowledge that the Iraqi war had nothing to do with the war on terror. But by muddying the waters and implying pretty clearly that the people who opposed the Iraq war were on the side of the terrorists, the makers of this movie show that their sympathies are actually with the extremists on the American side. As if to ram the point home (as it were) there's a speech at the end where where they use the sort of language that may shock some readers where they actually state fairly transparently, that while the Good Guys may do damage they're still the good guys. The opening scene where the terrorists are foiled only at the expense of knocking the Eiffel Tower into the Arch de Triomphe seemed a lot less funny after that.

In another scene Alec Baldwin is seen at a loss for words and just blurts out "Corporations... global warming..." How ironic is that? It's the Bush admistration that's been ramming home the same vapid soundbites about the war on terror and the fight for freedom for the last three years, while people like Baldwin have tried to open up a debate, however egregiously, about the Bush admistrations real motives for the war.

To top it all, one of the opening scenes is in a Broadway theatre where the play is about AIDS, which panders to the predjudices of Red-Staters about both the the city of New York and the acting proffesion and their association with the mythical "liberal elite"

On the other hand, there were no caricatures of George Bush and the people around him, all of which should be ripe for satire. Also, the events that took place in Abu Gharib were too ghastly for the sensitive souls who weren't afraid to get some cheap laughs by showing some puppets butt-fucking.

I'm aware that America is a big country with more shades of opinion than the simple red/blue dichotomy might suggest. I know that the republicans draw their support from a wide coalition, many of whom might have been genuinely offended by this film. But Parker and Stone are clearly on their side. I want my €5 back.

Republic of Britain?

It seems the British Tabloids have found yet another subject to get themselves into a tizzy about, and I'm not talking about the "15p a pint" headline that almost got squeezed out of the People on Sunday by the appositely monikered Abi Titmuss.

No, it seems that they're all shocked that a member of the Royal family, who aren't allowed marry Catholics, let alone Jews, was photographed wearing a Nazi Uniform.

From my republican perspective I can't see what all the fuss is about. He comes from a family of Germans who dress up in silly costumes several times a year to show how much better they are than anyone else, so he must be wondering the same thing.

Every columnist has their given their two cents about why Prince Harry acted the way he did. I remember a few years ago a poncey English guy came on to the Late Late Show and blamed the Royal Family's decline on the fact that they started marrying "commoners" a few years ago. So it's all his mum's fault, the same Diana that campaigned for land mines to be abolished, it would seem.

Others claim that he was acting the role that all offspring of leaders act and that he was drinking from the same bowl as the likes of Euan Blair and the Bush twins, who, even though their dad is no great Intellect, know better than to wear the insignia of a regime that invaded many countries, stole their resourses and tortured the locals.

Others say that it's because his mother died when he was young and that his father doesnt spend enough time with him, though I don't suppose Big Ears will getting any visits from the social services soon.

Me, I blame the crowd he hangs out with. Anyone that starts a party with a "Natives and Colonials" theme is eithercompletely out of touch with the times or else of the conviction that the rules don't apply to people of their caste, or a combination of both. So it's hardly surprsising that one of them would wear an insignia of an 80-year-old foreign group who believed they were the master race.

The curious thing about the British class system is that not only do English people think they're better than anyone else, the upper classes think that they're better than the working and trading classes as well. Watching the early episodes of Seven-Up, which examined people from different social strata at seven-year intervals, you get a chilling sense of the superioity complex they have, as one of them, all of seven years old, starts ordering a working class kid around. It's unclear whether he acts this way because he's been taught to do so or whether he just has an innate sense of superiority.

It's curious, too, that when the Germans were trying to take over the world, they had to keep telling their population that they were better than anyone else, whereas in the days of the British Empire the ruling classes would already have been preaching to the converted.
It's no secret that the Nazis were actually big fans of the British aristocracy, that concentration camps were invented during the Boer war by the British, that the Germans wanted to train a group of James Bond-like spies modelled on MI5 because the English "had such a long history of being a master race"

It's also true that while 6 million Jews were being gassed, in India, of which Harry's grandfather was Emperor, four million Bengalis were deliberately srarved while Churchill kept their grain impounded.

Yet people are shocked to see him wear the Nazi armband. It's shocking to me that the Germans would have felt the need to appropriate an image that comes from Hinduism, (which is a bit of a shock to the many Israeli tourists who visit India's inexpensive shores today) when their own history was so filled with icons.

On the other hand, most of Britains' symbols were imported from somewhere else. St. George was originally from Catalonia, St. Andrew from Israel. The Prince of Wales' motto is Czech. Their religion is a German version of a Roman version of a middle Eastern religion. Lions aren't indiginous to Britain either. So it doesn't come as that much of a surprise to me that one of their royal family should appropriate an image from his German cousins.

Still, they feel they need to discipline him, and he's going to have some sensitivity training from the chief Rabbi. Hopefully he can introduce him to some nice Jewish girls so he can see what a loss Austwich was to humanity, though if he brought one home people would see that his act wasn't all that out of character for the royal family.

Then he's going to have a spell in the Army. Well, that certainly sorted Hitler out. He was wearing Nazi armands and making anti-semitic remarks with total impunity until he signed up for the Austrian army in 1914, and they weren't long beating it out of him. This is the same British army of course, which executed hundreds of Irish soldiers who naively thought that by fighting for the colonial overlord they might get some sort of autonomy.

Harry's misemenour can only be good for the burgeoning republican movement in Britain. Hardly anybody there is going to want the eightieth aniversary of Austwich to be presided over by this obnoxious little prick. I'm all for a Republic of Britain, which would pull the carpet from under the Ulster Unionists and hopefully the money saved could be sent to people who really need it instead of spoilt brats like Harry.

Britain only changes really slowly, though, but the trend in the media is away from gossip about the royals to people that the public can relate to. The end of the aristocratic sport of fox-hunting is another welcome development. Yet the sad fact is that many of the wealthiest young people in the country are old money. Until this changes, then many young aristos will naturally feel that they're better than anyone else.

Kill all SUV owners

A documentary on Channel Four the Other day achieved the rare feat of making me hate SUV owners even more than I did before.

What would Jesus drive? was largely preaching to the converted, in my case at least. I've always regarded people who own these monster cars as greedy, selfish, sociopaths who're either ignorant of the impact their cars have on the environment or just basically don't care about anyone besides themselves and their immediate families.

But some of the things I saw in this programme made my jaw drop. One family in Huntingdon Beach, CA, told the camera without a trace of irony that they collect cars the way some people collect stray animals because they're "inexpensive and fun"
I want to kill this person, slowly and painfully. First of all, I want to see all his cars crushed and then converted into tractors for hungry communities in Africa.
When you see people like this, you're reminded of Theodore Adorno's comment about the banality of evil. He didn't come across as being a malovent person, yet he ought to be aware of the destruction that his lifestyle wreaks on the planet and many of those people who're misforunate enough to live in countries that have more oil than they can use. And he's got to be aware that most people in the world can't afford a bicycle, let alone a car.

But he wasn't the person that I hated the most. At a motor industry event in Anaheim where they were selling Hummers that get 11 miles to the gallon, one cunt told that camera that he wanted George Bush to get his act together. I couldn't have agreed more, until he said "We own Iraq, and Oil is $50 a gallon?"
I'm going to let his failure to comprehend the subtleties of imperial conquest pass. The important thing is that he seems to know that Bush invaded Iraq to secure it's supply of cheap oil, and that he actually wanted 100,000 people to die so he could drive a bigger and more dangerous car. What sort of people think like this? The sad answer would appear to be Americans.

One smugly asserted that when the California Earthquake strikes, SUV drivers will survive while all the people in "Little Cars" will be killed.

Another was trying to convince us that Global warming would be a good thing, leading to an increase in foliage. Even if the specious, oil-industry-sponsered "Science" behind this assertion were true, the sad fact is that oil is going to run out in fifty years time and then we'll be reliant on bio-fuel, which means more rainforest depletion.

It's not all bad news, though. A series of ads has been shown across the US informing people of the consequences of their choice of motor. Others are taking a more direct approach, spraypainting and even firebombing 4x4s and painting messages like "One more Dead Iraqi" on SUV owners driveways. We need more commendable, civic-minded behaviour like this. If it's justifiable to attack Iraq on a mere suspicion, it's right to attack SUVs when it's demonstrable that they're expediting the end of the world as we know it.

The easiest and most risk-free way to vandalise an SUV is to scratch it with a key, though this usually backfires as it leads to more spraypainting and concomitant environmental damage.

Or you could download some fake parking tickets from www.wastemonsters.co.uk. They're configured for certain central London areas but if you're good with computers (I'm Not) you may be able to redesign them. Put them on as many SUVs as you can, just don't get caught.

Alexander the not-so-bad

Oliver Stone's latest movie didn't go down too well with the critics in the US. It's funny how they seem to achieve so much unanimity when their all the sort of independent minded free thinkers that become employed as film critics by quality newspapers. (Here's an article that suggests why this may be so.)

Culture is dissiminated around the world a little quicker than it was in Alexander's
day, but I just got to test my own reaction against those of the American elite yesterday.
Among the biggest bones of contention are Colin Farrell's hair, and, disturbingly, his Irish accent. I can't even be arsed, as we say here, finding out if the same critic criticised Brad Pitt for not talking in a Greek accent in Troy, but I'm suspecting that this wasn't the case. It seems this last reviewer missed the whole point that the Macedonians were outsiders within Greek society and that the accents of the mainly Irish cast sybolise this. I notice that they weren't afraid to go to Morocco to make this movie like Pitt & co. were, but then there've been so many bombings on our island that we all have immunity, so why would we be worried about Al-Queda?

Which brings me to my main gripe about the critics response to the movie. It's alarming to me that only one of the reviews I came across interpreted the film as an allegory about modern America, and even then he didn't mean it as a compliment.
Yet this movie is as cogent a warning about the dangers of imperial overstretch and the sort of hubris that's gripping the American Right as is likely to be made in America in the current climate.

I noticed one poll conducted among people in EU nations about their opinions on the US war in Iraq. The country that was most opposed to the war was not France or Germany, who both know a bit about the dangers of imperialism, but Greece, who know from way, way back that trying to conquer Central Asia is a troublesome business. Many have tried, even before they found a use for the slimy black stuff under it's sand, recognising it as the gateway to the riches of India, China, and South-East Asia.

It's fascinating to watch the young Alexander being brought up to believe that his people are inherently better that anyone else, much as American children are today by being forced to recite an oath of allegience every day. The paradoxical thing was that back then, it was the Europeans who saw the Arabs as being licentuous and ill-disicplined, whereas now it's the other way around. It's ironic how Alexander was able to defeat a much larger army with little more than a zealous belief in his own destiny with little more than the sort of swivel-eyed fanaticism that characterised the crusaders a millenium and a half later, and Some Arab terrorists today.
And how did all those critics not notice that Alexander repeatedly insists that he's trying to spread freedom, when it's more than obvious that he wants to plunder the wealth of what the narrator Ptolemy calls "occupied territories" (!) and convert them to his way of life?

A lot of the criticism that the movie has solicited concentrates on the influence of Alexander's family on his life. Perhaps it's apposite that this film was made when America was led by a man who spent $200 billion of the country's money trying to catch the man who killed his wimpish dad. More than once in the film Alexander is told that he was not fulfilling his father's will, just as George W Bush did the opposite of what his father recommended in a 1995 book.
That this movie bombed at the box office is hardly an indication that Americans don't want to be warned about the dangers of imperialism, after all, Fahrenheit 9/11 was a smash. It's surely not that the allegory was too subltle, after all this is Oliver Stone we're talking about here. I'd hate if audiences spurned the movie just because the critics told them to, when one of their main complaints was how long the movie was, after all, if you pay 8 0r 9 bucks, you want to get your money's worth.

The movie isn't without faults, particularly when Ptolemy, played by Anthony Hopkins, skates through a large part of Alexander's early career. It's hard to disagree with the critics who accuse Angelina Jolie of camping it up and not aging until the very end. Stone doesn't do anything original with the battle scenes, keeping to the old Alexander Nevsky template. Actually, the whole movie is a traditional hollywood sword-and-sandal epic in many ways, though there are some neat Oliver Stone touches, like when he juxtaposes scenes from Greek myth with events in Alexander's life. It's a shame that he feels the need to give us a course in Greek Mythology 101 when so many of their archtypes are still our archetypes, but then this film was aimed at the multiplex.

Some critics criticise Stone for skirting around (as it were) the issue of bisexuality. Oh, please, give the guy a break. You know he couldn't risk either alienating the American right or the Greeks who still haven't come to terms with the fact that one of their heroes may have occasionally attacked via the rear passage.

Perhaps it's that I was so mesmerised by Stone's work as a teenager that I'm always going to be loyal to him, so maybe all the critics are right and I'm wrong. That he's been able to make counter-establishment movies for so long is an indication that the freedom which the US boasts about isn't completely non-existant. It's my hope that America will eventually realise the folly of it's current policy in the middle east and that this movie will be seen, like High Noon, as a brilliant historical allegory

Apres le deluge, Ou est-que Dieu?

In my predictions for this year, I migh have said some facetious things about the Tsunami disaster in South-East Asia and the responses of some western governments.
I really didn't think that the US were going to try to pin the blame on Iran, though they had just as much to do with it as Sadamm did with 9/11.
The truth is that the US government has pledged $350,000,000; an increase on it's original pledge of $10,000,000, which sounds like a lot until you realise that they've already spent $200,000,000,000 on the war in Iraq, though they claim, after finding no WMD that the war was for huminatarian reasons.
George Monbiot has already pointed out how hypocritical this is. John Pilger has had his two cents as well

Meanwhile people of various faiths are grappling with the question of how an Omnipotent God would allow such a thing to happen with various degrees of intellect and logic. See here,
here , here , and here.
One woman on Sky News argued that we shouldn't blame the big man upstairs for this as we don't blame him when something wonderful happens (sic).
It's hard to muster up any contempt for a woman who can't formulate a coherent sentence or and has probably never had an orgasam (think about it) but she does represent the views of a large number of people.

I think she was probably an Anglican, which I've always thought of as a form of bet-hedging rather than a faith. One Church of Ireland minister in Today's Irish Times argued that God didn't have anything to do with the Tsunami but had everything to do with the relief efforts, which is a totally anglican way of looking at it.It's nice to know that when I donated money to world vision and all those collection boxes around town I wasn't acting of my own free will but being pushed to do it by the same deity who allowed the earthquake to happen in the first place.

The response by Muslims is a bit more sinister. Again on Sky News, a young boy of about 15 years from Aceh thought that Allah was punishing Muslims for not being fanatical enough, which only made me wish that an Earthquake had hit Mohammad when he was counting how many odours women have. Then in Today's Times, a Muslim cleric says that it's not for us to question the ways of God, which again is just what you'd expect him to say.

On the other hand, I saw a Businessman in Sri lanka, who'd be either Hindu or Buddhist, taking a more philosphical view and saying that though all his shops were destroyed he still had his health.

What this seems to demonstrate is that the debate about where God is after this disaster takes place mainly in newspapers and on the net and not so much in the minds of believers, who're all able to rationalise this to fit whatever beliefs they have.

Religous people are pretty good at rationalising stuff. In the Bible the plagues that hit Egypt are a punishment for the shitty way they treated the Jews, whose bad fortunes are always a test of faith. It's depressing to me that this sort of thing still goes on when we have such a better understanding of how the Earth works. The best thing that could have come out of this tragedy is a weakening of Religous fundamentalism in The US and the Muslim World, but I don't think this is going to happen. When a big Earthquake hit Lisbon in 1755, it accentuated a trend towards secular humanism that led to the enlightement and the French and American Republics. Today the trend is away from secularism and towards fundamentalism, and I'm afraid the Tsunami isn't going to have mcuh effect on this.

I'm a bit annoyed that some people are pointing out that people need things to believe in, as if secularists believed in nothing. We believe in reason, in understanding, in tolerance and in respect for the environment, when the only thing many religous people believe in is how much better they are than people who don't believe the same things as themselves.

I'm also annoyed to hear tourists described as "modern rapists of Paradise" as this tars babckpackers like myself with the sort of people who stay in $1000 a night hotels with air-con and swimming pools. When I went travelling I stayed in the most basic accomadation and went trekking in nature parks and snorkelling, all of which provide the locals with an incentive to maintain the existing ecosystems, which are under threat from farming and fishing. This is the case because so many people have been kicked off their land to make way for industrialised agriculture, which feeds the West's (and China's) insatiable desire for meat products. In Asia, as in Latin America, it's the likes of McDonalds that are responsible for the destuction of paradise. But I don't expect to hear any clerics pointing the finger at them

Steal a little and they put you in Jail, steal a lot and they make you King

It seems the peace process has broke down in the North again. You can tell from all the bluster in the Sunday Independent and it's ilk. When the peace process used to break down during the Balkans wars in the 90's people would start to get killed again, but in Ulster it seems that they just fire even more obnoxious insults at each other.
In fairness, the IRA have really pushed the envelope this time. All those bombings were one thing, but robbing a bank? There's no excuse for that sort of thing, after all it's not like banks ever rob us, is it?
Robbing a British Bank of British banknotes isn't going to win them any friends in Westminister or among the loyalist community, but my suspicion is that if they were to do something similar down here, robbing banknotes from the AIB and selling them back to people on the street at a knock-down price then it would actually win them votes. Of course, we use the Euro down here, so the governent wouldn't be able to put them out of commision.
It's unlikely to lose them any votes up north either, though there's the slight catch that the votes are for a non-executive assembly which won't have any power unless they give up all criminal activity.
Sinn Fein's denials of involvement in this incident strike me as being a bit half-hearted. It's obvious that everyone of a criminal bent up there is involved with some sort of parimilitary organisation and that the loyalists hardly have the requisite grey matter to pull off something as intricate and complex as a bank raid. On the other hand, there are plenty of people in the province with an interest in keeping the conflict going who all know that the provos credibility is at an all time low after the Columbia debacle.
It seems though, that they don't seem to care all that much about how much they've alienated the British goverment as they know that nationalists will be the majority within 15-20 years anyway and that the last straw holding the ill-concieved Ulster statelet will fall apart as this becomes more apparent. Down here, though, it will only increase the outlaw chic which draws a lot of their support.
Micheal McDowell, the man who insisted on the clause about "criminality" must be wondering why he didnt get the same sort of bounce in the polls when it was revealed that he was up to no good when building a new house. Then again, it seems mildly hypocritical for him to criticise Sinn Fein for involvement with criminals when he's been breaking the law himself.
But where would democracy be if any political party which was involved with criminals wasn't allowed participate in the democratic process? Fianna Fail have been involved with dodgy property developers who've robbed far more from the Irish exchequer than the IRA did from that Belfast bank, but you don't see Michael McDowell calling for their heads. Over in Britain, many of the Tories will still hunt in defiance of the Ban, but their party will still be allowed to oppose Tony Blair's goverment after the next election. Blair himself supported the miner's strike, which was technically illegal, in the 80's, and since he's changed sides, has supported an illegal war in which the death toll for the Northern conflict has been dwarved many times. Yet he remains Prime Minister. Only in Northern Ireland, it seems, are parties which have criminal associations barred from holding office.
At least for the meantime.

Where's me Serpent?

Our uneleceted President came down to open the festival, as promised.
She told us that our enemies had been vanquished, and that everyone would get a new donkey this Christmas, our something along those general lines.
The Exile John Creedon returned from his sojourn abroad to preside over the festivities.
The fireworks went off, and we were all impressed by the bright lights. We pushed up against the barriers to get the best view.
But... where was the serpent?
All the buzz about in the weeks leading up to the opening of the Cork 2005, City of Culture thing that you may have heard of, promised us a big serpent leaping out of the River Lee. Instead all we got was some tail-like things sticking out of the river and shooting off more fireworks.
Peasants like myself who aren't involved with the Cork 2005 organising commitee are always impressed by bright lights and that sort of thing as we don't have any televisions or computers in our houses and therefore lead very dull lives. But, heck, we were promised a serpent, and I expected one to come splashing out of the river, fire blowing from it's eyes and venom rasping from it's tongue, and this is all I got.
I couldn't be arsed getting up on new years day to aquire a ticket so I ended up buying one on the street. €3 was the price I was quoted but he didnt have the right change so just handed me a big handful of coins. So I paid the best part of a fiver to see a serpent, and this was all I got. I must say I'm really disenchanted.
It's a genuine pity, because there really was a good buzz around town for the rest of the day, with more musicians and performance artists than you could shake a stick at, and there was a genuine carnival athmosphere. It's a shame that at the end, the "organisers" felt they had to herd us all behind barriers so we could see this horribly anti-climatic finale.
It's hardly surprising, given the attitude the "organisers" seem to have, which is that the people of Cork have little capacity for producing anything of value themselves and have so little appetite for high culture that they need to put on some fireworks to keep us amused.
Take a look at their website and all you'll see is links to their corporate sponsers and no potential for interactivity.
On the other hand, go onto Mick Hannigan's alternative Where's Me Culture site and see the buzz being generated, with all sorts of wierd and wonderful ideas being put forth. (one of them is mine. Can you guess which?)
Having been to their opening party in the mardyke which was generated by people from Cork for people from Cork, I'm going to be investing alot more faith in this than in the official Cork 2005 organisation.