Targeted killings

Random assassination is horrible wherever it happens, Woolwich or Waziristan, Boston or Baghdad, Oslo or Islamabad. But the sympathy of Westerners seems to be reserved for cases where the victims live in countries like our own. With the development of targeted assassination as a substitute for classical warfare we have entered a new era. One tragic result is that the very people who have the authority in their communities to put an end to violence are often those who are killed, for example Sheikh Yasin the blind and quadriplegic leader of Hamas, blown up in his wheelchair; he was on good terms with some rabbis, whose religion resembled his. At the moment most of the killing is by American drones or Israeli helicopters, and most of the victims are Muslims, but it won't stop there. The victims or their supporters are going to seek more and more opportunities for revenge in a tit-for-tat sequence with no foreseeable end. Sooner or later there will have to be some sort of agreement between all the states that have sponsored such assassinations: 'we shall stop killing your people if you will stop killing ours'.

Blogger's Blues: Cheer from Zarathustra.

Oh dear! I haven't blogged for more than 5 weeks. Since Obama's failure to say or do anything useful during his visit to Israel-Palestine, and with the continuing sectarian violence in Syria and elsewhere, I have been unable to think of anything positive to say. I need to remind myself by reading great Jewish writers that Judaism was at the origin of many of the greatest civilized virtues. Lately, though, I have been re-reading Zarathustra (not Nietzsche's fiction, but) the extraordinary Iranian who was the source of most of the values of post-Biblical Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Writing more than 3000 years ago, he rejected the old religion of caste, warring gods, animal sacrifice and shamanistic ritual. His Gathas (hymns) praise Lofty Wisdom, Ahura Mazda, origin of the world and source of the virtues of Justice, Integrity, Devotion, Good Government, Truth, Endurance and Human Wisdom. Ahura ('Lord') is masculine and Mazda is feminine, so there is not the skewed vision that comes of having a god who is a 'He'. Despite millennia of wars between the Persian and Greco-Roman empires, and later between Muslims and Christian powers, Zarathustra's ideas were carried all around the world by the daughter religions. I am not so keen on some of his other ideas - the Devil, the End Times, the Last Judgement, Hell and Paradise. It is interesting that later Zoroastrians believed that a Saviour would be born of a virgin, impregnated with the sperm of Zarathustra as she bathes in Lake Hamun, into which the Helmand River empties itself. Perhaps there is a virgin in the British Army who will come back pregnant from a swim in that lake before the troops are brought home. But it would be better if the British stopped thinking they can save the world.

Three strikes and you're in?

Our incompetent Coalition Government has just had three strokes of luck in a week to cover up their unpopularity. First North Korea goes mad, threatening to blow up the world, which enables David Cameron to claim that we need to be able to make the same threat with our Polaris-Trident bombs. Then the verdict on the abominable Philpott, father of 17 children, of whom he kills six, calls attention to the fact that a few freaks are able to use benefits to raise families in double figures, which allows our dear leaders to imply that most receivers of benefit are skivers and scroungers. And now the death of Baronness T. has brought an opportunity for days of televised hymn singing in praise of her and her legacy. Well, she herself said that her greatest creation was the Right Dishonourable Blair's New Labour, so we really are boxed in. It is still a mystery how she was able to take economics back to the 1800s. I suppose it is because she preached a simple faith - so simple that anybody can repeat the creed. How do we persuade people that a complicated world needs complex solutions to its problems? Anyway, the immediate gripe is that taxpayers are to pay part of the £8 million cost of her funeral. Her son, now Baron Thatcher, should be made to pay the lot. He is a multimillionaire, probably through dodgy arms deals with the Saudis and others, which he was able to make thanks to who his mother was.

Academia

Very odd! I keep getting messages telling me how many people have viewed my page on academia.edu. It is news to me that I have such a page, never having set one up nor authorized anybody else to do so. I get the impression it is yet another of these self-feeding websites like Linkedin whose ambition is to gobble up the world. Anyway, any visitors to my page will be disappointed to find that I have not published anything remotely academic for years. My next paper is not due out for another 9 months, and I don't expect any interest outside the little world of Mid-Victorian studies. I doubt very much whether academe in general is going to find out much to solve the world's problems, now that most research is paid for by big corporations, which do their best to control what gets published. For anybody who has not yet read Ben Goldacre's 'Bad Pharma' I recommend it strongly as an account of how medical research - and practice - have been taken over by private interests: not a good omen for the British National Health Service under its new management!

Who will lead?

Where are the great religious leaders? We have the absurd spectacle of Christians fighting each other over all things sexual, Muslims killing each other over a quarrel that should never have arisen 13 and 1/2 centuries ago, rabbis for Zionism and rabbis against Zionism, Hindutva leaders preaching Hindu 'fundamentalism', Buddhist monks fighting over which lama is the right one... Well, I suppose the Buddhists come out best with their Dalai Lama, and perhaps the new Pope will untie some sexual knots (but I doubt it). Is it because all the brightest people have been repelled by these petty conflicts and devoted themselves to the sciences? I see no necessary contradiction between the scientific approach and the true foundations of religion; science is about what you can observe from outside and religion should be about what you see from within. Perhaps the problem is with the business of leadership; people expect a leader to tell them what to think or do, when what is needed is leaders who will ask people to see for themselves. I am reading How to Live: a Life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell - a wonderful book - and it has made me want to read 'On Voluntary Servitude' by his friend La Boétie, which is about people's insane readiness to be led by fools.

Apartheid in Israel-Palestine

It would have been better for me if I had never studied Arabic and Hebrew. What a miserable part of the world! I stupidly hoped Obama would try to do something, but he just made empty speeches - all he's good at. He still imagines a viable 2-state solution is possible with half a million extremist Zionist settlers on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. He seems no more concerned with international law than his predecessors. And the Arabic-speaking states are not helping themselves by resurrecting the millennial quarrel between Sunni and Shia. Don't watch this space; nothing good is coming. What a contrast with Harold Macmillan! As British Prime Minister he went to South Africa and told its Parliament on 3rd February 1960:'The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.' It was the beginning of the end for Apartheid there, though Maggie Thatcher did her best to protect the old regime, calling Mandela a terrorist. Now we have apartheid in Israel and its occupied territories, and no leader dares says a word.

Israel and David Attenborough

Nothing to do with Israel, but again I need it in the title to get readers. I suppose the only connection is that, like backers of Israel, I write lots of letters to newspapers. Most of them get published, as I have learnt the knack: make one good point and keep it short. Sometimes I regret that I toss them off so lightly. For example I was incensed by talk about "the next David Attenborough" so I wrote to the Radio Times. What I should have said was simply that there cannot ever be a next Sir David. He is unique: a highly knowledgeable biologist who has spent fifty years pioneering what was a novel genre, the wildlife film, and doing it at a time when much of what he recorded is likely to disappear in the near future. Instead, after briefly making that point, I let myself get diverted into a complaint about Brian Cox being billed as the new Attenborough, before I had even seen his series (actually it bored me to sleep, but that's not the point). That was a bit mean to Cox, whose astronomy programmes were wonderful. I suppose I was partly put out because the BBC is not making fuller use of the excellent wild-life experts it has, such as Saba Douglas-Hamilton and Charlotte Uhlenbroek. Anyway, they published it as 'letter of the week' and I won a Chinese portable radio, but I did miss the point.