The Endless Chain Podcast

Why

Back in the mists of time, the Brussels Shakespeare Society put on a play at a theatre in the Schaarbeek district of the town that was, at least then, known as the Scarabaeus. A scarab is an Egyptian good-luck charm, except in the case of this theatre. It is council-owned but was then leased out to a theatrical two-hander, the principal player in which was the wife, whose name was (not) Hippolyta. Image: the stage door to the Scarabaeus Theatre, Schaarbeek. Hippolyta had something of a reputation among amateur theatre companies in the city, although I myself had never encountered the woman and wouldn’t have known her from the Queen of the Amazons. That was until I became a set-builder on a play being done by a group of Hispanics. One director of my acquaintance had advised that she needed treating with kid gloves and that he had experienced some awkwardness with her, but had always managed to get what he needed from her, besides her sass. During the run of the play initially referred to above, the theatre’s management had contrived to lock a door that offered access to the far side of the stage, which they did during the actual performance. Actors piled out of the dressing room, only to find their path to the correct wing of the stage barred by this locked door. The management advised that this passageway to the far wing of the stage had not been included in the rental agreement and that use of it was therefore not allowed, failing any compensation for the facility. The Society was annoyed, shall we say. My own familiarity with the theatre, besides a couple of miscellaneous events that I attended there, came just before Covid, when I was asked to build the set for that play put on by a Spanish theatre company—the classical El anzuelo de Fenisa (Fenisa’s Hook) written in 1617 by Lope de Vega. Part of the set would comprise a couple of magicians’ boxes, essentially two flats turning on their vertical axis, but given depth for solidity, in case someone bumped into them. To add stability, a small, offset door was incorporated into one side whereby bricks could be placed into it, thus considerably lowering its centre of gravity. It was a cool design and was very ably decorated by a brilliant Rumanian artist I knew, who produced magnificent decor on these very simple-looking but carefully designed constructions. One scene was depicted on one face, and another scene on the other face, with the sides simply being painted black, since they depicted nowhere. When it came to assembling the boxes, on the day of the dress rehearsal, it was discovered that our Rumanian friend had inadvertently painted the incorrect side of the panel with the door cut into it: it could not be reversed because of the door being offset to one side. “No matter,” I said, “before the cast arrive for the first performance tomorrow, I will come in early and paint the unpainted side panel the requisite black colour.” Come the next day, the management of the theatre asked me what I was intending doing. “Just painting this panel,” said I, and I explained why, with a cheery smile. “Oh, no, you don’t,” came the reply. “Oh?” I queried. “You’re not opening a pot of paint in my theatre.” “I will put down a dust sheet, no worry,” I said. “No.” “Then open the rear stage door and I will take the scenery out onto the street and paint it there.” “No. I’m not opening the door and letting the heat out.” At this point, I started to count to ten, but, unfortunately, only reached eight (I’ll leave out the expletives). “For a week, we have been treading on eggshells to avoid crossing you or annoying you or doing anything that might be against your written and unwritten rules, and we have taken every care to make sure we smile and are pleasant and say good morning and good afternoon and goodbye and, quite honestly, you’re the same old cantankerous gorgon that you ever were, and we did it all for nothing.” The show’s director swiftly intervened and said it would be better if I left, with which I complied. I don’t know if the scenery ever got painted as it should be, but what I considered righteous anger in his, not my, behalf was taken by him as upsetting his applecart. It was far better to not paint the scenery for his play than to upset the theatre manager. Even with the fact that a huge amount of very hard work had gone into producing these boxes, transporting them, erecting them, painting them, nobody was interested that the builder’s pride was clearly less meritworthy than the demands of the people who’d done nothing more creative towards the production than leasing out the space in which to perform the play. The story doesn’t stop there. I would later be refused a part in another play by the first-named theatre group, on the grounds that it was to be performed at the self-same theatre; I was even asked not to buy a ticket to come and see it. Shortly after that other play had been performed, Hippolyta was evicted from the building by the council, on grounds of mismanagement of the premises. I had not been the only one to have an issue with her administrative techniques. But others in the amateur dramatic circles deemed it far more important to acquiesce in Hippolyta’s unreasonableness than to risk them not being able to rent the theatre from her at all (not even for ready money, as Wilde’s Merriman might’ve said). These episodes demonstrate a conflict of paradigms. Some will take a stance that avoids all and any disruption because, in a small and tight-knit community, disruption is undesirable. Yet, unfortunately, there are those who precisely recognise that disruption is indeed unwanted and, being in a position of influence or control, are therefore able to set stumbling blocks and hindrances and yet never incur any true wrath by those who are inconvenienced, because the stick in the mud has a broad discretion to exercise, to which it is deemed to be in everyone else’s best interests to submit. Disruptors, as many are perceived, call out injustices to appellate instances which, then, to the consternation of all, simply endorse perverse exercise of the prerogative. One comes to realise that complaining and protesting, far from achieving change, bring only exclusion for the protester, whose calls are unlikely to fall on the ears of anyone with any power to heed them: they are preferably silenced rather than being allowed to continue to disrupt in a manner that, in any event, others perceive as being in vain. The current student protests are a classic case in point, with somewhat graver consequences than my own being barred from an Egyptian-inspired theatre. A year ago and more, a Russian mercenary gave a frank online interview describing in enough detail to shock how he and his comrades in arms had gathered together Ukrainian civilians in a sports centre in Ukraine and then sprayed them with bullets. They included men, women and small children aged five and less. They were all sprayed with gunfire until the cries ceased. When asked why he had complied with the order to do this, he replied that the orders had been given by Yevgeny Prigozhin and that failure to comply would not have in any way prevented the slaughter, but simply added him who refused to the final tally of the dead. There are many definitions of what constitutes democracy, and democracy can take on a whole variety of forms. We have the philosophical definitions of freedom and equality as given by Plato and we have modern parliamentary democracy in European nations or under the American constitution, and even under questionable regimes like Zimbabwe, the Russian Federation and Iran. It can be difficult to discern which regimes are democratic and which are not. But, when push comes to shove, the test of a democracy can transpire to be remarkably simple. It is whether the ordinary citizen, when commanded to do something by the ruling authority is entitled honestly to ask the person in command to tell him why. If authority can respond in a manner that goes beyond because it’s the law—even supposing it can do that—by explaining the rationale for the law and why the law is a good law, then, one has at least the beginnings of a democracy. But if because it’s the law is followed by enforcement of that law—even by violent means, Brobdingnagian in their execution—those who cast ballots in elections must question why they bother to play their role in a drama with such flimsy decor. And, if democracy is what we actually want, the time has, at that point, come for revolution. Either that, or you’re simply barred from the show. Get full access to The Endless Chain at endlesschain.substack.com/subscribe [https://endlesschain.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Law enforcement on campus

Suppose we didn’t know why there are ructions at university campuses. Not suppose that they were having a food strike (which we did at school, and which I wrote about here [https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/striking-boys]), but let’s suppose we just didn’t know what the trouble was. That we’d never heard of Israel, or Gaza, or sliced white bread. What, then, would you think about what’s happening at Yale, and Columbia, and elsewhere at this time? Go ahead: you are hereby freed from the constraints of having to judge the issue itself. You have no responsibility to judge the merits of the occupations and the encampments and the sit-ins. What is your judgment of how they are being dealt with? Is it that protest is futile, so that to protest anything is wrong? What, then, if you received £5 less in your change than you ought to? Is it worth protesting then? Or should you simply accept that short-changing is part of life and you must acquiesce in it? I was short-changed five cents this week; I protested, and got my five cents. It was very amicable and an apology was given. It was only five cents, but they were mine, not the shop’s. Sometimes justice is easy to discern. No police were called. Is the decision to call the police dependent on the severity of the protest, or is it dependent on other factors, like the loudness of the chanting? The vehemence of the violence? The damage to tender young shoots of grass on lawns? The loss in stock market value of whatever loses stock market value when such protests take place? What about the decision to arrest people who use nothing but their voice to protest (aside from the unfortunate damage to pristine lawns)? Is it justifiable to arrest people for voicing their protest, or for marching? Or for just being there? For voicing their protest in the form of silent placards? Maybe we should just protest and not say why we protest. That way, no one is embarrassed. But then people would ask, would they not, “What are you protesting about?” Then, if they were told what the people are protesting about, that should be the point at which a criminal offence is committed. Would that make more sense? In Russia, they hold up pieces of white paper with nothing on, and still get arrested. A young Jew was arrested in the UK for displaying a placard that said Jews Against Genocide. When that resulted in him being taken in by the police, he asked, “Would it have been more acceptable if the placard had read Jews In Favour Of Genocide?” to which the police officers had no answer but to treat him even more roughly. If the students of America, and elsewhere, it must be added, are slowly, but surely, realising the inane conundrum they are living through (and growing into), the irony lies in the fact that they are being constrained in the expression of their dismay and disgust with powers that they cannot otherwise hope to influence, on a matter of conscience, by law enforcement agencies who themselves have no answer to the logic arraigned against them by those they arrest for offences that have, in many cases, not been committed or that do not even exist. And, it is at that point that the debate between the educator and the educated ceases to be limited to the educational institution, for it is now a debate that implicates us all. Not all of us are protesters, but all of us do protest at some time or another, as my small change dispute demonstrates. And not all of us evoke protest, but the divide is opening up wide between those who aspire to a position whereby insouciance towards others is a core element of that position, and those who aspire to the position whereby protest against the insouciant is, for them, a core value. In the 1990s, clothing trends between the generations narrowed to the point where a success story arose in malls around the globe: The Gap. Sweatshirts aside, and 30 years on, a new Gap is establishing itself, and it will not be closed with just a drawstring. It is the agencies called upon to restrain the protests that are failing to understand their complicity as tools of the authors of circumstances which youth has banded together to oppose. The agencies of law enforcement comply without question on an, at most, questionable legal basis to perform, not the will, but the whim of established authority, under laws cast so widely that you’re guilty if we say so. Laws for the facilitation of elimination. Some comply with the command to enforce with a reticence that, at least, is creditable. Others do so with a venom that recalls the Nuremberg defence of I was only following orders. Aye, some may just follow orders, and others champ at the bit, waiting for the orders, adherence to which they will later brush from themselves, as Pilate washed his hands after the flogging. And that is why the cause of the protest is now no longer of core relevance. It is the reaction of the law enforcers that should concern, not just the college young, but the broad gamut of our societies. Our right to remain silent is becoming an obligation. Get full access to The Endless Chain at endlesschain.substack.com/subscribe [https://endlesschain.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Oh, to be in Mali, now that spring is here!

Let me tell you something: every morning, I go outside to one of the three water butts I have positioned around my house that collect rainwater off the roof. I fill two watering cans and carry them inside to the downstairs loo. And, when I want to flush the loo, I fill the cistern with my rainwater. It saves water. In fact, rainwater collects beneath my driveway in a concrete structure holding 3,000 litres, or 800 gallons US, and the intention is at some point to install a pump in order to more easily access that water: they cost about 50 euros. I’ve learned that we must conserve water. Not splash it around—take showers instead of baths, and close the tap whilst brushing our teeth. The concern is that water is a valuable resource, and, what’s more, it costs. Around here it costs me 100 euros a quarter. If I can use water off the roof, then that cuts down the water I need to purchase. It takes a couple of minutes to fetch the water and, even if I’m on my own and my name isn’t Henry, I hear the voice of Odetta [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odetta] in her classic 1961 duet with Harry Belafonte: Henry, fetch the water! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_Hole_in_My_Bucket] I can always spare a couple of minutes for some nostalgia, but, most of all, fetching the water is a Cast Away [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cast_Away] moment for me. In the movie Cast Away (note the split between the words: Tom Hanks’s character wasn’t simply a castaway, he was in fact cast away, by the woman he had loved), we, along with his companion, a football named Wilson, accompany Hanks in excruciating detail as he tries, and finally manages, to make fire on his Pacific desert island. When he succeeds, he bounds with mighty joy and declares himself a master of the elements, dancing a dance of victory. It’s a little bit amusing, until, that is, we think ourselves into the situation. Alone, unknowing of the future, learning to survive, needing to survive, needing to invent fire: wouldn’t you, too, have danced? When Hanks escapes back to civilisation, his company, FedEx, holds a reception for him. As the festivities end, everyone recedes outside and Hanks is left for a second alone in the party-strewn room. He spots a candle lighter on the table and lifts it in his hand. He regards the end of the stick with an air of irony, as he pulls its little plastic button. Out of the end pops a flame. It is that easy. Click. Flame. Click. Flame. I collect rainwater for my toilet because I can, because it makes economic sense and because it has a practical aspect to it. But especially: it has a pedagogic purpose for me—it costs me very little to know the hardships of others. Some, on desert islands, collect rainwater because they must. And there are some who have no water to collect, either from the sky or from a standpipe. When you flush, think on that: three gallons of water, down the toilet, literally. That’s one heavy watering can’s worth. A functioning waste disposal system, with well maintained sewers. You know, what you whisk down the loo will soon be concrete? That’s what they do with poo: they build skyscrapers and country piles. Thames Water [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Water] is a private English water company that is now threatened with nationalisation, after being privatised in the 1980s. They were sold off, earned handsome dividends for shareholders for 40 years, seemingly underinvested, so that 25 per cent of their water was lost through mains breakages, and now overflow 17,000 litres of untreated sewage into London’s River Thames each day. Some of the Oxford and Cambridge University rowers, who compete annually in skulls on the river, went down with e-coli infections after this year’s race. There are parts of the world where people don’t die from boat racing in such pollution, but from having to drink it. So, go fetch the water every now and then, and have your very own Cast Away moment. Realise how inconvenient it is to have to step outside in order to flush a toilet. And think how inconvenient it would be if the water poured no more: if the butt stopped. Belgium has been battered of late with northern winds, rain storms and four degrees in the early mornings. The buds have budded, and the blossom has blossomed, but the warm envelope of the sun’s caress has been scant to date in 2024. Still, summer surely is on its way from the south, where, in the fourth month of the year, it is already baking the Sahel. The Sahel is a band of sub-Saharan countries that stretch across the midriff of Africa, from Senegal, to Mali, to Burkina Faso, to Niger, Chad and the Sudans. Mainly Islamic in composition, how remiss the colonisers were to fail in their Christian indoctrinations, and how ungrateful of these erstwhile pearls of empires to turn against their erstwhile colonial masters and welcome to their bosoms the new, Russian sugar daddies. The rulers of roosts are in raptures; the populace, in desperation. This image (from The Guardian [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/18/lethal-heatwave-in-sahel-worsened-by-fossil-fuel-burning-study-finds]) shows the up-and-coming rural middle classes of Mali. Two oxen and a wagon, replete with harvest, this man and his boy are the new local yuppies. Who knows? They may even have electrical current at home for a few hours a week. Enough to charge their mobiles, at least. And, even if they don’t own it, the farm they work on may even have water. A few drops, as, this week, the temperatures in the western Sahel, on the Atlantic coast with its balmy breezes and this cool, pre-summer taster of warmth, soar to an incredible 45°C (or 113 in American: just call him Mr Fahrenheit). Mali last week hit 48° and more, and 102 people died in Bamako in its sweltering, human-caused, climate-change furnace. It’s not a tragedy that you caused; it’s a tragedy that we’ve all caused. Let me repeat that: it’s mid-April, in West Africa, which benefits from prevailing westerly breezes, sweeping over Cape Verde into Senegal, and the temperature is 45 degrees Celsius or more. Brikama, at the mouth of the River Gambia, is plunged nightly into darkness, the only effulgence coming with the searing sun as dawn breaks. There is no electricity for days and weeks on end. The communal water tap that serves whole blocks of primitive houses, covered with naught but corrugated sheeting for a roof, delivers not a drop of Adam’s wine. In The Gambia, even the basic amenities are switched off, without explanation, without notice, leaving the populace to fend for itself under crushing heat and in relentless poverty. American troops are told to leave Niger, because US military support is no longer wanted there. The very support that Mr Zelenskiy would give his eye teeth for, Niger has told to “go home”. If they have nothing to do, they should fly up to Ukraine. The West send troops to control Central Africa, to pad and pamper its plump potentates, and leave in penury its impoverished peoples. And in cool, plush, air conditioned offices in Europe, we debate migration and wonder how we can stop it, while extinguishing our fires but keeping turning our AC systems and charging our EVs. Italy rules that ships that save those in peril on the seas are not, as it happens, flouters of policy, but saviours of souls. If they can save them, so can we. Yet still the desperate drown in our seas, and yet still they are hated by our executives and our extremists, and yet still they come. For they have nothing to leave behind them but their desperation. One step towards Algeria already fills their hearts with hope. Not for them the play of Dick Whittington, nor for them the companion pussy cat, for in them beat hearts of lions, and they look not back, but forward. Io capitano! They come, these captains of their souls, armed only with Chinese wisdom: every journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. At that point, it matters little how the journey ends, for the dreams that generate the endeavour of that one stride are already worth its risk. I know a family that has nothing. Not a drop of water and not an ounce of power for their refrigerator to keep fresh the little food they have. Ramadan is over now, but they will continue to fast, for they have no choice in this matter. We have choices. They have no choices, and they have no options. I need you to help them. Please. I hope that this will be no vain plea. It is a cry for alms, I make no apology. I beseech you, find it in your heart to help, if you can. I have an existing appeal fund set up at GoFundMe, in my own name. It’s now no longer an appeal for a business start-up, but a request for help for a family of eight who don’t have any opportunities. If you have pledged anything to me for this blog, cancel it: please, give it to the Africa fund. If you can spare anything, anything at all, it’s already a fortune for them. And you already have my thousand thanks. The fund’s here: https://gofund.me/dc7334ab [https://gofund.me/dc7334ab]. Thank you for reading The Endless Chain. This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to The Endless Chain at endlesschain.substack.com/subscribe [https://endlesschain.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The moral imperative of a trumpet

A gobshite is a stupid and incompetent person. Pronounced gob [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gobshite]-shahyt [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gobshite]. Realpolitik is a 19th century notion conjured by Ludwig von Rochau, which is in widespread use in today’s world. Nowadays it’s taken to mean the politics of pragmatism: achieving the possible, what is realistic, rather than attaching to high-flown, and highfalutin, moralistic goals. Realpolitik contrasts with Idealpolitik. Rochau’s initial observation, in an endeavour to reconcile the apparent rise of power embedded in nation states and their empires in the 19th century with the liberal enlightenment that had swept across Europe in the 18th century, concluded in the oft-quoted wisdom: “to bring down the walls of Jericho, the Realpolitiker knows the simple pickaxe is more useful than the mightiest trumpet.” The reference here is to a battle supposed to have taken place when the Israelites were conquering land in what is now the West Bank area of Palestine. It is recounted in the Bible, in the Book of Joshua, and involved the slaughter of every person and every animal in Jericho (at God’s command, mind you), except for the family of a lady of the night named Rahab, who had aided the invasion by hanging a red cord out of her window. The story is dismissed as propagandist legend by archaeologists, who have found no trace of the metropolis that was supposedly thereby conquered (seemingly using the well-known military technique of priests marching around city walls while blowing trumpets). Rochau’s view is that pickaxes would have achieved victory more quickly, but it’s hard to see how that could have been done in less than the seven days it took the trumpeting priests. Where Rochau errs in this graphic, but facile, comparison is his assumption that trumpets will never bring down city walls. Because, according to biblical legend, they did at Jericho—it is an attested case. Our error would be to assume that pickaxes will bring down city walls at all. For that, there is not a single attested case. So, which of these is Realpolitik: pickaxes, or trumpets? What the Book of Joshua tells us is a moral story, not an actual story of military history: by stirring up an army to do wondrous things, wondrous things can be achieved. Napoleon Bonaparte once said that the morale of a soldier is worth thrice his weaponry, and that is certainly borne out in tales such as the Battle of Hostomel Airport, which took place in the first days of the Russo-Ukrainian War. A Ukrainian National Guard unit of only 200 soldiers (most of whom had never shot a gun in their lives, and for whom the closest brush with a battlefield had been when playing video games) succeeded in repelling the initial Russian commando attack on the airfield. Shooting down combat helicopters with rifles and a simple rocket launcher instilled courage and determination in the Ukrainians, who were instrumental in saving Kyiv from being taken within the predicted 72 hours. Twenty-five Ukrainians posted to defend a radar installation at the north end of the airport were, owing to the exposed terrain, unable to flee when outnumbered, and got taken prisoner. They were later exchanged and would report to their debriefers, in a somewhat bemused fashion, that their captors had asked them, “Why did you shoot at us?” The Russians had expected to be greeted as liberators, even though they came in with a sweep of attack aircraft. Russians generally did indeed conclude that Ukraine was to blame for the war: for firing back. In a mood seen as echoing what all military nations do when honouring their combat dead (and with the propaganda aim of instilling respect for, and devotion to, the nation and its armies, on the part of both the Ukrainian people and foreign onlookers), Ukraine has marked significant days, such as its national day and the day of heroes, in remembrance of its fallen in the still ongoing war, to bolster morale. The conflict has been shrouded from the outset in one big question, which was posed on social media early on by an Arab student at a German university: “What is the nature of the Misunderstanding between these two neighbours?” It was he who capitalised Misunderstanding. But I wonder whether the war will be remembered as that—a misunderstanding. Is war not always the result of a fundamental breakdown of common comprehension—misunderstanding? Or do nations invade other nations because they can? Since that fateful day in February 2022, many commentators, analysts and news folk have tried to understand. There is speculation as to how it began (NATO, insecurity, theft of assets), and as to the strategies being deployed (tank-resistant defence lines, oil refinery strikes, the Black Sea fleet) and, perhaps most importantly,  as to how it will end (victory, of course; but whose?) In the forefront we have the Idealpolitik notions of Greater Rus, the philosophical right for Ukraine (and, by implication, Estonia, Lithuania …) to exist as a sovereign nation. These are notions of idealism, albeit hardly born of enlightened thinking. As Rochau would discover, the mistake liberals made was to assume that the law of the strong suddenly evaporated simply because it was shown to be unjust. As we have come to learn, nothing could be farther from the truth. Being strong has absolutely nothing to do with morality. But holding to a moral principle can still be an element underpinning strength, albeit of a different kind: the Realpolitiker surrenders when in defeat; the Idealpolitiker fights on to the death, not because he thinks he can win, but because he believes in the ability to win of his children. Realpolitik is vaunted by those who resort to it as being practical and pragmatic. It sees the world as it is and deals with it in terms of what it is. Idealism, on the other hand, deals with the world in terms of what it ought to be. When idealism attains the upper hand, the Realpolitiker is dismissed as cruel and amoral. The greatest danger, however, lies in assimilating the two views in one, and that is what has happened in Palestine. Realpolitik has decreed the extermination or elimination by whatever means of the Palestinian people, a process seen as getting nowhere fast for the past 50 years, now accelerated into an end game that nonetheless fulfils an ideal, one backed by as moral a tenet as one can muster: a place of sanctuary and safety for the Jewish people, where, at last, they can find refuge and protection from their enemies around the world. For this they exert pressure on US politics, and enforce moral imperatives against Germany, which has in the past sought to eradicate their race. Whilst the Jewish left pleads for a morally sound solution in a single state that assures the freedoms and rights of all its citizens, as only, in their view, a modern, liberal society surely can, the ultra-orthodox denounce that ideal as unrealistic, and insist on their own ideal: destruction of their fellow man in the name of their own preservation: the ideal of reclaiming the land that Joshua fought for. What Roger Casement, Padraig Pearce, James Connolly and the other great Irish nationalists wrought for Ireland was a vision inspired by idealism, backed by an achievement that was in truth realised against all the odds, which no one, least of all Michael Collins, could have dreamt would ever be feasible; which in 1910 had only the prospect of absolute and utter failure as its sole, possible outcome: ravaged Ireland taking up arms against the great British empire. Where Ukraine has drawn its strength from to stand up with valour and dignity against its enemy I cannot tell. I am not the only one: across the world people are baffled at the Ukrainians’ tenacity in the fray of their crisis. If they lose, then the world must do them the honour of casting them as victors all the same, just as we Brits did at Dunkirk. Victors not, to be sure, of Realpolitik, for that would have demanded capitulation on the airfield of Hostomel; but, certainly, victors of Idealpolitik, for their determination to fight to the last for an ideal grounded in self-determination as a universal aspiration. Ukrainian pacificist philosopher Vlad Beliavsky put it thus: You’ve got 40 million united Ukrainians, so what will Putin do? Will he massacre 40 million people? That’s the only way he can win this war. The only way.” That from the mouth of a pacifist. That’s quite some mettle that these Ukrainians possess. But from where was it that the Irish drew their valour? A large part of it came from something that, outside the Emerald Isle, is rarely talked about these days: the Great Famine, the Gorta Mór. Frequently portrayed as a nation’s battle against an insect-induced harvest failure, it may have had that as its root cause but it had its effects as the result of man’s untrammelled cruelty to his fellow man. Great quantities of foodstuffs were exported from Ireland whilst the laissez-faire government in London looked away uncaringly. Absentee landlords evicted families from the far reaches of the west and south of Ireland, and in some towns two-thirds of the population perished. Over a million fled abroad, mostly to the USA. And at home a million died, and were buried in the very land that could not victual them. The period 1845-1852 was a harsh period of Irish history, made harsher by rich, self-satisfied men. The Famine was not some natural disaster against which no measure was possible. The British occupiers aggravated a crisis to, as a matter of policy, make of it—there is no other word—a Holocaust. Top left to bottom right: The Irish Republican Youth Movement declares unity with the Palestine Liberation Organisation. James Connolly (Scottish trade unionist and Irish republican, 1868-1916): “The British government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland and can never have any right in Ireland.” Roger Casement (British diplomat and Irish humanitarian activist, 1864-1916): “Ireland, that has wronged no man, that has sought no dominion over others, is treated as if she was a convicted criminal. If it be treason to fight against such a fate as this, then I am proud to be a rebel.” Pádraig Pearce (Irish barrister and political activist, 1879-1916): “You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.” It is the ever-present memory in Irishmen’s minds of this cruel disaster wrought upon them by a wilfully insouciant foreign occupier that is surely influencing the sympathies manifested today by Ireland with Palestine. Ireland has been before where Palestine now is—succumbed by military might, starved to death, encouraged to exit. Ireland has voiced its sympathy, and Palestine must look to Ireland as a source of support, and of morale, and, if need be, of means. It is ironic that the sole other voice in Europe backing the Irish position on Palestine at this time is Spain—a nation infamous for the cruelty it imposed itself on a worldwide empire of its own. Be that as it may, it is to Spain’s credit that it sees justice in an ideal that baulks at all notion of Realpolitik in the Holy Land. I just wonder at how this all sits in the Canaries and Catalonia. Neither we, the weak, nor they, the powerful, may ever forget: the law of the strong will not evaporate simply because it is shown to be unjust. The resolution to the Ukrainian situation will likely come at the negotiating table and a realpolitical Ukrainian position would be to preserve life and concede principle: to lay down both trumpet and pickaxe, and seek, at least, respite in justice. Some ideal may yet be attainable, but with skill and precision. What Ireland achieved in 1927 was remarkable. The rebels of 1916 had been executed and, eleven years later, the Free State that would preface the Republic had been wrenched from the occupiers’ hands. It was an idealistic fight by which Hamas might well be buoyed, and in which—one hopes—it might not be constrained to take up further arms. On that we may defer to their opponent: will Israel recognise restraint as weakness, as Realpolitik, or as idealism? For now, the downtrodden will contemplate what they’ve lost, consider what’s realistic, and fix on such deals, and ideals, as may assure them ... some victory. And then they may reflect: if our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed. Get full access to The Endless Chain at endlesschain.substack.com/subscribe [https://endlesschain.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

How do you know the Bible tells you the truth?

“How do you know the Bible tells you the truth—because we have other religions to go by?” Thus a discussion host [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj4Jg_s5i9Y] poses a question to a believer in God. The answer comes: “Because I pray about it.” Without wanting to be dogmatic, he is right. Here’s why I think he is. Belief is like many human emotions (if not all of them, actually—visceral). It springs from the heart. If it sprang from the head (as a rational process), there would be no such thing as belief (because we don’t physically have anything to believe in). If I get excited at the prospect of my summer holiday, you may be pleased for me, and yet you may dismiss my choice of flying as ecologically irresponsible, or tell me that I could have got a better deal going somewhere else, or that I should choose another companion. But only I can feel the excitement of my summer holiday. Do I then allow myself to be influenced by your denigration of my holiday? Am I less excited if you challenge my vacation? And can you not feel the excitement bubbling within me? Truth is, your criticism may dismay me, or I may redouble my enthusiasm, with an attitude of “I don’t care what you think!” However, you cannot feel my excitement at my holiday. Maybe you never get excited at holidays. Maybe you just like spoiling people’s fun. Maybe you think getting excited about holidays is for little kids, and you’re a big grown-up. In terms of visceral belief, we must distinguish between matters that are inherently provable (like the facts adduced in a court of law) and belief in a deity, which is inherently unprovable, but for the proof of which the believer adduces their own evidence (such as a vision, a dream, a set of coincidences, a sense of wonder, or a shiver down the spine). Even courts of law don’t actually determine belief in evidence: they determine only enough belief (the balance of probabilities, or beyond reasonable doubt, rules of corroboration, etc.). For the rest, with statements like “I believe the president is honest”, the evidential basis on which such so-called beliefs are based can be scant to say the least, and easily manipulated to say the most. So, what does the respondent mean when he says, “Because I pray about it”? Are we only praying that the president is honest? Our view of our world is a view based on judgment. The allusion to courts of law is not misplaced, but law courts are the least of the institutions of judgment in our life. We ourselves are institutions of judgment. We judge value (in a food store) and we judge danger (on the road), and we judge trust (will we contract with someone, marry them?). There is as good as nothing in our physical world that we do not judge. We probably make thousands of judgments every day. Some are major ones, like a court of law makes. Some are minor, like threading a needle. We get annoyed at the judgments of others and we seek to defend ourselves against their judgments. We ask people to judge us kindly—to like us (please like this article, below). Therefore, it’s … let’s say, attractive to know—if know we do—that there is an entity out there somewhere that we do not need to judge, and which will essentially judge us, not on what we do, however, but on what we intend to do. That is a surprising switch between our laws and our deity’s laws. Despite our analysis of law between the subjective and the objective elements of a crime, we even have laws that don’t care what you intended (like parking regulations, or even felony murder). The deity’s laws, or judgments, don’t much care what you actually do, but care what you intend to do. That’s why, in many beliefs, you can simply think to the deity that you would like forgiveness, by feeling remorse, and in your belief system, your conscience is thereby cleared. That is the whole purpose of belief; your criminal or civil liability is, of course, not affected. Whether the deity exists, or exists in the form that the believer thinks it exists, is immaterial, and that is a major hurdle for those who challenge believers, something they cannot get their heads around. Maybe I can help. Belief is a communion between the believer and that in which he believes. A husband can believe in his wife, even if she is poor, maladroit, ugly, coarse, uneducated. Her husband can still believe in her, because the criteria that he applies in believing in his spouse are not the criteria that those around them use in judging the lady. We say that people should look beyond the outward and see the inner quality of the person. What a believer does is to look beyond the outward manifestation of our world and think (or believe) that they perceive an inner quality. The differences are not vast, but no analogy is perfect, I know. This is almost an application of quantum physics: if I believe the president is honest, then he is. If I later come to see that my belief was erroneous, then I will change my mind. People can change their minds, and do so all the time. So what’s wrong with that? Well, what is often wrong with that, in the physical world, is that I will be labelled as ignorant, naive, unknowing. I will be judged by those around me, for having been gullible. Even if I was right before and only now am wrong in having changed my mind. And the problem with belief springing viscerally within me or being dampened by later realisations is that I will only ever know if my belief was erroneous when I die, and non-believers want to know now, and that, unfortunately, is not in the deal when it comes to belief: it must spring from a visceral emotion of the heart, and not from a rational judgment of the head. If you don’t believe, I can’t make you believe. And nor can you make me not believe. You cannot reason belief or its absence. What each believer sees is one of two things, however: it is something they have discovered through their own experience, or it is something that has been drilled into them by tradition and convention The moot question is whether the latter of these is even belief (any more than a court’s holding that evidence is true is a belief). In Asia, the form of what they believe there may be that of Buddhism or Hinduism and, in Europe, perhaps Christianity. These are all outward forms of religious belief. But those who penetrate the outward to recognise the inward values will frequently abandon any importance that was hitherto attached to rites and ceremonies, as being simply cultural attachments. A bit like driving a Hyundai in Korea and a Mercedes in Germany. They both work as cars, but have different forms in different parts of the world. Occasionally, a Korean will even drive a Mercedes, and a German, a Hyundai. We know phrases like float your boat or do your own thing, and that is pretty much what belief is. The difficulties arise when one person’s conception of belief comes up against what others circumscribe as a definitive model of belief. In other words, there are those who refuse to allow an inward exploration of the deity or the substance of the individual’s belief, and attempt to constrain others to believe in the same way that they believe. This is fatuous, because belief springs from the heart. You cannot persuade another person to believe, still less induce them into believing as you do. You can force them into saying they believe, as with torture, but you cannot make them actually believe. This is an argument that non-believers often get tied up in: they cite all the harm that organised religion and fundamentalists and fanatics do, and therefore say that, because no god could condone such acts, there is therefore no God. That is a bit like saying that because some witnesses lie in court, you cannot ever trust a witness in court. Mendacity is not endemic to all judicial witnesses; and duress and manipulation are not endemic to all believers. But they are traits that can be detected in some of them, just as lying is a trait of which some judicial witnesses are guilty. I usually sum this up as follows: God is not for everyone. He is for every one. Every one of us will conceive of our belief, or its absence, in a way that suits us, and this freedom, the absolute liberty of belief, is something that our modern world can have difficulty in appreciating, because that mode of thinking removes belief from the realm of what we like to think of as judgment, which is some people making an assessment of the conduct of other people. On the other hand, God’s judgment is where we actually make an assessment of our own intentions; not our acts, but our intentions. Not judged by others, or by God, but by us. Some people feel uncomfortable with that—that judgment should be left to us ourselves. They want to judge others, instead. They want, not to believe in God, but to be God. However, it is precisely an absence of judgment that marks out the relationship to a deity. We often perceive deities as holders of power, and then we proceed to define power in terms that we think we understand it to be: like great empires, or missiles or guns—the ability to force others to our will. But that is not God’s power. God’s power lies instead in love, which is a nebulous concept that fundamentally comes down to the opposite of what we constantly do on Earth: judging. Love is power to force ourselves to our own will. Love is not outpourings of kind words or acts, love is not roses and chocolates, love is not physical reproduction of the race, giving to charity or anything like that, though these can all be outward manifestations of an inward feeling we identify as love. Love is simply not judging others and, in the Christian tradition at least, it is phrased thus: “love as you would be loved” (N.B. there is not even a command to love: it’s really up to you—float your boat). The phrase means “desist from judging others in the same manner as you don’t want to be judged by them”. And that is a notion that comes from the idea that judgment comes not from others but from God. And if we obey the commandment to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, then, combining these two simple tenets, we don’t ever need to enact another statute anywhere on the world and can simply close our law courts. Now, if that’s not a powerful law, tell me what is. A law not enforced by authority, but by us ourselves. And that is why the discussion participant was right to say that his belief is right because he prays. It is his religion, and his alone. His prayer is his communing with his deity. His love, his own enforcement of his own love. I am convinced that belief, because it springs from the heart, is something that does not need to be taught or reasoned, nor studied, nor read. It can spring spontaneously without the believer ever having heard of God. It simply springs from the ability to live without judging others. It’s like being awarded a college degree without even having matriculated at the institution. Or being given an OBE, if you like, or a military medal. God will love you even if you don’t know Him, provided you love others as you love yourself. It’s not much of a test; and it involves very little judgment. Of others. How this love is arrived at will differ for each and every individual. There are not eight great religions in the world, not even eight hundred: there are eight billion religions. And, just as all roads lead to Rome, all religions lead to the same place, regardless of what you call them, how you dress them up, how you love. It really is all you need. Get full access to The Endless Chain at endlesschain.substack.com/subscribe [https://endlesschain.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]