I wrote my first post over at Larvatus Prodeo, which, for international readers, is one of the leading leftist Australian political blogs. At the moment there are about 170 comments on the post, which is about 165 more than I ever get here ;-) It's been an interesting process to go through - to write something on a strictly political subject and then watch the boys come out to argue. I say boys because I'm sure at least 90% if not 95% of the commenters have been male (there is a Christine Keeler, who could well be a man).
When I was at school I belonged to a champion debating team and that kind of argumentation comes easily to me. Or maybe I should say it used to come easily to me. As I've got older and wiser, I'm less interested in point-scoring and position taking. I still take the same kinds of political positions as I did when I was young, but I feel somehow less fixed in those positions - what matters more than any opinion I could hold is what's actually happening in the world. (Does that make sense?)
What saddens me and I guess on some level horrifies me in reading the comments from rightwingers on a post about Vietnam and Iraq is how callous most of them are. They have the chess board mentality - no sense that human suffering is at stake, it's all about making tactical moves.
I wouldn't say I'm a pacifist, though I come close. Actually, that's one of those 'positions' which I think is impossible for someone like me - living in an affluent peacetime situation - to take or not take. It's a redundant question - am I a pacifist? I don't know. The concept of war seems totally absurd to me. I remember that after visiting Belfast in the early 80s, where you could walk round any street corner and encounter a soldier in camouflage gear stalking along the street with gun out, I returned to my home in south London, which looked much the same as the streets of Belfast, and kept expecting tanks to roll around the corner. It took a week or more for that effect to wear off.
Another 'war' memory: I was at a Guy Fawkes party in an east London house and the host showed me the old bomb shelter at the bottom of the garden. I remember standing out in the garden on that cold starry evening and thinking about how planes had once flown overhead and dropped bombs on the people like me who were underneath them. Imagine being underneath a bomber - how utterly bizarre that human energy has gone into making such scenarios possible. Yet such scenarios are being played out around the world even now.
Last weekend we visited our friend Angus on the occasion of his 85th birthday. I knew he'd flown in bombers in WW2 but had never talked about it with him in much detail. I asked him about it. He'd been based near Birmingham. He told us he'd been in one of the planes that bombed Dresden. It wasn't that time but another occasion that his plane was shot down over the English Channel. Three of the crew survived. He told how local people came out in their small boats to pull them out of the water.
"I was off my head", he said. Not the sort of expression he or any 85 year old usually uses. "What do you mean?" I asked.
"I was out of my mind with fear".
He said he can only remember parts of the fall from the sky, with the plane on fire. He continues to have nightmares, literal nightmares in which he apparently screams out for long periods in his sleep, sixty+ years after the event.
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