Nostalgia: it just ain't what it used to be

It was a pleasure to discover that my youngest son was visiting the family of our daughter-out-law this weekend. That took him to Belfast. And that took me back to some old memories, with feelings a little like nostalgia.

I say “a little like” because the word “nostalgia” suggests more attractive memories than those that came to my mind.

The first time I travelled to Belfast, I stayed in the Europa Hotel, reputed to be the most bombed in Europe. Indeed, when I arrived, one side of the hotel had all its windows boarded up after a bomb attack. To get in, I had to walk through a corridor with a chicane leading to a security area where luggage could be searched. Ironically, the whole cumbersome structure was unmanned, which was convenient since it saved me time, but also unnerving because it didn’t inspire much confidence in the security measures.

My room overlooked the headquarters of the Ulster Unionist Party with its sign, “Keep Ulster British”. That struck me as ironic since I was a Brit and little about the place struck me British.

Normally, alone in a new city, I’d wander out to get the feel of the place and find someone pleasant for a meal. I felt so afraid of those eerily empty streets that I found it hard to take the plunge on my first evening in Belfast. In the end, in order not to give way to simple cowardice, I walked quickly around the block opposite the hotel, saw nowhere that attracted me for dinner, and went back to order room service instead.

Later I got to know the city rather better, and had many of the classic experiences: driving without knowing it within a few hundred of metres of a major attack (the Ulster Defence Association’s shooting of Catholic civilians in a betting shop, leaving five dead and nine injured), asking directions of a flak-jacketed, machine-gun-toting policeman and being surprised by the cordiality of the answer, walking with other civilians through the middle of an army patrol…

A scene from 1971:
how civilians and soldiers mixed in Northern Ireland

I also learned to appreciate many of the ironies of the Northern Irish existence. For instance, the Ulster Defence Association that carried out the betting shop murders, was officially “loyalist”. Loyalty, it seemed, did not require respect for the law or traditions of the country, Britain, to which these gentlemen saw themselves as loyal. But then, outside the Northern Ireland Assembly building there still stands a larger-than-life statue of Sir Edward Carson, the man who raised an illegal army to fight the British government’s moves towards a timid measure of home rule in Ireland. “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right”, he proclaimed, and though a lawyer and a Member of Parliament, he mustered forces to support his claim. However, his treason was met not by imprisonment or the rope but by a statue to his memory.

Some years earlier, I had travelled to East Berlin. I landed in the West and took the Underground into the Eastern sector, seeing for the first time the dimly lit ghost stations of the East, closed to passengers and patrolled by armed policemen. When I emerged at Friedrichstrasse, the only station left open in East Berlin on that line, I also had to walk through a corridor with a chicane, but this one was far from unmanned, as I came around a corner nearly into the arms of a young policeman with a machine gun clutched to his chest.

Armed police in a Berlin ghost station

As in Belfast some years later, I was nervous about wandering out into the streets of East Berlin. I quickly realised, however, that East Berlin fulfilled a positively Thatcherite vision of urban peace (Maggie was firmly enthroned back then, made secure by Labour’s decision to equip itself with a leader no one was going to elect Prime Minister – oh, how we learn the lessons of experience): the streets were safe, with more police on view than anyone else. Only near the Brandenburg Gate did I feel nervous again: there was the wall, suddenly blocking off the great boulevard of Unter den Linden, with a small opening guarded by armed men, and the glare of the searchlights in the death strip beyond them.

Thinking back today to those two experiences, of Belfast in the Troubles and Berlin in the Cold War, made me realise that nostalgia will soon not be what it once was. The nastiness of those days had a quality of drama, inspiring many a novel or film: how often have you seen floodlights on barbed wire in spy films based in Berlin, or blacked-up British troops patrolling past IRA murals in films about Belfast?

Whereas today’s ghastliness has replaced drama by farce. People who don’t know what they’re wishing for have elected an unstable moron to the White House or voted to take Britain out of the European Union, without understanding the wound they’re inflicting on themselves.

On the other hand, the farce is a dangerous one. An unstable moron with his fingers on the nuclear button? Sheer slapstick, for sure – but hardly a laughing matter. 

I preferred the old nostalgia.

Combating terrorism: we know what works and what doesn't. So why do we keep choosing what doesn't?

There’s no simpler solution to complex politics than war.

That’s because all war requires is the willingness to spend a lot of money, sacrifice a number of lives of your own people and, if things go to plan, a lot more lives of another people. Mostly nations of the prosperous West have little difficulty working up the necessary will. So, for instance, the Fench reaction to the Paris attacks, to mount bombing raids on ISIS in Syria, is a simple, not to say simplistic, response.

French air strikes.
Simple. Powerful. Effective? Who knows.

Almost as simple is rounding up people. It’s more difficult if you take the trouble to arrest real suspects, against whom you can mount a case. If you just go after people who might be supporters, without pedantic concern for, say, evidence, that’s as easy as bombing raids. You might, like France, just round up the perpetrators’ families.

Not that I’m particularly criticising France. Other nations behave as badly. Consider reactions to the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001, carried out by a team which was predominantly Saudi. The leader of the organisation behind the attack, Al Qaida, was also Saudi. Much of the funding was Saudi.

It still made some sense to attack Afghanistan, if only because the Al Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, was living there. But it made no sense to attack Iraq next. Iraq? There was no suggestion of Iraqi involvement in 9/11. So the justification for the Iraq invasion became weapons of mass destruction. Absence of evidence, the hawks would tell us, isn’t evidence of absence. However, once we were able to establish facts on the ground, it became clear there was plenty of evidence of the absence of those weapons. And hence absence of any justification for the war.

To try to give it some kind of retrospective appeal, the invading forces decided to rebuild the country along new, improved lines. Unfortunately, they used the army to do the job. Armies are designed to destroy, not to build. So the effects were as disastrous as might – ought – to have been expected.

After years of downright oppression, the Shia majority of Iraq took power. Like most people previously downtrodden, they leaped at the opportunity to do some treading down themselves. The West, which had casually disbanded the Iraqi army with its Sunni leadership, took no steps to protect Sunnis from the rule of their enemies. New Sunni resistance movements emerged, fell under the control of religious fundamentalists, and from that toxic fusion, produced ISIS.

Doesn’t the French reaction, so far, to the Paris attacks remind you of the US/UK response to 9/11? Force first, and repression, rather than thought, self-analysis and careful consideration of the consequences of action.

Self-analysis is badly needed. It’s emerging that both Iraq and Turkey warned France of the impending attacks. That they weren’t forestalled is a major intelligence failure. Analysing that shortcoming is far harder than despatching aircraft or arresting suspects. Besides, many people – some of them individuals I’d previously regarded as sensible – are clamouring for heavy handed action. “Close the borders!” they call, “lock up the imams! Kick out the refugees!”

That last call is particularly curious. Many refugees are fleeing the onslaught of ISIS, the very foe we face in the West, and which the West created. More Syrians are killed every day than in the Paris attacks that so stunned Europe. Close the borders to them? That’s like eating a starving man’s meal and then refusing to let emergency supplies through.

What’s worst about the demand for repression is that we saw what happened when we took that approach towards Iraq. It heightened tensions. It attracted recruits to the insurgent cause. It led to the unleashing of the forces we now have to combat.

Curiously, we also know a different way of behaving and know it works. When the troubles broke out in Northern Ireland, Britain’s initial response was also repressive. The consequences were Bloody Sunday, the Guildford 4, the Birmingham 6, a whole litany of other miscarriages of justice, murders, bombings and misery.

Eventually saner spirits prevailed. They understood that an insurgency only survives with the support of a disaffected population. So steps were taken to stop the disaffection. Housing, job opportunities and education were improved for the previously oppressed nationalist communities. Military action was maintained but at a lower level, while the accent moved more firmly on effective intelligence work, until the IRA was so penetrated that its decisions were being communicated to British security services in near real time.

Out of all this came the Good Friday peace agreement. There have been setbacks, but by and large it’s held. The result, for anyone who remembers Belfast before, is spectacular. It used to be a city under siege; today it’s vibrant and exciting. 

That approach works, and we know it works. Against ISIS, we may have to use more extensive brute force, to defeat it militarily. But we’ll also need far better intelligence work than France has produced so far. And we’ll need to support the communities that produce the terrorists.

The last step’s counter-intuitive. It means investing in the very people from whom the insurgency emerges. It means making them prosperous and tolerating their cultures and faiths. For those in France who are sickened by the Muslim veil or beard, and are saying so loudly since the attacks, that will be a hard pill to swallow.

Trust me, guys. It really works. Far better than repression, which is what ISIS wants – repression generates the oppressed, disaffected Sunnis who made it strong in the first place. ISIS hates the idea of well-off Muslim communities in the West, peacefully coexisting Shia and Sunni Muslims in the Middle East. 

Because they’ll snuff ISIS out.

Troubling times

Many years ago, I emerged from a meeting in a hospital, with some of the managers and one of my colleagues, into pleasant sunshine made more attractive by the prospect of a congenial lunch ahead.

Nothing unusual about that. I’ve been working in the healthcare sector since 1985. To be out with a group of executives is normal to the point of banal. The aspect most out of the ordinary, this being the British Isles, was the sunshine.

But then the everything changed. As we stepped off the pavement, we moved into what might have been Beirut. To our right and left, in front and soon behind us were armed soldiers, crouching down with their assault rifles resting in the crook of their elbows, helmets low over camouflage painted faces.

My colleague and I, unnerved, fell silent but the hospital people just kept chatting easily, implicitly answering a question I hadn’t asked: how do we behave now?

And then I had the classic experience of such situations: one of the soldiers looked straight at me and smiled. He was a soldier no more. He was a young man doing his job, and that job meant that what for me was simply a pleasant spring day, for him was a day of wariness in which he was a target.

That moment didn’t take place in Beirut but in Belfast. In the course of more visits to the province than I can count, it was just one of many times I directly felt the effect of what we euphemistically call ‘the troubles’. 

On another, I was struck by the Israeli flags flying in a loyalist area.

‘Is there an official visit?’ I naively asked.

‘No,’ laughed my host on that occasion, ‘some of the nationalist boys have taken to flying Palestinian flags out of solidarity, so the unionists put out Israeli ones.’

Whatever one side did, the other did the opposite. It was sterile, hopeless, unremitting hostility.

But then I was back again soon after the Good Friday agreement. The transformation was extraordinary. 

On my first visit to the city, I’d been put up in the Europa Hotel, which seemed proud of its status as Europe’s most bombed. One side of the building was boarded up, the rooms out of service. The approach to the reception area was through a chicane but, in a very Irish way, unmanned so I could walk through unobserved and unchallenged. Opposite were the offices of the Ulster Unionists, sporting the slogan ‘Keep Ulster British’, which struck me as curious since Ulster isn’t in Britain at all.

As I was on my own, I decided to pop out for a drink in the evening, but quickly abandoned the idea. I’ve never been anywhere so eery. Empty streets, silent pubs, at 9:00 at night. And of course no-one was thinking of anything innovative in the way of food or drink: a sandwich meant two bits of white bread with ham or cheese in between, variety being offered only by the pickle; tea and coffee were virtually indistinguishable in their appearance, and sometimes their taste, served in huge mugs. And the place was bristling with weapons.

In recent years, it’s become unrecognisable. Coffee shops serve cappuccinos and espressos. You can get salads or noodles in fast food shops. Sandwiches are offered with a choice of types of bread, even baguette, and contain outlandish fillings such as brie. Brie? In Northern Ireland? Lord Carson must be spinning in his grave.

And in the evenings? The place is brimming with life. Young people, old people, all sorts of people, wander the streets. The pubs are loud and lively and cheerful. You can get weird cocktails (from experience, some of them very weird), wines, foreign beers. A fun, friendly, fashionable city.

So it’s depressing to see Nationalists and Loyalists rounding on each other again, over who can march where, who can shout what slogans at whom, who can sing what songs outside what buildings.

Going back to old ways?

It was a funny old place back then. But it wasn’t much fun. 

Who on Earth would want to go back to all that?

Belfast

We’re just back from Belfast, a city that has always held a special place in my affections, ever since I found myself going there regularly for work in the eighties and nineties. Like another of my favourite cities, Berlin, it’s somewhere that has suffered, and that suffering has marked it but also matured it, made it more interesting, both in the physical aspect of the city and in the character of the people you meet there.

In my early visits, it was a pretty surprising place. I remember coming out of a meeting and finding myself right in the middle of an army patrol – soldiers, rifles in hand, moving in short burst up the street, then crouching to check on any possible hostile movement. It was a shock but then I noticed that the people I was with were simply walking through the group as though it weren’t there – the smiling faces of the men in suits, armed with briefcases, simply weaving their way in amongst the blacked-up faces of the men in uniform, armed with automatic weapons.

This weekend it surprised me again, but for the opposite reason. It surprised me by its sheer normalcy. One of the mundane effects of the troubles, one of the effects on everyday life, was that Belfast seemed stuck in a time warp compared to Britain. At a time when British eating habits were being transformed, Belfast clung on to the old traditions – as one of my friends pointed out to me, in those days the range of sandwiches on offer would be ham and pickle or cheese and tomato. Today brie or chorizo is on the menu, in cafés where coffee, as in most places round Europe, means espresso or latte or cappuccino or Americano, not just a spoonful of nondescript powder dissolved in warm water. Just the same banal modishness that we find everywhere, you might say; but in a city whose outmodedness had been such a characteristic for so long, that kind of banality is exciting and refreshing.

I was particularly delighted by St George’s Market. It was heaving with people (in the past shopping, particularly in the city centre, was something that you did quickly, almost furtively, in order to get home fast before anything unpleasant – potentially life-threatening – happened to you). And the place was a wonderful mix of different sounds and smells and flavours – I saw food from India, from China, from Spain, from the West Indies, as well as from Ireland (the latter on a stand offering either Irish stew or Curry, a combination that has to be an eloquent tribute to how far things have come). The profusion was exhilarating, and I loved the way it showed the tediousness of all those ghastly racists in organisations like the British National Party , with their desire to replace this kaleidoscope by the dull homogeneity of mono-culture.

It was great to spend a weekend in a city which is emerging, and emerging rapidly, from a long tunnel of pain. It shows what can be achieved just as soon as we can silence those who are prepared to kill and maim in the name of religion or, even more trivially, over what colour of flag we live under.

All that nonsense produces lots of wonderful material for songs and films. But it can’t hold a candle to the sheer pleasure that Belfast is now enjoying, of being able to live in peace at last.