Treason in the White House

The price of not being prepared for war can be an end to peace
Syrian Kurds flee the fighting as Turkey invades

Oh, say can you see,
By the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed,
At the twilight's last gleaming?

The words of Francis Scott Key’s poem, which became the lyrics for the US national anthem, refer the American flag flying over Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland, after a night’s bombardment from ships of the British Royal Navy in September 1814. The image of the flag still flying proudly in the dawn, despite such a battering from what was then the world’s leading naval power, is a tribute to the pluck of a still small nation standing up to the oppression of a far more powerful one.

I don’t believe that war is glorious, even less that it should be fought for glory. It should be fought as a last resort, and only because the principle at stake is so vital that even deliberately killing others is a price worth paying to protect it. That was the case in Fort McHenry, for instance.

Even better, however, is to be able to use the threat of military force to protect the principle, without actually activating it. The Principal of my first college was a former General, Sir John Hackett. He once told me that a military commander who has to give the order to open fire has already failed. The perfect military engagement, in his view, was one where the winning side deploys such overwhelming force that the other backs down without firing a shot.

Sometimes, indeed, the mere presence of a powerful nation’s soldiers in a potential war zone can deter other nations even contemplating military action.

These are principles known well in the United States. Let’s see what a few presidents have said on the subject.

George Washington declared that “being prepared for war is one of the most effective ways of preserving peace”. It wasn’t an original thought. The Romans had a similar saying, “si vis pacem, para bellum”, “if you wish for peace, prepare for war”, and the Greeks and Chinese voiced the same idea earlier still.

To be a great nation requires certain qualities. “We must dare to be great; and we must realise that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage”. That’s true even without war, but it’s certainly true of war in particular. Being prepared for war requires being ready to engage in toil, to make sacrifices and to display high courage.

That was Teddy Roosevelt.

There’s another quality that great nations, like great individuals, enjoy and display. “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” as another President put it. And he’s right: without loyalty, high courage, toil and sacrifice will produce little worth having.

Who was that President? Why, Donald Trump. Interesting, isn’t it, that he talked about “I need loyalty”? He needs it from others. He doesn’t need to show any himself.

Which is why he’s suddenly pulled out of Syria, leaving his allies, the Kurds, at the mercy of Turkey. Which has prompted invaded.

The American presence was the classic case of simply being present. They weren’t there to fight the Turks. But their mere presence meant that an invasion couldn’t be launched – it might have led to American losses and a massive American retaliation. Trump could have preserved peace by being ready for war. Instead he claimed:

WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN. Turkey, Europe, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the Kurds will now have to figure the situation out…

Figuring the situation out for the Kurds sounds like getting themselves massacred by the Turks. Which, incidentally, means they won’t be able to guard prisoners from the ISIS terrorist movement, now poised to escape and start their campaign again. After three years of US effort against them. That doesn’t sound like “FIGHT TO WIN” but much more like “FIGHT TO LOSE”.

The loss will be down to a failure to show precisely the loyalty Trump himself demands.

Let’s end with some other words from a US President, on the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 a date which will live in infamy the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

We can add another date to the roster of infamy: 8 October 2019.

The day Donald Trump decided to pull out of Syria, without notice, betraying his Kurdish allies to the invading Turks.

Just a step, from innovation to obsolescence

My first attempt to get a degree, in the early 1970s, wasn’t an edifying picture of progress through study. But it wasn’t entirely without educational value. It’s just it wasn’t the value that had been planned for the course I was supposed to be following, but wasn’t, as I invested my efforts elsewhere.

The institution kind enough to tolerate my presence for a few years back then was King’s College, London. One of the best ventures I engaged in while there was the publication for a little while of a satirical journal. It gave a slightly radical, highly irreverent and self-consciously humorous take on events in the college.

It was called ‘Something’. As in ‘something is stirring in King’s’. Ingenious, right? Well, amusing to students, at least.

Our best headline ever referred to one of my fellow students as a ‘debutante whore’. She took it well, as it happened – I think there was a certain cachet in appearing in the paper for as long as it lasted – but I certainly would not use such a term for any woman today. To be honest, I wouldn’t have used it then either: it was a typo. I’d been typing the beginning of a sentence, ‘the debutante whose…’, and hit an ‘r’ instead of an ‘s’.

Something’s best writer was a student with a splendidy biting pen. I wish I could remember his name. When he saw what I’d written, he exclaimed, ‘Oh, that’s good! Excellent’. I hadn’t the heart to admit that I’d simply made an error – praise from him was invaluable – so I let it stand.

A typo. An error while typing. For these were the days when we still typed text. On actual typewriters. And the typewriters we used weren’t even the fancy IBM ones with a golfball onto which the letters had been cast, where a mere touch of a key on the electric keyboard drove the letter powerfully onto the page. No, these were the old ones, where the power with which you hit the key determined the firmness of the impression on the paper.

And hitting them hard mattered. Because we weren’t typing onto paper but onto what we called ‘skins’ though the proper term was ‘stencils’. You had to keep the typewriter ribbon – which carried the ink – out of the way so that the keys, unpadded, hit the skin directly and cut the shape of the letter into it. What you ended up with was a foolscap stencil – a bit bigger than A4 which hadn’t yet been introduced in England – with letter-shaped holes cut into it. We’d then load it onto a machine which drove ink through it onto a page. Or rather, several hundred pages.

In other words, it was a duplicator, a quick and cheap way of producing a large number of copies of a single document, before photocopiers were available.

A Gestetner machine with skin in place and ready to duplicate

It was a cheap process but not free. Though it was free to us, only because we impudently helped ourselves to the college’s stencils, ink and paper, and with no authority whatever used their duplicators – one each, from the two great companies that produced them, Roneo and Gestetner. I later discovered that the college principal, Sir John Hackett, scholar and soldier, found Something quite amusing and had told the authorities not to stop us abusing their generosity, as long as we stayed within reasonable limits.

What’s the point of this story?

Well, within a few years, photocopiers appeared in every office and, indeed, college and the idea of typing onto skins and running sheets of paper through a duplicator went completely out of fashion. Roneo was bought by Vickers Engineering and then Alcatel in France; Gestetner was taken over by Ricoh from Japan. Duplicators are now museum pieces.

A few years later, having a little mended my ways and actually got a degree (in a different subject and at a different college), I found myself working in the field which is still mine 35 years later: information services for healthcare. And quite soon I was putting up a business case to my superiors to buy a fax machine. More and more NHS organisations were using them and, rather than wait for us to get documents to them by post, they regularly asked us to fax them through.

It was a battle, but the pressure was growing, measured above all by people using commercial fax services and charging the company for them. Before long we had our first fax machine. It was exciting: we were at the cutting edge of technology, a bit like when I first learned to use a duplicator.

And why do I tell that story? Because earlier this week I saw a newspaper article – that is, an article I read on line but on a newpaper’s website, though it wasn’t actually printed on news-paper – announcing that the NHS was phasing out its fax machines. I saw the technology introduced, now I’m watching it go again.

Some years after the campaign for faxes, I was working for another company which was resisting the generalised use of laptop computers. The cost of equipping all the staff was just too high. But, grudgingly and with bad grace,  eventually the pressure was too high and we were all issued with laptops. The same sort of story as with the fax machines a decade earlier.

Today, turn up in a new job and the first thing that happens is that you’re issued with a laptop computer. A phone as well, as it happens – but I don’t have the space here to go into that innovation too.

There was a time, in the middle ages, when children could learn their trade from their parents. Tools had changed so little between generations that the skills were still good. Technology outlived its users. Not today. Within my own career, I've seen a technology appear, be superseded, and vanish again.

Will the same happen to my laptop? Am I already witnessing its decline into the mists of history that have swallowed the Roneo and Gestetner duplicator, and the NHS fax machine? Who knows?

Exciting times. If Something still existed, I could have written a story on the subject.