The powers that blunder and their victims in Ukraine

It’s agonising to watch the suffering of Ukraine today. And I feel it all the more strongly because of the work I was doing only fifteen months ago, with a group of Ukrainians who impressed me as much for their competence as colleagues, as for their warmth as friends.

At the time I worked for an American company whose founder and his seriously ill son, had undergone the pain of finding a way through the maze of the healthcare world. He emerged appalled at how little information is available about hospitals.

He decided to launch a software system to tackle the problem, and assigned the work of building one of the first modules to two Ukrainian students at Berkeley, near San Francisco. They amazed him by turning it around in a few day. He gave them a second much bigger task, and again they’d completed it in astonishingly quick time. There was more to them, he decided, than met the eye.

“You’re not doing this alone, are you?” he asked.

“No,” they admitted, “we’re getting help from a bunch of friends back home.”

“Well, why don’t you form yourselves into a company and I’ll give you an exclusive contract to develop the system for me?”

By the time I joined the American company, the arrangement had been working well for seven or eight years, and a pretty remarkable system had emerged from their collaboration. They were two separate companies, but they worked as though they were one. The people I met when I travelled out there didn’t behave as though they were in a partner company, but like colleagues. Skilled and dedicated colleagues. I was proud to work with them.

Where in Ukraine was this happening? That’s a question one can’t answer without making a political statement. It’s like that city in Northern Ireland: call it Londonderry, and you sound like a Unionist who regards it as part of the United Kingdom; call it Derry, and you sound like a Nationalist who feels the place is Irish.

I knew next to nothing about Ukraine at the time, and had barely heard of the city, which I called “Kharkov”. That’s a Russian name, and arguably it makes sense to use it, the population being overwhelmingly Russian (it’s only twenty miles from the border).

On the other hand, it is in Ukraine, and many of my colleagues used the Ukrainian name “Kharkiv”, which was probably more politically correct. I didn’t meet any Russian speakers from there that objected to the name, and so made an effort to use it too.

Kharkov/Kharkiv illustrates the problem of that whole region. Russian speakers belong to the same community as the people half an hour’s drive away, the other side of the international border. Many of my colleagues had close family in nearby Russia.

The problem is particularly acute in one area of Ukraine that most Britons have actually heard of: the Crimean peninsula. British and French troops fought Russians there in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1854, at the battle of Balaclava, the British plumbed the depths of military incompetence at the same time as they scaled the heights of glory (glorious incompetence being one of the great characteristics of armies in combat). Tennyson summed it up for us:

“Forward, the Light Brigade!” 
Was there a man dismay'd? 
Not tho' the soldier knew 
Someone had blunder'd: 
Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs but to do and die: 
Into the valley of Death 
Rode the six hundred.

A British blunder,
where the Russians are blundering around today

The Brigade captured the Russian guns, couldn’t hold them, and had to retreat to their starting point. Of the 600 who started out, just 195 were still unhurt and on horseback at the end. 

“C’est magnifique,” French Marshal Pierre Bosquet observed, “mais ce n’est pas la guerre.”

In truth, it wasn’t magnificent, it was carnage, and it was very much what war’s about.

That was in October 1854. A century later, in 1954, Crimea was the subject of another historical blunder. In a fifteen-minute interlude in a meeting of the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party, its General Secretary Nikita Kruschev told his colleagues that Crimea was being given to Ukraine.

He liked Urkaine, where he’d spent some time, and his wife was Ukrainian. At the time it probably didn’t seem to make a lot of difference: no one imagined the Soviet Union was going to unravel, so transferring a territory from one administrative unit wholly dominated by Moscow to another, was an empty gesture.

But then the Soviet Union fell apart, Ukraine became a sovereign state, and found itself in possession of Crimea. The Russians hastily agreed a lease to allow their Black Sea fleet to keep using the port at Sevastopol, but otherwise they were out.

Although not really. Ukraine remained heavily dependent on Russia, particularly for energy, as Russia showed by turning off gas supplies when it felt the need to exert some pressure. And it was glad to be able to work through a friendly President, in the form of Viktor Yanukovych.

But now Yanukovych has gone, to be replaced by people far less under Moscow’s thumb, far more inclined to look westward. We’ve seen the results: explicit military threats from Russia, and open army action in the Crimea, where “self-defence” groups, looking suspiciously like Russian forces without identifying insignia, have seized key locations.

It’s deeply depressing.

But I’m particularly distressed for my former colleagues. Because just as the international political atmosphere around them deteriorates, the international commercial world has turned toxic for them too.

It was announced on Friday that the Ukrainian arm of the operation I worked with is suing the American company for $30 million. Why’s that? Because the Americans, under entirely new management, have unilaterally decided not to extend the contract after it expired on 28 February. After ten years outstanding work, my friends in Kharkov/Kharkiv now have to go the Californian courts to try to protect their position.

I don’t know whether those friends in Kharkiv/Kharkov will still be Ukrainian in a few months, or will have been made Russians by force of arms. I don’t know whether they would welcome such a change or resent it. Equally, I don’t know whether they’ll still be delivering services to their old American partners or whether they’ll be struggling to find new sources of work.

What I do know is that in both instances they have been the victims of international forces beyond their control.

All I can do is wish them well. These are tough times. I hope you and your compatriots emerge from them quickly, and unscathed. 

Unlike the Light Brigade.

Arabs and Jews: things were better under the Nazis

It’s always a pleasure when a film reminds one of when things were better than they are today. Even if that just leaves one wishing they could be as good again.

It’s odd when the setting for such a film is the Nazi occupation of Paris. But that’s what Les Hommes Libres, available in English as Free Men, successfully does.

A Nazi officer in the Paris Mosque, from Free Men

It’s set amongst the North African community in Paris during the Second World War. There had been significant immigration from Algeria and other parts of the Maghreb to France even before the war, though the really big wave came later. Many went home when the Germans invaded, but a large number stayed on, scratching a living as best they could under difficult conditions.

That led to a development that many might find extraordinary, given the state of tensions in the world today. The Muslim community of Paris, which wasn’t persecuted by the Nazis, did what it could to protect as many Jews as it could. It focused on Sephardi Jews, from North Africa themselves, because they spoke Arabic. The main mosque in Paris issued as many as possible of them with certificates attesting to their being Muslim: with similar features and the same language they could pass as part of community.

How many people were saved? Estimates vary between 500 and 1600. A drop, certainly, in the ocean of suffering that was the Holocaust. But for the 500 or 1600, it was literally the difference between life and death.

In protecting Jews, the North Africans of Paris reflected the attitudes of their compatriots and coreligionists back home. In countries under Vichy French or German occupation, Muslims refused in their vast majority to collaborate in persecuting Jews. In Algeria, when the (French) authorities offered expropriated Jewish homes up for new owners, some of the (French) white settlers leaped at the opportunity; Mosques denounced the practice and few Muslims took advantage of the offer.

That was a continuation of a centuries long tradition. When a more extreme Muslim ruling group from Morocco took control of Moorish Spain, many Jews left to live elsewhere in North Africa; when the equally extreme Christians of the “reconquest” took back control of the whole of Spain, others followed.

In the Arab, Muslim world Jews found refuge and forged new careers. Moses Mamonides, of whom Jews still say “from Moses to Moses there arose none like Moses”, lived and flourished in Cairo, where he was a court physician and wrote major works, some in Arabic (strictly Judaeo-Arabic, Arabic written in Hebrew script).

For centuries, Jews and Arabs worked and lived well together across North Africa and the Middle East. Those good relations, as Free Men shows, extended to Paris during the war.

Heartwarming, isn’t it? But a bit of shame that relations between Jews and Muslims today are so much worse than they were under Nazi occupation. With, sadly, no likelihood of their returning to those idyllic conditions any time soon. 

The sewers spread more smears

If you want to smear a politician, there are many accusations you can make: espionage, perhaps, or corruption; if you want to get domestic, it could be adultery or using prostitutes; but, boy, you really get your shaft home if you accuse a leading figure of paedophilia.

So that’s what the Daily Mail, which passes as a newspaper in Britain, has decided to do to Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the Labour Party. Caught up with her in the smear is her husband, Jack Dromey, a Labour MP since 2010 and a leading trades unionist before then. Because it’s best to do these things in threes, the Mail has also got its knife into Patricia Hewitt, a former Labour Health Secretary.

Harriet Harman: the Daily Mail's latest target

Now you can make a smear up wholesale, and the Mail has done just that in the past. But it’s best if you can give it some slight basis in fact, on the no smoke without fire principle. All three these people worked for the National Council for Civil Liberties, now called Liberty, at different times in the seventies and early eighties. In the 1970s, the NCCL accepted an affiliation from a body called the Paedophile Information Exchange. 

It never should have taken that affiliation. Shami Chakrabarti, who now heads Liberty, apologised for this grave mistake only last year, saying that “it is a source of continuing disgust and horror that even the NCCL had to expel paedophiles from its ranks in 1983 after infiltration at some point in the 70s.”

In those days, the NCCL had 1000 affiliates, and to my knowledge just one rotten apple. On almost all questions, they and its successor pop up regularly on the right side of questions: defending individuals from injustice, police violence or limitations of freedoms. It made a mistake and a serious one over the PIE, but I can understand people like the Mail’s victims choosing to stay with the organisation despite it.

In any case, the Mail is attacking individuals and not an organisation. The nub of their charges is that Harman herself was soft on paedophilia. She, they claim, worked to get the age of consent reduced to 10 and to soften regulations against taking photographs of children.

The reality, as she made clear, is that she never advocated reducing the age of consent to 10. She asked for the age of consent for homosexuals to be made the same as for heterosexuals. As for photographs of children, she was endeavouring to ensure that innocent photos of children taken by parents (perhaps in a bath – and I know I have some glorious ones of the aftermath of my boys’ unilateral decision to repaint their room) or pictures used for sex education, should not be criminalised.

The reality is that Harriet Harman’s only offence is that she’s taken a political stance that doesn’t appeal to the Mail.

And what of the Mail itself?

Well, it has quite a colourful track record. For instance, Britain has been struggling with a series of measles epidemics over the last few years, because a since struck off doctor called Andrew Wakefield published now discredite research suggesting that the Measles-Mumps-Rubella vaccine was dangerous. The ensuing panic led to major drop in vaccination rates and the subsequent epidemics.

Who gave his results the publicity they needed? Why, the Daily Mail. And they’re publishing articles still: Melanie Phillips, the star journalist on this story, is still writing material giving credence to Wakefield’s continued rants.

But that’s only the most recent of the Mail’s journalistic triumphs. They reached the high point of their existence came in the 1930s, when they supported Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. And as supporters of his, they naturally also approved of his good friend, Adolf Hitler.

Even earlier, in 1924 the first Labour government in Britain was facing a general election it was likely to lose. Just seven years after the Russian revolution, Grigory Zinoviev was still a leading member of the Soviet Communist Party. Just four days before the election, the Daily Mail published a letter from him to the British Communist Party suggesting how advantageous a Labour victory would be.

Did the letter lose the election for the Labour Party? Possibly not. But the Liberal vote collapsed and the Tory vote rose: the general interpretation is that anti-Socialist Liberals switched in droves to the Conservatives.

And the letter? It was a forgery.

Every country needs its sewers and its cesspits: they serve a vital role. It’s just a pity when they masquerade as newspapers. And poison the minds of anyone they can reach.

A tribute to the strength of the slaves who populated the US. And the white settlers too. They had much to overcome

Black friends, and not just black ones, have often pointed out to me the sheer courage and strength that must have animated the unfortunates who made the dire crossing of the Atlantic from Africa, to enter slavery in North America. 

It must indeed have taken great resolve and reserves of will to avoid being crushed and live through both the journey and slavery itself. Black Americans – or African Americans if you prefer the terms, and I don’t, because they are wholly American – can at least pride themselves on being descended from tough stock.

Slaves on the 'Middle Passage'. It took strength to survive

It strikes me, however, that white Americans were also fortunate to survive the process of colonisation. 

It has often surprised me – though perhaps it shouldn’t – that quite a few Americans labour under the illusion that the first English-speaking settlement in their land was in Massachusetts: the Pilgrim Fathers from the Mayflower expedition. It’s comforting to think that these were the first, as they’re presented as victims of persecution escaping to a land where they could be free. 

In passing, it needs to be said that this does ignore the awkward truth that the freedom they sought also involved denying any to those who were of a different faith from theirs. The Salem witch trials were perhaps the most celebrated example of the intolerance of the Massachusetts Puritans, but it was far from the only one.

In any case, they were not the first settlers. These were in what would be turned by their descendants into the slave-owning, tobacco-growing colony of Virginia. Two attempts at colonising Roanoke island failed in the 1580s. Then in 1607, settlers were sent to what became Jamestown.

Now here come the breathtaking stats: two years later, by 1609, 1000 colonists were down to just sixty.

No slaver could possibly have stayed in business with that level of losses. These guys just couldn’t make a go of things. In fact, the remaining sixty were heading down the river, ready to make a dash back to England, when they were met by a new fleet coming upstream which forced them to return to the hellhole they were escaping.

What had been the problem? Well, they certainly had their share of attacks from the local Algonquin ‘Indians’. The latter, perhaps not entirely unfairly in the light of subsequent developments, were distrustful of these new arrivals who were encroaching on their ancestral lands. There must have been problems with disease too, no doubt. But the biggest difficulty of all was that the colonists just couldn’t feed themselves.

Now, hold on and think about that. By the seventeenth century, ‘Indians’ had been living on those lands for perhaps 10,000 or 12,000 years. For some centuries, they’d developed an agricultural way of life, growing such crops as maize, which they supplemented with meat from hunting in the forests that covered most of the landscape.

They weren’t dying of hunger.

In fact, just as happened in the later Massachusetts colony, the local people made the big mistake of taking pity on the settlers and showed them how to grow food to stave off starvation. A gesture of kindness for which they were thanked by a war of extermination which started in the 1620s (but, of course, a justified war: those vicious savages had attacked some English settlements which they viewed as threatening more of their lands).

Jamestown. Settlers faced many obstacles, not least their own ineptitude

In my view, it’s time to salute those early colonists. They had much to overcome. Hostility from the local population. New diseases. But above all their sheer incompetence at carving out a living for themselves from highly fertile land.

Not sure why I can’t feel quite the same degree of admiration for them as for the slaves who survived the ordeals they faced...

Tony Blair: place in history, place in soap opera

Few Prime Ministers can have been as preoccupied with their place in history as Tony Blair. 

Sadly, he’s rather torn that one. He still thinks that history will exonerate him, but then I suppose we all need our comforting illusions just to get through life. My view? His name will be as indissolubly linked to catastrophe in Iraq as Anthony Eden’s is with debacle in Suez.

Still, if an honourable place in history is rather beyond him these days, at least he can aspire to a significant supporting role in soap opera.

Let’s set the scene. For over a decade and a half, Blair’s been a close friend of Rupert Murdoch, the Berlusconi of the English-speaking world. People in Murdoch’s circle like to put it about that he more or less put Blair into office, and the two of them pretty well ran Britain together for the best part of a decade. Sadly, rather a lot of us think that picture wasn’t terribly far from the truth.

Even after he left office, Tony remained close to Rupe. Tony even became godfather to Grace, one of Murdoch’s daughters by his then wife, Wendi Deng. The baptism took place in the river Jordan, as though Murdoch (or possibly Blair) was a kind of latter-day John the Baptist and Grace, or possibly her sister Chloe, baptised at the same time, was the Messiah returned in female form.

Good taste of the kind we’re well used to from Murdoch’s papers.

Within his media empire, Murdoch was in the meanwhile promoting the career of one of his finest editors, Rebekah Brooks, who eventually became Chief Executive of his News International corporation.

When David Cameron became Prime Minister, he decided to appoint a former BBC journalist, Guto Harri, as his Communications Chief at Downing Street. When Brooks learned that this was about to happen, she rang Cameron and told him that he should do no such thing, but appoint Andy Coulson instead. Coulson had been her successor as editor of the News of the World.

Cameron in those days thought that ‘lol’ meant ‘lots of love’ and used to text Brooks with ‘lol’ as his sign off. All that love – he could hardly deny her wish to see Coulson in the Downing Street role, and he was duly appointed.

Sadly, the News of the World, the paper that loved to break scandals about other people was about to face its own: the accusation that it had been hacking the phones of celebrities and victims of crime to feed its ravenous craving for sensational, or salacious, news. The paper eventually closed and both Brooks and Coulson were arrested, Coulson having to resign from the post Brooks had arranged for him to be given.

And Blair? Well, just before Brooks was arrested he apparently gave her advice to stand firm and tough things out. So she had the incumbent Prime Minister and an illustrious former one as close and personal friends. She must have taken comfort from such protection.

Today, though, she’s had to take the stand in her own trial, and what emerged? That she had a ‘car crash’ of a private life, as her marriage to actor Ross Kemp fell apart. Among other things, this involved ‘periods of intimacy’ with the very Andy Coulson she’d done so much to promote. Not an affair, you understand – just intimacy. 

Rebekah and Andy
Good friends, good colleagues and periods of intimacy

See what I mean about soap opera? The femme fatale with two powerful men at her beck and call, and working for a third, arguably more powerful than either of the others. She’s in a failing marriage with a celebrity. She seeks consolation with a subordinate whose success she promotes. It’s the first season or two of – what shall we call it? Perhaps We Make the News.

But, I hear you cry, what about Blair in all this? Surely he has only a walk-on part, not a major supporting role as you claim.

Not so. For as in all successful soap operas, season 2 has seen new plot lines added. Now it seems that Murdoch and Blair are themselves involved in what looks, on the surface, like another love triangle. It’s around that Wendi Deng, mother of Tony’s goddaughter Grace.

Bright and feisty, she intervened in defence of her husband when he was attacked with a cream pie within the hallowed precincts of the Palace of Westminster. She was there even before the security guards whose job it was to ensure – well security. Tough lady.

It seems she has a softer side too.

‘Oh shit, oh shit, whatever why I’m so missing Tony … he has such a good, body and really, really good legs …’ she wrote on one occasion, and it’s hard to deny the sentiment even if one might question the English. 

Wendi, Rupe and Tony. The love triangle for season 3?

Did they have an affair, or even ‘periods of intimacy’? Who knows. It seems that Murdoch thinks so, and to justify his divorce, latched onto the times Blair and Deng spent alone together in his house – his house, just imagine – while Rupe was away. It seems Tony can’t get Rupe to take his calls any more and has given up trying.

Well, there’s plenty of smoke around, and who knows what fire is smouldering away underneath it? Sounds like a great theme to explore in season 3 of We Make The News.

You might say it’s a bit grubby, but then so was the whole Iraq affair. And at least the soap opera’s unlikely to leave some hundreds of thousands of civilian dead in a devastated nation.

Unlike the history.

Denounced by Churchmen, is the latest assault on the poor just another case of the banality of evil?

Soon to be a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, has denounced the British government’s policy towards benefits as a ‘disgrace’. He warned that they will leave the poorest and most vulnerable in society facing ‘hunger and destitution.’

Vincent Nichols outside the Catholic Cathedral in Westminster 

Like a great many people, I am deeply distrustful of organised religion. Its leaders, it seems to me, are often on precisely the wrong side of debates, even on the moral questions which should be their principal domain of expertise.

My suspicion is all the deeper because they tend to reason in terms of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, categories that I distrust. After all, no one thinks what they’re doing is evil, however monstrous the act may be: they’re generally convinced that the intention behind the act makes it good. 

So, for instance, no one likes being threatened by foreigners with weapons, as the West’s response to terrorism shows. And yet if Britain manages to avoid being sucked into another adventure in the next few months or so, we may be about to enter the first full year we have enjoyed without military action since the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. In all that time, Britain has fought to defend its own borders only once, in 1940.

How many people, in how many countries, must have felt that Britain’s behaviour was evil? And yet in this country, we’re convinced that British soldiers are heroes and their behaviour exemplary.

However, my uncertainty about the concept of ‘evil’ was shaken when I came across the work of Hannah Arendt. She is one of my favourite thinkers of the twentieth century. I’ve been dipping into her work again since yesterday evening, when I watched the excellent film Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta with Barbara Sukowa in the title role.

Hannah Arendt: acute insight into the nature of evil

Arendt was the writer who coined the expression ‘banality of evil’, from watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann had been in the SS during the Second World War, and his task had been organising the transports to carry Jews to ghettos, to concentration camps and ultimately to extermination camps.

What appalled Arendt, herself a Jew, was the staggering mediocrity of the man.

“The deeds were monstrous, but the doer ... was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”

He was a minor cog in a massive bureaucracy, merely doing a difficult job as competently as he could. He didn’t think what he was doing was evil. In fact, Arendt realised, he didn’t think at all.

“... the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.”

That’s a particularly powerful statement if you share Arendt’s world view. For her, man is essentially a thinking being. Stop thinking and you deny your very personhood. Deny yours and how can you recognise anyone else’s?

But Arendt’s key thought comes as a question:

“Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it ‘conditions’ men against evildoing?”

An acute insight into the true nature of evil. And if there’s any characteristic that particularly strikes me in the behaviour of the present British government, it’s precisely thoughtlessness. Apparently unable to imagine the suffering they’re inflicting on others, they impose it with the same indifference to the people affected as Eichmann showed.

So perhaps it’s not inappropriate that a Prince of the Church has denounced the government’s attitude. Good and evil are concepts that he works with daily. And what he has denounced seems precisely to fit the Arendt concept of evil in its harrowing banality.

In addition, we read today that a group of charities have found that there is a ‘culture of fear’ in the benefits world these days.

Hunger. Destitution. Fear. Yep, that sounds like the handiwork of evil. The banality and mediocrity of men like David Cameron, George Osborne or Ian Duncan Smith (the benefits minister) shouldn’t delude us into thinking it’s anything else.

After all, Eichmann was just as banal and mediocre.

Marks and Spencer, ever the early bird

I’m intensely grateful to Marks and Spencers, worthiest of British retail outlets, for having printed an uplifting sentiment on the soles of my slippers.

Inspirational message on M&S slipper soles

However, I have to say that the gesture does raise a few awkward questions.

First of all, just who do they expect to be reading my soles?

I mean, I generally walk on them. Perhaps M&S hope I’ll put them up on the coffee table so someone sitting opposite me can read the message. It’s true that I do tend to prop my feet on the table when I can but, hey, I do usually take my slippers off first. What do they think? That I’m a slob all the time?

Maybe M&S are just looking after my spiritual wellbeing. After all, slippers bring comfort to the feet, so perhaps the inspirational words are there so M&S can be seen to be taking care of body and sole together.

But, secondly, the words themselves. The early bird catches the worm? I’ve never got that saying. I mean, someone really thinks the prospect of catching a worm is going to get me out bed early? Dream on. As I intend to.

No, the only creature that would get up betimes to catch a worm would be the bird, just like it says in the proverb itself.

Now here’s the problem. I understand that this is an important principle for birds to master (though it’s not quite so salutary, let me point out in passing, for the poor old worms).

And here’s the rub: when did you last see a bird wearing slippers?