Grasping Nettles

Most people find nettles a bit of a nuisance, I suppose – though I do remember when very young the neighbourhood bully found a nearby nettle patch pretty useful for quelling dissent – and for all I know the Romans introduced them to Britain (if they really did) with something similar in mind, though I doubt it: I imagine the Romans were aware of their value as food for animals (and humans), not to mention for a yarn that with a little extra difficulty outclassed flax – and then there was their value as a compost-maker. No, nettles are ok, if you can stand them. I’ve been particularly susceptible to painful nettle-stings in this year of what I would call quite exceptional growth in the vegetative world, so I have mixed feelings, even though I’ve conscientiously harvested two big jars of the seeds to go into the bread dough.

You frequently hear complaint these days from environmentally conscious folk about the lack of old-fashioned wildflowers on roadside verges. The verges are deemed to have become too nutrient-rich, perhaps as a compounded result of run-off from farm-fields, and having therefore attracted the more thuggish plants, thistles, rosebay willowherb and of course nettles. I have a Modest Proposal to make there, but first (as usual) a digression, involving children and wildflowers.

Children of course no longer grace our countryside, any more than do the wildflowers whose naming they have been historically so largely responsible for. Drive down country roads now and you could go for days without ever seeing a kid on verge, field or track – doing what they were once wont to do – playing the fool, playing truant, helping out in the fields, getting shouted at by the farmer, filching the odd root vegetable for the kitchen, building stuff, climbing stuff, knocking stuff down or digging stuff up, hanging out and generally getting themselves a good education. Where have they all gone? Has breeding dried up? A bit, maybe, but not enough to make ths cataclysmic difference. I suppose they’ll all, like their parents, have been sucked into conurbations of various sizes where, I guess, the Law and its various executors can keep more of an eye on them.

Country people, farming people, have of course always been a bit of a nuisance to the Powers That Be. I suppose that goes to some extent for such farmers as still remain in the countryside, but as this demographic has become so reduced in numbers, and is at any rate largely enslaved to the Banks, they don’t constitute much of a Voice, and when they have political representation it’s generally in the form of the richest and most landowner-like of their number, who can more or less tell the others How It Really Is because they’ve done all right thank you by How It Really Is and if the others haven’t quite come up to the same standard of prosperity all they need to do is try a bit harder, and so the attitude gets hard-boiled into the farming community at large. “I don’t think the farmers will like that too much”, I once said to one senior politician about something-or-other, can’t remember what. “Ach” – his response – “farmers are always complaining.” The pressure is indeed still on to get the People out of the countryside – that’s to say the people who interact with the countryside rather than those who just squat there – where they really are of diminishing use to the Economy and the continuing process of Industrialisation of everything.

Anyway, as to my Modest Proposal – a phrase, when I think about it, that was first coined when a great Irish satirist noted a superabundance of children – starving ones in his case – in the countryside. My proposal is much more modest than Dean Swift’s: I had a notion about roadside nettles, etc., which everyone seems to get annoyed about, whether those environmentally-inclined or those who want “better visibility” so they can drive faster (and why shouldn’t they, considering you scarcely see a soul actually walking on a country road?). Surely our efforts to “keep the verges tidy” – which means that some herbage-cutting machine sweeps along them and leaves the remains minced up on the surface, to rot in in due course – could be slightly reformed, slightly improved, if said remains could, instead of being left to rot back in to the ground, be collected up and, say, dumped into large cages spaced at regular-ish intervals along the roadside. You would then get something (depending on how carefully you did it) resembling a series of compost heaps. I’m not suggesting that the local peasantry would actually come along and help themselves from this useful resource, seeing as there’s not much local peasantry left, but I dare say some kind of machine could be developed that could collect up the last couple of years’ rotted-down remains and deliver them somewhere where they could be useful. The main point about this is that at present, leaving the verge-cuttings to “rot in naturally” in situ, means that you are constantly enriching the soil, which is exactly what the large thuggish plants, like nettles, thistles and willowherb, particularly thrive on. Systematic impoverishment of the wayside soil, on the other hand, would eventually disfavour the large plants and in time encourage the return of their daintier cousins – to everyone’s delight, I imagine, apart from those who just want to drive as fast as possible.

On that particular topic, Ellie and I were one rainy night outside Alford, driving slowly along a windy stretch of road behind a tractor, whose driver was either taking his time or couldn’t go any faster. Up pipes Ellie’s GPS – “there is a 60-mile-an-hour speed limit in this road: why are you driving so slowly?” Exactly the same on another occasion, a very narrow, very windy road outside Banchory – scarcely more than a farm track, with passing spaces and broken tar-edges. Really? The intelligence of machines, I guess, though the worst of it is that you can’t answer back – certainly not with the expletives you’d like to lace your response with.

As to machines and their intelligence or lack of it, I assume we must, as a species, be finally facing a crossroads – or maybe it would more of a fork in the road – that we have been approaching for a long time – centuries, probably: I mean the decision whether or not to stay human. There hasn’t been much decision in it of course, so far: I would say we have followed – probably more or less blindly – a pattern of self-destructive stupidity the blame for which can’t really be laid at anyone’s feet. But show-time, I have to assume, will not be long. A”singularity” is predicted, which I take to mean that human so-called intelligence can be hugely enhanced via digital implants (as opposed to things you carry in your hand or use on your desk). If this happens I guess the next step would be to find a way of encoding this enhanced “intelligence “ into the DNA, making it per se heritable and lo and behold you have  new type of human being which, according to Darwinism (so-called) will replace as “unfit” the old un-computerised style of human, and which will be endowed with “super-intelligence”, ie vast stores of instantly accessible “data”, and generally with very tidy and logical minds. I’m quite sure this would involve a steady tidying-up of the human mind, and the first target of the New Human vacuum-cleaner would presumably be Dreaming, which currently fills up such a large proportion of brain-bytes with nonsense.

I suppose, if this split occurs, one branch of humanity will break off from the rest and – I don’t know, follow Mr Musk and his successors to the stars or wherever he thinks they’ll be going. The rest, if there is a rest, will have the task of facing up to the consequences of the wanton destruction that has been visited on all parts of the planet, apart maybe from the one or two tiny pockets where deep jungle and stone-tipped spears have so far held off the encroachment of outsiders.

What will those consequences be? Well, I certainly don’t know: perhaps they won’t be as bad as they currently look – especially if Musk and Buds manage to draw off a goodly enough bunch of Pilgrim Fathers (and Mothers) to plague some distant planet, or if there’s some other kind of frightful culling that might knock a little sense into us. But I would like to think that some long-term Lesson had been learned, that survivors wouldn’t just lapse into some primitive, or let’s-start-all-over-again, state.

One thing I suspect will remain true: machinery has a way of requiring not just maintenance but improvement. A machine is a bit of a hungry little blood-sucking demon (well, metaphorical blood), which constantly requires more oil, more steel, more circuitry, more chips, and that’s about it and the only thing likely to sufficiently counteract it is a better, an increased, awareness of our own humanity and what constitutes it – or doesn’t constitute it: I’m thinking there of, among other things, the absurd Cartesian assumption that the human being, or for that matter any other living being, is itself a machine and part of a mechanism. This notion – and it’s at the very core of the Technological Age – has guided us for far too long, with the result that (among other things) we have lost sight of the once self-evident truth that the Earth needs to feel the tread of human feet – their touch, their rhythms, feet walking, feet running, feet dancing, feet of those working, feet plodding homewards when the day’s work is done: the countryside laced with interconnecting footpaths – this is a need, the direct connection of the Earth with her (so far) most remarkable product, the human being, and not one of humanity’s proxies, like the huge ground-crushing machines we can view in every field and every forest. Sometimes it looks as though this has been sussed, ie vague efforts are made to re-introduce footpaths (cycle tracks? bridle paths?) for amenity purposes – but “effort” really is the operative word, as it goes largely against the grain of the time.

What the self-destructive stupidity (which is no-one’s fault) can only lead to is an Earth that (like the human mind with its dreaming function excised or ablated) is at first sanitised then in the end sterile, desert-land, empty of soul, sufficient maybe to feed health-less bodies, but even that on a scale of diminishing returns.

How has this happened – how is it happening, right under our very noses? Well, as no-one is to blame, I suppose we have to look at that, aforementioned, pattern of self-destructive stupidity. Is a pattern “just a pattern”, or can we ascribe intention to it? Moot point. But let’s say there is intention behind the pattern which has been busily emptying the countryside of its human riff-raff: what could the intention be? If the resultant countryside is as I’ve described, would it be fair to say that there are forces at work which intend the destruction of both Humanity and the living Earth? Unfortunately this won’t be clear, probably, until we stand on the bank of the last dried-up stream holding the last clod of de-natured soil. But then, as with all evolutionary change, we will be able to say, oh that’s where this was all heading! We know there’s no purpose in evolution, just blindly occurring mutation, and something which, viewed retrospectively, looks like purpose (eg how did the giraffe get to that ridiculous, but actually rather practical, shape? – it just happened, man). But despite appearances of course we know there was no purpose – how? Well because we know there was no purpose, that’s how, shut up, there’s no living Earth, it’s all just a big blind machine, and machines run down that’s just the way it is.

To me, and with all this in prospect, the only real question left is, can we – individually rather than collectively – take a hold of ourselves and learn to embrace our own humanity and what that means? Can we penetrate the mists of our self-made ignorance and give ourselves choice? Can we grow up? Or will we let ourselves go on being infantilised, year after year – maybe for a couple of centuries yet, but getting there, getting there….

Another One

….Thought I’d better add the picture as I mention it.(Courtesy of the C A Roy Archive)

I was just about to post a blog about nettles, but in the meantime there came the news of the sudden death of an old, dear, friend, so I’d better leave my blog till I’m in more of an editing mood. Damned nuisances, dear old friends dying, disrupting our timetables, what do they mean by it….

Anyway, Charlie’s magnificent portrait shows him craggier and more venerable than I’ll probably remember him, but appropriate enough I guess, for one who has “passed on”.

Thud

Whichever side of the wall we’re on
We persevere
Sometimes an echo from beyond
Reminds us
Surprises or confounds us
But nothing we can clearly hear

An apple thudding from a bough
As we sit placidly
With the coffee can and not much thought
May turn our minds
Towards the indisputable grounds
Of science laws, like gravity

But then the other moments come
When all is mystery
And we see the solid wall’s been built
From nothing but mistakes
Miscalculations, strikes
Into thin air – and suddenly

The bough shakes
And the air fills with falling rain
That suddenly rises up again
And we say “mist”, but what we mean
Is mystery, the echoes from beyond
Become a clamour
And we old men put off our armour
And dance around in the scud –

All from one apple’s thud
We thought we could hear
Maybe, behind the wall
(Or not) where we, dimly, persevere.

In memory Alan,  (Biggles, or –ha ha – Tin Man, no longer appropriate….), who died on Monday

Of Slaters (and other Creepy-Crawlies)

Ben was up this last week to do some serious work he’d been planning on the old cottage, where a substantial section of roof had rotted at the point where the “original” slated section met with the “new” (dunno, hundred-year-old? maybe more) section finished with Welsh slate and had conspired with the activities of too-high farm machinery parked inside the building – breaking roof-joists etcetera – to render the place not even a lot of use as a store. Ash (Goody, as was) was his right-hand man and while the youngsters (ha ha, Ben’s not yet 50) endured some pretty intense heat both aloft and on the ground, learning the noble trade of slatery as they went along (I shouldn’t forget the rest of the team, Rachel, Robin, Kyle, maybe more – nor the not completely irrelevant fact that I ran into Micky Small yesterday who, also slating somewhere on a building not far way, reported setting up a thermometer on that roof and recording 50 deg) – anyway, the old guy (ie me) was left to sniff out the odd bit of shade on the pile of slates we’ve one way or another (but all honestly) accumulated and try and find replacements for the considerable number of broken or damaged items.

I put “original” in quote-marks because I assume, in part from the number of reed-beds hereabouts, that the original roof was thatched. There’s a tin-roofed cottage not far from us which is much prized by the Planning Department because the tin was found to cover an originally thatched roof. Thank goodness our building was no such historical treasure or we’d have had no end of trouble. Whenever it was that our old cottage was “modernised” from its thatched state – anything up to a couple of hundred years ago – I suppose the fancy new roofing material was Scotch slates – heavier, less industrialised-looking than the – later – rectangular and regular Welsh slates, being made of much softer material and tending to be tear-drop-shape, though with the bottom edge straightened off, and hung from a single nail, which would have made repairs much easier as you could swing the things back and forth if you needed to work on an adjacent slate, but against which the more crumbly nature of the material meant you were more likely to have to do repairs than with the Welsh. So I suppose you could say the introduction of Welsh slates was a similar level of “progress” to the introduction of Scotch slates to supersede reed thatching.

The material, in process of organisation (more pics below)

Which is all a preamble to the cogitations I was left to as I tried to find suitably-sized, unbroken slates while Ben and Ash sweated and worked out chopping and distancing techniques (the end result looks pretty good, I’ll try and find if someone’s thought to do a photo). My cogitations? Well, I was pretty bored, but in addition I found a barrow-load of the things as much as I could manage to push up the not great distance and very slight gradient towards the work-site (I mention here, a bit irrelevantly, that because of this gradient, in common with some of the older cottages hereabouts the cottage roof-ridge runs parallel to the gradient of the ground, ie is well off the horizontal – which means that for any building or joinery or maintenance work you do you have to throw away your measuring instruments and use your eye instead).

Anyway, cogitations…. These centred not so much on the heat and discomfort as on that sheer weight of the barrow-loads. How long, how many man-hours of digging, breaking, lifting, shaping, had gone into the production of these – well, well-designed, well-thought-out, objects? Tons and tons, months and years – the sheer amount of painstaking hard toil, all that sweat and brawn, seemed almost too much to contemplate. And this for one tiny cottage! Multiply that up to the various scales demanded by what we now call the Industrial Revolution – when of course it soon became obvious that Scottish slate was insufficient in quantity, but when luckily we found that carving our way into the Welsh or Spanish mountains more than made up the shortfall – and the thing becomes quite incalculable. I’ve often wondered about the numbers of Welsh slates countable in the grey streets of central and suburban Aberdeen, which is not large as cities go. Just the sheer amount of material pulled out of the ground, transported and worked and laid on roofs and then forgotten about, all so that people, and their various enterprises, domestic and industrial, could stay dry! And then multiply that to the scale required by the whole industrial north….

I’ve no particular gripe against regarding the world, your environment, “The Environment”, as a treasure-trove of “resources”. I guess every animal does it, and of course anyone who doesn’t make use of resources could be rightly regarded as an idiot. I suppose you could argue about “proper use of resources”, not to mention “respect for the environment” which might – well long ago I’m sure it did, to an extent – take into account the needs of your fellow-creatures and whether or not they clashed with yours. I was conscious, as I was lifting out my piles of slates, of the fact that I was disrupting the existence of the many hundreds of occupants of the slate-pile – which is not me virtue signalling, because as far as I’m aware this is something that passes through the mind of any resource-extractor, and the lower they are on the social scale the more likely they are to feel some empathy with the various six or eight-legged, crawling or sliding or otherwise sectioned creatures of our daily underworld – I think of an old film, I thought it was called “The Ants”, tho in what language I can’t remember (my online searches for it have been fruitless, or lost in the flood of offerings on the giant man-eating ants theme) which finishes with a scene of two of the protagonists, the world as they knew it substantially destroyed by whatever bunch of Supremacists were around at the time (Nazis, probably, in this case), kneeling on a road watching as a colony of ants goes diligently about repairing the damage done to their nest by some casual passer-by.

Those who have power, and those who for one reason or another have to do the bidding of those with power, belong essentially to two different species. I don’t know if they are both exactly what you could call “human” species, but if one species is closer to the ants, then one wonders what the other must consider itself closer to? The Gods? The Annunaki? The Aliens? – something “up there” anyway, the sky’s the limit for our nonsenses. I think of this latter human sub-species as the Supremacists, and though I don’t know exactly how long it’s been around to trouble the world, I think it’s fairly clear that it’s received an evolutionary boost since the coming of industrial technology.  Ants (real ones, I mean) we can watch and admire: but what do the Supremacists, those found at the core of our Power Elites, tell us about humanity? There’s a myth current among many of the young – it may have some basis in actuality, what do I know? – that the “Epstein class” indulges a passion for sacrificing and eating human babies. I call this a myth because, whatever the reality, I think these youngsters see with considerable clarity that a rejection of moral standards, a repudiation of guilt or of responsibility towards others, doesn’t place you amongst the gods, as their simple-mind aspirations presumably intended, but rather among satanists and their presiding demons.

One thing is certain; the rate at which we extract resources grows unabatedly, exponentially; the conflicts over who gets the best share of them likewise; the justifications for the need for all this extraction pour on as unabatedly – but justifications are not the same as real reasons. I guess everyone knows somewhere, deep down, that a very simple, a very basic way of life – maybe what was once honoured as, and is now despised as, “poverty” – is perfectly adequate; that that knowledge indicates Reason, as in what is reasonable. We know this (I imagine it’s why we like to keep pets, for example, or grow a few plants in front of our house – fellow-creatures whose “simplicity” we value), but we certainly make sure we train our children to forget it asap – and why? because they wouldn’t get very far in life if they didn’t, they’d be at a disadvantage, wouldn’t they, in our “competitive world”.  The myth is that society – which generally means someone telling them what to do – would collapse without their efforts to do their bit, otherwise understood, by the majority, as scraping a living.

The world is currently engulfed in a war which I imagine is, like most wars, over resources. While oil/gas may be the resource in question in the immediate short term, the real goal (food supply excepted, that’s a no-brainer) appears to be what you could simplify as “control of choke points” in connection with, on the one hand, data storage/manipulation, and I assume artificial “intelligence” and robotics, and on the other hand “money markets”, whatever that means – analysts like Michael Hudson give a pretty good run-down of the economic realities, all a bit above my head, though the choke-points issue is clear enough: Hormuz, Bab al-Mandab, Suez, Malacca, Panama, all come into focus, and are all real places with real people living nearby – not to mention the newcomer, the Atlantic sub-Arctic passage, which is a bit too close for comfort, if you live in Scotland, not nice and faraway like those in “foreign parts”. Trace the choke-points to the actual theatres of the current war and you pretty soon see that the outrages of Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Ukraine are all part of one picture.  I haven’t been keeping up with the News too much of late, but I imagine western Governments and their colluders in the media (which, of course, shape the actual words – equals thoughts – that the general populace gets to use) are still managing to hoodwink said populace into thinking of the wars in Ukraine (bad Russia) and West Asia (bad Iran, or maybe not-so-bad) as separate issues. So far the global death tolls are being more or less limited to these tragic regions, but the old “when elephants clash the grass gets trampled” maxim could apply pretty much anywhere. It’s also hard to predict what suicidal urges the various religious fanatics involved may have – I suspect that old prophecy about “the abomination of desolation” is a turn-on for a few of them and some of them think of a bit of nuclear desolation, a bit of “fleeing to the mountains”, might be a pretty cool outcome, as long as they have their well-appointed bunkers – and, in the minds of the madder ones, could even encourage those Celestial Powers to come down and do some celestial magic.      

John Mearsheimer points out how rapid is the flow, the to-and-fro tide, of empires, how fluid and unsettled the relations of the global “great powers” have always been and continue to be. Those relations tend to be about the extraction of resources and who “controls” it. I suppose the control of the “money-markets” is a weird substratum of this – I certainly don’t get it, but then I’m poor. But I don’t think even Prof Mearsheimer takes fully into account the new element that creeps in with the advance of technology. Viz:

The Imperialist mindset has to be said for it that it recognises a degree of care for people – its people, as it would probably formulate it. This is because every empire, as so far known, is built upon people, their abilities and their toil. The imperialist mindset includes, and may even to a degree care for, The People, and even ethnic cleansing has tended to be more a case of imperial re-organising (sometimes with a bit of slaughtering) rather than an attempt to eradicate entire peoples. Its bastard offspring on the other hand, the Supremacist mindset, requires people to an ever-diminishing degree: I would think it’s not exaggerating to say that its ultimate aim is the destruction of humanity. I can only assume, as hitherto in history we have only really witnessed empires and their ways, that humanity is still largely unaware of this characteristic of the Supremacist mindset. We have seen it evinced naked and unabashed in the Nazis, certain Zionists and certain Christians with their weirdly suicidal tendencies, but before these phenomena not too much (unless, I suppose, you count in the Zealots and Sicarrii of Judaea’s first century CE): British attitudes to the peoples of its “colonies”, immigrant European attitudes towards the American “natives”, bear elements of it, but the destruction of peoples has tended to be to some extent balanced by an empire’s need of – or at least use for – them. With the new Supremacist mindset, basing itself increasingly – exponentially so – on technology, large swathes, if not all, of the human race can contemplate the reality of its own extinction, being no longer needed. Why would it be? Humanity is smelly, disorderly and – once it’s been (as now) trained into a rapacious attitude towards the earth’s resources – very expensive to maintain. In the language of old pop-movies, the (rather comfortable) nightmare scenario of The Matrix, which is where we are now, will with little doubt soon be superseded by the nightmare scenario of Terminator, which is far less comfortable..

I don’t think one has to be much of a prophet to make such a prediction. For centuries, all over the world, the populations of country areas (which have an irritating tendency towards independent thinking) have been systematically pushed towards ever-larger conurbations (quite handy for Eradication purposes, don’t you think?). Ray Kurzweil’s nonsense about the Singularity tends in exactly that direction, as surely as, in another sense, did JRR Tolkien’s mythical warning about power (“one ring to rule them all”….), that particular “singularity” being because all humanity disappears into one all-enveloping power “blob”, from which individuality is indistinguishable.  

Does it matter? And if it does – as some of us believe – what’s to be done about it? well, I should say, probably nothing. There’s a chance it will burn itself out in the fires of its own kindling (as in Tolkien’s myth), the only question there being whether it first achieves the destruction of humanity, which is its ultimate aim. One thing is sure; it thrives on opposition, it loves to be hated: hatred is what it lives on. We look at the heroism of the Palestinian people as they struggle for justice, of course. The heroism of other doomed peoples, from the Tatars of Crimea to the clans of the Scottish Highlands to the tribes of north America, are all remembered as part of that same cry for justice. Where are they now? Their deeds, their fight for justice, at least lives on in history as an inspiration to all who love justice, perhaps? I doubt it. I actually can’t think of anything that can be done, apart from what ordinary people have tended to do up to now: remain ever-sceptical of the Power Elites, never cease to quietly despise them, and if possible try not to take up arms for (or against) their causes.

 This last is difficult because people in general don’t understand the power of language, of words. Advertising understands this: with some well-placed words people will readily abandon ancient domestic skills, yield to the promises of progress and convenience and become increasingly more inept – “it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves”, as Bob Dylan once noted – and their ineptitude makes them all the more malleable. In the political arena, a few words can overnight change the outlook of an entire nation. I mean not the content of the words that are used to persuade them into actions that go against their standards of decency or their better judgement (like going to war), but the form of them: the sound of the words (generally very few of these, so that discourse can be avoided) their rhythm, their “catchiness” – all aspects of poetry, it has to be said. With poetry used this way the People can always be subverted, manipulated – unless they can train themselves out of the habit. Amidst all the seemingly insuperable obstacles that surround humanity, learning to see through the verbal blandishments of the Power Elites is probably the least impossible course. The only Revolution with any chance of succeeding is the revolution of whispers.

1 – the task (Scotch on the left, Welsh on the right – the pic doesn’t really show it, but marrying the two is biggest challenge)

2. looks alright – till you poke it!

3. new substructure (this actually on the other side, the north – or cool, ha ha – side)…

4, getting there…

5. just needs a ridge

Playgrounds Are Just For Games

One of the interesting things about the somewhat ridiculous incident in the English Channel (where, by all accounts, a Russian frigate attempted to spark off World War 3 by firing on a couple of our plucky pensioners out yachting, who would have fired back if they’d had any weapons) is the fact that the furore was allowed to die down so quickly. I think it was Michael Walker of Novarra Media who suggested that this (the dying down, I mean) was at the behest of the Admiralty, who apparently had a moment of rationality such as our leaders and various power-brokers do not seem to experience much these days. I’m pretty sure that in the good old days of the Cold War (which for decades has been considered past history until said power-brokers decided it was time to stir up the embers – sorry, getting mixed up in my metaphors – stirring up the embers of the Cold War? Weird imagery even for a populace well versed in trashy fantasy sci-fi…. Where was I? ah, close parenthesis –) – in the good old days of the Cold War, when I was growing up – the ‘Fifties and ‘Sixties I suppose you’d say, before the Good Times came along and softened everyone’s brains – the incident would not only have been blown up out of all proportion but more to the point kept going for several weeks, why? because people at large had longer and less distractible memories in those days and the good power-brokers of our nation were making sure we were being kept in a state of constant war-preparedness.

Whether the British populace was at that time really susceptible to being talked into going into another war is probably dubious. The armed forces, British and American, were still a force to be reckoned with, and I’m pretty sure the threat from Russia of a nuclear retaliation was actually known to be a lot less than our good media made it out to be – and of course the Russians were acting out their part as only Russians can, growling at all the appropriate moments and generally sounding very scary. There was a strong pressure from the power-brokers to go to war with Russia there and then because the USSR was deemed to be so weakened from its struggle with Germany that a little push would send it into a state of collapse. Sound familiar? Well, you might ask what prompted Napoleon to do something as crazy as invade Russia – it’s probably just part of the Western mindset, a bit like Mount Everest back in the ‘Fifties, which “had to be” conquered, or the Moon a bit later which “had to be” landed on – immerse yourself in the atmosphere of fear and frenzy and sweat and fart in an old-fashioned all-boys playground and you might understand why such things have to be – Russia had to be destroyed, or at least dismembered, “because it was there”.

Now I won’t disguise that I believe the best way of weakening Russia is in all likelihood to establish decent diplomatic and then trade relations with her/him (depending on how your regard the sex of bears). Not that I’m interested in weakening Russia as such, but I am interested in this whole concept of strong or weak nations, and how you measure strength and weakness. We still – almost universally, possibly, mothers possibly excepted – think that a young guy who can “handle himself” is a bit admirable. That doesn’t mean he’s violent, or even prone to violence, it just means that if it came to the bit, he’d be able to deliver a sucker-punch (or come back and keep standing when he’d been given one). Where would he have learned to do this? I suppose you’d have to search about the various bodies littered around the boys’ playground. Of course a really smart young guy will probably be able to earn one of those sucker-punch reputations without ever having to land a blow, but I suppose even the reputation-makers require something solid to build on. At any rate we’re all well versed in what “being a man” involves.

I’m not quite sure when the change came in Europe-Russia relations. Going back to the “Cold War”, I guess that, while it was a time when the military top brass in Britain and America and the various associated power-mongers would have liked to go to war to “finish Russia off”, it happened to be a time throughout Europe when governments, a bit shaken by the realities of modern warfare, and cognisant of the fact that the Working Classes had behaved themselves really rather well and helped deliver us from the Nazi Threat, had got busy introducing many measures which were – er, a bit socialist really, and the Working Classes might not actually have taken too kindly to going to war with a nation that championed the socialist ideology – especially when they were just starting to get some nice pats on the head for all their help, in the form of Welfare States galore and all kinds of other social Benefits. It was possibly time for a recess, but the true reality remained: because Russia was still “there”, ie. still required to be destroyed. And the other side of the coin shouldn’t be forgotten: Russia’s own sense of its “there-ness” meant that he/she was in constant anxiety of getting destroyed – was paranoid, in other words, because of course no-one really wanted the destruction of Russia (oh yes we did! – hush, be quiet down there).

I don’t know if the history of Western Europe shows us to be more violence-prone than any other culture, but the truth is that we are demonstrably very violent, and see violence and power and authoritarianism as basically the only way to “get along”. We have exercised this penchant for violence on most of our fellow-creatures, and certainly on those of our fellow-humans who, by some sleight of logic, we have deemed less able to “handle themselves” than we are (take carpet bombing of cities with inadequate air-defences for example – which puts me in mind of that old Specsavers ad – see? you should have invested in a PATRIOT system…..) The rising of the Dragon of science-based technology some five centuries back (I call it a dragon because I certainly couldn’t call it, say, a faithful Hound) has seen us pretty quickly talked into believing we are better able to “handle ourselves” than any other culture on earth – and the rest is history.

Things are changing of course, as they were bound to. The Dragon holds more of the world’s peoples in its grip and I assume will continue to lead them by the nose, but the possibility of a levelling out of “power” amongst the peoples of the world could eventually mean a sign of hope for some time in the not-too-close future. The best thing for us in the “West” would be to recognise what the new ascendant “power” means – I mean the “crescent” (it’s not a real crescent  but is no less crescent-shaped than the old Fertile Crescent, though a bit bigger) of China, Russia, Iran. We can fight tooth and nail to “stop” it, and the various heirs of the Nazis and their supremacist brethren have realised that, no longer having the open, naked military might to impose our will by sheer terror, our only way forward is through what used to be called Terror-ism – that is, the attempt to control events by spreading chaos everywhere in the hope that most of the chaos elsewhere will leave us in relative peace, apart from the poorer sections of our communities, who are always a nuisance and not always controllable by naked force alone (try pandemics maybe? – particularly slow-creeping ones), and might on occasion have to be paid off if they can’t be otherwise bamboozled.

If the Naval Brass kind of squashed the story of the brink-of-WW3 incident in the English Channel incident I imagine they had a good reason for it. Wisdom (ie why would we want to go to war with Russia?)? Maybe. Self-interest (ie we’ve got better ways of persuading the government to increase military spending than military brinkmanship – and, maybe, the main purpose of increased military spending is to ensure that the junior officers, towards whom the Top Brass still have a quaintly paternalistic attitude, can be assured that their career and pension prospects are honoured)? Well, maybe again. Maybe the priority is buying time, while we grow lots of scary new teeth in the form of various hi-tech tubes with explosives on top, and anyway we’ve still got a hold on the Ukrainian people and can get them to go on fighting till there’s none of them left, and then we can move on to the people of Georgia and Armenia and wherever else we can stir up trouble. These mature-sounding plans may be heading in a completely different direction, of course, you never know. I have a fantasy of some smart and cool-thinking Top Brass guys actually trying to push the power-brokers into ever-greater belligerence, in the full expectation that Russian patience will snap and the British and German weapons facilities that are currently contributing to the attacks on Russian soil will be directly targeted – as, in case you missed it on the news, is currently under consideration in Moscow. The thinking could bifurcate from there: either there would be the “Israeli” solution, ie we could drag America into a nose-to-nose war with Russia – whether nuclear or not would depend on the size of Russia’s reaction to the current attacks, and I imagine the Russian leaders are currently trying to work out exactly what size of retaliation against western facilities would be most appropriate, as in most effective in ending the whole nonsense. Or else (my favourite fantasy, because I love the thought of there being some – retired, or near-retired – old-school fuddyduddy Admiral who publicly points out that the butts of the upcoming lot aren’t even worth kicking) the whole nonsense would fizzle out and some leader of some authority come along  (not your standard degenerate, not in thrall to the Secret Services Triad and, I fear, not Andy Burnham, nor the other one with the bulgy eyes) and do a Willi Brandt (or even a Mikhail Gorbachev?), as in reach out and initiate diplomatic and trade “feelers”, perhaps even sensible fiscal and economic policies, vis-a-vis Russia.

– And Nicola Sturgeon is teaming up with Michael Gove to play out some “war games” against Russia? Well, we really need that. Someone’s got something on someone, I would guess…. Unless…. unless the war game looks at real scenarios, I guess that’s faintly possible – though, with the BBC in charge….. well, I don’t want to be a wet blanket