Cassandra Voices

Category: Current Affairs

  • The Powerful Nature of Addiction

    Back in 2016, I was embarking on a road towards sobriety after nearly eighteen years of committed alcoholism, homelessness, depression, and, in many ways, desperation. I needed to change. However, I did not know how or where to begin. I started with ‘one day at a time,’ taking small, manageable steps. If I don’t drink this week, I will try it next week. That was my mantra, and that’s how it went initially.

    That was when I happened to be in Manchester on my way from Salford, where I had been staying in a homeless night shelter, and walking into town to go to work one Sunday morning, when a fresh-looking can of Carlsberg was sitting all alone on the low or a brick wall near a small park. As to where its owner had gone, I had no clue. Still, I wanted to down that can of fizzy beer. I wanted to guzzle its beery contents down my throat and for it to wash around freely in my guttiwuts (as they put it in Clockwork Orange). Filling me with the desire for more beer, to smoke fags, and to fall about like a drunken imbecile, not being at all the responsible person that I used to be and aligning foolish behaviour(s) I know all too well – being the eternal alcoholic bum.

    Cut to the previous year prior, 2015, on a Sunday, the first of November, I had the worst hangover of my life, and wanted to kill myself. I simply had had enough of being an alcoholic.

    The scenario was that I was at Birmingham International Airport’s train station, lying on a bench in the small waiting room, suffering from a desperate hangover, holding onto a sausage baguette with congealing red sauce in a paper bag, murmuring in pain. I didn’t see how I could continue in life, having failed at it so badly.

    I wanted to throw myself under an oncoming train.

    I had been out on the lash in Birmingham the night before and spent a lot of money on a premeditated drinking session. The following day, I jumped on an earlier train, and the conductor came round and asked for my ticket and, inspecting it, said, ‘You’re an hour early; either buy a new ticket which will cost you £35.00 or get off at the next station and wait for your train.’ I choose to get off.

    Feature Image: David Kwewum

    Sobering up has been rather hellish. Seriously, it has.

    For the first five years, I was ill. I was lethargic and had a rumbling stomach. I believe I developed GERD (Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease), where the lining of the stomach is decimated due to all the booze I tipped down my throat, where it swilled around in there like a dark, seething, twisted, broiling sea.

    During my recovery, if I drank strong, cheap tea bags, the tannins in the tea played havoc with my liver, leading to a dull, searing pain in the lower right-hand side of my upper body.

    In 2017, I went to the GP in Derry, where I was living in a hostel, and he informed me I was having recurring liver infections. He didn’t know what I knew.

    I had a liver scan. There was some ‘superficial’ scarring on my liver, the nurses at Altnagelvin Hospital said. If it was superficial, I didn’t want to know what actual, deeper scarring felt like. No way. This had been painful enough so far.

    The reality was, after years of alcohol consumption, I had liver disease – let’s make no bones about it, leading to recurring infections. And my diet was atrocious, which contributed to my poor health.

    I drank far too many fizzy drinks. I scoffed far too many biscuits – once I sat down with a cup of tea, I would ‘clear the decks’ in terms of consuming high-sugar and high-fat content junk food in one sitting. Tunnock’s Teacakes were a firm favourite; I could consume at least four in one go. I ate crisps by the tonnage and ballooned to nearly fifteen stone in 2020. That’s big for someone of my height of 5ft 7¾, with a small enough frame. I was a greedy, unmitigated, irresponsible (health-wise) git.

    Two years ago, I went to the GP for a checkup as I was feeling lightheaded and had chest pains. My blood pressure was up six points, and I had high cholesterol, I was informed. I was on the danger alert for a heart attack. I think I have had some minor ones. Or Angina, at least. That or it was the GERD.

    These days, I rarely drink fizzy drinks. I seldom eat crisps and opt for baked ones. I would have a chocolate bar at least twice a week. Rarely more than that. I prepare most of my meals from scratch and mostly drink water.

    I recently saw an advertisement on a billboard at 8:44am for a pint of the black stuff, and wanted to imbibe it so badly that I considered going on the ‘drink.’ I swear to goodness that one millisecond glance up at that foamy pint with roasted barley, and I was there with one in my hand, ready to take a good draught.

    That is the powerful nature of addiction – that pull is as strong as it ever was, even though I am currently nine years alcohol-free.

    It takes work to remain sober. I don’t think I ever will be free from alcoholism.

    Only now can I say that I am not drinking. And that’s what I intend for the foreseeable future.

    I’m aware of the downsides, and it’s far from ideal: the anxiety, the guilt, and the worthless feeling(s) that soaking oneself in booze brings.

    At least now that I am sober, I can focus on my hobbies, including writing and making music – two things which bring me joy. And if that gets me out of bed in the morning – I now rise every morning at around 5am – sleeping right through from the night after usually going t to bed around 10pm.

    That is something which I can control and manage. I opt to be busy, which is something I aim to maintain. Things change when people have to.

    Feature Image: Pixababy

  • Podcast: Patrick Cockburn on Syria and Ukraine


    Are the Eurocrats and their allies most delusional about the topics they profess to find most urgent? Or are they just setting out to delude the rest of us?

    This was Ursula Von Der Leyen speaking at the 9th Brussels Conference on Syria, on Saint Patrick’s Day last:

    The agreement between the central authorities and the Kurdish SDF… is nothing short of historic. As is the signing of a constitutional declaration by interim President al-Sharaa. On the other hand, the attacks on security forces and the violence against civilians in Syria’s coastal region show that the situation remains fragile…

    The Syrian authorities’ commitment to bring the perpetrators to justice, to protect minorities, and form an inclusive government – all of this is vital for reconciliation.

    As these words were being prepared in the run-up to the conference, informed observers of Syria’s situation could see a different picture: targeted sectarian massacres of Alawites, not just “violence against civilians”, had begun. To precious little outcry in the West, death squads indifferent to calls for restraint from Damascus were fanning out in coastal Latakia. Far from cohering into a place of “inclusive government”, Syria looks more likely to be approaching a condition of volatility and chaos, not a “fragile” democracy with “freedom of opinion, expression, information, publication and press”, as claimed in the text of the interim constitutional document. Quoting an acquaintance living in Maaloula, a Christian town Northeast of Damascus, Patrick Cockburn relates how multiple groups have been plunged into trepidation: “The Christians are frightened, the Alawites are frightened, even the secular Sunnis are frightened…”

    That fear relates not only to who is supposedly in charge in Damascus, but to the extent of their control, if any, over the forces made up of jihadis from around the world who are now the primary wielders of military power across most of the core of the country. The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Council, meanwhile, has actually been outspoken in its criticism of the Islamist-shaded constitution, saying it has “reproduced authoritarianism”.

    Every single premise of Von Der Leyen’s statement as quoted above is questionable.

    Its conclusions are absurd.

    Why do we start by picking out the ancient Christian redoubt of Maaloula? This frame of reference helps to show how far back in time the communities of modern-day “Syria” go, as well as Cockburn’s in-person familiarity with their inheritors’ attempts to survive in the horrible present. Writing back in 2012,  Cockburn concluded a piece for the Independent by observing that “the sufferings of the Christians of Syria are no worse than those of the Muslims, but they feel that whatever the outcome of the Civil War, their future will most likely be worse than their past.”  The omens, he felt were not good. He was right.

    In Syria, they seldom are. This Post-Ottoman, Post-French mandate state goes back to 1945 in its current form. Will it even continue to exist in another few years? The massacres now taking place in Latakia, Cockburn would write a few days after our conversation, are being “ignored”, but “may shape the Middle East”. (iPaper, March 15)

    As the second part of the conversation in this episode outlines, European leaders and their friends are prone to magical thinking in the matter of their proximate crises as well as distant. In recent coverage on Ukraine for the iPaper, Cockburn has argued that “Western governments, media and PR firms” have crafted a depiction of the conflict as a replay of WW2. In this vision, “compromise was ruled out as practical policy, meaning that the war could only end with a Ukrainian victory and Russian capitulation – though nobody seriously believed this was going to happen since… the failed Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer of 2023.” In an echo of that argument, Cockburn’s contemporary Peter Hitchens stated, in an interview in Slovakia’s Standard magazine:

    “The whole of the Western world has been told things about Ukraine which make it very difficult for a compromised peace.”

    On grave matters of peace and war, European leaders are failing to adopt a realistic vision, concludes Cockburn.

    This is something of an understatement.

    With Europeans apparently determined to tool up for armies that don’t exist (and would be unlikely to have much fighting morale even if they did) and prone to praising the emergence of “progressive” states that have all the long-term prospects of a snowman in the Sinai, we are looking at a new era of wishful, read delusional thinking.

    A final note:

    This conversation with Patrick Cockburn is his second with Cassandra Voices. One year ago, Patrick was our very first guest. Back then we mostly spoke about his father Claud, the subject of a new biography by his Cork-born son. This time, we jump to more familiar terrain: the battlefields of the present day, Ukraine, Syria, and Gaza. Cockburn once praised his late friend Robert Fisk as a “historian of the present”. Like Fisk, Cockburn began in Ireland, then spent decades doing mostly Middle-east-based journalism, mostly in person. This meant cultivating friendships, survival skills and a sense of discernment for the historical roots of ongoing events. More sedentary now than, say, the start of the Syrian Civil War 14 years ago, or the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (both of which he covered while on the ground), he is better placed than most to share useful perspectives on far-off theaters of fighting. We’re honored to have him back.

  • Podcast: ‘We Urgently Need a Global Vision’

    In a turbulent period in European history, and beyond, we are delighted to draw on the sage input of the former Irish ambassador to Russia, poet Philip McDonagh, who also worked for a long period on the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland. He explores the possibilities for a lasting, inclusive peace between Russia and Ukraine. He also laments the expansion in military investment in the U.K. and the rest of Europe, calling for a new global vision to contend with the troubles of our time.

    Philip McDonagh discusses the role of rhetoric in international politics, going all the way back to Aristotle and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. A key concept, in his view, is a right to dissent: he considers this a vital component to democracy that is under threat across the world today. He refers explicitly to the lack of debate around the ‘triple lock’ on the Irish government’s ability to commit Irish troops to peace-keeping operations.

    Philip McDonagh worked extensively on the Good Friday Agreement as political counsellor to the Irish embassy in London, and was subsequently involved in various initiatives to bring lessons from this to other conflict zones, including India-Pakistan, India-Sri Lanka and Korea. The most important lesson he draws from these negotiations is the need to reframe the problem so that ‘all sides can see a better future.’

    He regards ‘small, potted statements on X’ as a huge impediment to diplomacy, considering this part of a wider cultural disaster that we are experiencing with the information environment. He would be delighted to advise Michael Martin before his visit to the White House, referring to the continued relevance of the OSCE, which offers a framework that includes the United States and the Russian Federation for peace-keeping and monitoring.

    As Irish ambassador in Moscow he conducted high level negotiations with Russian officials, and found their diplomatic service to be highly professional. He recalls ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev saying to him that Ireland could reconcile Russia and the United States because of our friendship with the Americans, and what he thought would be our empathy with a Russian perspective.

    He refers to fears on the Russian side of entering negotiations, given the stated objectives of European sanctions has been to collapse the Russian economy. He maintains that they would see a pattern of discrediting or criminalising the Russian leadership precisely in order to prevent negotiations.

    Russia is part of Europe he argues, pointing to the geographic definition of the continent extending to the Urals, and pointing to the great Russian writers such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Pushkin, as well as shared Christian and Muslim traditions. He refers to an unhelpful cancellation of Russian culture in parts of Eastern Europe in particular.

    Philip McDonagh says that the major task of diplomacy is to attempt to reconcile the interests of both sides in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Notably, the potential expansion of NATO into Ukraine and Georgia was a source of serious discontent in Russia prior to the outbreak of the war.

    He takes a global perspective on the need to resolve the European conflict, arguing it is immoral for us to commit to spending huge sums of money on weapons, when so many around the world are starving. We need a methodology or framework to think about the future he argues – new spaces led by civil society. This requires a morally serious form of multilateralism he says, maintaining that to describe this as a planetary emergency is realistic.

    He concludes with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer who said: ‘we must have the courage to believe in a future that is not visible in the alternatives of the present. That’s the future we have to enable with our political choices.’

  • Make Greenland Great

    In his last great novel The Plot Against America (2004) Philp Roth posited plausible circumstances where President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the great social democrat, could be dislodged by the proto-fascist Charles Lindbergh.

    Sadly, a failure to understand history bedevils our time. We have sleepwalked into a similar scenario after the last U.S. Presidential election. Now I fear it is too late. A fascist leader appears to have been re-elected President.

    In 1935, as much of Europe was succumbing to fascism, Upton Sinclair penned his dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here in which Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip enters the presidential election campaign on a populist platform. He promises to restore the country to prosperity and greatness, offering each citizen $5,000 per year. Portraying himself as a champion of ‘the forgotten man’ and ‘traditional’ American values, Windrip defeats incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination, and then goes on to beat his Republican opponent.

    It can happen here and now. Trump is emblematic of how, worldwide, a new form of corporate fascism, or corporate communism, has become dominant. So let us examine the initial pronouncements.

    Inauguration Day

    What did his flurry of executive orders mean, apart from braggadocio and sabre rattling? This is quite apart from the caveat that executive decrees short-circuiting the legislative process are the hallmarks of fascism, as Carl Schmidt the legendary jurist argued. American democracy appears to be in tatters.

    In an inaugural address that was remarkably coherent and lucid in conceptual terms, Trump invoked President McKinley (1897-1901). The implications are clear. McKinley colonised Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and Cuba, and was also hostile to global cooperation.

    So, resignations from the admittedly corrupt WHO and the revocation of the Paris Climate Change Agreement are the first two steps. Now, all directly or indirectly funded citadels of world governance are under siege if they oppose or sanction American interests.

    Danish author Peter Høeg penned a famous bestselling book Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow (1982) about Greenland and more precisely the Danish government’s treatment of the indigenous Inuit community The engine of the plot is the concealment of a state secret: a lethal meteorite and a parasitic worm that serves as an existential threat. The ruling Danes are not portrayed sympathetically with respect to Greenlanders. Indeed, according to a recent poll Greenlanders aspire for autonomy, but not another external coloniser.

    Yet Donal Trump wants Greenland and seems prepared to invade. Thus, he sent his son to a resort in the island’s most populous town Neuk armed with the slogans about making Greenland great. The thought did occur that Inviting homeless people into a 4-star hotel, albeit accidentally, is a policy he could replicate in his domestic policies, though I doubt he will.  The whole staged visit was of course bellicose posturing, and the shape of things to come.

    Why then the sudden interest? Well, it’s not so sudden frankly, but it’s most revealing. The interest stems from what is apparent in the Trump regime’s agenda: a zero-sum game of competition between nation states, leading to a global competition for diminishing resources. Texan and indeed Arabian oil supply may run dry and is certainly being exhausted at current consumption rates.

    Greenland is terra nullius or virgin territory, unspoiled in one crucial respect. It is among the last outposts where the riches of the earth can be extracted – to enrich the few and destroy the planet. More to the point, it will soon be exploitable given that climate change is overwhelmingly likely to cause the glaciers to melt.

    Black Gold

    Oil! (1927) is the title of Upton Sinclair’s epic novel about American greed, which was adapted into the film There Will Be Blood (2007). Today, American capitalist colonialism wants not just Greenland, but the Northern Territories of Canada. Drill Baby Drill.

    The Northern Territories of Canada are also an Arctic landmass of untapped resources. In his speech, he specifically mentioned tariffs – incidentally also a Mckinley policy – and tariffs were only just averted from coming into force against Canada and Mexico. China was also hit with retaliatory measures. Yet, it is the plain people of America who voted for him who will pay the bill, only after he has fired half the federal government.

    Thus, invocation of McKinley in his speech is also the invocation of a solid hard currency President that is for the few, not the many.

    The concept in international law of domestic jurisdiction is to respect national sovereignty, and only where there have been systematic human rights abuses to interfere in the domain reserve of a state. The justification of a breach of an obligation ergo omnes or a Crime Against Humanity is, ideally, filtered and ratified by the U.N.. This has often occurred in a bogus fashion, such as the dodgy dossier that led to the Bush-Blair war on Iraq. Trump also wants oil, but is going about it in a different way.

    So, he will not accept any international sanction or control, and will move with autocratic impunity. Play ball or we will invade, or refuse to recognise the UN, or perhaps force it to decamp from New York. Should the General Assembly object to any of this it may simply be liquidated. The statement above might seem alarmist but there are few checks and balances left.

    That seems to me to be what is happening is with the division of the world into trading blocs or sectors. Trump does not want to spend hard dollars on wasteful wars in the Ukraine or Gaza but that is not to say he gives a rat’s arse about human rights. Instead, he aims to establish a profit-driven North American confederation, to include Canada and Greenland, and, of course, reclaim the revenue of American businesses.

    Hi ally, or puppet master, Elon Musk, also has limited respect for national sovereignty, but a different mechanism of attack. He destabilizes through funding political actors such as the ADF in Germany and agitates online against the Starmer administration.

    America wants pliant co-operative regimes, with Musk acting as a modern-day Kissinger-without-portfolio. Trump has no doubt suspended the ban on Tik Tok to allow his bestie to buy it up and pollute the minds of an entire generation. This is Freedom of Expression if we will tell you what to say.

    ICE and Department of Homeland Security agents detaining a man.

    Ethnic Cleansing

    We will also see de facto ethnic cleansing, as in his proposal that two million Gazans should vacate their land to make way for a new Riviera. Also, the removal of undesirable aliens, even those for whom America is a birthright, and the development of a Mexican Iron Curtain.

    The new form of cleansing is akin to the McCarthyite Red Scare, given the removal of employment rights of those who are opposed to his interests and thus by definition seditious. Most of this action will be upheld by a compliant and docile judiciary. In short federal employees with even a trace of Red will be summarily dismissed.

    And what of Ireland? The extension of American trade will surely lead to the decamping of multinational corporations. American hedge funds already enjoy a dominant interest in our domestic housing market. Nevertheless, I predict tariffs will be employed against Ireland and Europe if regimes are less than favourable towards the United States.

    Further, the entire liberal WOKE agenda, which in my view has been deeply troublesome and counterproductive, is being dismantled. ‘His Christians’, as he calls them, form the Bible Belt will see a return to very traditional female and male roles. This is of course after his Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. His Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also has very extreme views on homosexuality, so watch this space.

    There were also pardons for far-right protestors after he lost the last election, and a promised investment in more lethal injections and an escalation of the death penalty. The previous few years have seen the US Supreme Court block off appeals for ineffective assistance of Counsel. One senses that his emergency powers remit of executive action will not be confined to the Mexican border, but the legislative remit will be much wider and internal, and will be upheld by SCOTUS.

    It is apparent that the worldwide human rights post-Second World War consensus is over save for a few enclaves. State authoritarianism – with his acolytes in Argentina and Italy present at the inauguration – will now increase at a rapid pace.

    More fundamentally, if American democracy doesn’t survive this then all democracies are threatened. We all contract pneumonia, politically speaking, when they catch a cold.

    Karl Kraus

    The legendary Austrian journalist Karl Kraus died in 1936 after editing Die Fackel for thirty-seven years, shortly after Hitlers ascension to power in Germany. At the height of collapse, and after a self-enforced interregnum of nine months he published one last edition that included the extended essay ‘The Third Walpurgis Night’.

    The essential argument is that with their devotion to palaver and tactics, the Social Democrats facilitated Hitlers rise. He despaired at their belief that ‘they could break [the] magic circle [of Nazism] by means of the Constitutional Court.’ Consequently, the essay supports the Austrian Christian-Democratic Chancellor Dollfuss as anything other than Hitler was needed. Well, the lunacy of liberal political correctness and their failure to focus on real issues facilitated misguided Populism.

    The opening paragraph of the extended essay is devastating in its implications for today:

    As to Hitler, I have nothing to say. I am aware that as the upshot of extended reflection, of repeated efforts to grasp the phenomenon and the forces driving it, this falls far short of expectations. They were, after all, pitched higher than ever before at a polemicist who is popularly—but mistakenly—expected to take a stand; and who, when confronted by any evil that appeals to his temperament, has indeed been prepared to “stick his neck out”. But there are evils which not only make the neck cease to be a metaphor…

    The best reading of Walpurgis Nacht, as Patrick Healy has suggested, is that satire should point not only in the direction of rhetorical agility – use of mockery, insult, indignation etc. – but also to its fusion with the voice of the moralist, employing the skill of a standup comic. The word has also a meaning of stew bringing all ingredients together. However, just as with Hitler, so with Trump, we are now beyond satire. At one level we must remain silent, or use words sparingly.

    Kraus, in his masterly analysis of Goebbels (a precursor to Musk), accepts that so deeply clever and embedded is the propaganda – and the appearance of culture and progress – that we forget that they intend to do what they are going to do.

    The reaction to the camp fascist Nazi salute by Musk is a clear indication that seriously cultivated people should not take these barbarians seriously, but they ought to be taken seriously, as globally, in a state of collective hysteria, people are voting for them into office. So, is it that we, the civilised, are no longer to be taken seriously?

    Watching this shit show unfold is like being the Isherwood figure in the film Cabaret at the German been garden as he hears a version of the Horst Wessel being sung.

    Trump, unlike nativistic Greenlanders, wants ownership of land and people’s minds, but in a very unstable situation there is an alternative. Remember what happened to President Mckinley.

  • Ode to the Sausage Roll

    In George Orwell’s 1939 novel Coming Up For Air, at the beginning of chapter 4, issue is taken with substandard food products, which do not taste like the product promoted and, indeed, taste like something else:

    At this moment I bit into one of my frankfurters, and—Christ!

    I can’t honestly say that I’d expected the thing to have a pleasant taste. I’d expected it to taste of nothing, like the roll. But this—well, it was quite an experience. Let me try and describe it to you.

    The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly—pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.

    This brings me to mass-produced sausage rolls. We have been socially engineered to accept inferior products due to being ‘always on the go’ and ‘eating on the hoof.’ Thus one may enter a high-street establishment – the name of which I will not mention here – to purchase one of their sausage rolls in an act to stave off the morning hunger.

    Yet, it is a tube of pink cooked sludge – faintly reminiscent of pork –encompassed in a uniform pastry that is almost parcel-tight; a small, perfectly wrapped parcel.

    Imagine venturing into the post office and asking the lady behind the counter,

    ‘Can I post this sausage roll to Scandinavia here, please?’ With a stamp attached to one corner and a Sharpie scrawl to its destination. Would a mass-produced sausage roll make it in one piece to say, Gothenburg?

    I have eaten them.

    In a pinch.

    Don’t get me started on their bean thingy, which gives me rising acid reflux like molten lava in the chambers and corridors of the heart.

    The problem is with quality, which the main protagonist is concerned with in Robert M. Pirsig’s modern, philosophical treatise work, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.

    Quality has dissipated due to mass-produced products.

    I remember in Botanic, Belfast, on the city side of the small hill, there was a bakery beside a laundrette. This was twenty-odd years ago. I remember they sold great sausage rolls. Inside, along with the pork meat was a little chopped-up white onion. The flaky, buttery pastry was fresh and delicious. A wee drop of red or brown sauce and I was in foodie heaven. The staff were friendly locals, and I recall the hearty chatter and warmth of the welcome. That bakery is long gone. I am unsure of its name now, which escapes me. Sadly.

    Wee bakeries – the one on Chapel Lane, city centre Belfast – served great homemade vegetable soup and sausage rolls. And Fifteens. Oh, yes.

    There was one near The Arches, East Belfast, and I was in one day as the baker was letting warm soda farls clatter onto the baking table. They were still steaming warm, fresh from the oven. I wanted to hit one with a drop of butter and strawberry jam, taken with a mug of tea. Who hasn’t wanted a fresh soda farl with crumbed ham, cheese, and tomato? Or a soda farl made with treacle? Or with Indian cornmeal?

    Years later, I would work with very that baker during nightshifts in a homeless hostel – how strange being in Belfast is at times, an almost Jungian synchronicity on the one hand, but due to the size of the city, perhaps no happenstance at all. He told me about the early morning starts and the wee bakery on the Woodstock Road, the cramped workspace above the shop. The lone baker works away in the early morning, while patrons sleep deeply through the morning darkness. Hard, honest graft.

    In 2001, I recall being in Sallynoggin, Dublin. I was labouring for a plasterer at the time. We were in Dublin, travelling up and down from the North over the course of a month or so, and in a Spar, I saw chicken-filet burgers – proper ones, bread-chicken-filet burgers with lettuce and tomato – and they looked delicious. There were also big sausage rolls with grated cheese in them, so when you warmed them up, they created an unctuous cheesy goodness with the meat and pastry. Oh my.

    When we enter a reality of accepting inferior products, we become ‘modified’ slaves to the corporate dominion and accept the way things are…

    I don’t accept.

    It’s easy to call into a high-street establishment without thinking.

    It takes a bit of choice to make a better decision to opt for a better product to consume.

    The other day, I was in a wee ‘local’ bakery and had a sausage roll with a drop of red sauce and a hot cup of tea; on a cold January day, it hit the spot. I left refreshed and warm, entering the biting, frosty air, wrapped up in my coat as I trudged home.

    You could support the local bakery. Goodness knows they need it.

  • Lebanon: 5,000 Kilometres Away

    Beirut, Mar Elias, 26 November, 7pm.

    Despite the cold wave that hit the city this week (8 degrees Celsius is equivalent to 0 in the Mediterranean), my mother and sister left all the windows and doors open, to prevent the worst. They are – as I type – sitting in my sister’s room in the middle of the apartment. They moved away from the balconies, from the saloon, where chandeliers could fall on their heads. They sat there with a heater and they said they were praying. Praying? I come from a family that does not pray. Well, my sister has started a tradition lately. Transmission in my family is inverted it seems….

    We talked for 15 minutes and then, short of words, I stayed there. I’ve been 45 minutes on the phone, not talking anymore, just in the background, just listening, tele-transporting myself to the house, trying to be present for them, for the neighborhood, for my childhood, for my upbringing, for myself in fact, in silence. A phone call to hear silence, and to witness a bombardment. Waiting with them, for the bombardment. To add some absurdity to the absurdity, I do not want them to wait alone, so I am waiting from afar with them on the phone. Waiting for the sound.

    My mother and sister are also waiting for my other sister, who is blocked in the Hamra traffic. Since the evacuation order was issued an hour ago, people ran off and are acting according to the “safety” measurement. An urban nightmare. My mother and sister are 600 metres away from a location listed as a targeted spot, as part of a list of targeted spots. My mother and sister believe and trust that they are okay and that they will be okay and that everything will be alright.

    They asked me to hang up as my brother needs to talk to mother. I had to hang-up.

    I am 5000 kilometres away, yet I do not feel that I am okay nor do I feel that I am alright. Actually, I do not share their opinion. I am scared, just like last October, when I was scared when the tension started. I am scared like last November, when two monsters were threatening to “Flatten Beirut, like [they] are flattening Gaza”. I am not a geopolitical expert; I have good sensors though. My skin is full of those. I feel events, people and situations (precisely the reason why I am geographically away from Mar Elias at the moment). And what my mother and sister are living now, I also feel it so acutely. My mother’s tone of voice betrays her stoic words. This lady saw it all, she is strong but her voice is shaking. She cannot fake it any longer… I feel ashamed to be away and that she has to see more, more of it, more of the same. Shame. I returned to Beirut in 2018 and had my share until mid-2024. So all I can do is call back and stay on the phone.

    –  Please let me stay with you, do not hang up.

    I am a scared mother, I am scared. I am scared just like we had to hide in the corridor for long nights in 1989 when the “East-West” War was on. When, for some reason, we were stuck in a corridor despite being totally outside the “East-West” logic. I am scared just like in 1990, during the War of Liberation, when we had to run, father and I, from Verdun up-hill home, using walls as our only shelter, moving like lizards, from wall to wall until we reached home, when his forty-five-year-old body was hiding mine of 5 years old. It is striking how I can still remember his body twitching.  I am scared, just like in 2006, when our house was shaking like an autumn leaf because of its proximity to the southern suburb area.

    –   Mama, how do you feel? What did you eat for lunch?
    –   I cooked green beans and rice, and …

    Mother’s voice is cut, muted for a moment; it agonizes for seconds.

    –  Mama! Are you okay?
    –  I am okay. I think something blew off… the floor shook a bit.
    –  Mama, are you okay?
    –  Yes, yes, I am fine… It is done, it’s over. “That was it!”, she adds in a reassuring tone, as if nothing happened, not to scare me. 

    Then I hear the cry she tames. But I hear it. She swallows it, as she is so good at hiding emotions, suffocating them. I learned a bit of that from her. At least, only when it comes to crying… for the rest I am very explicit. I feel the silent water in my eyes, flooding water as silent as hers.

    Silence.

    That was it: the promised, announced, planned and advertised attack on my mother’s area. Not Hezbollah’s area, not a single-one-of-them area – I will forever refuse such a takeover of my area, as it is simply my mother’s area. That swallowing of something in her throat felt like a violent mutilation. I witnessed my mother’s breath cut by the IDF. My mother who had to silently watch the Israeli soldiers hiding in her parking lot, during the civil war when they entered Beirut West, and specifically our neighborhood, and regularly visited Ali Alwan from the Murabitoun – a collaborating spy. 1981. My mother, whose home office got hit by their bombing, when they were looking for Yaser Arafat, who was located a few buildings away. 1982. My mother, who is not knowledgeable of any military artillery, had a Milan (Missile d’Infanterie Léger Antichar) hitting her roof, and therefore she knows all about Milan missiles. Mother is an expert in Milan missiles actually. She recognizes those, as every militia man went up to observe it under her guidance, before collecting it from her place. She dealt, however, with the dusty remains of the aftermath alone.

    Then she remembered I am still here, as I remained silent and was only capable of writing frenetically. She overcame her emotions, with an unusual sharing of details:

    –  Lily, I am glad you are away. The air is polluted, dusty, black powder on all surfaces here. You cannot touch a surface. You cannot breathe well. Every day, I thank God for being alive and for you being away.

    –  Well, mama I know how cumbersome I am to you…

    –  No, you wouldn’t have been able to run. You wouldn’t have taken it.

    –  I cannot run anymore as much as I did since the Explosion, mama. Also, I am not only a runner… it is not the only activity I live for….

    –  Lily, water is scarce and cleaning your 15 meters’ balcony every day and planting bulbs and seeds weekly wouldn’t be easy… you would not have really dealt with the rationing …

    –  You didn’t tell me that last time we spoke.

    –  Do you really need to know everything? You’re tiring, you always want to know everything….

    She has been actually lying, since I left she has been lying. She avoids telling me whatever goes wrong. I always discover the truth later.

    Then she screams: “Nathalie, do not step on the balcony! Stay inside”.

    –  Lily, we need to take a phone call; someone is calling us.

    She hangs up on me for the second time.

     

    Dublin, Portobello, 26 November, 6pm.

    I feel alone and lonely and utterly sad. I am in an early time zone, and I feel left behind, not only in space but also in time. I do not want to be there; she is perfectly right. My nervous system would not be up to it. She knows her kids well, despite the opacity and the thick curtains of hidden emotions we built between each other, her and I. She is tougher and so are my sisters. Maybe because I left at 22. They never left. She never left, she never left Lebanon, never left Mar Elias. It’s her hood, that made it ours, as per our matriarchy.

    I called again in ten minutes. They didn’t even talk to me; they opened the line and continued conversing. Nathalie tells mother: “The ceasefire has been announced”. My sister should be delusional. A ceasefire while we just got “raped”? How is that possible?

    I open my news channels. “Israel approves ceasefire deal with Lebanon, continues to heavily strike Beirut and various areas”, Beirut Today.

    It’s surreal.

    Middle East Eye (MEE) reports: “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday said his war cabinet had approved a ceasefire with Hezbollah in Lebanon that will pause fighting for 60 days. He promised that Israel’s war on Gaza will continue. US and Arab officials told Middle East Eye that under the agreement, Israeli forces will withdraw from south Lebanon. Hezbollah has agreed to end its armed presence along the border and move heavy weapons north of the Litani River, the sources said. The Lebanese army is expected to deploy in south Lebanon, with at least 5,000 troops set to patrol the border area along with an existing UN peacekeeping force. An international committee, including the US and France, will be established to supervise the implementation of the ceasefire agreement and UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the last major war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006. Hezbollah is yet to comment on the deal. US President Joe Biden will speak later on Tuesday. A senior US official told MEE that Israel will not be granted the right to attack Lebanon based on any suspicious movements”.

    I have not been sleeping well. I have been sleeping either little or lightly. I’ve also been having nightmares, night sweats and uneasy mornings. Last night, I slept light and little. I was late and have a deadline tonight. David, a recently made friend, texts: “Phibsborough this evening, we can listen to traditional music, do you want to join? “Music? The Irish’s best skill… I have not eaten yet, I had a work meeting. I am hungry, I also need to pee, and work and sleep early if I can, but the silence is heavy. Irish Music. It is like finding evidence of God when one was just doubting the concept. My eyes are itching. I scrub my eyes, bite my nails’ skin, it tastes salty. My eyes should be salty. I want water on my body and water in my eyes.

    I finally stand and walk in circles, something I often do when lost in my own cage of thoughts… I start looking for eye drops. I need eye drops for sensitive eyes and maybe to be around people making music. Because it’s been months of sonic booms, thunder of bombardments, knocks of explosives, bursts of war tokens, and ongoing buzz, yet all I need is music. My ears feel a deep, deep silence though: a silence similar to a soundless bombing. I imagine that I am deaf. What if I became deaf for real? The silent break in my mother’s voice swallowing the attack, absorbing the shock, stayed in a cochlear space in my body, more profound than any sound I have ever heard.

    It is silent peace time, and time for traditional Irish lyre…

    Feature Image: Moment Israeli strike hits building in Beirut’s southern suburbs | AFP

  • America The Bisected

    Like most of us, I spent the past week in a state of deep reflection over our collective national fate. Like some of us, I mourned. The American political sphere seems to have reached an anti-zenith, one culminating in some dystopian rhetorical Babel tower built and sustained by hatred. What have I seen in my life and times? The death of nuance and curiosity. The death of (real) tolerance.

    I spent the past week reading status after status beginning with the words ‘Go fuck yourself if you_____’ regarding the election results—a decisive Trump majority. Trump himself engendered—I imagine because he had so much to gain, and now enjoys the fruit of his labor—this exact brand of vitriol, something like near-total dismissal from the left of the humanity of the right and vice versa. He now rules supreme over our fragmentation, the sole beneficiary. I cannot emphasize the extent to which I am certain the ‘go fuck yourself if’ approach to our fellow Americans—as sympathetic as it is, frankly—will keep men like Donald J Trump in power forever. I cannot emphasize the extent to which the left’s patent refusal to acknowledge a single human quality in the right* decisively lost what appears to be the entirety of the working class,* once a democratic bastion, and catapulted Trump to victory.

    I’ve been thinking about stereotypes, which served as the oil-slicks upon which we’ve slid rapidly down to where we are. The left’s general profile of the typical Trump voter is this: uneducated, uncultured, evangelical/fundamentalist, nationalist, and white. I hope they’re now asking themselves why Trump won 45% of the Latino vote, the highest for a Republican presidential candidate in history. Stereotypes run a troubled livewire between truth and untruth. Thanks to my up-bringing in a tiny conservative Midwestern town, I know many Trump voters personally, although few from my own inner circle voted for him (with some exceptions) – they are not, by and large, toothless xenophobes.

    They are—if you’ll allow me to generalize—rural, religious, and educated, but not to a standard that approaches the left’s quote unquote elite. Many of them remain in the small towns of their origin, and are proud to be there sustaining those communities. They pay attention to their money, hopeful for Trump’s promised economy, which is also the issue that solidified his Latino percentage. I’m speaking of people I actually know, people I grew up with, people worth understanding and—here’s something subversive—people worth learning from. Is their perspective on 21st century life in America smaller than or inferior to that of their left-situated counterparts? I’d say sometimes it is, and attribute this reality directly to the narrowness of perspective that’s nearly inevitable, should one never venture meaningfully away from one’s place of origin—meaning one receives any and all education (including four years of college) in that very place alongside—this is key—the same kinds of people and ideas they’ve always experienced, and the same norms they’ve always inhabited. Rural Americans typically can’t experience the demographic diversity (and this kind implies many other kinds) urban dwellers take as a matter of course. There are fewer ways of seeing and being, and more assumptions, therefore, about the ‘right’ ways to see and be.

    The curled-lip sneer of the left-elite for the entire right—its steadfast refusal to attribute any moral integrity whatsoever to no less than half of America—will take us from Trump era to Trump era. It’s only a prediction, but let’s see. The Trump supporters I actually know (and I assume many of those I don’t) are not only NOT going to go fuck themselves, but continue to show up to the polls and vote for whatever powerful person that allows them to feel—however deceptively, however crudely—valued, seen and understood.

    The grief and pain of marginalized communities in view of a new Trump era makes more sense to me than I can rightly convey—the queer and trans communities, POC communities, immigrants. So let me be clear about those to whom I make this appeal. If, like me, you are white, privileged, educated, and generally able to tolerate and engage true ideological diversity and diversity of lived experience/identity, part of the ‘work’ to be done now may be disabling your elitist gag-reflex long enough to sympathize—not with racism, sexism or fascism—but the human beings to whom you hastily and even lazily ascribe these isms from your ivory tower. The more deeply we cling to our ‘fuck yous,’ the more robust Trump’s victory becomes—he has successfully deafened his supporters—your fellow Americans—to any condemnations you now choose to apply. ‘Fuck yourself’-style public engagement has led to two separate waves of Donald Trump. Can we agree it’s categorically failed, and will continue to fail?

    Trump (and men like him) are only in trouble when we award the status of full humanity to the opposing party. I’ll be more radical—it’s actually when we reawaken to that immutable status. I admit my hope is small, but I’ll do what I can. If you voted for Donald Trump, you won’t hear ‘fuck yourself’ from me, or see me stare down my nose. But if you want to participate in meaningful dialogue about why many people—specifically many oppressed people—so fear and despise him, please, let’s talk about that. Let’s open each other up and see what new things we can find. The old things have ceased to serve us well. If you are celebrating the incumbent POTUS, I guess I leave you to your victory. But I question whether any of us—any of us—should celebrate the completely bifurcated America we’re now forced to accept for four years…don’t you?

    Feature Image: ATC Comm Photo

  • Lebanon: Domestic Considerations May Prove Decisive to Hezbollah

    Media coverage of the war currently unfolding in Lebanon describe Hezbollah as an “Iranian-backed” group, and frame the conflict as one between them and Israel. In this reading, little attention is given to Lebanon beyond Hezbollah, nor that Hezbollah, for all its links to Iran, is first and foremost a Lebanese group embedded in Lebanon’s sociopolitical fabric. As Michael Young at the Carnegie Middle East Centre also points out, while Hezbollah’s military superiority enables it to act unilaterally, and undermine the Lebanese state at any given moment, the armed group must still weigh into consideration its relations with other domestic actors, both allies and adversaries, in order to secure its longer-term presence in Lebanon.

    War with Israel will strain these relations. Israel’s brutal response has already killed over 2,000 people, displaced over a million, and destroyed homes across Lebanon. Israeli atrocities will likely breath fresh life into the Lebanese resistance, birth a new generation of Hezbollah fighters, and contribute to an even greater level of anti-Israel sentiment across Lebanon. But simultaneously, the damage inflicted on Lebanon will make many call into question Hezbollah’s unilateral course of action in launching rockets into Israel since October 7th last year.

    So far, the only material result of these attacks has been to bring harm to Lebanon, with no obvious benefit to the Palestinian cause beyond the symbolic show of solidarity with Hamas. And Lebanon has enough problems as it is. The country continues to suffer in the wake of a gargantuan economic collapse that has hollowed out state institutions, and sent poverty rates spiralling over the past five years.

    Criticism of Hezbollah is valid, but should not be allowed to reinforce Netanyahu’s narrative that Lebanon has been “kidnapped” by Hezbollah, or that if Hezbollah were out of the picture, a process of normalisation could begin between the two countries. While it is true there are some political actors in Lebanon who secretly harbour a desire for normalisation, most notably the Christian far right, it is equally true that Palestinian solidarity, and an appetite for anticolonial resistance against Israel, extends beyond Hezbollah to wider Lebanon.

    The opening years of Lebanon’s Civil War in the mid-1970s showed this. A pro-Palestinian coalition of Lebanese groups led by Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt formed an alliance to challenge the Christian far right who were trying to expel the Palestinians from Lebanon. It is also worth noting how today, US-led funding for the Lebanese army is deliberately limited, with no supply of the sort of weaponry that could render them a match for Israel. It may be argued that the non-state position of resistance to Israel is inevitable, given the West’s unconditional support for Israel would never allow the Lebanese army to assume such a position, even if it enjoyed a democratic mandate to do so.

    Domestic criticism of Hezbollah and opposition to Israel are not mutually exclusive. Over the past decade, Hezbollah’s revered status as the resistance to Zionist aggression has depreciated. The group’s stances towards various events in Lebanon and Syria have exposed them as being part of a corrupt political establishment that it so often claimed to stand apart from. Hezbollah’s decision to enter the Syrian Civil War in support of the Assad regime was hugely controversial and pitted it against Sunni Islamist opinion both in Lebanon and regionally. Indeed, news of Hassan Nasrallah’s death prompted scenes of jubilation in Idlib, the last holdout against the Assad regime in post-war Syria.

    Mass Protest Movement

    More recently, in 2019, when a hugely optimistic mass protest movement erupted in Lebanon demanding an end to the country’s corrupt sectarian system, Hezbollah intervened decisively against the protestors, denouncing the movement as a plot by foreign embassies trying to destabilise Lebanon. In late 2019 and into 2020, Hezbollah-affiliated gangs were commonly seen confronting street protestors in Beirut, thuggishly trying to intimidate them off the streets.

    Hezbollah’s thuggery was made visible once more in 2021, when a prominent Hezbollah critic and civil society activist Lokman Slim was found murdered in his car in South Lebanon. The judicial case into the killing failed to make any progress, reflecting a culture of impunity that Hezbollah enjoys in Lebanon.

    Hezbollah impunity was the focus of heated criticism in the aftermath of the massive explosion at the Beirut port in 2020, which came about when thousands of tons of fertiliser exploded in a warehouse, killing over 200 people and causing heavy damage to much of the capital. Many believed that the suspicious presence of such a fertiliser which can been used to make improvised explosives, was somehow linked to Hezbollah operations. The unexplained failure of repeated bureaucratic efforts to remove the dangerous material from the port, hinted at opaque Hezbollah interference, possibly linked to Syria. The group was the first to publicly reject calls for an international investigation into the port explosion, further placing them under suspicion and above the law.

    Because of the port’s location in the city, the explosion did most damage to Christian neighbourhoods in East Beirut. This circumstance helped stir up anti-Hezbollah sentiment among Lebanese Christians. This is significant because one of Hezbollah’s major domestic allies since the mid-2000s, has been a Christian party, the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM). The alliance with the FPM was informally articulated through the Mar Mikhael Agreement, that effectively gave Hezbollah political cover and greater legitimacy for their armed presence in Lebanon.

    The FPM’s longtime leader Michel Aoun became president of Lebanon in 2016, further securing Hezbollah’s position. But his presidential term ended in 2022, and he is yet to be replaced as political power brokers, including Hezbollah, fail to agree on a successor. Lebanon’s current presidential vacuum is casting uncertainty toward Hezbollah’s place within domestic politics.

    Meanwhile the FPM have been heavily criticised by other Christian parties including the Lebanese Forces, for aligning themselves with Hezbollah and failing to protect Christian interests, as the devastation from the Beirut explosion served so well to demonstrate. With parliamentary elections scheduled for 2022, the Lebanese Forces sought to capitalize on anti-Hezbollah sentiment and courted Christian voters frustrated with the FPM’s passive collaboration with Hezbollah. This meant adapting a bullish attitude towards Hezbollah, particularly in relation to the Beirut explosion.

    Funeral of the Hezbollah members killed in the clashes.

    The Tayouneh Incident

    Tensions came to a head in October 2021 with the Tayouneh Incident. Hezbollah and its allies organised a protest to the Ministry of Justice in Beirut against the Beirut Port investigation. The protesters consisted of Hezbollah and its allies’ Shia’ supporters from South Beirut, many of whom were armed. When the crowd reached a major junction called Tayouneh, demarcating where Christian East Beirut begins, a segment of the protesters entered adjacent neighbourhoods and were fired on by Christian gunmen positioned in surrounding high rises, most likely affiliated with the Lebanese Forces.

    Street fighting ensued all afternoon, with six Hezbollah-affiliated gunmen killed. The incident put Beirut on a knife edge with many fearing the outbreak of a new civil war. The location of Tayouneh was ominously symbolic. It was here that a Christian militia attack on a busload of Palestinians in 1975 set in motion Lebanon’s fifteen year long civil war.

    The parliamentary elections went ahead in 2022. The FPM lost seats, and the anti-Hezbollah Lebanese Forces made substantial gains, becoming the country’s largest Christian party. This, combined with the presidential vacuum, means the political cover that Hezbollah enjoyed under the Mar Mikhael agreement is no longer in place.

    Fast forward to current events and none of these political considerations seem immediately relevant. Israel has now brought the war to Lebanon and the country for the foreseeable future is locked into Hezbollah’s war of resistance. But Hezbollah has been hit hard. Its’ military strength, carefully accrued over decades, has been severely depleted.

    Some estimate that about half of the Lebanese group’s arsenal of rockets and missiles have been destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, though it is hard to be sure. Since early summer, a string of senior Hezbollah commanders have been killed by Israel, including the party’s longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah on 27 September. To kill Nasrallah, Israel dropped 80 American-made ‘bunker busting’ bombs, weighing 2,000 pounds each, on Hezbollah’s underground command centre in the heart of South Beirut.

    The attack shook the whole capital, levelling six residential buildings and leaving a massive crater of rubble, with Nasrallah and others dead and buried underneath. This devastation came just as Hezbollah was reeling from Israel’s attack on their communication systems, as hundreds of pagers and walkie talkies used by Hezbollah operatives, simultaneously exploded killing approximately 32 people, including children.

    A Rainy Night in Saifi – Luke Sheehan and Nadim Shehadi in conversation

    Infiltration

    Within the space of a few weeks, Israel has shown how devastatingly extensive their infiltration of Hezbollah has been over the past few years. Until now, analysts tended to emphasise how Hezbollah’s involvement in the Syrian Civil War enabled the group to expand and increase its strength. Now commentators are pointing out how the group may be over-extended.

    A recent article in the Financial Times pointed out how the need for more recruits in Syria, collaboration with corrupt Syrian officers, and Russian intelligence likely provided Israel with opportunities to better infiltrate the group. There are also rumours of an Israeli-planted Iranian spy who has gained close access to Hezbollah in recent years and potentially played a role in the killing of Nasrallah. The Israeli attack was based off real-time information regarding the former leader’s whereabouts. The use of AI in satellite and drone footage to detect Hezbollah locations, and of sophisticated surveillance systems like Pegasus have also likely played a part in giving Israel the clear upper hand over their rival.

    While Hezbollah may be weakened, they likely retain significant strength. An Israeli ground invasion will meet dogged guerilla resistance from thousands of determined and well-trained Hezbollah fighters with substantial, albeit depleted, firepower. Hezbollah are well dug in. Bogging down IDF soldiers in endless guerilla warfare will help them change the narrative that so far has gone against them.

    This narrative may play a part in shaping the Hezbollah that emerges out of this conflict. A major question will be Iran’s ability to support Hezbollah’s military recovery. Hezbollah relies on its military superiority within Lebanon to coerce other Lebanese actors into forming political arrangements that favour Hezbollah.

    Events in recent years have, however, destabilized these arrangements and brought Hezbollah and Lebanon to an uncertain political juncture. Now, the war with Israel threatens Hezbollah’s military superiority. Together these developments raise uncertainty as to how Hezbollah will emerge from this conflict and whether they will be able to retain their dominant political position in Lebanon once the dust settles. Such domestic considerations may ultimately prove more decisive to Hezbollah decision-makers than the current confrontation with Israel.

    Feature Image: Hezbollah fighters in southern Lebanon, May 2023

  • The Austrian Mind

    There still exists – even today – a yearning, a nostalgia for European solidarity, a solidarity of European culture. Regrettably, solidarity itself no longer exists, except in hearts, in consciences, in the minds of a few great men at the heart of each nation. European consciousness – or what one might call a ‘cultural European awareness’ – had been on the wane for years ever since the awakening of national identity. You could say that patriotism has killed Europe.
    Joseph Roth, On the End of the World (first published in 1933).

    Late last month 28.9% of Austrians voted for the Freedom Party (FPÖ) led by Herbert Kickl, an avowedly anti-migrant, anti-Islamic party, founded in the 1950s by former Nazis. The governing conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) gained 27.5% lost 20 seats, while its coalition partner, the Greens received 8.2%, losing 10 seats. In third place, the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) received 21.1%, marking its worst result ever. In fourth place, the liberal NEOS increased its share to 9.1%.

    We can only hope that the conservatives do not enter into a coalition with Kickl’s party as Hindenburg did with Hitler’s Nazi party. Perhaps a Dutch solution will at least dilute the forces of darkness. Kickl was formerly the speech writer of the now-deceased long-time leader of the Freedom Party, Jörg Haider, but Kickl is far less ambiguous in his pronouncements than his former boss.

    What’s clear is that the far right is on the rise across Europe, Ireland and the world. My own childhood in Ireland, as a half-Austrian, not unlike Hugo Hamilton’s experience as recounted in his autobiography The Speckled People, involved casual racism and bullying on account of my background.

    At one level Austria is among the most cultured of nations.  So, I defend it. Ma Vlast as Smetana said about Czech Bohemia, albeit a defensive posture often leads to a failure in understanding. Why Kickl? What is the Austrian Mind that has created this?

    Mozart family, c. 1780 (della Croce); the portrait on the wall is of Mozart’s mother.

    Mozart of Salzburg

    My family, who I am close to, hail from Salzburg, home of the Fespiele. Mozart was, of course, born in Salzburg where a little museum glorifies his brief tenure on Earth. Mozart’s music combines lyricism, frivolity and profundity in equal parts. What it points to in the human condition is not just chocolate-box fripperies, or the texture of lightness that is Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, but the darkness therein. Darkness threads through the Austrian mind, juxtaposed with light.

    Thus, Don Giovanni is about the destructive powers of rakish satanism, also evident in Stefan Zweig’s arguably best book beautifully filmed by Max Ophuls’ Letters from an Unknown Women.

    In Mozart also the incomparable Magic Flute splendidly rendered into film by Ingmar Bergman, is in effect about the dubious justification of freemasonry to which Mozart belonged; and also, a cri de coeur, in praise of enlightened and benevolent monarchism against the vectors of state and, in particular, church authoritarianism. This assertion of a wise moderation against extremism resonates today.

    The great enfant terrible of Austrian letters and its greatest post-war writer Thomas Bernhard was gloriously insulting about Austria. His masterpiece Woodcutters (1984) is about a man in a chair at a party sipping Champagne. Letting fly at Austrian bourgeois hypocrisy, he says:

    Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretence, never genuine, never real.

    In his will, Bernhard ordered that none of his works should be performed in Austria. This has been deliberately avoided. All cultures have their tropes.

    The Merry Widow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv1GNZCyL64

    Austrian Kitsch

    Culturally, Austrians, along with the Irish and British, have far too close a relationship with kitsch. The Merry Widow light operetta, like a jaded ritual, is still performed in the Lehrer Theatre in Bad Ischl and elsewhere. The Blue Danube is not unlike a classic Britpop song.

    The great Herman Broch was fascinated by kitsch, linking it correctly to a decline in values:

    The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se, forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system.”

    In some respects, the triumph of kitsch paves the way for Nazism, as Broch and indeed Robert Musil have both argued. Radical evil and bad art is evident in our age too. This is a kind of camp fascism which Susan Sontag also identified.

    Beethoven was of course German, but lived and died in Vienna. His darkness is a counterpart to Mozart’s light. His deafness influences the isolated pessimism of the later atonal dark sonatas, and are close to the finality of expression in musical terms that Beckett created in language.

    His final string quartet is integral to Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann, where the satanic composer, modelled on Heidegger, sells his soul to the devil.

    I have found that it must not be. The good and the noble, what they call the human, even though it is good and noble, what men have fought for, have stormed citadels for, and in their moment of fulfilment, have jubilant proclaimed it is not to be. It is not to be, it will be taken back. I will take it back.

    Mann, the great German conservative, had the moral integrity to decamp to the U.S. and to Switzerland, but a crucial point to appreciate is that conservatism is not all bad if it conserves the good and the ethical too. So, the Christian Democrats in Austria have a stark choice, whether to embrace satanism or not.

    Sleepwalkers

    The rise of Nazism is also anticipated brilliantly in Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, one of the great novels of Austrian heritage. In the character of Hugenau, a man solely motivated by profit – homo economicus to use the term favoured by the nefarious law and economics movement in Chicago – we have a real sense in 1918 of a brutalised generation containing the seeds of fascism. The book culminates in the murder of a journalist and the rape of his wife.

    This is akin to neoliberal Europe today where meaningful journalism has been effectively killed and defiled, as state-sponsored criminals launch hatred at ‘the other.’ Off with their heads, or to Rwanda, or now Albania.

    The legendary Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke in The White Ribbon, based in pre-war Germany at the turn of the twentieth, demonstrated how damage had been done to a whole generation by a cruel form of authoritarianism. Today, social media has augmented the problem of semi-literacy. Strange fruit, as Billie Holiday would say, is ready for demonisation. In Ireland the neoliberal governing parties have generated the social conditions for riots and a new decadence.

    As for Italy, the land of Fellini and Da Vinci, where the far-right mayor of Monfalcone near Joycean Trieste has banned cricket as she does not like Bangladeshi people in her town; they only play cricket she says and contribute nothing. The fact that such football clubs as AC Milan was originally a cricket club seems lost on her. Mayor Anna Maria Casing, elected on an anti-immigration platform is now an MEP. Her far-right colleague, prime minister Meloni prosecuted Roberto Saviano the legendary journalist for calling her a bastard over her immigration policies.

    So, Austria is not alone in its infamy.

    The darkly pessimistic Herman Broch shows how the far right and populism go hand-in-hand with hatred:

    It is always he, unfortunate wretch, who assumes the role of executioner in the process of value-disintegration, and on the day when the trumpets of judgment sound it is the man released from all values who becomes the executioner of a world that has pronounced its own sentence.

    The Rathaus (City Hall), the seat of the local government.

    Golden Age

    The golden age of Vienna ended peremptorily with the dismembering of the Austrian empire, after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo sparked the inferno of World War I, when leaders sleepwalked into war. This is the state of somnambulism that Broch also identified evident in Musil.

    The word Kaakinen is Broch’s playful word for Vienna which, in effectively means shit. Thus, he writes in The Man Without Qualities:

    Stupidity is active in every direction and can dress up in all the clothes of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has for every occasion only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

    In Zweig’s retroactive memoir The World of Yesterday there are references to Freud and Herzl (one of the founders of Zionism), among the titanic intellectual figures of pre-war Vienna. These are curiously name-dropped like the celebs of our time, but in a curious state of derealisation of how history is closing in. Freud, who was Austrian, died as an emigre from fascism in the U.K..

    Whether the concept of hysteria is sexual or not, no doubt this is a hysterical age where all sorts of fantasises are being sublimated into nefarious activities and agendas – and indeed where persecution delusions are omnipresent. This leads to the scapegoating of immigrants.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1930.

    The Sound of Silence

    Ludwig Wittgenstein is central to our age of distortion and manipulative language. The fundamental achievement of his Tractatus is a recognition of the limitations of language. It can only show and represent, he argues, and, within limitations, clarify. Thus, language is context-specific, self-limiting and denuded of ethical and moral context.

    Reading Wittgenstein, like reading Hemingway, Camus, and Beckett, clarifies how language should be used clearly, and is most useful for everyday life, but not ethics. The final line of the Tractatus has acquired a mythical status: ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’

    Silence is important, but when we can speak let us speak out ethically. A recent Austrian Nobel laureate is Peter Handke is a great writer, though not in Thomas Bernhard’s league. Handke’s flirtation with the Serbian cause, however well-intentioned and misconstrued, leave a degree of doubt, given the Austrian mindset, but there is a rich warm humanism in his work.

    Handke argues you must create silence or, rather, the effect of silence, through words. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams his recent recollections of his mother’s suicide is jaw-dropping, and among the best books published in the last ten years. So let us create the silence of words, before it is too late.

    Feature Image ‘Avenue in the park of Schloss Kammer’ produced by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt in 1912 whilst he was living near the village of Unterach on the southern shore of lake Attersee in Austria.

  • Ireland’s Toxic Culture of Omertà

    Recently walking into a garage to pay for diesel, I scanned the news stand, as is my habit, to see if I had missed any of the day’s events. Something did catch my eye, and surprised me. A county Louth paper, the Drogheda Independent, had a headline about the Lourdes Hospital’s, disgraced surgeon Michael Shine.

    It seemed a group of his victims had come forward and the Taoiseach was considering a public enquiry. Such abusers leave deep scars that in many cases never truly heal, but he was enabled by the culture of that time. A toxic cowardly omertà still evident in Irish society.

    The reason the story caught my eye was that I was once a patient of Michael Shine. At the till, I reflected on that brief experience as a twelve-year-old.

    Much to my parent’s dismay, at age twelve, I was six foot tall, and had size twelve feet. My father was a fisherman, skipper and trawlerman in the Irish Sea and Atlantic Ocean. Wherever the fishing was at, he was there. He had a wife and four children who would literally eat him out of house and home. The four children that is, not my mother, who is a saint.

    The height issue was not so bad. East German army coats – available from the now long-gone army surplus store in Dundalk, Jocks – tended to grow with you, but getting the size twelve footwear became problematic. Decent footwear in Ireland has always has been difficult to find and expensive. Even now if I want a decent pair of shoes, I have to go to Dublin for the size, range and quality.

    Cheap footwear is a false economy, but when you’re size twelve at twelve back in 1989, you have to occasionally hang on until all the other bills are paid, and rightly so. None of us ever starved, but purchasing size twelve shoes, on occasion, had to wait, and this wait unfortunately caused a small issue over time to arise: an ingrown toenail. It went on for a while and caused some pain, which resulted in a referral to the Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. I can’t remember whether I was twelve or thirteen by that stage.

    Drogheda.

    Small Scar

    I do remember that it was corrected very effectively through a small surgical procedure. As I type, barefoot, I can still see the small scar Michale Shine cut in, removing the side of the nail and the infected area of my left toenail. But before he did so, I had a consultation with him.

    I was brought into a medical examination room, high up in the hospital, from where I could look out over the town. The room had a lot of windows, but was far too high up for anyone to see inside. I walked to the side of the examination table, and I think I heard him say something about my toe, so I took off my runners and socks and went to get up onto the medical examination table.

    His response was “no, no, your pants as well.” I was wearing jeans at the time. I did as I was told and found myself on the examination table sitting upright, looking out over the roof tops of Drogheda. Boxershorts had not entered my wardrobe at this stage of my life. I think the under garment I was wearing are referred to as slips – men’s underpants. So, from hip to toe, on both legs, I was bare skin.

    Shine placed his right hand on my upper left thigh, for my ingrown toe examination, tapped my thigh twice with his palm, smiled a shark’s smile and told me I was a “fine big boy”. Now DaVinci’s Vitruvian man measures a palm as the width of four fingers and I say it with no shame that Shine’s hand was just the width of another four fingers away from my cock. I should probably say penis, but it’s not a word I would ever use and in fact it’s a bit creepy to be honest.

    The memory or indeed the incident has not affected me. It might have added some uninvited flavouring to my psychological or sexual development as a confused teenager that I could have done without. But honestly it has not adversely affected me.

    I am lucky, very lucky in comparison to some. That was as far as his hand went. In fact, when he said it, I said nothing but stared over his shoulder at the only other man in the room, a junior doctor. It is the memory of the look on his face, that has stayed with me ever since.

    I have learned a lot about people over the years. One thing is about how people perceive fear. Experience has taught me that they feel it in one of two ways: fear for themselves or fear for others. It can be a fleeting moment, which you can correct, or it forms who you are for ever more.

    In my time with the Airport Police, I was fortunate enough to have been trained in behavioural detection. What I have learned about people, through many life experiences, allows me to honestly assess my memory of that junior doctor’s fear. It was only fear for himself. The nameless coward was mute, grey with fear and looked at me as if to say: please don’t say anything.

    The enablers who reside within and contribute to the toxic culture of an organisation or indeed society are sadly simply cowards. Many are not bad people; in fact, most are not, but their cowardliness contributes to the very problems they grumble about. Some in positions of supervision and management are dangerous cowards, as they misuse their limited power and will push you under the bus in a heartbeat to save themselves.

    I wonder how many boys were not as lucky as me, and actually said something? You can imagine the enablers, can’t you? Silencing the innocent to save themselves. I imagine that junior doctor would have seen nothing if I had said something.

    Perhaps you’re even one of them yourself, an enabler? It’s a disease in Irish society that needs to be challenged at every level. To target those who speak out, tell the truth and call it as it is, is an attack on your own safety and your own democratic right.

    https://cassandravoices.com/society-culture/a-whistleblowers-motive/

    False Rumours

    Sadly, enablers cannot see that and the coward in them likes to see the whistleblower get what he deserves, which reinforces their cowardliness. They may even spread a false rumour, like the DAA Airport Duty Manager who held court in the airport control room weeks after my departure, informing those present that I was in trouble for being a wistleblower. It is not the case; it was not the case.

    Or the Police Inspector who wanted me to facilitate and provide whatever training I could to a candidate for a position in the Airport Police Dog Unit, even before he had been interviewed. I might never have bothered pointing out how it might look to other officers, or how people would perceive that. I had wasted my time objecting, as the candidate still got the job. People like this all needlessly and carelessly damage our democratic society. We spend so much of our lives in a workplace; of course it is part of society. The values and culture we experience there permeates society.

    I can speak about these things as I declined DAA’s unfair dismissal offer of €4,800 in return for a non-disclosure agreement. An agreement that listed forty-two separate pieces of legislation that would have inhibited me from taking any further legal action against them. If they have done nothing wrong, why have forty-two pieces of legislation and a non-disclosure agreement? Evidently, I did not sign.

    The main evidence that I wanted was in a redacted report. The enablers’ legal team had the evidence statute barred. I wasn’t prepared to move forward without it.

    That legal interpretation, I will argue in the future, in employment law is a scam and one that the Workplace Relations Commission are failing to acknowledge as such. Perhaps because it makes their lives easier. The statute of limitations to take a case for unfair dismissal or penalisation in the workplace, under employment law, is six months. I would argue it is not six months for the admissibility of evidence of penalisation in the workplace. This is a legal scam that a weak Workplace Relations Commission are enabling! But don’t judge them too harshly.

    The enablers are alive and well in Irish society, just ask the victims of Michael Shine.

    Feature Image: Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda