Cassandra Voices

Tag: Food

  • Manchurian Monkeys

    Acts of commission – such as an amputation of the wrong leg or a dose of morphine an order of magnitude higher than recommended – generally elicit moral outrage. This anger usually extends to the relatives of the deceased should the victim pass away. Based on figures from the U.S., where medical error is the third leading cause of death, we may infer that five thousands are dying each year occur as a result of medical examination or treatment in Ireland through either commission or omission. The likelihood is that the former outnumbers the latter (see Oops! Why Things Go Wrong: Understanding and Controlling Error by Niall Downey (Liffey Books, 2023))

    Over the course of the past century the medical profession has been responsible for horrendous, large scale acts of commission, usually in service of an ideology that made perfect sense at the time. Thus, various documentaries depict old Nazi or Japanese doctors recalling with rheumy eyed nostalgia ‘the good old days’; when everything made sense and boiling, freezing, vivisecting and poisoning human beings was all in a day’s work.

    Japanese Unit 731 inflicted unspeakable brutality on the population of China (Manchuria) and Korea. Their experiments were published in prestigious medical journals many of which were aware that the Manchurian monkey-subjects were in fact Chinese peasants (see Japan’s Infamous Unit 731 by Hal Green and Yuma Totani (Tuttle Classics, 2019). Many died during the experiments – one rarely survives vivisection – and the remainder were murdered before the laboratories were destroyed.

    Most will be familiar with accounts of the Nazi doctors – of whom a tiny fraction were put on trial at Nuremberg in 1947 – and from which we derive the Nuremberg Code on human experimentation. 50% of German doctors were members of the Nazi party in the early 1940s by which time the euthanasia programme were in full swing.

    Doctors’ trial, Nuremberg, 1946–1947.

    For the Greater Good?

    The rationale for carrying out much of this barbaric work was apparently ‘for the greater good’, clearly not of the subjects, but for those who held sway over life and death by virtue of their power. The academic brilliance of many of the Nazi doctors led to them being spirited away to the USA to prevent the Soviets accessing their genius. Many of today’s pharmaceutical companies benefitted from their discoveries, e.g. sulfanilamides, methadone, phenol to name but a few (See The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert Jay Lifton, Hachette Book Group, 1986).

    Of course it wasn’t only the Germans and Japanese who had a penchant for inflicting carnage on the human race; the USA’s own Fort Detrick was a bio-weapons development site, which has had several accidents since the 1960s (See Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick, by J. David McSwane Simon and Schuster, 2022). It was even cited in Professor Jeffry Sachs’ 2022 Lancet report concerning the possible source of Sars-CoV2.

    Less often discussed are acts of omission, unless one regards inordinately long waiting times for operations and treatments as omissions. These are not to be dismissed and would include the tragic deaths of children here in Ireland awaiting scoliosis surgery.

    The type of omission that we wish to speak about is perhaps more sinister and it doesn’t lend itself to explanations such as ‘scarce resources’ or ‘bureaucratic bumbling.’ Some omissions hint at a systemic evil.

    In 2020 at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic (a pandemic generated by fear and hysteria as much as illness), it was widely believed, and stated by the majority of family physicians, that there were no safe and effective treatments for the condition. After all, they had been told as much in a the guidelines that were issued by the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) in April 2020: ‘Care of the Covid-19 presumptive or test positive covid-19 patient at home, including management of the deteriorating patient.’ The document stated that 16% of those over eighty years could die and that 50% of deaths could occur in the community.

    Repurposed Drugs

    At that time, however, there was a growing number of doctors around the world using repurposed drugs, i.e. medications that were known to have effects outside of what they were designed to do, and that these features might be helpful to fighting this novel yet potentially deadly situation. This is referred to as ‘empirical treatment’ and doctors have been practising it for decades, if not centuries. Examples include the use of blood pressure tablets for headaches, aspirin in the treatment of heart attacks or sildenafil (Viagra). Many are eternally grateful for empiricism!

    To the long list of empirical treatments one should add hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and ivermectin (IVM). However, these once safe, cheap and readily available drugs were transformed by a sustained media campaign into potentially lethal, prohibitively expensive and scarce medicines. Debate around their possible merits bordered on the disavowal of heresy. Indeed, mentioning them on social media platforms resulted in suspension or banning as an army of so-called ‘fact-checkers’ protected the world from empiricism.

    Thus, the medical profession, scientists and public health officials abandoned critical faculties and moral courage and joined the mob to bray and bark out any nonsense fed to them by Anthony Fauci, Mike Ryan, Luke O’Neill and other such figures. None of whom had clinical responsibility for patients.

    Whilst all of this was unfolding there were people within the Health Service Executive (HSE) here in Ireland, and no doubt in many similar organisations around the world, who knew that repurposed drugs could have had a vital role to play. Indeed, Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India with over 241 million inhabitants, made readily available, take-away packs containing these drugs.


    Freedom of Information Request

    A recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveals the National Clinical Advisor and Group Lead at the HSE was issuing entirely conflicting instructions to hospital CEO’s around the country in respect of Hydroxychloroquine. A letter to the CEO’s of Irish Hospitals ,dated 24/March/2020 instructs that:

    Hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) has been identified as having antiviral activity against SARS-CoV2.There is sufficient rationale and pre-clinical evidence of effectiveness to include it as an antiviral treatment option and is included in the guideline.

    Its use was not, however permitted in the community or the Nursing Homes. Even more bizarrely in another letter of the same date, issued by Primary Care Reimbursement and Eligibility at the HSE instructed that all pharmacists in Ireland to report any doctor writing prescriptions for this medication.

    NPHET and/or the HSE had decided that patients would not be treated in the community despite us having effective medication (chloroquine has been known since 2002/3 to have antiviral properties) and despite it being prescribed, albeit empirically, by family physician (See: ‘Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread’ Virology Journal, 2005).

    Physicians working within the community – GP’s who cared sufficiently to question the guidelines – looked into using Hydroxychloroquine and found the available evidence instructing that Hydroxychloroquine was most effective if used early in treatment. This is a common theme with most antibiotic or antiviral medications. So, it ought to have been abundantly clear that hospital was not the place where the treatment was needed, nor the setting where the treatment might even work. Of the c. 2000 Covid deaths that occurred in the Irish Nursing Home Sector it is doubtful if any one of them had access to this ‘effective antiviral treatment,’ which might well have saved their lives.

    A ‘visiting window’ at a nursing home in Wetherby, West Yorkshire.

    Loss of Hope

    It’s shocking to consider that while politicians, journalists and medics were ridiculing the U.S. President for using Hydroxychloroquine – at a time when Irish GP’s were being disciplined and placed under investigation for trying to use it to treat the sick and the dying – the doctors in charge of policy knew perfectly well that it was a safe and effective treatment.

    Even if decisive evidence was lacking, their application might at least have given people hope, which could plausibly have had a placebo effect. It seems as if ‘hope’ is precisely what they wanted to remove. The absence of hope certainly contributed to many lonely deaths.

    This seems to have been designed to serve a Pharmaceutical Agenda. You see Covid genetic vaccines were licensed for use under ‘Emergency Use Authorisation’ (EUA). They could only escape the necessity of appropriate trials and be released onto the market on condition that there were no available treatments. So, effective medications were withheld and carnage ensued in the nursing home sector, where victims were deprived of an opportunity to say goodbye to loved ones weeping in car parks. Their deaths facilitated a Pharmaceutical Agenda. They apparently died ‘for the greater good’.

    This theme of no treatment, in spite of thousands of case studies from around the world, was perpetuated in a February 2021 HIQA report. It was an approach demonstrating either willful blindness or callous disregard for the need to ‘first do no harm.’

    In hindsight, and having climbed in and out of so many rabbit holes, it’s hard not to believe that most people just follow orders – they don’t think, they don’t read, they just pay the mortgage, feed the children, get through the day and find comfort in wearing blinkers. And who could blame them?

    The reality is probably more than most could bear. Manchurian Monkeys are everywhere and they need to be controlled. One can’t have liberal democracy upsetting the plans for a greater, if less populated, future. Thus, insidiously unelected and unaccountable bodies – such as the EU Commission, UN, IMF, WHO and WEF slowly dismantle any democratic processes that might thwart their path to political hegemony: suppressing free speech, the right of travel, right of assembly, bodily autonomy, online anonymity, cash transactions and soon perhaps all forms of political dissent.

    Feature Image: Building of the Unit 731 bioweapon facility in Harbin

  • Podcast: “He Bought Plato” a conversation with John Dillon

    John Dillon, Regius Professor of Greek (Emeritus) at Trinity College Dublin, is an Irish classicist and philosopher considered a world authority in ancient philosophy and Platonism. Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1939, he returned to Ireland as a child and studied Classics at Oxford before earning a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. He taught at Berkeley from 1969 until his appointment at Trinity in 1980, where he remained until his retirement in 2006. Dillon is founder and Director Emeritus of the Dublin Plato Centre and a member of several prestigious academies, including the Royal Irish Academy and the Academy of Athens. A professor Emeritus of the British Academy. He has published over thirty books and numerous articles, focusing on the transmission of Platonic philosophy.

    Episode Credits:

    Host: Luke Sheehan

    Music: Loafing Heroes – ​​https://theloafingheroes.bandcamp.com

    Produced by Massimiliano Galli – https://www.massimilianogalli.com

  • The Birth of a Doctor

    The title of this article may seem somewhat prosaic, but given that it really is about birth after death it seems appropriate. For I really did die on July 25 2022, and that which came back to life was not the same person, and certainly not the same doctor.

    Prior to 2020 I hadn’t asked the question: ‘what is a doctor?’ I entered medical school to escape working class powerlessness, and successfully developed unhealthy delusions of grandeur reveling in a body of knowledge that I now know to be about as substantial as clouds. I did have some moments of sober reflection during my undergraduate days, but they were not in Dublin. Rather, the people and doctors of Moscow taught me to see the world from a different perspective. I have no love of Soviet-style Communism, and no wish to eulogize it, given the millions of lives lost or destroyed, but the sense of classlessness I experienced in the Russia of 1990 was liberating. It was a feeling that soon evaporated on returning to the ‘land of the free.’

    Reflecting now on how I practiced medicine, I think that it was fortunate that for much of that time I worked in low-risk environments. This was fortunate for the patients who encountered me at that time. Despite my paucity of knowledge and practical skills I succeeded in doing some good by listening and tried to understand complex human relationships, and the societal forces shaping these. With that perceived limited skill set – perhaps created by impostor syndrome and the pressure of the short duration of time per consultation – one invariably becomes a conduit for the distribution of pharmaceutical products. The quick pattern recognition followed by the reflexive use of the prescription pad. I was getting well paid. I was doing the same as my colleagues, or at least that’s what we told each other in practice meetings, and all was right in the world.

    Of course, I never really questioned what world I was actually referring to, my own or my patients. On reflection I chose willful blindness over open scepticism, a strange position to take for a young man brought up in Ireland since the 1960s. This was a country that showed clearly – at least to anyone who chose to look – that those in power and positions of authority had feet of clay. That period revealed clerical abuse, government corruption and waste, medical malfeasance in the form of vaccine experiments and the selling of children to wealthy Americans in collusion with the Church. Then we had the banking and economic collapse leading to the selling off of the country and its sovereignty, and more recently the Covid-19 scandal. Why did I think that the biomedical model served anyone other than those corporations and professions earning vast profits from illness?

    Image Daniele Idini.

    Awakening

    A growing cynicism and scepticism coalesced into an awakening on St Patrick’s day March 17, 2020 when then Taoiseach (prime minister) Leo Varadkar paraphrased Winston’s Churchill’s World War II speech: ‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ It was then, to quote Emily Dickenson, that I felt “a cleaving in my mind”. The juxtaposition of such incongruent images as the much loved and revered patron saint of Ireland with his herpetology skills, and the current barely re-elected and much reviled Taoiseach conjuring up images of the London Blitz when speaking about an impending wave of beta-corona virus infections recalled a Monty Python sketch.

    The more I listened to mainstream media in Ireland that mainly consisted of the state-funded Raidio Teilifis Éireann (RTÉ), the more the absurdities flowed and the cleft grew. Eventually, this dislocated myself and a few like-minded colleagues from the rest of our colleague’s apparent embrace of what to us seemed a clearly fabricated, dystopian reality. Doctors shut their practices, refused to see or treat patients because the Irish College of General Practitioners told them that there was no treatment available. Yet, the HSE had been claiming that hydroxychloroquine was effective in treating Sars-CoV1, from 2003, sending a circular to pharmacists suggesting they stock up on the drug and reserved it for treating patients in hospital with Sars-CoV2.

    Who thought that this was ethically and morally appropriate? The rest of society followed suit accepting with slack-jawed-gormlessness curious phrases such as ‘apart together’,’social distancing’,’flatten the curve,’ along with the ultra-dystopian ‘build back better’ and the ‘new normal’. What did any of these inane statements even mean?

    Societal strategies such as mandatory mask-wearing were inflicted with the emphatic certainty only fools can generate and even bigger fools gorge themselves on. Masks of any material, worn walking through restaurants, but not seated, even masks for solo journeys in cars. Then we had the perspex screens over which, apparently, viruses couldn’t jump, the safe purchasing practice of beer and crisps, but not socks and shoes, within the same department stores, and the viral-repellent Nine Euro Meal, along with the destructive removal of children from school for months.

    The sacred was not spared the ravages of this banal evil. Burials were in closed caskets, while no wakes were allowed, and only a ‘safe’ few mourners were permitted; weddings were cancelled, and masses went uncelebrated.

    The medical profession adopted its own dystopian practices such as artificially ventilating cases initially, at least until they realised they were actively killing people. Within general practice the main concern expressed on a well known GP support website was the potential loss of income if we couldn’t see patients. Any attempt to discuss the ramifications of drastically altering the daily rhythms of society was met with ridicule, and dismissed as irrelevant. After all, this was a pandemic and we could lose a substantial amount of our income! Later, when the topic of vaccine adverse events were raised, many of the same people urged us to shut up and vaccinate.

    Nursing Homes

    Meanwhile, in the nursing homes around Ireland, the elderly were left alone, unloved, unvisited and untreated unless it was end of life care. How ironic and criminally sad that these people should be treated this way for ‘their own good’.

    A personal story about a patient of mine may bring home the human tragedy. Jim and Mary were married for close to sixty years. Mary was moved to a nursing home after her dementia worsened to a point where she could no longer be cared for at home. Once that happened Jim visited her every day. Speaking to him after several of these visits he expressed his frustration at her memory loss. Then one day after a visit he came out and told me that he discovered that Mary had excellent recall of the events of their early life together, so he would just talk about those memories. For a while he had the woman he married back.

    Then the nursing homes prevented people visiting on account of Covid. Neither the residents nor their families were asked for their permission to be separated. Jim still visited everyday but he would come away frustrated. Mary would be placed in the window, like a mannequin, and Jim would stand outside. On a sunny day he would stand there looking at his own reflection, unable to see his wife.

    Jim was finally allowed in to see Mary, but by then she was on her death bed and was unable to share any memories or even say goodbye. This was for the greater good of course.

    What wasn’t used for anyone’s ‘ good’ were treatments such as Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine despite emerging evidence of efficacy from around the world from reputable clinicians. Curiously these ‘reputable’ clinicians rapidly became disreputable, despite decades of blemish-free clinical service to their patients. Some had very respectable research and academic careers. Yet, they became outcasts, renegades, not to be trusted according to the ‘fact-checkers.’ This latter group of reprobates turned out to be captured academics with vested interests in protecting certain ideologies or social media companies, pressurised by the U.S. state department and FBI to suppress all ‘thought crime’.

    Image: Daniele Idini.

    But One Hope

    Fear was thus weaponised as the great and the good climbed aboard the gravy train and stoked fear until a mental paralysis gripped the nation. Any dissenting voice was dismissed as selfish and lacking a social conscience. We had but one hope: the vaccine, which was arriving at ‘warp speed,’ while Ursula von der Leyden was exhausting her texting thumb making sure that we in Europe would be saved.

    Everybody would be rescued, whether they wanted it or not, and sure who wouldn’t want a novel pharmaceutical product that was still in phase 3 of clinical trials. Trials that were confounded by giving the placebo arm the product, a product never before used successfully as a vaccine. This was a product for whom the English language had to be subverted in order to accommodate it. Only the insane or the selfish would not want to be rescued, and we don’t want those type of people in our ‘new normal’ world was the message that came from politicians, celebrities and doctors via a complicit media. They pleaded for all our sake to get vaccinated. These were people who at any other time would not give a moments reflection to inordinately long waiting times in our public hospitals, the overcrowding in our prisons, the record levels of homeless children, or the plight of the working class suddenly wanted to embrace collectivism, and ideas about humanity sharing the burden of this ‘pandemic.’ And it worked. Beaten down by fearmongering propaganda and the mind-numbing effects of Netflix, beer and pizza most people walked towards the light, or rather what they were told was the light.

    As of 2025 homelessness in Ireland is at a record high, along with immigration and the cost of living. Excess deaths, which remained steady until 2020 (2018: 31,116; 2019: 31,134; 2020: 31,765) rising to 33,055 in 2021, 35,477 in 2022, 35,459 in 2023 and 35,173 in 2024. Cancer is also on the rise. We have the second highest rate in Europe as of 2022 (our Minister for Health’s office informed me that this was because we are so much better at recording than other nations). International events have further revealed the powerless of many nations and that the rule of law isn’t universal. There is no rules based order. There is only power and money and the golden rule is that those who have the gold rule!

    Image: Polina Tankilevitch.

    Vaccine Injured

    Amongst the flotsam and jetsam post-Covid are the inadequately accounted injured by these vaccines. They are deemed to be invisible, however, even inconvenient and regularly have their realities denied by the very people who created the problem. The medical profession is still clinging to the idea that they saved the world from the plague and are indignant that more gratitude hasn’t been shown.

    The medical profession according to JAMA(Journal of the American Medical Association) has seen a 30% drop in public trust. This will have complex reasons behind it, but the combination of snout in trough and downright dishonesty will have contributed. Gaslighting those who were previously well and now cannot function after receiving Covid vaccines has only added to this.

    People will reflect on the misuse of the Covid vaccines, the profits made and the lies told about its efficacy and safety, and wonder how many times these same scenarios played out in a greater or lesser form in the past.

    After thirty years of practice, I simply can no longer engage with a profession that has been captured by an industry whose sole aim is profit. Most postgraduate medical training is paid for or delivered by the pharmaceutical industry. One has to question what are the priorities of an industry that spends $19 dollars on advertising and marketing for every dollar spent on research.

    This results is a disease model rather than one that examines the root cause. The former results in conditions that coincidentally have pharmaceutical products as alleged solutions. This chronic disease approach rarely if ever returns a person to a state of health. With such an interventionist approach one can understand why around a quarter of a million people may die each year at the hands of the medical profession in the USA, and perhaps 5,000 per annum in Ireland. An emphasis on sleep, diet, breath and movement is unlikely to result in such carnage or in such vast profits.

    The shifting of a paradigm is rarely easy to achieve, but it is doubly troublesome when the concepts are unfamiliar to the people one is seeing on a daily basis in practice. Not only have the medical profession been trained to view health through the lens of chronic disease but the population at large connect health this with pharmaceutical products. They receive this message from most hucksters who want you to buy their products/procedures/cleanses etc. So when it comes to the person taking control of their lives there is a gargantuan effort needed to shift many people’s locus of control from the external to the internal. And it can be financially risky to give a person agency over their own health.

    Image: Brett Sayles.

    Growing Awareness

    Fortunately, there is a growing awareness that lifestyle is more than a sidebar to achieving health. Instead it is health. One aspect in particular has gained a wide interest recently, the issue of insulin resistance.

    This is this concept that I now spend most of my consultations discussing with amenable patients. The subject can be as complex or as straight-forward as one wants to make it. Fundamentally, we do not need carbohydrates, another large industry – the misnamed ‘food industry’ – would disagree, but physiology says we don’t.

    Up to 70% of the Western diet is composed of carbohydrates. Most of the items in our supermarket trollies are in packets with barcodes and usually contain a lot of carbohydrate, and worse still refined carbohydrates. These products are broken down into the main fuel of the body and in particular the brain, i.e. glucose. However many of these products contain fructose, or more precisely high fructose corn syrup, a substance that causes a great deal of problems for our mitochondria and subsequently our cells and energy levels. Most of the health problems that we develop are ‘energy’ problems. Using this term runs the risk of wandering into the land of ‘woo,’ but slowly the concept of energy deficits as a cause of many inflammatory conditions, such as diabetes, cancers and dementia is gaining traction.

    Returning to insulin resistance. This is a phenomenon that occurs when we consume and create more glucose. Then our body habitus changes, i.e. we get more fat than muscle and we move less. We then need more insulin to regulate our glucose levels. And this is where current medical thinking creates the problem that it then goes on to profit from.

    We measure glucose not insulin. Glucose stays within the normal range for decades before it rises above some arbitrary threshold to be called Type 2 diabetes mellitus. But insulin has been raised for decades resulting in high blood pressure, altered lipids, migraines, anxiety, depression, IBS, polycystic ovarian syndrome, dementia, cancer and insomnia to list but a few. All of these conditions are seen as separate problems when in fact they have a common treatable root cause.

    Let me just clarify something at this stage. I am not saying that these complex conditions are solely caused by insulin resistance (IR), but IR is a fundamental feature and if more effort went into reducing IR through actual lifestyle changes then people could actually return to and maintain a state of good health.

    Image: Josh Sorenson.

    Suicide

    At the beginning of this article I alluded to how I died in 2022 and that was the death of this doctor. From that suicide attempt, an attempt precipitated by increasing dismay at the state of the world and my profession in particular, I have rejected many of the beliefs and gods of the past. I have found hope in taking an approach to both my lifestyle and that of my patients which actually has tangible results, and is not based on probabalistic forecasts. My own state of health is fundamental to how I practice medicine and is reflected in my consultation style and physical presence with my patients, and whether they ‘believe’ what I tell them until they see that it is or isn’t working for themselves. Then we rethink and try again. This is unlike the medical model that expects the patient to believe regardless of the almost inevitable side effects.

    The physician needs to be and live in the state of health that they want the patient to obtain. Patients are driven by emotion and to some extent by optics not by rational argument. An overweight, flatulent and out-of-breath doctor is not going to promote anything healthy in his or her patients. They can, however, empathize with the pill for every ill model because they have clearly embraced that wholeheartedly.

    The role of the doctor has declined in significance over time and will continue to do so with the evolution of more advanced AI models if doctors continue down the same road using the same disease model paradigms that are conveniently linked to pharmaceutical products. Instead, doctors need to revert to the model of the physicians of old, and perhaps once again let ‘food be thy medicine’ and be role models for their patients. Optics in today’s age of forever-on-screens is a useful adjunct, but the doctor-patient relationship untainted by influence from the pharmaceutical industry should still be the bedrock of the practice of medicine.

    Feature Image: Pixabay

  • On Rhetoric

    What makes for fine rhetoric in an age of disinformation? Clearly, this is distinct from the techniques employed by corporate motivational speakers, tele-evangelists or self-help gurus. A useful starting point is to examine Aristotle’s views on Rhetoric, who argued that speech can produce persuasion (pistis) either through the character (êthos) of the speaker, the emotional state (pathos) of the listener, or the argument (logos) itself. Artistotle divides rhetoric into three branches. Deliberative speech that sets out to persuade or dissuade. Judicial speech that accuses or defends, and Epideictic speech that praises or blames.

    He sub-divides this into deliberative speech, where there is advice to do something or a warning. Churchill from the back benches warning about the rise of Hitler is a good example of this form. Furthermore, a judicial speech which is intrinsic to the advocate is what he terms an epideictic speech. These include, among others, funeral and celebratory speeches. Abraham Lincoln’s speech Gettysburg Address a good example of the last.

    In his dialogue’s, Plato, Aristotle’s predecessor, was primarily responsible for bringing the founder of all philosophy Socrates to the world. Unlike Aristotle, however, Socrates was deeply sceptical of all sorts of rhetoric. The Socratic method invites scepticism and ultimately may perhaps lead us into an intellectual dead end, in so far as it never answers anything but questions everything. Thus, the dark arts of rhetoric were despised by Socrates, which may have been a contributory factor to his conviction and execution for impiety, not least as a result of the play The Clouds by Aristophanes which satirises him.

    The Socratic method, however, largely ends in aporia, meaning a matter being unresolved. Interestingly, discrediting arguments is crucial to an advocate raising doubts before a jury. The Socratic method also utilises elenchus which discards unsustainable arguments one by one. Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (1927) puts it this way: ‘When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’

    The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787).

    Stunned and Possessed

    Socrates was obviously a very effective persuader in the Aristotelian sense, or as another great orator Alcibiades put it, all who listened were ‘stunned and possessed.’ Nevertheless, he clearly had a point about the dangers of rhetoric. He encapsulated this beautifully at his own trial, which is referenced in Plato’s Apology

    How you have felt, O men of Athens, at hearing the speeches of my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that their persuasive words almost made me forget who I was – such was the effect of them; and yet they have hardly spoken a word of truth. But many as their falsehoods were, there was one of them which quite amazed me; – I mean when they told you to be upon your guard, and not to let yourselves be deceived by the force of my eloquence.

    Used for a just cause rhetoric can be highly effective and great force for the good, either in the Aristotelian sense or in Aquinas’. Yet it can also be used for nefarious purposes. That distinction ought to focus the mind on what is good and bad rhetoric, or oratory, and indeed whether it is only good if the motivations behind it are good. Clearly bad rhetoric in the moral sense can be effective. Propaganda is probably best illustrated by Goebbels. This is what he said about the burning of the books before some 40,000 people in Berlin:

    No to decadence and moral corruption … The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. … And thus, you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.

    Notably, in my last piece for Cassandra Voices I recalled the focus of Karl Kraus’ final anti-fascist text Third Walpurgis Night (1933) not on Hitler but on his rhetorician facilitator Goebbels. Or consider the facility with words of another satanic figure Aleister Crowley even in text:

    I am gold, I am God, 
Flesh to thy bone, flower to thy rod.
    With hoofs of steel I race on the rocks
    Through solstice stubborn to equinox.
    And I rave; and I rape, and I rip, and I rend
    Everlasting, world without end
    Hymn to Pan (1913)

    Unfortunately, practitioners of witchcraft, magic, or sorcery often seem drawn to the dark arts. In this respect the conventional definition of a warlock (a male witch) is an oath breaker, and no great orator or advocate intentionally misleads. There are other gradations of rhetoric as a dark art. Sorcery is low grade. Magic a higher form. Sorcery is merely results-driven. There is no consultation of principle. It has often been termed a crime against God and humanity. Thus, Goebbels and Crowley are examples of effective but morally bad oratory but given different moral positions in my view, distortion comes first as inappropriate oratory.

    Aleister Crowley.

    Legal Ambiguity

    Judicial or legal speech is ambiguous, and is capable of distortion, as when Cicero the great orator and trial lawyer defended Murena for bribing an electoral outcome against the highly ethical Cato. Cicero knew he got an obviously guilty man off for political reasons.

    As Aristotle recognised, however, any speech involves the effect on the listener. Thus, in Leni Riefenstahl’s classic documentary The Triumph of the Will (1936) the spellbinding oratory of Hitler is amply demonstrated, crucially with brilliant cross-cutting to the starry-eyed admiration of those choosing to believe. The film is not unlike watching an American evangelical Christian meeting.

    So, who were the great orators? Excluding examples from Classical Antiquity such as Pericles I discuss a few:


    Aneurin Bevin

    Aneurin Bevin was the architect of the NHS, who became the most loathed and loved man in England. This socialist gadfly with the sharpest of tongues engaged in a long-term sparring match with Winston Churchill. He was also intrinsic to Atlee’s resignation and Churchills appointment. Churchill once called him ‘a squalid nuisance’ not least when he was appointed Minister for Health in 1945. He was biased by a typically inappropriate Bevin question in 1942, at the nadir of the war: ‘The Prime Minister wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle.’

    Bevin had a real conception of the truth, describing advertising as ‘an evil service.’ He also welcomed an opportunity to prick ‘the bloated bladder of lies with the poniard of truth.’ He was also clairvoyant saying: ‘Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets.’

    He was also remarkably acerbic in exposing stupidity. About his political opponent Anthony Eden he said: ‘Beneath the sophistication of his appearance and manner he has all the unplumbable stupidities and unawareness of his class and type.’ He described the Tories more generally as ‘worse than vermin.’

    Benjamin Disraeli

    Then there was the great adversary of Gladstone and architect, along with Metternich of peace in Europe, the Sephardic Jew Benjamin Disraeli, who also a great novelist.

    Disraeli loathed the puritanical Gladstone, who was also a great orator. Unsurprisingly, the feeling was mutual. At one point he differentiated between the words misfortune and calamity with reference to his foe: ‘If Gladstone fell in the Thames, that would be a misfortune. But if someone fished him out again, that would be a calamity.’

    Moreover, Mark Twain attributed a crucial phrase applicable to our age to the British politician: ‘There are three types of lies — lies, damn lies, and statistics.’

    He was also a master of rebuttal, a crucial skill for an advocate. A fellow M.P. once said to him: ‘Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease,’ to which he replied: ‘That depends Sir, whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.’

    Furthermore, he was acutely conscious of stupidity and pettiness, saying: ‘To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge;’ and ‘Little things affect little minds.’

    He also displayed a degree of Socratic self-reflexiveness stating that

    One of the hardest things in this world is to admit you are wrong. And nothing is more helpful in resolving a situation than its frank admission.”

     

    Winston Churchill

    The historical ledger reveals his role as First Lord of The Admiralty in causing the disaster that was Gallipoli, while the people of Dresden, who took seventy years to rebuild the Fraenkische, have never forgiven the actions of Bomber Harris, which admittedly Churchill was contrite about. Hitler’s great opponent was responsible for a long list of war crimes, not least a certain blindness to the welfare of other races – just ask the Bengalis – but as an Orator in a time of great crisis he was unparalleled.

    In his first speech upon uniting Labour and Conservatives against a common foe he said: ‘I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’ And after the near-disaster at Dunkirk he said:

    This is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large, or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

    Also, memorably after Montgomery’s victory at Tobruk, when the tide had turned he said:

    Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the end of the beginning. 

    He was also given to witty if chauvinistic asides, sometimes difficult to disentangle from his evil doppelganger F.E. Smith, particularly with respect to Lady Astor the first female member of parliament. The following statement is said to have occurred with another M.P. Bessie Braddock. ‘Sir’ she said, ‘you are drunk,’ to which he replied:  ‘And you, Bessie, are ugly. But I shall be sober in the morning, and you will still be ugly.’

    Clarence Darrow

    Clarence Darrow was the greatest trial lawyer that ever lived in my view, but also an inspiration behind progressivism, a desire derived from a group of like-minded people, including Oliver Wendelll Homes to improve society. His career is littered with triumphs, including the greatest plea in mitigation ever in Leopold and Lowe and his staunch defence of anti-racism in the Scottsdale case. Often considered merely a sophisticated country bumkin lawyer, he was in fact an incredible orator.

    This is what he had to say about criminal defence lawyers:

    To be an effective criminal defense counsel, an attorney must be prepared to be demanding, outrageous, irreverent, blasphemous, a rogue, a renegade, and a hated, isolated, and lonely person – few love a spokesperson for the despised and the damned.

    And in The Scopes Trial we find the greatest cross-examination ever of his opponent the prosecutor William Jennings Bryan, three-time presidential candidate and religious fundamentalist:

    Bryan:  A witness had testified on Bishop Ussher’s theory that the Earth was formed in 4004 B.C.

    Darrow: That estimate is printed in the Bible?

    Bryan: Everybody knows, at least, I think most of the people know, that was the estimate given.

    Darrow: But what do you think that the Bible itself says? Don’t you know how it had arrived?

    Bryan: I never made a calculation.

    Darrow: A calculation from what?

    Bryan: I could not say.

    Darrow: From the generations of man?

    Bryan: I would not want to say that.

    Darrow: What do you think?

    Bryan: I do not think about things about which I do not think.

    Darrow: Do you think about things about which you do think?

    Above all there is the famous peroration in that case

    If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and needs feeding.

    Darrow’s agnosticism, incidentally, may be attributed to a sense of doubt intrinsic to trial lawyers. Indeed, he wrote extensively about Voltaire, who was also a man of doubt, reason and with a sensitivity to miscarriages of justice.

    Martin Luther King

    First there was his description of wisdom: ‘In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.’ And on the subject of tolerance he said: ‘There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.’ Also a common theme evident in all the great orators, was his hatred of ignorance: ‘Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.’ But let me sign off this article with perhaps the greatest public rhetorical statement ever, which remains apposite to our age:

    I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.

    Feature Image: A fresco by Cesare Maccari (1840-1919) depicting Roman senator Cicero (106-43 BCE) denouncing Catiline’s conspiracy to overthrow the Republic in the Roman senate. (Palazzo Madama, Rome).

  • Zambia: Literature through English

    I spent a number of years in Zambia, in the early seventies, the mid-seventies and the early nineties, teaching the English language and literature in English to school students in their early and late teens. They were preparing for public examinations including GCE overseas certificate organised by Cambridge University. It was called Literature in English because novels and nonfictional biographies by modern African authors were among the set texts in addition to Shakespeare and novels by George Orwell and Thomas Hardy.

    Here is a list of texts I had the pleasure of reading and discussing with my classes. Some of them were written originally in French by writers resident in French-speaking countries of West Africa and translated into English for the benefit of readers elsewhere who could not read French. The year of first publication is given.

    All of these were published in the UK Heinemann Modern African Writers series. Visit their website for many more titles.

    Cry the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton (1948)

    Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe (1958)

    No Longer at Ease, by Chinua Achebe (1960)

    The African Child, by Camara Laye (1953)

    Houseboy, by Ferdinand Oyono (1956)

    The River Between, by James Ngugi (1965)

    Mine Boy, by Peter Abrahams (1946)

    Down Second Avenue, by Ezekiel Mphahlele (1959)  autobiography

    In Corner B & Other Stories, by Ezekiel Mphalele (1967)        short stories

    Return to the Shadows, by Robert Serumaga (1969)

    Mission to Kala, by Mongo Beti (1957)

    Alan Paton was a white South African Christian, probably an Anglican, who was opposed to racial discrimination. Today he might be termed a white liberal. His novel Cry the Beloved Country portrays rural and urban society just before the race laws were passed by the all-white parliament implementing the ideology of Apartheid (so-called separate development). The novel portrays a black village priest and a white farmer who must deal with news of a murder. A Zulu priest, Stephen Kumalo, receives a message that his daughter Gertrude is ill in Johannesburg. Kumalo visits the distant city for the first time and discovers that Gertrude has taken to living from selling illicit alcohol and prostitution. His son Absalom has murdered a white man during a botched burglary. The murdered man had multicultural sympathies and was the son of a white farmer near Kumalo’s simple residence. Other characters appear throughout the novel, which is well-crafted and full of symbolism.

    I read this novel with teenage African students in Livingston, Zambia in 1992-93 just as Nelson Mandela was released from twenty-seven years detention in the notorious Robben Island and was happy to remark that the warped world portrayed in Alan Paton’s text was ending.

    Things Fall Apart

    Things Fall Apart (borrowing from a poem by Yeats) by Nigerian Chinua Achebe achieved worldwide fame and was translated into many languages. It describes the traditional village life of Okonkwo before colonial forces brought changes that Okonkwo could not cope with. Ultimately his anomie drives him to suicide. In many ways the personality of Okonkwo is unappealing to the modern reader – he is patriarchal and hidebound by customs which are a barrier to social progress. It recalls in a different context of Peig Sayers and her anti-modern idealisation of life on the Great Blasket Island.

    In my opinion a far more satisfactory novel by Achebe is No longer at Ease (from a poem by T.S.Eliot) which looks at newly-independent Nigeria and the financial pressures that tribal loyalty exert on the main character, who yields to the temptation of bribe taking in exchange for doing favours. Achebe incidentally published a short collection of essays entitled The Trouble with Nigeria, which deals with corruption, tribalism, militarism and religious-regional tensions. Presidentialism – the cult of the President – is another peeve. He contrasts it with an occasion when he attended a cultural event in Dublin and President Patrick Hillery accompanied by his aide-de-camp arrived and took a seat without anybody in the audience rising to salute him – unthinkable in Nigeria.

    Camara Laye from French-speaking West Africa published his autobiographical narrative about simple village life entitled L’Enfant Noir. I read the English version with students in a rural school preparing for the Form Three exam, the equivalent of the Junior Cert. I wouldn’t describe it as an outstanding work. It is rather sentimental and unreflective in parts. But my students enjoyed reading it.

    Ferdinand Oyono’s short novel was published in French in 1956 and translated into English. The houseboy performs cleaning and simple cooking chores for the Governor of a West African state during colonial times. It is narrated in diary form, two exercise notebooks such as might be used in a school. The town cemetery has an African section and a European section. A few of the European graves contain the remains of inter-racial children that their white fathers acknowledged. The houseboy learns French taking a peek at Parisian newspapers. His interesting situation becomes dangerous in the second notebook when the Governor’s wife goes on holiday to France and he begins an affair with a white mistress. The houseboy sees too much and… there are consequences. It is a brilliant little novel.

    From Kenya

    From Kenya in the early twentieth century comes, The River Between by James Ngugi was written while he was studying abroad. It deals with the collision between African culture and foreign Christian missionaries who suspect ‘pagan practices’. On the ridges where members of the Kikuyu tribe dwell many miles north of Nairobi a teenage boy and his sweetheart, Waiyaki and Muthoni, are Christians, but nonetheless want to proceed with the coming-of-age male and female circumcision ceremonies. (In those days female circumcision was not identified as a patriarchal control of female sexual freedom – Ngugi uses it as a symbol of African authenticity.) Tribal rivalries and personal animosity bring matters to the boil. Muthoni says she is a Christian but also wants “to be beautiful in the tribe” through circumcision. My students in Zambia were not familiar with circumcision rites as the male form is practised only in one small area, but they enjoyed this novel, which sold well.

    The writer became a cultural nationalist and changed his name to Ngugi wa Thiongo. He wrote many books and essays in Kiswahili, now the second official language of Kenya after English. He taught courses in literature in the UK, the USA and other regions of Africa. He got into deep trouble with Kenyan politicians because he thought they were neo-colonial stooges.

    Mine Boy by Peter Abrahams is a sort of coming-of-age novel that describes a migrant worker’s experiences of encountering the big city in South Africa. The village boy sees young city women selling distilled liquor and fighting over their pitches. He sees loose morals everywhere and asks naively Are there any customs here? Abrahams has been faulted in not tackling the racial discrimination in this novel.

    A more interesting later novel in which Abrahams draws on personal experiences of studying in the UK is entitled A Wreath for Udomo. After graduating in the UK, Udomo returns to an imaginary country called Panafrica, struggles for independence and becomes Prime Minister. A concatenation of personal and tribal antagonisms destroys freedom ideals and … read this very realistic novel. This work was not on the schools syllabus but copies could be borrowed from school libraries.

    Ezekiel Mphalele

    Life growing up in a shanty suburb in South Africa is graphically described by Ezekiel Mphalele. We read this set text for GCE certificate in a Livingstone school. In 1993 Zeke Mphalele was an honoured guest at the University of Zambia in Lusaka. It coincided with school holidays and I travelled to a reading and discussion with the writer hosted by secondary school teachers. He was asked why so many writers emerged in West and East Africa and South Africa, but not in Zambia, and answered that intense struggles against colonial and racial situations impel autobiographical and fictive writing. A similar intensity did not exist in Northern Rhodesia before it changed its name to Zambia in 1964.

    Mphalele did not become a novelist. He wrote short stories and essays and had a most successful teaching career in USA universities. In Corner B & Other Stories, by Ezekiel Mphalele (1967) published by East Africa Publishing House (Nairobi) was not on the Zambia exam syllabus. I can recommend it for the curious.

    Return to the Shadows was written by Robert Serumaga, who studied at Trinity College Dublin before returning to Uganda. The novel is set in the aftermath of a military coup in a country called Adnagu (Uganda spelled backwards) and seems to presage the terrible years of Idi Amin.

    Finally, there is the humorous novel of French-speaking author Mongo Beti from West Africa, Mission to Kala, which portrays mischievous intrigue by a chief and his associates when a young city man who failed the baccalaureate is sent on a ‘mission’.

    *Books about life in Africa have been written by white writers with British and other backgrounds. Elspeth Huxley, Joyce Carey (Anglo-Irish) and Doris Lessing come to mind.   Africa-based writers of different ethnic orientation have published in different languages about many themes. The human condition in all its cultural and geographical variations is worth writing about. One point I wish to make here is that efforts should be made to establish financially viable Africa-based publishing companies. Metropolitan London and Paris with large Afro-populations dominate the Africa publishing scene.

    Feature Image: Zambia National Assembly building in Lusaka

  • Eastern European Poetry in a Time of Trauma

    I have been working in education for the last twenty-three years, and been publishing books as a writer over the last sixteen. I find disturbing the recent precipitous decline in reading and, consequent ignorance pervading contemporary culture. In response, in an effort to demonstrate its importance to my critical development, I would like to trace the build-up of my current library which I started developing in 1999. I should preface this by saying that before 1999, I had been living and working in France for the most part. So, when I returned to live in the Republic of Ireland, just before the millennium, I was really starting from scratch.

    I should also mention, as it is extremely important, particularly in the context of tpoehe present discourse – primarily focused on both personal and professional growth – that I had just experienced a profound trauma at that time. In 2000, I lost someone very valuable to me, and not only that, but also by losing this person I lost a whole way of life. So, in many ways, when I started buying my first books they were, without a doubt, instrumental in helping me face the trauma on an daily basis.

    So, what kind of books did I buy and read, twenty-five years ago? Looking at my library, which is comprised of around six hundred or so books, I know exactly which shelf – there are thirty-five in all – that I should start with. These are ones I began reading when I arrived here in Dublin; predominantly poetry books written by Eastern European authors that have been translated into English by some wonderful translators.

    Why Eastern European poetry in English translation? I craved humour in my life, but not just of the glib and cynical Hollywood kind, which I was also relying on at other moments. You see life in Europe after World War II was not easy. Countries that had been torn apart by the most appalling violence were trying to put themselves back together. Poland, the former Czechoslovakia and Serbia were three of the main countries whose poets and poetry I was particularly attracted to. I will take each of these three countries in sequence and describe some of my poets I loved to read almost a quarter of a century ago. I will also try to identify the very specific humour that these poets displayed, and why this appealed to me at a time when I was trying to get over the traumatic event that had such a destabilizing effect on me.

    Morskie Oko alpine lake in the Tatra Mountains, Poland.

    Poland

    Let’s start with Poland, as it is a country with which we Irish have a lot in common. Both of us experienced brutal colonial history amid violence, economic hardship and a profound engagement with the Roman Catholic church. I am going to describe very briefly the work of two Nobel Prize winning poets, Czelaw Milosz (1911-2004) and Nobel-laureate Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), both of whom I loved to read during that period. Undergoing a lot of emotional suffering, I appreciated in particular their wonderful sense of irony.

    An experience of profound suffering can do many things to you depending on your personality type. Some people, for example, simply give up. Life loses all its spark, and you sleepwalk through it for the remainder of your life. This is not living, but merely existing, and it is not my approach. Of course, you don’t know how you are going to adapt to a personal crisis, particularly of the kind that I was facing.

    Of course, when you are suffering, you become very poor company to others, as all you want to do is think about yourself. Self-pity, is a terribly egotistical response, but when you are genuinely suffering, you generally don’t have any time for other people and their particular problems. These two great poets, however, allowed me to empathise with others. By reading their work I began to take an interest in other people once again, as it was quite clear from reading their poetry, that they had themselves suffered enormously. For example, Milosz particularly in his early poetry, describes the Warsaw ghetto.

    Wislawa Szymborska was of the same generation of poets such as Milosz and although her poetry is less explicit about her experience of the war. There is a steeliness of spirit, as in Milosz, behind the subtlety and irony which mask these experiences. This I found deeply inspiring. Indeed, when I think of Szymborska and her poetry, I think of three lines, which were translated beautifully by her translators, Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh.

    The joy of writing.
    The power of preserving.
    Revenge of a mortal hand.

    The last line is particularly arresting, particularly in the context of today. Revenge is not exactly a motive for the majority of so-called poets writing in this country, or so you would imagine. We are so governed to restrain ourselves from such notions – formerly by the Catholic Church, forgiveness being key – and latterly by the all-pervasive ideology of political correctness embedded in institutional ideas such as DEI (Diversity, Equity and Integration). The bland platitudes that have become the calling card of spokespeople in corporate cultures and NGOs have obliterated such notions as Szymborska seems to be conveying in the lines above.

    Like most people who suffer, I felt that I had been wronged, and, as a writer myself, what Szymborska had managed to do, in just three lines, was to give credence to a whole worldview, or artistic philosophy. She made me think of Dante and Joyce and other writers down through the ages, who all had the same belief. How did this translate to me? Use your suffering, but don’t be poisoned by it. Use it with some irony and wit!

    You see, I was beginning to become more human. This is what reading such poets had done to me. They were achieving two results: teaching me to be a ‘mench’, and, at the same time, teaching me how to write.

    The Federal Assembly in Prague.

    Czechoslovakia

    Again, in the former Czechoslovakia there was the poet and immunologist, Miroslav Holub ( 1923-1998). Holub became a hugely important writer to me during this early period what we affectionately now term as the ‘noughties’. I began with a wonderful collection published by Bloodaxe called Poems Before & After, referring to the period before the Soviet occupation and after. As with Milosz and Szymborska, Holub had this beautiful steely quality. All three poets were tough, resilient, and strong. They were not ‘woke’, for want of a better word. They were not full of bright, dewy-eyed idealism about the future having tasted the bitterness of Life, with a capital L,. Yet they managed to deal with it, on terms which they had made their own.

    The Gift of Speech

    He spoke:
    his round mouth opened
    and shut in the manner
    of a fish’s song.
    A bubbling hiss
    could be heard
    as the void
    rushed in headlong
    like marsh gas.

    Sometimes the poems read almost like ‘nasty jokes’, as I came to describe them. I loved this quality the more and more I read Eastern European poetry. It was full of what you might plainly describe as ‘tough love’. This is exactly what I needed, right after getting my ass kicked by some girl. Such was my trauma! Here were poets, of such stature, writing about world war, relating directly some of their most apocalyptic experiences, Holub and Milosz particularly, and they were making light of it! What pain had I in comparison? It really helped put things into perspective. I was just a little bitch, in comparison, moaning about some girl! Jesus, I needed to Man Up!

    Golubac Fortress by Danube river, Serbia.

    Serbia

    Finally, there were the two Serbian poets, Aleksander Ristović ( 1933-1994) and Vasko Popa (1922-1991), who brought the very self same qualities as Holub, Szymborska and Milosz: a steeliness which fortified them against ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’. I discovered Ristović first in a beautiful little Faber edition that had a detail taken from ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, by Hieronymus Bosch, which had been one of my favourite paintings as a boy. The poems were translated by a fellow poet, Charles Simic, whom I later went on to read. This short collection, simply titled Devil’s Lunch, was a selection of the Serb poet’s work, and it was a delight that gave me hours of pleasure. Here is a taste.

    The Glimmer of Gold

    Nobody reads poetry anymore,
    so who the hell are you
    I see bent over this book?

    I loved the directness of approach, the bookish and almost medieval humour. The poetry of Vasko Popa was very different. Again you found the steel, but, the humour was less present, more a kind of violence that lingered uneasily in the background. For this reason, I read less of him, but his enigmatic micro-constellations that inhabited defiantly every single page made me sit up. I came away from his poetry marvelling at the very distinct approach of these formidable writers.

    Over a decade later, after first obtaining a degree in philosophy, I went on to complete a masters in comparative literature where I found myself translating the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. I would spend the next decade and a half translating his work, and I see the self-same qualities of steeliness and inimitable humour in Baudelaire. It is something that I find really lacking in contemporary life. There is a war going on in Eastern Europe yet again. I know that both Ukrainian and Russian poets are writing about this old theme, yet again. I see some of this work being posted thanks to poets like Nina Kossman, who is also an avid translator, particularly of the Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941).

    Yet, when I look around here in Dublin – a city I have been quite active in over the years organizing festivals and readings – I very rarely find Irish writing with a similar vigour. You see it in poets like Seamus Heaney and Patrick Kavanagh, of course, both coming from farming backgrounds where the violent nature of life is a constant backdrop. Heaney’s first collection Death of a Naturalist (1966) was all over such themes, while Kavanagh’s ‘The Great Hunger’ (1942), is without a doubt one of the greatest long poems written in the English language in the last century. It is also extremely funny, confronting an eternal Irish problem, sexual repression.It also aligns with the stoic sense of detachment that all of the aforementioned Eastern masters brought to their work.


    Feature Image: Prague from Powder Tower

     

     

  • Podcast: The Ghosts of Monto: Terry Fagan on 1950s Dublin

    Terry Fagan is a renowned Irish local historian and storyteller from Dublin’s North Inner City. Born in the 1950s and raised in the historic heart of what was once Europe’s largest red-light district, the Monto, Fagan witnessed firsthand the rapid transformation, and often erasure, of the surrounding Dublin tenements and their culture.

    He is, to this day, one of the best living sources of lore and information about this lost world, as well as a collector of histories of it.

    In the 1970s, Fagan began his historical work by recording oral histories from local residents, many of whom remembered formative events such as the 1913 Lock-Out, the 1916 Easter Rising, and the War of Independence and Civil War. These interviews also documented memories relating to life in Dublin’s tenements, experiences in industrial schools and Magdalen laundries, dock work, women’s roles, deaths of children, money lenders, orphanage life, and more, covering both the public and intensely personal history of inner-city Dublin.

    Fagan’s work extends far beyond oral interviews. He is the longtime director of the North Inner City Folklore Project, an initiative that began as a jobs program and allowed him to preserve and publish stories from his community. Over decades, he has amassed a vast collection of tenement artefacts: photographs, books, letters, coins, dockers’ buttons, children’s toys. His vision has always been to open a dedicated museum so this vital social history is preserved within, and for, the local community rather than being housed elsewhere.

    This museum has been a reality in the past and Terry’s current passion is to reestablish it.

    Terry has published works such as “Monto: Madams, Murder and Black Coddle” and “Dublin Tenements: Memories of Life in Dublin’s Notorious Tenements,” both drawn from his extensive oral history collections.  He is also a popular walking tour guide, interweaving tales from his own life as well as audio samples from the collections he oversaw. The Monto tour includes tales about brothel madams, dockers, and a “hidden Dublin” many would prefer to leave interred in the past.

  • Bullying: It’s You, Not Me

    Bullies can take many shapes, forms, and disguises. It seems a daily occurrence that can be defined as repeated behaviours that are intentional or have malicious intent to cause fear or to instil feelings of superiority in the bully, while also causing anxiety and hopelessness in the victim, due to the bully’s relentless behaviour.

    Northern Ireland, where I grew up, is a hotspot for bullying. It seems to thrive in an environment where tribalistic differences are constantly debated, leading to hostility, sectarian violence, hatred, and ultimately, often, murder.

    When I was a boy, from about the age of six for a few years I was indeed a bully myself. I should add that I have been bullied many times.

    Anyway, I bullied a girl at primary school who had an eating disorder. She used to make large bubbles with her mouth because her stomach was troubled. I mocked her over it, because I was a damaged child and did not know any better. She was thin, wore glasses, and I was a pig-ignorant, angry little boy with blonde hair and blue eyes. It was as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, adults used to say about me once they realised, I was a bully without an emotional processor.

    But I could not understand what I was doing due to poor emotional regulation and underdeveloped emotional skills. One thing was certain: I was damaged.

    I come from a broken home and a troubled, all-encompassing background where violence was often inflicted by a parent or guardian. They were young themselves and did not know any better.

    I was constantly on the defensive. And I remained so for decades. Fight or flight with pounding anxiety, cortisol coursing through my system.

    It is a difficult paradigm to break – the cycle of aggressor abuse and the inflicted aggressions, both verbal and physical.

    I was aggressive and used to demand that other school kids bring in a football to school until two much tougher brothers roughed me up out the front of the school on the grass one afternoon. And the bullied girl’s mother accosted me at the school gates, calling me out, rightly so, but I did not know any better. My bullying was reactive without conscious thought. My prefrontal cortex was not developed. Anyway, that was the end of my primary school bullying career.

    Cottonbro Studio

    Bullying in Adulthood

    There is always an opportunity to make money, poke fun at someone, or treat someone like a lesser human being; and here’s the thing: people definitely do, and try to do it, daily.

    I have watched several TEDx Talks on bullying and other YouTube videos on the topic. There seem to be two types of bullying: implicit and explicit.

    It’s a complex human behaviour to gauge on the social barometer. That is, many people are involved in these actions. It is part of us. Indeed, one wonders which circle of Dante’s Hell houses bullies and what they have awaiting there.

    Is it a deliberate choice or a visceral response to something in their psyche? Sometimes, individuals with damaged self-esteem find it challenging to know how to repair themselves. They have become so deeply traumatised that they cling to what they know, or rather, have become.

    There is the Dark Triad of Personality: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and, in a pitiful corner, Psychopathy, which is quite common in Northern Ireland if you ask me.

    In Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis, he posits that some individuals employ mind games and manipulate others’ emotions to achieve their goals.

    In my teens, a bigger mate bullied me because of his size and skill as a fighter. Needless to say, we are no longer friends.

    A few years ago, he emailed to ask how I was and say that he missed me, or something to that effect. I replied telling him that he had bullied me, and I had dark thoughts about getting revenge on my bullies.

    He emailed back, saying he didn’t believe it, that he, it, the bullying ‘was that bad.’ But he was – he was a bully. He is probably still in denial.

    In some ways, he was a rather unusual character. I believe he was bisexual and concealed it, using aggression as a coping mechanism. He also tried to project an image of being a tough man.

    In Northern Ireland, the projected image of ‘don’t mess with me sunshine’ is all. The knuckle-dragging image of the hard man, the person feared and respected for his reputation as a fighter, is deeply ingrained in the collective, broken Northern Irish psyche.

    Loudmouth

    When I turned eighteen, I was quite the loudmouth, and a young, tough bloke at a local disco bullied me.

    One night, he was waiting outside the disco, itching for a fight, slouched against the wall under the arch of the local hotel. I was walking alone, leaving the disco, and he decided to pick a fight with me. He approached and swung a big, balled-up fist. I took it without ducking, as I was intoxicated – as usual – and he clocked me. Since I was skinnier and therefore fair game, it was on for him.

    He thumped me, and I staggered away. Afterwards, I sat on a low stone wall, and I think I had a bloodied nose – I cannot quite recall, but I do remember putting my jeans in the bath with warm water and salt, which drew the blood out of them.

    On another occasion, I was a bundle of nerves due to anxiety, excessive drug use, and simply not being well. I suffered from cannabis-induced psychosis and alcoholism. When he came over and threatened me I soiled myself. I sat there in the front seat of my mate’s car, let it happen, and wetted my trousers. I didn’t show anything to my friends inside the car, but that’s what occurred. The bully left after realising I wasn’t taking the bait or accepting the challenge of a fight. I was very skinny then, not eating properly, and most likely he would have beaten me to a pulp.

    Years later, I wanted to attack this individual. Full of rage, I was letting him dominate me in a way. I often thought of killing him. Decades of pent-up rage came to the fore in my psyche, and I was not going to lie down and take it anymore. The fact is that he was an ignorant halfwit and would have had little insight into his behaviour.

    Then there was the self-proclaimed ‘Christian’ in a homeless hostel in Belfast. A ‘Baptist’, ‘turn the other cheek?’ They were full of shite. He was, and probably still is, a narcissist who ‘knew better’ than the rest. He bullied me, well, it was institutional abuse, while I was resident in a homeless hostel. He became insanely jealous of the friendly relationship I had with one of the female staff. Getting through that situation over a year severely tested me because I had finally a bit of strength about me then, and I wanted to test that out.

    After that there was bullying, from a verbally abusive, ‘celebrity’ chef, who I worked for. He called me ‘a useless bastard.’ because I didn’t dress a plate of raw salmon to his standard. I informed him that I would not talk to a dog the way he talked to his staff, and I walked away not to return. He was well known as a bully. One day, allegedly, he grabbed one of his smaller trainees by the neck and pinned him up against a fridge. Needless to say, he doesn’t come across as a bully on the television or radio.

    Image: Pietro Lang

    Owning up to my own Failings

    I intentionally bullied a rather large, but chilled out guy with whom I shared a house as he was one of the laziest people I have ever met. He would not lift a finger to keeping the house in shape. He lay in bed all day nursing a hangover, something I had plenty of experience with.

    He was angry with me, but I later apologised and explained I only tried to motivate him when he lay in bed all day. Once I pulled him and his mattress off his bed and took him downstairs, as it was a lovely day outside, and he was lamenting his life while suffering from a hangover. This was his, or rather our norm.

    One day, I made a loud noise behind him in the kitchen, as he didn’t know I was there, which startled him while making a sandwich. He held a steak knife in his hand, turned around, and said: ‘Just you wait, Burnsy. One day I will get you.’

    Bullying also occurs in relationships. They must always be right. They will gaslight you into believing that you are the problem. They play the victim and are rather good at emotional manipulation. They cannot comprehend that a relationship is a collaboration. They call the shots, hold the power, and you must bend to their ways.

    I have been gaslight into believing that I was always the problem. Playing the victim is a form of emotional manipulation. Some cannot comprehend that a relationship is a collaboration. They must call the shots. Bullies rarely change. I work on it.

    Yet, sometimes you have to act aggressively when no other option is working.  Once, back home, a letting agency with questionable ethics, known for rather shoddy practices, failed to answer my calls, refusing to return a deposit of £527.00 owed to me. They dragged their heels and told me one date and then another, and wouldn’t pay.

    The owner has been done for fraud multiple times. It seemed as if the ‘management’ were trying to rip me off for the sheer fun of it. So, I went to their office and told them they had ten minutes to pay me, or I would have to get a bit rough. I got my money back within an hour or so.

    Robert Greene

    Robert Greene on Bullies

    Robert Greene, in his book The 48 Laws of Power, doesn’t explicitly discuss bullying as a primary topic, but he does address behaviours and tactics that are often associated with bullying, particularly in the context of power dynamics and social interactions. He highlights how insecurity and a desire for control can motivate individuals to engage in manipulative and aggressive behaviours towards others.’

    I do not stand for bullying nowadays. Although I wonder whether challenging or confronting a bully is really only a Pyrrhic victory? Or perhaps it’s a way to square the circle of your own trauma. I will leave it the reader to decide. I wrote this piece to confront my own mistakes and bullying behaviours to help build clarity and humility in myself, from now on.

    Feature Image: Mikhail Nilov

  • Covid-19 Vaccines: Informed Consent?

    What if I told you that I had a new product – never before used on a population-wide basis – and after coming into use the manufacturer requested that a court compel the authorities to lock away the results of the initial trials from prying eyes for seventy five years?

    This same product is made using E.coli bacteria. Yes, they are the little buggers that can give you the runs, but they are not all bad. These same clever E.coli make strands of genetic material or recipes for a protein that’s actually found on the outside of the virus, Sars-CoV2,a beta-corona virus that in healthy people may give them a bad cold. For others it can prove nasty, but in this unfortunate group of people almost anything can prove nasty. This is the same spike protein that is thought to provoke the worst excesses of the immune response when one encounters a beta-corona virus.

    The genetic material uses a unique substance N1-methyl pseudouridine, a synthetic base not found in nature as one of the letters spelling out the recipe for spike protein production. This substance, we are told, stabilises the recipe and helps the cell produce spike protein for longer. That can be a good thing because we want spike protein, to allow our immune system to react to it and produce protective antibodies for future use.

    That would be all very well if that’s all it did. Pseudouridine, however, produces a phenomena called frameshifting so that the reading of the recipe can go a bit off track. It’s a bit like reading ‘add  4 cups of flower’ and instead adding ‘flour’ to your scone mix. Who knows what you might end up with. Actually nobody knows for sure.

    And that’s not the only problem with letting E.coli make products for humans. E.coli have their own agendas. They are living creatures and not machines. They are under evolutionary pressure to disseminate their genes. One of the ways in which they do so is by packaging them into a little envelope called a plasmid and ejecting it out into the world. This is the process used to make the mRNA for the Covid vaccines, only the bacteria don’t just follow the recipe. They are artists and so embellish and improvise and sneak their DNA into the end product.

    Now the manufacturer assures us that they are one step ahead of these fiendish creatures and have managed to remove most, but not all of this foreign material. The manufacturers have in the past few years caught a break from the regulators who once upon a time said that the DNA from bacteria had to be so low that it was measured in picograms. It’s now measured in nanograms, which is one thousand times greater!

    They reassure us that this tiny amount – albeit one thousand times greater than was previously permitted – is broken down by the immune system. The immune system doesn’t like ‘naked DNA,’ i.e. DNA free-floating in the body. What if it’s not naked, but contained within the lipid nanoparticle, and it enters the cell with the rest of its encapsulated material?

    If the DNA passed on to us humans from our E.coli cousins were to confer the ability to photosynthesise, I’d gladly accept the reduction in my food bill, but what does the bacterial DNA code for?

    But its ok, or at least the manufacturers tell us it is. The level of DNA set by the FDA is what the manufacturer says is in their products. They’ve tested them and the various regulatory bodies believe them. Fingers crossed behind the back etc etc.

    Several independent researchers, however, noticed the crossing of fingers trick and had a look for themselves and found a lot more bacterial DNA. Now who do we believe?

    If that isn’t bad enough something else in the vials, and I don’t understand why it is there. This wasn’t presented to the FDA in the original application for licensing as ‘it was considered to be a non-functional part of the plasmid.’ Its presence has been disputed by some regulatory bodies and researchers, but is now actually recorded in the manufacturer’s literature.

    This substance is Simian virus 40, not all of the virus, just a portion called a promoter/enhancer sequence. In another incarnation this same substance – genetic material from a monkey virus – facilitates the entry of genetic material into the nucleus and hence the genome of the individual treated. This is the desired aim in this other incarnation, but is it the desired aim in the Covid vaccines? If not then why is it there?

    Authorities have sought to reassure those asking questions about SV40 that it is a ‘naturally occurring virus’. Somehow telling me that I am to be injected with a portion of genetic material from a virus that infects monkeys doesn’t reassure me.

    Let us speculate for a moment on the ramifications if this genetic sequence did facilitate the entry of the vaccine genetic material into our genetic material. If it was a heart cell or a liver cell nothing might happen. That genetic material may never again be expressed in the lifetime of that individual especially if they were elderly, wherein cellular activity, like most other activities, is slowed right down. If, however, the genetic material is incorporated into a sperm cell, what then? It could theoretically be transferred to the next generation through a baby with rapidly growing cells. What then?

    Pseudouridine is a synthetic substance not found in nature. Will we have then created semi-synthetic life forms or trans-humans? And just to stretch this concept to the point of being almost ridiculous, who owns the genetic material? Does the manufacturer have any proprietorial rights over the trans-human creature? When I discussed this with ChatGPT it gave me a long winded explanation as to why this is a complex medicolegal area, but it didn’t say ‘no’.

    Maybe I’m over-reacting. Maybe N1-methyl pseudouridine, bacterial plasmid DNA and fragments of SV40 will do me no harm. But what about the lipid nanoparticle?

    Surely a fatty bubble couldn’t do us harm, or could it?

    Once again, regulatory authorities dispute that there is substantial risk to us humans. They deny the amount of DNA, whether the DNA can incorporate into our genome, whether the mRNA can incorporate into our genome, significance of the SV40 fragment and the potential side effects of synthetic lipids.

    The title of this essay is ‘Informed Consent.’ At the time that these products where given emergency use authorisation they were still technically experimental and given the abundance of unanswered questions I would say they remain experimental.

    The 1947 Nuremberg Code, formulated after the trials of the Nazi doctors stresses the concept of informed consent before an experimental medical procedure is carried out on a human being. What percentage of the 70% of the world’s population who received these products can say that they gave ‘informed consent’?

  • Teenage Sex for Meth

    Aged sixteen, I started trading sex for meth. There was no discussion about this with the drug dealers. It was understood. To me, this was a natural progression. My stepfather began to gawk at me when my first breast bud appeared, then molested me when I was twelve. Until I left home for college, I suffered his ongoing body comments and threats, which proved him interested in his sexual excitement and not his fatherly duties. Perhaps even worse, the predatory behavior I experienced within my own family created a dangerous foundation that others soon would exploit.

    By thirteen, many adult men would stare and some asked me out. That year, an eighteen-year-old had sex with me on a beach, when I couldn’t find the words to say no. A family friend molested me while I was on the phone with my mother, apparently confident I wouldn’t tell her. He was right as that didn’t occur to me because she never intervened when my stepfather beat me. By sixteen, I’d had sexual encounters with at least six men more than ten years older. They all expressed astonishment at my prowess but otherwise had not referenced the age implications.

    Each traumatic event, including the regular physical attacks at home, propelled me into a search for escape. Within a month of the initial sexual assault, I often consumed alcohol. I added marijuana, then pills, then acid. At sixteen, I found my drug of choice, methamphetamine, and began shooting up at seventeen. I was in full-bore addiction when I graduated high school.

    I had disconnected from my body and emotions long before I used drugs. This strategy helped me endure life in a house of horrors. The chemicals made this technique easier to maintain. As my substance use disorder progressed, so did my promiscuity statistics. I earned the approval of men at the top of the local drug dealer tier because of my sexual skills and attractiveness. If they weren’t available, I’d have sex with almost anyone who filled my spoon with meth, even strangers. With the guys from my hometown, I accommodated them to reinforce the friendship bond or in an unstated exchange for speed. Once a dealer I’d known since childhood suggested I blow him, handed me a half-ounce bag of meth, and told me to take as much as I wanted.

    The “sex and drugs and rock and roll” motto of the day afforded me a bit of cover. But that slogan’s fun aspect didn’t apply. Sometimes these men, even those I categorized as buddies, would become aggressive if I said no to sex. For example, I occasionally slept with the ex-con who first provided me with meth. One afternoon, he tried to convince me to give him oral sex, which I politely refused, since I needed to sleep after a three-day drug run. He pushed my head down repeatedly, trying to force me. I cried and after a while he left. Later, when I ran into him at the bar, he bought me a drink and gave me a speed vial. I interpreted this as an apology. Afterward, I’d hang out with him in a group but never alone.

    This was a rare healthy decision. More typical, I took rides from men I barely knew or went to their apartments to shoot up. The other meth-addicted girls warned me against this. But I didn’t care about the risk, as long as I gained access to the drug I craved. Plus, in addition to the deep drive to consume meth, threatening situations felt familiar and energizing. I often wondered if I’d survive the night but did it anyway.

    And to be pretty provided a rare feeling of power, as short-lived and superficial as it was. At times, my promiscuity caused me to writhe in disappointment with myself. But I shoved aside such thoughts. I wasn’t thrilled when someone mentioned that, behind my back, people said I was a slut, that horrible word society uses to put down women but not their male partners. Still, I didn’t care enough about my reputation to change. In my mind, the greater the number of boys, and especially adults, who desired me, the greater my value. I didn’t appreciate that the validation I sought through promiscuity exacerbated the pain that compelled me to fall even deeper into my addiction.

    So, when I entered recovery for my methamphetamine use disorder, I felt ashamed of my promiscuity. Until, in treatment for post-traumatic stress and anxiety, my counselor pointed out that most of my earliest sexual experiences were crimes against me. This list includes my stepfather’s molestation and sexual threats, the family friend who grabbed my naked breasts, every adult male who had sex with me when I was under the legal age of consent, and each sexual encounter where I complied due to fear.

    Gradually, as a result of hard work in therapy, I came to understand the connection between trauma, addiction, and my actions. I also learned that one-third of abused adolescents develop a substance use disorder by age eighteen. And those, like me, with four childhood traumas or greater, are six times as likely to do so in their lifetime. Similarly, this group is four times more likely to start sexual activity earlier, to become pregnant as a teenager, and to have over fifty sexual partners. While it is true that some women make these choices freely, which is their right, many fall into the behavior for reasons they barely fathom.

    I didn’t have any of this information when I was sleeping around. Gaining this new understanding released the self-condemnation and allowed me to empathize with my younger self. I had made these self-harming and life-threatening choices because all these sexual assaults, and the physical abuse, destroyed any belief that I deserved better or had anything else to offer. Looking back, I even congratulated myself for entering into a monogamous relationship in my early twenties. Because this was long before I began the long slog to heal from my addiction and the emotional scars from my childhood.

    It’s been thirty-one years since I began my recovery journey. During this process, I married my long-term partner, went to law school, and was appointed a federal judge. I also learned to recognize and then address the numerous effects of my trauma history. While I still struggle with anxiety, these episodes are less intense and briefer. Instead of making choices that add to my pain, I now value serenity and contentment.

    Still, I clearly recall how, when I engaged in high-risk activities like sex with strangers, I intermittently would think, “I’ve lost my mind” or “I must not care if I live or die.” This message also came from others, mostly through their horrified expressions when they heard what I’d done.

    What I, and my drug cohorts, should have thought was, “What happened to you that you’re driven to act this way?”

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini