Cassandra Voices

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  • Grandmothers’ Fight for Stolen Generation

    Review: A Flower Travelled in my Blood: The Incredible Story of the Grandmothers who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children by Haley Cohen Gilliland.

    Between 1975 and the first half of 1978, it has been estimated that the Argentinian dictatorship under Jorge Rafael Videla killed and ‘disappeared’ 22,000 people. As far back as 1984, the National Commission of the Disappeared People (CONADEP) estimated that between 10,000 and 30,000 people were disappeared by the dictatorship from 1975 to 1983.

    The rationale that “If they were taken, there must be a reason,” employed by Argentinians during the dictatorship in a bid for personal safety is immediately imparted in Haley Cohen Gilliland’s book, A Flower Travelled in my Blood: The Incredible Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children (Avid Reader Press, 2025). The book tells the story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo – a group of grandmothers whose sons and daughters were disappeared by the dictatorship, and whose grandchildren were kidnapped and illegally adopted by members of the dictatorship’s state institutions.

    The book opens with the kidnappings of Jose Manuel Perez Rojo and his wife Patricia Roisinblit, who were both involved in left-wing activism and resistance with the Montoneros against the right-wing turbulence in Argentina that culminated in General Jorge Rafael Videla’s dictatorship. Jose and Patricia’s toddler Mariana was taken to her grandparents by the parents’ kidnappers. In her late stages of pregnancy, Patricia gave birth to a boy while detained at the School of Naval Mechanics, known as ESMA.

    The book focuses on the Roisinblit family as it traces both Argentina’s dictatorship history and that of the Abuelas. Rosa Roisinblit, who passed away in September this year at the age of 106, was one of the Abuelas’ founding members. For Rosa, the disappearance of her daughter and abduction of her grandson altered her existence from a person who completely avoided mention of politics to a driving force behind the organisation that openly challenged the dictatorship. At first through persistent presence and silent protest at Plaza de Mayo, the Abuelas would find themselves at the helm of exposing the systematic disappearances of dictatorship opponents and their stolen children.

    Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla swearing the Oath as President of Argentina, 29 March 1976.

    Videla’s dictatorship attempted to avoid the scrutiny which the Chilean dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet ignited. Argentina obscured its description of opponents, and by doing so widened its net to encompass not only those involved in resistance but also anyone remotely linked to the disappeared detainees. The author notes, “For the junta, these covert abductions were the perfect tool: brazen enough to incite fear, but subtle enough that Argentines could pretend they weren’t happening.” As the “disappeared” started making its way into conversations and rhetoric, Videla himself utilised the word in a press conference to bolster dictatorship impunity: “The desaparecido is an unknown … they are an unknown entity, neither dead nor alive, they are disappeared.”

    Of Jewish descent but born in Argentina, Rosa at first turned to Jewish organisations and even the Israeli embassy for help, but none was forthcoming, despite the fact that many Jewish people had been detained and disappeared by the military dictatorship. Videla’s manipulation of Christian values to justify atrocities was also either tolerated or supported by the Catholic clergy in Argentina, leaving the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared with little recourse. It was during one such futile meeting that Azucena Villalfor, the mother of a disappeared detainee, determined to stage a protest at Plaza de Mayo – a gathering for relatives of the disappeared to recognise and know each other.

    Fourteen women gathered for the first meeting and the group later called themselves the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. It was from this group – the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo – that the Abuelas formed their own distinct group, as they were looking for both their disappeared children and grandchildren.

    The Plaza De Mayo in Buenos Aires, where the grandmothers have consistently protested since 1977.

    When Rosa joined the group of women, she realised that some stories of the disappeared children held some commonality – some women were also looking for their grandchildren. As support for their mission grew, some people came forward to report that their neighbours suddenly were raising babies, despite no earlier signs of pregnancy. The first inklings that the junta in Argentina had systematically abducted their grandchildren came when two Uruguayan children were located in Valparaiso after being abducted from Buenos Aires in 1976. The transnational operation was linked to Operation Condor – a US-backed plan that sought to eliminate all Communist and socialist influence in South America, and in which Argentina also participated.

    Alfredo Astiz, a naval officer who worked as ESMA, was tasked with infiltrating the group, posing as the brother of a disappeared detainee. The bodies of two mothers and a nun, supportive of their cause, were discovered decades later in a mass grave as a result of this operation.

    The Abuelas followed up on clues to piece together the broken narratives that could shed light on the disappearances and illegal abductions, since it was clear that no help from the state would be forthcoming. The military would not divulge information about the disappeared and it was through contacting other human rights organisations and a breakthrough in genetic testing that the Abuelas were able to prove the identity of the stolen children they eventually tracked down, and those of the children who came forward after the fall of the dictatorship in 1981.

    Cohen Gilliland gives a detailed account of the forensic anthropology that was employed to identify the remains of the disappeared buried in mass graves, as well as the setting up of Argentina’s National Genetic Data Bank in 1987. American geneticist Mary King devised a grandpaternity test that would allow the analysis of DNA samples from the grandparents and grandchildren to prove their family lineage. Cohen Gilliland writes: “In many cases, such as Rosa’s, the Abuelas were looking for grandchildren who had disappeared while still in their mothers’ wombs.” Following the return to democracy, the grandpaternity test became accepted as evidence in court cases relating to the abducted and illegally adopted children of the disappeared.

    Argentina’s truth commission report noted the abduction of the disappeared’s children, stating: “When a child is torn from their legitimate family to be placed in another family environment chosen according to an ideological notion of ‘what is best for their salvation,’ a vile usurpation of roles is being committed.” The report also lauded the Abuelas’ work and determination to establish not only the identities of the stolen children, but also the contribution of their efforts towards seeking justice for crimes against humanity committed by the dictatorship.

    “When a child is torn from their legitimate family to be placed in another family environment chosen according to an ideological notion of ‘what is best for their salvation,’ a vile usurpation of roles is being committed.”

    Despite the scientific success of genetic testing, several of the abducted grandchildren who came forth, as well as the Abuelas, did not anticipate the ramifications that disappearances and abductions would have on the affected families. Amid campaigns to discredit the Abuelas, and lawsuits contesting custody, the book illustrates how the dictatorships tore families apart and created new ones founded on torture, disappearances, abductions and lies. Reconciliation with biological family at times came at a cost, where justice was achieved at the expense of psychological trauma. Justice did not necessarily ease the endured past.

    This trauma is highlighted in the book through Rosa’s story and her search for her abducted grandson, Rodolfo, who was given the name Guillermo by the couple who raised him. While Guillermo – as he is referred to in the book – swiftly seeks out the truth about his identity, he is also faced with the repercussions of the decision. The psychological and emotional toll is evident as he navigates through two distinct realities: one in which the dysfunctional and abusive family he grew up with disintegrated, and the other in which he sought to reconcile himself with the history of his biological family, which should have belonged to him.

    One memory Guillermo narrates is his adoptive mother asking him, at the age of eight, what would happen if another woman claimed to be his mother. As memories of his past contend with the present, and the contradictions arise, particularly the discrepancies in his upbringing, Guillermo faces a major identity crisis. “You kidnapped the grandson of the vice president of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo,” he told Francisco Gomez, his adoptive father who worked for the military.

    Yet Gomez’s eventual arrest and its effects upon his adoptive mother brought a new round of implications for Guillermo, who found it difficult to distinguish emotionally between healthy and traumatic bonds. Even within his biological family, Guillermo and his sister became estranged over the rupture caused by the dictatorship’s abduction, despite the fact that Guillermo went on to become a lawyer and participate in bringing the dictatorship perpetrators to justice alongside the Abuelas.

    Milei shaking hands with Donald Trump in February 2025.

    Cohen Gilliand’s book is particularly important at a time when Argentina’s right-wing government is resolutely waging war against memory institutions in the country. Argentina’s quest for justice already faced hurdles during Mauricio Macri’s presidency, but current President Javier Milei has exceeded Macri’s measures since the start of his tenure, attacking not only sites of memory but also directly targeting the Abuelas. In a decree that was rejected by the Chamber of Deputies in August this year, Milei sought to remove the autonomy of the National Genetic Data Bank. This book treats the delicate subject of disappearances and abductions with dignity, yet with the clarity and sense of justice that must be employed against dictatorship oblivion.

    Feature Image: The mothers and grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo enter the former Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics detention center.

  • 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

  • Poem: Hats On for the Happy

    Hats On for the Happy

    We couldn’t go in person
    since the car had grown moss inside.
    So we sat on Zoom in Birmingham,
    between a Dublin screen
    and one in the south of Chicago.

    We were silent, serious. Our separated frames fused
    to witness the in-person
    rejection of otherlessness. Two Canadians
    entered the gallery, laughing under starry pointed hats.
    Were they suggesting

    we far-flung wedding guests, fixed
    to the wall, watching and waiting, might have a party
    of our own? Dublin man
    fetched himself a sunhat. He handled
    his brim a lot. I left the screen and found my bonnet –

    orange felt, with a yellow
    flower, in a cupboard I never use.
    The Canadians waved me back to my chair.
    The Chicago Mississippi-
    Bankside lady pierced the screen

    with solemnity – who would not be solemn
    at the imminence of such
    vows – then disappeared behind
    clouds of simulated background.  She came back
    Queened, in a boat of black

    hat, that was tulled and beaded
    and pinned tight to her slowly unsombreing stare.
    Our four tiny head-high squares
    of life sparkled over the grey room. We
    made champagne-rich speeches about commitment

    to wear and be worn by, to cover
    and to be covered by. My partner was bare-
    headed. He never wears a hat, only a sun visor
    that shades his sight
    when the heat-sapped tryst of eye

    and sky is painful. The bride folded her veil back
    into a hood. The groom
    meditated on her draped hair
    and then on her naked face. Say it, whispered each
    brimmed and muted heart.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Substituting Memory for History in the (Mis)information Age

    History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
    James Joyce, in ‘Nestor’, from Ulysses (1922)

    If there is any substitute for love, it is memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.’
    Joseph Brodsky, in ‘Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) An Obituary’, from Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986)

    One of the more contentious trends in contemporary historiography, and philosophy of history, is the weird juxtaposing of memory and history, with the latter being privileged (perhaps unsurprisingly, by professional historians) as somehow superior, or more objective. This is evident, for example, in the work of Roy Foster (e.g. ‘Sorry is not enough’, London Independent, 17/07/1999), and of David Reiff (‘The cult of memory: when history does more harm than good’, The Guardian, 02/03/2016). This tendency may have partly originated in a reaction against the work of French historian Pierre Nora, who, in his efforts to define what constitutes a ‘true’ history, instigated this opposition between history and memory. Because outright political agitation and national imperatives dominate readings of history, he argued (see Realms of Memory (1996/1998), therefore there is no objective truth to be found there. However, he went further, adopting the nihilistic perspective that because memory, although preferable, is also selective, there is, effectively, no such thing as a recoverable past. In his somewhat opaque attempt to reconcile Marxist dialectics with an underpinning theology, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), Walter Benjamin took a more measured, if equally audacious approach. In Thesis VI he wrote:

    To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.

    But how exactly has memory come to be viewed as the poor relation of history? For what else is history, ultimately, but the product of memory? Or, at the very least, a consequence of the urge to memorialise? If only because Memory (Mnemosyne) is the mother of History (Clio), as she is of all the muses.

    This shift in status is compounded by the current fearmongering panic and paranoia about the threat to humanity and the humanities by the dreaded Artificial Intelligence. While AI is NOT nothing to worry about, it should be remembered that narratives of conflict in contested spaces have always been distorted by misinformation: it is known as ‘the fog of war’ or, more commonly, ‘propaganda’. All that has improved (or disimproved, because of the uses to which it is put) is the technology. As the great Irish essayist Hubert Butler wrote in ‘The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue’:

    Speed of communication has increased, and we are expected to have strong feelings about an infinite series of remote events. But our powers of understanding and sympathy have not correspondingly increased. In an atmosphere of artificially heated emotionalism truth simply dissolves into expediency.

    That was in 1956. It was ever thus. Whatever the contemporary concerns about manipulation by A.I., data harvesting, algorithms and bots, it seems to me that digitally native under-30s are more than capable of dealing with the vagaries of the media with which they have grown up and are therefore adept at handling because of easy familiarity. When it comes to being duped online, the kids are savvy enough. It is the supposed adults in the room you have to fear for and keep an eye on.

    Perplexity as to the status of historiography as a somehow tainted literary representation or a scientific unbiased recounting is nothing new, with E. H. Carr’s What Is History? (1961) provoking fierce responses like that of Geoffrey Elton’s The Practice of History (1967), because of Carr’s relativism and his rejection of contingency as an important factor in historical analysis; that is, his almost proto-Baudrillardian notion of history as a partisan pursuit, a simulacrum written by the winners, or at least by those whose relative perspectives are skewed by vested interests or their own agendas. Elton, on the other hand, was a strong defender of traditional modi operandi and was appalled by postmodernism and multi-narrative histories, seeing the duty of historians as empirically gathering evidence and objectively analysing it.

    Thucydides Mosaic from Jerash, Jordan, Roman, 3rd century AD at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

    Herodotus vis-à-vis Thucydides

    The Carr/Elton debate can be seen as a more recent reenactment of a controversy which has reoccurred throughout (as it were) history, for example in relation to perceptions surrounding the virtues and drawbacks of Herodotus vis-à-vis Thucydides as historians of Ancient Greece, or of Suetonius in contrast to Tacitus of Ancient Rome, the methodology espoused by each echoing the practice of their predecessors. Thucydides and Tacitus may be more analytical and less anecdotal than Herodotus and Suetonius, but their histories are still based on interviews with participants and eye witnesses, and then drawing their own conclusions. How do we know if these interviewees were telling the truth, or if their memories were accurate or faulty? They could be deliberately lying, or accidentally misremembering. Plus, these informants are rarely named. Then there is the question of how much bias effects the reliability of Herodotus’ Histories and Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome, given their respective Athenian and Roman sympathies, which they freely admit. Herodotus may have been accorded the accolade the ‘Father of History’ by Cicero, but at least as early as Plutarch’s pamphlet On The Malignity of Herodotus, he has also been known as the ‘Father of Lies’. When introducing his English translation of the Annals, Michael Grant even refers to Tacitus’ ‘mask of austere impartiality’. Meanwhile, much of Plutarch is pure entertaining hearsay. Furthermore, it is worth remembering that the Greek word Ιστορία (historia), from which our own specialised meaning is derived, meant ‘research’ or ‘inquiry’, rather than the definitive account, and is how Herodotus’ titled his work.

    So, while from an early twenty-first century perspective, Herodotus may seem more like a chronicler rather than an analyser, it is important to remember history’s origins in storytelling, and the influence of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – the stories from both of which were recited orally long before they were ever written down – on Herodotus’ mindset and methodology. Indeed, in an echo of those tales told around a campfire, which rhymed to facilitate ease of memorisation, it is believed that Herodotus would have given public readings from his Histories in Athens. For this reason, we may find it more understandable that he is nebulous about the differences between tradition and history, and that he did not always realise that eye witness accounts of the same event can vary. If literature is what is written, and Herodotus was writing history, we should not forget the debt both literature and history owe to the oral tradition.

    Of course, professional historians will argue that historiography has come a long way since antiquity, especially through the use of documentary evidence – inscriptions, manuscripts, treaties, newspaper and (latterly) television and radio reports, court records, archival material and archaeological discoveries, etc. But all of these (un)reliable sources are, finally, human products and personal artifacts, and thus subject to the fallibility of the species – certainly in their interpretation if not equally so in their inception. Just because something is written down does not make it true, or even representative. What pressures were being exerted on those doing the writing and signing, and what did they stand to lose or gain by their acts of scrivening – their Oaths of Allegiance and their Declarations of War? How far can we even rely on those who observed them, or who claim to have done so? Indeed, overreliance on these constituent parts privileges literacy over the oral tradition, one which Herodotus (influenced as he was by the Homeric epics) came out of and which historians have always relied upon – however unreliable it, in turn, may be, based as it is on folk memory. To favour the written over the spoken word does a great disservice to so-called ‘ordinary’ people, and smacks of a ‘made by great men’ approach to historiography. In this prejudice originates the elevation of History over Memory.

    History Faculty building on the Sidgewick Site of the University of Cambridge.

    Worthwhile Academic Pursuit

    None of the foregoing is intended to denigrate the study of History as a worthwhile academic pursuit. But one has only to trace the history of nationalist, revisionist and counter-revisionist narratives of past events on our own island over the preceding century or so to glean an inkling of the fluctuations of fashion in how history is done and disseminated, and to be aware that all readings of history, whatever the original sources or new evidence which come to light, are necessarily provisional. Plays by Brian Friel like Translations and Making History engage with how this history has been made, and remade. The presentation of the past, whether in memory or history (or historical memory), and the relation of both forms of presentation to the ideal of an unmediated past – that is, to an account of the past not distorted by the medium in which it is presented – is illusory. In this regard, every form of (re)presenting the past is a construction and an attempt to pass on something that is already forever lost.

    The concept of historiography as representation, which can easily shade into fiction, while being presented as factual truth, has correlatives in our own time. Herodotus’ treatment of the Persian invasions under Darius and Xerxes implies an underlying conflict between the absolutism of the East and the allegedly free institutions of the West, between Persian monarchy and Athenian democracy. The fact that we have no Persian record of the Persian Wars is down to the fact that Persia was an oral culture, and their version has been lost in the mists of time. In this case, written words would have proven useful. Herodotus’ contention that democracy was the cornerstone of Athenian superiority, and his praise of it as responsible for Athens’ pre-eminent position, might make us mindful of the justifications invoked for the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and Britain. While bringing the benefits of democracy and freedom to a former dictatorship was the general goal of the invasion, the proximate goad was the supposed presence of weapons of mass destruction within the jurisdiction of that regime, a piece of ‘intelligence’ which was subsequently exposed as a faulty, if enabling, fiction. However, that the reason for going to war ultimately proved to be another instance of imaginative invention, every bit as much a representation (or spin) as elements of Herodotus’ Histories, did not bother the advocates of that invasion unduly after it was discovered, evidence that people are still as enthralled by mythic embroidery masquerading as objective fact as they ever were.

    To be sure, in Herodotus’ day it was the Persian Empire which was the aggressor, looking to colonise Greece, and the united city-states, including Athens, were merely defending themselves. The notable difference in our day is that it is the democrats who are doing the invading, with the sanctioning intention of toppling an absolute ruler, or eradicating terrorism. Again, how often today do we hear the sound bite, employed not only in defence of Israel’s right to defend itself, but also in support of its continued existence, that it is ‘the only democracy in the region’? Without too much of a stretch, it could be argued that Herodotus was indulging in an early version of what Edward Said subsequently termed, in the title of his masterly book which almost single-handedly founded postcolonial studies, Orientalism (1978). Having initiated the debate, Said developed it further in Culture and Imperialism (1993), sensitising the average western reader to this strange and sinister colonialism of culture. Sadly, these tropes will not cease, for obscurantism is not the sole prerogative of any epoch, or political grouping.

    Said’s originality was evident in the way he defined the subject of his book.  Orientalism is, first, an academic specialisation: a topic studied by archaeologists, historians, theologians and others in the West who are concerned with Middle Eastern and North African cultures. But Said added two further meanings to the term. Orientalism is also something more general, something that has shaped Western thought since the Greeks: namely, a way of dividing up the world between the West and the East. What appears to be a simple geographical fact is, says Said, actually an idea. The division of the world into these two parts is not a natural state of affairs, but an intellectual choice made by the West in order to define itself. The third meaning for Orientalism is more historically specific. Since the latter part of the eighteenth century, when European colonialism in the Middle East developed most fully, Orientalism has been a means of domination, a part of the colonial enterprise. Said argues that colonialism is not only about the physical acts of taking land, or of subjugating people, but is also about intellectual acts. The academic study of the Orient is unthinkable outside its colonial context and vice versa. So, rather than just an innocent scholarly topic, Orientalism is a general way of imagining the world’s divisions and a specific mechanism for furthering the colonial quest.

    Following Foucault, Said describes the Orient as a product of discourse; that is, not as something in the world that is discovered and analysed, but as something created by Western institutions and ideas. The definition of the Orient is a means of regulating it; the apparent truths discovered are in fact ideas circulated and accepted as part of Western colonial activity in the Middle East. The sense of the Orient as a discursive construct, in turn, enables Said to make one of his most important and striking arguments: what the West believed it had discovered about the East tells us little about the colonised cultures, but much about the coloniser’s. The texts and disciplines that comprise Orientalism – historical narratives like that of Herodotus, analyses of religion, travel writing, etc – reveal the values and preconceptions of the West, of the way people in Washington or Paris or London, or indeed fifth century Athens, wanted to see themselves, their fears and ambitions and prejudices. In particular, the image created of the East is used as a means of constructing one’s own identity. The picture of the East functions as a distorting mirror image, enabling the West to say that whatever they are, we are not. This emphasises the way in which a duality, often referred to as a dyad, is set up: West and East, us and them.

    In spite of the growing influence of Asian nations and the recent ‘Easternisation’ of international politics and trade, such exclusively Western- or Euro-centric readings still predominate our understanding of global history. This is a mindset which has been challenged, in what can be seen as a continuation of the Orientalism project, by Peter Frankopan, in his The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015), and The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (2018). One would do well also to have a look at Palestinian-American Rashid Khalidi’s books Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (1997) and The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2017), in which he depicts Israel as a settler-colonial state, and argues that the modern history of Palestine can best be understood as ‘a colonial war against the indigenous population’.

    Bakhmut_during_the_battle_(2023-04-05).

    Proxy Wars

    Both of the ongoing international conflicts which dominate the news cycle in these times, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Israeli-Hamas hostilities, are in truth complex proxy wars. Appeasement, or its more recent first cousin, conflict management, does not work. As Professor Yossi Mekelberg, of the venerable Chatham House Think Tank, has written:

    One conclusion from the collapse of the status quo between Israel and the Palestinians is that conflict management is a fallacy that has failed time and again. As a long-term instrument it at best buys time until the next round of violence begins. More than 75 years of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians have seen periodic outbreaks of hostilities and periodic efforts to bring peace based on a two-state solution. For most of this time the focus has been on managing the conflict. This exposes a lack of belief that a peace agreement laying to rest the differences between the two peoples can be reached. It also shows that the international collective security mechanism set up after the Second World War has failed in its mission to peacefully settle conflicts.This conflict does not need management, it needs its root causes to be addressed.

    The Northern Ireland Peace Process, which culminated in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 (‘Sunningdale for slow learners’), provides some hope that reconciliation is possible in ‘lost cause’ situations, even if underlying tensions still persist. At least it put an end to what were euphemistically termed ‘The Troubles’, with their violence and loss of life. A United Ireland will happen sooner or later, and it will be an economic problem, much as the reunification of Germany was: Britain does not want to continue footing the bill for the statelet, and the Republic of Ireland is charry of taking it on. Meanwhile, most of those resident in the territory – from whatever side of the Unionist/Nationalist sectarian divide – are more preoccupied about having to pay for G.P. visits and prescriptions, should they find themselves in a New Republic.

    The Russian/Ukrainian stalemate might be resolved if Putinistas were to be purged of their nostalgia for the Russian Empire and the former reach of the U.S.S.R., and had their fears over N.A.T.O. encroachment addressed; and if Zelenskyyites were not so ardent in their pursuit of N.A.T.O. membership. The Russian invasion was not, as is routinely heard in Western governmental and media discourse, entirely ‘unprovoked’. As Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs of Colombia University has written:

    A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective. […] The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.

    As for the seemingly intractable Israeli/Palestinian conflict, with its attendant apartheid, ethnic-cleansing and genocide on the part of the more powerful and well-resourced combatant: if Israel were suddenly left to fend for itself, without being massively underwritten by the U.S. and the E.U., it would soon have to start behaving itself, and acting in a civilised manner with its neighbours – just as a reduction in Iranian (bankrolled by Russia), Qatari and Yemeni support for Hamas would greatly alleviate tensions in the zone. Alas, this is not going to happen, given the North American imperative for a strategic foothold in the region and Zionist funding of their politicians through AIPAC, coupled with German Holocaust guilt, and the onus on oppositional sympathisers to provide some sort of counterforce. The only difference between the I.D.F.’s war crimes and those of Hamas is that the latter lacks the technology to do as much extensive damage, because the former enjoys such disproportionately huge investment, and impunity.

    History makes no mistakes because it has no purpose – that much Hubert Butler must have known by that time (1930s and 40s) if only because at Oxford he read the Greek and Roman classics. In any case, the dishonesty, self-deception and self-aggrandizement of those evoking history to pull the trigger didn’t escape him, not did their utter humanness. His knowledge of Russian…and of Serbo-Croatian,not to mention his French and his German, helped him along the line, no doubt, enormously. The detection of humanness in those whose words and deeds obscure it is, however, his own feat. On the other hand, this must have been easier for him, an Irishman, since schizophrenic uncertainty is humanness’ integral part.

    So wrote the great Nobel Prize-winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in ‘On Hubert Butler’ (1994). In what could be read as a corrective to the notion of this blind, ahistorical history, he also gave this insight in his essay on the work of the great Greek pre-Modernist poet, Constantine Cavafy, ‘Pendulum’s Song’ (1975): ‘The only instrument that a human being has at his disposal for coping with time is memory, and it is his unique, sensual historical memory that makes Cavafy so distinctive.’ However, if the school principal in the ‘Nestor’ episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, Mr. Deasy, is blatantly antisemitic in his exchanges with Stephen Dedalus, Brodsky, in another essay, ‘Flight from Byzantium’ (1985), is patently Islamophobic, displaying a smug ignorance and revulsion of ‘the East’. Indeed, so vitriolic is his repugnance, it is tempting to speculate that he is intentionally verging into parody:

    The delirium and horror of the East.  The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet.  Nothing grows here except moustaches. A black-eyed, overgrown-with-stubble-before-supper part of the world.  Bonfire embers doused with urine.  That smell! A mixture of foul tobacco and sweaty soap and the underthings wrapped around loins like another turban.  Racism?  But isn’t it only a form of misanthropy?  And that ubiquitous grit flying in your muzzle even in the city, poking the world out of your eyes – and yet one feels grateful even for that.  Ubiquitous concrete, with the texture of turd and the colour of an upturned grave.  Ah, all that nearsighted scum – Corbusier, Mondrian, Gropius – who mutilated the world more effectively than any Luftwaffe! Snobbery?  But it’s only a form of despair.  The local population in a state of total stupor whirling its time away in squalid snack bars, tilting its heads as in a namaz in reverse toward the television screen, where somebody is permanently beating somebody else up.  Or else they’re dealing out cards, whose jacks and nines are the sole accessible abstractions, the single means of concentration.  Misanthropy?  Despair?  Yet what else could be expected from one who has outlived the apotheosis of the linear principle? From a man who has nowhere to go back to?  From a great turdologist, sacrophage, and the possible author of Sadomachia?

    Brodsky even goes on to argue that: ‘By divorcing Byzantium, Western Christianity consigned the East to non-existence, and thus reduced its own notion of human negative potential to a considerable, perhaps even a perilous, degree.’ He also implies that: ‘…the anti-individualistic notion that human life is essentially nothing – i.e., the absence of the idea that human life is sacred, if only because each life is unique’, originates in the East, and that Western Christianity’s neglecting the experience supplied by Byzantium is the reason why college campus killers are classed as mentally ill, and presumably suicide bombers are labelled religious fanatics, as opposed to just plain evil. If supposedly enlightened classical humanists can harbour such sentiments, what hope can there be for reconciliation and mutual understanding?

    Interestingly, in ‘A Man Must Not Be Too Moslem’ (1953), Paul Bowles (while admittedly, no friend of Said – See Hisham Aidi, ‘So Why Did I Defend Paul Bowles?’, New York Review of Books, 20/12/2019) took entirely the opposite tack, and was so prescient that the ideas contained therein could have been ripped from today’s headlines. He wrote:

    Rationalizing words like ‘progress’, ‘modernization’, or ‘democracy’  mean nothing because, even if they are used sincerely, the imposition of such concepts by force from above cancels whatever value they otherwise have. There is little doubt that by having been made indifferent Moslems, the younger generation in Turkey has become more like our idea of what people living in the 20th century should be. The old helplessness in the face of mektoub (it is written) is gone, and in its place is a passionate belief in man’s ability to alter his destiny. That is the greatest step of all; once it has been made, anything, unfortunately, can happen.

    Mit Gewalt aus Bunkern hervorgeholt (‘Forcibly pulled out of bunkers’)

    Victims of Oppression go on to Oppress

    It can be argued that what Israel is doing in Gaza, and has done to the countries which surround it since its foundation, partakes of the classic pattern of abusive behaviour, on a national rather than an individual level. ‘Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return’ as W. H. Auden had it in ‘September 1, 1939’. It is not unheard of that victims of oppression go on to oppress even more. The Jewish people, who were victims of a genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War, are now themselves perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinian people. Perhaps Brodsky’s Jewish ancestry accounts for his self-advertised blindspot: he was merely conforming to stereotype. But the Children of Gaza by now far outnumber Butler’s ‘The Children of Drancy’ (1968/78) – with the added developmental difference that now the whole world is watching their slaughter. Yet the majority of Western leaders persist in standing staunchly by Israel and its policies, paying mere lip service to popular calls for a ceasefire while continuing to supply the weapons used for the razing of Gaza and the annihilation of its people. The last thing our planet needs in this day and age is the continued endorsement and maintenance of yet another theocratic ethno-state. We in Ireland should know this all too well. George Santayana’s famous aphorism is usually misquoted as ‘Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it’, but in its original form read, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ Unfortunately, no one learns any lessons from history, and remembers only what suits them, which is why it constantly repeats itself – first as tragedy and then as farce.

    Bad things undoubtedly follow when any ethnic or national or religious grouping (often a toxic concoction of all three) claim to have all the answers, and so start getting notions that they are The Master Race, or The Chosen People, or undertake Crusades against the Heathen or Jihad against the Infidel, or any convenient Evil Other. Note that I include here such secular religions as Fascism and Communism, which too frequently manifest as latter-day utopian belief systems which can be used to sponsor mass murder.

    All wars are, at root, economic. The geopolitical importance, the religion and the patriotism, the toppling of tyrants and establishing of democracy, are just the attendant window dressing. (Doubtless, all those anti-materialists who would prefer to forget, or only remember in an approved way, will here dismiss my arguments with the classic cheap insult of ‘vulgar Marxist’ – incidentally, a phrase Foster has appropriated from Benjamin’s Theses, although used there in an entirely different context. Apparently, there exist kosher, refined Marxists, and objectionable, vulgar Marxists. Thus, E. P. Thompson is deemed acceptable within the academy, despite the fact that he expressed sentiments such as, ‘so great has been the reaction in our time against Whig or Marxist interpretations of history, that some scholars have propagated a ridiculous reversal of historical roles: the persecuted are seen as forerunners of oppression, and the oppressors as victims of persecution’ (from The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, 1978).) Yet all wars also end eventually, if only for longer or shorter periods, either through disengagement, conquest, de facto surrender, formal surrender or negotiated peace agreement. The means of disseminating misinformation may be more covert, efficient and persuasive, but what does not change is human nature. The apportioning of blame, who has right (or God) on their side, is in most conflicts a question of ‘How far back would you like to go?’ (which is, in turn, a slightly more grown-up rendering of the childish playground staple, ‘You started it’). Would that be the first incursion or the latest atrocity, or any point on the calendar in-between?

    At some point, the origin of the primordial offence recedes from history into myth – found in sacred books and the stories people tell. Sometimes it is even, conveniently, the Word of God (be it Yahweh or Allah). Arguably, memory is more historically accurate than lots of competing histories. Indeed, as has been demonstrated, many of those histories, official and unofficial alike, are based on recollections after the fact. Ultimately, history is nothing more or less than memory. Yet memory fades, unless it is recorded – however rigorously or haphazardly – in history. We currently stand as helpless as we ever were when The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, as Goya had it, and Voltaire’s admonition, ‘Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities’ is still, sadly, applicable.

    Feature Image Otto Dix, Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor (“Stormtroopers Advance Under a Gas Attack”), 1924.

  • Feathers for Rosa – a tribute to Rosa Luxemburg

    To celebrate International Women’s Week, The New Theatre is presenting ‘Feathers for Rosa’ by Noël O’Callaghan and Douglas Henderson—an unusual tribute to Rosa Luxemburg. Centring on the poem ‘Du liegst | You lie’ by German-Jewish poet Paul Celan, it consists of a thirty-minute performance interspersed by three original songs. There is also an exhibition of paintings, an installation of a basket of white feathers from the Berlin canal swans, and a nine-minute experimental film and music video.

    The following dialogue is based on the film script: Speakers are Noël (N) and Douglas (D).

    N: I was once chased by an angry swan twice my size…

    Years and years of painting swans… this flock lives on the banks of the Berlin canal—the same waterway where the body of Rosa Luxemburg was thrown on January 15th, 1919 and lay for four months undiscovered…or was it?

    Did the swans floating above, perhaps the ancestors of this flock, discover it under the ice?

    Did the moorhens and ducks spread the news up and down the banks… there’s something in the weeds… something in the weeds… something’s caught.

    One day, he brought a poem into the studio…to set to music. It was called ‘Du liegst – You lie’ a poem by Paul Celan… about the murder… and about the body in the canal.

    The Flock.

    D: I found this poem in an email from my friend Alex. Its vividness and incantational drive seemed to drag me along in its wake. I was a bit surprised, since I associated this German-Jewish poet with poetry of the Holocaust and thought of him as somewhat impenetrable. Had complexity and interpretation veiled an evidently deep political commitment? Could it make a song?

    Du liegst im großen gelausche, umbuscht, umflockt

    You lie in the great listening, ambushed, flaked round

    N. A strange and powerful song emerged and, as we played it night after night, a vision projected itself onto the dark, studio walls… a drowned Luxemburg, disembodied, upside-down, surrounded, Ophelia-like by bushes and waterbirds (umbuscht, umflockt), manifested itself as a sort of stained-glass window… and I made the painting ‘Du liegst’. Was I thinking of Harry Clarke? Yes, I think Rosa should have a stain-glass window. Was I also thinking of Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia or of Georg Basiliz’s upside-down portraits?

    D: The poem is a retelling of the brutal murder of Rosa Luxemburg and her political ally Karl Liebknecht… at times mimicking the sadistic language of her killers…Rosa’s body thrown into the Landwehr Canal… her political ally, Karl Liebknecht, riddled with bullets in the Tiergarten…

    der man ward zum Sieb, die Frau müßte schwimmen, die Sau

    the man became a sieve, the woman had to swim, the pig

    Sieve – screen grab from film.

    N: The poem is also an account of Celan’s last trip to Berlin just before Christmas 1967…the city in a state of political turmoil following the murder by police of the student Benno Ohnesorg during protests against the visit of the Shah of Iran. During his visit, Celan walked the banks of the Spree and Havel rivers and along the Landwehr Canal past the site of Luxemburg’s death. Further along the canal from here you reach the Hercules Bridge, and in a park nearby, there’s a statue of Hercules fighting a boar… a pig. 

    geh zu den Fleischerhaken,
    zu den roten Äppelstaken 

    go to the meat hooks,
    to the red apple candlesticks from Sweden 

    … the Nazi meat-hooks of Plötzensee prison, the Fleischerhaken… the apple candlesticks from Sweden seen by Celan at a Christmas market in Berlin, the Äppelstaken.

    Es kommt der Tisch mit den Gaben
    er biegt um ein Eden

    Here comes the gift-laden table,
    it turns around an Eden

    …Hotel Eden, where Luxemburg was held and tortured before her murder. 

    D: Candles were important for the Roman Saturnalia, the feast of Saturn, the precursor of Christmas. Hercules offered candles to Saturn in place of human sacrifices…honouring Saturn’s altar not by slaughtering a man, but by kindling lights… Sweden – the refuge of Willy Brandt, the architect of détente in Europe, who once said peace isn’t everything, but nothing is possible without it.

    N: Weisestraße in the Neukölln district of Berlin is a ten-minute walk from where we’ve both lived for many years. It’s a typical street for this area… many apartment buildings dating from the end of the 1800s… really nothing to distinguish it from other similar streets in the area… nothing that alerts you to the weight of history. It was here at house number 8 that Rosa Luxemburg, together with her political ally Karl Liebknecht, spent some of their last days before their brutal murder… hiding from fascist militias in the apartment of supporters. Here they held political meetings to discuss the failed January uprising, even read bedtime-stories to their hosts’ children, until, fearing discovery, they had to leave…

    D: We did some filming there one day in late December. There was a police raid on a nearby café because of an Instagram post supporting left-wing Palestinian resistance. We met some activists from the feminist anti-capitalist Zora collective who had been targeted there. They asked about our project and were delighted to hear that their name would be travelling to Ireland.

    N: Banks of feathers like snow (umflockt)… I started collecting them… apropos of nothing, really, other than their beauty… then thoughts of Emmeline Pankhurst intruded. Her hateful White Feather campaign to send men to their deaths in World War 1. To turn a thing of such beauty into shame… it’s evil. Luxemburg was so different. She urged soldiers to lay down their weapons, to desert… and to know their real enemy. She paid for this with her life…

    für sich, für keinen, für jeden

    for herself, for no one, for everyone

    The time has come to reclaim the White feather, to honour the Deserter…

    ‘I see them walking,
    walking back,
    back from the front,
    The walking wounded,
    The walking dead.’

    (from Woman of the Rubble’s speech – ‘Feathers for Rosa’ performance).

    Der Landwehrkanal wird nicht rauschen
    Nichts
    stockt. 

    The Landwehr Canal won’t rush.
    Nothing
    stops.

    ‘Feathers for Rosa’ is funded by donations through our gofundme campaign. Donors receive original watercolour sketches of swans made on the banks of the Landwehr Canal.

  • A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    In the poem your butchers
    fear to breathe, the murdered nurseries

    are clean, the brimming
    table-top restored – your every room

    aflush with idleness again,
    a bowl of flying spices

    near to hand, the oven-bread
    uplifted through the haze: a feast

    the windy air will sing
    from the open-hearted balcony

    to the salted promenade below,
    where a boy

    is counting ripples out to sea,
    and the market-men

    are bundling their wares,
    the coming dark

    a gentleness
    and rustling of wings:

    no raining heat
    or carnage to allay,

    the waterways unpoisoned
    by cruelty or death.

    You see – the dream
    your fingers fashioned like a sail

    is soaring in the breeze;
    your pen

    outlives the bullets
    of the eviscerator’s gun.

     

    The Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer (1979-2023) was killed along with his family in Gaza on December 6th. His final broadcasted poem, “If I must die” makes reference to his statement in an interview that if soldiers arrived on his doorstep he would fling his pen, his only weapon, in their faces. 

  • Ten Faery Tales for Our Time

    This article is dedicated to Patrick Healy.

    The Irish people have a long-standing relationship with ‘numinous presences in the landscape’, often referred to as the little people, or faeries. The literature provides a complex set of illusions. The writer, philosopher and independent scholar, my friend, Patrick Healy on a recent visitation tendered me a painting of Mad Sweeney (buile shuibhne), which forms part of his forthcoming exhibition in Amsterdam.

    It made me consider the enduring relevance of the faeries, although I now live in Leatherhead in leafy Surrey, where the little people are well hidden.

    In H.G. Welles’ remarkable parable of the future invasion by aliens from outer space, The War of the Worlds, we find the ultimate understanding of an existential threat. When Orson Welles put out his infamous 1938 broadcast, he set it in New York, causing a level of consternation that led some to flee to the nearby hills. The original book is of course set in Leatherhead, which is clearly not immune to faery tales.

    Most contemporary faery tales often provide binary messages of good and evil for children – or even child-adults susceptible to manipulation – who see battles between good and evil and a Manichean Universe. Thus, children and adult minds can be manipulated, and often nefarious agendas can be set using their effect.

    According to the plagiarised – but well received at the time – work of the psychologist Bruno Bethlehem The Uses of Enchantment, faery tales help children resolve Freudian oedipal conflicts. But on whose behalf? They are cautioned to stay safe from ‘evil’, but the meaning of good and evil is far from clear in this day and age.

    Historically, faery tales contain a surprising level of terrifying violence, often involving gruesome acts such as cannibalism, witchcraft, and bodily metamorphosis, as with werewolves. They play to latent fears that can be deployed to manipulate or control the human psyche.

    I will now draw out some crucial messages for the profound structural ways we organise our present lives around faery tales.

    Illustration of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” by Vilhelm Pedersen (1820 – 1859).
    1. The Emperor’s New Clothes

    Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 tale is based on a 1335 story from the Libro de los ejemplos (or El Conde Lucanor). It is short and alarmingly precise, involving an emperor of such vanity and so susceptible to flattery that his dressmakers get him to pose and preen naked.

    It seems to me that most of the politicians of Ireland, the UK, the EU, and the world at large are the vain inheritors’ of the Emperor’s new clothes, with fake experts and insiders flattering and manipulating them. Political leadership is always subject to vanity and therefore susceptible to flattery.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    Where there is no leadership, the people perish.
    Proverbs 29.18.

    Vilhelm Pedersen illustration for “Ugly Duckling”
    1. The Ugly Duckling

    This 1843 tale by Hans Christian Anderson is perhaps my favourite faery tale. Anderson was not a transcriber of faery tales – as the Brothers Grimm were – but a great creative artist. Here the eponymous ugly duckling is hounded out of the tribe, simply for being ugly, but a new tribe welcomes her as she is really a swan, not an ugly duckling at all. At one level this is about finding your niche and not associating with quacks – including those who force you out of town.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’
    H. G. Welles

    What we need now are more ugly ducklings, and not clean-cut conformists – the inappropriate adults in the room.

    Hobbit holes or smials as depicted in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
    1. The Hobbit

    In J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 fantasy classic, an insignificant shire hobbit, Bilbo Baggins with the aid of dwarves and a magician defeats the dark forces in the battle of the five armies. Written just before World War II, it anticipated an Allied victory against the dark forces of fascism. A parable for that time and our own, which is elaborated upon in The Lord of The Rings.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    ‘We burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo, men women men women and children recognised that what was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. Lemay said if we HAD lost we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals, and was right’
    Robert McNamara, ‘The Fog of War’

    Always keep in mind who the dark forces are, and that winning is not everything, or not always. Manichean battle between good and evil rarely occur. Who is evil today? Is it just Vladimir Putin or those who seek to prolong the war? And if Mr Putin is a war criminal, what of Bush, Blair and Biden?

    The Cheshire Cat.
    1. Alice Adventures in Wonderland

    In Lewis Carrol’s famous 1865 story Alice falls into a rabbit hole, and witnesses a succession of fantastical creatures, including The Queen of Spades who conducts a trial in breach of due process: sentence first, verdict later.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    This cannot be improved upon in terms of a commentary on this age of prejudgement and guilt by social media, or in the wake of any accusation.

    One modern version occurred when then Spanish minister Donna Luzon in advance of the Catalonia trials referred to those accused as the ‘convicted.’ We continue to find prejudgement of pre-crime, and conviction by association of those we disagree with. Quasi-internment. Deportations and extraditions. The obliteration of due process. The end of human rights. Endgame. Off with your head or to Rwanda.

    Well mercifully the Court of Appeal disagrees in the U.K.. But what about Julian Assange’s final appeal?

    Humpty Dumpty and Alice, from Through the Looking-Glass. Illustration by John Tenniel.
    1. Alice Through the Looking Glass

    The second Wonderland visit is best interpreted as being about language and the distortion of tradition.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    ‘I know of only one authority which might justify the suggested method of construction. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”

    “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be the master, that’s all.” After all this long discussion the question is whether the words “If a man has” can mean “If a man thinks he has”. I have an opinion that they cannot, and the case should be decided accordingly.’

    The above quote comes from Lord Atkin in his dissenting judgment in Liversidge v Anderson (1942). It concerned the decision to intern someone as a subversive without due process. Thus we find a direct transcription from the book in the great English language decision upholding due process at the height of the Second World War. A sole dissenting judgment from a man and lawyer in touch with working class sensibilities

    First combined edition (publ. Ted Smart, 2000)
    1. Northern Light / His Dark Materials

    The ultimate anticipation of medievalism, with orcs seeking to undermine our hero Lyra, with her supportive, if ambiguous, daemons. Here we find the oppressive authority of organised religion and the death of the great bear Irek Brisson, who has fought so valiantly on her side.

    Philip Pullman was clearly influenced by John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), where Lucifer seems to be seeking to save humanity from institutional religion – as opposed to Christian belief which is a force of good – thereby undermining the satanic myth of the fallen state from Original Sin.

    The reversion to biblical historicism of the Old Testament is a dangerous feature of our age, not least in the US Supreme Court. As Pullman put it elsewhere: that great man Jesus and that scoundrel Jesus Christ.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    Original Intent interpreting a legal document from its inception, and not dynamically. Thus, America recognises the right to bear arms because it was acceptable over two hundred years ago. As Amy Coney Barrett put it after her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court: ‘[Catholic judges] are obliged by oath, professional commitment, and the demands of citizenship to enforce the death penalty. They are also obliged to adhere to their church’s teaching on moral matters.’

    From Sleeping Beauty (1959 film).
    1. Sleeping Beauty

    Based on the faery tale ‘La Belle Au Bois Dormant, published in 1697 by Charles Perrault, this story has been sanitised for popular consumption. In Disney’s retelling, the kiss of the prince awakens the sleeping beauty, but in the original telling of the tale she is not roused, and he falls in love with her body and essentially rapes her.

    It is only at the birth of her twins when one of the babies suckles at her breast that she wakes up. The prince then tells her what has happened. As if all this was not bad enough it turns out that the prince’s mother is an ogress, who is longing to eat her grandchildren. The tale first appeared in England in 1729 in Stories or Faery Tales from Past Times.

    Pantomimes and Disney have thus obliterated everything but the kiss.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    The idea of a prince coming to the rescue is also a theme in Rumpelstiltskin, and is the driving force in Cinderella too, although what makes for a prince is far from clear. Is it a man who abuses women or a coercive structure which abuses men and woman? Or worse still, those individuals who rape the earth. Thus, we should be careful about what and who we consent to, whether princes or princesses. Stay safe from sexual predators if you can.

    The main cast during filming in 1970.
    1. Willie Wonka and The Chocolate Factory

    Let us remind ourselves of the plot of the 1971 movie (based on Roald Dahl’s novel), in which Willie Wonka owns a chocolate factory, but has closed it down, because of espionage and betrayal. Here a race of Oompah Lumpas work under him, who seem like incorruptible souls, like Norwegians perhaps or Icelanders.

    So, in seclusion he creates the Wonka chocolate bars containing elusive golden tickets to a factory for a competition, as he is getting old and realises that someone else needs to take over the place.

    The children lucky are given a series of tests, for he only trusts uncorrupted children to run the business. He is a man-child adult himself, or a magician or sorcerer. But he finds that the children have also been corrupted. Fallen angels in a world of illusions.

    Charlie Buckets is the last recipient of the golden ticket. He fails because after cheating along with his grandfather. But is redeemable, as Wonka comes to the conclusion that the ideal child to run the chocolate factory is working-class. At one level his poverty has produced an element of dishonesty.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    Let us be wary of the inappropriate adults in the room and conscious of how poverty and social exclusion are an increasing feature of our time. So let us also be wary of going it alone, for the poor fall into traps set by the rich. And in an age of limited mobility to escape the debt trap, let us be wary of how and by what mechanisms the poor can inherit the earth or even achieve a basic income.

    1. Puss in Boots

    The oldest written telling version is Costantino Fortunato (Italian for “Lucky Costantino”) by Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola.

    Charles Perrault’s transcription is about a miller’s son who is left a cat in his father’s will. The miller’s son is none too delighted with his inheritance until the cat assures him that he can make the young man’s fortune. All the cat needs to accomplish this is a pair of boots. Thereafter, the cat makes him richer than his wildest dreams, and he marries the most beautiful princess.

    Juxtaposition and Commentary

    Beware of charming con men who claim they will make you rich, a lesson learnt by as all those who suffered from subprime mortgages and banking misrepresentations from the wolves of Wall Street in Ireland and elsewhere. Lies and misrepresentations that have been rubber stamped by the courts.

    Beware of dynamic self-made monsters such as the unlamented Peter Sutherland for they have destroyed and pillaged the earth.

    Readers should by now understand how we have been manipulated since childhood by faery tales in a deeply structural way, through the creation of a simplified world of good and evil.

    1. Wilde Encounters…

    I recently acquired a first edition Oscar Wilde’s Salome with illustrations by Beardsley. Now as I alight daily in Clapham Junction station on my way to court there is a plaque to Oscar Wilde as I change trains. I am reminded of being an aspiring young thespian in Trinity College 1989 where I played Edward Carson opposite to Patrick Healy as Wilde. So I conclude with Oscar Wilde’s faery tales – above all ‘The Nightingale’, along with ‘The Rose’, ‘The Happy Prince’ and ‘The Selfish Giant’.

    By serving their masters selflessly, the swallow and the rose die and only the selfish giant gains a measure of redemption through the generosity of his soul. He had allowed Christ or Christ’s emblem into his garden and now he gains the garden of paradise, or is it the kingdom of heaven?

    Feature Image: The Fomorians, as depicted by John Duncan (1912).

  • Requiem for a Profession

    We are sodden with fake news, hyped-up and incomplete information, and false assertions delivered non-stop by our daily newspapers, our televisions, our online news agencies, our social media, and our President.
    Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, New York (2018)

    I doubt there are many career guidance counsellors now advising school leavers to become journalists. This is down to a serious depletion of the Fourth Estate, in Ireland and around the world, especially attributable to the technological rupture of the Internet. Investigative reporting is really being squeezed. This spells danger for our democracies, as power is not being adequately held to account.

    In Ireland Mediahuis, a Belgian company which owns a host of newspaper titles including the Irish Independent, Sunday Independent, Sunday World and Belfast Telegraph recently announced a voluntary redundancy programme. It seems highly unlikely that any of these positions will be re-filled once “re-structuring” is complete.

    In 2022 the profitability of that company’s Irish operation fell considerably (€117.3 million to €65.3 million) from the heights of 2021, when the government’s Covid advertising bonanza was still in full swing. Although online subscriptions increased by 13% over that period, this does not translate into direct profitability.

    Journalism, as an industry, is still reeling from the original sin of publishing online in the early noughties. Once a legacy publisher – the Guardian under Alan Rusbridger in particular – broke ranks and put “the news” online for free, the rest were forced to follow suit, with varying paywalls, or risk irrelevance.

    Declining newspaper sales eventually brought an end to what now seems an Edenic era: when real journalism represented a viable career option for a young graduate, or even a person straight out of school.

    In America the number of journalists fell from 60,000 in 1992 to 40,000 in 2009,[i] a pattern seen all around the world.

    As revenues have diminished workloads have increased. Cardiff University researchers recently conducted an analysis of 2,000 U.K. news stories. This showed an average Fleet Street journalist was filing three times as much as in 1985. Or, to put it another way, journalists now have only one-third of the time they previously enjoyed to perform their jobs.[ii]

    This gives rise to an unprecedented amount of what Nick Davies has defined as ‘churnalism’, as journalists become passive processors of ‘unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve a political or commercial interest.’[iii]

    One suspects recent developments in AI will accelerate existing trends, and hollow out the industry further. A latter-day Napoleon might not now consider four hostile newspapers to be more formidable than a thousand bayonets, as government subsidies or a philanthropic grant might easily quell opposition.

    There are a few bright spots on an otherwise bleak horizon – such as the vibrancy of contrarian podcasting – but it’s hard to disagree with the pessimistic conclusion of ‘the last great American reporter’ Seymour Hersh:

    The mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television networks will continue to lay off reporters, reduce staff, and squeeze the funds available for good reporting, and especially for investigative reporting, with its high costs, unpredictable results and its capacity for angering readers and attracting expensive law suits.[iv]

    We now encounter an industry captive to social media behemoths, who demand coin in exchange for boosting and blue ticks. In order to finance the few remaining full-time employees, legacy media relies increasingly on biased “philanthro-capitalism”. Moreover, without a steady sales income, the sensitivities of advertisers – including emanations of the state in the era of Covid – are also less easy to disregard.

    By its nature, investigative reporting struggles against constraints, legal or otherwise. Indeed, Seymour Hersh’s frustrations with his employers in the New York Times over a lack of support for his investigations into corporate America in the late 1970s led him to hurl his typewriter out an office window at one point.

    If current trends continue the practice of investigative journalism in legacy media will go the way of the newspaper boy and shorthand.

    Is it any wonder then that surveys show that less than fifty percent of the populations of the UK and US trust mainstream media? The figure for Ireland is marginally over fifty percent, but falling.

    In this country an aspiring journalist would want to be well insulated against poverty to challenge the dominant neoliberal consensus expressed through the print duopoly, and RTÉ. Having investigated any aspect of the state-corporate nexus a job applicant might have to field uncomfortable questions in any subsequent job interviews. Ireland is a small country after all, where whistleblowers are generally considered a nuisance.

    Those decent ones still working within the profession must maintain a steely reticence, recalling Seamus Heaney’s poem about ‘politicians and newspapermen’ in Whatever You Say Say Nothing (1975):

    ‘O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
    Of open minds as open as a trap,

    Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks’

    Successive revelations of corruption among elected politician by what is essentially a two-man journalistic operation at On the Ditch – backed by Web Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave – serves to expose the paucity of investigative reporting among the dominant legacy players, where hundreds of journalists rarely, if ever, land direct hits on the political class. Some are obviously frustrated in their efforts, while others are presumably selected for deference.

    Tánaiste Micheál Martin’s crass characterisation of the founders of On the Ditch ignores the existence of a revolving door in Ireland between media and politics that has long inhibited criticism.

    In Irish journalism today, a little investment goes a long way, especially when combined with a willingness to contend with defamation actions, and the more insidious methods that have been employed by emanations of the state in the recent past.

    We hear repeated warnings on RTÉ and in print about the dangers of conspiracy theorists and the purveyors of disinformation. This blithely ignores that, time and again, mainstream media has erred in its assessments and failed to provide an adequate account of “the facts”, let alone acknowledge their own internal contradictions.

    In Ireland the collective failings of the media came to a head during Covid, when a cabal of civil servants unlawfully usurped power from elected politicians and set in train an unprecedented spending bonanza. There have been few if any sustained investigations into how all that money was spent from a media that was awash with advertising revenue. Nor was there significant dissent from clearly damaging policies, such as extended school closures, or the undermining of previously sacrosanct civil liberties.

    Then the Covid crisis gave way to the Ukraine crisis – in what appears a continuation of the Shock Doctrine – and we find a fresh wave of manipulation seemingly designed to nudge a reluctant Irish public into acceptance of NATO membership. Even a token left-wing voices in the mainstream media often reveal themselves beholden to the dominant interest.

    It is instructive how many mainstream journalists seem inclined to undermine the case for neutrality, despite successive opinion polls showing the Irish public overwhelmingly wish to remain non-aligned, or militarily neutral. There are some obvious conflicts of interest, at the very least.

    It is both our greatest strength and greatest weakness in Ireland that as English-speakers we are subject to relentless propaganda, but are equipped linguistically to cut through the Gordian Knot.

    Key critical skills are, however, often lacking, in large part due to an Irish education system that has downgraded the humanities and social sciences, and which according to the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher must avoid producing ‘second-class robots’ – the obvious implication being that is exactly what it currently produces.

    Perhaps this explains the cacophony of bewildered voices on social media that lapse into outlandish conspiracy theories. False prophets like John Waters offer a vision of a return to de Valera’s Ireland, which was in many respects a miserable, post-colonial epoch with no place for youth or vibrancy.

    Foreign friends wonder why the Irish people are so passive when it comes to housing and securing other rights vis-à-vis the state and dominant corporations. The absence of investigative reporting and critical insight is crucial to maintaining this status quo, where young workers are fleeced by landlords, including REITs that barely pay tax in this country.

    Stopping the rot, and saving Irish democracy, surely begins with reforming the public broadcaster, which barely maintains the pretence that it conducts investigative reporting. Sadly, it has long been beholden to advertisers.

    The malaise has been brewing for some time. The director and author Bob Quinn in 2001 argued that RTÉ had become a:

    bloated and swelling corpse, feeding the increasing number of parasites but incapable of directing itself because there is no life, no human spirit to quicken it … This despite the efforts of bright young men in advertising to string gaudy beads around the neck of the corpse, the vile body, in an effort to persuade the people of this country that their property is still working on their behalf. It is not. It is simply the vehicle for the frustrated fantasies of ad-men, the megalomania of insane technocrats and the sanctification of the acts of a conservative government. If one looks closely at those lines, one will see evidence of the greatest sell-out ever perpetrated on a nation – by the nation itself, through its sons.[v]

    In the past there was at least one national newspaper that tended to go against one or other of the dominant centre-right parties, who have since entered coalition.

    Any country lacking a media prepared to conduct hard-hitting investigative reporting and which prevents divergent opinions from being ventilated cannot remain an independent republic, or a genuine democracy, for any length of time. Despite a groundswell of support for the opposition, removing the current coalition from power without a change in the media landscape may prove extremely difficult, just as in other European countries.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

    [i] Alan Rusbridger, The Remaking of Journalism and Why it Matters Now, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2018, p.163

    [ii] Ibid, p.181

    [iii] Ibid p.181

    [iv] Seymour M. Hersh, Reporter: A Memoir, New York (2018), p.5

    [v] Bob Quinn, Maverick: A Dissident View of Broadcasting Today, Dingle, Brandon Books, 2001, p.xxxiv-xxxv

  • Free Public Transport is Public Good Deliverable for Dublin (2019)

    In contrast to other major European cities, Dublin has few rail- or tram- lines. Instead, public transport users mainly rely on an extensive but complicated bus network. This is, however, slow and unreliable, owing to Dublin’s appalling traffic congestion. Moreover, for several key destinations outside the centre, notably Dublin Airport, buses are the only available public transport option.

    Dublin’s traffic congestion suffocates key transport corridors: from Stillorgan to St Stephen’s Green; Blanchardstown to Stoneybatter; Terenure to the Liberties; and Coolock to the Docklands. These arteries are so gummed up that drivers last year spent, on average, two-hundred and fifty hours in traffic – making Dublin the third worst city in the world for time spent sitting in traffic.[i]

    The effect of spending the equivalent of more than ten full days in a car each year, can only have negative health, psychological and social impacts, leading to isolation, stress, anger and weight gain. And how do many drivers compensate for time lost in traffic? By using smart phones to ‘connect’ – illegally of course – with the world outside.

    Regrettably, however, the authorities seem unwilling to contemplate a gradual retreat of the motor car from the centre. In contrast, across Europe, bicycle (and scooter) rental schemes, allowing residents to beat the traffic, have multiplied. Networks of cycle paths are mushrooming: for example Paris’s cycle lane infrastructure will, by 2020 have been expanded by 50% in the space of just five years.[ii] Elsewhere, city councils are lowering speed limits, introducing car bans and car-free days, pedestrianising streets and replacing car with bike parks.

    The ‘slow’ Dublin city centre, in tandem with the legacy of inept and corrupt planning for the suburbs, along with high car insurance and ancillary costs, present Dublin with severe challenges in terms of retaining both Irish and International business.

    Indeed, a 2018 study by the Dublin Chamber of Commerce found 73% of companies were finding traffic was having an increasingly negative impact on their businesses.[iii] In addition, heavy car reliance pollutes, causing both smog detrimental to human health, especially from diesel engines, as well as CO2 emissions generating climate chaos.

    One obvious way of addressing these problems would be to develop more extensive, comfortable and efficient public transport for Dublin; especially as without implementation of a pragmatic, but innovative, public transport infrastructure, any hope of expanding business and employment in the capital should be set aside.

    Dublin’s public transport network can be improved by diminishing distances between stops. Denser public transport can be delivered to the city (and the rest of the country too) swiftly, and without incurring vast additional infrastructure and capital costs. Importantly, adverse environmental and social impacts – such as we are witnessing with the BusConnects ‘mega-project’ – can easily have be avoided by liaising with community groups and other interested parties.

    The important question to address is how Dublin’s public transport network will alleviate traffic congestion. And after half a dozen incomplete Bus Network improvement plans (anyone remember the ‘Quality Bus Corridors Network’ and the ‘Swiftway BRT’ plans?) pompously rolled out over the last fifteen years  – all of them expensive and requiring costly compulsory purchase orders – it is high time to think outside the box.

    A Public Good

    The problem is that all previous bus network improvement plans – with BusConnects only the latest – accept the accommodation of other types of road users as axiomatic, including, of course, motorists. This, unavoidably, demands road-widening: usually requiring land acquisitions to establish minimal widths of twenty metres, i.e. a two-metre-wide footpath, a two-metre-wide cycle track, a three-metre-wide bus lane and a three-metre-wide traffic lane, on both sides of the road.

    If brought to fruition, twenty-metre-wide BusConnects corridors will, unavoidably, split neighbourhoods apart. Pedestrians will be channelled into designated ‘safe’ crossing points with communities separated by concrete corridors – what transport planners refer to as ‘pipelines’.

    But what if there were less cars on the streets? Would this really reduce the need for additional space and infrastructure, and diminish impacts?

    This brings us to the idea of recognising the use of public transport as a Public Good which should become free for passengers, thereby encouraging people out of their cars. Yes free – why not?

    Access to public transport might become viewed as a fundamental human right, akin to the provision of healthcare and education. Indeed, in more than a hundred cities in the world it is possible to ride on a tram, metro or bus for free – and without having to evade an inspector!

    From the buses of Porto Real in Portugal, to the Miami Metro in Florida, and from Noyon in France and Chengdu in China, free public transport is a successful urban mobility option for mitigating both the environmental and sociological impacts of transport. The latest place to embrace the concept is Luxembourg  – it will soon be the first country with all public transport free.[iv]

    There are a number of powerful arguments for making public transport free – or at least below the cost of operation and maintenance – provided either by government directly or through the private sector.

    For starters, private cars impose numerous costs on society that drivers do not pay for. Every time we start our diesel, petrol, hybrid engines – or even electric, as long as fossil fuels power stations – we generate air pollution, and clog up roads for other users. These costs are measurable in environmental damage, health care costs, and wasted time, which non-motorists pay for indirectly, through taxation.

    Economists and planners have long advocated that motorists should pay these costs directly, allowing people to make rational choices. Well-designed congestion pricing schemes, such as those found in Singapore, London, Stockholm and Milan, ensure that private vehicle drivers pay more if they choose a congested road – just as Dublin’s Port Tunnel has different rates depending on the time of day.

    A variation on a congestion pricing scheme for Dublin would be an additional levy on fossil fuels, which could be dedicated to relieving air pollution thereby raising respiratory health.

    In the absence of a congestion pricing plan for Dublin, however, and powerful opposition to it, subsidising public transport, which gets people to drive less than they might otherwise, is an feasible alternative – albeit, the combination of both measures would be optimal.

    Everyone benefits when people can travel around more safely and freely

    Making public transport freely available for all should create greater labour flexibility, with companies potentially choosing from a larger pool of employees, as well as accessing more suppliers who might not be deterred by high transport costs. Moreover, people would be more inclined to take more impromptu, and safer, outings for shopping, leisure or social purposes. It might save many rural pubs.

    Naturally, removing the financial cost of public transport to users would not make it ‘free’, as someone would have to foot the bill. It can be demonstrated, however, that using taxation revenue to pay for public transport would make everyone wealthier, in the wider sense of the word.

    Permitting ‘car sprawl’, i.e. unrestricted growth in car sales and road infrastructure with scant regard for urban planning, makes no economic sense, as profits generated by millions of generally single-occupant vehicles come with significant costs. The waste of resources, and other social costs are ‘conveyed’ from the calculation of these profits, and passed on to the taxpayer, future generations, and sometimes other countries.

    Implementation Challenges

    The concept of free public transport poses several implementation challenges. Amongst the arguments potentially adduced against it are as follows:

    1. It would require more public transport units to accommodate increased demand, which harms the environment, just as cars do.

    Indeed, if everyone used public transport, more, polluting buses would be required. In addition, upgrading our public transport infrastructure is energy-intensive, drawing largely on coal and other fossil fuels. But it would take many cars off the road and reduce the overall impact in the short term, while bus manufacturers could be incentivised to produce cleaner, more comfortable, and ‘smarter’ vehicles.

    1. With our level of public debt we cannot afford to spend money on frivolous projects like this.

    In fact public transport is the opposite of debt: when carefully and strategically planned it brings tangible rewards, and more importantly reduces carbon emissions; especially important with the Irish state facing hundreds of millions in fines for failure to reduce emissions that are the third highest in the EU.[v]

    1. Car sales would drop significantly.

    Indeed they would if public transport was free for everyone to get to work. Families would no longer feel the need for two or more cars. This would likely hurt the (non-indigenous) car industry, but manufacturing resources could be redeployed into making buses, or even bicycles.

    1. Some of our public transport is terrible – this would just increase the pressure.

    Regrettably, much of Dublin’s transport network is currently over-crowded and unreliable, and this is precisely why government investment is required to accommodate demand and increase capacity.

    1. Public transport service providers cannot be expected to provide a reliable service without a financial incentive.

    This argument rests on the assumption that when we pay nothing, and heaps of people are using the service, we cannot expect top-notch customer service. The ultimate client, however, in this case is the state and a simple clause in each public transport services contract could require all services to achieve a minimum standard of quality, based on the users expectations.

    1. Many people dislike public transport and would never use it.

    There are of course people who will stick to their cars whenever possible, but they would at least start bearing the real cost of using them.

    Combating Climate Chaos

    Introducing free public transport would reduce the number of cars on the road. A moderately loaded bus can carry approximately eighty passengers during a typical commuting hour. Compared to the typical car occupancy of a maximum average of two passengers at peak hour, it is a straightforward calculation that a single bus would remove up to forty cars from the road.

    A strategically designed and free bus-based city public transport system with, say, a fleet of five hundred buses could thus potentially take twenty-thousand cars off the road; almost half the number of cars currently dominating Dublin city’s centre.

    In all likelihood many of us would choose not to own a private car – perhaps renting where the need arose – thereby reducing the volume on the road. Repeated across dozens of cities in a country and thousands worldwide, free public transport could be a game changer in terms of transport emissions.

    Any government’s job is to provide services for the people. Free public transport is an example of a great service available to all. Taxation is already devoted to healthcare, education and road maintenance, so why not make provision for a service conferring such wide-ranging benefits? Moreover, it should go without saying that any government should  be taking care of the environment we pass on to our children.

    By making free public transport an aspect of the social contract, the government would be compelled to bring about improvements as required. With more users – especially vocal ones – deficiencies would be exposed. Reducing the number of cars on the road would also yield space for footpath and cycle track improvements.

    If public transport were offered for free more people would surely avail of it. Indeed, more of us would already be using public transport if it did not cost so much; ridiculously, driving into town is often ‘cheaper’ once you own a car and paid insurance.

    Enhanced Wellbeing

    A study conducted by the city of Copenhagen linked regular public transport use to a lower mortality rate, a happier disposition, and greater labour productivity. Public transport users take up to three times the amount of exercise per day compared to drivers, simply from walking between stops and their destinations.[vi]

    Public transport also brings financial benefits to communities: not only directly by providing jobs in the industry itself, but also by creating a key component to a healthy business ecosystem, and by increasing mobility options for both commuters and customers.

    It can assist in shaping a more active society, where people accept and respect each other, interact more, learning how to live together – the core elements of a healthy polity – all for free!

    Such an idea may seem revolutionary for a car-dominated city such as Dublin, but actually it’s more like a reversion to how it operated in the past. The city existed for at least a millennium before the motor car arrived on the scene. Its city centre was built around pedestrian traffic, which had to be forcefully adjusted as car ownership expanded. Cars never made sense in Dublin, but they found a way in and have become part of the urban tissue. Now that must change.

    Will we ever have free public transport in Ireland? Not anytime soon I fear. It would take considerable campaigning for this to occur. But we must do something to alleviate the insane traffic congestion in our city, and awaken to the responsibility of addressing the climate chaos afflicting the planet.

    [i] Fergal O’Brien, Dublin third worst city for time spent sitting in traffic – survey, RTÉ, February `13th, 2019, https://www.rte.ie/news/dublin/2019/0213/1029375-dublin-traffic-survey/.

    [ii] Sarah Barth, ‘Paris’s 5 year cycling revolution: Twice the cycle lanes and three times the cyclists by 2020’, road.cc – peddled-powered, April 4th, 2015, https://road.cc/content/news/147613-pariss-5-year-cycling-revolution-twice-cycle-lanes-and-three-times-cyclists-2020.

    [iii] Untitled, ‘Traffic congestion hitting Dublin companies – Dublin Chamber’, RTÉ, 15th of March, 2018, https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2018/0316/948010-dublin-chamber-traffic/.

    [iv] Daniel Boffey, ‘Luxembourg to become first country to make all public transport free’, The Guardian, December 5th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/05/luxembourg-to-become-first-country-to-make-all-public-transport-free.

    [v] Kevin O’Sullivan, ‘Ireland has third highest emissions of greenhouse gas in EU’, Irish Times, 26th of August, 2019, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/ireland-has-third-highest-emissions-of-greenhouse-gas-in-eu-1.3998041.

    [vi] Sarah Boseley, ‘How do you build a healthy city? Copenhagen reveals its secrets’ February 11th, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/11/how-build-healthy-city-copenhagen-reveals-its-secrets-happiness

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    “You have no appointment.”  

    I’d emailed, left messages, and read their mission statement: To free the innocent, prevent wrongful convictions, and create fair, compassionate, and equitable systems of justice for everyone. 

    No. I have no idea what I’m doing, but I’m doing it. Walking downtown to the office of The Innocence Project in Manhattan. On my way, I look up to see the spike of the Freedom Tower cutting through dense spring clouds. It makes me wonder, in this country of income disparity, prejudice, and Proud Boys, is there indeed justice for all?

    “Well, I’m here now and I’d like to speak to an attorney.”  

    I fucked up. No one is coming to speak with me. 

    Within minutes, I’m greeted by an affable intake attorney named Dara, who gives me her full attention. I explain that I’m a writer advocating for a wrongfully accused inmate at Cumberland Prison. Emmanuel Clark is serving a life sentence for first degree murder. After letting her know that Emmanuel’s files were given to their office by his cousin four years ago to no conclusion, she agrees to take my 16-page typed transcript and assures me the office will again give his case … a look. I’m informed it will take time. That there are no guarantees. With profuse thanks, I’m gone.

    For months now, I’ve interviewed Emmanuel Clark. An inmate serving a life sentence with no parole at Cumberland Prison in Baltimore. He went in at age 19. Now he’s 46 years old, serving time for a crime he claims he did not commit. We communicate by prison pay phone, trying to untangle a web of injustice. One that is all too common when you’re young, poor, and not white.

    I learned about Emmanuel through my friend Greg. Someone who knows what it’s like to be incarcerated. But for the past 10 years, Greg has focused his life on sobriety, and making people laugh, while attempting to make a difference in the world. He heard about Emmanuel’s plight through his cousin, felt compelled to advocate for him, and solicited my help in the process. Both my friend and I have had our share of family dysfunction. Probably what lead us both to stand-up comedy and a decade-long friendship. But we’re here now. Meeting once a week, to put together this complex puzzle that a corrupt legal system once scattered.

    A robot operator asks us to accept the call, “From an inmate at Cumberland Correctional Facility.” Press zero, and you’re connected. Allocated a strict 30-minute time limit for which the inmate has to pay. At 90 cents an hour on a jail work program, one phone call per week is a significant expense. But after two decades of no one listening to his story, Emmanuel decides it’s worth it. He’s excited. There’s a lot to tell and not much time. Greg in his raspy, Good Fellas voice repeats, “Very simple, Emmanuel, go slow and don’t give us too many details all at once.”  As he speaks, I’m reminded of Denzel Washington in the movie, Philadelphia and his unforgettable line, “Tell it to me like I’m five.”

    Born Emmanuel Clark, in a rough section of Baltimore City, neither the Greek American father he never knew, nor a Native-American mother were capable of raising him. Both parents had a dependency on drugs and alcohol which would later prove lethal for their son. What followed was foster care, juvenile detention centers, and homelessness. Out of desperation to survive, 16-year-old Emmanuel started selling crack on the street. And by 1997, he was convicted of murder one. A life sentence. Without parole.

    Emmanuel had been selling in Patterson Park. An area of Baltimore known as Butcher’s Hill. His customers were, for the most part, prostitutes and petty thieves. There, he met a woman named Bonnie Felicetti who worked as an admin for a lawyer. But Bonnie was also a known prostitute and crack addict. She lived with her husband Tony, also a drug user, and a 38-year-old friend called Louis Koch. Emmanuel didn’t know Louis well but described him as follows:

    “When you talked to him, you knew he was kind of…slow. Bonnie would get high and use Louis to buy drugs when she didn’t want to leave the house.”

    On Sunday, June 16th, the night before the murder, Emmanuel gave his last gram of crack to Bonnie with the promise that she’d pay him back. 60 bucks. Within the next couple of days.

    Next morning, Monday, June 17th, Emmanuel got breakfast at Hardee’s, before walking to Patterson Park, where his cousin would re-up his supply. He was there for several minutes when Louis showed up, saying Bonnie would be home from work. And had his 60 bucks.

    “I figured I’ll hang out there, get my money, wait for my cousin and get off the streets.”

    When Emmanuel followed Louis home, he was led through an alleyway. Not the front entrance.

    “Louis went through the gangway. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I just followed him.”  

    As the two entered Bonnie’s backyard, Emmanuel saw panes of glass on the lawn. He noticed the outside windows were broken, but the inside windows were intact.

    “Louis asked me to hand him the glass and I did. Whatever was in the yard, I gave him. Some of the glass I handed, he put on the kitchen table and then threw it away.”

    Both men then entered through the window.  Emmanuel was there for maybe five minutes, when he heard his cousin’s whistle. 

    “We had calls to let us know we were looking for each other. When I left Louis, he was alive.”

    Responding to the call, Emmanuel headed back to his cousin’s, re-upped his supply, then proceeded to where he’d been staying at his girlfriend Tonya’s house.

    “When we’d made it back into the neighborhood, there was police everywhere. I didn’t find out Louis was dead until the next day.”

    Tonya and her mother didn’t like Emmanuel selling drugs. So, he’d applied at Teddy’s Roofing and got the job. 

    “It was my first day of work and when I got home that night, Tonya was in our bedroom crying.”

    “What did you do?”

    “What do you mean what did I do? I didn’t do nothing!”

    “The police was here asking questions about you.”

    Louis was pronounced dead on June 17th, stabbed with a screwdriver over 100 times. Fingerprints on the glass pointed the police to Emmanuel, and the weight of these accusations triggered a psychological breakdown. 400 milligrams of Thorazine and Tegretol were administered. Both antipsychotics.

    “I had a mental snap.”

    “I was given heavy doses of drugs.”

    “I was a zombie.”

    After ten days of treatment, Emmanuel was back at the regular detention center where he faced hours of grueling questioning.

    “I was scared terribly. The cops said I would never see my girlfriend again. Eight hours later, I repeated everything they told me. I just wanted it to be over.”

    If Emmanuel got something wrong, if something didn’t fit the detective’s narrative, they would correct him. Under the influence of drugs, he was coerced into giving a false statement.

    “The confession I gave the cops didn’t match the evidence. This was in my taped confession. Which, years later, they claim they lost.”

    Reading through Emmanuel’s case file, I noticed a few things. Fingerprints on the glass belonged to both Emmanuel and Louis. Glass found placed in the trash. The cops told Emmanuel to confess that he broke in through the window. But the question remains: What kind of robber breaks in and then places the glass in trash bins? There were also a pair of pliers and knife found near the window which fits with Emmanuel’s narrative that Louie was being locked in the house by Bonnie and Tony.

    After his arrest, Emmanuel awaited trial, locked up in Baltimore City Detention Center for a year and a half. Feeling his fate was sealed, he attempted an escape.

    “I was going down and I was desperate.”

    Digging his way out of jail through a catwalk, he was caught just as he jumped the barbed wire fence. Photographs taken of him that night show scrapes, cuts from a fence and his hard fall. These pictures from his failed escape were then transferred into evidence for his impending trial. Evidence which was conflated, to make it appear as if those injuries occurred the night of Louis Koch’s murder, as a result of a struggle between the two. At trial, Emmanuel’s public defender never questioned those images detectives and a prosecuting attorney presented to the jury.  

    “I kept telling my lawyer the photos they were using were from the escape, NOT from the crime scene. All he could say was, “I don’t know Mr. Clark. They went into evidence.”

    Emmanuel was convicted of first-degree felony murder. For 26 years he’s been a model inmate at Cumberland Prison with no history of violence. He went in barely out of his teens and is now a middle-aged man who spends his days in a cell no bigger than the average American bathroom. Days when the prison goes on lockdown, for lack of staff or bad behavior from a prisoner, Emmanuel spends 22 hours in his cell.

    “It’s a fishbowl. They can see everything we do. There is no privacy.”

    On more than one occasion, I’ve asked Emmanuel how he has spent so many years like this, and the answer is always the same.

    “You don’t want to know.”

    I’ve asked my friend Greg too, how he dealt with being incarcerated for the stint that he did. And on every occasion his answer is always the same.

    “When you’re in prison time stops.”

    With our interviews completed, Greg and I had limited choices. We could wait for someone to take the case, or solicit another pro bono office. At Emmanuel’s suggestion, I contact Project Six, and The Integrity Unit, two Baltimore agencies with similar missions of reversing and/or reducing sentences for the wrongfully accused.

    In the interim, I go back and forth with The Innocence Project, inquiring about the status of Emmanuel’s case. When I get the same response every time, that they have limited staff, massive caseloads, and thousands of pages to read and review, I have to let it rest.  But my last email was a doozy. An article I sent on Robert Patton, one of the three detectives in Emmanuel’s case. Patton had been accused of four different types of misconduct. Including, but not limited to, withholding the testimony of key witnesses.

    The decision to devote two of his podcasts to Emmanuel’s predicament, resulted in Greg’s phone lines lighting up with calls from distant family members and intrigued listeners. For the duration of his segment, there is full support but no funds with which to move forward in a tangible way. To retain a lawyer worth his or her salt. An intricate case, such as this, would cost at least 50 grand. Emmanuel’s family doesn’t have that. What they do have are jobs, kids, worries, and bills.

    Emmanuel has confessed many times that even though he often feels forgotten, he understands. For people on the outside life goes on, but for him time has, in a word, frozen.

    Six months after my downtown visit, Emmanuel received a letter that could change his life. I’m paraphrasing, but it went something like this: “We’re pleased to inform you that The Innocence Project has agreed to take your case. Please fill out the attached form. Upon our receipt, you will be assigned a lawyer and a legal team. There is no fee for our services.”

    The odds are still stacked against Emmanuel. When a system puts you in prison, they are unyielding. Unwilling and unlikely to admit their mistakes.  Prisons are big business. The city of Baltimore spends roughly 300 million dollars every year to incarcerate people.  There is no promise Emmanuel will ever see the outside of a prison wall. Nor is there a set time frame for the re-trying of his case. The legal road back to equanimity is a long and winding one. But for the first time in decades of unimaginable suffering, these clouds of despair have been pierced. By hope. For justice.

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