The prize painting in the National Gallery of Ireland is, without a doubt, Caravaggio’s depiction of The Taking of Christ. The painter presents us with an iconic image of Judas in the act of betraying Christ with the sign of a kiss, as previously arranged with Roman legionaries, who are depicted in costumes from Caravaggio’s own time.
In fact, Caravaggio even depicts himself in this great work, bearing a lantern so that he might better see the image of Christ.
I am always reminded of the Rolling Stones song on Exile of Main Street in which Jagger sings ‘don’t talk to me about Jesus, I just want to see his face!’ And of course, Oscar Wilde’s unforgettable lines taken from The Ballad of Reading Goal:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
So, betrayal in art, and particularly embodied in the Biblical figure of Judas, is nothing new. In fact, when I first saw some of Michael Corrigan’s Judas poems, which was around this time two years ago, while co- editing the April edition of Live Encounters Poetry and Writing with Mark Ulyseas, I was immediately reminded of Brendan Kennelly’s Book of Judas (Bloodaxe Books, 1991) .
So, I was intrigued. It was high time – twenty year separates the publication of these books – that a poet from this most treacherous of isles penned a few poems treating of the monumental and time-honoured theme of betrayal.
Indeed, James Joyce never stopped harping on about how Irish history was full of tales of treachery. A Portrait of a Young Man as an Artist (1916) begins with the parents of the young artist in question arguing over the betrayal of Charles Stewart Parnell.
Continuing on the political scene – as a Cork man – how could I miss an opportunity to bring up the assassination of Michael Collins…!
But enough, if I keep enumerating all the treacherous, low down dirty deeds that have been committed down through Irish history and immortalised by writers, and artists I’ll never get started on this review!
But one final word: isn’t it interesting that both Michael Corrigan’s book and Brendan Kennelly’s were published in the UK?
Achtung, “The best way to serve the age is to betray it”…. The Book of Judas. Brendan Kennelly. 17/4/36-17/10/21. RIP. – Bono pic.twitter.com/S7rWFC6kHG
The title poem of the book greets the reader on the first page, here is the final verse.
On the night I sold you to the wolves of respectability,
in Gethsemane where sleeping olives dreamed of rain,
I pressed my face to the loamy earth and beneath a moon too cold
to touch, I believe I heard her mournful sigh;
“nothing is new, nothing is new,
I have seen it all before.”
The poet, imagining himself as Judas makes the figure contemporaneous, which he also does quite successfully with other Biblical figures in the collection, such as Maryfrom Magdala. This last poem offers a really poignant insight into the Bible’s most notorious harlot who washes the feet of Jesus with her hair; indeed it is said by some to be that she was the sexual partner of the man from Nazareth – he the son God, the lover of a prostitute! Say what you like, but by God that book (the Bible) is a cracker. No wonder it’s a bestseller!
In Ephesus her end of days,
nights shallow with shortening breath,
a mill beneath the small bare room,
millstones grinding, dark sea lapping at her door.
I also love how in the first verse the poet informs the reader of Mary’s wealthy origins. As an Irishman, Corrigan understands people’s innate prejudices; as we are far more likely to forgive someone coming from a ‘good’ home, in other words a wealthy family, than a person from a poor background.
This goes back to Max Weber, who recognised a correlation between wealth and respectability, perversely conflated in the West with spirituality. This idea of respectability, signalled very early on in the very first poem – see again above – underscores the whole collection The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot; especially how such a notion, being respectable, makes traitors or ‘Judases’ of us all. It is into this constantly recurring idea that the poet mines, to wonderful effect.
She sang sea music, fluent in the rise and fall,
knew deep, dark places that calved the biggest waves.
From the flat roof of a prosperous house in Magdala, Galillee,
watched the purple gather of every winter storm
chase small boats to harbour before an angry swell.
I don’t know how historically accurate any of the above is, nor do I particularly care. Poets were never well known, or appreciated, for their attention to facts, at least in days of yore; metaphor being their quarry to a far greater extent.
It is only recently, I believe, that poets actually have had to literally embody their work in both life and deed, literally breathing words of blessed scripture. Good lord, good luck to them!
Vineyards in the Champagne region of France.
Terroir
Another particular feature of what, I believe, is Mister Corrigan’s second superlative collection is the irreverent and humorous nature of some of the poems.
At times, I was reminded of another stalwart in the recent Irish literary canon, and that is Paul Durcan. Michael Corrigan, being but a few years older than myself, is of that generation that grew up during the Depression in 1980s Ireland, and his humour is deeply informed by the experience of busts and booms, in that particular order.
This is something that you simply cannot imitate. The French have the term terroir which is particular to their culture. They use it principally to describe the distinctive flavour and taste of a certain cheese or wine that can be traced to the particularities of weather and soil of the place it comes from in France.
Champagne is an obvious example of this cultural phenomenon. No other sparkling white wine can use the term unless it comes from this specific region. The French feel other sparkling drinks, such as Prosecco, come from very different terroirs with different soil and climates and so cannot possibly be described using the term.
The particular terroir that Michael Corrigan comes from is a feature informing the aesthetic of his work; like the shells in the soil that inform that old white wine that comes from Bordeaux and whose name escapes me now…
When the dark waters of sleep
close across my resting butch face
and I become a fat Ophelia
floating down the weedy slope
of memory, hope and duck billed platitudes,
back to childhood, back to faith,
where a diarrhoea fountain
of bare-knuckled nationalism
provides us with its dullard troops
each one trained to shit on sight,
the brightest and best promoted to teach
in the places that smelled of failure and feet.
There are many so-called poets who are praised for their satirical nature. Many is the time that I have read their work and wondered what all the fuss was about.
Poetic trends, like any, come and go . But verse such as the above would certainly qualify as satire of the very highest order. God knows every particular cuntry has its own exasperating strains, and dear old Ireland is no exception.
Embracing Mediocrity
I remember being at an exhibition in one of the older more established art galleries in Dublin and a very famous photographer, who had made his career abroad, commented on how in the Republic we make a point of embracing mediocrity
It is this particular phenomenon, again, that I think Mr Corrigan is particularly good at eking out. Begrudgery being another!
when masters came to class tooled up
and the biggest looters wore the best suits,
Every society has its particular issues. I’ve lived long enough in France to spot some there, and having lived with an Italian for over twenty years, I am qualified to identify that country’s or rather its peoples, foibles.
What Corrigan is particularly good at putting his finger on here (both of the above quotes are taken from Unlearning my Place) is the atrocious competitiveness produced by living on a small island, where everybody is fighting for their portion of the land.
You also find it in the novels of Andrea Camilleri describing Sicily. The cold, brutal violence of the mafia in his case. In the Republic of Ireland, things are a lot less dramatic. Dead is the word. Everybody is caught in a kind of entropy that James Joyce identified on page one of Dubliners – PARALYSIS.
The disease has not gone away. Irish society, in general, is still plagued by it. The absolute awfulness of social convention. The tiresome scene that informs everything. Even poetry!
Choose friends wisely,
enemies will self-select,
smiling like tigers or growling like bears,
an arm around your shoulder
while pissing down your leg,
the welcome will be warm
before you’re taken out and shot.
The indirect nature which seems to govern everybody’s speech, the coded chatter, the back stabbing nature that it all creates. All the atrocious hallmarks of the ‘Irish’ when at home; behind the smiling eyes: the daggers in their bones.
The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot – Poems by Mick Corrigan is a wonderful collection of both poetry and verse. The first is infused with Biblical insight and learning, while the latter is concocted with sharp and bitter knowledge won, no doubt, first-hand by the author who thinks so little of the slights by now that he has made it the stuff of polished rhymes and memorable phrases.
The Love Poetry of Judas Iscariot: Poems by Mick Corrigan Dionysia Press Ltd, 2021
59 pages – £15.50
Do you know the feeling of wanting to discover secrets that aren’t being spoken aloud?
For a while I thought it was an esoteric way of preserving knowledge. I imagined there were savants to seek out, to turn to.
And in search of traces, I became passionate about chasing and searching for the threads of various human cultures, intertwined for thousands of years, starting from the perspective of Sicily, an island in the middle of the Mediterranean.
At a certain point I began to realize that the secrets were no longer alive: the people were gone, without leaving a cultural legacy behind.
Impossible, you will say. Everyone leaves an enduring oral imprint on the people around them. And yet, through passages less emphatic than the burning of books, or the eradication of cultural witnesses, a culture may be overwhelmed and deleted by a dominant culture, leading to the progressive decay and then complete disappearance of a cultural legacy over a few generations.
Cultural Imperialism
We are the result of five thousand years of cultural imperialism, which has slowly led to the affirmation of the strongest and most violent group, which now presents itself as an international, global monoculture that has drastically overwhelmed all others. It is the culture of today’s contemporary globalized world: capitalist, patriarchal, monotheistic and consumerist, in which a few cultural differences found at various latitudes appear almost as commercial nuances – variations on stimulating consumption.
As soon as I realized that I was living in an era directed by a total cultural monopoly, I began frenziedly passing on, divulging, recomposing and reviving those shreds of a subaltern culture that I could find; whether they were dying, or perhaps already immortalized by a lone enthusiast, annotated and then recorded over the past centuries; although often in forms not suitable for preserving the enduring ferments in the material of oral tradition.
I sought the secrets “between the lines” of verses or stories: after all, we know that this way has always been used to preserve and pass on things: concealing them in a joke, a rhyme, a riddle, a bell, or a proto-memory.
I searched inside song traditions, oral stories, and in the repertoire of oral tradition, which they have not been able to completely eradicate from memory: precisely the songs of oral tradition which has the potential to preserve and pass on secrets about the meaning of life, the most important baggage that generations have the burden to pass on – at all costs and through all possible stratagems – in case of censorship and oppression.
Women’s Songs in the Sicilian Tradition
In the last few years I have been primarily interested in Women’s Song in the Sicilian tradition, which constitutes an even more fragile niche in the midst of the general fragility of the heritage of tradition, since it suffers in addition from the perpetual minority suffered by the patriarchal cultures that have followed one another since the third millennium B.C..
It is a repertoire scarcely paid attention to, liminal to other stronger and more manifest repertoires, more excavated and documented; and in any case predominantly investigated from a male perspective; from a point of view that is still and always hegemonic, in terms of the gender question.
This is the most fertile repertoire for those who, like me, are in search of handed-down secrets: women represent a particular segment of social reality, in which the needs of the private and family sphere interpenetrate uniquely with the needs of the public, socio-economic sphere; women have the task of ensuring the survival and growth of the social actors of the future, the children, and women, have the task of turning the economic wheel of the family micro-society. Always.
Lullabies
The musical repertoire of women is often a mixture of different genres that refer both to the classic cycle of life – including lullabies, engagement, wedding songs and funeral laments – and to the sphere of work, as well as to the religious sphere, in a diversified way according to the religion of reference.
Often the added value that we find in the fragments of female repertoire is that there is a greater purity and resistance to the assimilation of the hegemonic cultures, alongside a tendency towards fusion.
Having been maintained and handed down in an intimate and private setting, and almost always in the absence of musical instruments, they have not been subject to admixture and transformation to adapt to changing tastes and fashions, resulting in the loss of content and precision of message.
In the repertoire of female gender, the first place – cultural universal – is entrusted to the chapter of maternity. That is to the lullabies and dirges that women in every part of the world sing to their children to quieten them and accompany them in their sleep.
The lullaby is the song of intimacy and privacy, it remains contextualized to the intimacy of the mother-daughter relationship.
I am convinced that the valorization – the patrimonialisation of this enormous cultural baggage, immaterial heritage of the human race – restores strength, health and richness to the woman, and to her social role. It is a wide and shared documentation of this infinite repertoire, allowing for the patrimonialisation of a real hidden and almost unused treasure.
My two latest albums from 2019: Dormi, a matri. Ninne nel Mediterraneo and of 2020: Viva Santa Liberata. Sicilian Women Folksongs, are dedicated to the traditional female repertoire. They are the culmination of many years of research – an audio production project investigating, witnessing, and passing on this repertoire.
The path of research on lullabies has been going on for twenty years. It includes field research, the testimonies of women in the first person through intercultural workshops, archival research, and even authorship in some cases.
Above all it has come about in meetings, not only with women but also often with sensitive men who have a strong sense of the magical power of the lullaby.
Collaborators
The opportunity to record an album of lullabies presented itself in 2018. Thankfully, the idea received a warm welcome from the singer friends to whom I proposed a collaboration, under my artistic direction (Simona Di Gregorio, Costanza Paternò, Clara Salvo, the very young Rawen Laid).
Each had the task of testifying some traditional lullabies, not only Sicilian but looking to a wider Mediterranean culture for inspiration, with freedom of choice in the type of processing and repurposing; the disc: Dormi, a matri. Ninne nel Mediterraneo (2019) represents one more instrument with which to carry out the project.
VIVA SANTA LIBERATA is a record that was created as a tribute to women’s singing, in particular narrative singing, another branch of the female repertoire that has fallen into almost total disuse.
The songs of mothers and daughters, grandmothers and mothers-in-law, sisters and aunts, cummari, majare and soothsayers, midwives and nannies, complainers, healers; the song of girls and ‘teachers of water.’
The title was born from a provocative play on words in relation to the iconography of the feminine in Christian cultures, proposing a synthesis of the dualism between virginal sacrifice and chastity on the one hand, and self-determination and sexual freedom on the other.
Santa Liberata
Santa Liberata claims her atavistic freedom, starting from sexual freedom, the source of all her other powers connected to life and its balance, in the cyclical nature of time, and her source is the fountain of Living Water.
Santa Liberata (in Sicilian “Libbirata”) is the character that continues to guide my work in the last two years. She presents herself in appearance as the Catholic saints, and requires the usual celebrations reserved for the patron saints, such as Santa Rosalia in Palermo and Santa Agata in Catania, that is, required at the annual preparation of a Fistinu, in which her qualities and merits are magnified and her precepts divulged.
PART II – A World Music Festival in Sicily
But the Fistinu is not only this, it is an enterprise involving dozens of artists, workers and associations that have joined my adventurous proposal to build an event around the music, which puts at the centre the idea of a healthier community: a mixed community in which identities and traditions intersect, intertwine and develop; a concrete community that integrates with the natural world; that welcomes it in a symbiotic and non-competitive way, rebuilding the good traditional ecological practices.
It is the heritage of our ancestors; a community of individuals aware of their right to well-being, to care for themselves according to their own free choice, as symbolized by the medicinal hemp, symbol and ornament of Santa Libbirata; an idea of liberation of conscience that starts from the liberation of women, and for this Santa Libbirata.
The Fistinu is an event in which people can find the beneficial dimmension of the participatory FESTIVAL, using the traditional techniques of music, song and dance.
The feast is an occasion in which people dance together, as a communal rite of reintegration of well-being ‘individual through the collective and collective through the individual.’
The popular or folk music has among its functions to bring together the community in a particular occasion, merging together in an experience of total participation, physical, mental and emotional, with the support of rhythm and song; each tradition retains its key to open the doors of participation through dance and song, a ritual and archaic dimension that helps to recreate social harmony and community well-being.
We endeavoured to recreate a tradition of FESTIVAL in Sicily, which in addition to supporting itself through the indigenous cultural traditions, such as the contradanza or the ballittu, inevitably recreates itself by opening and dialoguing with other musical traditions, the cultures that coexist in Sicily today, which can point a magnifying glass on the processes of migration and cultural metissage.
Cultural Crossroads
Looking at the past, centuries of real experience of cultural cross-fertilization between different and distant traditions – including Arabs, Vikings, Greeks, French, Turks and Americans – are the basis on which Sicily’s own musical tradition, the most archaic, has been constituted.
Looking at the present, Sicily is the junction and crossroads of the great migrations of the third millennium, on its territory different experiences and cultural languages continue to meet, dialogue and merge.
Since the third millennium A.D. began we have witnessed the transformation of the whole world. There are no longer borders for information, culture, fashions (unfortunately still too many borders for the dignity of human beings on the move): inevitably the transformation leads to global métissage.
The culture of global métissage is like a river in which everything is mixed; if the course is too wide, values sink and rot at the bottom, the surface becomes one sterile insignificant reality, enslaved to the market and the economic system; but if the course is alive, the identity of our ancestors does not fade in the midst of everything, but is enlivened alongside the others – roots that intertwine and strengthen each other.
Then the métissage becomes our strength, the new strength of the individual of the future.
SI LU CHIù FORTI A’SSIRI SCANNATU
LU CHIù DIBULIDDU E VOGGHIU ESSIRI
SI LA PETRA FERMA A’SSIRI MARTIDDATA
COMU ACQUA CHI CURRI E VOGGHIU ESSIRI
C’ARRIFRISCANNU SCURRI E UNN’è DI NUDDU
L’ACQUA CURRI SUPRA LA MUNTAGNA
SCURRI LENTA MA PASSANNU CANCIA
CANCIA IDDA E CANCIA LA MUNTAGNA
LENTAMENTI L’ACQUA LA TRASFORMA
The music of cultural identity, of the roots, the language and the words of our ancestors, contain within themselves a permanent force. This is like water that flows and slowly manages to shape even the rock, which can allow us women and men of today to face the contemporary world with love, to bring our positive contribution to the creation of the society that is currently getting out of hand.
Micro Identity
That’s why I want to continue to sing in Sicilian, and not only in Sicily, in Italy, and in the whole world. The micro-identity doesn’t close, doesn’t stop and doesn’t die out, but can be offered to the world without fear, allowing us to open up and confront each other, bringing knowledge, esteem and enrichment that strengthens all our resolve.
And I want to meet and get to know closely your stories in your dialects and your songs and dances, to be able to see the strength of the recognition of the message: Acqua di stu chiaru fonti, that secret that has been handed down to us from the past of generations by our Ave.
CU VIVI ACQUA DI STU CHIARU FONTI
S’APRI LU CIELU E CALANU LI SANTI
FUNTANA DI BIDDIZZI E D’ACQUA CHIARA
CA CU CI BIVI CI LASSA LA MENTI
UNDI CAMINI TU L’ARIA SCARA
PERNI E DOMANTI SU LI TO SBANNENTI
DI TUTTI LI FUNTANI SI CHIù RARA
E SUNNU L’ACQUI TOI LI CHIù LUCENTI
PRI TIA LA TIRRA STISSA SI PRIPARA
LARGA LU MARI CISSANU LI VENTI
CU VIVI ACQUA DI STU CHIARU FONTI
S’APRI LU CIELU E CALANU LI SANTI
FUNTANA DI BILLIZZI ED ACQUI ARANCI
NA BEDDA COMU A VUI NUN SI PO PINCIRI
FUNTANA DI BILLIZZI ED ACQUI D’ANCILI
CUI PASSA DI STA STRATA LU FA MPINCIRI
TU SI FUNTANA DI TUTTI BILLIZZI
NTRA LU TO STICCHIU C’E LA MIDICINA
QUANTU MALATI C’è TANTU NNI SANA
C’A LI MALATI LIVATI LA SITI
A CHIDDI MORTI LI RISUSCITATI
CU VIVI ACQUA DI STU CHIARU FONTI
S’APRI LU CIELU E CALANU LI SANTI
Speaking to the Ancestors
But from what past are the ancestors speaking to us? Or rather, how far back is this past from which these rhymes emerge? The rhymes speak of a feminine entity superior to the human dimension, whom one addresses face to face, like a mother or a companion, but whose praises are sung in music, as to a Goddess. It is an emergence of the prehistoric Mediterranean Culture of Mothers.
Digging into history, I wondered when it happened, and how such an unbalanced way of life took over; I was lucky enough to discover the work of prehistoric archaeology by Marija Gimbutas, who reinterpreted prehistory, in particular the time period between 3000 and 2000 BC.
This was before a prolonged period of invasion, when a different culture was widespread throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, up to Ireland. From the archaeological data, she concluded this was non-hierarchical, mutualistic, and based on the balance with the natural elements, in which women kept the most valuable skills related to survival, and were responsible for the welfare of the community.
Wayne Dyer called this Gilanic culture, joining equally the Greek roots: -gyn feminine and -an masculine with the unifying letter lambda.
Extra-Europeans
There was a time when those who now pretend to be the original indigenous citizens of Europe were only the new comers, the ‘Extra-Europeans’ of the past. They established their presence by means of wars and violence, trying to destroy or to exploit for their own aims the civilisation they found. They have been trying since then to impose their own single set of truths, values, gods. Now we can say that they failed in doing so at least for two basic reasons: first, we are still here to prove the existence of that earlier civilization, the goddess civilization, because they cut and burnt the trees but didn’t eradicate their/our roots; secondly, what has been achieved through violence and a monocentric male paradigm of dominance is a society based on malaise, destruction and death without regeneration and growth. Now we need a new science, a new politics and a new history, that is no more just his–story.
What have been called disdainfully ‘matriarchal studies’ indicate that egalitarian forms of social structures have existed in the past and are still in existence today in some parts of the world. In ‘matriarchies’ women are at the centre of culture without ruling over other members of society: their aim is not to have power over other people and over the natural world, but to have the power to nurture cultural life based on mutual respect.
…
Our task, therefore, is to transform the hope originating from all these discoveries about our Archaic Past into bursting energy to Realize now, as Mary Daly calls it, our Archaic Future.
Luciana Percovich, Barcelona, 2003.
So I found the tangle of the skein, and what’s more, I found myself with the thread in my hand. When a woman finds herself with a thread in her hand, the archaic instinct is to start weaving.
And from time immemorial, you have to involve others to weave together, if the fabric is endlessly wide.
Weaving then, it is in that time that songs are born: it is there that the story is always made goddess.
This is what Percovich means by Her-story. But let’s go in order.
Tangle of the Skein
The tangle of the skein is in this nebulous prehistory, out of which for decades now has emerged a new truthful narrative that speaks of a better world, or at least another possible one, through the archaeological evidence of a culture that refers to and strongly overlaps with the Utopia of the twentieth century, a better world, Huxley’s Island.
It opens a glimmer of hope: they almost convinced us that we are losers, utopians for an equalitarian and mutualistic world, they corroded our confidence in the ideal, and instead we have the archaeological evidence of the Neolithic, up to the Minoan culture in Crete, as witnesses of a better world.
And we know that this culture that was its bearer has been overwhelmed and prevaricated by an invading culture, which continues to prevail.
Once we have assumed this fact, the rest is all downhill, we simply need to reinterpret all that we known, and all that we will still learn with a new key, free from the intent of the dominant culture to make us slaves and oppressed, forgetting our identity. We haven’t been taught and told where we really came from, now we have to sew up the whole thread of history, to regain strength and courage, and self-confidence, and build our better world. Our archaic-future.
The Culture of the Mothers
The thread, I was saying, I found it in my hand. Digging into the archaeology of Sicilian songs, we can find these poetic fragments clearly ascribable to the spirituality of this culture of the Mothers, gilanic, and connected to the cult of Water and Waters: they are the retropapiri of our spiritual and ritual repertoire!
They can be a nucleus around which to sew up the fragments of memories of songs that have managed to reach us from this archaic culture, and by recomposing a fabric, we contribute to the re-emergence of a cultural identity in which we can feel at ease and heartened by our true roots.
Sicily is like a cauldron, the seething cauldron in which the cultural interactions between the migrant populations of history and the wandering of the merchants in the Mediterranean have stratified: among the sediments there are traces of cultural persistence of an ancient, prehistoric culture that unites us and reflects us: the culture of the Mothers.
It is the land of the golden apples, perhaps here rests hidden the Fata Morgana. If she is resting here, she is resting behind a magic mirror, and Circe is singing to call back from sleep all the sirens of the sea and invite them to a feast.
Women, says the song, let’s take back our customs, the feast must be done at least once a year, the feast where we can sing and dance and meet to tell our stories and our songs. In order not to disappear, to prevent our culture from dying out.
It is for this reason that from Sicily SANTA LIBERATA SENDS AN APPEAL.
From Sicily to all the islands, both territorial and cultural: sisters we are, capitals of cultural persistence!
In us is the germ of resistance, if after so many millennia we can still resist with a memory of the stories, voices and songs of our ancestors, who handed down their island culture.
We bring together in a project a path of meetings of songs and sharing, a project of permanent chorus of the archaic feminine, we constitute an OPIRA OF PUPE.
Singers and performers, bearers of traditions, passionate, willing weavers, Santa Liberata is building the road, from Rome to Sicily. Spring 2022.
At a recent debate organised by the English-Speaking Union (ESU) at its HQ, Dartmouth House in London, we considered whether the British government’s response to Covid placed too great a priority on security rather than liberty. Naturally I took the liberty side of the argument.
I expressed the fear that such a public forum as the ESU had convened could represent an interregnum, or lull in the storm, but hope springs eternal.
A central hallmark of a democracy is freedom of speech. In terms of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, Anthony Lewis argued free speech should act as a search engine for the truth. Ronald Dworkin argued that free speech is a condition for legitimate government, and a counterweight to hysteria and unreason. Stephen Sedley, an eminent English judge, called it the lifeblood of a democracy. Freedom of speech also opens government and private enterprise to intense scrutiny. Above all, it encourages diversity and tolerance.
Christopher Hitchens.
Right to Ridicule
It is not for the faint of heart. Christopher Hitchens remarked that freedom to speak inoffensively is meaningless, while Dworkin insisted on a right to ridicule.
The overarching argument for speech rights was expressed beautifully in extremis by Hitchens when he said, ‘if you disagree with me that is your prerogative, so stand in line while I, rhetorically, kick your ass.’
Conflict is resolved best through argument with the truth sacrosanct, ideally via open-ended public debate.
This should not merely be rhetoric, but include arguments of substance. And the ESU provides, or can provide, that forum. Perhaps uniquely so. Indeed, it was heartening to encounter a multi-generational debate that included insightful youthful interventions.
In retrospect, Hitchens represents the tail end of a tradition beginning with his hero Thomas Paine, mediated through his other great hero George Orwell, and culminating in him through a rich tapestry of public intellectuals and journalists, who fundamentally believed the pen to be mightier than the sword: that speech and words matter.
Alas today speech has degenerated in the popular press into public titillation and gossip. It is also noticeable that the great traditions of investigative journalism, evident during the golden era of the Washington Post under Katherine Graham and The Times under Harold Evans, is in serious decline. Today most investigative journalism is a sham. The intellectual culture of the press has been degraded beyond belief.
Social media is now a form of speech-driven pornography, where legitimate and illegitimate expressions of speech are proving impossible to disentangle. Character assassination and casual defamation have become the order of the day. The Internet may be a force of liberation in some respects, but also permits public display of ever more bizarre and outlandish commentaries. Mark Zuckerberg has unleashed a Promethean conflagration that remains untamed.
Today’s emphasis on brevity and soundbites in politics conceals how the truth often requires explanation, as it is often nuanced.
Aneurin Bevan talking to a patient at Park Hospital, Manchester, the day the NHS came into being in 1948.
Like paying a visit to Woolworths…
Aneurin Bevan, as good an orator as Churchill, once remarked that listening to a speech from Labour leader Clement Atlee was like paying a visit to Woolworths: ‘everything was in its place, but nothing was above the value of sixpence.’ To be convincing speech should have the necessary brio to rouse an audience.
From Jeremy Bentham’s Speech Acts, Jürgen Habermas, develops the crucial idea of Ideal Speech or Communicative Action. This is an idea that speech should be formal, and not tainted by an unthinking recourse to ideology. He also suggests that such dialogue in the tradition of the Enlightenment salon will provide technical outcomes that are also morally purposeful.
In Communicative Action he wrote: ‘Speakers coordinate their action and pursuit of individual (or joint) goals based on a shared understanding that the goals are inherently reasonable or merit worthy.’
It succeeds:
insofar as the actors freely agree that their goal (or goals) is reasonable, that it merits cooperative behaviour. Communicative action is thus an inherently consensual form of social coordination in which actors “mobilise the potential for rationality” given with ordinary language and its telos of rationally motivated agreement.
Although not all speech should have to be taken seriously, it is important that a forum such as Dartmouth House is maintained for popular shibboleths to be dismantled in public debate.
George Orwell.
Doublespeak
So, propaganda should not be taken seriously, nor modes of advertising, without close and detailed inspection. The opinions of many putative experts fall under the same category. Certainly, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
The use of language – however cloaked in notional expertise – to undermine freedoms is a very worrying development. The employment by officialdom of complex legal discourse and manipulation of language may represent the onset of what George Orwell referred to as ‘doublespeak’. This can be exposed in civilised public debate in a neutral forum.
A certain degree of puff and blow will always be found among business-people. Advertising lubricates the wheels of commerce, but when almost non-existent standards permit multinational corporate entities, including the pharmaceutical sector, to fabricate, falsify and frankly lie, thus precipitating financial and environmental collapse, this may represent a return to the dark ages.
Sadly, mainstream political debate has disintegrated. Notably, Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton engaged in a travesty of a public debate before the US Presidential election of 2016. It was more like a staged reality TV show. Its nearest equivalent was the format of a farcical game show, such as the Jerry Springer Show.
Thus politics has become part of the entertainment industry. Despite his Classical education, Boris Johnson invokes Peppa Pig before business leaders.
So, an unconditional respect for freedom of speech should be offset by an understanding that certain speech does not warrant protection. Nonsense is best resolved by forensic debate – cutting through crap in common parlance.
Surveillance Capitalism
The criminalisation of unpopular opinion is a worrying feature of our times, and it is ‘subversives’ such as Julian Assange – along with those who dared to hold a referendum in Catalonia – that are accused, prosecuted, and convicted of treason. It is these dissidents that need protection.
Under the Facebook and Google dispensation people become products to be profiled and mined, a point made brilliantly in Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.
Moreover, political correctness has also led to the intensification of extremism. I would argue that this includes attempts by the transgender lobby to ban esteemed academics from the airwaves or campuses. ‘No platforming’ undermines public debate, as do unsubstantiated complaints to academic authorities that lead to the removal of a radical professor.
So, when in Georgetown University certain radical professors indicated they were far from unhappy at the death of the arch conservative Judge Scalia, their conservative colleagues sought their removal on the basis that the ‘snowflake’ generation of easily upset students would be offended at the disrespect.
We must maintain a right to protest, engage in civil disobedience and crucially – in an increasingly controlled and technocratic age – the right to offer truth-bearing, fearless and independent criticism.
KKK rally near Chicago in the 1920s.
The Limits of Freedom of Expression
Speech has its outer limits, where there is a clear and present danger of imminent lawless action. This tension is explored in Snyder v Phelps, where a fundamentalist Christian group demonstrated outside a gay serviceman’s funeral.
Upholding speech rights, the Court concluded that:
Westboro believes that America is morally flawed; many Americans might feel the same about Westboro. Westboro’s funeral picketing is certainly hurtful and its contribution to public discourse may be negligible. But Westboro addressed matters of public import on public property, in a peaceful manner, in full compliance with the guidance of local officials. The speech was indeed planned to coincide with Matthew Snyder’s funeral, but did not itself disrupt that funeral, and Westboro’s choice to conduct its picketing at that time and place did not alter the nature of its speech.
Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and—as it did here—inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course—to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.
Moreover, in Brandenburg v Ohio 359 U.S 44, the Court went so far as to protect even racial abuse at a Ku Klux Klan ‘rally’ held at a farm in Hamilton County.
One film showed twelve hooded figures, some of whom carried firearms. They were gathered around a large wooden cross, which they burned. No one was present other than the participants and the newsmen who made the film. Most of the words uttered during the scene were incomprehensible when the film was projected, but scattered phrases could be understood that were derogatory of African-Americans and, in one instance of Jews.
The Supreme Court concluded that this was speech protected under the First Amendment on the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation, except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.
In contrast, the ECHR will not protect either racist speech or Holocaust denial. And even the ESU may feel the Americans went too far.
But the detailed US decisions show how far the US courts are prepared to travel to protect speech. It is an important point that it is the speech we most dislike and most disagree with that needs the most protection.
Village stocks in Bramhall, England c. 1900.
Enemies of the People
Whistle-blower legislation protects those who want to expose official corruption and protects speech. However, as I have found, the spectre of criminal prosecution under Official Secret’s legislation is always a suspensive and possible threat. Anyone blowing the whistle must evaluate the risk of prosecution, including the almost inevitable consequence of job loss and ostracism.
Henrik Ibsen’s Enemies of the People – perhaps uniquely in his oeuvre – was overtly political. The premise is simple: a prominent and well-connected local engineer whose brother is the town mayor is asked to conduct a survey of the waters of the town. The town in question has become famous as a spa resort attracting a great deal of tourism, but when he tests the waters, he finds that they are polluted and informs the town and indeed his brother.
It is the reaction to this that is interesting. Rather than lauding him and complimenting him for his finely attuned sense of ethics and correct analysis, they turn on him with ever-increasing ferocity. A storm of hatred is unleashed.
He will destroy the local economy. Their livelihoods will be affected. The industry of the town will be negated. He is shunned, ostracised, victimised. His family is torn apart, and he becomes an ‘Enemy of the People’. The mob descend in all their unfettered glory. Sound familiar?
Thus, we must protect freedom of speech as it vitalises a democracy, but we must also recognise the rules of civic discourse.
Yet I fear that a great tradition of oracy, public communication, rationalist discourse and generalist interest is in decline: usurped by the purveyors of false information, false speech acts and blandishments.
If the English-Speaking Union can revitalise the young with a passion for genuine public communication, it will be performing a great service, training a new generation of professionals in the essential and transferable skills of advocacy, public communication and, above all, respect for the truth.
The English-Speaking Union (ESU) is an international charity and membership organisation underpinned by Royal Charter working to give all young people – regardless of background – the speaking and listening skills and the cross-cultural understanding to enable them to thrive.
Our programmes are underpinned by over 100 years’ expertise in the field of debate and public speaking delivery, policy and research.
Founded in 1918 by the author and journalist Sir Evelyn Wrench, the ESU brings together and empowers people of all cultures and nationalities by building confidence and shaping communication skills, so that individuals can realise their full potential. In our 36 branches in England and Wales and 54 international branches, the ESU carries out a variety of activities such as: competitions, debating, public speaking and student exchange programmes, teacher training, classroom outreach, research and scholarships. All of these encourage the effective use of the English language around the world.
To find out more about our work, please go to: https://www.esu.org/ and so consider joining the ESU: https://www.esu.org/support-our-work/become-a-member/. Please contact Matthew Christmas, Head of Engagement, if you would like to know more or to volunteer with us: matthew.christmas@esu.org.
Dartmouth House, in the heart of Mayfair, is our International Headquarters and, as Covid recedes, we are delighted to be re-starting our regular public debates where we encourage civil discussion and informed debate where all ages can get involved.
The next Dartmouth House Debate is on Monday 09 May 2022 at 1830 hrs to debate the motion that “This House believes that cryptocurrency and NFTs are a hyped-up fad.”
We hope that will want to find out more and get involved with the ESU.
On the last day of February, the first Ukrainian refugees arrived in Serbia. Radoš Đurović, the director of the Center for the Protection and Assistance of Asylum Seekers in Serbia believes that approximately 600,000 Ukrainian refugees will come to Hungary and will be expecting them to come to Serbia, once Hungary has reached capacity.
Despite the Russian National anthem being played at train stations in Serbia and pro-Russian protests happening in Belgrade. Nonetheless, Radoš Đurović states that ‘Ukrainians think of Serbia as a friendly country.’ The question is where is this friendliness to other nationalities?
Medical Volunteers International have been providing medical care along the EU borders in the Balkans and have witnessed the abuse that is being carried out at the hands of the EU, as well as those whose job is to protect the people.
A press release by UNHCR just last month states: ‘What is happening at European borders is legally and morally unacceptable and must stop. Protecting human life, human rights and dignity must remain our shared priority.’
But after the influx of refugees over six years ago, shouldn’t this be something we should have improved on greatly? With the current EU policy, razor-wired fences, brutal pushbacks and the prevention of the right to claim asylum, sadly things are getting worse, not better.
Frontex states that they have seen a148% increaseon the western Balkan route in January 2022 alone. Serbia is known as an important transit country for people on the move (POMs). It is estimated that 60,000 people moved through there in 2021, heading to the EU to seek safety from war, persecution, poverty and many other human rights violations.
Yet the Višegrad Four, an alliance that has been set up between the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, have on the one hand deployed more police to the Serbian/Hungary border to assist with the violation of EU laws in pushing back refugees from Afghanistan, but, on the other hand, has declared how they will be accepting refugees from Ukraine, along with Serbia and Romania. All of these countries are involved in the mistreatment of refugees from countries such as Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.
In 2015, Hungary built a four-metre high razor wire-topped fence along its borders to Serbia and Croatia. This spans the 109 miles (175 km) length of northern Serbia and all the locations this report mentions are within this area. With first-hand documentation of wounds caused at the hands of the Serbian police and those involved with the pushbacks from Hungary and Romania, the human rights violations at our borders seems to be going unnoticed, or perhaps uncared about by our governments.
Many POMs have spoken about how they have made it across Hungary but have been caught at the Austrian border, then pushed back without the opportunity to claim asylum or any type of documentation to Serbia. This is due to the pushbacks in Hungary being made legal. A report found here gives in a lot more details however in short, due to a state of emergency declared in Hungary in March 2016, pushbacks have been allowed. Many people are returned through special gates built in the border fence however reports of robbing, beatings, and humiliations by the police are regularly being reported to the team. This has been criticised by the EU and violates international treaties such as the Geneva Convention which Hungary has signedyet Hungary has now been getting away with this for 6 years.
During 2020/2021, 22,204 people were pushed back from Hungary. Most of these people are from Syria and Afghanistan. There were also increased reports towards the latter end of last year of people being pushed back from Austria to Hungary, then Hungary to Serbia. This report talks about the places along the Serbian/Hungary borders, and what exactly is happenings to the people who are seeking safety in the EU.
A young man uses his phone to contact family after using Collective Aids generator to charge his phone.
A registered organisation called Collective Aid also works along the northern Serbian border giving showers, non-food items and uses a generator to help POMs to charge their phones and even offers the basic requirement of a shaver for a haircut to maintain people’s dignity.
Evictions by the police are common in these locations which are mostly squats within abandoned buildings. Mass raids happen every couple of months and are mostly linked to protests from the local fascist group.
Recently a mass eviction happened where police hit each place along the Northern border one after the other. A few hundred people were taken but many also managed to escape.
People messaged stating that the police smashed open the doors and some people escaped out the window. They beat the people, robbed them of their money and phones then they were loaded onto buses and driven to a camp in the south of Serbia. They even hit the hotels where sick and vulnerable POMs stay. The injuries from these evictions are evident for weeks following this, and also the psychological effects on already scared and vulnerable people are massive.
Horgoš
Horgoš is a small town next to the border of Hungary in North Serbia. There are two main locations where POMs live. One squat is against the border fence and near a road checkpoint for crossing the border which can be easily viewed from the watchtower.
Here there are mostly Arabic-speaking people from Morocco and Tunisia but some from Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. In recent months there have been approximately seventy people living here, but this is set to increase again in the warmer weather. The people living here, like all locations spoken about, are very transitional.
The second location is at an old farm. Here there are many squatted buildings and it is more spread out over the area. There are normally 90-110 people here. Here there are mostly Farsi, Urdu, etc. speakers from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. It is very rare to find Arabic Speakers staying here however in the past week a Kurdish-Turkish group have been staying there as well as a young family from Syria.
One of several abandoned buildings that people on the move are living in, Horgoš Farm, North Serbia.
As with the border area, living conditions are very poor here. With the abandoned buildings being used as squats, with leaking roofs, many tired and weary people sleep off their exhaustion after spending the night on “game”, the name given by many to the act of crossing the border and arriving at a destination where there is no risk of being pushed back from.
It becomes a game when night after night is spent trying to achieve this. There are many reports of phones being smashed and money being stolen during pushbacks by Hungarian and Romanian authorities.
As with most of the squats, due to such a high transition of people, there is a major outbreak of scabies, particularly with people coming from the refugee camps which are commonly referred to by POMs as a place that is highly infested with scabies mites. With open sores caused by the reaction to the mite, many of the people living here are in dire need of treatment.
Abandoned farm near Horgoš
Taxis are regularly driving to this location bringing people back from the “game”, bringing people food/supplies, and also delivering live sheep to be killed. There are many fleeces around the property from slaughtered sheep that the POM’s have purchased from local people.
One of the many stray puppies sitting on slaughtered sheep to stay warm.
At the farms, the crossing of the border is very well organised where groups hit the fence at the same time with ladders. We see many injuries to hands from the razor wire on the top of the fence as well as injuries to knees and ankles from jumping down the opposite side.
You see many people going on “game” with thick gloves to protect their hands. Building barriers is not going to deter people who are fleeing their homeland but makes the lives of the POMs trying to make it to a safe country to ask for protection much more difficult, forcing them to take dangerous routes across Europe or into the hands of smugglers.
Giving wound care to a young man who has frostbite to his feet from walking in the snow in inadequate shoes.
There are many pushback stories from this location. One man from India tries every single night to go across the border. If he makes it into Hungary, he is typically gone for a few days before being returned through gates in the fence by police. If he makes it and is gone for a few days then pushed back, he has one night of rest before attempting again.
When I spoke to him, he had been in Serbia for 80 days and his only focus is getting through Hungary to prevent a pushback. He told me that if the border police know you speak English then they will beat you more to try and get information from you such as your route, how you crossed the border etc. After experiencing this a few times, he now pretends he cannot speak English.
He is trying to reach Spain as he has family there. He isn’t safe at home and he describes how his life is in danger if he returns home. He entered Serbia legally with his passport. He said that there is now an increase of advertised travel packages offered by travel agencies in India also to Belarus. As his passport was stamped and he would soon become illegal by overstaying his days, he then posted his passport to his family in Spain so that he is undocumented.
Turkish-Kurds huddled around a fire to keep warm whilst boiling two eggs.
We see many people who have been subjected to police brutality. One Moroccan man at the border was caught by the Hungarian police who saw our bandages on his feet, therefore, beat his toes. He has a major wound there caused by frostbite.
Police brutality cases are referred to Collective Aid who takes Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN) Reports from every case that they have time to do so to document the police brutality situation.
Subotica Train Tracks
The train tracks run through the city. Many people from Afghanistan and Pakistan live in abandoned buildings along the train tracks. There are many minors living here but we never come across families here as the conditions are too poor. There are approximately one hundred and fifty people living along the railway.
Minor warming himself in the sun. The kettle was boiled at the electric box that has been tampered with to get electricity.
As this area is in the city, they are regularly targeted by the police. The police often raid the places in the early hours of the morning and beat and rob the people. They seem to do this for a few nights and then leave them alone for a week or so. Perhaps it is to do with when they get paid as they only rob the people of money rather than belongings. With no way of making a complaint, these POM have no option but to accept that this will happen.
Recently these raids and cases of police brutality are becoming more and more frequent. During the day on the 1st of March, police raided the train tracks and took the people to the police station and told them they should either pay a fine or they would be taken to the camp in the south. Over one-third of the POMS that the team saw that day had signs of police brutality. Many people arrived back from being transported to camp three hours away in taxis with many injuries which the medical team assisted with.
18-year-old boy from Afghanistan’s injuries following Serbian police brutality on 3rd March 2022. Photo taken on 10th March 2022
One had what he thought was a receipt for the money he had paid at the police station however it was a Decision on Return. Unbeknown to him, this is a declaration that he entered Serbia without legal grounds and therefore legally has to leave Serbia within thirty days. If he does not leave then he can be forcibly removed and in addition following this decision, he cannot apply for asylum in Serbia.
A lone refugee from Afghanistan sat on the train tracks trying to stay warm in the afternoon sun.
Two days later, evictions were carried out in this same location. The police openly in broad daylight beat the POMs as they put them in their vans. One of these locations was very public outside a supermarket with many local people around. The POMs were forced into the vans. There were approximately three police vans, six police cars, and around fifteen police personnel, so ample opportunity for one of the law enforcers to speak out about the brutality used against the POMs.
A young man from Afghanistan sleeping on a disused area of the train tracks after spending the night on the “game” and being pushed back.
Then again on the 8th March, the police had been and targeted the young men living here. They beat and robbed them. One man has a bandage wrapped around his head and a large bruise under his eye. No one wants to stay here, but again these people have no choice after being pushed back night after night.
Distributions of much-needed bags of food outside a squat.
We find many people in this area who are without warm clothing, sleeping bags, and even shoes. Additionally, at the end of last year, a POM was killed on the train tracks. It’s a dangerous place to live. Not only due to the trains but also due to the extremely poor living conditions but also due to the frequent police and fascist attacks. They sleep with their shoes on ready to run from the police. Not having any shoes is a big problem as the train tracks are littered with broken glass, nails and oil from trains.
Two Afghan minors cook over a fire whilst other members from the squat await their turn to cook.
One story from a minor from Afghanistan is a young man aged fifteen years who we met on the train tracks. His English was perfect and he helped with much-needed translation for the team. His family invested everything they have in him so he could make the dangerous trip to the EU in the hope that his asylum claim is accepted and that family reunification would allow them to be together again in a safe place. He has been stuck here for nearly a month now and has been subjected to many beatings from the police.
Srpski Krstur
In Srpski Krstur, there is an informal camp where many people live in tents in a wooded area along the river. Here the river is used as part of the Serbia/Hungary border therefore there is no fence. Many people live in tents in this area so over winter, many people left for official camp or hotels that accept POMs but also a number remained. The numbers are now increasing here. They are all Arabic speakers here and a good mix of Syrians, Iraqis, Tunisians, Moroccans, and Palestinian.
Currently, about seventy people are living here. It is a long walk to the local village here so access to drinking water is not readily available. Many people drink from the river here and we see many gastrointestinal illnesses. During January, the temperature was always below zero during the day. You would see people walking along the riverbank with bags of food that they had bought in inadequate clothing. Tissue damage due to the cold in this area is a problem.
We have started seeing an increase in families in this location and will no doubt see many more in the warmer weather. They generally cross the river here in inflatable boats provided by someone that works for a smuggler. The river here is deep and fast flowing so is very dangerous.
Djala
Last year, the number of families living in Srspski Krstur decreased due to mounting repression by the police. Many relocated to an abandoned house on the outskirts of the village. This squat is where Arabic families stay, mostly from Syria but a few people from Iraq. There are normally ten to twenty adults here with children and young babies at any one time. It is very close to Srpski Krstur so they use the same way to cross the border in boats. This is better for families with young children who cannot climb the fence but also very dangerous in terms of the fast-flowing river.
Here there was a malnourished baby called Yousef. Yousef was just twenty days old when he was found to be very low in weight. With education to the mother about increasing feed and close monitoring of the weight, Yousef became a lot stronger.
It took a lot of coordinating to see Yousef in this time due to his mother desperately going on “game” very regularly. At one point they were gone for several days and made it to the Austrian border to be caught and pushed back to Serbia. During this time they were held outside in freezing conditions by the Hungarian authorities despite the mothers pleading for the month-old baby to be taken inside out the elements.
Yousef, unfortunately, developed a respiratory condition and conjunctivitis following this experience which was successfully treated by the medical team. Recently it was heard that she has made it with her two children to Austria.
It is in the area of Djala and Srpski Krstur that there is a very angry Commissariat. The Commissariat is here to protect the needs of the refugees but this female officer is very difficult. She aggressively speaks to organisations who are there to help and sets them time limits for how long they can be in an area despite the needs of the people.
Sombor
Sombor is on the Serbian/Croatia/Hungary border and is known for its fascist area involvement. People have been photographed who help the POMs here and posted on a Facebook page and death threats have been issued.
Old train carriages on Sombor train tracks where people on the move live.
There is a group of people living in abandoned train carriages most of which are from Afghanistan but some from Pakistan. At the moment about forty people are living here but it has been very few over winter as it is extremely cold to live here. Numbers can raise to between 100 -150 during the spring and summer months.
A tent in one of the many abandoned train carriages at Sombor where people on the move live.
There are a group of minors aged just thirteen years old here. They have been here for some time and are completely alone. You see them playing in amongst the carriages and on the tracks as well as cooking boiled eggs for themselves. The eggs are provided by Collective Aid during their once-weekly food distribution here. This is a horrendous place for these children to be.
Rough hands of a 13-year-old child as he peels an egg he has boiled for himself.
This area is targeted a lot by the police. During raids, they smash the sides of the old train carriages so that in winter it is impossible to stay out of the elements. There are areas along the train tracks where people have wired plugs into the electric boxes so they can charge their phones.
This is common in a lot of squats but is exceedingly dangerous as its mains electricity. There is a squat in the middle of Sombor next to Lidl and a bus station. Here there are a lot of Indians, Pakistani, and Afghans. Numbers are around thirty people in recent weeks and set to rise in spring. It is not a very nice place at all and everyone has respiratory problems due to the cooking being done inside without ventilation. Also. there is a massive scabies problem here.
The cat that lives with the minors in the train carriage with the youn boys, all from Afghanistan in the background.
An old factory outside of town has many people living around. It is mostly Arabic speakers. There can be over one hundred people here but over winter there is on average of about 40-60 people. There is a large amount of rubbish here and a massive rat problem. A few weeks ago, part of the factory where people lived fell down, luckily no one was hurt.
Old abandoned buildings at the factory where many people on the move live, North Serbia
Here a group of young men from Syria who were attempting to cross the border at Kladusa, Bosnia spoke at length about how they had been pushed back and beaten so many times by the Croatian police that they decided to come to try at this border instead. They also experienced this same brutality from the Hungarian police. Here, a young man shows his bruises on his shins following the Hungary authorities catching him, then beating them with batons before pushing them back to Serbia.
Bruises on the shins of a young man from Syria who was beaten by the Hungarian authorities, North Serbia.
Majdan
Majdan is a village on the Serbian/Romanian/ Hungary border which has become an increasingly set route in the winter of 2019/2020. During this time, pushbacks were mostly unheard of so POM’s didn’t ever collect at the border in squats attempting the game, as the passage into Romania was accessible. It was during the summer of 2020 that reports of Pushback materialised and POMS started staying in abandoned houses and a milk factory in this area to attempt the game.
We see a lot of police brutality wounds here mostly due to the Romanian police. People try and get around the fence on the Hungary border by crossing into Romania and then moving upwards. There seem to be more broken bones due to police brutality here than in any of the other places. It is also very poor living conditions with no access to running water and with the nearest official camp fifty kilometres away.
People on the move collecting outside the milk factory as a distribution happens, Majdan North Serbia.
Arabic speakers live in an abandoned milk factory in poor conditions in tents within the building. There are normally approximately fifty people here but this will continue to rise as it gets warmer. There are so many reports of violence from the Romanian police during pushbacks where they use tricks of humiliation as well as violence to try and deter POMs from crossing the border here into Romania.
Additionally, Romania, during pushbacks are denying the people fleeing persecution in Syria and Iraq, the right of claiming asylum. Instead, they were taken to the bordered and told “no asylum here” and whilst being beaten, robbed, their personal belongings destroyed and in some cases attacked by dogs.
This is another place, where if POMs are handed over to the Serbian police by the Romanian authorities after they are denied the right to claim international protection, they receive a Decision on Return, giving them thirty days before they can legally be removed from Serbia.
During some mass evictions in February, a POM managed to conceal his phone. He was on the bus heading south to a camp and messaged to see if it was known where he was going and if there was any assistance for him. He reported a raid at the milk factory by Serbian police. All the POMS were beaten, robbed, hands cable-tied behind their backs and loaded onto buses. They were humiliated and beaten throughout the seven-hour trip south. They were put in a camp and the very next day he left and got the bus back to the north. The polices had slashed all their tents and destroyed his belongs including his asthma inhaler.
A group walking back to Rabe with their food supply given to them at Majdan, North Serbia.
Hotels
Several hotels across the north of Serbia open up their doors to POMs giving them a safe and warm place to stay but obviously like all hotels, at a cost. Many of these places are criticised by local people and may have to pay money to the Serbian mafia to continue providing accommodation to these people in need. The medical teams visit a couple of these hotels, providing much needed medical care to these at-risk people.
Many people with serious frostbite wounds were seen over the cold winter months after being forced into paying for a room as they are unable to live in the cold, poor conditions of the squats due to extreme tissue damage. Many people share a room to reduce the cost but the hotels that accept the medical team do genuinely tend to care greatly about the human suffering they are seeing.
First photo of frost bite injuries to refugee from Syrias hands in North Serbia. The follow up images are too severe to show.
A lot of patients were seen this past month with frostbite due to exposure to the cold. A Syrian man has been seen for the past four weeks after having severe frostbite on all his fingers. He is likely to lose the end of two of his fingers to one of his hands and will need support to access the hospital when the time comes to operate.
The police do come and raid these hotels and like all places they mistreat the POMs, rob them and transport them to camps in the south of the country. Many people return from their trip on the game with injuries caused by brutality from the Hungarian authorities. Again resting their bodies from the beatings before attempting the game again.
Recently a young man from Syria showed us a dog bite. He spoke about the beating he received from the Hungarian police after he was caught. He thought the torture was over and he was free to go but as he walked away, they released the border dog on him and he received a dog bite to his upper arm.
Two men from Syria were assessed who had jumped from the fence between Serbia and Hungary and damaged their ankles. As they couldn’t mobilise during their pushback, they had an x-ray whilst in Hungary, and their ankles were found not to be broken. However, as they could not walk at all, they were given blood thinning injections to prevent blood clots before them being returned to Serbia through the gate and left out in the cold on the other side.
As the refugees from Ukraine are welcomed into the EU borders, these forgotten people stuck at the EU external border of Serbia continue to be the forgotten ones. Left bruised, robbed and traumatised time and time again, frustration amongst humanitarian workers grow as they watch limited but much need funding moved from here to the borders of Ukraine. Our hearts break for the people trapped here, whose only crime is in the eyes of some, is their lack of white European features. I ask myself regularly where is the compassion?
Or, at least, I was in the same room as him, no more than thirty or forty feet away, for several hours. Not much further than Macron recently in Moscow.
In August and September 2000, the last time Ireland was lobbying for a seat at the UN Security Council, I was an intern of the Irish diplomatic corps at the United Nations in New York.
My job was to record the speeches of the Heads of State. I was present for the speeches of the heads of state and government at the Security Council and General Assembly, including Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat, and Fidel Castro.
I felt, even then, that Putin’s energy was very dark – a psychopath perhaps, devoid of empathy.
There is no doubt in my mind that this war is morally unjustifiable and wrong, despite the questionable wisdom of expansionist Western foreign policy (from a Russian perspective).
At the same UN summit in 2000, Tony Blair gave the most incredible speech. I was taken in, hook, line and sinker, by his incredible rhetoric and passion. His forked tongue only became apparent later. How could we be so manipulated?
A false representative of the light you could say. That which appears to be of the light, but is deceiving.
Whether by intent, or design, is another question, but nonetheless he is a man with the blood of many on his hands. Of course, he can still argue that the war in Iraq was justified.
That’s what they alway say, these power-hungry men, as the blood of innocents flows. For the victors, that is how history is written.
Putin and his long-time confidant Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
Evil in the World
There is no doubt in my mind that evil exists. The light exists, the dark exists, and the false light exists. The false light is that which masquerades and deceives: a complex Luciferian archetype.
We like to believe that we are on the side of good, and the ‘other’ side is evil. The truth is much more complex, and permeable. In a world where we like to define things as black or white, there are many shades of grey.
Good people can do unspeakable acts of evil, while even evil acts can have positive consequences.
Anger is sometimes a necessary and appropriate emotion when our boundaries are violated, on a personal or national level. Sometimes, in the face of unprovoked aggression, the only option is to fight back.
When we are feeling strong emotions, however, we are open to manipulation. Any time I feel a strong emotion of anger or fear due to a situation in my life or through what I see in the media – as I am feeling now – I ask myself, am I being manipulated? If so, by who, and for what end?
Who will benefit, if due to my anger and dismay at the brutal and morally wrong treatment of Ukrainian civilians, I somehow begin to fear or hate Russia or Russians?
What if I decide, in my anger, to fan the flames of hatred, anger, and war, rather than douse them? Are we to support the spread of this conflict, rather than hope for peace?
If there is one thing I have learnt over many years of diving deep into the metaphysics of light and dark it is that there is much that we are unaware of. We are all pawns in a greater game than we are aware of, you could say.
If it turns out that the game is rigged, and no matter which side seems to come out on top, the house always wins, then the only option is to stop playing the game.
Hitler’s prophecy speech of 30 January 1939.
What is the Influence of Evil?
The genius of evil is that it influences us through our deepest fears and weaknesses. If, for example, your deepest fear is failure, being attacked, overwhelmed or destroyed. Perhaps this is the result of an unsafe and traumatic childhood.
This could manifest as paranoia, fear, or deepest shame at the loss of personal or national prestige, as is perhaps the case with a ‘strongman’ such as Putin. This is perceived as a threat to your very existence.
When some external event triggers this terrible internal fear, the very personal and overwhelming nature of this trigger is how evil influences a person. Evil finds our unconscious hidden weaknesses, and exploits them ruthlessly.
How do we recognise the influence of evil on ourselves? By hating another person, race, or nation, we are acting under the influence of evil.
This is the genius of evil: it realizes our deepest fears through the prism of our distorted perceptions. It preys on our weaknesses, separates us, divides us, makes us hate instead of love.
It is rare indeed, for someone to wake up in the morning saying “today I choose to be evil”. There are also those who can be described as pure evil – consciously evil – in the sense of acting with intentional malice, but these people are rare.
For the most part, evil slides in unseen, unconsciously, through our psychic blind spots. What lengths would you go to, to avoid your deepest fears? To avoid a perceived existential threat to you, your family or nation? This is how ‘normal’ people do the most terrible things. Evil locates our deepest fear and weaknesses, plays on them, magnifies and exploits them.
Like a computer virus exploiting a line of faulty code, evil exploits the faulty code of the human race. Shame, fear, anger, and trauma are the gateways into the body, poisons, faulty code, through which evil may stem, if allowed. These are known as the three kleshas or poisons of Mahayana Buddhism: ignorance, attachment and aversion, from which evil arises.
Projection of the Shadow
The great psychiatrist Carl Jung elaborated on the projection of the shadow being the greatest moral threat of our age.
A threat to the very future of humanity, and one the majority of people are utterly unaware of.
We psychologically project that which is disowned, unbearable and unconscious in ourselves, onto the other, thereby ridding ourselves of the need to make conscious decisions, take responsibility for our actions and integrate our experiences.
Thus Jung writes in Archaic Man that ‘Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena… Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly.’
He adds in Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930–1934:
Modern people … are ignorant of what they really are. We have simply forgotten what a human being really is, so we have men like Nietzsche and Freud and Adler, who tell us what we are, quite mercilessly. We have to discover our shadow. Otherwise we are driven into a world war in order to see what beasts we are.
If we do not acknowledge and own our shadow, we project our inner darkness onto the unfortunate recipients of our projections, as human beings have been doing for millennia of wars and cycles of destruction.
Ballads of bravery (1877) part of Arthurian mytholog by Lorenz Frølich.
Mythology and Psychology
Invariably, humans fall pretty to some great mythology, whether it is nationalism, tribalism or religious belief, which assures them that their cause is just.
We are not far removed from the Crusaders in this regard, who believed they were saving Jerusalem from heathens – in the twenty-first century as much as in the twelfth.
The psychological projection of the shadow is how mostly men are capable of inflicting barbarous acts of evil onto the ‘other’, who has generally already been thoroughly dehumanised and demonised.
Recently, a former officer of the US Navy Seals Special forces, one of the men who led the hunt for Bin Laden, told me how easy an operation this was to undertake.
He said that one of his main responsibilities in Afghanistan and Iraq was to keep his men in line, reminding them of the humanity of the enemy. In a warzone, how easy it must be to forget.
In his book on evil The Lucifer Effect, the psychologist Phillip Zimbardo, who also designed the Stanford Prison experiment, wrote:
I don’t believe anybody’s inherently evil. I believe we’re inherently good. And until they get put in a bad barrel. And there are a lot of bad barrels. A lot of jobs that we take encourage us to cheat, to lie…. If you’re a prison guard, afraid that prisoners are going to attack you and you have to create a false illusion that you’re domineering, you’re dominating them, you’ll shoot to kill then that’s the image. I believe in the goodness of human nature. And it’s being put into situations that corrupts that.
Zimbardo defines evil as exercising power to intentionally harm (psychologically), hurt (physically), destroy, or commit crimes against humanity.
From his psychological analysis of the US soldiers at Abu Ghraib who committed atrocities on the Iraqi POWs, Zimbardo shows that evil is situational.
Like it or not, we all have the potential to be a Nazi prison camp guard in us, given the right situation and dehumanisation of the enemy.
The Russian people have perhaps a greater understanding of this than most, given their brutal history and capacity for resilience and suffering. As one of their greatest novelists, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, put it: ‘the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.’
Sabrina Harman poses for a photo behind naked Iraqi detainees forced to form a human pyramid, while Charles Graner watches.
The Red Peril 2.0
How easy it is for us in the West to demonize the Russian threat, the hapless Slavic soldier from the steppes, conscripted as they have been for centuries to die as cannon fodder in a war they did not want.
This appears to be a reawakened Communist threat. Indeed, the idea of invading hordes from the east is a deep fear ingrained in the West, since the time of Genghis Khan and beyond.
In recent times it has been the threat of militiant Islam, the Muslim horde overrunning Europe, but our collective Western shadow is now projected elsewhere.
In some bizarre, surreal joke of history, we are apparently witnessing Chechen fighters, suffering from severe historical amnesia, from a land so terribly brutalized by Putin, take part in the invasion of Ukraine.
Likewise, and in a perfect mirror of a paranoid Putin – a dinosaur whose thinking is conditioned by bipolar geopolitics of the Cold War and Great Game of the nineteenth century – the West with its expansionist foreign policy represents a threat to the very survival of his beloved Russia.
Apparently, this existential threat is to be countered at the cost of total war.
Ukraine and the West believes it is protecting itself from the threat of Russia, as has proved to be the case.
Putin and his acolytes believe they are protecting Russia from military encirclement as a result of the eastward expansion of NATO since the end of the Cold War. These have become two disastrous self-fulfilling prophecies. Thus both perspectives have turned out to be valid on their own terms.
It’s history repeating itself, even so far as Putin making the same strategic mistakes as Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1942 in greatly underestimating the vastness of Ukraine and over-extending supply lines.
Hitler, of course, committed the same folly in reverse in the 1930s, emphasizing the need for Lebensraum, living space, for the German people, who were apparently threatened by the great Slavic hordes to the east.
Hidden Forces
What would you do, if you felt as if your nation or family was under an existential threat, and only you had the vast power to stop it?
Do you think you would commit acts of evil to ‘protect’ yourself, believing this to be for the highest good in the circumstances?
There are hidden forces at play here. I use the word hidden intentionally, knowing that some will understand what I am trying to say. Those who have ears to hear will hear.
How else can we make sense of the ritual of bloodletting that so-called rational actors seem to periodically engage in, most clearly perhaps in the massacres of the First World War, when the most ‘civilized’ of nations sacrificed their best and brightest.
For what? How could humans behave in such a barbaric and irrational way?
Human beings often operate like actors on a stage, contending with forces greater than we can imagine. These might be described as the anabolic and catabolic forces of nature, involving endless cycles of growth, death, decay and rebirth.
My first experience with ayahuasca on Maui, Hawaii many years ago, demonstrated this to me very clearly. For whatever reason, I did not fear looking into the darkness. That night I left the safety of the ceremony and went out alone to stare into the unknown of the dark jungle.
Instead of fearing the dark, I wanted to understand it.
Nietzsche warned: ‘Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster … for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you,’ but this was not my experience. I found that looking into the abyss gave me a greater understanding of the world.
Jung, so well versed in ancient knowledge and metaphysics, brought these themes to a psychological level, writing
The sad truth is that man’s real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail over the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy will defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be (Carl Jung, Approaching the Unconscious).
The Metaphysics of Light and Dark
We live in a world characterised by duality – light and dark, good and evil. These are two sides of the same coin; you cannot have one without the other.
Irrespective of anyone’s spiritual beliefs, you may still find useful insights in spiritual traditions on the nature of evil.
In the ancient Zoroastrian tradition, it was believed that the universe is a battleground between Good (Ahura Mazda) and Evil (Angra Mainyu). Angra Mainyu is not God’s equal opposite, but the destructive energy that opposes God’s creative energy.
It is essential for us to remember that this battle is not external to us as humans. It is an internal process in everyone.
Even in the Bible, Isaiah 45:7 says, ‘I form the light, and create darkness. I make peace, and create calamity. I am Yahweh, who does all these things.’ In other words, according to an Old Testament view, Yahweh (God) is the source of all things, light and dark.
The Taoist yin yang symbol captures the essence of this most beautifully. The seeds of light grow in the dark, the seeds of dark grow in the light.
Other metaphysical systems were all too aware of this too – that too much of anything becomes its opposite. The Mediaeval Jewish Kabbalists saw evil as a result of unbalanced force. For example, the benevolent dictator, motivated by the seemingly altruistic aim of protecting his people, can easily become a tyrant. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as the folk wisdom goes.
In a tremendously complex world bedevilled by unintended consequences, we are often unaware of the full consequences of our actions, yet we are still responsible for them. A classic example is the arming of the Taliban, formerly the mujahideen, by the U.S. in pursuit of its geopolitical ambitions of bringing about the demise of the USSR in Afghanistan the 1980s.
In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the sacred texts of Hinduism and a treatise on the ethics of war, we are told that Krishna (God) gave humans free will so they would have the volition to choose love, but ‘impelled by material desires, the souls engage in evil deeds and are subjected to others’ evil actions, as per the inexorable law of karma.’
Comanche Indians Chasing Buffalo with Lances and Bows, by George Catlin.
Wetiko
Jungian analyst Paul Levy, in his seminal work on the origins of evil Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil brilliantly describes how humanity is suffering from:
a spiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness.
Many traditions speak of a concept similar to that native American idea of wetiko. The Jewish- Christian gnostic mystic tradition, for example, draws on descriptions in the two-thousand-year old writings known as the Dead Sea Scrolls – found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi – of the archons, who have imprisoned the divine spark of human souls in material creation.
Likewise, the Bible speaks of a ‘counterfeiting spirit’ deceiving humanity. The Tibbetan Buddists speak of humanity trapped in the matrix of samsara, of suffering.
The essence of evil is that it helps continue the illusion of separation of souls from universal consciousness, from source.
This is perhaps the deepest symbolic interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve. The fall of matter from spirit, the loss of our connected state of original innocence.
Evil prevents us from recalling who we truly are. It separates us from each other and from whence we came.
A destroyed Russian BMP-3 near Mariupol, 7 March.
What can be done?
First, on a macro level, the consciousness of the human race must evolve to a point where war is no longer acceptable, for any justification, under any circumstances.
Otherwise, paranoid, wounded, power hungry men, for it is almost always men who start wars, will inevitably find a justification for their actions.
As the astrophysicist Carl Sagan said:
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
It will be necessary to make war an absolute taboo and to ostracize those who participate in it. It may take many generations and even millennia for this to occur, but happen it must.
Peace must be a conscious choice for humanity. As Margaret Mead put it: ‘Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a means of solving conflict?’
There are some encouraging signs that in this first European war of the social media age, this may be happening – via the compassion and condemnation of the international community.
But this cannot only apply to wars started by the ‘other’ side, it must apply equally to wars started by or supported by the West in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Otherwise, Western hypocrisy and privilege continues.
For this to happen, a global shift in consciousness is required, if not rogue actors will easily take advantage of a more peaceful world.
It will also require a much more equitable world, one where justifiable grievances can be addressed and resolved equitably, before violence is resorted to.
Is it naive to believe such a world is possible? Perhaps, but in a world of nuclear weapons, we surely have no choice but to evolve and ensure our long term survival.
It will also be necessary to change the current structures of power, so that the concentration of political power no longer allows the egos of weak, wounded men to force wars and mayhem on their people.
As part of this evolution of human consciousness, some form of collective healing will be required to address the psychological wounds of the human race, the majority of which is traumatized as a result of centuries of war and oppression.
Otherwise, wounded man-children will continue to play out their traumas and pathologies on a world stage; handing these down to the next generation.
We would do well to remember the indigenous wisdom that the seven generations to come inherit the traumas of the past seven generations.
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961).
Personal Responsibility
Secondly, on a micro level, as individuals, we must take personal responsibility for the psychological awareness of our shadows. Becoming aware that we are not always as good as we imagine ourselves to be.
As Jung put it:
Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.
We need to educate people on the need to make conscious what is unconscious, unhealed, unprocessed, unowned in them, before they find someone or something else to project their deepest fears and darkest thoughts on to. This is of the utmost importance for the survival of the human race, and not talked about nearly enough.
How can we expect peace in the world when we are at war with ourselves? If we want to change the world, we must first change ourselves.
Our outer world reflects the state of our own inner psyche, individually and collectively. That our currently external reality is in such dire shape reflects the inner collective reality.
If we do not mend our ways the great ritualistic dance, the great cosmic game of growth, death and rebirth, construction and destruction, with human beings as mere unconscious pawns, will begin again, as it has for many of the past millennia, but this time with the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Feature Image: Mushroom cloud from the explosion of Castle Romeo in 1954.
Don’t you ever read the papers? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn’t get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is to make himself a Dictator.’ ‘Well, I’m blowed!’ I was astounded at my keenness of perception. The moment I had set eyes on Spode, if you remember, I had said to myself ‘What Ho! A Dictator!’ and a Dictator he had proved to be. I could not have made a better shot, if I had been one of those detectives who see a chap walking along the street and deduce that he is a retired manufacturer of poppet valves named Robinson with rheumatism in one arm, living at Clapham. ‘Well, I’m dashed! I thought he was something of that sort. That chin…Those eyes…And, for the matter of that, that moustache. When you say “shorts,” you mean “shirts,” of course.’ ‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’ ‘Footer bags, you mean?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How perfectly foul. P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters (1938).
The above quote may offer a certain hope for those of us who see in each crisis a foretaste of worse to come; that hope is that Fascism can be undermined by ridicule – even while it is gaining traction – as long as a Dworkinian right to freedom of speech abides.
But I next turn to a writer not noted for his sense of humour, George Orwell, who is central to our understanding the Great Depression, at least from a British vantage. His 1946 essay ‘How the Poor Die’is a also crucial text for this austerity period, when social supports are being steadily withdrawn and a public health crisis looms large. Such are the consequences, unintended or otherwise, of an awful ideology that has put the NHS into freefall, and the Irish health service into near collapse.
Animal Farm and 1984, with their simplification of language and distortion of truth from 2 =2 =5 to Newspeak – or in present parlance News International – are curiously prescient for our age. The Communist dystopia Orwell envisaged is not what we have now. Our own is of a different character altogether.
Lowry, Laurence Stephen; Coming from the Mill; The L. S. Lowry Collection; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/coming-from-the-mill-162324
Army of Managers
The great painter of the Depression-era L.S. Lowry once remarked:
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
This is the kind of Stockholm Syndrome that we have witnessed throughout the pandemic, when even left wing parties previously noted for their resistance to corporate authority, rolled over to have their bellies tickled, as the one percent almost doubled their wealth.
Lowry, as much as Grosz and Dix, chronicled working-class existences in painting, but as a prose artist he also captured the era beautifully in Coming From the Mill (1930). ‘As I left [Pendlebury] station I saw the Acme Spinning Company’s mill,’ Lowry would later recall. Describing:
The huge black framework of rows of yellow-lit windows standing up against the sad, damp charged afternoon sky. The mill was turning out hundreds of little pinched, black figures, heads bent down. I watched this scene – which I’d looked at many times without seeing – with rapture.
His matchstick men and women are best seen in the Lowry Gallery in Salford near Manchester, an area much gentrified now but still recognisably working class. And if you turn away from the main paintings, one still finds the bitter fruits of economic depressions: drunken brawls and young children in virtual rags.
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is a core text of our time. The soma-induced compliance replicates our non-critical consensus of disinformation. Bernard the anti-hero wishes to leave for Iceland, a psychological state many of us wish to flee to now. Like Wittgenstein, I have a preference for a good Fjord.
In mainland Europe the contradictions of the European Depression are well etched by the greatest of all American writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was an incurable alcoholic by the time he penned his second masterpiece Tender Is the Night, to mixed reviews, in 1934. The lead character Diver is redolent of a lost parvenu generation, a parable for how many of a certain class lose their way on the French Riviera.
It is cautionary tale of a loss of relevance, context and credibility. In a way, we all must resist a decadent urge to act like Tory grandees on the fiddle amidst the booze at Number 10.
And what about other European literature for those who want us to “stay safe by staying apart”? Well, the antisemitic Louis-Ferdinand Céline is responsible for at least two prose masterpieces of the Great Depression that lay bay his own hypocrisy.
His 1932 Journey to The End of Night is a phantasmatic horror story chronicling the Great Depression. It contains a piquant quote that goes some way towards explaining his own moral descent: ‘I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.’ We ought to be wary of artists that achieve great success in their own time, or journalists for that matter.
He also refers to the “necessary” distance the rich must develop from the sufferings of the poor:
I hadn’t found out, yet that humankind consists of two quite different races, the rich and the poor. It took me … and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.
Jean Renoir
More than Céline, along with Albert Camus, the greatest French intellectual artist of that period was the film director Jean Renoir. His most significant film ‘La Règle du jeu’ is situated at the precipice of collapse.
Set in an aristocratic milieu just before the outbreak of the Second World War, it is decidedly jittery, with a real sense of fin de siècle. We find attractive though silly people on the brink of a calamity. It seems now quite relevant as we face unprecedented times, where chaos and uncertainty rule.
Renoir views the characters sympathetically with Octavia – the voice of moderation – central to the film. Renoir was acutely conscious of being on the brink of disaster, and expressed an objective humanism with the famous line ‘that everyone has his reasons.’
In the subjectivity of our time that quote remains a clarion call for a heightened perception of danger, especially as moral relativism gains traction.
Renoir elaborated in commentary on the film that all cultures are cliquish and have their own rules and protocols of dealing with those who do not observe the rules of the game, or the rule of law. But that is prior to seismic change where brute force supersedes civility.
Renoir touched a raw nerve. When it opened a right-wing French audience went berserk, in a way similar to the reception in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of The Western World in 1907.
Renoir’s acid comment was in effect that these people were doomed, and that the audience reaction showed that ‘people who commit suicide do not do so in front of witnesses.’
The film has an astute sense that class or poverty more than race or ethnicity is the ultimate determinant of social division. That idea remains vitally important in these absurd politically correct times, and indeed victimhood or assumed victimhood as it is now. Our priorities should be to maintain access to housing, health care and legal representation.
Welles and Buñuel
Another of the greatest creative artist of the twentieth century toured around Ireland at the end of the Depression, before taking a job at The Gate Theatre. Later, in ‘The Third Man’ (1949) he made a guest appearance as Harry Lime. One, less celebrated speech. captures the existential dilemma of our time
If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax – the only way you can save money nowadays.
This is a logic that appears to have been adopted by pharmaceutical companies in recent times.
The great surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel was another of the great anti-fascist artist of the Depression-era. He attacked the prevailing mores of clerics, sexual repression and state authoritarianism with utter clarity and savage wit. This led, unsurprisingly, to periods of exile from Spain and a final hideaway for eighteen years in Mexico.
The stunning and very brave 1950 film about poverty and child criminality in Mexico ‘Los Olvidados’ (the Forgotten Ones) caused a sensation at the time. Its theme reflects a drift into criminality among the youth in many parts of London and Dublin. Today’s child poverty, exploitation, crime and even slavery were also a feature of the Great Depression era.
Tell Me Why?
How does Fascism come about? Well it’s a product of inequality and poverty. You could say: “It’s the economy dummy!” In the period we can find evidence of this emerging among the workers in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, or the disenfranchised on the streets of Weimar, or the representations of Orwell and Céline who suffer most due to the naked expropriation “adults in the room.”
Economic depressions create conditions for fascism, or even the new-fangled corporate fascism of our age which represents a triumph of demagoguery and disinformation. So be wary of manipulation and stay flexible, if not unsafe. Facebook and the mass media augment Orwellian tendencies and a campaign of compliance and of induced consent is creating serf capitalism and a potential Malthusian population cull.
Alas, there is no New Deal or Marshall Plan on the horizon. World leadership is lacking and often far from benign and corporate-led. Apart from resisting manipulation, what all of us at the sharp end of the stick can do is protest to avoid obliteration and not be participants in our own self-abnegation.
Resist decadence if you can. Survive the new depression: this Great Reset Depression. It will require optimum coping skills not to be culled. And if all else fails, poke fun at the fascists and observe how uncomfortable they become.
Sometime in early 2022, in the middle of the fourth or fortieth wave of the corona virus, I got a message from my old friend, Stefano Schiavocampo. He told me that he was editing for a magazine in Dublin and he’d like me to contribute.
“Me?” I thought, “What would anyone need to hear from me?” In finishing this abstract essay now, that thought still hasn’t changed much.
To be honest I basically just wrote it for him. I hadn’t seen Stefano in over five years. In my memory he’ll always be on fire in the eyes and still at heart. The eternal street musician, at home in the overgrowth of roads less traveled and Tuscan villas. The tarred fingers rolling Belgian anarchist squat cigarettes. The boules champion of mid-evil French castles with a perennial beer frothed mustache grin forever fresh from an Irish dive.
Though the thought of him is once again on my mind, I still don’t know where he and his family are today. Let’s say Dublin for lack of a better guess. I like to put him there, so I can dream myself back to that place. That rough little city of rain and song. The idea of an audience has become too abstract to imagine over the last two years of separation, so I write these words less to the faceless you and more for my old friend Stefano and my city of maybes; Dublin.
Before the Storm
I’m going to assume that you don’t know me. There are pretty few justifiable reasons why you would unless you were in south-eastern Florida in the late 1980’s. If so, then do you remember that hospital by the beach where it was forever womb warm? Where it’d get so hot it’d cook up thunder every afternoon like the one I was born on before the storm. If you weren’t there, then do you remember being out on that pier while I was making my first memory looking up at a spaceship drawing a cloud into the sky when the wind threw my hat into the waves and I was caught right before jumping in by my mom. Remember that skateboarding Mickey Mouse hat? It was great, right?
If you were there, then you obviously can’t forget dad’s accident and mom’s cancer. The Damocles Sword and an uprooting from coast to corn fields. Canned laughter on TV. Being a big brother. Fitting in and testing boundaries. Rejection at a grade-school dance. Starting a band in your basement. Remember those Nirvana covers and a new name every week (Sideburns Magoo, Brothers from Different Mothers, etc…)? Power chords turned to fingerpicking.
Time went marching and the coddled underwing turned to an opening curtain on the other side of the world. Graduating from structure to be reborn and blinded drunk talking Marx smoking through every bar and backstage back and forth between Berlin and Vienna, with something to prove and not much to do it with.
You might have been there and might remember more than me. If you weren’t, then there are songs I forget that we can use to remember.
So, so many songs. Used to show you my world. Used to make me what I wanted to be. Used to understand what I was feeling. To put words to the wordless. Then sing and sing and sing again till hoarse. Surrendering nightly to and follow behind powerlessly contorting to the shape of a stage-light shadow of a past me or a mimicked subconscious idol.
Remember when all the hope of youth ran out of greener grass to graze on? Maybe it happened to you too. Waking up in a small room of a shared apartment wondering “why here and how forward?”
Stubbornly stagnated sticking to a dream no longer dreamt and fattened by vices lazing low below the horizon of what dreams may come. Onward the same. Onward the same. Feet in a world changing and a skull shat full by boomers. Heavy-headed limbo walking closer and closer to the ground. Raging inside rolling and worming across a world of drying sidewalks. The friction of blue-eyed ambitions rubbing up against obstacles of age.
Sparking and humming the subtle melodies sap slowly out of fall trees. We have felt the fretboard for a resolving chord. Not knowing the notes we play, but knowing only if they sound right. Those human feelings passing from you to something beyond. Slowly they launch like drops of sweat evaporating up into clouds to rain on far off fields. The songs faintly rumble in the internal distant thunder of night. The sound of little universes being born. A world of meaning in a moment.
Though I have assumed that you don’t know me and I not you, a storm is born from all but itself and a creation never comes alone. Creation is an act of sharing. To sense is to share. To share yourself. To share in someone else. To give and receive simultaneously. To connect. In spite of the distance between us now. In spite of this world where we are all apart. To bridge the gaps in the voids inside of us and between us with an honest act of creation is one of the few real beauties we have. Where we are a part of each other. To remember we are one. I’m trying to remember. Do you? Remind me.
— Ian Fisher is a songwriter, performer, and recording artist raised in Missouri, USA, and living between Germany and Austria. Rolling Stone magazine describes his music as “half Americana and half Abbey Road-worthy pop”. He has written nearly two thousand songs while touring Europe, the USA, and Africa. You can listen to his most recent album, “American Standards”, on his website (www.ianfishersongs.com/music) or on any streaming site and you can support his music by joining him at www.fanklub.com/ianfishersongs. Fisher is currently working in Sicily on a new collection of intimate songs for an album to be released this November.
You enter here a taut quintet Where theorists can shift or shape How we make sense of market flow; How men and how it’s mostly men, Explain the ways our commerce works. No Flash of insight, more a slow Encroachment that in turn creates Our understanding how by stealth New certainties of common sense Construe the weave of life and wealth. Micheal O’Siadhail, The Five Quintets, Dealing, Canto 1, Mechanisms, p.67.
‘Is what is written on a piece of paper worth the paper it’s written on?’ was the simple question posed by the Master of the High Court, Edmund Honohan, at the beginning of a recent Decision, delivered on the 9th of February, 2022 in the case AIB PLC vs Gary Lennon.
Curiously, unlike other Decisions, this is still unavailable on the court’s website, and certainly didn’t make many headlines; although an article in the Irish Times provides a simplified account.
Could this be because of its seemingly complex legal arguments; or perhaps because it reveals too much about how banks and Vulture funds are taking advantage of Ireland’s permissive legal environment?
The Decision relates to a case in which AIB were claiming payment of an outstanding debt, from Mr Lennon. However, Mr Lennon counterclaimed that AIB had not furnished the necessary evidence to the Court entitling them to substantiate or prove the claim.
The first thing that a bank or vulture fund needs to do when claiming payment of an outstanding debt or repossess a house, is to prove, with supporting hard (’probatory’) evidence, that it owns the rights to that property or debt.
Unsurprisingly, this often proves a difficult exercise after the individual debts are bundled up (securitised) and sold on the international market via ever more and more complex financial structures; Section 110 companies, SPVs, Subsidiaries of subsidiaries. These structures allow our banking system to handle non-performing loans, but also to facilitate a lot more capital outflow, often in the form of un-taxed profits.
AIB PLC vs Gary Lennon
In this Decision (which to be clear is not a judgment) by the Master of the High Court we find, apart from the case in question, some serious warnings in relation to the use in courts of the Civil Law and Criminal Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2020, which now allows business documents, previously considered mere hearsay – out of court statements that are generally inadmissible in proceedings – as evidence in financial cases.
Simply put, when it now comes to such cases, it has become acceptable for a bank to adduce hearsay evidence, laying claim to a property or debt, and for this to be accepted in good faith.
Thus, according to Honohan’s Decision, creating a situation where:
In banking cases, the plaintiff has deep pockets and a reputable firm of lawyers to present the case. Is there any risk of an overarching judicial prejudice in the plaintiff’s favour? The lay litigant thinks there might be.
We cannot overlook, either, the alarming phenomenon of banks telling the courts to not even think of requiring their witnesses to come to court and submit to cross examination. A belief that summary judgment is there for the asking?
Confusion around what actually constitutes acceptable evidence and the institution of legal procedures that overwhelmingly favour big financial institutions over ordinary citizens, could be yet another channel for regulatory capture.
There is currently €16 billion worth of loans on this roulette table in Ireland, all of which are in some way securitised and being traded as we speak.
With politicians and the media are now furiously engaging with more accessible aspects of the housing crisis, like simplistic explanations of supply and demand, and the necessity for foreign investment, it is also important to look into how the law has been altered to give more leeway to banks and Vulture funds.
Citizens, as much as the financial institutions, should demand a justice system that satisfies basic criteria of fairness and impartiality. This should make it realistic for any citizen to challenge a bank or Vulture fund.
This ought to be regardless of how deep, shallow, or broken, your pockets are.
“Wolf of Golfgate” Country
Readers may be familiar with a movie about the 2008 subprime market collapse called ‘The Big Short.‘ It is constellated with explainers like Margot Robby in a bubble bath illustrating subprime mortgage backed securities, and chef Anthony Bourdain making a fish soup with left over mortgages with low values to explain securitisation.
The financial collapse, as described in the movie, actually happened, after some twenty years of head spinning financial innovations. In that period, investment banking went from being a relatively boring and stale career into what may be referred to as the “Wolf of Wall Street” life.
Fast forward about a decade, banks get bailed out, while austerity cripples the most vulnerable. 2013 is the year that Reits and Cuckoo Funds came to Ireland and begin to dictate the kind of supply of housing the Irish should have. This has led to the artificial inflation of prices in the housing market.
In the Land of the Wolf of Golfgate there are thousands upon thousands of loans being bundled together, as we speak, and traded around the world like you would soya beans or any other asset. The reality on the ground is that these are mostly homes that many of us are living in, or should be.
Securitisation and other complex financial structures to recover outstanding debts, are not always a bad practice and are actually an essential tool to limit banks’ exposure to risk; thereby ensuring a country’s financial stability.
But if financial predators go unchecked, especially when it comes to housing, and the courts are not up to speed with the financial innovations involved in the cases that it encounters, the country offers fertile ground for those financial entities, and their money, to become overwhelmingly more powerful than the ordinary citizen.
As Edmund Honohan warns in his recent Decision:
Courts are not yet up to speed with the byzantine multiple-player transactions in the capital markets. Even the Financial Times, in a full page ad in the edition of 27/28 November 2021 warned “Fakery is now everywhere, Regulation has failed.” Our courts are still exploring the mechanics of securitisation. Wait till we start getting “synthetic” securitisation! And as for encryption and blockchain software, who will interpret the “hash”? (77)
Moreover, in this often unbalanced relationship between the judiciary and high finance, the use value of a house is deemed to be superseded by its exchange value.
Another explanation is that unequal access to quality legal representation creates a great disparity between individual citizens and these institutions when it comes to access to housing stock and credit.
This is an issue for which a petition has recently been launched to address a problem that could affect over 200,000 people. It is called ‘Legal Support for possession proceedings on homes.‘
“There are currently thousands of citizens battling to save their family home in Irish Courts, not represented by any legal team.” Legal Support for possession proceedings on homes | Uplift https://t.co/Hz99SW6K8Y
For the above to happen as smoothly and quietly as possible, you need lubricant in the machinery, which normally comes in the form of extra virgin political oil. This speed up things and make sure the machinery of claims and repossessions works like clockwork, and without any unnecessary impediments.
As we previously mentioned, one of the widespread practices for banks, Vulture funds and Cuckoo funds, to lubricate the passage of cases, is to present hearsay evidence, something somebody says out of court, and for it be accepted in good faith: This practice now seems even easier despite ad hoc clarifications in the Civil Law and Criminal Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2020.
The Act was passed shortly after the case, Promontoria (Aran) vs Burns, wherein Promontoria, a notorious investment fund, often referred to as a Vulture, (I didn’t say it, it’s hearsay) was barred from presenting business records in evidence, and therefore lost the case.
At that point most people in the country were absorbed with dealing with a pandemic, and shortly afterwards there was the Golfgate Scandal, which included Brian Hayes, CEO, Banking & Payments Federation of Ireland; a prime examples of Ireland’s revolving door between politics and the private banking sector.
With an urgency rarely seen for other problems, such as the homeless and healthcare crises, the Act was fast-tracked through the Oireachtas.
Here is how Minister of Justice and Equality, Deputy Helen McEnteeintroduced the Act in the Dáil debate on the July 30 2020:
The commission’s report recommends that records compiled in the course of business, because they are generally reliable, should be admissible in civil proceedings as an inclusionary exception to the hearsay rule, subject to the safeguards that have been set out in the Bill. Separately, the Court of Appeal was called in a recent case, Promontoria (Aran) Ltd. v. Burns, to interpret and apply the law as it currently stands regarding the admissibility of business records in civil cases. Both judgments delivered by the court last April were clearly of the view that the law in this area needs to be updated by legislative reform. More recently, the Judiciary has specifically identified legislative reform of the civil law rules on business records to my Department as among the most urgent priorities for it to be able to advance cases fairly and without unnecessary delays and costs to all parties concerned.
It introduced the possibility, or rather encourages the use of business documents as evidence, even if they are mere hearsay, although it does allow the other party to challenge the validity of such evidence.
But best of luck if you are a lay litigant, without legal aid and in a precarious financial situation, attempting to challenge a skilled team of lawyers pitted against you, by the bank or Vulture fund in question, full of good faith.
The inherent risk to private citizens posed by the the misinterpretation of this new law in front of the disarming power of the law firms which the banks rely on, was articulated in an earlier decision by Ed Honohan, AIB PLC vs McGrane, on the 9th June 2021, under the heading EU Charter of Fundamental Rights:
Given that at least some of these issues – contract terms, debt restructure etc. – are now the subject of EU Directives, the courts will have to satisfy themselves, under Article 47 of the Charter, that the defendants are given “effective access to justice” and, for cases of complexity of the sort above described, that “Legal Aid shall be made available to those who lack sufficient resources insofar as such aid is necessary.
Most litigants in person just show up in court on the day the case is listed and it may then be too late to make up for lost ground. The chances of framing and corroborating a second bite at the cherry, on Appeal, may be vanishingly small, even if they manage not to miss the ten-day deadline for an Appeal (which many do).
Writing in Prospect Magazine in 2018, David Neuberger, former President of the UK Supreme Court, said:“Without the rule of law society becomes unjust, violent and poor. It is of fundamental importance that courts are open and accessible.
“Accessibility means that people with grievances and those being sued must get access to legal advice and to courts. It is an affront to justice if people cannot understand or enforce their rights.
It’s always a difficult task to communicate to a wider audience how the intricacies of the law, full of carefully crafted language, are at play in underpinning how our society, and economy operates.
Especially when true complexity arises, actual trials are needed and the public needs to know it can trust their judicial public servants “the adults in the room”, in the making of these key decisions.
The thicker the blanket of legal fog, the more political “good intentions” and “good faith” are but a faded image of what people’s actual needs are.
This leads to a society dominated by cynicism, unable to envisage any change, and politically impotent.
In two hundred years doctors will rule the world. Science reigns already. It reigns in the shade maybe – but it reigns. And all science must culminate in the science of healing – not the weak, but the strong. Mankind wants to live… to live. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907), p.263
This article charts the origins and development of what often appears to be a strawman conspiracy theorist over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially through “fact checker” initiatives operating at the behest philanthrocapitalism. This appears to have insulated regulatory agencies long prone to capture from adequate journalistic scrutiny, leading to a groupthink amidst an effective censorship of alternative, and scientifically valid, assessments of the danger posed by COVID-19, and the optimal humanitarian response.
Losing Our Grip?
In May, 2020, veteran Guardian journalist John Naughton explored the origins of Plandemic a “documentary” video ‘featuring Dr Judy Mikovits, a former research scientist and inveterate conspiracy theorist who blames the coronavirus outbreak on big pharma, Bill Gates and the World Health Organization.’ Naughton relates how the video migrated from mainstream social media into the dark recesses of the Internet.
As he put it: ‘The cognitive pathogen had escaped into the wild and was spreading virally.’ Ultimately, the New York Times ‘traced it back to a Facebook page dedicated to QAnon, a rightwing conspiracy theory, which has 25,000 members.’ All this Naughton said: ‘confirms something we’ve known since at least 2016, namely that conspiracy theory sites are the most powerful engines of disinformation around. And when they have a medical conspiracy theory to work with, then they are really in business.’
In May, 2020 The Atlantic’s Jeff Goldburgannounced that conspiracy theorists were winning, and that America was ‘losing its grip on Enlightenment values and reality itself.’ Thus a 2014 study estimated that half the American public ‘consistently endorses at least one conspiracy theory,’ a proportion that had risen to 61% by 2019, suggesting the Internet was accelerating the trend. Another survey indicated that 60% of Britons were wedded to a ‘false’ narrative.
Adjudicating on the falseness, or otherwise, of a narrative is not always, however, a straightforward exercise. Indeed, it will be argued that justifiable concerns around recent impugning of expertise have been weaponised to create another layer of disinformation over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The “wild-eyed” conspiracy theorist – often referred to as “members of the tin foil hat brigade” – has become a widely derided figure. This appears to be a belated response to so-called “post-truth” accounts, associated with supporters of Donald Trump in the U.S. and proponents of Brexit in the U.K., dismissive of expertise. This challenged a board consensus around such issues as the importance of mitigating climate change. But in confronting genuine disinformation it appears that many on the left, in particular, failed to interrogate vested interests during the pandemic.
“Totalizing Discourse”
Charles Eisenstein defines conspiracy myths as ‘a totalizing discourse that casts every event into its terms.’ He traces these overarching explanations – relying on observed phenomena only insofar as these fit with a preordained pattern – to the first century Gnostics, who believed that ‘an evil demiurge created the material world out of a pre-existingdivine essence.’
The “totalizing” nature of such an approach has previously been dismissed by Karl Popper since ‘nothing ever comes off exactly as intended.’[i]Oliver and Wood(2014) identify three facets to an approach that has traditionally pointed to Freemasonry –an “illuminati” – Jews and Jesuits, and, in more recent times, intelligence agencies such as the CIA, KGB, MI5 or Mossad:
First, they locate the source of unusual social and political phenomena in unseen, intentional, and malevolent forces. Second, they typically interpret political events in terms of a Manichean struggle between good and evil … Finally, most conspiracy theories suggest that mainstream accounts of political events are a ruse or an attempt to distract the public from a hidden source of power (Fenster 2008)
In her seminal 1951 text The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt identifies such a tendency as a precursor to mob rule, describing how a conspiracy theorist ‘is inclined to seek the real forces of political life in those movements and influences which are hidden from view and work behind the scenes.’[ii]
Yet certain conspiracy theories in our time, such as suggestions the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 in order to plunder oil resources rather than decommission weapons of mass destruction, or that the fossil fuel industry deliberately sowed confusion over climate change, remain plausible, even if we lack clear documentary proof.
A problem lies in how individuals with minimal academic attainment treat conspiracies as objective truths rather than conjectures based on circumstantial evidence. The likelihood of a conspiracy is often portrayed as “beyond reasonable doubt”, as opposed to “on the balance of probabilities.” A formally educated observer may be repelled by an insistent approach that does not allow for reasonable doubt.
The intuition relied on by confirmed conspiracy theorists thus generally fails to acknowledge uncertainty, and lacks scientific or historical rigour. Yet these accounts may still occasionally yield insights when empirical methods fall short. After all, suspicions raised by conspiracy theories are often vindicated. Rather than dismissing out of hand such ‘magical thinking’, it is useful to consider these as unproven hypotheses, and not necessarily untrue, simply because an individual is overstating a case.
For example, over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic increasingly persuasive evidence has emerged of a laboratory leak – perhaps from so-called ‘gain of function’ research – giving rise to the pandemic. But in February, 2020 The Lancet published a letter from a number of prominent scientists who ‘strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.’ This had a chilling effect on the scientific debate during the early stages of the pandemic.
Notably also, the ‘father of economics’ Adam Smith opined that ‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.’[iii] Smith’s portrayal of commercial calumnies is reflected in a question posed at a medical conference in 2018 by a Goldman Sachs executive: ‘Is curing patients a sustainable business model?’
Previously, a succession of pharmaceutical scandals led Ben Goldacre MBE to take a sympathetic view of so-called “anti-vaxxers”, who are now consistently conflated with “conspiracy theorists”: ‘I think it’s fair to say that anti-vaccine conspiracy theories are a kind of poetic response to regulatory failure in medicine and in the pharmaceutical industry. People know that there is something a little bit wrong here.’
Similarly, Tom Jefferson – editor of the Cochrane Collaboration’s acute respiratory infections – in an interview with Der Spiegel in 2009 in the wake of the Swine Flu pandemic-that-never-was pointed to shadowy pharmaceutical forces: ‘Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur.’
UNESCO’s World Trends Report 2018.
Journalism Under Threat
An assumption of malevolent or self-serving – cui bono? – motivations (particularly concerning a Big Pharma industry with a shameful record of distortion and manipulation) is almost a prerequisite for being an investigative reporter. Stories don’t drop out of the air. Unless a journalist assumes wrongdoing – in essence a conspiracy theory – there would be no reason to begin digging.
The key distinction between genuine journalism and conspiracy theorising is that proponents of the latter tend to blurt out their “findings” without marshalling supporting evidence, with the Internet providing anonymity as required. This, however, makes such accounts easy to ridicule to the detriment of journalism with an evidential basis.
Journalists have long been deflected from investigating large corporations. In a recent memoir the great American journalist Seymour Hersh fumes at how in the late 1970s The New York Times shut down his attempt to investigate corporate America ’when confronted by a gaggle of corporate conmen.’[iv]
This challenge has increased significantly in the wake of the Internet. After the “Original Sin” of free online publication, the number of American journalists fell from 60,000 in 1992 to 40,000 in 2009, a pattern seen across the world. As revenues diminished, workloads increased. Cardiff University researchers recently conducted an analysis of 2,000 U.K. news stories, discovering the average Fleet Street journalist was filing three times as much as in 1985. To put it another way, journalists now have only one-third of the time to do the same job.[v]”
“Fact Checkers”
Over the course of the pandemic a strawman conspiracy theorist appears to have been consciously developed to deter valid journalistic interrogation, in particular, through so-called “fact checking” initiatives. It has reached a point where, as Charles Eisenstein observes: ‘“Conspiracy theory” has become ‘a term of political invective, used to disparage any view that diverges from mainstream beliefs. Basically, any critique of dominant institutions can be smeared as conspiracy theory’
In the absence of adequate journalistic scrutiny during the pandemic corruption has been rife. The executive director of The British Medical Journal Kamran Abbasi described ‘state corruption on a grand scale’ that is ‘harmful to public health’ Abbasi observes how the pandemic ‘has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.’
This also occurred in the context of unregulated social media, where companies set their own rules. In March, 2020, having previously styled itself ‘the free speech-wing of the free-speech party’, Twitter moved to address concerns around conspiracy theories. In future it would be: ‘Broadening our definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information.’
Nonetheless, free reign was given to “click-bait” alarmists such as Eric Feigle-Ding on Twitter, who saw his following mushroom from just two thousand to almost a quarter of a million. Angela Rasmussen, a Columbia University virologist, identified a pattern: ‘He tweets something sensational and out of context, buries any caveats further down-thread, and watches the clicks and [retweets] roll in.’
Twitter did not act alone in upholding an apparent orthodoxy that often lapsed into an extremism that deterred legitimate questioning. Google took unprecedented steps to erase material violating ‘Community Guidelines’: ‘including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of global or local health authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.’
Initially at least, Facebook adopted a more laissez faire approach, although users who had read, watched or shared ‘false’ coronavirus content received a pop-up alert urging them to go the World Health Organisation’s website. In November, 2021, however, the editors of the British Medical Journal sent an open letter to Facebook in response to “fact checkers” undermining their investigative report into ‘a host of poor clinical trial research practices’ at Pfizer’s original vaccine trial.
Thus, the approach of the social media giants was bolstered by an unprecedented journalistic effort to “factually” repudiate conspiracy theories during the pandemic; notwithstanding how ‘uncontested facts—things that are ascertainable, reproducible, transferable and predictable—tend to be elusive.’
Preparations for the “fact-checking” initiative began in January, 2020 when a global #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, comprising more than one hundred “factcheckers” around the world, described as ‘the largest collaborative factchecking project ever,’ was launched by the Poynter Institute, ‘when the spread of the virus was restricted to China but already causing rampant misinformation globally.’ It said that the WHO had classified the issue as ‘an infodemic — and the Alliance is on the front lines in the fight against it.’
From March 2020, with the support of these “fact checkers”, outlets such as Reuters responded to an anticipated wave of conspiracy theories, taking particular care to address allegations against Bill Gates. He has been described as ‘the world’s most powerful doctor’ despite not having earned a medical degree due to the Gates Foundations being the second largest funder of the WHO, after China. This included allegations that he had apparently planned the pandemic, and wanted to commit genocide through vaccines.
For example, on May 30, 2020 a BBC article purported to defuse claims the pandemic was ‘a cover for a plan to implant trackable microchips and that the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is behind it’; although it acknowledged Gates had said that ‘eventually “we will have some digital certificates” which would be used to show who’d recovered, been tested and ultimately who received a vaccine,’ and also referenced ‘a study, funded by the Gates Foundation, into a technology that could store someone’s vaccine records in a special ink administered at the same time as an injection.’
Front building of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle.
Gates Foundation
When it came to outlandish conspiracy theories around COVID-19 all roads led to Bill Gates and his $47 billion philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – besides a personal fortune of $115 billion, and growing, as of October 2020.
For many of world’s population under stay-at-home orders the pandemic was viewed through a digital prism – often at a remove from morbidity or mortality itself. At that stage, Gates’s 2014 Ted Talk ‘The Next Outbreak. We’re not ready’ seemed almost prophetic.
He opined: ‘If anything kills over ten million people in the next few decades it is most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.’ The failure of Western governments to prepare for such an eventuality seemed to have been laid bare – in particular the Presidential administration of Donald Trump, who according to a Cornell University study ‘was likely th\\e largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation “infodemic.”’
Gates’s main reference point appears to have been the Spanish Influenza (H1N1) outbreak of 1918 – the Ur-pandemic of modern times – that led to up to fifty million deaths, many of them young men in their prime, at a point when the global population was approximately two billion. In contrast, the infectivity and severity of SARS-CoV-2 ‘are well within the range described by respiratory viral pandemics of the last few centuries (where the 1918–20 influenza is the clear outlier).’
Neil Ferguson
“Scientific Groupthink”
In March, 2020, Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson told the New York Times the ‘best case outcome’ for the U.S. was a death toll of 1.1 million, rising to 2.2 million in a worst case scenario, a projection that has proved wildly inaccurate. Yet, alternative, and scientifically valid, assessments of the danger posed by COVID-19, and the optimal humanitarian response to the challenge were virtually ignored in legacy media at the time. Thus, an Oxford University paper, which included Sunetra Gupta as an author, countered what the New York Times described as the ‘gold standard’ Imperial modelling underestimated immunity from prior coronavirus infections and posited a far lower infection fatality rate.
But in March, 2020, the Financial Timeswarned that Gupta’s group’s modelling was ‘controversial and its assumptions have been contested by other scientists.’ Implicitly, the Financial Times was accepting the “gold standard” Imperial paper.
Moreover, in November, 2020 an article in the Scientific American describes how Stefan Baral, an epidemiologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health, wrote a letter about the potential harms of lockdowns which was rejected from more than ten scientific journals (and six newspapers) in April, 2020. Baral recalls, ‘it was the first time in my career that I could not get a piece placed anywhere.’
The article also recalled that, ‘highly anticipated results of the only randomized controlled trial of mask wearing and COVID-19 infection went unpublished for months.’ The authors concluded that the ‘net effect of academic bullying and ad hominem attacks has been the creation and maintenance of “groupthink”—a problem that carries its own deadly consequences.’
In the absence of access to authoritative, diverging scientific accounts, opposition to lockdowns could easily be dismissed as being the preserve of conspiracy theorist cranks associated with “anti-vaxxers” and even a “far-right” fringe.
“Screen New Deal”
Apart from offering pharmaceutical companies the huge financial incentive – grasped within open arms – of developing a vaccine for universal application, lockdowns and social distancing measures also brought soaring profits for major technology corporations. Moreover, restrictions provided a testing ground for the Gates Foundation’s long advocacy of technological approaches in education.
In May, 2020 Naomi Klein identified collusion between state and Big Tech interests in what she described as ‘A Screen New Deal.’ She referred to New York Governor Mario Cuomo’s courting of Google and the Gates Foundation: ‘Calling Gates a “visionary,” Cuomo said the pandemic has created “a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas … all these buildings, all these physical classrooms — why with all the technology you have?” he asked, apparently rhetorically.’
Remote learning technology permitted extended school closures around the world, despite the chance of death from COVID-19 being ‘incredibly rare’ among children. Researchnow suggests many students made little or no progress while learning from home, and that learning loss was most pronounced among disadvantaged students. As a consequence, up to 20,000 children in the U.K. went missing from school rolls during the pandemic. Nor is it apparent that teachers faced any greater risk compared to the wider population in fulfilling classroom teaching.
Media Funding
Popular consent on a global scale for lockdowns, particularly from those identifying on the left, seems to have been manufactured through vast ‘philanthropic’ funding of journalism, in particular of publications associated with progressive outlooks.
By June 2020, the Gates Foundation contributed $250 million to journalism, which according to Tim Schwab in The Columbia Journalism Review, ‘appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world’s most visible charity.’
A theme of ‘we are in this together’ inhibited criticism and enquiry. This quiescence has been criticized by the Greek socialist Panagiotis Sotiris who wrote: ‘What is missing here is something that used to be one of the main traits of the radical left, namely, an insistence that science and technology are not neutral.’
Tim Schwab calculates that $250 million had been devoted to journalism by the Gates Foundation for the six months up to June, 2020,. Recipients included BBC, NBC, Al-Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, The Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting, as well as the BBC’s Media Action and The New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund.
Schwab adds: ‘In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations—which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates’s funding into the fourth estate.’
As a result, he says:
During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively—both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation’s website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead and CureVac.
The Gates Foundation’s pivotal role in funding global health has long raised concerns. In 2008, Dr. Arata Kochi, the former head of WHO’s malaria programme argued the Gates Foundation was undermining scientific creativity in a way that ‘could have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policymaking process in world health.’ He worried that Gates-funded institutions – including Imperial College London (MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis) – were adopting ‘a uniform framework approved by the Foundation,’ leading to homogeneity of thinking: ‘Gates has created a ‘cartel,’ with research leaders linked so closely that each has a vested interest to safeguard the work of others. The result is that obtaining an independent review of scientific evidence (…) is becoming increasingly difficult.’
GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, is the most obvious example of the Gates Foundation’s engagement. GAVI has successfully immunized large numbers of children, but been criticized by other NGOs for inadequate funding of health system strengthening.
One of GAVI’s senior representatives reported that Bill Gates often told him in private conversations ‘that he is vehemently ‘against’ health systems (…) he basically said it is a complete waste of money, that there is no evidence that it works, so I will not see a dollar or cent of my money go to the strengthening of health systems.’
As of 2017 only 10.6 percent (US$862.5 million) of GAVI’s total commitments between 2000 and 2013 had been dedicated to health system strengthening, whereas more than 78.6 percent (US$6,405.4 million) have been used for vaccine support. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) states that, while GAVI has helped to lower prices of new and underused vaccines for eligible countries, the cost to fully immunize a child was 68-times more expensive in 2014 than it was in 2001.
According to long-time Gates critic James Love, Gates ‘uses his philanthropy to advance a pro-patent agenda on pharmaceutical drugs, even in countries that are really poor.’
Safe Treatment?
This article makes no bold claims regarding the efficacy of any treatments, but the overwhelmingly negative reaction of legacy media to research pointing to the efficacy of the off-patent drug Ivermectin suggests that vested pharmaceutical interests wished to undermine public confidence in any scientific arguments regarding its efficacy.
In June, 2020, a laboratory study demonstrated it was ‘an inhibitor of the causative virus’ (Caly, 2020). Later, a Systematic Review, Meta-analysis that included twenty-four randomized controlled trials said: ‘Moderate-certainty evidence finds that large reductions in COVID-19 deaths are possible using ivermectin.’
In a predictable example of “fact-checking” where an outlandish claim is used to discredit a compelling hypothesis, the Poynter Institute quoted a social media post ‘rating’ the claim that Ivermectin basically ‘basically obliterates’ as ‘false.’
The Guardian’s dedication to discrediting the meta-analysis also suggested vested interests were at work, and contrasts with a failure to report on the British Medical Journal’s account of a whistle blower alleging serious data integrity issues during Pfizer’s vaccine trial.
It should hardly be controversial – let alone dismissed as a conspiracy theory – to argue that the weight of evidence points to a ‘Gates-Approach’ lying behind ongoing adoption by most Western governments of unprecedented suppression measures in support of universal vaccination – notwithstanding potential treatment alternatives – leading to the introduction of vaccine passports, as Gates “predicted” in April, 2020. This also occurred alongside a familiar ‘rhetoric supportive of ‘holistic’ health systems.’
It is now clear that consent for lockdowns, especially in the Anglophone world, was manufactured through wildly inaccurate epidemiological assessments of an infection fatality rate of 0.9% in the notorious Imperial College paper. This estimate has since been adjusted to 0.2% (available on the WHO website), a figure which Joffe argues is likely ‘a large over-estimate.’
It is also clear that globally mortality statistics for COVID-19 have been systematically exaggerated. This manipulation can be traced to a WHO document from April, 2020 entitled ‘International Guidelines for Certification and Classification (Coding) of COVID-19 as Cause of Death’. It set out strict rules for the registration of COVID-19 deaths, which differ fundamentally from registration for other causes. The guidelines define a COVID-19 mortality as ‘a death resulting from a clinically compatible illness, in a probable or confirmed COVID-19 case, unless there is a clear alternative cause of death that cannot be related to COVID disease (e.g. trauma).’
For most people COVID-19 is a virus that poses little danger. Prior to the arrival of a vaccine, a U.K. study from October, 2020 found 76.5% of a random sample who tested positive reported no symptoms, and 86.1% reported none specific to COVID-19. Moreover, an article from Peter Doshiin the British Medical Journal in September, 2020, stated: ‘At least six studies have reported T cell reactivity against SARS-CoV-2 in 20% to 50% of people with no known exposure to the virus’; apparently vindicating Sunetra Gupta’s “controversial” paper, over which the Financial Times cast doubt.
A “totalizing” discourse of a COVID-19 conspiracy theory identifies a preordained plan being set in motion by malicious actors, wherein the pandemic culminates in a dangerous vaccine being foisted on a brainwashed population. This might lead to an assumption that such vaccines invariably give rise to severe adverse reactions that are systematically covered up. Such an account does not demand evidence as events are simply unfolding “as planned.”
In reality, however, events rarely follow a preordained pattern, and even in circumstances of regulatory capture state agencies are never entirely bereft of integrity. Moreover, such accounts divert attention from probing interrogation of the efficacy of vaccines and the desirability of universal uptake of a medication that does not block transmission, especially one rushed to the market, and which may cause unforeseen adverse reactions.
It is also apparent that public perception of the efficacy of vaccines has been distorted by the media’s reporting of relative risk reduction, as opposed to absolute risk reduction, which is just 0·84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.
Moreover, importantly, in January, 2021, Peter Doshi and Donald Light in the Scientific American objected to the undermining of ‘the scientific integrity of the double-blinded clinical trial the company—and other companies—have been conducting, before statistically valid information can be gathered on how effectively the vaccines prevent hospitalizations, intensive care admissions or deaths.’
This came after Pfizer pleaded an “ethical responsibility” to unblind its trial and offer the vaccine to those who received a placebo. The authors argue that ‘there was another way to make an unapproved vaccine available to those who need it without undermining a trial. It’s called “expanded access.” Expanded access enables any clinician to apply on behalf of their patient to the FDA for a drug or vaccine not yet approved. The FDA almost always approves it quickly.’
In terms of any actual conspiracy or contrivance to raise prices along the lines of tendencies that Adam Smith pointed to among gentlemen of commerce, the role played by Bill Gates has been, doubtless, more complex than many conspiracy theorists allow for. However, in circumstances where a billionaire with a history of monopolistic aspirations promotes an agenda aligning with his financial interests it should come as no surprise that colourful theories abound; especially with many journalists seemingly inhibited from enquiring into his Foundation’s activities.
Indeed, ironically, the aforementioned Guardian journalist John Naughton recently described Gates while Microsoft CEO as having acted like ‘a mogul who is incredulous that the government would dare to obstruct his route to world domination.’ Does such a leopard ever change his spots?
Sadly, the amplification of the outlandish claims of conspiracy theorists by so-called “fact checkers” could be causing reputational damage to genuine expertise, and allow demagogues reliant on angry mobs to say: “I told you so.” The propagandist role of “fact checkers” has undermined genuine investigative reporting, much of which already occurs on the margins.
In the early stages of the pandemic especially, difficulties in reporting were compounded by deficits in scientific understanding among overworked journalists in precarious employment, who were encouraged to justify unprecedented lockdowns as a form of social solidarity. The assumption that by “following the science” a journalist is adequately performing his or her role is a dangerous fallacy, which does not take account of how diverging scientific arguments may be concealed.
In the absence of sufficient independent journalism, and amidst censorship of alternative scientific opinion, troubling questions remain unanswered as the pandemic draws to a close. Perhaps we will never know the full story. Nonetheless, it is vital that adequate cost-benefit analyses (including with access to full trial data) are conducted on all pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions in future.
Feature Image (c) Daniele Idini: The Burning of “the Witch of Winter” in Cardano al Campo, Lombardy, Italy.
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[i][i] Karl Popper (1972). Conjectures and Refutations, 4th ed. London: Routledge Kegan Paul. pp. 123–125.
[ii] Hannah Arendt (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951, p.140
[iii] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, book 1, chapter 10, par. 2).
I can barely make out Richard´s handwriting on the piece of torn paper. “Second left” I say, looking down at the words. “After the farm…with eh, the eh, big stables.” “I think we just passed it.” Richard says, looking behind him. “Eyes on the road dude!” I shout. “Please!” I´d almost reached for the wheel. “After the farm. So, the second left. Not signposted. Look! There! There there there! Second left! Second left!” Richard takes a glance at the rear-view mirror, indicates, decelerates, and turns off the winding, narrow country road. “This is it,” I say, turning down the music. “This might be it.” Richard says.
The boreen is a long tunnel of trees. Sunlight flickers through the thick leaves overhead, giving the passageway an intense golden-green glow. Stray branches and brambles tap, knock and scrape against the windshield, and drag against the worn-out body of the car, as we’re bumped and jolted gently in our seats. Richard is quiet, his forearms resting over the steering wheel, his fingers interlaced. We’ve been driving since morning, across the smooth new continuous sedation of the M7 motorway, from Dublin to Exit 27. But now, nearing the end of our journey, I’m becoming curious again as to where I´m being led.
Richard sits back and steers the car slowly from out under the trees and into a sunlit clearing. In front of us, behind a low, grey, moss-mottled stonewall, squats an old shrunken cottage, tucked up in welcoming silence. Richard turns the key in the ignition and the rattling engine shudders and shuts off with a sigh.
Once through its small front door, we begin to explore the dark little habitation. The air inside is cool, cavernous. Rough flagstones, slightly uneven, line the ground. Whitewashed stonewalls loom close in the wan daylight which struggles in through the deep-silled elfin windows. For some reason I was expecting a stifling humidity, a trapped reek of old country rot and neglect to greet us.
On the right is the kitchen. A deep white porcelain sink and dim countertops domesticated with wooden containers, a red kettle, a wooden bread-bin, a blue cup-rack, and a stainless steel dish drying rack. From the ceiling of an arching alcove hang a confusion of copper pots and pans over a blackened range. Ahead, at the far end of the room, stands an old round pine table and three pine chairs. Behind that, and in front of a larger day-lit window, is a red cushioned, two-seater couch and small mahogany coffee table. To either side of the couch, tall leafy plants, dark and evergreen, creep up out of the farthest corners, as though the trees outside had somehow broken in. On the left wall is a small black stove and, beside it, an empty wicker basket for firewood.
I follow Richard down the narrow hall that leads to two bedrooms, their open doors facing each other. In the smaller room I see a framed print of “Men of Destiny” hanging on the wall. Behind the last door, at the end of the hall, is an old grimy bathroom. I step around Richard and take a look inside. Its green-tiled gloom and old dirty white shower-curtain remind me of something out of a horror film.
“She must have had someone in to do the roof,” Richard says, walking back down the hall and looking up at the newly restored wooden beams.
“She keeps the place well, your aunt,” I say, following him. “I don’t know why I’m so surprised.”
“What you think?” Richard asks, looking around.
“I love it,” I say, “It’s perfect.”
Richard looks at me.
“Do you good to get out of Dublin anyway for a while,” he says. “Clear your head.”
“You have no idea, Man.” I say, looking at him. “Thank you for inviting me.”
“No worries,” he says, spinning his car-keys around on his finger. “Right. Let’s make this place our own.”
Out back, in what we could reclaim for a garden, after I´d sheared away some dead dried branches of a gooseberry bush and Richard had strimmed some of the long grass, we share a light lunch at a small wooden table, sitting on two loose wooden chairs.
It’s a fine spread. Various cured hams. Gorgonzola and Camembert cheese. Black pepper crackers. Green pitted olives. Sundried tomatoes. Crisp brown bread and a beetroot, grated carrot, broccoli and hazelnut salad for which Richard has whipped up his delicious honey mustard and Irish whiskey dressing. To top it all off, I´ve opened a none-too-chilled bottle of steely Chablis.
In the warm summer air, we take our time and eat slowly, swatting wasps and midges away from our food and from our faces. I’ve had to move my chair out of the sun and into the shade more than once. I don’t want to get burned. The garden surrounds us. The creeping brown briars. The exhausted trees and their shade. The tall dry grass. All so overgrown. So still. So dense. So close to us. This is true summer seclusion. I look around and enjoy a deep sense of peace. This is our place now, to do as we please, to idly rusticate in, undisturbed, for a week.
Richard is sitting back in his chair with his blue denim shirt open, sunning himself and chewing on a piece of bread. Under his straw hat he wears Aviator shades and with his Van Dyke goatee he is nothing if not the epitome of summertime cool. He smiles broadly at me and looks like he’s about to say something, or is thinking of saying something to me, but then just goes back to admiring his surroundings, leaning back on his chair. I drink my wine and listen to the insect hum in the grass, and in the trees all around me.
“You know what?” Richard says after a while.
“What?”
“I found a bag of MDMA in these work shorts.”
“Ha! Really?”
“I think it must have been left-over from the barn-party in Kilkenny.”
“That was some night,” I say, reaching for my pouch of rolling tobacco, suddenly nervous and certainly thrilled on hearing that night now being finally brought up again.
I fumble with my rolling papers and with the tobacco. Part of me wonders if it´s true, if he’d really found it, or if he’d bought some especially for this trip in the hope of recreating something of that night, of that morning. Either way it’s welcome news. In fact, it’s exactly what I want to hear, what I’d been hoping for. I tap my rollie on the table, smiling, then light it up.
Settling back down into my own skin again, I feel at ease. Recomposed and in control. I look at Richard as he takes a drink of wine and rests the base of his glass on his flat brown stomach. Then, with a finger, he lowers his shades, looks at me from under an arched eye-brow and, in a mock paternalistic tone says,
“I was debating, you know, on whether or not I ought to tell you.”
“Well, you’ve blown that now haven’t you? And sure why wouldn’t you have told me?”
“You said that you wanted to get some work done down here.”
“So did you.”
“Ah, but that’s different.”
“How is that different?”
“Mine is just the monkey work. I don’t want to be a bad influence on you and, you know, hamper, or dampen, or darken even, your…” He searches dramatically, airily, with his free hand for the right word, “…your cogitations.”
“My cogitations? Or do you mean, my brooding contemplations?”
“Your country ruminations?”
“Oh, my rural cerebrations?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, you won’t. Besides, I don’t plan on writing much. I’ll be reading, mostly.”
“Mostly,” Richard says, smiling. “You brought enough books down with you anyways.”
“I always do. Usually too many,” I say. Then I add, with a smile, “I just don´t know what I want sometimes.”
Tapping the ash, I pass the rollie over the table to Richard.
“You still only writing the short ones?” he asks.
“Yup. And still only for myself and for the entertainment of my friends.”
Richard blows smoke in the direction of some midges.
“Too right. Nothing worse than a poet who publishes. So go on then. Give us one before we go back to work.”
“Alright. Do you want a happy one? A sad one? A funny one? Or a sexy one?”
“Surprise me.”
I take my glass and raise it for a toast. Richard sits up, leans forward and raises his glass too. I can imagine that behind his sunglasses Richard has closed his eyes, cleared his mind and is making himself suitably receptive. Sitting up straight in my crockety chair, I look at him and say, in my smoothest voice.
“I find myself again, cast into the ancient gaol of love. But this time I´ll remember that the cell door is always open, and the guards are always drunk.”
“Beautiful” Richard says. “I was transported”
“I’m sure you were.” I say, smiling.
“I want more.”
“You’ll have to wait.”
“Well then, in the meantime,” Richard says, “Here’s to a poetical and festive week in the country.”
We clink glasses.
“Cheers.”
We clear the table, bringing our plates, glasses and bowls back inside. My eyes have to readjust to the sudden cottage darkness. Sun-dazzled, and a little drunk already from the heat and the white wine, I find that I´ve wandered off in the wrong direction and start laughing to myself, at how disorientated I am. This is a crazy little domicile I’ve found myself in. Blinking and stretching my eyes wide open, now I´m standing by the table. I look down at my stack of books, at my notebook and my pens, all neatly laid out. There will be time. Plenty of time. I can feel it building already. Some good work is going to get done.
Richard has plugged his phone into the speakers he’s brought and is playing a compilation of Italian Renaissance lute music. Its gracious simplicity fills the air around us with a homely sophistication. I put the two plates with my emptied wine glass down on the countertop and stand beside Richard at the sink. He washes. I dry. We listen to the music and fall into an easy rhythm. I notice that he’s even brought his own little bottle of organic washing-up liquid.
“Man, that wine is choice.”
“Goes down easy.” He says.
“Too easy.” I say, smiling. “So, time for a little daba-daba?”
“Ha! You dirty drug fiend. I have to get up into those trees now…”
“You doing that today?”
“Better to get it done now,” he says, looking out the window. “Then I can relax.”
“True,” I say. “Best to wait…To wait. To wait.” I add with a deep sigh. “Such exquisite restraint you display.”
“All the better to torture with, my dear.”
Richard smiles and hands me a rinsed wet plate and I come back to myself, dreamily, to the task at hand.
“Will I open another bottle or do you want a beer?”
“I think I’ll have a coffee,” He says, pulling the plug in the sink.
“I’ll make it for you,” I say. “You go out and get started.”
At the side of the cottage, I bring Richard his coffee. He points up at some low overhanging branches.
“These are the ones she wants me to cut back I’d say,” he says.
“How long will that take you?”
“´Bout half an hour or so. But there’s probably more to do around the place.”
“Well, I’m looking forward to helping out,” I say.
“Don’t worry,” says Richard, “There’ll be plenty to do.”
We step over the orange extension cable and Richard’s chainsaw, his clear-plastic goggles and his pair of old, dirty, heavy work gloves.
“Bringing the hammocks was a great idea,” I say.
“It was, wasn’t it?” He says, grinning. “We’ll put them up later. One there…and one…over there. If you could strim some more between those two trees that’d great.”
“Yeah. No worries.”
“And I was thinking of digging a little fire pit too, over there, for later on. If the nights are going to be as nice as they say, might as well stay outside for as long as we can.”
“Sounds great.”
“When was the last time you lay out in the night and looked up at the stars?” Richard asks.
“I can´t remember,” I say. “There was even a time there when I couldn´t look up at them for long. Sometimes, I don´t know, it was just too immense. I´d get the fear, and have to look away.”
At the rear of the cottage near a little back-gate we stop at a gap in the boundary trees. I look down over a field of high, lush green grass. Shielding my eyes from the sun I see the hazy banks of a river, more fields, other country houses, and mountains far in the distance.
“We’re not too far from Ardnacrusha, are we?”
“No,” Richard says, lighting a rollie, “It’s a few miles down to the right there.”
“We should go for a walk then later, if you want?”
“Sounds good,” Richard says. “I’ll get cutting.”
On a narrow pathway, along the bank of the river, we walk in the direction of Ardnacrusha, passing my hipflask of whiskey back and forth. The calm country scenery, the cooler evening air and the sound of gravel pleasurably crunching underfoot mellows my thoughts. Up ahead, Ardnacrusha Bridge arches over the river. Nearing sun-down, the shadow of the bridge ripples on the orange and purple water.
“So you’re serious…about leaving your studio in Callan, and never painting again? Say it ain´t so, Man.”
“Well yeah, that´s the idea.”
“Just had enough?” I ask, passing the flask back to him.
“You saw the last work.”
“I did. And I really liked it. Very zen. One fluid movement across the canvas. I always thought it looked like a tusk. You sold a few too.”
“Three.”
“That´s good.”
“Not good enough I´m afraid. No, it´ll never leave me, but I need to take a step back. Or a step forward. I need to get out, get moving again.”
“Where you thinking?”
“The Camino first. Then maybe Mexico, for a while. Bring my ukulele.”
“And write some songs?”
“Write some songs and find my way. At the moment I think I´m being drawn to horticulture.”
“Really? That actually makes a lot of sense,” I say, taking the flask back from Richard.
“Yeah,” Richard says, “I think so too. Tend a garden and…”
But I’ve noticed something up ahead. The diminutive form of someone standing up on the bridge. I pocket the flask and gaze on, thoughtlessly, not even wondering until, suddenly, that same body falls clear from the bridge and splashes into the water. I stop and grab Richard by the arm.
“Fuckin’ hell!
“What?”
“Did you see that?”
“Did someone fall in?”
“I don´t know, Man. Either fell in or jumped.”
Without another word Richard starts to run ahead. I keep my eyes on the water and watch as an arm, then a head, comes up to the surface, and disappears again. On the bank of the river Richard begins rapidly undressing: shirt off, boots off, jeans off, socks off. He looks back at me, desperate for some sign of warning or encouragement. But I’m dumb-struck. Helpless.
I stand back and watch as Richard dives into the water. Gathering up Richard’s still warm clothes, I hold them close to me, and keep my eyes on him as he swims out and dives under. Coming back up, he looks around, and dives back down again. Each time he disappears, I hear myself mumbling,
“He’ll be ok. He’ll be ok. Come on. He’ll be ok.”
I walk backwards to keep up with the displacements of the current. From the river bank all I can to do is focus on maintaining a line of living endurance between myself and Richard. Somehow, through my undivided attention, a fierce observance, I feel that I can transfer all my available energy and strength to him. That this will keep him safe. That this connection will keep him alive.
Thrashing the water Richard struggles back to the riverbank, pulling the still body of a boy, a teenager, behind him. At the water’s edge I bend forward and grab hold of Richard. Once he’s up on the bank, I reach out and get a hold of the boy, grabbing him under an arm. I pull and drag him, with Richard’s help, up and out of the cold water. Richard collapses on the grass and turns on to his back. Grunting and gasping for air, he covers his face with his arms and struggles to speak.
“He…He’s got something…in his pockets…weighing him down…”
But before I can gather my thoughts Richard rolls off his back and gets himself up onto his knees. He leans down over the kid, tilts his head back and blows into the boy’s mouth. Richard stops, gasps, listens, and looks down. Nothing.
Again he blows again into the boy’s mouth and I watch, horrified, as that chest rises and falls under his soaked, black t-shirt. Nothing. I turn away. All I see is the rushing, swirling brown surface of the river, and all I can think is that there must be more bodies in there, more bodies like this one, lost in those damnable depths, helplessly flowing by.
A sharp and sudden intake of breath from the boy’s mouth startles me. Richard falls backwards onto his hands. We both watch as the boy’s body spasms and contracts on the grass. His eyes open wide as his pale hands clench and tear at the grass. He coughs and gasps painfully for air as dirty greenish rills of foul river-slime runs down the sides of his mouth.
On our way back to the cottage nobody says a word. We trod through a field, having forgotten to take the easier pathway back to the cottage. Richard strides through the waist-high grass with all of his reach and strength, and still only in his boots and wet underwear, determined to get away from that river as fast as he can.
The boy staggers behind me as though drunk. Lost to his surroundings. From the corner of my eye, I think I see him dropping stones out of his pockets. I think I hear them falling to the ground, one by one. I look his way but his head is down, staring into the grass. Mesmerized. Twice the boy snaps out of it to look up and take notice of where he is. I hear him gulp and catch his breath.
“You ok?”
“Yes.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name?” I ask.
But the kid says nothing.
Our cottage appears up ahead from behind the cluster of trees. Up beside the chimneypot is a rusty TV aerial and a warped weathervane leaning silhouetted against the clouds in a fading purple and orange sky. Richard opens the barely hinged back-gate and the kid follows us around the side of the cottage. We enter through the small front door, one by one.
The kitchen and living room smell of cool country evening air, coffee, and freshly cut firewood. Richard’s shaking, and without saying a word, walks down the hall and into the bathroom. Still holding Richard´s clothes, I pour a glass of water from the sink tap and put it down on the table for the boy. I ask him to sit, and he sits.
“I’m Stephen.” I say. “And that’s Richard. What’s your name?”
Sitting there in front of me, silent and stunned, he’s a rudely revived corpse shivering in his dripping clothes. Around his plain grey canvas runners, strands of slimy green river weed are still coiled. I try not to stare but can’t take my eyes off his narrow, mean-looking face. His long, thin arms are pale and his short dark hair is flattened to his head. He can’t be more than fifteen or sixteen.
“You should have a shower when Richard gets back.”
A long silence passes between us before he says anything.
“Don’t tell anyone I’m here,” he says.
“I won’t.”
“Don’t call anyone.”
“I won’t.”
“Swear?” He says.
“I swear. What’s your name?” I ask again.
“Daniel.” He says, looking at the glass of water on the table. “My name is Daniel.”
Richard returns in a long grey woollen jumper, fresh jeans, and in his bare feet. He hands Daniel two big fluffy grey towels and walks him down to the bathroom.
“There´s hot water,” I hear Richard say. “Try and get warm.”
Daniel closes the door.
Without looking at me, Richard goes into his bedroom and shuts his door. I go and sit down at the table and place Richard’s clothes on the seat beside me. I take my hip-flask from my back pocket and I drink from it. But the whiskey doesn’t taste right. It’s watery. Silty. I put my pouch of tobacco, filters and lighter on the table and just sit there, looking at them, without appetite, but it’s not even the pouch of tobacco that I see.
All I see is Daniel, standing in his clothes under the hot shower, waiting to feel warm again. Then peeling off his wet clothes, like layers of a painless, un-protective skin. Runners. T-shirt. Socks. Jeans and underpants. Drenched, they fall and slop to the floor. Heavy. Sodden. And sad. I see him sitting down in the bath, under the showerhead, in the steam, his eyes closed. A tiny dot of darkness, peaceful and unthinking. And warm. Warm for a while at least. Until the water starts to run cold.
In the living room candles are lit and pots of food simmer on the kitchen’s range. A fire rages silently in the stove. The mahogany table, on which Daniel´s clothes have been laid out to dry, has been pushed closer to the fire. Richard and I are busying around each other, almost as though we’re putting on a little show of domesticity for Daniel, who sits quietly at the table, in warm borrowed clothes.
Richard opens a bottle of red wine while I lay out three plates. We’ve insisted he eat with us. There is no talk about today. Nothing. Richard pours wine as I spoon out steaming pasta shells and meatballs. Passing an aromatic roll of garlic bread around, I feel that me and Richard are doing our best, our utmost, almost telepathically, to make Daniel feel included and welcome at our table.
Instinctively, I go to raise my glass for a toast but correct myself, and cover it, by just taking a small sip.
“Tuck in.” says Richard. “Its good. It’s warm.”
We all eat slowly. Small mouthfuls. We try to eat. There’s warmth and healing goodness in the food but there seems to be no real depth to our hunger. Still, we persist in silence. Shadows flicker close around us on flame-lit walls. Daniel´s shadow flits and frets on the wall behind him. When he burps, I think I get a phantom, silty taste of muddy water in my mouth. Daniel pushes the food around on his plate, then cuts a meatball into small manageable bites. Richard nods and sighs as though talking to himself in his head.
After chewing on a piece of sauce-soaked bread for what seems like a very, very long time, Daniel coughs, clears his throat and looks up at me, then at Richard. In a soft, hesitant voice he asks,
“Ye both…ye both from here?”
“No,” I say, and clear my throat. “No. I’m from Sligo originally, but I live in Dublin now and Richard’s from Kilkenny.”
Daniel nods and looks down at his plate.
“Are you from Clare?” I ask.
“Limerick.”
“Oh right. Where abouts?”
“Castleconnell.”
“That nearby?”
“Near enough.”
“My aunt owns this place,” Richard says finally. His voice is distant, as if it were coming from somewhere behind him.
“We thought we’d just come down and do some work around the place,” I say, “Help out his aunt, you know?”
“Just the two of ye?” Daniel asks.
“Yeah.”
Daniel looks at Richard, then at me. I feel like he’s going to say something –
“Would you like more sauce?” Richard asks, moving the ladle around in the pot. “There’s some left.” “No.” Daniel says, pushing his plate away from him. “I want to go home.”
“We’ll take you home after this,” I say. “Please. Try and eat something.”
Attempting to lead by example, I try to eat but have to stop after a few mouthfuls. I sit back in my chair and turn my wine glass around by its stem, observing the marks left by my lips and the tiny bits of food on the rim. I’m unable to look at Daniel directly. I can’t watch him go through those mechanical movements of eating all alone. A density, of something incommunicable, hangs around him. It´s emanating from him. He saw nothing down there, in the murky underwater. No premonitory flashes or flickers of an afterlife. Nothing in those last moments but the shock of it, and the struggle against it. A last taste of terror before release. I watch as my wine glass becomes misty. Candle light flares into golden, watery shards. I turn my face from the table and discreetly wipe the welled tears from my eyes.
We drive in the direction of Castleconnell in silence. It’s late, but not so late that Daniel’s parents might be worried. In the back seat Daniel sits in his own damp clothes.
“You should make up something about today,” I say to him. “Say that you went out to Ardnacrusha for a swim. And eh, a group of lads or something threw your bag of clothes into the river and you had to swim out after them, to get them, you know, and you nearly drowned. And that’s why, if they say you look shook, that that’s why you look shook, you know?”
“And you just went to a friend’s house then, afterwards,” Richard says, looking back at him in the rear-view mirror, “To shower and to calm down or something. But now you’re home. Safe and sound. And everything´s ok.”
I turn around and look back at Daniel.
“You know what we mean? Like a cover story.”
“I know,” he says.
“Practice it in your head for a while,” Richard says. “Convince yourself that it’s real.”
We park outside Daniel’s house, a huge, warm-looking, many-windowed Bed and Breakfast just off Station Road. Cars pass by on the road beside us, their headlights shining in on us intermittently. I think about giving Daniel my number, but I don’t know how much more I can help. Then it just seems like a bad idea. Richard turns in his seat and looks back at Daniel.
“You alright?” He asks.
“Yeah.” Daniel says.
But he just sits there. Waiting. Part of me is expecting him to say sorry to Richard, or to the both of us. Part of me is expecting him to say thanks. Part of me is expecting him to break down crying and part of me is expecting him to go absolutely ape-shit now. To start kicking and punching the back of my seat and screaming. Screaming that we tried to abduct him or kidnap him or…But he just sits there. Waiting.
After a while he opens the door, gets out and slams it shut behind him. He doesn’t turn around, or say anything, once he is out of the car. We just sit there and watch him as he walks over the cow rail and makes his way up to his house.
“What’s the name of the B&B?” Richard asks, taking out his phone.
“Glenville B&B,” I say. “Why?”
“´Cos we’re coming back here tomorrow. Or calling them.”
“I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
But I don’t say anything. I’m watching Daniel as he walks up the long, steep driveway to his home. All I can think about now is what it’ll be like for him when, after he rings the bell and waits in the cold, well-lit archway for his mother or father or brother or sister to come to the front door, and they see him standing there, pale and shivering and alone. They won’t even have to look in to his eyes to know. Daniel. It’s Daniel. Something has happened to him.
