A friend of mine has been asking a lot of questions about the elections on Facebook. In a chat, she asked this:

“Would you personally prefer the NHS to be looked after by Labour, Conservative or Lib Dem?”

So seeing as she is taking the election seriously I’m taking her questions seriously.

It’s a really good question. Please be aware that the answer is long. It’s complicated. But I think it goes to the core of why this election is important. 

It’s comforting, given much of the noise surrounding politics. particularly the ad hominem insults.

Anyway, let the mansplaining begin.

Definition of an ad hominem attack:

“whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument”

souce: Matthew Syed, via Wikipedia. He is a table tennis champion and a journalist. This doesn’t make him right and it doesn’t make him wrong. 

I think a certain amount of ad hominem hostility is natural. A murderer, for example, or someone who was sacked by a newspaper for dishonesty, or who has a track record of lying, might reasonably be expected to lie again. 

The problem is that people who lie are also masters at ad hominem attacks. They know their audience.

Whatever your views, insulting the idiocy of the person with the perceived incorrect view is unlikely to change minds, based on what we know about behaviour change theory. People change their minds gradually and in stages, with contradictions and insults relating to current thinking usually not effective. 

Lots of people look to attack the argument of the person by finding flaws in that person’s background…

Looking at someone they disagree with to find chinks in their armour – like they have a posh voice, or eat their bacon sandwich the wrong way, do a certain job, or their hair is a bit scruffy, or they have a weird shape neck, that’s an illogical ad hominem attack.

Who the hell are you, anyway?

Me? As it happens I’m state-educated but went to university when it was still relatively cheap. I’ve voted for three of the major parties: I’ve even had a Thatcherite phase, when I was too young to vote.

I’m still only 90% sure who I’m going to vote for, for what it’s worth. It’s probably not the party I canvassed for at the local elections.

I’m pro NHS, and I wrote about the joy of tax before I heard there was a whole book about it:

Beware ad hominem justifications too:

‘I’ve been a teacher for thirty years and…’

‘As a parent…’

Experience in a particular field is useful; but unless there is agreement amongst people in this group it does not suffice as a dealbreaker when you are trying to prove someone else is wrong. Which brings us to something that has worried me a lot lately:

lots of political debate ignores the fact that things can be simultaneously true

There are great debates to be had, but social media tends towards short, simple statements which tend to work as confirmation bias rather than illuminate an issue.

Take Grenfell. I think it is deplorable that long term underinvestment in cladding could lead to the deaths of people. 

It is simultaneously true that there could have been mistakes made in the way that the fire was dealt with. 

It is simultaneously true that firefighters are incredibly brave and saved many lives. 

And so on. 

But people are inclined to cherrypick a single element because it fits in with their political or ideological viewpoint.

Here’s a list of some simultaneously true things about the NHS, etc:

(and please note I’m using the phrase Big Pharma in a neutral way, neither to attack nor support the big pharmaceutical companies)

1. Medical inflation exceeds regular inflation
2. This is for a lot of complex, interconnected reasons, some of which are unconnected to party politics… for example…
3. America is increasingly litigious. Thus Big Pharma has to make more from drugs as people sue them more, so the cost of drugs outpaces inflation
4. Big Pharma has to make more from drugs as shareholders demand it
5. Big Pharma has big overheads, and attracting decent scientists, building labs, carry out trials, etc, is very expensive
6. We are living longer and that’s a sign of successful medicine, public health and lifestyle choices
7. An ageing population means that the NHS will cost more
8. Prevention is better value than treatment
9. Many voters see spending money on prevention as frivolous, particularly when their tax dollar goes to media companies
10. Apps can be a part of prevention
11. Many of the firms that make apps are more interested in maximising profits than patient wellbeing
12. If people avoid tax, the burden for it falls on people who do pay tax
13. Even those companies that pay no tax here, but make profit, benefit from a healthy workforce
14. If the economy tanks the NHS is proportionally more expensive
15. Whereas many British people are used to seeing the NHS as a resource for the people, many people  are looking at it as a potential revenue stream
16. Many people on the political right see health care provision as being best delivered by the private sector
17. Personally, I strongly disagree with 15) based on my own observations of setting up a justgiving site when I was raising money for a charity
18. Neither major party is good on the economy. The highest interest rates (1981), the highest ever unemployment rate (1984), for example, all happened under Tory governments
19. But the biggest factor in the UK’s economic health tends to be global – with a few notable exceptions, like the disastrous Lamont ERM moment, or the Brown bullion sell-off.

Point 1) gets important when you start to look at figures and spending pledges. Think of the NHS as being like a middle-aged person trying to keep fit…you have to put in extra work to stay the same, to improve you need to do extra extra work.

It’s very complicated. I just skimread a report, called:

Comparative Life Cycle Assessment of an Artificial Christmas Tree and a Natural Christmas Tree

It’s a deep-dive, into what kind of Christmas tree you should have. This is how complicated the world is.

And why the alarming rise of populism scares people like me.

In a world which is more connected and complex than ever, leaders who simplify, blame, and chant are a dangerous breed.

We have these on all sides of the political spectrum.

In other words….beware false binaries 

I saw a re-post about the NHS, posted by my Mam’s best friend.

You wonna save the nhs? Then educate yourselfs, stop going to gp for stupid reasons, stay out of a+e unless it’s an actual emergency, start taking reposibility for your health and your families, don’t drink or take drugs to such and extent that your organs fail and stop eating so much that you become a health hazard.

[spellings are theirs]

The thing is, it kicked off an argument where it was originally posted. Because the post seemed to some people to criticise the NHS. Maybe the poster hated the NHS.

But all of the things mentioned above can be true along with the simultaneously-true statements:

‘the NHS is under threat’

‘many Tory MPS genuinely believe in the NHS’

‘a party which has a track record in selling off publicly-owned utilities, is unlikely, in the long run to care so much about preserving the NHS’

‘there are people who seek to dismantle the NHS, including commercial interests who would benefit from this’

…and so on.

You are voting for ideas, as well as MPs

People on the political right have an ideological commitment to free trade solutions and to reducing the size of the public sector, and increasing the size of private sector. It’s their stated aim.

The Conservatives (and to a degree New Labour) privatised utilities such as water and gas, sold off council housing, fire stations, as well as parts of the prison service, and various government bodies I hadn’t even heard of till I started working with them.

This is a global trend. But not evenly distributed throughout the world.

So the aim of many on the political right is to reduce the size of the NHS. 

In the long run, this will either:

a)   introduce the efficiencies of the private sector into the inefficient dinosaur that is the state-funded NHS 

b)    allow unscrupulous private firms to exploit health care and make money for shareholders at the expense of ordinary folk, like in America

This time, the two statements can’t be simultaneously true.

5 to conclude

My opinion is that public service ethos is important to areas like nursing and health.

The NHS needs to change, and evolve.

I think it is easy to criticise the NHS, as it’s one of the biggest organisations in the world. There will always be horror stories.

It needs more funding than ever.

For most people in the UK, it’s logical UK to support the NHS.

It’s not rational economic choice to not support the NHS if you are so rich you’ll always be able to afford private care… this is a fairly small category, but an influential one.

Many people in America think they will always be rich enough to afford medical insurance, a life event happens, and they find themselves begging for cash on JustGiving.com.

Personally, I think the NHS is a miracle and worth fighting for. 

The evidence I’ve seen suggests the Tories can’t be trusted on the NHS. There is a healthcare crisis, which can’t be solved by Brexit, privatisation, tax cuts, false claims over nursing numbers; nor the influence of countries with a much more mature private health care infrastructure and the likely price hike of medicine following uncertainty over trade deals.

I don’t know who I’ll vote form but it will be a vote to keep the Tories out.

I tried to step out of my echo chamber yesterday. It failed.

Guy I used to play football with years ago, he voted Brexit. We’d disagreed a bit on Facebook.

He canvasses for Labour, and put something up pro Corbyn’s policy on economic equality. His friend, who I’d never met, said she liked Jezza but couldn’t see past Labour’s ‘policy of mass immigration.’

I politely butted in, saying that for me inequality is a more important issue than immigration. I said that it lets the genuine elite off the hook when they blame immigrants

I tried to be fluffy and respectful, trying to avoid the shouty ‘how wrong you are’ style that FB political debates cans often become. But just saying, you know, blaming outsiders is usually a right wing thing.

The far right in London started out being anti-Welsh migrant workers, became anti-Jewish and then morphed into being against black and Asian people from the commonwealth: more recently anti economic migrants from Eastern Europe or Africa, or people fleeing the conflicts in Iraq and Syria. For Trump, Mexicans.

I also said that Tories have missed so many immigration targets over the years, it’s odd they have managed to brand themselves as ‘tough’ on immigration. I didn’t mention UKIP at all as but assumed that as they are batshit crazy and started out as a right wing fringe of the Tory party, this wouldn’t be of interest to anyone contemplating voting for the Corbynator. I read their manifesto and it’s drunk, simultaneously blaming immigrants, whilst promoting policies like increased military spending and cutting aid, which make it likely to cause people to want to leave their country of origin in the first place.

The thing is that since Brexit I’ve really tried genuinely to understand the position that immigration is of such concern to people; I’ve looked around me for signs that immigration is making the world a worse place. I haven’t really found any.

I learnt in Mr Bryant’s GCSE geography class that Britain has an ageing population and needed people of working age as a result of the demographic transition model. Which is why immigration was needed in the UK and across Western Europe.

I’ve lived in areas with loads of immigration, and seen how people from other countries – and their music and food – has enriched Britain. Not just in the last few decades, but over the centuries.

The climate of fear caused by terror must be a factor for some people who have drifted towards a vague and dark fearful right, where immigration and terror are linked. It’s all Muslims, thinks Trump, all billion of them, a category fail almost as stupid and dangerous as ‘all infidels are targets’.

To me it the terror is real, but fuelled by botched and often illegal overseas government sponsored military escapades, which provide a place and an ideological space for a deluded bunch of violent young men to survive and thrive. ISIL are patriarchal, parochial and parasitical; that they use the technology they disagree with to meet their aims shows how muddled their thinking is. It is a truly evil ideology which we should obviously take seriously. But clearly not the result of immigration.

The idea that these simple-minded and deluded young men should allow Britain to abandon our commitment to human rights and tolerance is so ridiculous: human rights is a much better idea, and terrorist ideologies thrive where human rights have been abandoned.

As it happens, my surname is so Yorkshire it’s also the name of a brass band; but it’s actually French Huguenot – people seeking religious asylum here in the 18th century, and aside from the Romans, Norman French, Angles, Saxons, Vikings immigrants you get to hear about in school, there were a whole load of other immigrants who made Britain what is is, from the Dutch engineers who reclaimed East Anglia and made the Thames the shape it is today, to the Portuguese Jews who introduced the chippy to Britain.

From Frisian fishermen to Hanseatic hustlers, Britain and Europe have always been linked more than we would care to acknowledge; not least because people changed their names to sound more English.

Not without reason: during the First World War a Scottish pub called Strachan’s was attacked because it sounded German, and so many German bakeries were attacked that there were shortages of bread. Does the baying mob (and the politicians and media encouraging them) sound familiar?

The more we learn about history from actual DNA evidence, the more we realise how connected Europe has always been: the Victorians got it wrong, basically, even though they influenced British history books and thinking with their history and obsession with racial purity. From our fishermen to our royal family, Britain has always been a mash up and all the better for it. In my opinion.

Indeed, the irony of the isolationist argument is that it contradicts the data: to say ‘United Kingdom Independence Party’ you have to use words which are German, Norman French, Latin, Greek, Danish and Roman in origin, because that’s who we are.

And there are so many other things to spend your worry-time on than immigration: catastrophic species decline, global warming, the global assault on human rights, violent conflict, vile acts of terror across the world, illegal invasions and incursions which kill many more and create the breeding ground for more terror, antibacterial resistance, ongoing conflict in the middle east, global poverty, tribalistic intolerant rhetoric in the political mainstream, the denial of science snd the assault on truth, road safety deaths in developing countries even, all bother me more than migration.

I don’t think I’m particularly left wing, but I’ve marched against poll tax, and the fascists and the racists in the East End: just because it seemed to be the right and decent thing to do. I’ve come from a steel town which was failed for decades by politicians of all hues. I’m sceptical of all claims.

But there’s always a least bad option, and I believe that the best parties to deal with the things that concern me are on the ‘progressive left’, that most people would benefit from voting out a party which seeks to dismantle the NHS and increase privatisation of services. I want free healthcare when I’m old, and I’m happy to pay taxes for this, libraries and the like.

Aside from May’s incoherence, she seems to represent the party of big business, and rather than benefiting the majority, which was the initial point.

I have friends with very different views, and some of them vote very differently to me.  I always thought it was good to have people who are different from me in my circle. The Voltaire thing, I disagree with what you say, but say it in front of me and we can all be friends, hopefully.

I was therefore surprised when my comment was deleted; to his friend he explained that the tories miss their immigration targets, and that immigration has been a ‘failed experiment’.

I called him out on it. I said that sounded more Enoch Powell than Labour.

And he deleted me as a friend on Facebook; so there the debate ended. He said we could still be friends in real life.

It’s been bugging me ever since; I just wanted to say to [name], if you get to read this: I don’t think that  immigration has been a failed experiment at all. I think the colonialism that predated it, based in deliberate racial inequality and the exploitation of human and other resources, that was the bad bit. The slavery, maybe or the gunboat diplomacy, the dividing up of the world by people with better weapons who thought this gave them – literally – the divine right to rule the world. That was a failed experiment.

Not the immigration, the movement of people, which followed it.

We are all immigrants somewhere down the line, and have been since humans learnt to travel. Our genetic code and our location needn’t tally, and mostly doesn’t. This is partly why I choose to reject an identity politics based on nationalism, isolationism, or immigrant blame.

On the one hand, I don’t want to focus too  much on immigration, because to me the big problems faced by our species so obviously need international collaboration with the cleverest people working together on them, looking beyond national interests.

For this reason I still can’t quite believe that we left the EU, or that people bought Trump’s isolationist rhetoric for that matter; and I still find it bizarre that people on the political left would consider a swing to the political right because of immigration.

But I’m still curious, and genuine. I want to know why immigration is a failed experiment? I promise not to defriend you… even if I disagree with what you say.

Happy voting anyway…

Who should you give money too? And does it do any good?

These are big questions. To begin with I should explain that I hate Pudsey with all my heart, all the more so when I had to walk past him to get to work at Television Centre. I would give him a secret punch as I strolled past.

I hate the obsession with public giving, and ‘beating last year’s targets’ for events like Children In Need. There is simply no evidence that celebrity-endorsed mass television appeals are good for the people they are supposed to benefit.

Arguably the reverse: they divert people’s finite available donatable income away from causes they have researched and believe in, because Westlife were in a bath of baked beans or whatever. Certain causes get trendy because Bono’s involved or vice versa.

^ I honestly have no idea if that is an accurate representation of Children in Need. Lenny Henry possibly? What does he do for the rest of the year? Not important right now.

By outsourcing our charity decisions and turning them into a showbusiness event, we make one off payments rather than ongoing commitments and we end up giving money to those causes which work best on television.

One of the earliest telethons, in America, was all about cerebral palsy because a senior executive’s daughter suffered from the disease. It wasn’t based in a rational decision, but for decades became a national institution. Not that I’m suggesting that people with cerebral palsy all got gold-plated toothbrushes, it’s clearly a good cause; just that it is one which reflects choices of people in powerful positions.

Because the telethon format is so upbeat (apart from the sad package bits) it can stop us looking at the serious, structural reasons whey people find themselves in need.

The chummy ‘we’re all in it together and you are a stingy square if you don’t dress up’ mentality bugs the flip out of me and made me even more unpopular than ever when I had to suffer the indignity of frequent daily association with colleagues.

It’s pretty arrogant to assume that just because you did something I should support your causes, right? Even though I’ve done this. I did the London Marathon once and as a social experiment asked my colleagues to donate to my fund without telling them where it went. Only two people asked.

I mean, donkey sanctuaries? In the olden days there were no donkey sanctuaries, just donkey heaven slash donkey glue.

How do I know that you don’t already have very well thought out charitable plan, based on better analysis and research of the world’s problems than mine?

So it’s therefore hypocritical that I’ve basically written post this in order to get you to donate cash to my own Christmas fund.

In my defence, I’m going to lobby for the thing I’m asking you to give money to. Which is the UNHCR refugee crisis charity.

The reason I chose this over the idiot donkeys is the scale and nature of the problem and the way it is presented.

News media is inherently dominated by  change, impact and proximity, which can distort our interpretation of the world. Calais refugees are a relatively new phenomenon, and it’s easy for journalists to visit them. They impact on British people entering and leaving France. And they are obviously on the news agenda – at last. Albeit often in quite hysterical ways.

I have some excellent friends who have gone out to help there: I’m proud of them. Calais refugees certainly need our assistance, and are worthy of our charitable donations.

But it’s easy to forget that there are three million refugees in Turkey. Three million! And many have been there for years. So they don’t get the column inches or the FB updates.

Three thousand people have drowned trying to get to Europe and several more are marooned elsewhere across the continent.

So definitely continue to help the people in Calais, but remember other people affected by conflict who will find themselves far from where they want to be this Christmas.

And, you know, let’s hit the target otherwise I will look foolish.

—

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I had a strange job during Gulf Two. I had to keep the BBC website alive.

Or at least the BBC homepage, bbc.co.uk. It was – along with Friends eeceunited, Napster and AOL – one of the UK’s most popular websites in 2003.

Fortunately the task didn’t require much work.

If demand for the site got to a certain level I had to break into the HTML, turning the site into a simpler version of itself which would load more quickly. If the site got hacked somebody would call me up and tell me what to do. I was pretty scared of this eventuality, but it didn’t happen. Instead I watched events unfold on various TV screens.

As it was a night shift, I stayed in a hotel round the corner from Bush House – sleeping during the day. Just me and lots of screens all night. Frankly, not much to do but watch the screens.

I noticed the repetition of the same few successful ‘target strikes’, I got to know them like an iconic sporting highlight. They think it’s all over.

It was a bit like a computer game. It was exciting. The targets were always a military vehicle in a desert: nothing ever missed.

I was curious about this; at one time there were six released videos. But there had been several sorties. What happened to these?

There must have been missiles that missed, targets which were located in towns:  a missile hit a building but damage another building which isn’t the target. But it was always a cross hair direct hit.

And the same time, they were talking of the thousands of missions that were being carried out. And I realised that the ratio of ‘missions carried out’ to ‘released footage’ is usually several thousands to one.

It wasn’t deliberate bias on the behalf of the duty news editor in charge of a particular bulletin. Anybody in that position would have to show the best available images. But the cumulative effect was inevitably misleading. Wide shots of the strikes in built up areas, close ups of the successful hits of isolated targets.

There were no outright lies, as you get with Russian and Iranian state television.

But what people saw on television, and therefore how they perceived the conflict, but was based on a highly edited selection of footage. The editors were the military: they chose what we got to see. They didn’t bother with a bloopers reel.

The decision to bomb or not is not one to be taken lightly. It is grave. You are making a decision to kill at least some people who are innocent. You would think the best available information should be used. You would think that this decision could be one which transcends party politics.

(It’s more accurate to say ‘the decision whether to join more fully in US-led bombing campaign which has been going on for the last year.’ France, Qatar and even Canada have been involved in strikes, and the UK’s role has been to support strikes with things like reconnaissance and air to air refuelling. You could argue that an extensive bombing campaign should  have brought Isis to their knees, rather than seen a period of unprecedented growth in the organisation.

Since Russia got involved, several hundred non combatants have been killed directly in bombing, but several thousand more civilians have been killed by the Assad regime. Russia still backs Assad. It’s very hard to verify exact figures, but it is acknowledged that US strikes have killed many more civilians than Isis since strikes began: more than 100 children amongst them)

In this context, the name-calling by certain sections of the media and the leaders we pay to govern us is an embarrassment.

The ‘consensus’ on Corbyn, according to the Telegraph, is that he is an ‘unelectable embarrassment’, and the party is gripped by some sort of madness or delusion. His supporters? An ‘online subspecies’.

Wow. Whatever you think of the guy, and his solutions to solving the world’s problems, it seems pretty vitriolic. People who think differently to you are not even human any more, and mentally unstable. You are either on the team or so worthy of contempt as to be no longer a person.

This is the opposition to the strikes – belittled and idiotic, a loony fringe. The photographs of him are carefully selected too, just like the air strikes. They capture him looking rabid, or ridiculous. It’s a version of the truth. In cartoons he is even worse. He is not on the team. His ‘Nuclear armageddon? No thanks.’ stance marks him out as  dangerous

Instead we have the patriotism, the flags: in fact the colours the shapes on the flag. People will go to war for colours and shapes, or rather these days support other people to do so.

When the bombing starts, it gets worse. I remember people cheered on the bus, when they announced the start of Gulf One in 1990. All sixth form kids. Did they have combat experience? A sound knowledge of foreign affairs and the complicated geo political tensions affecting the region?

No. They had been whipped up to a fervour by the media, waving the flag on their behalf. Colours and shapes. The bad guy. Saddam Hussein is evil they said. But we provided them with the weapons, I explained to largely uninterested peers. [This continues to be a factor admittedly]. We trained his troops and literally sold him some of his weapons. Maybe a more long term solution would be to not do this? And why are you cheering when you know that innocents will die?

Albeit innocents who look different to you, and eat different food.

We learnt new words. Human shields. Collateral damage. Friendly fire. They launched sneak attacks, we launched surprise attacks. They cowered, we used stealth.

Now we hear about ‘targeted bombing’. This was used as the reason why this bombing would work this time around as opposed to the other bombings which didn’t work and which killed innocent people and bred more terrorists. Targeted bombing sounds so much better than plain old bombing, but every bomb ever dropped has been aimed at a target in some way.

I hear there are Jihadis in Brussels: if targeted bombing works, why not bomb Belgium? Because we know we would accidentally kill some innocent Belgians, I suspect.

Of course we are ‘better’ at bombing: technology has improved since Britain first bombed Iraq.

(Britain first bombed Iraq in 1920. 100,000 British and Indian troops had been involved in a costly ground war; they adopted a policy called ‘aerial policing’ for reasons of cost. It didn’t really work.)

We don’t drop bombs over the side of a biplane any more, but we do make mistakes.

It didn’t last long on the news bulletins last week, but the report on the US bombing of the MSF clinic where my friend Declan worked is very revealing. And depressing. Human error and bad systems, basically.

It’s a reminder that ‘targeted air strikes’ is an aspirational phrase.

We get to hear about the bombing of an MSF hospital because there were so many international staff involved; MSF has a media team and people lobby in its behalf. If they had been poor Afghanis, would there have even been an enquiry?

This is the kind of data which should be discussed, for the right choice to be made. But we have politicians talking instead.

You may still feel that bombing is the way forward, and I understand that view. It may be the best solution.

That I personally feel that it isn’t, is less important; politicians and those who influence them should come to make this decision based on facts and evidence, away from hysteria.

Away from language which George Orwell, in 1946, described as ‘designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’

He went for the political left as well as much as the political right in this regard, as well as advertisers and politicians; but he reserved a special vitriol for those who mask the reality of war with language designed to confuse.

‘The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink…

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.’

Defenceless villages like Idlib. Never heard of it? Bombs hit a crowded marketplace there on Sunday. At least 40 dead.

—————————

 

 

 

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Fighting an idea with violence.

Is doomed to fail.

Because you can’t kill everybody who has that idea.

This is particularly true with extremist ideologies, which have at their heart the concept of martyrdom.

It’s like the 1980s arcade game Asteroids.

You shoot the asteroid and create several more.

They need martyrs.

Because this is a promise of eternal life in heaven.

Do you see how killing people who believe in this is not a deterrent?

It is the opposite.

‘It’s because of Islam, right?’

Well no. I’m secular please don’t blame me for Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot.

There are more than a billion people who are Muslims, the best guess for Isis troop strength seems to be about 20 – 30, 000. So do the maths. I can’t.

They want this ‘us versus them’ illusion, like we are so different. This binary clash of civilisations falsehood is a thing they encourage. It’s clearly not true.

I’m lucky to have been to several countries in the Arab world – which isn’t a great phrase as they bicker amongst themselves as much as people in ‘the Christian world’ or ‘the West’ or whatever it is.

Always had a good time. Always met nice people. Always felt incredibly welcomed. Always felt embarrassed how people wouldn’t let me pay for stuff: even taxi drivers.

‘You are from England? Be my guest, don’t pay.’

Wow. A taxi driver letting you off the fare. Let that sink in.

So he ruined it by telling me how much he liked Top Gear, which is apparently big in the Middle East, but this act of kindness has stuck in my mind.

Chaos theory is nonsense of course, a butterfly flapping its wings doesn’t change anything, but an act of kindness can stick in your mind and have this effect. So anybody who I think might be racist about ‘the Arabs’ gets the cab driver story from me, plus a few other stories of kindness shown to me by people from other countries, and in theory maybe they won’t be racist to people who will take offence and become a jihadist.

Even if this doesn’t work, being kind to people from other communities is quite a nice thing to do for its own sake.

But people support them in the region?

No. Read the Isis in-house magazine.

(you really should do this. Know your enemy, and don’t let a third party interpret their ideas for you. It’s here: http://www.clarionproject.org/news/islamic-state-isis-isil-propaganda-magazine-dabiq )

It’s packed with criticism of other Muslims.

They hate other Muslims, other Muslims hate them.

Like Millwall, they don’t care.

Their interpretation of the Koran is obsessed with death and the apocalypse and is not widely shared by most Muslims.

Their recruitment tool is victimhood.

The West hate us so we will destroy the West.

They succeed.

I saw a profile picture on a Facebook

‘I hate Islam’

Brilliant.

If you are Isis.

This is exactly what they want.

They want to generate a bit of hatred, some of it will take hold: recruitment.

In the style of a Vis Top Tip:

World Leaders – stop bombing the wrong people.

That would also help.

Innocent people being bombed is an excellent recruitment tool for violent extremists.

It generates revenge and martyrdom

Not in many people.

But you only need a tiny tiny percentage, as discussed.

Injustice breeds extremism.

Mosques became the centre of revolt in countries which were occupied by Europeans or which were governed by dictators who were backed by the West, because they couldn’t close the mosques.

Isis could only exist in opposition to the Assad regimes which were propped up by the rest of the world for decades. Nearly 50 years of human rights abuses, states of emergency, torture, detention without trial. So an ethical foreign policy would help.

So what to do?

Acknowledge history.

In Algeria the French secret police would drop rebel leaders into the sea from helicopters, and then go on to train the Argentinian Junta in how to torture people.

In Paris in 1961 the secret police murdered dozens of Algerians, and dropped them into the Seine. Nobody knows how many.

This is context: It should not need stating that this does not justify any acts of revenge, decades later. But I get the impression that a lot of people don’t get this context.

If you are Russian, vote out your leaders who are instrumental in blocking unilateral action in the region, and contributing to the ongoing civil war.

If you are a world leader: put pressure  on China who seem to be backing Russia’s stance on the Assad regime out of old habits.

Beware the language of conflict.

‘This is targeted bombing though,’ somebody said.

I will decide the adjectives, thanks.

All bombing in the history of the world has been described by those carrying it out as targeted. It looks amazing in the videos they release when the bombs hit the right target. And you don’t get to see the rest.

Jihadi John is possibly dead, said the authorities days before Beirut and Paris were attacked.

‘We’ll know from his phone records. If he stops using his phone, he’s dead. The vehicle we hit is too mangled for us to be sure.’

Nobody is talking about the bombing of Jihadi John now: whether it was a successful assassination or the killing of another innocent.

‘Collateral damage’ being the phrase they used to describe the killing of innocent people by accident, a word deliberately used in order to minimise how bad it is to kill somebody by mistake as part of your conflict. In the kind of places where some people think that life matters a bit less.

The idea that ‘violent death and taking down some people with you and then heaven’ is ‘better than life in its current form’ tends to come from places where life isn’t so great in the first place.

Palestinian kids do this; no job, no future, suicide by running into Israeli soldiers. A version of ‘suicide by cop’. You end up on a poster of martyrs.

Some young men copy them, in the way they copied Kurt Cobain, even though their circumstances are different.

Give people a better idea.

Give people a better opportunity.

Reduce inequality.

Don’t invade the wrong countries.

Invading countries, I repeat, is not the best way to deal with terrorists: the weapons, infrastructure, ideology, leadership structure, and methods are associated closely with countries which have been invaded.

Campaign against the arms trade and lobby for a reduction in weapons? There’s 100 million AK 47s kicking about so it’s a challenge. It’s an expensive amnesty for sure, but better value than the cost of more and more weapons.

Don’t look to the narrative arc of a violent movie for solutions to complex problems.

Acknowledge and seek measures to uphold human rights. These aren’t perfect, but they are the best tool we have for resolving conflict amongst people and delivering justice.

Education, education, education.

There are some well educated terrorists for sure, plus some who have had every opportunity in life. But most aren’t. The countries with the poorest and least educated people generate the most terrorists and suffer the most from acts of terror.

When one of the failed London bombers was captured: he grovelled.

He mentioned human rights

‘I have human rights you know’

My first thought:

‘Human rights?

After attempting to murder people?

How dare you?

You’ve forfeited those through your actions’

A bit later I thought:

‘You do have human rights; because they are inalienable. You cannot take them away. Your scummy actions will not cause me to change my view on this, nor cause me to deny you your rights. The right to justice, a fair trial.

By not allowing your action to change my view on human rights, we can be seen to be carrying out justice. My instinct might be to put a bullet in your cowardly face* has the potential to cause another injustice, for all the world to see. People might cheer me on, but why create another martyr? Because we know that martyrdom, along with  Islamophobia, is a key recruiting tool.’

(* I wasn’t there incidentally. I just read about it)

You may carry out inhuman wrongs. You may choose this path. You may parade your ‘prisoners’ and demand ransom. We should have nothing to do with it.

The subsequent appeals, incidentally, failed. The way in which they were arrested, questioned and offered legal representation were found in the European Court of Human Rights were found to be exemplary. I’m sure it cost a lot of tax money to establish this. But better than the alternative, to waste the guy.

To actually bend the rules. To say – actually, because you are terrorists, we will deny you your human rights it’s a special case.

Because then you allow terrorists to dilute your commitment to human rights, to make you do bad things.

ISIS captives wear orange, in a parody of those held at Guantanamo Bay.

Guantanamo Bay is exactly what violent extremists had in mind. The perfect recruitment tool. Torture and humiliate your enemies, deny them rights.

Beware, too, the revenge stories told using the laser guided language of technology.

That you can ‘take people out’ with ‘targeted’ or ‘clinical’ or ‘precision’ strikes.

People live with people. Have you ever seen an explosion? You will frequently  get the people you want to kill, but not others.

You know how angry ‘we’ are because of the killing of innocents? That’s how angry other people get when you kill innocent people too. Even if they are unlucky enough to live in the same town as people belonging to this awful nihilistic, apocalyptic, ignorant, bullying, illogical, incoherent death cult.

It’s a category fail. Similar to the category fail that, in the minds of Isis which sees all people in Paris as a legitimate target. Be better.

I’ve heard it said we should close our borders.

Great. Maybe do that, maybe stop rock concerts too, because they are clearly a risk. Shut the borders, forget about human rights and stop people from traveling?

I don’t want to live in that place.

Mostly there’s not much we can do. And getting angry just makes it all much worse.

Learn about the conflicts around the world. Vote for people with integrity, look to build bridges. Be nicer to each other that before. Give some money to people fleeing violence who come from poor countries if you can afford it.

Choose life innit.

The Sun is a compassionate family newspaper. We know this because in 1987, after the Zeebrugge ferry disaster, in which 193 people died, the Sun organised a charity single called Ferry Aid. Because the Sun cares about people who die in maritime accidents, they will be something similar this week?

No. Not this time. Katie Hopkins – writing in the Sun – says she doesn’t care. Her words: “Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show me skinny people looking sad. I still don’t care.”

Her views are extreme and presumably designed to provoke outrage; but plenty of people are sure that immigration is the big problem for the UK; there’s even a political party dedicated to the issue. So it’s as important as the environment.

The immigration debate is clearly emotional; but lets pretend we are capable of being rational and think about the issue in terms of logic.

Because immigrants are acting logically based on the best knowledge available to them. Think of what UKIP want for Britain: jobs, education, decent healthcare, human rights. These are the motivations people have for getting on a boat in the first place.

The UKIP policy on immigration is on a surface level simple – just prevent it from happening.*

Stop immigration? Stop people living and working outside the country in which they are born? Stop them moving in order to find  a better life for themselves in the way which has characterised the history of humanity?

It’s jawdroppingly stupid as a ‘solution’ to the problem, notwithstanding the fact that blaming foreigners and outsiders has a long history of ending badly for all concerned.

For one thing, we in the UK are net exporters of people. This is a good thing. Living and working abroad were defining experiences for me, including the welcome I received from complete strangers who could just as easily been mean.

The thought of being prevented from doing so, staying in a neglected post-industrial corner of Britain? It’s not a great thought.

Travelling, behaving internationally, makes us less likely to start wars because we think of people in other countries as people rather than people you call cockroaches.

(It doesn’t always work out: UKIP has an active branch in Spain. That UKIP is popular in Spain is a tragicomical logic problem, a bit like the fact that UKIPPERS spend so much time banging on about how great Britain is and then grumble about immigration)

Secondly, to be isolationist and British… lets think that one through. So you invent gunboat diplomacy, start an industrial revolution from the profits of the transatlantic slave trade, using the biggest Empire in the history of the world for raw material and a market? You then claim ownership of huge swathes of the planet, introducing your foreign religion, language and power structures all over the world, establishing self-serving but entirely false borders  in places which decades later are the cause of conflict and misery? Involve yourself in serial botched military interventions (including one based on fabricated evidence) and whilst selling weapons to people who supply  terrorists … then try to be isolationist?

The UKIP solution to immigration is so lacking in logic it would make Mr Spock depressed. The relatively good news is that there are much better solutions.

For one, reduce global inequality so that people are less strongly motivated to leave their country of origin.

Now, Farage wants to make Britain (only Britain) more prosperous whilst reducing foreign aid. This would effectively make it less attractive to live in those very places you want people to stay. Is that logical?

If you were being logical you would be thinking globally about inequality. If people cannot live prosperously and peacefully where they are, they will move. This is obvious? So try and make where all people live peaceful and prosperous, not just your little surface area.

Like a lot of bad ideas from the Victorians that we can’t quite shed, the notion of the world as a system of competing nation states, a zero sum game in which you can only prosper at the expense of others, has never been true. The reverse is true.

But this Britain versus the rest of the world thing won’t go away. Ironically it’s not even a particularly British thing. Petty nationalism is a global phenomenon – we didn’t invent it.

If we want Britain to be ‘great’ we would move beyond just thinking about Britain and acknowledge our karmic debt of honour to the countries we once treated as our own – which is what Britain did to most of the countries experiencing the kind problems which lead to the desperate emigration we are seeing today. That would be truly patriotic: if we truly do believe in the oft-quoted and self-declared British values of fairplay and decency.

Or perhaps it’s just our duty as world citizens.  If we believe that all people are created equal and therefore equally deserving of human rights, then we should getting angry about immigration in a totally different way. That is, angry that people are dying in barbaric conditions, rather than that they might try and live where we do.

Lets show some compassion to the people Katie Hopkins charmingly refers to as cockroaches.

Until we do – another massive species fail.

Katie: the washed up bodies you don’t care about might not share your skin tone, but if you picture them as your friends and family and you might start taking the solutions more seriously.

Nigel: Until we do – another massive species fail. if you had the bad luck to be born in a country experiencing conflict or where economic opportunities confine its citizens to poverty it’s pretty likely you would do exactly the same things as those tragically killed at sea this week. So what are you going to do about it? Because your current solutions are really, really bad.

Disaffected potential voters: it’s too late to start your own party, for this election and I feel bad that you don’t like the choice there is. But go for the least unacceptable choice to help prevent UKIP from influencing the political debate.

*It’s actually a little weirder than that; have a look. Given that this is their main thing it’s remarkably  underwhelming .  2,500 more Border Agency staff? Really? And confusing too. The vague, euphemistic  language evokes the early Nazis before they could say whatever they wanted.

 

My first thought on learning about the tragic events at the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo was ‘wow France has a satirical magazine.’

My former colleague Will’s first thought was: ‘they did a really bad job of silencing the now world famous satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo.’

My second thought was ‘maybe they have the same PR people as The Interview’ swiftly followed by ‘you are probably a bad person and should certainly not post intrusive thoughts like that on social media.’

Followed by ‘well the victims used to work for a now world-famous French satirical magazine* so they presumably liked bad taste jokes.’

They liked jokes more than the people who murdered them, so we shouldn’t stop making bad jokes. For once, we can actually say, ‘it’s what they would have wanted’.

It’s just too depressing that somebody would want to kill you for a cartoon.

Any type of illustration. Any flag, symbol, colour, shape or thought. It’s, as people keep saying, barbaric.

So what is the civilised response?

Je Suis Charlie is a good start. Kind of. Solidarity. Not to be scared (although I wanted to be there in Paris with a placard saying ‘il y ne pas Charlie, il e’st un tres naughty boy’).

And there’s the binary us versus them thing. I don’t like cartoonists being murdered nor do I like endorsing the editorial values of a magazine I don’t know much about and I try to avoid wilfully insulting someone’s culture (even if it’s my right to do so). Does that make me a bit of a Charlie? You can’t be. It seems to be all or nothing. Us versus them.

Certainly the younger me would have changed my Facebook page to a picture of the prophet Mohamed, with ‘je suis the prophet Mohamed’.

Because how dare you tell me not to draw a picture of a deity whose existence I don’t even believe? How dare *you* censor *me*? In what way is your belief system so superior that you can prevent me from saying what I want about yours?

Except Facebook didn’t exist when I was young.

And is this about avenging the Prophet Mohamed? Really? Because some delusional murderers said so? How do they get to make that decision?

This is an insult to more than a billion muslims who – though they may not particularly like it when you insult their god – think sinful to murder someone for it. But who will get caught in the backlash anyway.

So I don’t believe the stated motive of the murders, however comforting it might be on the surface. It’s the equivalent of saying that ‘she was asking for it.’ You don’t let the perpetrators have the final word, nor control the debate. Which depressingly happens.

Because with the crushing inevitability of a Mac versus PC discussion, lots of atheists and Christians have decided that it’s a Muslim God and an inherently  barbaric violent religion at the core of the problem.

Which thankfully isn’t the problem: if all billion plus Muslims thought it was ok to attack non believers there wouldn’t be many non believers left.

As an atheist, I would get really annoyed if I got blamed for Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin.

It reminded me of the comment which briefly appeared on  Wikipedia after the London bombings: ‘Kill All Muslims’.

A chilling message: and it exactly what the suicide bombers ‘would have wanted.’  People that commit acts of terror thrive on this kind of thing.

It is a specific ideology which some Muslims adhere to;  it’s impossible to ignore. So where did it come from?

The disclaimer here is that nothing in the history of the French treatment of Algeria justifies murder; rather that it’s important to understand the backstory of how violent, nihilist strands of extremist Islam ideology come to be closely associated with resistance.

And the French treatment of Algeria, within living memory, was barbaric. Apart from invading and taking it over in the first place, they put in place a two tier system, an inverse caliphate if you will, where French people lived a pretty nice French life in pleasant boulevards (technically it was part of France), whilst indigenous – Muslim – people were illiterate, poor, and unemployed.

Muslim neighbourhoods were shanty towns, police harassment was rife, life expectancy was low, and educational opportunities were limited. It was the systematic repression of a people who were treated as inferior.

This was just after World War Two, yet without apparent irony the inevitable Algerian resistance was crushed in ‘peacekeeping’ missions by the French authorities.

This was characterised by systematic and covert torture and mutilation as well as the disappearance of several thousand resistance leaders.

They dropped people out of helicopters.

Paul Teitgen, secretary-general of the secret police in Algiers and a hero of the French resistance who had himself been tortured by Nazis compared detention centres to Gestapo cellars.

Those who survived are alive, and those who carried out these acts, largely unpunished. Atrocities were committed on all sides, as peacekeeping descended into full-scale war.

Obviously this does not justify anything whatsoever. But perhaps explains the context: how many Muslim Algerians got so angry. This was the generation of the parents of the people who we think are the killers.

It has as much to do with human rights abuse as faith.  Although faith and identity became tangled as in so many other places invaded by European powers, where people define themselves in opposition to the invaders and develop an anti-Western identity.

The current ideology of terror is a nihilistic and stupid interpretation of the Koran and one which is rejected by most Muslims.

But it is perhaps not surprising that some people who have been denied full access to education and opportunity should come up with a world view that is not  discursive, sophisticated and inclusive.

Obviously the instinct for revenge is strong and natural. But it needs to be targeted.

Harassing the wrong people, invading the wrong country, for example, has clearly created more terrorists. A lesson we could have learned from Algeria, where ‘peacekeeping’ ended up in full-scale war.

Or the ongoing War On Terror (sic) which has killed a number of people we can only round off to the nearest significant figure.

We don’t know, for example, how many people have been killed in covert drone strikes: 2, 400 according to the [admittedly-not always accurate] Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Je suis Asif Iqbal, anyone? Je suis Bibi Mamana? Plenty of names to choose from on the BIJ’s Naming The Dead website.

Innocent people caught in the crossfire. Victims of a misplaced revenge gone badly wrong.

I hope the death of the Parisian cartoonists creates no more… and that the ensuing debate is all about what counter terror measures actually work.

 

 

 

 

* called Charlie Hebdo: http://www.charliehebdo.fr/index.html

Dear Ruperto,

I thought I’d send in a field report from the Exotic Rooftop Restaurant, Par Ganj, New Delhi, India. It’s been a while since we last visited, in 1996.

Getting online has been a quest in itself.

‘First World Problem’ I hear people say, with increasing frequency these days, of course I have first world problems as I come from   the first world, I’m hardly going to have bilharzia and be worried about people from the next village kidnapping my fifth child and selling him to the rebel troops.

So my hotel should have wifi. ‘Maybe is coming tomorrow.’ That familiar head wiggle.

It should have been working whilst I was during the session on how to use social media with campaigners for fairer conditions in the garment industry: not for the first time I find myself describing Twitter with words and mime.

I still think I spend as much time looking for places with wifi as five years ago, just with higher levels of reliance, expectation and disappointment.

Anyway to Connaught Place, the only street name  I could think of as I’m staying in the slightly weird diplomatic quarter where there are lots of parks and embassies and not much else apart from my hotel: obviously the charming/annoying haggle over fare  still exists.

But obviously, it being Saturday morning, it’s half day closing. I actually quite like that somebody [presumably British?] issued a decree to close the shops down for half of potentially the busiest shopping day. For almost an hour I wander, searching for a cybercafé [or what is known in many places these days as simply ‘a café’]. I can’t tell you if it’s changed much because I literally don’t remember it at all.

Languid dogs with skin showing from the beatings, paan spit marks, beggars and potbellied, dirty-looking men sniff, spit and vend snacks: it seems  designed to test Western sensibilities. In between big chain stores with welcomely aggressive aircon: M&S, Levis, and Benetton. Has anybody ever bought anything from Benetton?

Several false leads, it really looks like there should be a wifi-enabled café in this the upmarket centre of the capital of modern India . I ask several people who evidently have no need for a ‘cybercafe’ . The closest I get to the Internet is a tourist office where a young chap offered use of his terminal, the trade off being lots of spiel about tours, I need to do several hours of catching up with work stuff. And frankly I can’t remember passwords like I used to.

(reminds me of an awkward moment I recently had in Tanzania where a chap thought I was looking for a ‘wife’, rather than actual ‘wifi’)

I visit a number of Costa Coffees to no avail. What’s the point in globalisation if it doesn’t bring wifi to me personally?

Like a classic Westerner, getting all hot and sweaty: disbelief that a central business district won’t sell me over-priced bland coffee with annoying names in exchange for the Internet. I would have even broken my Starbucks rule but naturally it was closed for repairs.

I imagine lots of people – both Indians and foreigners – have sidestepped the need for a web café through using devices with a  data sim.

I think in 1996 it was still more normal to see a sign for  ‘fax service’ than for ‘internet service’, but Internet cafes were starting to emerge. Personally in 1996 I don’t think I would have had anybody to send an email to.

You went travelling, you vanished for those months you were gone, perhaps rejecting everything you once stood for upon your return, or practicing a new religion: there were no incremental selfies to warn people of what you were to become.

You just turned up at your local pub, looking completely different.

I was directed to ‘CCCL Mall’ by what young people inaccurately call a ‘random’, who seemed helpful rather than a hustler.

It was a short tuk tuk drive away: they still have these, but now they have a little electronic meter on them which as you can imagine are routinely ignored. I used to get really cross about rickshaw types ripping off foreigners and dual pricing in general, it’s one of those things that doesn’t seem to matter now.

Delhi traffic has got bigger: there’s flyovers and metros now and bigger cars. You still see Enfield Bullets and Honda Heroes with lots of people on them and bundles of stuff but there are all kinds of other vehicles too – the average vehicle size is increasing. Plus they still have cycle rickshaws and cows although fewer of them. In a tuk tuk in several lanes of traffic you feel like you are on a little boat in the ocean. Crossing the road is as much like frogger as it ever was, but now it’s speeded up a bit.

There are a billion or so Indians, and as they get richer I wonder where the extra oil will come from to keep them in their bigger vehicles, but then I do tend to worry about things.

Anyway, ‘CCCL mall’ turns out to be more of an ‘emporium’, selling the usual tat, big wooden elephants and tables that would look wrong in any room. I thought I’d been stitched up, but they did indeed offer wifi although clearly not without risk to data. If I want share my personal information with strangers, I’ll use a Western data mining company like Facebook, thanks very much.

I try approaching people who explain to me in English they can’t speak English, and that perchance for perambulatory advice I should seek an alternative source of information in order to achieve the desired effect both linguistically and geographically.

Or get approached by hustlers who clearly have no interest in my wish for a web café and who suggest a particular emporium instead. The classic foreigner in India problem: you actually do need some information but not from the people who are offering to help. When they ask what I’m looking for I tell them solitude. Look still cost nothing by the way, and England is still good country.

They are quite pushy – I think we got a bit freaked out by all this hassle and hustle especially in Kanchanaburi. It’s possibly a good place to have your first non European travel experience, everywhere else more or less seems a bit easier after India. I’m sure it ahem set me off on a quest to seek an end to injustice too.

I think I was angry then as I am now about the inequality of the place and people banging on about how spiritual it is, when even the spiritual centres seem incredibly materialistic places in which human suffering is routinely ignored.

The caste system still exists, as people kept reminding me; I spot a lady facing a window, her head on the ground, in rags, a parody of shame. It may be an act, either way it seems an inhumane way to go about earning a living, to make yourself appear as worthless as possible in order to receive the flick of a coin from somebody with greater life chances and more coins than you.

The British must have thought they’d landed on their feet, to find a society in which everyone knew their place, where there was a subservient underclass to do all the shitty jobs, and a built-in belief system that makes people think it’s not a problem because of a future afterlife scenario.

Maybe it gives people something to look forward to and all that, religious tolerance, bla bla, but really? I think it’s just a way of powerful people maintaining a status quo and a get out clause to do nothing to help the poorest people: a complete con.

That the Brits did nothing about it is not to their credit, but they can hardly be blamed for decades of subsequent apartheid-style discrimination, which continues in an era of economic boomtime.

So you have people who are basically living a post apocalyptic lifestyle, wild haired and eating out of bins, and people like me stepping over them guiltily, whilst looking for a way to connect with colleagues thousands of miles away using a network of linked computers using fibre optic cables and satellites or something. Captain Kirk.1 would have had something to say on the issue it were an alien planet I’m sure.

I have no idea where I am except that it’s Delhi, although spotting a sign for Par Ganj I head there. I associate this place with Westerners in specialist flowing cotton trousers, the kind of which used to be issued to anthropology students.

(notes: as I wrote that paragraph a couple walked past in exactly those trousers: him pink, her purple)

Where there are noserings, wifi and bottled water are sure to follow. I follow the sign, being mapless. You can’t buy a sim card without ID and a delay, so I have no information at all about my location – the horror – but walk on developing larger and larger sweatpatches like a character from ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’.

I end up, as is often the case, in an area of light industry. There lots of manholes you could vanish into and people building or welding stuff, a clinic that offers a stool test here, an amusingly named hotel there. I feel like a spoilt idle foreigner, which is accurate.

Once or twice people say things like ‘friend, don’t go there it is dangerous’ and given I’m carrying a laptop worth a few years’ street hustler salary, I take heed although somewhat conscious it could be a double bluff.

There are still lots of amusingly named shops and hotels – extremely sexy shop and shoppy shop could catch on in Europe I reckon. There is a guy wearing a t shirt which reads ‘I love the smell of bacon in the morning,’ although he really, really doesn’t look like he falls into that demographic.

There are people who seem to do nothing at all and others who are working their socks off. Smell-wise nothing has changed. Loud hawking? Check. Annoying loud horns and over-use thereof? Oh yes.

After an hour or two hours walking in gradually increasing heat I found the Par Ganj as we might remember the place. It seems batik will never die; the thing now amongst your travellers is rickshaws for all the shopping: you don’t ride the rickshaw, you put your stuff in the back. Still a silver bearded skinny old boy doing the humping, still generally twice the age and half the body mass of the person they are doing the humping for.

I witnessed an American woman flip out at an old guy whose rickshaw was full of bundles of something. She was really shouting at the guy for taking a wrong turning, and totally unembarrassed about using him much as you would an ox or a mule. I quite like the idea that some hippy emporium for floaty people in San Francisco will vend shawls based on such interactions.

I finally find my wifi and roof garden even though it is, despite assurances, so slow as to not really be of any use at all which is why I’m writing this instead of organizing my next set of training sessions as I should be.

Even in the tourist bit, after a while tourists start to really stand out. So many of them seem pale and miserable… probably avoiding smiling to avoid getting hustled but it’s nice to watch from a rooftop. Some of them look so nervous I want to hustle them myself. In my straw poll I notice that there seem to be more Asian tourists – Chinese and Japanese? And there are still plenty of Israelis amongst the Europeans and Americans.

Still lots of young women who wear very skimpy clothing too, despite the Lonely Planet telling them not to. There goes a lady who has gone the other way and whose head to toe neo Indian outfit including headscarf draws plenty of attention   . A couple of really old long haired anthropology trouser hippies stroll by. ‘Aren’t you bored of India yet?’ I think to myself although I imagine people are looking at me in much the same fashion.

I think that brings us up to now, although looking across I can see the Everest  Kitchen Roof Top, which looks somehow familiar. Is that where Des and the other one planned to by a boat and sail slowly down the Ganges?

I order the totally predictable fried rice with garlic and chilly for old times sake and listen to tourists in vest tops plan the next stage of their adventure as I plan my next moves, one of them is Skyping her manoeuvres in detail via a smartphone.

I’m partly disappointed because I think she should be enjoying the moment, and you wonder if this is the generation who will never miss a connection because they communicate electronically rather than through messages in guesthouses and hopefully-passed on telephone messages, but the other part of me is simply jealous of her connection.

 

Ta ta for now,

Nick

 

 

Update: there’s a metro! It’s brilliantly cold and pretty much full of men, despite the ‘ladies only’ section. I use it off off peak, but the jostle potential is huge. I hadn’t previously noticed the extent to which there are hardly any women in most of the places that you end up; perhaps the Delhi rape riots brought this to thought to the fore. So many men to so few women in public spaces does not seem healthy to me.

I also hung out at the Delhi Race Club  (1940) [sic], an unusual place. There was no race on the day I visited, in fact they only hold races on Tuesdays, which is brilliant. But there was still betting on horses: there are several betting booths inside a big warehouse type thing next to the actual course, apparently they bet on races all over India with results coming in via ‘teledex’.

 

I imagine this lack of betting shops is to do with an old skool colonial law banning betting shops: as with the half day closing, I imagine the Man will change all of this when it starts totting up the potential revenue streams, but for the moment the Delhi Race Club (1940) does a roaring trade in jubilation/misery.

What I like about the Delhi Race Club (1940) is that at the time when the British Empire was most at threat, as Nazi bombers circled Europe, and Japan was planning an invasion that would overturn the Brits in Singapore, Malaysia and parts of India itself [just] and arguably speed up the eventual collapse of the British Empire itself, there were some people who thought it was a good idea to open a race course.

It’s been another bad week for humanity.

Why do some people want to kill each other so much? Why are so many children being killed? And is there anything we can do?

In 2001 I used to cover the Middle East, albeit from a studio in North London for a news agency which supplied a web service called America Online (AOL). I would phone a rabbi one day and an imam the next to try and achieve balance over time.

Lots of journalists love covering the Middle East, but I hated it. It was depressing.

I got a fairly equal amount of hate mail from Israeli and Palestinians – i.e. a lot. You could often work out what the interviewee was going to say from their surname.

Although the worst was targeted at people who broke out of their positions: they’d get flak from both sides instead of just one.

The hatemail, incidentally, tended to feature reference to dogs, pigs and incest suggestions, whoever sent it. A strange thing to have in common.

It seemed to be such a predictable stalemate. A bit like Northern Ireland. It seemed like the craziest 5% on either ‘side’ of the conflict were dominating proceedings and defining the news agenda.

I’ve subsequently worked in several areas affected by conflict; and learnt a lot more about its nature. If I knew back them, what I know now, as they say.

Because, as a colleague pointed out, most people cover conflict without knowing anything about its nature, like reporting a football match without knowing the laws of the game.

What we know about conflicts, and how they end, has the potential to be a very positive and powerful force.

It may be crass to be pointing this out as body bags, some of them tiny, are pictured amongst the rubble.

That we are less violent as a species than ever and even some seemingly unendable conflicts are a thing of the past is of no comfort if you are unlucky enough to be living in one of the areas currently experiencing invasion or shelling.

That you are less likely to die violently in 2014 than at just about any point in the history of the world presumably provides no comfort.

Importantly, we know much more about how violent conflicts end and – just as relevant – how violent conflicts don’t end.

You hear a lot that religions are the cause of all wars. I think I probably thought this at some point.  Not least because the ‘God told me this land is ours’ argument is hard to overturn in people’s hearts and minds.

It is an apparently convincing – and comforting – argument. It offers an apparent  solution. But there are some major flaws with this argument.

Conflicts do not end when everybody becomes atheist. Whilst many feature religion, several others do not.

From Hitler to Stalin, via Pol Pot and the Rwandan genocide there have been several war-like non believers and violent conflicts that have nothing to do with religion.

Clearly there are people of all faiths who are non violent.

And a mass de-conversion of people who have a religions faith is not a practical option. There are one and a half a billion Muslims, two billion Christians, a billion or so Hindus… who will make everyone atheist?

It would involve people rejecting their entire belief systems, forcing people to go against the things they learnt as children from loving families.

Perhaps most importantly, tolerance of other people’s ideas beats turning people around to your point of view. This is a really important aspect of lasting conflict resolution.

It’s a logistical and practical fact in managing conflict: you will have to work with people who don’t share your outlook on things.

This presents a tough problem, because you don’t want to be tolerant of people doing very bad things.  But generally this is not many people. The craziest 5% thing. The problem is that some people look at the craziest 5% and see them as indicative of the other ‘side’ and either become exasperated or justified in their own violence.

I keep putting ‘side’ in quote marks, because this can be a misleading term. We are used to thinking in a binary fashion. Mac versus PC, Left versus Right, Palestine versus Israel, Good versus Evil.

Possibly the idea that there are two sides in a conflict is part of the problem. Because what we do know is that conflicts end when people shift from their deeply entrenched, culturally-reinforced and often simplified positions, towards thinking more about their many more usually mutual interests which kickstarted those positions in the first place.

If two groups compete over land, a classic resource-based conflict, they often get lost in the ownership and flags, or the language and gods, issues rather than the benefits deriving from the land.

Resolution lives in this common ground: here both groups can agree that they want the economy to work and the schools to be good and freedom of movement – human rights basically.

Lots of things get in the way of this discussion, not least acts of violence themselves.

It’s unfortunate that conflict resolution through violence is such an enduring and successful meme, cinematically in particular. There is no relationship between military might and moral right, but we’ve got used to it. People feel paradoxically safer with more weapons in the world.

I had an interesting online discussion with an Israeli guy on Facebook about the Middle East early in the week. It had started out with a comment about the bias of the BBC made by a British friend who complained that there was bias, that the suffering of Israelis had not been mentioned enough.

I expressed my surprised at this, and we got into a conversation. It was a respectful discussion, even though we disagreed a lot, and it was interesting to hear an Israeli view. It was useful to hear this:

‘What is Israel to do? Just let Hamas get on with it and not retaliate because they may hit a nearby house?’

This is an interesting question. The idea that the only way you can respond to missile attacks is through more missile attacks which cause more missile attacks seems strange to me, as a pacifist.

I responded:

“If your child had been killed by an Israeli rocket, would you be a) more inclined to peace or b) looking for retaliation. If enough people answer b), then it’s the wrong thing to do. Given this started over the awful deaths of Israeli teenagers, lots of people will think b) So all the options I’d explore would not involve sending missiles. So I’d negotiate, I wouldn’t have sealed off Hebron, stop illegal settlements, I’d basically do the things that Amnesty International recommends…

“Sending missiles into Palestine does not work, it hasn’t worked in the past and it continues to not work. Once you think this it becomes a murderous act…”

It went on a bit longer than this, of course: and I hope I’m not being unfair in quoting out of context. But it’s weirdly easy to meet strangers from other countries, and it can be a good opportunity to meet people with different outlooks.

And maybe change your mind (or someone else’s) on world issues.

“Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed,” as the UN puts it.

The problem is that a lot of the ‘debate’ is so poor. I mentioned Macs versus PCs earlier not to be flippant, but I’ve observed that if you go online with a software problem it’s inevitable that, at some point, somebody will say that you should be using a Mac [or vice versa]. People pile in, it escalates. People have already made their minds up. Cycle forums get heated about helmets. It’s rarely a nuanced debate.

A lot of the debate about simply finding new ways to re-state one particular position: a viral going round amongst Israeli sympathisers will show schoolchildren being indoctrinated in Palestine. On the other side racist Israeli teenage tweets about Arabs.

In fact both are useful bits of data in understanding what is happening. But both are generally used to back up a position. Look at how bad the other side is.

I like the logical fallacies wallchart for plainly explaining some of the ways in which people justify their views:

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/pdf/FallaciesPoster24x36.pdf

People add a fact to their position and come up with an illogical solution. As in the following equation*:

F+P=IS

So here is a Fact:

“Some people in Hamas are happy to kill civilians.”

And a Position:

“We need to defend our land through violent means”

Which leads to an Irrational Solution:

“Lets send missiles into areas where there are Hammas even if it kills children.”

Or another way:

“Some people in Israel are happy to kill civilians.”

Plus:

 “We need to reclaim our land through violent means”

Equals:

“Lets send missiles into areas where there are Israelis even if it kills civilians and they fire back.”

Of course if you add a ‘non’ to the violent, the range of solutions will increase. As a pacifist I tend to advocate non violent solutions.

Here are some facts:

There are more American Jews than Israeli Jews and they are a powerful lobbying group because America is a rich country

Many Jews advocate for a peaceful solution in the Middle East (but some Muslims want to kill them anyway)

Many Muslims advocate for a peaceful solution in the Middle East (but some Jews want to kill them anyway)

Most Muslims don’t want to kill anyone at all

Most Israelis don’t want to kill anyone at all

Many conflicts in the world happen in places where there was a colonial era land grab  and many of these places are in Muslim areas

The treatment of Jews under the Third Reich was a crime against humanity

Some people are horribly anti-Semetic

Some people are horribly anti-Muslim

It’s wrong to kill children

Many British people of my generation and older have been subconsciously brought up pro-Israel because of terrible things that happened during World War Two a conflict which had a huge cultural impact

[and so on]

And here are some different solutions or interpretations based when you add them to a position:

There are more American Jews than Israeli Jews and they are a powerful lobbying group because America is a rich country (therefore kill all Americans and Jews because there is a Zionist conspiracy)

There are more American Jews than Israeli Jews and they are a powerful lobbying group because America is a rich country (therefore lobby this group)

Many conflicts in the world happen in places where there was a colonial era landgrab and recent invasion and many of these places are in Muslim areas (therefore all Muslims are violent, it’s fine to illegally invade them)

Many conflicts in the world happen in places where there was a colonial era landgrab and recent invasion and many of these places are in Muslim areas (therefore all Westerners are bad)

Note that there are a lot of ‘somes’ and ‘manys’ in the truism list.

One of the unexpected benefits of travel is seeing the other side of people’s generalisations; I’ve been in countries where I’ve been blamed for US foreign policy because I was a Westerner (‘Why are you blaming me for things I’ve marched against?’)

Or I’ve had Westerners open up to me because I’m a Brit (‘they should flatten Iraq’ was one memorable comment from an American lady in 2001).

This is the category fail at the heart of how some people think about conflict. In my Facebook conversation with an Israeli, I added the word ‘some’ a lot.

“This is how Palestinians teach their children.”

(This is how SOME Palestinians teach their children)

“Palestinians want to wipe Israel off the map”

(SOME Palestinians want to wipe Israel off the map)

[And so on]

I think the ‘reindividualisation’ of the people on the other side of a conflict is important in order to short people’s positions. It’s achievable, and people are doing it on social media.

http://aplus.com/a/arab-jewish-couple

My New Israeli friend admitted that had no Palestinian friends [virtual or otherwise], and I think many of the Palestinians I’ve met don’t have any Jewish friends either. Certainly many of the people whose hateful comments about the Internet you see cannot have friends ‘on the other side’ because they couldn’t possibly generalise about them in such a way if they did.

If you’ve been lucky enough to live in cosmopolitan cities, you’ll know that knowing a wide range of people makes you less likely to generalise about groups of people.

Once you fail to see people as individuals but as units in a group you don’t like, eg Tutsis, it’s becomes easier to be violent towards those units.

 

category fail: someone sprayed this on the wall of my local mosque, presumably in order to offend the Muslims within who presumably he had never met. I imagine this is because a different Muslim somewhere else did a bad thing.

It’s why anything you do to dehumanise somebody is a very scary thing.  Johan Galtung  – a Norwegian mathematician amongst other things but most well known for being a founding father of peace studies talked a lot about cultural violence.

“Cultural violence” refers to aspects of a culture that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence, and may be exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science.”

It relates to ‘structural violence’:

“Avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs”

Which leads to ‘direct violence’ – and onto the topic of human rights. I mentioned earlier how ‘tolerance of others’ beliefs’ beats ‘getting everyone to believe what you do.’

Human rights seems to be the best system in place to manage the various different beliefs and needs.If you observe human rights, you get to believe what you want. You get to understand everyone else’s right to this as well.

There are lots of problems associated with the genesis of human rights – not least the fact that the UN is associated with an era that created the partition of Indian and Pakistan and the creation of Israel, for example, is something that many Westerners don’t get – or at least it took me several years to grasp.

With human rights nobody is perfectly happy: because you are essentially balancing my right to do X with your right to do Y.

There is a pleasing logic about this, but human rights are beaten by cultural, structural or direct violence.

Take away one group’s right to education [by structural violence] and people will start imposing their dogmatic views through violence of their own, for example.

Think about Boko Haram (BHM), then read this:

(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

So BHM want to take away these rights, but the point is that they didn’t benefit from them in the first place.

Provision of education in Northern Nigerian was spectacularly bad. Now it’s getting worse. It’s easier to start a hateful sect based on narrow dogma where people are uneducated.

The denial of human rights in Israel seems spectacular, and to have lead directly to violence carried out by some people.

Article 22 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

If you buy anything from Israel, you are contributing to an economy whose government is spending money on missile attacks which are not achieving their stated strategic aims, whilst killing several innocent people.

The credibility of the notion of human rights, and bodies which set out to uphold these rights,  is under attack whilst this (and the several other systematic acts of structural violence in the land which was – according to the UN Security Council – illegally annexed) continues

Hamas missile attacks are not achieving their stated strategic aims, whilst killing innocent people and drawing further attacks from Israel. Violent Anti-Semitic commentary by some Palestinian supporters is another barrier to peace negotiations.

I would seem to have got spectacularly off the point of defending Peace Studies.

So, in British broadsheets at this time of year, bright girls from posh schools get pictured mid air, clutching  multiple A* A-level papers.

Most of them would not dream of studying Peace Studies at Bradford, of course. Nor their less photographed male counterparts. People prefer a ‘real degree.’

But wouldn’t it be good if the people who had most choices in life wanted to do something positive about ending violent conflict?

http://www.palestinercs.org/en/