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Another Naive Question...
10 May 2008 .
If, through their nasty little power-games, the Myanmar junta prove responsible for avoidable deaths to the tune of tens of thousands, how are they not guilty of 'Crimes against Humanity'?
An interesting point in a letter to the Independent (from Dr. Julian Caldecott), yesterday: the results of Cyclone Nargis were exacerbated by the clearance of thousands of square miles of swamp, forest and mangrove - encouraged by the late British administration. Remaining mangroves are apparently sparse and were quite unable to resist the winds and storm surges. The doctor says what seems obvious, that, as weather conditions worsen, it becomes increasingly urgent to restore these (and other) natural systems, especially if (as he says) mangrove swamps can provide astonishingly large food supplies in the form of fish and prawn stocks. I might disagree with his final conclusion, however, that the British - having pulled the systems apart in many places - ought to be in the forefront of putting them together again (especially if he is in any way invoking our government): I don't think our record on interfering has always proved so very beneficial to the world, in colonial times or more recently.
Nargis 'Julian Caldecott' mangroves 'crimes against humanity'
The Twenties in Colour.
08 May 2008 .
I've been watching some of Albert Kahn's 1920's film on TV, colour movies, breathtakingly and almost painfully evocative, no matter how often you watch it.
There are scenes of a Gypsy gathering in the South of France. Kahn seems to have made a connection with these private people, Romanies from France, Spain, eastern Europe and all over; children dancing, women dressing up, men proud, desperately poor but utterly dignified... I write 'painfully'; when it comes to these scenes I mean just about intolerably so: with hindsight, I can't help but see the shadow of fascism darkening the Mediterranean sunlight, the horror which a dozen years later made an industry of slaughtering quite probably most of those who were filmed.
'Albert Kahn' Roma Gypsies Nazi
Halmoni.
25 April 2008 .
When I was young, I was in a bowling league for a while; the members were almost all Hong Kong and Singapore Chinese, Koreans and Japanese. I never quite understood why the league hung together, since the Chinese and Koreans (who occasionally had some political differences amongst themselves) would have little to do with the Japanese: the war had been over for twenty five years, but apparently there were still issues simmering just below the surface, even though most of the members had been born after it ended.
Out for a drink one night, one of the Korean guys told me that someone he knew (I suspect one of his family) had been forced to be a 'comfort woman' for the Japanese occupiers. For a while after that, I wondered not that he was a bit distant with the Japanese but that he could bear to be in the same city as them. (But in the end, whatever may be wrong with the generation of 1968, they try not to blame each other for the sins of their fathers.)
So, whenever there's a programme or an article about the comfort women, it catches my eye. One of the things I found difficult to deal with (on my friend's behalf, I tell myself) was the blank denial of those events by the Japanese government; a few years ago, when it finally made a formal (if limited) admission, I felt that an important turning point had been reached.
Now however, it seems that revisionist politicians in that country are trying to reverse the admission. Well, that's probably to be expected. But an article in the Independent drew attention to how elements of the Japanese press are working hard to re-write history. With Dirty Des' Sexpress, and Ned Kelly's Spews of the World, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but when reporters willingly go along with the most reactionary and repellent elements of their societies, it still makes me feel a bit ill.
Just for the record: a dwindling number of women whose lives were destroyed still face the horrifying assertion that they were willing, legal prostitutes. If you're not already familiar with this matter, please, if you can, read the Independent article (The Slaves' Revolt, 24 April) or do your own research. If you find that you feel the same way as I do, please keep it in mind, perhaps blog it, and don't let the revisionists get away with it.
Halmoni 'Comfort women' 'Japan and Korea' revisionism 'The Indpendent' 'Sex trade' 'forced prostitution'
A Childish Tantrum... but it is my site...
18 March 2008 .
I apologise for my posting of last night (the next item, if you're reading blogologically), since my moment of petulance served no useful purpose. I know perfectly well that the world is what it is...
I thought about changing or wiping parts of the posting; but I decided long ago that what I write here should stay, unedited (except for obvious grammatical errors or to avoid being sued), so here it stays. Our frustration is part of how we react to events, which is the point of this site after all.
Most of the time, like sensible folk, I acknowledge the way things are and get on with my life. When there's stuff in the world I don't like, I accept that I can't change everything and that, even if I could, what I think is right may not always be what everyone else thinks is right. Sometimes, though, probably like those same sensible folk, I'm damned if I'm going to sit like a plum duff all the time, letting all the rubbish happen, without saying something.
When we want to be the guys in the white hats, we can find ourselves in a struggle that will probably never be resolved; but it can't, or shouldn't, be walked away from even if we know that at best it's a rather geological process.
So what should I do? Words in the pub don't go very far; words on a website probably not much further (though there's always a chance, I suppose, that The Father Of The Nation will just happen to visit, and have a Damascene moment). I'm too old for party politics - and retain very little respect for party politicians; I'm opposed to violent revolution; and I've lost patience with marching - to be utterly ignored along with the million other souls marching alongside... so what should I do?
Sometimes, I just let my frustration bubble over a bit; hence rather unsophisticated postings for which I then feel I need to apologise.
[The war reporters who put their lives at risk all the time must feel the same way, albeit with more courage than I - or do we think they're just doing what they do to entertain us?]
'war reporters'
Haditha.
17 March 2008 .
I know that some of the opinions I hold are seen as remarkably unsophisticated in some quarters; here comes one of the most naive but also persistent:
I'm watching 'Battle For Haditha', showing on Channel 4. It might as well be My Lai, or Amritsar, or Lidice; the list never ends. I'm tired of shit being broadcast and nothing changing. I'm tired of shit being broadcast and the politicians mouthing the same bland complacencies. I'm tired of shit being broadcast and the world shrugging its shoulders as it heads off for another bout of retail therapy. Not just the cruelties of war: the economic horrors we inflict - kids in clothes factories or silver miners in Peru or sex-trafficked prostitutes raped a dozen times a day in our own cities; the contempt in our racism, social Darwinism and fat-cat greed. And so on and on and on....
Haditha only came to light because of video given to a Time reporter, months later; the Marines, whose men were responsible, hadn't bothered to acknowledge the incident or investigate it. It obviously begs the question of what has happened in Iraq which doesn't happen to have come to light. [The portrayal of Corporal Ramirez, the young man who was the senior survivor of the attack which led up to the massacre in Haditha, was ambiguous...]
It wasn't the programme that brought me to the keyboard, however, but the prayer. After countless civilians, including children, had been killed in a frenzy of uncontrolled anger and blood-lust, a senior marine arrived on the scene, and promptly had all the soldiers present bow their heads in a prayer of thanks for God's help in killing His enemies. I do hope that whoever was making the film was very careful about that (and about everything else)... if it didn't happen as they said, they should hang their heads in shame for imagining it; if it did happen, then God rot those who prayed to Him - or who ever pray to Him - in that way.
That's the end of my moment of petulance, for the time being. But, for what its worth, I have worn the Queen's uniform, and I have thought about these things, and I do acknowledge the effects of adrenalin and fear, and I do realise that what I've been watching has been a portrayal on television; and I still recognise the Mark of Cain when it's stuck under my nose.
Haditha 'My Lai' 'Corporal Ramirez' 'Mark of Cain' 'God's enemies'
The Irredentist Kurds.
05 March 2008 .
"The Kurds now know that within 45 minutes, a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured."
Kurdistan is in the news again; or rather, it isn't. Turkey has invaded Iraqi Kurdistan with what appears to be overwhelming force. Since it did so, news about events there has been noticeable only by its absence. I take it we're assuming that the Turks are behaving with perfect decorum.
Kurdistan is distinctly one of the more insulted areas of the modern world. Go back twenty years, to 1988... What led Saddam to think he could use chemical weapons to devastate around 40 Kurdish villages and, most famously, the city of Halabja (where there were 15,000 immediate casualties and God knows how many since) with impunity - confident that the world would pass on by, which it would have done if he'd not then invaded Kuwait? What, or who, gave him the idea to do so in the first place?.
The quote isn't from Turks or the Iraqis, of course; it comes from a young RAF officer in 1924. His name was Harris and the weapons being used included poison-gas bombs, contrary to the recent Geneva Convention but with the enthusiastic endorsement of the then British Secretary of State for Air.
The Secretary was Winston Churchill; the RAF officer went on to be known as 'Bomber' Harris. Dresden never had a hope. If Saddam knew any history, neither did Halabja.
[At least there's no suspicion that the Turkish forces wish to emulate Saddam. Or Churchill.]
How can we be so blind about ourselves and the horrors for which we share a responsibility?
'Irredentist Kurds' Halabja 'British Secretary of State for Air'
Turkey Flexes Its (Racist) Muscles.
28 February 2008 .
There are moments when I truly despair...
The one fairly reliable ally which the coalition had within Iraq was (Iraqi) Kurdistan; it was also the one part of that country which enjoyed a peace that wasn't the peace of exhaustion and fear: it was our only partial but reasonably undisputed success. (If you believe that the 'surge' has achieved what is being claimed of it, I can't agree... although I pray you're right.).
Then into this oasis marches the Turkish army (Turkey being another country which has never quite forgotten its dream of imperial hegemony). They claim to be hunting down the PKK Turkish-Kurdish guerillas, not that they have much chance of prising them out of well-prepared positions in the mountains. All they do seem to be doing is weakening the autonomous Kurdish zone and the regional government. And the response from the West? None, so far as I can see. The Turks have been there a week; do we expect the Kurds to be happy about this, or that their western allies have said and done nothing about it? Meanwhile the Iraqi prime minister - who, given some guts, might have had a unique chance to try to unite Iraq in the face of another insult - has apparently come to London for a medical check-over.
I've characterised Turkey as 'racist'. You don't need to read the papers on this, or even to talk to Kurds: just listen to the Turkish government (or let their actions speak for them) or talk to quite a few Turkish people, when they aren't being too careful, on the subject of Kurds. If this seems a bit sweeping, then I have to say that it's no more so than the sweeping racism against the Kurds I've witnessed (albeit with plenty of honourable exceptions) over the past forty years. [There are plenty of Turkish and Kurdish folk in this part of North London.] If you want more solid evidence, take a look at continuing Turkish denial of the Armenian holocaust (which Adolf Hitler certainly didn't fail to notice when making his own plans). It would be brilliant to have Turkey in the EU but, while it's still unreconstructed and in denial, the idea that we let that country join the EU is a travesty, whatever the notional benefits.
I regret that a less tolerant side of my nature is showing; but it is my site, and anyway I'm not sure that it's very helpful to tolerate continuing intolerance. If I'm wrong about Turkey, and if anyone cares enough, I'm willing to listen and to apologise unreservedly. But, as I've said elsewhere, I'm won't add 2+2 and make 5.
Added: Clearly this site is more influential than I supposed. On 29 Feb, Turkey announced that its forces are withdrawing from Iraqi territory. A pity that the precedent for incursion has been set, but still.
'Iraqi Kurdistan' Turkey irridentism 'Armenian holocaust'
Rewriting History.
22 February 2008 .
I've just seen the first paragraph of the Williams draft:
"Iraq presents a uniquely dangerous threat to the world. No other country has twice launched wars of aggression against neighbours (1). In the 77 years since the Geneva Convention against chemical weapons was signed, Iraq is the only country to have broken it (2). Saddam Hussein is not the world's only dictator, but no other country has used poison gas against civilians. No other country has flouted the United Nations' authority so brazenly in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction." The numbers in brackets are mine and are references for what follows.
There are some handwritten notes in the margins, apparently by a different person (a senior official in the Foreign Office?).
By (1) are written:
By (2) is written:
The note-writer is uncertain what time-span the draft is covering; it seems fairly clear to me. (Actually, I'm really beginning to wonder just how intelligent some of these people are supposed to be.) In any case, I suggest that the draft writer is doing a remarkable amount of rewriting of history which the note-writer doesn't go very far to correct. Without even checking I offer the following:
a) Waging aggressive war against neighbours (at least twice since 1945 - going back any further makes the list too endless - and ignoring wars against neighbours in the same country):
b) Use of chemical weapons/poison gas on civilians (since Geneva). Apart from Japan on China, and the industrial use of Zyklon B by the Nazis, we have, between the world wars:
Chemicals used by the US in Vietnam are never mentioned: this despite the fact that dangers from dioxins (in Agent Orange) were already becoming clear.
And my point? Not, I say quickly, that I think Saddam wasn't so bad. He was. Just that I think it's illuminating that the two major 'coalition' nations, the UK and the US, appear in this off-the-cuff list of baddies.
'the Williams draft' 'chemical weapons' 'poison gas' 'Geneva Convention' Saddam 'Agent Orange'
Aya Zayoun.
14 February 2008 .
The following is an extract from Johann Hari's article in the Independent on Thursday, 20 December last; just one of many such by endless commentators since long before Diana Spencer:
Cluster munitions are bombs that, as they fall, separate into dozens of smaller, bright yellow "bomblets", each about the size of a can of Coke. Every one carries flying shards of metal that can tear through a quarter-inch of steel. They fall as "steel rain" over an entire kilometre, and they cut up anything they hit.
These weapons are wildly indiscriminate. You can't aim them, any more than you can aim your handbag when you empty it out on to the floor. When the British dropped 2,000 cluster bombs on Basra in 2003, they landed on the roofs of schools and civilian homes as much as on Saddam's men. Worse still, many of the submunitions do not explode when they hit the ground; instead they stay there for year after year, waiting for someone anyone to stumble across them.
Children are particularly fond of picking them up, since they look like brightly-coloured toys.
That's what happened recently to four-year-old Aya Zayoun. She found one of the 4 million bomblets dropped on Lebanon by the Israelis in the last 72 hours of the 2006 war, and she thought it was a toy bell.
Aya excitedly toddled into her living room to show it to her parents and big sister and brother where it blew up, the steel ripping through all their flesh. They were lucky: they lost only limbs, not their lives.
Some 255 Lebanese civilians have not been so fortunate. Last month, there was a hailstorm for the first time since the war, and the hills of Lebanon echoed to the sound of hundreds of submunitions exploding.
They can wait patiently for decades. A few weeks ago, 17-year-old Choen Ha and two of his friends in Vietnam stumbled across four steel balls in the jungle. They took turns tossing them to each other, and then began to play marbles with them. Finally, one of them detonated. Choen was only saved by his family spending their entire life savings on his treatment; his best friend was shredded in front of him. The UN estimates that at the current clear-up rate, explosions like this will continue in Vietnam every week for another century. These bombs were dropped before I was born. They will still be killing after I am dead.
'Aya Zayoun' 'Choen Ha' 'Cluster munitions'
London Then And Now: The Plague, 1665.
17 January 2008 .
I mentioned yesterday the damage to the communities of London caused by the Great Fire. This followed (and perhaps helped to end by burning out) the Great Plague of the previous year (1665) - the plague to which the frontispiece on the home page of this site alludes. The history books understandably paint this as a horrible, nightmarish part of the city's story. Not so often mentioned, however, is that it was also what I believe to be one of the bravest moments in the story.
The Spanish 'Flu at the end of the First World War is often compared to the plague, partly on the basis of the number of deaths it caused. In fact, the plague has to have been massively more awful - by virtue of the proportion of the population that were infected, of the massively poorer survival rates, of the lack of any understanding of what was killing everybody, of its seeming relentlessness (plague had been a feature of European life for 300 years), of the horrible ways (and variety of ways) by which it killed people, and so on.
Yet through all of this the duty was carried out to record the death of every person, as usual, throughout this year of plague. Not only that: the cause of death in every instance was sought and recorded; people went on dying for all the 'normal' reasons; that didn't stop just because people were also dying of the plague. Since there were insufficient doctors to perform these duties, the process by which the cause of death was ascertained was crude, but that's not the point: in this seemingly intolerable situation, the city carried on an obligation which was important but which had little to do with survival. It is a truly extraordinary testimony to the spirit of the city and the loyalty of many of the people who ran it - in a time which we mistakenly think of as rather primitive.
Now is as good a time as any to note this: I chose the title for the site on the basis that what I believe we face now is as millennial as what was faced by London in the plague year; but also because the plague year showed that, even when things are intolerable, there is still something in the human spirit which can rise above them.
It is difficult to know now what part I learned of plague, fire and blitz from school and what part was folklore. However, at the risk of sounding old-fashioned: I was born in London; I am a Freeman of the City; I can place my father's family in London around 1150 with some confidence (and the obvious reservations!); I regard it as a reasonable matter of pride to be a Londoner; and in particular I regard the best examples of the behaviour of Londoners in those moments of crisis as being examples worth trying to live up to. [And, naturally, I regard it as a citizen's job to be stroppy with kings, politicians, and bureaucrats and officials of every stamp who get above themselves.]
'Great Fire' 'Great Plague' 'Spanish 'Flu' 'sense of duty' 'Spirit of London'
London Then And Now.
16 January 2008 .
I watched the first episode of a new series on television, 'City of Vice' (about the Fielding brothers in the London of around 1750, and the start of the Bow Street runners). Reviews portray the city of that time as, in effect, red in tooth and claw; so, to a lesser extent, does the film.
It's certainly true that more people died in London in the eighteenth century than were born there. Equally, it seems likely that it was the most turbulent century in the city's history, and by any standards it was fairly lawless: I'm sure I've read that the king himself, George III, was mugged in the park - apparently he took it in good spirit. Life wasn't easy for an awful lot of women, but then that's been true for most of time and still is in many parts of the world. It wasn't easy for the poor, either - although for some of them there were extraordinary opportunities for 'advancement'. And I admit that to be a prostitute, then, riddled with the pox, will have been unimaginably terrible - but I'm not all sure that to be a forced prostitute in London now is very much better.
However, I don't think it was unlivable for the vast majority. In fact, I think the London of then probably shared many of the features of the London of now. (In passing, I also suggest that some of the features which it did not share with modern London - the extremes of poverty and disease - are nonetheless true in some other modern cities.) Once again, in presenting this item: the thoughts here are my own, but I imagine that others must have seen the same parallels and there are no doubt countless books on the subject; so I make no claim to any great maturity in what I'm writing. And I apologise for apologising.
London 1750: It had been a city of communities based on parishes. The communities had been torn apart and the fabric of the parishes physically destroyed (by the fire of 1666). By 1750, it was a city that had reconstituted itself in different ways, including by an unprecedented influx of outsiders; that was going through long term financial growth on a massive scale, in which massive fortunes could be made and ostentatious wealth paraded side by side with deprivation; that is being radically changed anyway by the growth of technology and the trade in manufactureds; in which the nature of crime was changing because of the changes in society; that had not yet developed a policing service to replace the old parish based law enforcement, which had not been able to adjust to the changes.
London 2000: It had been a city of communities based on villages. The communities had been torn apart and the fabric of many communities physically destroyed (by the blitz then by the planners). By 2000, it is a city that is reconstituting itself in different ways, including by an unprecedented influx of outsiders; that is going through long term financial growth on a massive scale, in which massive fortunes can be made and ostentatious wealth parades side by side with comparative deprivation; that is being radically changed anyway by the growth of technology and the trade in financial services; in which the nature of crime is changing for reasons we know only too well; that has not yet developed a technological police force to replace the old local police service, which has not been able to adjust to the changes.
I don't think that the parallels can be stretched infinitely, but I do think that the levels of crime in 1750, and the panic of concerned citizens and of the government, have a lot in common with our fears now.
I'll probably find that these parallels are exactly what the programme will try to bring out. I wish I'd thought of that half an hour ago.
'City of Vice' 'Bow Street Runners'
Peasants and Proles.
10 January 2008 .
Simon Carr (Independent) wrote the other day that serfs in the 14th. century could live quite a good life.
One of the things that annoyed me about PM Thatcher was her smug sense of historicity, which could be summed up as, "Mankind fought and struggled for millennia to rise out of the mud and slime, and now everything's perfect: we've reached the Utopia which men have suffered and died for, the sunny uplands of making money and going to Tesco's every Sunday under the benign gaze of the Conservative party."
History tells us something rather different.
The Boer war took place a century ago, which to most people alive now is a long time past; but not to me: my grandparents were already born then and it's less than 20 years since the last soldier to fight in that war died. One of the things that shocked the recruiters was the poor health and physical development of many of those who volunteered, a high proportion of whom had to be rejected. What has come out off research since is that the working population in the late 19th. century worked longer hours and had less to eat in both quality and quantity than the rural population of the year 1500. Furthermore, nearly half the days (about 180) of the earlier year were festivals or holidays, when no work was required at all. In 1900, one week plus three days was usual. In the 15th. century, every adult man was expected to be skilled with the heavy longbow, a weapon which most 19th. century men could not even have fully pulled. In many respects, the life of late mediaeval man was preferable to that of my grandparents generation. The prosperity resulting from the extraordinary technological spurt of the last hundred years has been unprecedented; but it would be extraordinarily foolish to imagine that it is inevitable and unending.
I have seen it recorded that the levels of productivity in grain harvesting achieved in Britain during the Roman period, 1800 years ago, were not reached again until 1949, less than 60 years ago. Despite the demands of the two World Wars.
Life is not always onward and upward: politicians are wrong when they tell us that they can be, and we will pay a price if we accept their promises uncritically.
I haven't even started on the utterly unsustainable drive to growth which motivates business (and politicians). One of the reasons that the corporations are becoming so rapacious is that it will enable them to keep up the illusion for a few extra years. (Where I, possibly with you, am most likely to see this phenomenon so far is in our banks: huge profits, which they believe they must increase year by year - growth which can only be achieved by offering less and less to customers, while charging more and more. Or perhaps look at your local supermarket, and expect the stories in the media about their rapaciousness to be more and more frequent.)
'Simon Carr' Tesco Peasants
Easy To Forget - British Indian Ocean Territories
05 December 2007 .
I had forgotten, myself....
Among of the reasons I had for starting this site:
Phrases much loved by arrogant power: "You need to draw a line under that"; "It's time to move on"; "It's happened a long time ago"; "Nobody's interested". They love it even better if we, unthinkingly, use these phrases and thereby let them off the hook.
I'm just wondering why nobody has talked about the Chagos Islanders for a long time; why, in the pub, no-one knew what I was talking about when I mentioned BIOT (British Indian Ocean Territories).
Just to remind you; 40 years ago, the British Government decided to lease to the US the islands of and around Diego Garcia - now used as the major US airbase in the Indian Ocean, base for attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan and presumably Iraq. (You may feel that such a base is a good thing... but I'm not arguing that here.) In an act which some might regard as cynical (!), the British Govt announced that the Chagos Islanders who lived there (and had done for a lot longer than, say, the Falkland Islanders in the S. Atlantic) were not native. (The label BIOT was devised with the Ministry of Truth intention of assisting them in this deception of British people.) Since they were not native, said the government, they had no right to live there. The entire population was deported - thousands of miles to alien cultures where they suffer poverty and discrimination to this day. When, finally, the legal system in this country - including the House Lords - decided definitively that the Chagos Islanders had the right to return to at least some of their islands, the government of Blair, that screamer for democracy who took us into a murderous war for the sake of democracy (oh! the irony of it...), simply reversed this by an Order in Council. (The Order in Council, by which a PM can override any law and any democratic institution or decision without reference to Parliament or anyone else, makes hereditary lords and statutory instruments look people-friendly.)
As a sort of gratuitous final insult, the government said that the order was in the islanders' best interests, since some of the islands might be at risk from global warming.
E&OE, I'm afraid.
If you don't happen to know about this shameful business, please google 'Chagos' and 'John Pilger' - who is good on it.
BIOT 'British Indian Ocean Territories' 'John Pilger' 'Diego Garcia'
Estonia and the SS.
02 December 2007 .
There was a kerfuffle a couple of years ago when, if I remember rightly, the Lihula memorial was (re)dedicated in Estonia in memory of its nationals who died fighting in an Estonian division of the SS, against the Russians, during World War II.
I retain a small grumble against the Independent over their reporting of this business. I admit that we're going back a while, but I don't believe in 'drawing a line' and 'moving on', as seems so fashionable these days, until the record is set reasonably straight. Additionally, I believe that the Indy's slant on the Estonian SS is symptomatic of an occasional narrowness of viewpoint which still continues specifically in the news reporting of this generally least worst of the papers. I write this item to address both these matters at least in my own mind.
In essence, the Indy, in reporting, wrote that the act of building the memorial was appalling and unacceptable. It made no serious effort to explain why Estonia would do such a thing.
Estonia was annexed by the Soviets without any justification whatsoever in 1940; they had their intelligentsia, politicians, priests, teachers and ultimately over half of the population murdered or deported, their institutions extinguished, and all the other nastinesses so familiar to us from that time. And nobody did a thing. Britain went to war for Poland - rightly; but Poland was far from a liberal democracy (unlike Estonia, which I understand was close to being a model of democracy - although I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong), and Poland had taken part - alongside Hitler - in the landgrab of Czechoslovakia a few months earlier - Estonia had committed no offence at all, so far as I know. But Estonia was only a small country, so who cared then or cares now?
Plenty of people have heard of Lidice, the Czech village wiped from the map (with its occupants) by the Nazis in 1942 as part of the revenge for the assassination of Heydrich. The ruins of Oradour-sur-Glane in France have been left untouched after the "Das Reich" Division did the same there in response to some act of sabotage in 1944. Less well known is that these were just two among vast numbers of villages to share the same fate all over Europe, Russia and the Far East. Less acknowledged is that the Russians indulged in identically the same destruction with a gory abandon every bit of the equal of the Germans. The excuse is made that the Russians had suffered terribly from the Nazi invasion, and that therefore their atrocities were somehow more understandable. The truth is that the excuse is rubbish. The Russians were extinguishing villages - and their occupants - in countries they had occupied (and, I suspect, in their own) well before the Nazis invaded. That was the Estonian experience.
I wrote to the Indy to try to set the record straight. I don't think it was a particularly effective letter, and it wasn't printed; I've long since binned my copy along with the original article. (Sadly no-one else's correction, if there was any, appeared either.) I have found a draft, however, which I reproduce here (tidied up only for grammar, etc.):
From being a free and independent - and innocent - country, Estonia suffered after 1939 significantly more in relative terms than any other country in the current EU (including the not so innocent Poland - who grabbed chunks of Czechoslovakia on the back of the German takeover), but at the hands of the Soviets rather than Nazis ("Honouring Nazis", Letters, 9 July). Churchill was willing to sup with the Soviet Devil to defeat Hitler; Estonians, with much more immediate reason, were forced to sup with the Nazis against the Soviets. The Soviet crimes involved would fill many books - if the Russians had not prevented that and rewritten history, through a black propaganda with which they have swamped the market: so, as a taster, this from Andres Küng (April 1999: www.hot.ee/evlliit/okup_2.htm): The mass terror practised by the Soviet annihilation battalions did not originate in the Baltic people's armed resistance, which is what some Communists have claimed. The Baltic guerrilla fight against the Soviet occupation forces was like the guerillas who later fought the Nazis, a consequence of the terror against civilians indulged in by the occupiers. To the global list containing names of towns extinguished, like Lidice, Oradour and Babij Jar, from Estonia can be added names like Kabala and Kautla. In the latter village members of Soviet annihilation battalions tortured every single person they met to death. The youngest was two months old and the oldest was 78 years. Your article of 7 July reflected very much the Russian view, with just one sentence that no more than hinted that the Estonians carried - and still carry in depopulation and the results of enforced russification and of Russian immigration - a burden unimaginable to us further west. The Estonians were not saints, and they are still trying to reconcile a history in which two powerful and evil tyrannies almost destroyed their culture along with perhaps a half of their population. But since the Russians, in the Estonian experience, were the massively the more barbaric and destroyed lives on a far greater scale, I think we have very little right to criticise those Estonians who regarded ANY Germans as saviours and those who joined the (fighting) SS as freedom fighters; not at least without some fairly profound analysis. With regard to the Jewish community: this was the smallest in Europe, at up to 4,000 persons, somewhere between 400-2000 were selectively murdered (as well, it must be said, as a larger number brought from other countries to work camps in Estonia by the Germans). Holocaust researchers place the deaths at 44% of the community - foul, but not annihilation.
1. The crime was still genocide, but the numbers so comparatively small that most Estonians saw no hint of it.
2. I have seen no particular evidence of Estonians in numbers seeking to benefit from Jewish suffering and certainly not in any systematic way - there would not have been much to benefit from even if they had.
3. (Also deleted from the histories): The ultimate beneficiaries of Jewish property were the Russians, who themselves murdered and deported Jews. Long before Operation Babarossa, the Russians disposed of as many as a quarter of the Jewish population of Estonia.
Stalin and Hitler were Peas in a pod. We handled it one way, the Estonians another. We should not be too quick to judge.
Reference http://www.hot.ee/evlliit/okup_2.htm (in English)
Estonia SS 'Honouring Nazis' 'Andres Küng' Lidice Oradour 'Babij Jar' Kabala Kautla 'Stalin and Hitler'
Convenient Forgetfulness (Germany, Poland):
14 November 2007 .
I'm half-watching "Baddiel and the Missing Nazi Millions" on BBC1. Two days ago (below), I wrote on this page about the Germans accepting their responsibility for the Holocaust. I suppose that anything I write here risks being wrong-footed, and this certainly has been: it seems that with regard to looted art, one of the worst countries in trying to catalogue this, let alone return it, is... Germany.
Although Poland has only been mentioned in the programme as rather ambiguous, I notice something missing - which seems to be almost tabu: occasionally (although not in this programme) it's mentioned that the last great anti-Jewish pogrom in Europe were after the war, in Poland; what is seemingly never mentioned is that during the rape of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis, the Poles (along with the Hungarians) joined in avidly, taking chunks of Czech territory for themselves.
Oh, what truths it suits us to forget!
'Baddiel and the Missing Nazi Millions'
Holocaust Denial - Turkey
12 November 2007 .
Germany perpetrated a holocaust against the Jews within living memory. Because of the numbers involved and the industrialisation of the process, we may say that it is most monstrous genocide in history. Personally, I think that if you are at the receiving end, it makes little difference whether you are one amongst a few thousand or one amongst a few million; genocide is genocide.
Because Germany as a nation acknowledges its history (even if some of its nastier citizens deny or even glory in it), Germany is as welcomed as any civilised nation to its place at the table. If a resurgent militant Germany were one day to withdraw that acknowledgement, it would - I hope - become a pariah state. I would argue that in that respect, Germany is a special case; but perhaps those other nations who joined in with the holocaust - often enthusiastically - such as Austria, Poland, Lithuania, the Ukraine, inter alia, should also be regarded in the same light.
What about Turkey? I refer to an article by Robert Fisk in the Independent on Sunday. Turkey has also engaged in genocide. As Fisk says, it has been well documented, even by the Ottomans themselves. The difference is that the Turkish government, and the Turks I know, deny it - and use Iraq and NATO to blackmail weak Western governments into complicity with them.
I suggest that we must treat Turkey exactly as we should treat a Germany in denial. No military supplies or support; no special dispensations for Turkish citizens to migrate to the UK, and absolutely no question of Turkey being welcomed into the EU.
holocaust 'Armenian holocaust'
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