seanessay.com “If the Russians do atomic testing above ground people stay silent, if we do so in a cavern they protest!” an idealist in Camelot, circa 1960 (from memory)
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Using fiction and Metaphors of the past one may strive to discern the today of the Near East and Ukraine. Discern, yes, because writers of modern literature say it is a mistake to spell things out. Alright then.
Did you know that a 20th century Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, made a decision in advance, and secretly told his wife? He said if she was taken hostage by anyone, say, by the Front for the Liberation of Quebec, (FLQ) (an outfit known to bomb, kidnap, and kill a hostage) then he would not negotiate. If that sounds unusually clear sighted for a man from the liberal party, a party whose members, supposedly, are supposed to be too soft-headed to think ahead, well, Trudeau was a unusual man. (His essays, from before he went to parliament, clear my head as I read them)
Speaking of hostages and clear thinking, here’s what a character who had led resistance groups during WWII advised agent Matt Helm in The Terminators (1975) by Donald Hamilton,
QUOTE
“…Fair hell! Who ever heard of a fair war, for God’s sake?”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “you know the standard German method of retaliating for guerrilla attacks back in those days. What the hell made them think we’d pay any attention to their lousy hostages, son? We were getting shot; if someone else got shot too, we were just as sorry as we could be. It was too dam bad, and all that, but we had a war to fight and we just got the hell on with it. If those people wouldn’t get out into the hills and fight with us, the least they could do was stay in town and die with us, was the way we felt at the time.”
The room was very quiet after he stopped talking.
UNQUOTE
Astute readers will have remembered Matt Helm from the previous essay about my neighbours. In many of Helm’s gritty adventures he figuratively acts out, alongside younger adults raised on innocent television, the metaphor of being “a sheriff who fires his gun.” The horrified young people would be telling him “there must be another way!” while disengaging their mind’s eye. Perhaps “Freedom of speech” is so some responsible citizen, some creative poet, may come up with a “way” to share with the rest of us. Of course I expect no such creativity from sheriffs and army generals, not if WWI is anything to go by. Beside, during the military’s Cold War struggle for “hearts and minds,” it was the civilians who invented the Peace Corps.
Around the time of Trudeau and Helm I heard songs on the kitchen radio. One was a metaphor that if you allow a snake to regain it’s strength, “Take me in, oh pretty woman” then it will bite, like the African proverb about the scorpion stinging the frog because “it’s my nature.” Someone sang about humans: “…can a man turn his head, pretending he just doesn’t see?”
During the long-hair years it was a writer for underground newspapers, Rita Mae Brown, who wrote, “Even a bigot hates a liar.” True, back then—I never dreamed this would change during my lifetime.
A philosopher in London, Vlad Vexler said something original this week on Youtube: Vexler’s concept, in my own words, is that a lying politician lies to deceive, but a “post truth” populist politician enters into a shared lie, forming a dark lake where the public desires to jump in. Call it their escape from freedom. As if the average citizen prefers leaders with below average integrity; as if truth doesn’t count; as if it doesn’t matter that the public’s trust in democracy will be weakened…
A philosopher in Germany, Uwe Timm wrote a book in this century. The English translation is In the Shadow of My Brother subtitled A life and death in the SS. Timm wrote to grapple with the fact of his brother’s secret war diary, and the fact of a family, a community and a nation who didn’t understand.
QUOTE
—I weep as if I had to shed all my mother’s, my father’s, my brother’s suppressed tears, the tears of those who didn’t know, who didn’t want to know what they could have known, should have known. Wissen, to know, derives from an old High German root, wizzan, to see, to look. They did not know because they would not see, they looked away. Hence the frequent excuse: we didn’t know about it. They did not want to see, they looked away.
UNQUOTE
A hundred years ago my mother was a smiling toddler. Since then we have gone from nib pens with ink bottles to keyboards with screen tablets, and every year the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
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… …
Sean Crawford
In God’s own country,
February
2024
Sources
The web:
~Here is the link to Vlad’s Youtube—which I don’t watch all at once— the post-truth part is near the beginning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv6Sdq_yZGI
~Here I link my essay A Duped Lady Lies and Replies to Arnold where you may scroll to the end to find a link to Arnold gently discrediting the Kremlin’s belief the invasion was “needed to de-Nazify Ukraine.” https://seanessay.com/a-duped-lady-lies-and-replies-to-arnold/
Video segues to book:
Arnold’s observation of his father’s veteran friends being “broken men” is echoed in the observations of a Uwe Timm, who was a pre-schooler during the war, In the Shadow of My Brother subtitled A life and death in the SS. (2003)Translated from the German by Anthea Bell (2005) Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York (p.136)
Book:
The Terminators by Donald Hamilton, (1975, 2015) Titan Books 144 Southwark Street London (p.128)
Song lyric links (to play recordings):
Blowin’ in the Wind
The Snake
