Chapter
Nine
No Closing
Lines
Turn of the 21st century
Have no regrets!
“We are born astride the grave”. Since stumbling across them in my early teens, T S Elliot’s perfectly poised, poignant words have remained with me; reminding me, when they have drifted periodically into consciousness, of life’s contingent possibilities. So I have no closing, carefully crafted, cunningly shaped phrases. What might they express in the face of Elliot, for me a powerful but aloof voice? Try as I have, I cannot forge a concluding essay that summarises or epitomises three-quarters of a messy, confused reconstruction of an half-forgotten, forcibly recalled lifetime. I have no neatly packaged offering; save to invoke a colleague’s consciously whimsical observation that “old-timers” like he and I, wait ever expectantly in a sepulchral departures lounge.
Edith Piaf - that great, great singer - in her most fragile, haunted mode, urges us to have no regrets about one or other dying love affair. Nonetheless, I have regrets. I am stung by my years of alienation from my father, by my petty, pouting disputes with spouse and children, my occasional, unforgivable curtness with eager students ..... my bumbling efforts to disentangle the knots of the social and political events through which I’ve lived. Regrets? Yes, plenty. But none that disable one’s delight in the joys, the beauties, the vigorous grip of lived experience; one’s confidence in the thankfully irrepressible, utopian dreams of what will surely be. When in most need of temporarily borrowed strength, I recall an inescapably moving passage in the final pages of Arthur Miller’s magnificent Death of a Salesman; the scene in which Willy Loman’s, the salesman’s avuncular neighbour Charley laments his dead friend’s self-sacrificed life,
“Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoe-shine. And when they start not smiling back - that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream boy. It comes with the territory”.
Then, a moment later, still at the grave side, Linda, Willy’s widow, cries out the existential pain of a life given over to consumerism,
“Willy, dear, I can’t cry. Why did you do it? I search and search and I search, and I can’t understand it, Willy. I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home. We’re free and clear. We’re free”.
Travelling salesman, or one of that pioneering sociologist’s Emile Durkheim’s supposedly “free floating intellectuals”? Whichever, one “is got to dream boy. It comes with the territory”. And there are other lines; lines that tug as insistently, as clamorously at one’s mind and heart. None is more compelling than Percy Bysshe Shelley’s rallying cry from his Masque of Anarchy; a call that, despite over-use, carries its impassioned immediacy beyond the borders of any single state or node of oppression:
“Rise
like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth, like dew,
Which in sleep had fallen on you,
Ye are many - they are few.
This I take to be an unmistakably cross-national call; one presently addressed to a worldwide, a distinctively varied 21st century audience - an ideologically and concretely imperilled majority. Ye, indeed, are many, they, indisputably, are few. Your condition is ours: ours is yours. How might one expect to depict, let alone handle the massively-scaled problems that have been, are being dumped on us?
Entrenched inequity - a planet-wide promise
The excluded, the wretched, the huddled masses of the world: I cannot, I have no means with which specifically to address this immense range of my fellow human beings or the multiplicity of issues that confront them. The most one can reach for - particularly at the fag-end of a volume of personal reminiscences - is to select a single focus that might convey a wider impact. In this context, the mendacity of those in power comes immediately to mind; especially the fictions our putative world ‘leaders’ conjure up in order to persuade us to war. And, more specifically, the patently manufactured explanations they recently used to enlist our support for, in their chief honcho’s delicate language, “bombing the Iraqi people back to the stone age”. Wars tend to begin because leaders claim to have convinced ‘the people’ of some imminent danger.
There is, we all know, nothing new about this; except that since Nagasaki/Hiroshima, the threat has become too enormous for sane thought. We need no Thomas Powers, no Gore Vidal to analyse or be analysed in, of all unexpected journals, The New York Review of Books. They highlight too painfully the distortions used to deceive us. We have but recently had John Pilger’s The New Rulers of the World (2002), Noam Chomsky’s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (2003). And concurring signals come repeatedly from honourable, humane reporters like Robert Fisk, Alexander Cockburn, Chalmers Johnson.
But such matters are too urgent to leave solely in the hands of these and other respected journalists. We need also to internalise them individually. The newly launched “war on terrorism” is predicted to be an half-century onslaught, recourse to “pre-emptive war” is ever to be the prerogative of right-thinking powers such as the USA and Great Britain. Despite that, polls conducted in Europe indicate that the USA, and its tatty British ally, are widely perceived to be “the greatest threat to life on the planet”. We must, then, be on guard, the price of peace has become eternal vigilance. What follows flows from my attempt to put myself on alert; as ever, with the help of thoughts and reports culled from elsewhere.
I start with the always vigilant Noam Chomsky. In a speech presented in memory of Edward Said at Columbia University (November 20 2003) he claimed, with his customarily extensive references to authoritative documents, that,
“ the major threats to world peace are ... US support for Israel, which is the regional superpower [in the Middle East] and the US actions elsewhere in the world ... [what] has happened in Iraq is something deadlier than the worst scenarios sketched by the so-called liberal pessimists. The invasion of Iraq has led to an alliance of Arab nationalism with Islamic militancy steering both of them towards an amalgam, which is very ominous for the region and in fact for the world.”
Then an extract from John Pilger, who also rummages revealingly among official sources for his awakening warnings,
“The disaster in Iraq is rotting the Blairite establishment. Blair himself appears ever more removed from reality; his latest tomfoolery about the ‘discovery’ of ‘a huge system of clandestine weapons laboratories’, which even the American viceroy in Baghdad mocked, would be astonishing, were it not merely another of his vapid attempts to justify his crime against humanity”.
As I write, in early 2006, the so-called affluent West is in at least as great a danger of terrorist attack as it has been since September 11 2001. Afghanistan is reported to be as menacing for its citizenry as it was under ruthless Taliban governance - despite the triumphant, economically overwhelming, technically profligate US ‘victory’. Iraqi, US and other ‘allied’, dragooned personnel are dying almost daily. The long-suffering Iraqi population is virtually ungoverned, ungovernable. The world, or rather its news-hungry middle classes, ponder the US and British governments’ fabricated pretexts for unlawfully invading a small, oil-rich, reactionary administration whose dictatorial members they had initially hoisted into power and foisted on the people. The story reeks, ever-so-politely of opportunism, of lies, betrayal and counter-betrayal. Few but the Iraqi people themselves emerge from it with respect, let alone dignity.
Now that concluding, illuminating tale: one that has been usefully stitched together from a series of verbatim, unpolished quotations and an interspersed, carefully related commentary. Regrettably, I am unable properly to acknowledge the author, probably British, to whom I am indebted. Her/his e-mail message was passed unsigned to me. In the face of the content, the anonymity remains insignificant, though mildly irritating.
Damned lies - from start to finish
Sometimes, my unknown correspondent writes, it really is possible
to fail to see the wood for the trees. We need to be clear that Tony
Blair is claiming that the threat of Iraqi WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction)
justified a massive war against Iraq. We are to believe that after
a major conflict in which 88,500 tons of bombs were dropped in 1991,
after eight years of inspections, and after more than a decade of
continuous bombing raids, and of crippling sanctions imposed under
the most intensive and sophisticated surveillance operation in history,
both Blair and Bush received intelligence suggesting that Iraq was
a "serious and current threat".
As we now know, this alleged intelligence is said to have been related to WMD and links with [the supposedly terror organisation] al-Qaeda that did not exist. We are to believe, then, that a rush of terrifying information relating to non-existent perils - a rush so overwhelming that long-standing policy was abandoned - suddenly emerged to lead Bush and Blair to claim that nothing less than war was required to avert the danger.
This truly is remarkable. We might expect one or two erroneous reports warning of something that isn't there - but a weight of evidence sufficient to actually revolutionise policy? Beyond the possibility of some kind of mass hysteria, it seems almost unbelievable; this just is not the way the world works. Of course it could be argued that the threat was always "serious and current" - in which case why do nothing for ten years? And in which case why did a US cabinet member like Colin Powell say of Saddam Hussein on February 24, 2001:
"He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours."? (Quoted by John Pilger, Daily Mirror, September 22, 2003)
On the BBC's News At Ten O'Clock (February 2, 2004) reporter Gavin Hewitt suggested that the inquiry into the failure to discover Iraq's alleged WMD would likely focus on two issues: 1) Did the intelligence services "get it wrong"? and 2) Did politicians "fail to ask the people here [MI6] the right searching questions?" In other words, were politicians at worst merely indolent in failing to challenge the wild intelligence claims they dutifully passed on to the public?
Consider Hewitt's range of possible questions in light of comments made by Greg Thielmann to CBS [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] News last October. Thielmann, an expert on Iraqi WMD and former senior foreign-service officer for 25 years, claims that key evidence presented by Colin Powell to the UN on February 5, 2003 was misrepresented and the public deceived:
"The main problem was that the senior administration officials have what I call faith-based intelligence. They knew what they wanted the intelligence to show. They were really blind and deaf to any kind of countervailing information the intelligence community would produce. I would assign some blame to the intelligence community, and most of the blame to the senior administration officials." ('The man who knew', October 15, 2003, www.cbsnews.com)
"people at the top of the ladder didn't want to hear some of the things" [and] "in your heart of hearts you must realise sometimes that's not actually the right thing to say". ('Beyond doubt: facts amid the fiction', Vikram Dodd, Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicholas Watt, The Guardian, August 16, 2003)
Kelly, since deceased - some have argued, murdered - added:
"The 45 minute point was a statement that was made and it got out of all proportion. They [the government] were desperate for information. They were pushing hard for information that could be released. That was the one that popped up and it was seized on and it is unfortunate that it was. That is why there is the argument between the intelligence services and Number 10 [Downing Street], because they picked up on it and once they had picked up on it you cannot pull back from it, so many people will say 'Well, we are not sure about that because the word smithing is actually quite important."
Curiously, in declaring Andrew Gilligan's claims "unfounded" in his January 28 report, Justice Lord Hutton - heading an official commission of inquiry - said of Watts' report:
"Ms Watts recorded this conversation on a tape recorder and the recording was played in the course of the Inquiry." (The Hutton Inquiry, Statement by Lord Hutton, January, 28, 2004, http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk)
Brian Jones, a top analyst in the defence intelligence staff, told the Hutton inquiry how the "shutters came down" in government, preventing experts on chemical and biological weapons from expressing widespread disquiet about the language and assumptions in the September 2002 dossier. Jones told Hutton:
"My concerns were that Iraq's chemical weapons and biological weapons capabilities were not being accurately represented in all regards in relation to the available evidence. In particular ... on the advice of my staff, I was told that there was no evidence that significant production had taken place either of chemical warfare agent or chemical weapons." ('The Whistleblower', Richard Norton-Taylor and Vikram Dodd, The Guardian, September 4, 2003)
Jones writes:
"In my view the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS [Defence Intelligence Staff] were overruled in the preparation of the dossier in September 2002 resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities ... there was a lack of substantive evidence ... We were told there was intelligence we could not see". (Brian Jones, The Independent, February 4, 2004)
Responding to Colin Powell's February 2003 speech to the UN, former chief UN weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, said in an interview at the time:
"He just hits you, hits you, hits you with circumstantial evidence, and he confuses people - and he lied, he lied to people, he misled people... The Powell presentation is not evidence... It's a very confusing presentation. What does it mean? What does it represent? How does it all link up? It doesn't link up." ('Ritter dismisses Powell report', Kyodo News, February 7, 2003)
In his speech, Powell described as "a fine document" the Blair government's February 3, 2003 dossier. Glen Rangwala of Cambridge University quickly spotted that much of the dossier had been copied word for word (including punctuation and spelling errors) from an article written by an American PhD student twelve years earlier and available on the internet. The only changes involved the doctoring of passages to make them more ominous: the assertion that Iraq had been "aiding opposition groups" was changed to "supporting terrorist organisations". The comment that the Iraqi intelligence agency Mukhabarat had been "monitoring foreign embassies in Iraq" was changed to "spying on foreign embassies in Iraq" (Jonathan Rugman, 'Downing St dossier plagiarised', February 6, 2003, www.channel4.com)
It's hard to argue that the politicians merely misinterpreted intelligence in this case - the dossier was put together by a four-man team in Downing Street reporting to Alastair Campbell, then the Prime Minister's director of communications.
Glenda Jackson, the former Labour minister, pointed out at the time that the government was misleading parliament and the public, adding:
"And of course to mislead is a parliamentary euphemism for lying." ('Downing St. admits blunder on Iraq dossier', Michael White, Ewen MacAskill and Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, February 8, 2003)
All of this was beyond the remit of Lord Hutton, of course, who consequently cleared Blair and his Keystone Cops of all wrongdoing. Recall that Hutton was one of five law lords who accused their colleague Lord Hoffmann of acting as "a judge in his own cause" by failing to declare his links with Amnesty International when deciding whether the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, was immune from arrest and extradition in 1999. The Guardian reported:
"Lord Hutton said public confidence in the integrity of the administration of justice would be shaken if Lord Hoffmann's deciding vote that General Pinochet could be prosecuted was allowed to stand." ('Law lords condemn Hoffmann', Clare Dyer, The Guardian, January 16, 1999)
Pinochet was released and, on arriving in Chile, rose miraculously from his wheelchair to embrace well-wishers.
Former cabinet minister, Clare Short, insists that Tony Blair was guilty of "honourable deception" using "various ruses" and "a series of half-truths, exaggerations, reassurances that were not the case to get us into conflict by the spring" ('Short: I was briefed on Blair's secret war pact', Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, June 18, 2003). Short has described how a small cabal around Blair ignored normal procedures of cabinet government, and ignored the advice of the intelligence and diplomatic community, which she claims privately opposed the war.
Former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, describes how "there was a selection of evidence to support a conclusion... intelligence was not being used to inform and shape policy, but to shape policy that was already settled," (Ibid)
Like most of the media, Gavin Hewitt chose to ignore comments made by Paul O'Neill, former US Treasury secretary, last month. O'Neill, who attended countless national security council meetings, has explained how the Bush administration came to office determined to topple Saddam Hussein, using the September 11 attacks as a pretext:
"It was all about finding a way to do it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this'... From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go." ('Bush decided to remove Saddam "on day one"', Julian Borger, The Guardian, January 12, 2004)
O'Neill reports seeing one memorandum preparing for war dating from the first days of the administration. Another, marked ‘secret’ said, ‘Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq’. O'Neill also saw a Pentagon document entitled ‘Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts’, which discussed dividing Iraq's fuel reserves up between the world's oil companies.
The BBC's Matt Frei chose to ignore these claims and instead instantly smeared the man and his message:
"If you remember, Paul O'Neill was sacked mainly because he was incompetent, and he was more infamous for his gaffes than his insights on economic theory. He once famously said that the collapse of the energy giant Enron was an example of the genius of capitalism, and perhaps more accurately that the tax code in America was 9,500 words of complete gibberish." (Matt Frei, Newsnight, BBC2, January 12, 2004)
But the issue, clearly, is the credibility of what O'Neill has to say as supported by the 19,000 government documents he claims to have in his possession, one of which he revealed on live TV. US media analyst Alexander Cockburn comments:
"What bothers the White House is one particular National Security Council document shown in the 60 Minutes interview, clearly drafted in the early weeks of the new administration, which showed plans for the post-invasion dispersal of Iraq's oil assets among the world's great powers, starting with the major oil companies ... For the brief moment it was on the TV screen one could see that this bit of paper, stamped 'Secret', was undoubtedly one of the most explosive documents in the history of imperial conspiracy. Here, dead center in the camera's lens, was the refutation of every single rationalization for the attack on Iraq ever offered by George W. Bush and his co-conspirators, including Tony Blair." (Cockburn, 'The O'Neill/Suskind Bombshells - Bush, Oil & Iraq: Some Truth at Last', Counterpunch, January 14, 2004)
And consider O'Neill's revelations in the light of Tony Blair's claims in the infamous BBC Newsnight interview of February 7, 2003:
"When people say you're hell bent on this war, I've tried to avoid being in this position and I honestly thought there was some prospect last November when we passed the UN Resolution that he [Saddam] would realise we were serious about this and that if he didn't cooperate he was going to be in trouble." ('Tony Blair on Newsnight - part one', The Guardian, February 7, 2003)
Our unknown author summed up the thrust of his/her report in a single sentence:
“It's the use of the word ‘honestly’ that is interesting.”
For the sake of completion, that final remark might also have included an urgent, similarly pithy election slogan; perhaps something Orwellian like, “The truth obfuscates.” Or a similarly ‘honest’ reminder that the noisy voice of dissent grinds irritatingly on - listen, there is much to watch for, frantically to shout about; not least the pre-election news headline of February 10, 2004 - “Bush: I was wrong about Iraq”. He was “wrong in stating that there was ‘no doubt’ Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction”. No problem when all those arms and legs chopped off in battle do join together and say, “that’s OK”.
Why, one might well ask, elect to conclude these memoirs - full as they are of intimate, personal recollections - with the wholly, the unequivocally impersonal material presented in this section? Is it an appropriate way to bring a collection of this nature to an end? Well ... appropriate or not, it is what I have done. Among my reasons for doing so, three warrant mention here.
First and of least import, I am intrigued by the juxtaposition of my circumlocutory, discusive, prolix, relatively guarded written style with the far more direct, matter-of-fact, categoric reports and news items which I have drawn from the sources cited in the above paragraphs. And second, the dangerous misrepresentations that paved the way for that murderous misadventure - the military invasion of Iraq - need to be confronted at all times, in all places, even in a decidedly marginal assembly of an individual's recollections. This becomes the more essential when one ponders the analogous circumstances that antedated the attack on Afganistan and the frighteningly similar conditions that, as I face my computer monitor in early-June 2006, appear to be heralding a threatened assault on Iraq's neighbour, Iran. My final reason is, ironically, a very private one: I wish, quite simply, to record my horror and profound opposition to these new, and continuing, instanes of aggressive 21st century imperialism.
Alexandra township revisited
Now, in conclusion, a return to my own voice for a brief description of the world-renowned free-hold black township Alexandra; oddly named, at the turn of the 20th century, in honour of Queen Alexandra of England. Over some seveteen years back home in my homeland, I have reported numerous developments in the Alex township. That vitality-packed settlement cannot long be silenced. Now a further comment. On this occasion, it is spurred by a handbill thrust through my car-window when en route to Alex: “Jhb’s new Elite address ... the Claridges is redolent of a bygone era where luxury was synonymous with space, light and quality finishes. Italianate in style with formal gardens and a centrepiece ornate fountain, these spacious apartments feature a lifestyle enjoyed by the rich and famous.” Not, I was later reminded, quite what I knew lay ahead.
That is mortifying poverty: streets filled with unemployed people, smashed buildings left from the political wars of the mid-1990's, fragile shacks in which crowded families spend their lives - children their formative and elderly people their final years. Shacks that elbow their way onto, across public ways; shacks on dangerously damaged culverts; shacks in crowded backyards, shacks in straggling profusion. In February 2001 the government launched an urban renewal project for Greater Alexandra. Some 1.3 billion rands were to be spent over a period of seven years to improve living conditions for the approximately 350 000 people of the area. Those pervasive shacks were, unsurprisingly, central to this thrust. Yet, six years into the project, the local newspapers are filled with reports of failure, of infinitesimal, if any progress in the field of new housing.
Following my visits, I struggled with the mass of data in the documents handed to me by ever-helpful officials. Helpful, yes, but one must learn first to endure - certainly not acquiesce in - their recondite development-speak: the baffling initials and acronyms, the tortured language, the seemingly ready acceptance of bland, 'feel-good' intentions. How, for instance, does one constantly hold in mind the significance of a DBS, a CPF, the EMLG? What does one make of such oddities as “stakeholders” who are summonsed to participate in serried “programmes of capacitation for beneficiaries.” How does one bear with the ever up-beat, the vain-glorious exhortations of politicians in full flight? Where all this is not irritating, it is downright banal, perhaps consciously dissembling.
However, once through their pomposities, the documents are comprehensive. There are, as a case in point, numerous chilling estimates: Alex’s unemployment is put at 60%; household incomes average, at their very optimum, between R 1 000 and R 3 000 monthly. Over 70% of residents are unskilled, less than 4% are professionals. Formal educational levels are “generally low ... on the East Bank [where they are the highest] barely 50% of household heads have matric.” The township is desperately crowded; in, for example, Old Alexandra “70% of households comprise of more than 10 people.” Then what this report refers to as “challenges”: few, if any work opportunities for young people, “a mismatch between education levels and [the] surrounding economy”; inability to pay for housing ..... “high levels of HIV/AIDS.”
These are to be confronted via a gamut of inter-related counter-measures; sustained programmes of action, summarised as “key outcomes,” in the handbook Alexandra Renewal Project: Overall Proposals. They focus on the economic, social and physical aspects of development; each of which impinges on the subject matter of this brief comment - that inescapable Alex presence, shacks.
We learn that existing houses throughout Greater Alexandra are to be “upgraded”, empty warehouses, factories, and the some-time notorious hostels are to be converted for family use, new homes will be built, and public housing is to be transferred to the private ownership that tenants reportedly prefer (?). All these also impinge on that same over-riding issue, shacks - “informal dwellings within the flood plain of the Jukskei River and its tributaries, school sites, S’twetla, London Road and other areas will be relocated to more appropriate areas.”
There are, though troubling concerns; not least those associated with that thoroughly ambiguous, disturbingly vague official phrase “relocated to more appropriate areas.” Dishevelled shacks to be shifted across country to supposedly more suitable sites! Where, I asked, are they: the land in and about the township is already occupied, much of it by shacks. Sites, I was told, are in the process of being acquired: they will “most likely be 25 or more kilometres from ... [Alexandra].” So, once again those least able to make such changes are required to do so - echoes of that still pertinent music hall ditty, “Isn’t it a bleedin’ shame, it’s the rich wot ‘as the fun, it’s the poor what gets the blame.” There will, however, be official counselling for shack householders. That, I imagine, could be a chancy safeguard. Counsellors, therapists, like other folk, have off days; times when some, a minority perhaps, might overstep the line between guidance and cajolery.
Back to the shacks of Alex. When, on driving through the township, my colleagues and I paused by the roadside, we usually found ourselves at one or other assembly of these ad hoc homes. They are ever to hand. On those occasions, I stood, voyeuristic camera focussed, hesitating ... waiting to shoot. Although the feeling scarcely lasted a moment, I recall being swamped by inner questions. What, apart from surface appearance, do I understand of the lives seen through my lens? In what ways can I, swaddled in a snug middle-class cocoon, empathise with these barely glimpsed lives?
There I was, reaching for supportive experience: perhaps a commitment to 'the struggle' that has spanned more than five decades, three of which were spent in political exile abroad? I summonsed my decidedly bookish past: memories of Arthur Maimane’s 1976 novel Victims, even an unexpected recollection of Peter O’Toole starring in the heartbreaking realism of Maxim Gorki’s Lower Depths at the Lyric Theatre, London, in long gone 1952. The details were strangely clear. I clutched eagerly at anything that might, in some dimly discernable way, justify my Peeping Tom presence.
There is, obviously, no charmed path. Nonetheless, hesitant or not, just as I have no doubt that an elite Claridges address - though redolent of wealth and fame - cannot attract me, so I am certain that shacks, anywhere, are unfit for human occupation. They must go. The over-arching question is: how to humanise the official/legal, bureaucratic fiat that governs their occupants’ presumably imminent “relocation”?
A valedictory comment
In concluding these memoirs, I salute the future. Since adolescence, I have learnt that firmly anticipated endings tend frequently to become unexpected beginnings. So, my respects to what is yet to come.
