A "lion of prose" - RIP

Last May I, exceptionally, raved about the prose of a novellist, one William McIlvanney who, I have just learned, has died at the age of 79. As a tribute, I want to reproduce the post – 

These last few days I have been doing something I rarely do – I have been “savouring” a book – word by word as distinct from my usual habit of skimming. …..laughing out loud in delight at the language; marking sections every few pages with a pencil. And this is a novel – not my usual fare! A detective novel to boot – "Strange Loyalties" (1991). The book - the last of a trilogy - is written by one of the most underrated writers not only of the British Isles but perhaps in the English-speaking world - William McIlvanney

Here are a few samples of his style -

 The thought was my funeral for him. Who needs possessions and career and official achievements? Life was only in the living of it. How you act and what you are and what you do….  are the only substance. They didn’t last either. But while you were here, they made what light there was – the wick that threads the candle-grease of time. His light was out but here I felt I could almost smell the smoke still drifting from its snuffing….(p80).  

It was one of her partners who answered (the phone). When she knew it was me, her voice – always distant – more or less emigrated…..(p112)  

Attractiveness facilitates acquaintance, like a courier predisposing strangers to goodwill, and my mother had acquired early an innocent vanity that let her enjoy being who she was. But the kindness of other people towards her made her as idealistic as my father in her own way. She tended to think the way people treated her was how they treated everybody. She thought the best of them was all there was (p 128).  

Why do the best of us go to waste while the worst flourish? Maybe I had found a clue….Those who love life take risks, those who don’t take insurance. But that was all right, I decided. Life repays its lovers by letting them spend themselves on it. Those who fail to love it, it cunningly allows very carefully to accrue their own hoarded emptiness. In living, you won by losing big; you lost by winning small (p 134).    

Where I had come into what I took for manhood….meant much to me, not just as a geography but as a landscape of the heart, a quintessential Scotland where good people were my landmarks and the common currency was a mutual caring. Why did it feel so different to me today, a little seedy and withdrawn? p 183  

(Some might have thought her mad). But she wasn’t mad, just too sane to play along with the rest of us. She had awakened from her sleep-walk long enough to recognize the minefield we call normality. She had found a way to admit to herself the prolonged terror of living. Some people never do. p 206  

The invention of truth, no matter how desperately you wish it to be or how sincerely you believe in the benefits it will bring, is the denial of our nature, the first rule of which is the inevitability of doubt. We must doubt not only others but ourselves. (p 210)  

You offer him a vague perception and he takes it from you, cleans off the gunge and gives it back, having shown you how it works. He clarifies you to yourself. (p258) 

 Little wonder that in the tributes now being paid to him, this was said

His true peers were not alumni of the American hard-boiled school, such as Chandler and Hammett, but the likes of Gogol and Dostoevsky, Zola and Céline. He wrote about hard times and tough people – so-called “big men” and trauchled women – dealing with the fallout of unemployment, poverty and ignorance.“Why Willie is not better known outside his own heath has always been a mystery. In any other country that prizes the art of literature he would have been lionised.  

Generous tribute was paid to him in 2013 by another great Scottish writer - Allan Massie – a writer mainly of historical novels

McIlvanney, born in 1936 in Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, established himself some time ago as the best Scottish novelist of his generation. Docherty (1975), a social-political family novel set in a declining mining community, won the Whitbread award for fiction. Long before any but a handful of people had heard of Alasdair Gray, and before James Kelman had published anything, McIlvanney was recognised as the man who spoke authentically for the Scottish working class, out of which he had, like so many, been educated, being a graduate of Glasgow University and then a schoolteacher. So perhaps he wasn’t surprised when another teacher, encountered in a Glasgow bar, told him he had disgraced himself by stooping to write a crime novel – namely “Laidlaw”.

The charge was ridiculous; crime is a serious matter. Of course, most crime fiction is ordinary fare, read for amusement only. It may trivialise what is not, and should not be, trivial. But crime is at the heart of many great novels. Bleak House, which is a crime novel, is not trivial; Simenon’s novels are not trivial or mere entertainment; nor are McIlvanney’s three Laidlaw books. Their subject is the ruin of the body, the distortion of the soul, and the corruption of society.McIlvanney never allows us to forget that the damage crime does is not merely physical. Murder is always a form of betrayal, a denial of the respect with which we should treat each other. It infects everything around it.  

Laidlaw, an intellectual policeman, is damaged by what he experiences. He believes in communities; interviewing an elderly, loyal, but saddened mother in "Strange Loyalties", he reflects that there is nothing he wouldn’t do for the working-class women of that generation who held families together. But he himself is driven into isolation. 

McIlvanney is an existentialist writer, like Camus, whom he admires, has learnt from, and matches.He has never been prolific. If he had taken the advice he was given – to write an annual Laidlaw novel – he might be a rich man in his old age; but he has always gone his own way. The republication of these novels now will revive interest, and perhaps lead him to write another, as he has sometimes talked of doing. But his reputation, not only as the father of tartan noir, is assured. “Docherty”, almost 40 years on, is established as a modern Scottish classic, and I have no doubt that “The Kiln” (1996), which is, in one sense, a two-generations-later sequel, is a masterpiece. It confirmed him, to my mind, as the finest Scottish novelist of our time.

 It is one of those rare books that does what Ford Madox Ford thought imaginative literature could do better than any other art, making you think and feel at the same time.The “Kiln” is a novel of a hard-won maturity. Its hero, a novelist lost in the dark wood of middle age, sits, looking out at a cemetery, in a rented flat – in Edinburgh, not Glasgow (a sign of his displacement) – and gazes back on the summer when he was 17, in limbo between school and university, a magic summer which saw his passage to adult life.

The evocation of that time is beautiful, but now, behind him, is a broken marriage, memories of erratic social behaviour, and he is perplexed, as we all must sometimes be, by the question of what he has made of his life. He broods on the problem which is perhaps central to all experience: how to reconcile his sense of what he owes to himself with his knowledge of what he owes to others. There is then a vein of melancholy in the novel, but this is relieved by the often joyous vitality with which that summer is recalled, and enlivened by the acute social observation and darting shafts of wit. It’s a novel that tells you how it is, and therefore enriches your imaginative experience.

As a novelist myself (Allan Massie), I admire its craft. As a reader I can only be grateful. Almost 2,000 years ago, the younger Pliny wrote that “a man’s life contains hidden depths and large secret areas”. The thought is common. In Faust Goethe says: “Die Menschen sind im ganzen Leben blind” – men are blind throughout their life. True enough, but the best novelists offer us a means of opening our eyes, peering into these depths, and exploring these secret places, and they do so whatever their subject. 

William McIlvanney is one of the rare novelists who help us to know both the social world and our innermost selves. He is both moralist and artist, and a writer to be cherished.

There was a great interview with him in a 2010 issue of the Scottish Review of Books

Balkan perceptions

I’ve been quiet this past week simply because I’ve been wrapped up in what I hoped would be the final stages of completing the new book on Bulgaria – now running at 222 pages (compared with the 56 of Introducing the Bulgarian Realists)

Trouble is that I keep finding new names for my annotated list – 15 or so in the past week thanks to several finds and a visit to Pazardzhik and to a new graphics exhibition at Sofia’s City Gallery

These, however, are of minority interest and are therefore relegated to the last section of this post - which tries to confront the fact that potential readers may be disinclined to read a book which has “Bulgaria” in the title…
I’ m starting to wonder whether I would be better advised to use Balkan imagery in the title…. 

After all, tales of travels and exploits in these parts have apparently been part of the staple diet for British readers for several centuries…..as we now know thanks to the publications in the past 15 years of literary scholars  such as Maria Todorova, Andrew Hammond and Vesna Goldsworthy who have carefully itemised and summarised the writings of foreign visitors to the area - and identified various phases of the “West’s encounter with the near East”…Hammond’s The Debated Lands – British and American Representation of the Balkans, for example, suggests that - 

balkanist discourse has passed through three distinct paradigms. These are denigration before 1914; romanticisation in the inter-war years; and, after an ambivalent mixture of sympathy and disappointment during the Cold War, a return to denigration in the 1990s.

He then goes on to argue that –

pre-1914 denigration reveals close similarities to colonial discourse, how inter-war romanticism reflects the modernist quest for exoticism and psychological escape and how the reappearance of denigration coincides with the advent of postmodern scepticism.

Todorova has a fascinating chapter exploring how the region came to be called the Balkans (it was previously known as Haemus……  

The earliest mention of the name Balkan known to me comes from a fifteenth century memorandum of the Italian humanist writer and diplomat Philippus Callimachus (1437–1496). Persecuted by Pope Paul II, Callimaco settled in Poland and became a close adviser to the Polish king. He was the author of a history of the deeds of Wladyslav III Warnenczyk, in which he left a short description of the Haemus, which he saw when he visited the Constantinople on diplomatic missions. In his 1490 memorandum to Pope Innocent VIII, Callimaco wrote that the local people used the name Balkan for the mountain: “quem incolae Bolchanum vocant.”

Misha Glenny is one of the foremost commentators on the Balkans with a massive book The Balkans 1804-1912 - Nationalism, War and the Great Powers to his credit. He does not mince words when it comes with dealing with the negative reputation the area has    

To help set the record straight here are a few lesser-known facts about the Balkan peninsula that never make it into the newspapers. For those who would defend the Balkans but don’t know how, they will be useful for dropping into conversations about how hopeless the situation there is.

 1. The only country allied to the Axis that refused to allow any of its Jewish citizens to be deported to Nazi death camps was Bulgaria.

2. The single most violent period in Balkan history in terms of casualties sustained and the territorial extent of the warfare was a direct consequence of Hitler’s decision to occupy Greece, a decision prompted by Mussolini’s failed attempt to invade Greece in 1940. The Nazi resolve in March 1941 to dismember Yugoslavia was accompanied by the installation of a brutal Fascist administration in Croatia that was entirely unrepresentative of the political aspirations of the Croat people. Until Pavelic was installed in Croatia, there had been no history of mass violence between Serbs and Croats.

3. The Stalinist dictatorships that took root in Romania and Bulgaria were imposed by an agreement reached by Stalin and Churchill. In exchange for handing over these territories to Soviet influence, Churchill, and later Truman, were given a free hand by Stalin to smash a Communist insurgency in Greece that was on the verge of taking power with minimal foreign support.

4. Since 1989, the governments and people of Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania and Greece have all resisted attempts by nationalists to destabilise the local or regional polity.

5. The main victims of the sanctions imposed by the UN on Serbia have been the surrounding states, a number of which are attempting to steer their economies through the transition from Communism to capitalism. Bulgaria, for example, has been losing an estimated $2 billion a year. The impact on the economies of Western Europe and America has been negligible. The UN refuses to give Bulgaria any compensation.

Sadly the visibility of gypsies and criminals amongst those who have taken advantage since 2007 of Europe’s open borders has added yet another negative element to European perceptions of the area – so I have rejected the idea of a Balkan element to the book’s title a draft version of which can be accessed at The Bulgarian Realists – updated edition

But places with traces of older ways of behaviour - let alone the feel of antiquity - are increasingly impossible to find in this homogenised world. When found, of course, they need nurture - not hordes of people tramping the grounds and polluting the atmosphere. So, despite the many attractions of the country, this will not be a book which tries to encourage foreigners to visit special sites – it is rather a book which celebrates people long dead who have, however, left a bit of themselves in the attitudes and tastes of those who now inhabit its country.    

Finds I have to report are -

Contemporary Bulgarian Art – Paintings, Graphics and Sculpture ed Svetlin Rusev (Sofia 1982) was a large book I had seen a few years back but was discouraged from buying by the obviously political nature of the selection process. Seeing it again in the little second-hand place on Vasil Levsky corner at Sofia University made me realise that it was a real historical piece which warranted a place in my library – not least for its glorious reproductions. Its introduction is a stunning paean to the communist party - by the Chairman of the Bulgarian Union of Artists (7 pages which say absolutely nothing).

Rusev still bestrides the art scene these days but must regret the opening page’s hymn to September 9th 1944 as well as the obvious omissions eg no mention of the country’s most famous  aquarellist Konstantin Shtarkelov (banned and disgraced for his royalism) or the caricaturist Raiko Aleksiev, murdered in prison. The illustrations are still magnificent 33 years later and the whole book is an incredible bit of history (c 400 pages – not numbered)

A new auction house started in Sofia this year and has apparently held 3 auctions - each offering a superb 70 page catalogue. This is the November one I missed just by a day

Then a visit to Pazardzhik – a small town close to Plovdiv, a gallery I had just become aware of – which is supposed to house more than 2000 paintings donated by one of Pazardzhik’s most famous sons, the painter Stoian Vasilev. I could find no sign of them however! The first of the gallery’s 2 rooms – with still lives – was bitterly disappointing but things were made up with the portrait room which had a wonderful display of the works of one of Bulgaria’s best women artists - Elisabeth Konsulova-Vaseva as well as delightful examples of many others, including two I had not heard of – local painters Georgi  Mashev (1887-1946) and graphic artist Georgi Gerasimov (1905-1977). Although the curator spoke only Bulgarian, she was friendly and pressed several little booklets of these two artists and also about Stoian Vasilev into my hands and wouldn’t take any money for them….

My final find was Catalogue of Graphic Art (Sofia City Art Gallery 2015) a glorious record of the gallery’s graphic collection with a small reproduction of each item - 770 pages bilingual. That’s almost 4000 reproductions!!

A Hard Day's Night

Bulgaria is famous for its red wines – I remember first coming across them in the Glasgow Oddbins in the 1970s and, lo indeed, 40 out of the 50 best wines recommended in the Bulgaria’s magic little annual “Divino Guide” are red.

But it was their white wines which were the great discovery for me when I first motored through Bulgaria in 2002 on the way to Turkey. I was quite stunned by first the crispness of the vastly underrated Targovishte Muscat (which rightly won a bronze medal in a Paris fair a couple of years back) and then by the sheer variety I was encountering.

Now my palate (and body) reject red wines – apart from those from the Melnik area and the Struma valley which crosses the border with Greece

But there were still more than 100 varieties of white on offer at the 2015 tasting of Bulgarian wines which took place a week ago at the Narodni Dom Kulturna (I always confuse it with NKD – which my young Bulgarian friends tell me is proof that I was a spy!).

That’s quite a slog for one day – so it was very early to bed that evening. Sunday was for the roses (the liquid variety) – fewer in number so I was able to emerge after a couple of hours with a clear head and an even greater commitment to their whites….  I had missed last year’s tasting but had been sober enough in 2013 to keep some notes of how I marked the whites

To prepare for the 2015 tasting I had pulled out and checked the scribbles on my copy of the great little Catalogue of Bulgarian Wine (by T Tanovska and K Iontcheva - annual) which I use to record my impressions. The Wine Routes of Bulgaria (Vina Zona 2014) is also a nice little – if less technical – profile of 64 of the good Bulgaria vineyards. No fewer than 66 vineyards were presenting on 20-22 November – which means about 400 bottles were waiting to be tasted!!

Six wineries battled it out for my palate’s favour this year

Marvin’s Traminer (6 euros) is from a vineyard in the Sliven area (in the centre of the country) - an area whose wines were the first to make an impression on me some years ago

Boi and AR Pomorie  had a great Chardonnay and Viognier (6 euros). Pomorie at the Black Sea has some of the best white wines - but this particular winery was new to me….

Domaine Menada –  had a winner (Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay) for only 3.50 euros! A long established winery – near Stara Zagora in the middle of the country

Edoardo Miroglio – (a Chardonnay Barrique) – Sliven area again….

Villa Yustina is in the foothills of the Rhodope mountains near Plovdiv  and had a lovelyTraminer for 3 euros

Santa Maria at the moment is my favourite winery – in the south of the country near the Greek border – and offers two white wines (Sauvignon Blanc; and a Chardonnay - 4 euros) which won great applause at my own home wine tasting earlier in the month

Seven jostled closely behind -

Chateau Bourgozone - a favourite of mine on the western part of the Danube stretch – actually had 2 wines which caught my fancy – a Sauvigon Blanc; and a Chardonnay Barrique.

Levent – also on the Danube – had a wonderful Traminer/Miskat from the Russe wine house

Eolis - from the southern borderregion - had a lovely Gewurztraminer

Alexandra Estate – Vermentino (Sakar Region). a new grape for me

Four Friends vineyard is in the central region, near Stara Zagora and had a great Sauvignon Blanc (6 euros)

Neragora is a new organic vineyard in the Plovdiv area (receiving Italian help). Their Chardonnay and Misket was very acceptable

Todoroff – two of their wines pleased me - Rainbow Green (Muscat and Aligote); and Rainbow Silver (Cuve – SB and Chardonnay with some Viognier). Todoroff are in the amazing village of Brestovitsa (boasting 7 vineyards) very near Plovdiv

And, finally, four which didn’t score quite so high but which deserve a mention -

Levent – Riesling (5 euros)

Zelanos – Pino Gris (7 euros)

Saedinenie – Sauvignon Blanc and Viognier

Villa Yambol – Chardonnay (2.5 euros!)

Favourite Vineyards in south-east - Bratanov; Milidare; Medi Valley; Katarzyna;

Favourite Vineyards in south - Strymon; Villa Melnik

Favourite Vineyards at Black Sea Black Sea Gold; Ethno – in a village near Burgas on the Black Sea near the border with Turkey; and Slavyansti - ditto

Central - Targovishte winery; Starosel; Vinprom Yambol

The things I do for science!!!

Identity Politics and the Human Rights "Industry"

The unease about “multiculturalism” that has been festering in many Europeans for the past two decades seems to have exploded into full open view - as a result, first, of the sight of hundreds of thousands of refugees on the move from the slow train-wreck that Syria has become and now, this month, of the Paris massacre.

This post may seem to wander – but please bear with me as I try to clear my head from the obfuscated language used nowadays to talk about issues of “identity”…..

An article by Nick Cohen attacking what he called “progressive liberalism” struck a nerve with me this week – although I realized from reading his What’s Left? – how the left lost its way. How Liberals lost their way (2007) some years back that you do not get from him a balanced treatment…..  But the book did make me aware of just how different my Scottish experience was. We may have had some ripples of immigration from India, Italy and Pakistan but their entrepreneurial skills gave them a certain status. Somehow the rain and cold have conspired to keep most immigrants away from Scotland - it is telling that the most significant immigration to Scotland came a century ago - across the narrow stretch of water which separates the country from Northern Ireland…  These were not only poor - but Roman Catholic and therefore marginalized in the labour and housing markets.

As a youngster I was attracted to the language of “equality” used by people such as RH Tawney, Aneurin Bevan and Richard Titmuss and therefore became active in my town’s Labour Party in the late 1950s. As a “son of the manse” I was a bit of an oddity in the predominantly Catholic local party who aroused the strong prejudices in the protestants who were the mainstay of the town’s professional class. Their disapproval of my activities was strongly conveyed to my poor father (who never remonstrated with me). In 1968 I found myself a councillor representing a (religiously) “mixed” area but with my sympathies strongly for those “disadvantaged” – not least by the fickleness of the hiring habits of the shipbuilding owners.

That’s when I first saw the downside of democracy and the need for some “positive discrimination” – a concept just beginning to trickle across from the States……I spent the subsequent 20 years of my life on this “mission”. So I have “form” as an active “leftist” pushing such an agenda.

But I have never felt comfortable with the language of “human rights” - nor those using it…I well remember the impatience I had in the 1980s with the new language of “equal opportunities” which came largely from middle-class women with an understandable agenda of getting better jobs – when we were trying in Strathclyde to create better conditions for 300,000 people affected by long-terms unemployment, addiction and mental health.

And don’t even talk to me about my attitude toward the young international professionals I began to encounter in the 2000s using the language and holy scriptures of “human rights”. To me rights are something you have to struggle for – not text you bow down to because it’s enshrined in the documents of international bodies…..

It was at this point I started to question the motives and integrity of the people associated with what was becoming a huge industry…….and felt that my record gave me the right to challenge what I have seen as excessive “political correctness…” which has now reached the level of utter stupidity..     

Francis Fox Piven is one of the American left’s most distinguished activists and had this to say in 1995 about the rise of identity politics. Robin Blackburn is an independent-minded British Marxist who brought an eagle eye to human rights a few years back in this article - Reclaiming Human Rights

There are many individuals – particularly those suffering from sexual discrimination - who have gained from the assertion of rights but, from being one of a small minority of the left who dared question the assertion of “human rights” I suspect I am becoming more mainstream….. 

Passion and Dedication

I sometimes think that Newspeak has taken over. For years, for example, the journals have been full of talk of “innovation” and yet we live and breathe in ever more (globally) homogenised societies where “innovation” is, as often as not, simply what we used to call “product differentiation” – ie minute tinkering in design.

One of the reasons I am fond of Sofia is that I am constantly coming across here the quiet assertion of real (as distinct from pseudo) individuality and creativity…..Its art galleries and bookshops have been described in these posts as “the last sanctuaries of originality” – with the Astry Gallery as the leading example. It’s not just the way interesting (young and old) Bulgarian artists are cultivated and presented in her small gallery - it’s the friendly almost family atmosphere.

And the tastefully-designed bookmarks which mark every exhibition – real collectors’ items – are a simple gesture of that aesthetic commitment. They are produced by a young couple who have also become a great help to me eg in the production of my booklet on Bulgarian art (just about to go into a second edition) and in setting up my new website. Danail in particular has an exemplary “Can-Do” attitude as a result of which his little company has won more custom not only from me but from at least one other foreigner who found not only the quotes and deadlines unbeatable but the professionalism of the work deeply impressive. 

Let me give some other examples - last Saturday, returning from the tribute to the Paris dead at the nearby French Embassy, I stumbled across an incredible little pub (intriguingly named “Sterling Club”) just round the corner from my flat…It looks old but has in fact been operating for only three years….my next visit (with friends) I hope to get the story…..

Last year I was struck with two beautiful and highly original books about aspects of Bulgarian history and culture by two Bulgarians I now count as friends – Ivan Daraktchiev, with his amazing Bulgaria: Terra Europeansis Incognita; and Rumen Manov with his 700-page celebration of some 2000 cultural artefacts and photographs from his own personal collection - in A Fairy Tale about Bulgaria. Each was a labour of love – paid for by the author….  

And this Wednesday I shall be at a winetasting in a small shop at the Russian Monument which I have been cultivating almost since its start 4 years ago. Vinoorenda is run by a young man, Asen, and his father and, to judge by the cards and references at last weekend’s Annual Wine-tasting, has already built up an impressive reputation amongst particularly the smaller, craft vineyards in the country…. 

The blog has previously noted the proliferation in central Sofia of tiny shops run by both young and old……..a powerful expression of individuality which is repressed by the large stores which are the feature of most downtowns in European cities.

Is this just an accident of the narrow streets? ……I have a feeling it reflects something more cultural. Bulgarians, for example, don’t seem to have adopted the debt life-style of other nations……. They’re not taken in by fashions. They have a respect for healthy foods and vegetables (and for their country’s history and culture)…..

They are a small, relatively isolated country, surrounded by indifferent if not unfriendly neighbours – perhaps this has developed an awareness of being on their own and needing to work at something about which they’re passionate?

Coincidentally I’m reading one of Robert Greene’s recent books called Mastery. Guardian readers, as you will see from this review, turn their nose up at Greene but I confess I enjoy his books – not least for their layout and charming tales of emperors and great men.

Mastery is a celebration of the life of the “vocation” and the dedication which goes with it….In these times of shallow showmanship and deceit, we desperately need such celebrations…..Of course, those wanting a more serious read should go to Howard Gardner’s Creating Minds

Is our Moral Outrage Relative and Selective??

It’s been more than a week since the horrific massacre in Paris – whose death toll could have been at least tripled but for the effective work of security guards at the Stade de France where a friendly match had just commenced between France and Germany….The lockdown this weekend of central Brussels may seem heavy-handed but obviously warranted given the disaffection clearly embedded in at least one of the Brussels neighbourhoods……

Given the long battle which raged around a flat in the St Dennis neighbourhood of Paris on Wednesday before some of the apparent perpetrators were brought down, it is quite amazing that only three deaths seem to have resulted (more so in Mali) but, sadly, many more innocent people in Syria have died as France has stepped up its bombing of ISIS targets in that country…..

Like most people I have not only followed these fast-moving events but have tried to understand the motives of those concerned….For me there are 3 basic questions –

- Who are these people, prepared to blow up people amongst whom they have lived?

 -  Why are they doing it?

- What does it take to get them to stop?

Although I have 7 years of living in muslim societies, the Russian cultural influence (for which read vodka) was still strong in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan – although ebbing particularly fast in the last country… where indeed there was a lockdown in the Pamir mountains just outside Tashkent in 2000 because of terrorist activities…

I have, since that time, had a certain interest in Islam – to the extent, for example, of reading both Among the Believers – an Islamic journey by VS Naipul (1981); and Desperately Seeking Paradise – journeys of a sceptical muslim by Ziauddin Sardar (2004)

Curiously, few of the articles I have read seem to deal with the first question. One exception is Scott Atran and Nafeeds Hamid’s highly detailed profiling  in The New York Review of Books 

that 90 percent of French citizens who have radical Islamist beliefs have French grandparents and 80 percent come from non-religious families. In fact, most Europeans who are drawn into jihad are “born again” into radical religion by their social peers.

In France, and in Europe more generally, more than three of every four recruits join the Islamic State together with friends, while only one in five do so with family members and very few through direct recruitment by strangers. Many of these young people identify with neither the country their parents come from nor the country in which they live. Other identities are weak and non-motivating.

One woman in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois described her conversion as being like that of a transgender person who opts out of the gender assigned at birth: “I was like a Muslim trapped in a Christian body,” she said. She believed she was only able to live fully as a Muslim with dignity in the Islamic State. For others who have struggled to find meaning in their lives, ISIS is a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends, and through friends, eternal respect and remembrance in the wider world that many of them will never live to enjoy.

 A July 2014 poll by ICM Research suggested that more than one in four French youth of all creeds between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four have a favorable or very favorable opinion of ISIS.

Even if these estimates are high, in our own interviews with young people in the vast and soulless housing projects of the Paris banlieues we found surprisingly wide tolerance or support for ISIS among young people who want to be rebels with a cause—who want, as they see it, to defend the oppressed.

In another blog in the same journal a well-known Pakistani journalist (with a decade of personal experience as a guerrilla) looks at the divergent pattern of attacks on civilian targets by terrorist groups of the past decade and offers the obvious explanation for the attacks in the European heartland -     

ISIS is now determined to launch attacks against those states that are waging war against it. Turkey has just given the US government permission to use some of its airbases for strikes against ISIS; Hezbollah is helping Bashar al-Assad fight ISIS.

The Russians are now bombing ISIS and other groups, while the French are crucial partners in the anti-ISIS coalition.

French warplanes bombing ISIS from runways in the Gulf states are about to get a fresh boost as the French government sends its only aircraft carrier to the Gulf. 

ISIS’s message is thus clear—the group is waging an all-out deliberate war against all those countries that are lining up to fight it. Again, this is not an attempt to take down the Western order, in the way that al-Qaeda was trying to do, nor is it a reaction to the evils of Western heathens. It is a direct reaction to what is being done to ISIS by coalition forces. 

A Turkish academic, Mehmet Ugur, offers a more nuanced approach in “Social Europe” 

The background for this sad state of affairs is common knowledge. The emergence of a unipolar world system in the early 1990s has induced Western governments to push for unrestricted market dominance at home and abroad. Also, triumphalism has become the norm of foreign policy, which embraced military interventions aimed at regime change in contravention to international law and massive public opposition. 

One component of the ‘regime-change’ strategy was to support and collaborate with non-state armed groups. The first pilot exercise was the direct and indirect (through the ISI of Pakistan) support that the American administration provided to the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s. The support took an ‘unintended’ form during the 2000s, when the Taliban were slicing off US aid to the failed state that the US intervention had left behind.

Then came the Iraq War, which created a large number of Sunni armed groups, including Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The latter joined other Sunni insurgency groups in 2006 to form ISIS. The recruitment ground for these groups consisted of Sunnis who lost jobs and livelihoods as a result of Western military intervention in Iraq. The link between Western interventions and the strengthening of terrorist groups was also evident after the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya.

Under the nose of Western surveillance, Libyan arms depots were looted and weapons sent to Syria through a NATO ally – Turkey. The Times reported on an arms shipment on 14 September 2012. This is unlikely to have been the only shipment.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh wrote an article in April 2014, in which he exposed a classified agreement between the CIA, Turkey and the Syrian rebels to create the “rat line” – the covert network used to channel weapons and ammunition from Libya to Syria through Turkey.

 The funding was provided by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with full knowledge of the US authorities.

My third question does beg some further questions – not least the obvious one of why I haven’t raised this question before in my blog…..I'm forced to recognise that our sense of moral outrage is relative and selective. Indeed even to pose the question is, for many, a concession to terrorism……..

Translate it to more everyday behaviour….confronted by a bully, do we concede? Surely not! That's the "lesson" we've drawn from appeasement...Not surprisingly therefore it is the basis of most of the pundits’ commentary…… 

I think, however, we need to go back to the first question and be willing to explore more the nature of the people we are dealing with….it is certainly not the German friend Camus was writing to in 1944…
And the scale of games being played by our so-called allies in the Middle East (if not Russia) should certainly make us think ten times before sustaining or strengthening some of our strange alliances

update; by a pure coincidence, I have just started to watch this 1985 film "Brazil" which, despite its opening humour, sends shivers down my spine. We've been at it for 30 years??????

Death in Paris

The death by gunshot of one innocent is murder – of 130 a massacre - regardless of where it takes place…it could have been any of us in those cafes and halls of Paris……And anger was my first response – at the preachers of hatred in the mosques dotted around the cities of Europe. I felt sympathy for those who would lock them all up……

But then I found myself asking why I seemed to have had a different response to 130 innocent deaths in places such as Afghanistan and Syria. More than a hundred innocent deaths every day - from American, British, French and Russian missiles in these two countries and so many thousands in Iraq and Libya not so long ago….. I can, of course, blame the corporate media since we view the world through its’ lenses and they simply don’t rate such “incidents” or deaths from “accidental” or “friendly” fire. In that respect, we use the same defence mechanism as so many Germans in Hitler’s time who screened unpleasant or unacceptable “truths” from their consciousness……

True, more than a million British people marched against the Iraq war a decade ago – and some foresaw the radicalization that would come from Western “interventions”.

Even George Bush Senior has spoken openly (at last) about his son’s stupidity in letting his advisers take America (and many in the West) to war…… 

Four years ago, a Romanian journal asked me to reflect on how the world had changed since September 2001. This was the opening of my initial response - 

The attack on the Twin Towers certainly provided the opportunity for the security interests in leading States (adrift after the collapse of communism) to regroup and increase their budgets and power. "Counter-terrorism” became the slogan behind which the State increased various surveillance and control measures over its own citizens. Defence (aggression) budgets and actions boomed; powers of detention without legal redress were increased; a generation of young muslims radicalised; and cultural tensions increased.

But the 2011 attack was by no means the only significant event over the decade. Arguably, indeed, governments and media have used the threat of terrorism to distract us all from vastly greater threats to our security and social harmony which have developed as neo-liberalism has grown apace and threatened to destroy the democratic model which was so painfully constructed in the 20th century.

Earlier that day I had read of the death of one of France’s last remaining intellectuals  - Andre Glucksmann who  was apparently the guy who had suggested to Sarkozy the appointment as Foreign Minister of socialist Bernard Kouchner (warning – the link’s writer is a self-avowed neo-Con) although Kouchner typified a Blairite “moral activism” - and it is his legacy which looks to have come back like a boomerang to hit France…......

France – despite its hostility to the American line on Iraq – has turned out to be more hawkish in Syria…..where even  the UK hesitates….A French book published only last week questioned this......That led me onto another assessment – by Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker 

… when asked to distill Glucksmann’s contribution to French thought,  his friend and younger writer the writer Pascal Bruckner said that it was to put an end to any romance about Communism, but, more important, to reset the tuning of French understanding: he made it clear that building a more ideal world was a less important task than mending the evil in this one.
 “I cannot tell you what to be for. But I know what to be against,” was one of Glucksmann’s favorite locutions. It was hard to know how to make a better world. But it was easy to see what was making a horrible one. Designing the ideal order was impossible work. Saving the victims from those engaged in designing ideal orders was not, in truth, as hard as our laziness let us pretend it was.

I suddenly remembered Albert Camus’ 5 letters to a German friend in the book Resistance, Rebellion and Death (1960) which made a big impact on me at University……Written originally in 1943/44 the letters offer a powerful argument against the nihilism of those who practice violence – or rather

“I have never believed in the power of truth itself – but it is at least worth knowing that, when expressed forcefully, truth wins out over falsehood”

His third letter contains an important message for those of now contemplating Fortress Europe – 

You say “Europe” but you think in terms of potential soldiers, granaries, industries brought to heel, intelligence under control…you cannot keep yourself from thinking of a cohort of docile nations led by a lordly Germany   …....

for us Europe is a home of the spirit…. Don’t worry I shall not fall back on the argument of Christian tradition….that is something you have talked of too much….Europe has another tradition…my tradition, that of a few great individuals and of an inexhaustible mass….two aristocracies - that of the intelligence and that of courage

It is difficult to imagine these days such a dialogue (however imaginary) between a Frenchman and a representative of ISIS and, if it did, the Frenchman would not be expressing philosophical confidence but rather anger and bewilderment….

We need cool heads these days - our elites (British, French or American) have become too polarised in their attitudes...........and seem incapable of exploring Middle East  issues  (in all their admittedly fiendish complexity)in a balanced way. We need Fred Halliday back amongst us…..some of his thoughts on terrorism here

Here is one balanced assessment – another here and a final one from "Salon" whose analysis needs to be absorbed by the hotheads amongst us

RIP

the painting is one of a Paris series by Maria Raicheva, a young Bulgarian artist, which hangs on the wall in front of me and always attracts admirers