Acknowledging the Unquiet Dead

The time aorund All Souls Day can be disturbing. This year I went to our local RC Church with my friend and colleague Bishop Peter Doyle of Northmapton and the Archbishop of Ljubljana for a Mass of Reparation for the victims of Slovene atrocities in May and June of 1945. This was all put together by Keith Miles of the Anglo-Slovene society. The Slovene Ambassador attended, and we all ended up on Slovene TV, an unusual experience. The story behind this event does not reflect well on anyone, but it’s important to acknowledge its significance and learn from it.

It concerns 12,000 Slovenian troops who had fought for Nazi Germany and surrendered in Austria. Those who knew they might not fare well in Stalin’s hands rushed to surrender to the Americans and British, hoping to save their lives from the gulags. It appears they were promised humane treatment and a home in Italy, then packed by the British into cattle trucks that took them “home”. Who knew how much when, and how these actions relate to the scramble among the Allies as the future iron curtain was forming up in 1945 is still unclear.

The cattle trucks took them to a place now known as Huda Jama, where they were herded through a 320 metre tunnel to pits where they were stripped and systematically slaughtered. Their bodies were walled in to avoid future detection, and the whole affair tactfully forgotten. You need make no value judgment about these peoples’ politics or why they fought on the side they did in World War II to see it does nobody any credit to pretend about such an atrocity.

Brits and Americans like to believe we were always the good guys. In the main we were, perhaps, but we have our own dirty little secrets, too, and it does no harm to be reminded of our own capacity to be complicit in evil, just like everybody else. The murderers were home grown, but they would never have been able to murder without British troops herding prisoners of war into cattle trucks, some like the Michael Palin character handing out crosses in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, courteously and perhaps even with a few twinges of regret that they might be sending those poor devils to their deaths. Well, they were. Even (especially?) the British need reminding that sometimes the interests of the Great Game, courtesy and administrative efficiency, are not enough.

These were not the only nor the latest tunnels full of of dead bodies, not even in the former Yugoslavia. Only by encoding the past in a truthful way can we hope to understand our own capacity for evil, complicit or instrumental. Only by acknowledging that can we truly resolve to act differently, should our turn ever come to make the kind of fundamental moral choice, life or death, that most home counties Pelagian English obfuscate about and avoid. The unquiet dead should not go away without some formal acknowledgment, and act of reparation.

Europe: worth a few straight bananas

Awaiting European election results, Lucy and I popped over for a look at the Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker, now open to the public. For 20 years up to 1992 it was a regional government centre; a hidey hole from which a commissioner and 600 Civil Servants would have run a great chunk of Britain after the Bomb went off. Authentic Public Information films from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s play as you go round.

Stentorian government announcers explain how to protect and survive with bin liners, 35 milk bottles of water each, a sand tray and a central core or refuge under the kitchen table. They all assume one bomb somewhere with two weeks to recover, and we can only wonder at how we’d have died, the lot of us, if these devices had gone off in any number. They’re also rather coy about what you do when the fallout from your own nukes blows back across the channel and kills you anyway.
Yet for much of my lifetime that was the plan — hold the Russians on Lüneborg Heath for up to a fortnight, then go nuclear.


Some of us well remember the Cuban missile crisis — thinking war could happen, with some childish notion it would be a bit like the blitz. These films make it plain it would be like nothing of the sort.
A small amount of imagination makes it obvious this whole nuclear survival thing was and is a bunch of crap. Even with a backyard the size of Siberia (or Alaska) it's a complete hiding to nowhere.

When I was a nipper in 1962 a teacher told me there would probably be a third world war by 1970, as there had been one every 25 years of that century so far. That’s what she had experienced, anyway. The European Union may not have acheved straight bananas, but it has broken a sequnce of bloody European wars which ran for 300 years like sick clockwork, (1700+/ 1750+/ 1790+/ 1848/ 1870/ 1914/ 1939). NATO has provided a defence umbrella, but positively speaking, the EU has built a continent where a war between its historic nations is now, for the first time in 300 years, unthinkable. Its processees could doubtless be reformed in sensible ways, but the central achievement is that for the first time in 300 years, two generations, mine and my children’s, didn’t have to march off to a major war.

I’m less than impressed by anyone who is prepared to risk dismantling Europe, or reducing it to a mere trading arrangement.

The great failure of the League of Nations in the 1930’s was its inability to construct union at a deep enough level to prevent war between nation states in 1939.
It broke under stress precisely because it could develop no substantial common institutions.

To be a Little Englander you have to be too stupid, ignorant or unimaginative to understand the most basic fact of our contemporary history. In a world of globalised superpowers, Victorian nation states are ultimately roadkill; and if anyone were to let off a nuke the other side of the channel, we’d be killed by the fallout anyway within hours. Why wouldn’t we want to play a positive role in the mechanism for preventing that ever happening?

One way ticket to a madman destination...

...will you stop or will you just keep going?" What has the "surge" achieved, and where is it all going anyway, now even George Bush is using the "V" word?

It's been a disturbing year. General Tony Zinni, led the US Marines ably and effectively in the gulf, and afterwards back home. Now retired, his Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy presentation at Duke (available for free on iTunes — just key in "Terry Sanford Zinni" to find a free audio or video podcast) tells it, pretty much, as it is from a military perspective — Iraq, failures, realities and the Future.

Thomas E. Ricks is the Washington Post Pentagon correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winning military historian. His analysis is now in paperback, and the title says it all — Fiasco: the American Military adventure in Iraq. It's a terribly depressing read (people suffering from a surfeit of cheerfulness after the holidays can get it on Amazon in a job lot with Bob Woodward's State of denial: Bush at War part III).

In Ricks' view not only have many people died on all sides, many of them innocent bystanders, but the effect of the whole thing has been to destroy US credibility and stoke up terrorism. "Effective tactics harnessed to bad strategy equals military disaster." He investigates how the US could start a pre-emptive war based on false information (step forward Paul Wolfowitz, among others), and tracks carefully through the disastrous resulting imbroglio.

His Afterword ("Betting against History") suggests one of four denouements:

1. The best case scenario: the Philippines, 1899-1946 — thousands of troops there for many years to come while the place dials down and normalises
   
   
2. The middling secnario: France in Algeria or Israel in Lebanon — keeping a lid on low level civil war for as long as possible, whilst trying to keep casualties down to a publicly acceptable rate, until something can be cobbled together domestically. This took the Israelis 18 years in Lebanon.
   
   
3. A worse scenario: Civil war, partition and regional war. T. X. Hammes, the counterinsurgency expert says "We have lit multiple fuses. There will be multiple explosions. I'm thinking our grandkids could easily be there."
   
   
4. The nightmare scenario. This is where the 74% of Iraqis who say "it doesn't matter whom, the country needs a single strong leader" gets one. Then if the US bottles out for electoral reasons, you arrive at a profound irony: Iraq run by a real dictator (Caliph?), who really is all the things Bush & Blair said Saddam Hussein was, which SH was, but only in his dreams. Unlike SH this guy would be the real deal. Anti-Americanism would unite all kinds of people around him SH could never pull in. Thus (almost like Greek tragedy) the result of the war could be to bring about precisely the scenario it was intended to avoid, but in a much more virulent form.

Is there a 5th scenario?