Bardocrat 2

Bardocrat

     Historically, bards (i.e. poets) were radicals, freedom fighters and vociferous opponents of governments; they were also mostly egalitarian libertarians, and usually moral outcasts.  They generally cocked a snook at religion, dissed the establishment, and heaped obloquy upon those who opposed their views.  And they were invariably angry, often opinionated. 

     The West’s two most ancient bards, Homer and Hesiod, not only totally opposed each other’s beliefs and Weltanschauum:  they even confronted each other in a poetry contest on Mount Helicon. Lord Byron fought the snotty establishment in Britain, later dying a martyr to Greek independence from the Ottoman Turks. Shelley, though the son of a baronet, scorned riches and threw in his lot with the underclasses. Thoreau in America spurned his Ivy League background to grow beans and a beard by a pond in a forest.  Cervantes tilted at more than just windmills.  Rimbaud, Pushkin and Dostoevsky were all rebels.   

     How times have changed. Poets today are supposed to write pretty lines about love and trees and fluffy bunnies and peaceful people living in blissful harmony in inclusive societies with neutral pronouns.  They are expected to be witty, perhaps a little testy over sensitive issues like the climate; but they are not expected to use any degree of forceful language, which apparently traumatises some people.  They are also expected to shy away from complex rhyming structures (which require far too much skill), foreign words, archaisms and heated debate.  Why? Because, if they wish to be published, they must be politically aligned with the trending sentiments of their own society – i.e. politically correct. And they are supposed to be emotional rather than angry.

     Times have changed again.  Who wouldn’t be angry today?  If social injustice, plutocrats’ greed, Covid pandemic and climate chaos were not enough, we now have a dictator prosecuting a blitzkrieg against a sovereign democratic people in Europe whom he dismisses as “Nazis and drug addicts.” We also have an ultra-right-wing government in Israel hell-bent on eradicating all Palestinians, and therefore all hope of any Two-State solution.

     So, with Christmas coming – that time of ‘Goodwill to all men’ – what better time to launch Bardocrat? – who does not write about fluffy bunnies (though he does write about real ones) nor unrealistic fluffy-bunny societies. Moreover, he is frequently opinionated, bolshie when he feels it’s required, and employs satire, irony and ribald humour, complex rhyming schemes, foreign words and archaisms (as all real poets always have).  Bardocrat  also writes the occasional Essay, on both current and historical topics, always aiming to show both sides of any argument.  

     And whatever he writes he is guaranteed never to be politically correct.

     One caveat.  Owing to financial constraints (most poets are poor), Bardocrat  is obliged to share this website with someone called ‘Villastultus’, editor of Satyrista, who frequently writes commentaries upon some of my work, not all of them complementary.  Bardocrat’s not fazed.  I am more than confident that the quality of my work will shine through any analysis.  And besides, it’s hard to know sometimes whether or not he is serious.  You be the judge. 

*

     The following poems deal in differing ways with the same age-old issues: dispossession by superior powers.  The first was written almost a year before Britain reluctantly decided to cede the Chagos Islands to Mauritius; the others deal with related issues witnessed through the prism of individuals.  The Essay which follows the poems addresses essentially the same issues:  dispossession and displacement.

Chagos

Iberians sailed the ocean blue

Till they saw land they never knew.

They disembarked and built some huts,

And fed on fish and coconuts.

“So lovely are these isles, this spot,

It surely is a blessèd plot;” –

So said they as they sailed away.

“We shall return another day.”

But those the days of Empires were:

They sold those isles without demur,

First the Spanish; then the French.

The latter thought to leave a wrench;

So slaves they brought to work the fields,

To cut the copra, boost the yields.

But Empire always wants more, more!

Its barns had ever open doors.

And Empire is a fickle beast:

A Treaty followed by a feast

Passed Chagos on to British rule;

And in they sailed – more foreign ghouls.

Long, long years passed and bored they got.

Till Yanks appeared and said, Now, what

We need to fight our enemies –

They’re everywhere, believe us, please –

Are lonely isles where no one lives;

For which a handsome rent we’ll give.

That one – Diego Garcia –

The Brits yelled as they swigged their beer;

We’ll rent it you for your great ’drome.

Those living there we’ll push from home,

To other islands relocate.

We’ll sail them there and compensate.

But no one asked Chagossians this:

Would leaving here increase your bliss?

Of course not.  They all wished to stay.

But powers mighty had their way.

They threw them out; they killed their pets –

Then sailed away with no regrets.

     The next poem was written in Manila.  It’s theme of dispossession and loss is a common one in the crowded metropolis.

[A] Lot Lost

She squats on hunkers near the gate,

Her long grey hair teased by the breeze,

Her eyes invoking yesterdays

When all her hours invested here

Were filled with joy of home and life.

Celestial Heights Subdivision –

That’s what they call her bahay now.

Vast walls, iron gates, CCTV;

And guards with guns let no one in

Without a laminated pass.

A mangy dog comes panting near.

A poor soul selling scrap to eat

Halts in the shade to rest and smoke.

The guards hiss warnings through the gate –

No scavengers, nor dogs in here:

“Alis ka na! Alis ka na!”

But, ah, here comes the owners’ car.

The gates admit their SUV –

Smoked glass, aircon and gate pass free.

Mabuhay to Celestial Heights!

Her yester eyes glance up and squint

Down happy vistas, one day closed:

 When papers in the post arrived,

Informed her that her paradise

Was Real Estate – though not for her.

She owned no money, dynasty,

Nor things of value but her kids.

To the celestial heights she prayed;

But no help came – only delayed

The triumph of Celestial Heights.

[bahay – ‘modest house’; Mabuhay – ‘welcome’; Alis ka na! – ‘go away!’]

Cars & Kin

My rich neighbour’s built a house for his car;

It’s made of wood and brick, has alloy doors

Which softly rise as he glides up his drive.

Lamps greet him with a flood of homely light.

Quiet circuits lock his gate upon the world.

He feeds his car best oils and liquids.  And,

On Sundays he shampoos her glossy coat.

On winter’s coldest nights he wraps her in

Nice blankets.  And he calls her soppy names;

Regards her as his fam’ly – his own kind.

My other neighbours live in cardboard caves

They made from other people’s household waste.

They have no drive nor garden, no warm lights;

They huddle together round shared bonfires,

And the world of wealth clicks shut about them,

Yet gives them little but a cold contempt.

They feed themselves on cheapest stodge and tea.

They wash in hostels; dress from rummage sales;

Warm their bones with beer and blazing pallets;

Make curses names, and can’t recall their kin.

Oligarchs

All the little oligarchs

Stand grinning in a row;

Shiny teeth, like flashing quarks,

Reflecting media glow.

“God put us here to be your crown!”

That’s what their image says.

“Our mega-dosh will trickle down

And brighten up your day.”

But trickle’s tickle sans the ‘r’:

Like dark clouds on desert sand,

Which tickle all that rain’s not far,

‘Trickle’ clings within the hand

Of those who falsely promise much.

The plants those clouds teased put forth roots;

At healthy growth they clutched.

Betrayal withers all new shoots.

Yet still the fools stand there and grin;

They really think they’re gods.

Convinced their wooing helps them win,

They kiss the lumpen clods.

They spin and weave; they pose and crop;

“Compassionate we live to be!”

Yet in the vacuum of dop

Just sycophants believe it’s free.

Those juggernauts of industry

The oligarchs unleash –

Piled high with boons and liberty –

Draw in their wake what’s out of reach:

“Have bourgeois lifestyles every soul!”

Too late the poorest see:

The rich retain nine tenths the whole.

The poor retain – their misery.

      Bardocrat has noticed a great deal of confusion in the media about the War in the Middle East.  He hopes the Essay below might cast a little light on the very complex background to this terrible conflict.  It does not pretend to be either prescriptive or definitive.

The‘Promise’

      In October 2023 Hamas terrorists stormed out of tunnels under Gaza, irrupted into Israel and indiscriminately slaughtered over a thousand people, many of them women and children.  They slaughtered hundreds of defenseless young people at a music festival, set fire to houses in a Kibbutz and defiled many other dwellings.  In retreat, they took over 200 hostages, many of them still held captive today.  And the whole world expressed its horror and sympathy with Israel. 

      All too soon, though, that horror and sympathy began to shift to the ordinary people of Gaza, not all of whom supported Hamas.  Why?  Because bombs were raining down upon women and children, flattening hospitals, infrastructure, even religious buildings; and the Israeli army began to displace a whole nation in the process of pursuing the Hamas terrorists.  When its excesses were challenged – currently over 40,000 Palestinians dead, 100,000 injured, and half of Gaza City reduced to rubble – the army denied everything except self-defense. They also claim to have killed “battalions” of Hamas fighters – though we never see their bodies. Habeas corpus?

    Retributive Israeli assaults upon their neighbors are not new.  Sad to say, they have a history of it.  The Old Testament judgement of ‘an eye for an eye’ seems in today’s Israel to have transmogrified into something closer to ‘a hundred souls for an eye’.  For years, gangs of Nationalist settlers have been burning and shooting Arab neighbors out of their homes and off their land in the West Bank, activities which are all illegal under international law, draw international outrage, and are currently increasing while the world’s attention is diverted upon Gaza. 

     When a displaced youth in Ramallah or the West Bank throws a stone at occupying soldiers, they shoot him dead.  They don’t stop there.  They shoot up the boy’s neighborhood, bulldoze his house and kill several more of his neighbors.  And in Gaza injured Palestinians are strapped like sacks of meat to the bonnets of Jeeps. The soldiers’ superiors say they will be disciplined, but we hear nothing more. Challenges fall upon deaf ears.  Even UN condemnation draws only scorn from Israel, or more justifying press conferences peppered with references to smart tech seeking out terrorists hiding in hospital operating theatres. 

     Many across the world raise their voices in condemnation – but nothing happens.  Diplomats demand explanations – but seldom receive anything beyond denial or silence.  Even some Arab states say nothing.  The only thing we know for sure is that the same things will happen again tomorrow; again, people will be angry; again, nothing will happen.

     Why is this?  We have to ask this question because we all know that if almost any other country on earth were to behave like Israel in Gaza (and now also in Lebanon), it would attract international outrage.  The UN would not merely issue fierce condemnation:  it would dispatch high-ranking envoys and deploy peace-keeping forces between the warring sides.  And America would deploy a carrier force.

    To find the answer to this anomaly we have to go back a long way.  We have to go back to a secret agreement between colluding nations which led eventually to a seminal ‘Promise’.

     So, who promised what to whom?  The who was Lord Balfour, a British Conservative MP, who was Prime Minister of Britain from 1902-1905.  The whom were the Jewish people.  Here is his Promise to them:

     “HM Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing will be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

     Officially, this declaration, announced in November 1917, was known as the Fourth Formula – so called because it was preceded by three other Formulas, which were all rejected.  Today this all sounds rather odd, its language emollient, almost unctuous.  What gave the British Government the right to make such a declaration?  And why were they moved to make it? 

     The date gives a clue.  Between 1914 and 1918 Britain – then still a colonial power with vast influence – was fighting what we now call World War I.  Their allies were France, Russia, Belgium, Italy and Japan.  Their opponents were Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey (the latter known then as Ottoman Turks). 

     By late 1915 the Brits and the French sensed that the War was going their way; they were so confident that they began making plans to carve up the land they would take from the Ottoman Empire, which then included Palestine.  Mark Sykes and Francoise Picot, British and French diplomats respectively, concocted a secret deal which would carve up much of the Levant; the line they drew upon the map became known as the Sykes-Picot line; and the countries that line dissected (inter alia Iraq and Syria), were not consulted.  For their parts in this secret deal, Britain would get most of Palestine, southern Iraq and the strategically-important Mediterranean ports of Haifa and Acre; France would take Lebanon, northern Palestine and Syria; Italy would get southern Anatolia; and Russia would get western Armenia, Constantinople [today called Istanbul] and the Turkish straits. All these countries promised the resident Arab and Kurdish tribes that they would receive guaranteed homelands in return for fighting with the allies against the Ottoman Muslims.  Their betrayal – mainly owing to French plans to rule Syria alone, and British reluctance to trust Arabs generally – became a diplomatic thorn in the western conscience which persists today; the present carnage in Gaza seems to be pushing it in yet farther.  It also made one eccentric Englishman famous for his condemnation of western bad faith:  Lawrence of Arabia.  But that’s another story.

     In that secret deal traceable to 1915-1916, the most important chunk of soil to be apportioned as war booty to Britain was the Holy Land.  So, when the Armistice was declared in 1918, the British Government (in collusion with their main allies) were given control of a large part of Palestine that would later be designated Israel.  This also enabled the Brits to better protect the Suez Canal, since that was their premium conduit to their most prized colony, India.         

Colonial Indigestion

     When nations create empires, they uncreate cultures.  Discrete bits of other countries’ tribes, orders, religions and politics are cast adrift like so much flotsam upon a topographical sea; others become marooned upon opposite sides of an arbitrary demarcation line which, like a row of poisonous fungi, wasn’t there yesterday.  When the storm has passed and the dominant culture settles down to dinner, various bits of that homeless flotsam come tapping at the table of the new power, begging favors.  Initially, morsels and concessions are handed out to those who helped most or resisted least. Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman, British, Turk:  all these great empires behaved much the same way.

     Before long, though, the rulers develop indigestion.  Soon their temperament becomes haughty and irascible, their decisions hasty and ill considered. The Austro-Hungarian empire went this way and threw up the First World War.  The British carved up India and Afghanistan; together with France and other colonists they chopped Africa and shredded the Levant.  In line with the historical precedents, when dyspepsia obliged them to reach for palliatives and carminatives, they simultaneously handed down concessions (though not many), trinkets, lines on maps (loved by the winners; abhorred by the losers), and, of course, ‘Promises’.

The ‘Bride’

     All colonists have suffered from the complaints of those whom they conquered.  Their usual riposte was denial followed by violence.  But in cases where a soft option presented itself in order to quieten a particularly irksome batch of discontents, they sometimes seized upon it.

     This happened with the Jews, who had been seeking to establish a national home for centuries.  The de facto Father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl (an Austro-Hungarian journalist and lawyer), had many times promoted the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.  In 1897 he convened the first Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland. Through a friend, Max Nordau, he then sent two rabbis to recce Palestine as a possible site for a Jewish homeland, drawing mainly from Old Testament records (especially from the Jews’ Torah).  When they returned and published their report, they were honest enough to declare: “The bride is beautiful, but she is already married to another man.”  Palestine, the “bride” was already “married” to Palestinians – most of them Arabs – who had been living there for centuries.

     The Jews, though, were a different kettle of fish:  they were a tribe, not a nation; their numbers were disseminated through several cultures and countries.  Except for a scattered number of secular types, Jews had not fought with the colonists, nor had they resisted since they did not have a country for an outside force to invade.  After centuries of persecution, sympathy was beginning to grow for them, especially in Britain and America.  Tapping into this zeitgeist, influential Jews began to lobby the authorities in both countries.  Britain had many rich Jewish families such as the Rothschilds (in banking) and the Marks family (founder of Marks & Spencer).  Britain had also had a feisty PM of Jewish descent, Benjamin Disraeli (although he eventually converted to Christianity). 

     Among world authorities, however, one was particularly unmoved.  When Herzl visited Pope Pius X in 1904 to solicit his blessing for the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine, the pontiff replied bluntly:

     “The Jews have not recognized our Lord [Jesus], therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people. . . . Non possumus – we cannot.”

     Other locations were mooted.  Cecil Rhodes of South Africa was approached, as was Egypt, specifically for a site on the Sinai Peninsula.  Nothing came of either.  Herzl also approached the German Emperor Willhelm II and the Ottoman ruler Sultan Abdul Hamid II; both rejected his proposals. With the help of British diplomacy, even Uganda was proposed as a temporary home for the Jews.  But, again, nothing came of the plan.

     So, in 1918, under a mandate from the League of Nations (a precursor to the United Nations), Britain was given control of what we now call the Holy Land.  Lobbying for the Jewish homeland greatly increased.  It is therefore not surprising that Lord Balfour, one of Whitehall’s mandarins, should have come out with such a generous and emollient ‘Promise’.

     Less well known however is this:  the French had delivered their own ‘Promise,’ just months earlier, to one Nahum Sokolow, another promoter of a Zionist homeland in Palestine.  Apparently tapping into a seam of Zionist sympathy among the French, Jules Cambon, secretary-general of the French foreign ministry, declared:

      “You were good enough to present the project to which you are devoting your efforts, which has for its object the development of Jewish colonization in Palestine.  You consider that, circumstances permitting, and the independence of the Holy Places being safeguarded on the other hand, it would be a deed of justice and of reparation to assist, by the protection of the Allied Powers, in the renaissance of the Jewish nationality [nationalité juive] in that land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago.

     “The French Government, which entered this present war to defend a people wrongly attacked, and which continues the struggle to assure the victory of right over might, can but feel sympathy for your cause, the triumph of which is bound up with that of the Allies.”     

     The thinking behind all these diplomatic marshmallows was this:  please the Jews, our allies, by establishing them in Palestine, and thus create a buffer zone between them and the contiguous Arab and Moslem states – i.e. Turkey, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon. No more need to worry then about an assault upon the Suez Canal, nor on French interests in Syria and North Africa. We’ll scratch their backs; they’ll scratch ours. 

    So, in 1947, at one of the last hurrahs of empire, the United Nations, pushed by Britain and France (and the irresistible weight of American money) established a mandate which appropriated a chunk of Palestine in which the Jews could build a homeland.  Without consulting the incumbent “bride”, a large part of Palestine was confiscated and designated Israel.  Religious Jews justified this acquisition (as yet they do) by reference to the Bible’s Old Testament and their Torah (i.e. the Pentateuch):  God had plainly promised this land – henceforth The Promised Land – to the Israelites soon after they had left bondage in Egypt.  Moreover, their God had explicitly instructed them to drive out all the inhabitants already established there – an event which the Palestinians would later call Al-Nakba, the ‘catastrophe’.  This was the basis of Zionism.

     We must not underestimate the importance of the Biblical record for Jews, especially Zionists.  From the Book of Exodus to the Second Book of Samuel, their God, Yahveh, told them that the Land of Canaan – (i.e. Palestine along with parts of Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt) – was theirs.  Their nation would be established there by divine edict.  And anyone they found there should be expelled or slaughtered.  The Bible contains dozens – yes, dozens – of examples of this martial process of ethnic cleansing – centuries before the term was coined.  Numbers (the last book of the Torah) is very specific about this process: 

     “And the Lord said to Moses in the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho, ‘Say to the people of Israel, When you pass over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their figured stones [i.e. inscribed altars] and destroy all their molten images, and demolish all their high places [i.e. their places of worship]; and you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given you the land to possess it. . . . But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land before you, then those of them whom you let remain shall be as pricks in your eyes and thorns in your sides. . . ’ ” [Numbers 33:50-55]

   Here is another account, this time from the First Book of Samuel, Chapter 15, v.2:

     “Thus said the Lord of hosts, ‘I will punish what Amalek [leader of the Amalekites, who had opposed the Israelites on their march into Canaan] did to Israel in opposing them on the way, when they came up out of Egypt.  Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’ ”

     We in the West ignore these appalling events largely because they happened a long time ago, and also perhaps because few people actually read the Bible anymore; even fewer read it as an historical document, which much of it clearly is. In most churches today priests and vicars select innocuous passages for moral instruction:  they rarely even allude to wars or ethnic disputes, nor even to slavery, which – incredible though it may seem – the Bible entirely accepts.  Secular westerners would rather believe all these horrendous activities never happened:  that they are just mythology, born of wishful thinking allied to the desire of some to dominate others, who can then justify their actions by reference to a sacred book.  

     There’s another reason.

Piety

     From the Middle Ages, through perhaps until around the latter end of the sixteenth century, Christians were pious to a degree barely comprehensible today.  Their entire lives were consciously dedicated to worshipping God and living the Christian life (check out Piers Plowman or the Canterbury Tales, to name but two on the English canon).  Most of them, poor or rich, would pray fervently every day, sometimes all day; and it was not at all unusual for an individual to drop spontaneously to the floor or the earth to pray, if the spirit so moved them.  They lived earnestly by the Ten Commandments (or tried to).  And they genuinely feared hell as a real locus, to be avoided at all costs. 

     Their mental life was also skewed by a preference for hyperbole over practicality.  If the Bible said Samson slew more than a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, they believed it.  If the Bible said Samson caught 600 foxes, set fire to their tails and then liberated them into the ripening cornfields of the Philistines (i.e. the linear ancestors of today’s Palestinians), they believed it.  If God spoke to Abraham from a burning bush, or if a hand emerged from a woman’s vagina for a ribbon to be tied around it (whereupon it returned to the womb), then they believed those things actually happened. 

     They were also dominated by superstition, again to a degree that is hard to comprehend today.  So, when the Bible spoke of Unicorns, cockatrices (a serpent with the wings of a bird and the head of a cock) and fire-breathing dragons – which it does in many places – they likewise believed such things really existed. 

     Today we are no longer so pious; nor are we seriously superstitious.  Most of the time we think and act rationally.  So why, when atrocities occur in today’s ‘Holy Land’, do we dither and obfuscate before we condemn – and in some cases lapse into impotent silence? A human death is a death, just as a spade is a spade. It is not a cockatrice nor a unicorn nor a fire-breathing dragon, nor is it just a statistic.  It is a life.  And a multiple of lives slaughtered – where the clear intention (and, in the case of the current Right-Wing sustaining Israel’s flawed cabinet, avowed intention) is the eradication of a people – that is palpable genocide.

     But what do our leaders do?  Politicians of all persuasions mumble about how it’s essential that we keep Israel on side; like Old Testament prophets spouting doom, they throw in bleak asides about Iran and its proxies sending us all to oblivion if we fail to arm and support Israel – whatever they do.  They also refer to the 1000+ victims of Hamas whilst playing down the 40,000+ Palestinian deaths, or rephrasing the latter as unavoidable collateral damage.  Are children acceptable collateral damage?

     All the Israelis have to do in return is to describe, at stage-managed press conferences, how their bombs are so ‘smart’ that their individual pieces of shrapnel are programmed to avoid innocent women and children, and simultaneously to make unctuous statements about how humane is the Israel Defense Force – in spite of reams of impartial evidence to the contrary.

     Why is this?  The knee-jerk answer maybe because tribal Jews are largely resourceful and accumulate wealth, especially in America, Europe and the UK, so our capitalist societies hesitate to condemn them. 

     But there is a subtler reason:  subtler, but far more significant.  And like a Hamletian ghost, it hovers, whispering, at the back of all our judgements and all our decisions, especially those of our governments (who, remember, originally gave that ‘Promise’).

     It’s this.  Not many years after the Second World War, it was generally felt that the Germans – essentially a good race of people, very like us, who were misled by a madman – should be gradually and tactfully reintegrated into European society.  “Don’t mention the war!”  This injunction, whispered prior to any interaction with German people, became so entrenched and persistent that by the 1970’s it had become the butt of comedy.  Fawlty Towers spun an entire episode out of this sacred cow.

When the Jews Declared Independence

     Just one year after that 1947 UN mandate, the Jews – expressly against the wishes of the UN – declared their Independence.  Then, in defiance of world condemnation, they drove out the incumbent Palestinians (those “pricks and thorns” their God warned them not to spare) – who naturally resented the brash newcomers, especially those who began building upon Palestinian land and shooting anyone who objected – and all-out war erupted. 

     When this happened, the old colonial powers wrung their hands.  Some approved of what the Jews were doing; many did not.  But most inaction or prevarication was rooted in the same problem just cited for the Germans.  Since the Holocaust – and directly because of it – the Jews as a tribe had become a Sacred Cow. It was no longer acceptable to criticize them – at least not in public.  Today, anyone beginning a sentence with, “The problem with Israel is … ” – will immediately be shouted down as a Holocaust denier, anti-Semite, anti-Zionist, and so on.

     This is why most western leaders turn a blind eye to what the Jews are doing in Gaza (and latterly in Lebanon too), while impartial humanitarian observers wring their hands in despair.  Both sides are in a bind.  If they condemn Israeli action, they earn the wrath of most Jews, whose premier defensive reflex is always the Holocaust; if they do nothing, they are complicit in a massacre. This latter has moved South Africa – no stranger to colonial abuses, especially land-grabbing and indiscriminate slaughter – to accuse Israel of genocide at the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

     Don’t misunderstand me:  although I don’t personally know any, I genuinely admire the Jews.  They are largely honest, accommodating, talented, pleasant and hardworking, and they excel at almost everything they do; they lead the world in agriculture and many of the arts and sciences. I genuinely wish them well.  And, of course, if it came to a war, we would definitely want them upon our side.  But we must not allow sensitivity about past events to prevent us from criticism where it is surely required today. 

     Nor should we accept that we are condemned to be forever enervated by a cultural dyspepsia inherited from our ancestors’ indigestible political imperialism, most especially that ‘Promise’ – in which we had no say. Nor should we sit silent when an ancient religious document encourages its believers to do unspeakable things.

     The eminent historian, Arnold Toynbee (who dealt directly with the Palestine Mandate in the British Foreign Office), wrote in 1968:

     “All through those thirty years [from 1918 to 1948, when Israelis declared independence] Britain (admitted) into Palestine, year by year, a quota of Jewish immigrants that varied according to the strength of the respective pressures of the Arabs and Jews at the time.  These immigrants could not have come in if they had not been shielded by a British chevaux-de-frise [a defensive drum, or ‘iron horse,’ studded with spikes and wreathed in barbed wire].  If Palestine had remained under Ottoman Turkish rule, or if it had become an independent Arab State in 1918, Jewish immigrants would never have been admitted into Palestine in large enough numbers to enable them to overwhelm the Palestinian Arabs in this Arab people’s own country.  The reason why the State of Israel exists today and why today 1,500,000 Palestinian Arabs are refugees is that, for 30 years, Jewish immigration was imposed upon the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own.  The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy for the world, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the world’s peace.”  [quoted in Robert John & Sami Hadawi, The Palestine Diary, Vol. 1, New World Press, New York, 1970, pps. xiv-xv.]

     It is indeed.  We westerners should at least express regret for the betrayal we dished out to the Arabs and Kurds (currently being slaughtered by Turkish forces.), and our dismal failure to protect over 600,000 Palestinians from being driven from their land and homes (often in the middle of the night) in the name of Israel. Al Nakba should perhaps become a better-known phrase in the English lexicon.

     Let us remind ourselves of the second clause of Balfour’s ‘Promise’: “it being clearly understood that nothing will be done [by the establishment of Israel] which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, . . .”

     And it will continue to be a menace all while we in the West keep listening to those Hamletian whispers:  Don’t upset the Jews!  Don’t forget what Hamas did to them! And don’t forget the Holocaust!

     One final Hamletian whisper may be found embedded in that French ‘Promise’.  The expressed “renaissance of the Jewish nationality” is preceded by what to us today – especially those of secular persuasion – seems a vapid throw-away phrase: “the Holy Places being safeguarded.”

     Pious Christians the world over pay lip-service to this tangible notion.  Even in far-off Philippines – where extraordinarily little attention is paid to what happens abroad – almost everyone buys into it.  “Sad [about the slaughter of Palestinians], but sige na [ok now]. Don’t worry,” they whisper.  “The Jewish people are looking after the Holy Land for us! Jesus has a plan.  Bahala na [che sèra, sèra].”   

     When, at the start of the Gazan conflict, I expressed my horror at the bombing of women and children to a well-educated Protestant vicar, his immediate riposte was: “Well, they’re a hard-headed crowd.”  He very obviously had no sympathy for them. 

     Another professional Filipino, surfing through an Israeli propaganda website on his CP as he entered our house, immediately began endorsing to us the achievements of the Jewish state since its inception.  When I agreed, but pointed out that those things were only enabled via enduring western assistance, military protection, and huge sums of imported cash, he changed the subject.

     But as I said above, even in the 1940’s people were generally more pious than now.  To the colonial powers of the day (embedded in Church and State), Jews would ‘safeguard the Holy Places’ – that is Jerusalem with its sites of the Christian Nativity, Gethsemane, Golgotha and so forth – not to mention Al-Aqsa, the Dome on the Rock, for Moslems.

     What an irony.  Seventy years on, most of Israel, but especially East Jerusalem and that Christian ‘Holy of Holies’, Manger Square, is being thoroughly Judaised. From the Diaspora, rich Jews have for decades been sending funds to Israel to buy up every property, either by terminating the leases, weaponizing tax laws, or by compulsory purchase orders based on incomprehensible ancient prerogatives.  The Armenian Church, for example, one of the original custodians of Manger Square, are currently engaged in a stand-off with the Israeli authorities, who are trying to evict them.   Demolition of Palestinian homes – one of the most sickening sights depicted in the media – is always justified by Israel claiming that the owners did not have the requisite permits or zoning permission – which according to most impartial observers are virtually impossible for non-Jews to obtain anyway.

     The Right-wing governing Israel today and prosecuting the war, is not the least bashful or repentant about any of these processes, which are roundly and regularly condemned by the United Nations (one reason why Israel always regards the UN as an enemy of the Jewish state.)  Speaking before the UN General Assembly back in 2011, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu said:

     “I often hear them accusing Israel of Judaising Jerusalem.  That’s like accusing Americans of Americanizing Washington, or the British of Anlicizing London.  Do you know why we are called ‘Jews’?  Because we come from Judea.”

     He has a valid point.  Together with other races and tribes, Jews have been there since the Iron Age.  But extrapolate to the world scale:  Malaysians might expel all non-Malays; Filipinos might expel all non-Filipinos; Aboriginal Australians might expel all non-Aborignal Aussies; Russians might expel all non-Slavs; Hindus might expel all non-Hindus; Han Chinese might expel all non-Han Chinese.  And so on.

Chimera

     History has now revealed to us a worrying development, one which the makers of that ‘Promise’ did not foresee.  Writing in 1937, when World War II was brewing on the Hitlerian sidelines, the author of Great Britain & Palestine (from which I took the inspiration for this essay, especially the political shenanigans which led to that ‘Promise’), said this as the Conclusion to his book.  It’s worth quoting in full:

    “It is sometimes made a reproach toward the Jews that they have caught the malady of nationalism, which in its chronic state of inflammation since the war [i.e. World War I] we are coming to regard as the curse of the world [i.e. under Hitler].  Why, it is sometimes asked, should Jews, whom history has made internationalists by nature, throw away this distinction in a naughty world, so that in Palestine the issue, according to the Commission, has become their nationalism against the Arab, and an impartial trustee can think of no remedy but separating the two races for the sake of peace.  But the answer of the Jew is simple.  It is that his nationalism is not the rival of the Arabs but has at all times been anxious to join in the foundation of a new Palestinian nation by the mixture of the two racial elements – a big thing for the Jew to offer, seeing that Zionism is an attempt to grow Jewish civilization on its own roots. . . . And he may plead that his nationalism is free from the taint of ambition and self-seeking, is but as a cry of a people in bondage, and that from his State . . . may come the voice of international reason that will conduct the world to liberation through justice and peace.” Great Britain & Palestine, Herbert Sidebotham, Macmillan & Co., 1937, pp. 304-5. 

     We now know that Sidebotham’s optimism was hugely misplaced.  Within a mere eleven years of his published hopes, that magnanimous Jewish promise of a sharing nationalism evaporated like a desert chimera.  Warplanes and tanks replaced fancy words.  And no one doubts now that Zionism is a passionately nationalistic doctrine, cemented firmly in place by the expansionist wars of 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982 (and others) – and now augmented in 2024 through what Israel justifies as ‘self-defense.’  There are even rumours that right-wingers in America (and elsewhere) are planning to build real estate on Gaza’s seafront once the Palestinians have been killed or driven out – even as Yahweh told His chosen Jews to do long ago – according to Bible chronology, thousands of years ago.

     Perhaps that Hamletian ghost haunting the Western conscience might have a chat to its Hebrew counterpart in Netanyahu’s soul until they reach a pleasant and humane compromise of some sort – preferably one void of political ‘Promises’ and hideous outmoded religious instruction. If not, the powder-keg that is the Middle East might well explode in all our faces. 

    Then no one will have a home worth living in.

***

     Next Posting: Bardocrat will add more poems to this month’s cache plus a short analysis of a subject hardly ever discussed in the West:  the Russian viewpoint in that other ongoing conflict, Putin’s war on Ukraine. 

‘Satyrista’

November Exclusive:

‘Red Cabbage’

[by ‘Villastultus’]

     What is all this fuss about China’s patrols and construction activities in the West Philippine Sea?  Surely poor China needs defending against foreign propaganda and calumny?  And surely the Philippines, which is leading the misinformation drive, needs to be taken firmly to task on this sad matter?  Just consider this:

      Philippines has grossly offended China by:  (1) answering back when shouted at; (2) by several violent acts, such as sailing in seas off the Philippines’ coast in pursuit of fish which belong to China, and objecting to Chinese ships within the Philippines’ 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone; (3) by swimming in sea water, all of which south, west and east of Hong Kong Island belongs to China (which is why it is called the South China Sea); (4) by vandalism and by eating food on Ayungin Shoal; (5) by enjoying themselves conspicuously on Pag-Asa Island, and on other islands they impudently claim; (6) by interfering with Chinese fishermen loading their holds with endangered species; (7) by stubbornly insisting on remaining a transparent democracy; and (8) by heinously refusing to accept that China’s reclamation work on the Spratly Islands is merely for the purpose of growing vegetables.

     Let’s look in detail at these disgraceful acts.

     (1)  Filipinos have stubbornly refused to stop challenging China.  They should understand that when China speaks, everyone must listen.  Yes:  everyone. Major newspapers in Asia have weekly full-page colored supplements explaining the utter superiority of Chinese culture.  In the face of this ineffable superiority Filipinos should realize that their purpose in the universe is just to listen, not to comment or challenge.  Instead, they impudently insist that their own culture has a right to be heard.  They refuse to stop living on islands in their Exclusive Economic Zones, where they have brazenly lived for decades. 

     They are also a noisy people.  In fact, they talk so much that they are using up precious supplies of oxygen, which of course is also claimed by China, along with the rest of its airspace.  ‘Air space’ means just that:  space to breathe air.  And yet Filipinos keep crying to other bigger nations to help them out.  Crying uses even more Chinese oxygen.  Filipinos must learn to breathe less!  Ideally, they should stop altogether.

     (2) Filipino violence is inexcusable.  Fishermen off Zambales had the audacity to catch fish off their own coast; they even cried loudly when the Chinese trained water cannons upon their flimsy wooden boats.  Passive resistance and prayers to Christian or other monotheistic deities are offensive to the atheist ears of the Communist Party, therefore aggressive and dangerous. 

     Filipinos have invaded Ayungin Shoal.  A contingent of marines has occupied a rusting WW2 ship which, in an act of deviant vandalism, they grounded upon a coral reef.  There they insist on eating and merry-making in defiance of China’s attempts to dislodge them.  They indulge there in a wild Saturnalia consisting of eating stale rice and dried fish (employing cutlery instead of chopsticks!), and singing about the families they have abandoned for three months’ duty.

     (3) Since all sea water belongs to China, swimming off Philippine beaches is only permitted by appointment, and even then swimmers must not go too far out.  Moreover, even when permission is granted, Filipinos must not swim fast or shout or laugh since that consumes far too much Chinese oxygen [vide supra].

    (4) The marines on the aforementioned Ayungin Shoal are eating far too much rice.  One bowl a day is quite sufficient for small stunted people.  Any proportion over that ration will be claimed back when China removes them from its rightful territory.

     (5) Filipinos are doing criminal things on Pag-Asa Island.  They are building houses, eating too much in a place where they shouldn’t be eating anything, making love and babies, hanging out washing, smiling and laughing, and generally behaving like an established society – which they have rashly continued to do for forty years.  They claim they have over 7,000 islands; but since most of these are in the China Sea, or in waters connected by seawater to the Chinese mainland, then they also belong to China and therefore should not be inhabited by Filipinos at all – nor any other nation for that matter.

     (6) Chinese fishermen off Palawan, while innocently filling the holds of their ships with pangolins, sea turtles and giant clams, were arrested and fined by Filipino coast guard officers.  They had the nerve to charge them with poaching and illegally collecting species declared critically endangered by CITES.  Don’t they realize that CITES is a western concept?  It is not mentioned in the I Ching, Tao, Mencius or any Confucian writings. 

     Contrary to western propaganda, China’s researches have revealed that pangolins, sea turtles, giant clams and sea cucumbers, and numerous other wildlife, are superabundant everywhere.  In the seas surrounding Mischief Reef there were so many sea turtles and giant clams that officers from the Chinese Liberation Army were able to walk upon the water without sinking!  In fact there were so many that it was feared that they might impede the passage of the hundreds of Chinese vessels which patrol the area (for a historical parallel, confer the way pumice impeded ships’ movement during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on AD 79).  So, in the interest of maritime safety, the excess sea creatures were trawled up, and later ground down and used as backfill for the 3,500-metre runway they constructed there for the transport of their vegetables. 

     Besides, China has the divine right to eat anything it likes, especially anything living in or beside its own seawater.  Why?  Because it has a unique conduit to heaven:  li.  This li does not exist outside China, so the West cannot benefit from it.  It manifests itself in many ways and in different places according to the phases of the moon.  Its most dramatic manifestation came in 1989 in Tiananmen Square when thousands of student patriots committed mass suicide to demonstrate their undying love for the Communist Party.  (Nota bene:  Ai Wei Wei, par example, has so much li that the Communist Party advised him to leave China lest this plenitude should bring down the heavens and cause alarm among the uninitiated populace.)

     (7) In the face of continuing demands, Filipinos wilfully continue to insist on running their country through a transparent democracy.  For some extraordinary reason they don’t seem to comprehend the superiority of Fiscal Communism. 

     (8) Filipinos – and, nota bene, all other similarly decadent nations – must drop this ludicrous idea that China is constructing military bases on its islands in the West Philippine Sea.  As China has insisted for years, all their building on islands and atolls and shoals is simply for the production of vegetables.  China has gone to extraordinary lengths to show the rows of glasshouses filled with aubergines and cabbages, broccoli and zucchini.  The adjacent airstrips are merely for the convenience of the aircraft which will transport these green commodities back to the Chinese mainland – to be cooked together with those super-abundant pangolins, turtles and giant clams.  It must be understood, of course, that they have to station a few batteries of anti-aircraft guns and air-to-ship missiles because other nations may be tempted to steal their vegetables.   With such irresponsible neighbors as Filipinos – not to mention other interfering foreigners – China has to protect itself.

     Finally, it is necessary to refute one further prominent international canard:  that China has a political philosophy of overpowering other nations via something known as the ‘Cabbage effect’ – in other words, a way of slowly surrounding the heart of a problem or nation by gradually enveloping it in a succession of anodyne ‘leaves’ – anything from investment to doublespeak – until it is completely contained and thus rendered innocuous.  This is another scurrilous western notion put forth to destabilize China. As China has always maintained, it is producing vegetables only.  Vegetarians worldwide should be proud of China!

      Other nations might learn good things if only they would listen to China.  They might then realize that China is right about everything. If they did, they might even be granted li one day.

     Might is right.  And China is mighty, therefore it is right.

Villastultus’s advice:  Filipinos better start developing a taste for Red cabbage.

Next Posting:

A follow-up piece on China: ‘Albatross Guano’. We will also publish Satyrista’s own contribution to the poetical genre.  And, space permitting, we shall be analysing the apparent bromance between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Headlines

‘Sceptic Tank’ – its inventors doubt whether it will work.  But they don’t wish to create a stink about it.

A shocking outbreak of common sense in UK.

A huge sinkhole has appeared just outside Malacañang Palace. The Euro Com on Human Frights is looking into it.

Ministry of Onerous & Pointless Exercise   Bardocrat

     Historically, bards (i.e. poets) were radicals, freedom fighters and vociferous opponents of governments; they were also mostly egalitarian libertarians, and usually moral outcasts.  They generally cocked a snook at religion, dissed the establishment, and heaped obloquy upon those who opposed their views.  And they were invariably angry, often opinionated. 

     The West’s two most ancient bards, Homer and Hesiod, not only totally opposed each other’s beliefs and Weltanschauum:  they even confronted each other in a poetry contest on Mount Helicon. Lord Byron fought the snotty establishment in Britain, later dying a martyr to Greek independence from the Ottoman Turks. Shelley, though the son of a baronet, scorned riches and threw in his lot with the underclasses. Thoreau in America spurned his Ivy League background to grow beans and a beard by a pond in a forest.  Cervantes tilted at more than just windmills.  Rimbaud, Pushkin and Dostoevsky were all rebels.   

     How times have changed. Poets today are supposed to write pretty lines about love and trees and fluffy bunnies and peaceful people living in blissful harmony in inclusive societies with neutral pronouns.  They are expected to be witty, perhaps a little testy over sensitive issues like the climate; but they are not expected to use any degree of forceful language, which apparently traumatises some people.  They are also expected to shy away from complex rhyming structures (which require far too much skill), foreign words, archaisms and heated debate.  Why? Because, if they wish to be published, they must be politically aligned with the trending sentiments of their own society – i.e. politically correct. And they are supposed to be emotional rather than angry.

     Times have changed again.  Who wouldn’t be angry today?  If social injustice, plutocrats’ greed, Covid pandemic and climate chaos were not enough, we now have a dictator prosecuting a blitzkrieg against a sovereign democratic people in Europe whom he dismisses as “Nazis and drug addicts.” We also have an ultra-right-wing government in Israel hell-bent on eradicating all Palestinians, and therefore all hope of any Two-State solution.

     So, with Christmas coming – that time of ‘Goodwill to all men’ – what better time to launch Bardocrat? – who does not write about fluffy bunnies (though he does write about real ones) nor unrealistic fluffy-bunny societies. Moreover, he is frequently opinionated, bolshie when he feels it’s required, and employs satire, irony and ribald humour, complex rhyming schemes, foreign words and archaisms (as all real poets always have).  Bardocrat  also writes the occasional Essay, on both current and historical topics, always aiming to show both sides of any argument.  

     And whatever he writes he is guaranteed never to be politically correct.

     One caveat.  Owing to financial constraints (most poets are poor), Bardocrat  is obliged to share this website with someone called ‘Villastultus’, editor of Satyrista, who frequently writes commentaries upon some of my work, not all of them complementary.  Bardocrat’s not fazed.  I am more than confident that the quality of my work will shine through any analysis.  And besides, it’s hard to know sometimes whether or not he is serious.  You be the judge. 

*

     The following poems deal in differing ways with the same age-old issues: dispossession by superior powers.  The first was written almost a year before Britain reluctantly decided to cede the Chagos Islands to Mauritius; the others deal with related issues witnessed through the prism of individuals.  The Essay which follows the poems addresses essentially the same issues:  dispossession and displacement.

Chagos

Iberians sailed the ocean blue

Till they saw land they never knew.

They disembarked and built some huts,

And fed on fish and coconuts.

“So lovely are these isles, this spot,

It surely is a blessèd plot;” –

So said they as they sailed away.

“We shall return another day.”

But those the days of Empires were:

They sold those isles without demur,

First the Spanish; then the French.

The latter thought to leave a wrench;

So slaves they brought to work the fields,

To cut the copra, boost the yields.

But Empire always wants more, more!

Its barns had ever open doors.

And Empire is a fickle beast:

A Treaty followed by a feast

Passed Chagos on to British rule;

And in they sailed – more foreign ghouls.

Long, long years passed and bored they got.

Till Yanks appeared and said, Now, what

We need to fight our enemies –

They’re everywhere, believe us, please –

Are lonely isles where no one lives;

For which a handsome rent we’ll give.

That one – Diego Garcia –

The Brits yelled as they swigged their beer;

We’ll rent it you for your great ’drome.

Those living there we’ll push from home,

To other islands relocate.

We’ll sail them there and compensate.

But no one asked Chagossians this:

Would leaving here increase your bliss?

Of course not.  They all wished to stay.

But powers mighty had their way.

They threw them out; they killed their pets –

Then sailed away with no regrets.

     The next poem was written in Manila.  It’s theme of dispossession and loss is a common one in the crowded metropolis.

[A] Lot Lost

She squats on hunkers near the gate,

Her long grey hair teased by the breeze,

Her eyes invoking yesterdays

When all her hours invested here

Were filled with joy of home and life.

Celestial Heights Subdivision –

That’s what they call her bahay now.

Vast walls, iron gates, CCTV;

And guards with guns let no one in

Without a laminated pass.

A mangy dog comes panting near.

A poor soul selling scrap to eat

Halts in the shade to rest and smoke.

The guards hiss warnings through the gate –

No scavengers, nor dogs in here:

“Alis ka na! Alis ka na!”

But, ah, here comes the owners’ car.

The gates admit their SUV –

Smoked glass, aircon and gate pass free.

Mabuhay to Celestial Heights!

Her yester eyes glance up and squint

Down happy vistas, one day closed:

 When papers in the post arrived,

Informed her that her paradise

Was Real Estate – though not for her.

She owned no money, dynasty,

Nor things of value but her kids.

To the celestial heights she prayed;

But no help came – only delayed

The triumph of Celestial Heights.

[bahay – ‘modest house’; Mabuhay – ‘welcome’; Alis ka na! – ‘go away!’]

Cars & Kin

My rich neighbour’s built a house for his car;

It’s made of wood and brick, has alloy doors

Which softly rise as he glides up his drive.

Lamps greet him with a flood of homely light.

Quiet circuits lock his gate upon the world.

He feeds his car best oils and liquids.  And,

On Sundays he shampoos her glossy coat.

On winter’s coldest nights he wraps her in

Nice blankets.  And he calls her soppy names;

Regards her as his fam’ly – his own kind.

My other neighbours live in cardboard caves

They made from other people’s household waste.

They have no drive nor garden, no warm lights;

They huddle together round shared bonfires,

And the world of wealth clicks shut about them,

Yet gives them little but a cold contempt.

They feed themselves on cheapest stodge and tea.

They wash in hostels; dress from rummage sales;

Warm their bones with beer and blazing pallets;

Make curses names, and can’t recall their kin.

Oligarchs

All the little oligarchs

Stand grinning in a row;

Shiny teeth, like flashing quarks,

Reflecting media glow.

“God put us here to be your crown!”

That’s what their image says.

“Our mega-dosh will trickle down

And brighten up your day.”

But trickle’s tickle sans the ‘r’:

Like dark clouds on desert sand,

Which tickle all that rain’s not far,

‘Trickle’ clings within the hand

Of those who falsely promise much.

The plants those clouds teased put forth roots;

At healthy growth they clutched.

Betrayal withers all new shoots.

Yet still the fools stand there and grin;

They really think they’re gods.

Convinced their wooing helps them win,

They kiss the lumpen clods.

They spin and weave; they pose and crop;

“Compassionate we live to be!”

Yet in the vacuum of dop

Just sycophants believe it’s free.

Those juggernauts of industry

The oligarchs unleash –

Piled high with boons and liberty –

Draw in their wake what’s out of reach:

“Have bourgeois lifestyles every soul!”

Too late the poorest see:

The rich retain nine tenths the whole.

The poor retain – their misery.

      Bardocrat has noticed a great deal of confusion in the media about the War in the Middle East.  He hopes the Essay below might cast a little light on the very complex background to this terrible conflict.  It does not pretend to be either prescriptive or definitive.

The‘Promise’

      In October 2023 Hamas terrorists stormed out of tunnels under Gaza, irrupted into Israel and indiscriminately slaughtered over a thousand people, many of them women and children.  They slaughtered hundreds of defenseless young people at a music festival, set fire to houses in a Kibbutz and defiled many other dwellings.  In retreat, they took over 200 hostages, many of them still held captive today.  And the whole world expressed its horror and sympathy with Israel. 

      All too soon, though, that horror and sympathy began to shift to the ordinary people of Gaza, not all of whom supported Hamas.  Why?  Because bombs were raining down upon women and children, flattening hospitals, infrastructure, even religious buildings; and the Israeli army began to displace a whole nation in the process of pursuing the Hamas terrorists.  When its excesses were challenged – currently over 40,000 Palestinians dead, 100,000 injured, and half of Gaza City reduced to rubble – the army denied everything except self-defense. They also claim to have killed “battalions” of Hamas fighters – though we never see their bodies. Habeas corpus?

    Retributive Israeli assaults upon their neighbors are not new.  Sad to say, they have a history of it.  The Old Testament judgement of ‘an eye for an eye’ seems in today’s Israel to have transmogrified into something closer to ‘a hundred souls for an eye’.  For years, gangs of Nationalist settlers have been burning and shooting Arab neighbors out of their homes and off their land in the West Bank, activities which are all illegal under international law, draw international outrage, and are currently increasing while the world’s attention is diverted upon Gaza. 

     When a displaced youth in Ramallah or the West Bank throws a stone at occupying soldiers, they shoot him dead.  They don’t stop there.  They shoot up the boy’s neighborhood, bulldoze his house and kill several more of his neighbors.  And in Gaza injured Palestinians are strapped like sacks of meat to the bonnets of Jeeps. The soldiers’ superiors say they will be disciplined, but we hear nothing more. Challenges fall upon deaf ears.  Even UN condemnation draws only scorn from Israel, or more justifying press conferences peppered with references to smart tech seeking out terrorists hiding in hospital operating theatres. 

     Many across the world raise their voices in condemnation – but nothing happens.  Diplomats demand explanations – but seldom receive anything beyond denial or silence.  Even some Arab states say nothing.  The only thing we know for sure is that the same things will happen again tomorrow; again, people will be angry; again, nothing will happen.

     Why is this?  We have to ask this question because we all know that if almost any other country on earth were to behave like Israel in Gaza (and now also in Lebanon), it would attract international outrage.  The UN would not merely issue fierce condemnation:  it would dispatch high-ranking envoys and deploy peace-keeping forces between the warring sides.  And America would deploy a carrier force.

    To find the answer to this anomaly we have to go back a long way.  We have to go back to a secret agreement between colluding nations which led eventually to a seminal ‘Promise’.

     So, who promised what to whom?  The who was Lord Balfour, a British Conservative MP, who was Prime Minister of Britain from 1902-1905.  The whom were the Jewish people.  Here is his Promise to them:

     “HM Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing will be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

     Officially, this declaration, announced in November 1917, was known as the Fourth Formula – so called because it was preceded by three other Formulas, which were all rejected.  Today this all sounds rather odd, its language emollient, almost unctuous.  What gave the British Government the right to make such a declaration?  And why were they moved to make it? 

     The date gives a clue.  Between 1914 and 1918 Britain – then still a colonial power with vast influence – was fighting what we now call World War I.  Their allies were France, Russia, Belgium, Italy and Japan.  Their opponents were Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey (the latter known then as Ottoman Turks). 

     By late 1915 the Brits and the French sensed that the War was going their way; they were so confident that they began making plans to carve up the land they would take from the Ottoman Empire, which then included Palestine.  Mark Sykes and Francoise Picot, British and French diplomats respectively, concocted a secret deal which would carve up much of the Levant; the line they drew upon the map became known as the Sykes-Picot line; and the countries that line dissected (inter alia Iraq and Syria), were not consulted.  For their parts in this secret deal, Britain would get most of Palestine, southern Iraq and the strategically-important Mediterranean ports of Haifa and Acre; France would take Lebanon, northern Palestine and Syria; Italy would get southern Anatolia; and Russia would get western Armenia, Constantinople [today called Istanbul] and the Turkish straits. All these countries promised the resident Arab and Kurdish tribes that they would receive guaranteed homelands in return for fighting with the allies against the Ottoman Muslims.  Their betrayal – mainly owing to French plans to rule Syria alone, and British reluctance to trust Arabs generally – became a diplomatic thorn in the western conscience which persists today; the present carnage in Gaza seems to be pushing it in yet farther.  It also made one eccentric Englishman famous for his condemnation of western bad faith:  Lawrence of Arabia.  But that’s another story.

     In that secret deal traceable to 1915-1916, the most important chunk of soil to be apportioned as war booty to Britain was the Holy Land.  So, when the Armistice was declared in 1918, the British Government (in collusion with their main allies) were given control of a large part of Palestine that would later be designated Israel.  This also enabled the Brits to better protect the Suez Canal, since that was their premium conduit to their most prized colony, India.         

Colonial Indigestion

     When nations create empires, they uncreate cultures.  Discrete bits of other countries’ tribes, orders, religions and politics are cast adrift like so much flotsam upon a topographical sea; others become marooned upon opposite sides of an arbitrary demarcation line which, like a row of poisonous fungi, wasn’t there yesterday.  When the storm has passed and the dominant culture settles down to dinner, various bits of that homeless flotsam come tapping at the table of the new power, begging favors.  Initially, morsels and concessions are handed out to those who helped most or resisted least. Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman, British, Turk:  all these great empires behaved much the same way.

     Before long, though, the rulers develop indigestion.  Soon their temperament becomes haughty and irascible, their decisions hasty and ill considered. The Austro-Hungarian empire went this way and threw up the First World War.  The British carved up India and Afghanistan; together with France and other colonists they chopped Africa and shredded the Levant.  In line with the historical precedents, when dyspepsia obliged them to reach for palliatives and carminatives, they simultaneously handed down concessions (though not many), trinkets, lines on maps (loved by the winners; abhorred by the losers), and, of course, ‘Promises’.

The ‘Bride’

     All colonists have suffered from the complaints of those whom they conquered.  Their usual riposte was denial followed by violence.  But in cases where a soft option presented itself in order to quieten a particularly irksome batch of discontents, they sometimes seized upon it.

     This happened with the Jews, who had been seeking to establish a national home for centuries.  The de facto Father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl (an Austro-Hungarian journalist and lawyer), had many times promoted the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.  In 1897 he convened the first Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland. Through a friend, Max Nordau, he then sent two rabbis to recce Palestine as a possible site for a Jewish homeland, drawing mainly from Old Testament records (especially from the Jews’ Torah).  When they returned and published their report, they were honest enough to declare: “The bride is beautiful, but she is already married to another man.”  Palestine, the “bride” was already “married” to Palestinians – most of them Arabs – who had been living there for centuries.

     The Jews, though, were a different kettle of fish:  they were a tribe, not a nation; their numbers were disseminated through several cultures and countries.  Except for a scattered number of secular types, Jews had not fought with the colonists, nor had they resisted since they did not have a country for an outside force to invade.  After centuries of persecution, sympathy was beginning to grow for them, especially in Britain and America.  Tapping into this zeitgeist, influential Jews began to lobby the authorities in both countries.  Britain had many rich Jewish families such as the Rothschilds (in banking) and the Marks family (founder of Marks & Spencer).  Britain had also had a feisty PM of Jewish descent, Benjamin Disraeli (although he eventually converted to Christianity). 

     Among world authorities, however, one was particularly unmoved.  When Herzl visited Pope Pius X in 1904 to solicit his blessing for the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine, the pontiff replied bluntly:

     “The Jews have not recognized our Lord [Jesus], therefore we cannot recognize the Jewish people. . . . Non possumus – we cannot.”

     Other locations were mooted.  Cecil Rhodes of South Africa was approached, as was Egypt, specifically for a site on the Sinai Peninsula.  Nothing came of either.  Herzl also approached the German Emperor Willhelm II and the Ottoman ruler Sultan Abdul Hamid II; both rejected his proposals. With the help of British diplomacy, even Uganda was proposed as a temporary home for the Jews.  But, again, nothing came of the plan.

     So, in 1918, under a mandate from the League of Nations (a precursor to the United Nations), Britain was given control of what we now call the Holy Land.  Lobbying for the Jewish homeland greatly increased.  It is therefore not surprising that Lord Balfour, one of Whitehall’s mandarins, should have come out with such a generous and emollient ‘Promise’.

     Less well known however is this:  the French had delivered their own ‘Promise,’ just months earlier, to one Nahum Sokolow, another promoter of a Zionist homeland in Palestine.  Apparently tapping into a seam of Zionist sympathy among the French, Jules Cambon, secretary-general of the French foreign ministry, declared:

      “You were good enough to present the project to which you are devoting your efforts, which has for its object the development of Jewish colonization in Palestine.  You consider that, circumstances permitting, and the independence of the Holy Places being safeguarded on the other hand, it would be a deed of justice and of reparation to assist, by the protection of the Allied Powers, in the renaissance of the Jewish nationality [nationalité juive] in that land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago.

     “The French Government, which entered this present war to defend a people wrongly attacked, and which continues the struggle to assure the victory of right over might, can but feel sympathy for your cause, the triumph of which is bound up with that of the Allies.”     

     The thinking behind all these diplomatic marshmallows was this:  please the Jews, our allies, by establishing them in Palestine, and thus create a buffer zone between them and the contiguous Arab and Moslem states – i.e. Turkey, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon. No more need to worry then about an assault upon the Suez Canal, nor on French interests in Syria and North Africa. We’ll scratch their backs; they’ll scratch ours. 

    So, in 1947, at one of the last hurrahs of empire, the United Nations, pushed by Britain and France (and the irresistible weight of American money) established a mandate which appropriated a chunk of Palestine in which the Jews could build a homeland.  Without consulting the incumbent “bride”, a large part of Palestine was confiscated and designated Israel.  Religious Jews justified this acquisition (as yet they do) by reference to the Bible’s Old Testament and their Torah (i.e. the Pentateuch):  God had plainly promised this land – henceforth The Promised Land – to the Israelites soon after they had left bondage in Egypt.  Moreover, their God had explicitly instructed them to drive out all the inhabitants already established there – an event which the Palestinians would later call Al-Nakba, the ‘catastrophe’.  This was the basis of Zionism.

     We must not underestimate the importance of the Biblical record for Jews, especially Zionists.  From the Book of Exodus to the Second Book of Samuel, their God, Yahveh, told them that the Land of Canaan – (i.e. Palestine along with parts of Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt) – was theirs.  Their nation would be established there by divine edict.  And anyone they found there should be expelled or slaughtered.  The Bible contains dozens – yes, dozens – of examples of this martial process of ethnic cleansing – centuries before the term was coined.  Numbers (the last book of the Torah) is very specific about this process: 

     “And the Lord said to Moses in the plains of Moab by the Jordan at Jericho, ‘Say to the people of Israel, When you pass over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their figured stones [i.e. inscribed altars] and destroy all their molten images, and demolish all their high places [i.e. their places of worship]; and you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given you the land to possess it. . . . But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land before you, then those of them whom you let remain shall be as pricks in your eyes and thorns in your sides. . . ’ ” [Numbers 33:50-55]

   Here is another account, this time from the First Book of Samuel, Chapter 15, v.2:

     “Thus said the Lord of hosts, ‘I will punish what Amalek [leader of the Amalekites, who had opposed the Israelites on their march into Canaan] did to Israel in opposing them on the way, when they came up out of Egypt.  Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.’ ”

     We in the West ignore these appalling events largely because they happened a long time ago, and also perhaps because few people actually read the Bible anymore; even fewer read it as an historical document, which much of it clearly is. In most churches today priests and vicars select innocuous passages for moral instruction:  they rarely even allude to wars or ethnic disputes, nor even to slavery, which – incredible though it may seem – the Bible entirely accepts.  Secular westerners would rather believe all these horrendous activities never happened:  that they are just mythology, born of wishful thinking allied to the desire of some to dominate others, who can then justify their actions by reference to a sacred book.  

     There’s another reason.

Piety

     From the Middle Ages, through perhaps until around the latter end of the sixteenth century, Christians were pious to a degree barely comprehensible today.  Their entire lives were consciously dedicated to worshipping God and living the Christian life (check out Piers Plowman or the Canterbury Tales, to name but two on the English canon).  Most of them, poor or rich, would pray fervently every day, sometimes all day; and it was not at all unusual for an individual to drop spontaneously to the floor or the earth to pray, if the spirit so moved them.  They lived earnestly by the Ten Commandments (or tried to).  And they genuinely feared hell as a real locus, to be avoided at all costs. 

     Their mental life was also skewed by a preference for hyperbole over practicality.  If the Bible said Samson slew more than a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, they believed it.  If the Bible said Samson caught 600 foxes, set fire to their tails and then liberated them into the ripening cornfields of the Philistines (i.e. the linear ancestors of today’s Palestinians), they believed it.  If God spoke to Abraham from a burning bush, or if a hand emerged from a woman’s vagina for a ribbon to be tied around it (whereupon it returned to the womb), then they believed those things actually happened. 

     They were also dominated by superstition, again to a degree that is hard to comprehend today.  So, when the Bible spoke of Unicorns, cockatrices (a serpent with the wings of a bird and the head of a cock) and fire-breathing dragons – which it does in many places – they likewise believed such things really existed. 

     Today we are no longer so pious; nor are we seriously superstitious.  Most of the time we think and act rationally.  So why, when atrocities occur in today’s ‘Holy Land’, do we dither and obfuscate before we condemn – and in some cases lapse into impotent silence? A human death is a death, just as a spade is a spade. It is not a cockatrice nor a unicorn nor a fire-breathing dragon, nor is it just a statistic.  It is a life.  And a multiple of lives slaughtered – where the clear intention (and, in the case of the current Right-Wing sustaining Israel’s flawed cabinet, avowed intention) is the eradication of a people – that is palpable genocide.

     But what do our leaders do?  Politicians of all persuasions mumble about how it’s essential that we keep Israel on side; like Old Testament prophets spouting doom, they throw in bleak asides about Iran and its proxies sending us all to oblivion if we fail to arm and support Israel – whatever they do.  They also refer to the 1000+ victims of Hamas whilst playing down the 40,000+ Palestinian deaths, or rephrasing the latter as unavoidable collateral damage.  Are children acceptable collateral damage?

     All the Israelis have to do in return is to describe, at stage-managed press conferences, how their bombs are so ‘smart’ that their individual pieces of shrapnel are programmed to avoid innocent women and children, and simultaneously to make unctuous statements about how humane is the Israel Defense Force – in spite of reams of impartial evidence to the contrary.

     Why is this?  The knee-jerk answer maybe because tribal Jews are largely resourceful and accumulate wealth, especially in America, Europe and the UK, so our capitalist societies hesitate to condemn them. 

     But there is a subtler reason:  subtler, but far more significant.  And like a Hamletian ghost, it hovers, whispering, at the back of all our judgements and all our decisions, especially those of our governments (who, remember, originally gave that ‘Promise’).

     It’s this.  Not many years after the Second World War, it was generally felt that the Germans – essentially a good race of people, very like us, who were misled by a madman – should be gradually and tactfully reintegrated into European society.  “Don’t mention the war!”  This injunction, whispered prior to any interaction with German people, became so entrenched and persistent that by the 1970’s it had become the butt of comedy.  Fawlty Towers spun an entire episode out of this sacred cow.

When the Jews Declared Independence

     Just one year after that 1947 UN mandate, the Jews – expressly against the wishes of the UN – declared their Independence.  Then, in defiance of world condemnation, they drove out the incumbent Palestinians (those “pricks and thorns” their God warned them not to spare) – who naturally resented the brash newcomers, especially those who began building upon Palestinian land and shooting anyone who objected – and all-out war erupted. 

     When this happened, the old colonial powers wrung their hands.  Some approved of what the Jews were doing; many did not.  But most inaction or prevarication was rooted in the same problem just cited for the Germans.  Since the Holocaust – and directly because of it – the Jews as a tribe had become a Sacred Cow. It was no longer acceptable to criticize them – at least not in public.  Today, anyone beginning a sentence with, “The problem with Israel is … ” – will immediately be shouted down as a Holocaust denier, anti-Semite, anti-Zionist, and so on.

     This is why most western leaders turn a blind eye to what the Jews are doing in Gaza (and latterly in Lebanon too), while impartial humanitarian observers wring their hands in despair.  Both sides are in a bind.  If they condemn Israeli action, they earn the wrath of most Jews, whose premier defensive reflex is always the Holocaust; if they do nothing, they are complicit in a massacre. This latter has moved South Africa – no stranger to colonial abuses, especially land-grabbing and indiscriminate slaughter – to accuse Israel of genocide at the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

     Don’t misunderstand me:  although I don’t personally know any, I genuinely admire the Jews.  They are largely honest, accommodating, talented, pleasant and hardworking, and they excel at almost everything they do; they lead the world in agriculture and many of the arts and sciences. I genuinely wish them well.  And, of course, if it came to a war, we would definitely want them upon our side.  But we must not allow sensitivity about past events to prevent us from criticism where it is surely required today. 

     Nor should we accept that we are condemned to be forever enervated by a cultural dyspepsia inherited from our ancestors’ indigestible political imperialism, most especially that ‘Promise’ – in which we had no say. Nor should we sit silent when an ancient religious document encourages its believers to do unspeakable things.

     The eminent historian, Arnold Toynbee (who dealt directly with the Palestine Mandate in the British Foreign Office), wrote in 1968:

     “All through those thirty years [from 1918 to 1948, when Israelis declared independence] Britain (admitted) into Palestine, year by year, a quota of Jewish immigrants that varied according to the strength of the respective pressures of the Arabs and Jews at the time.  These immigrants could not have come in if they had not been shielded by a British chevaux-de-frise [a defensive drum, or ‘iron horse,’ studded with spikes and wreathed in barbed wire].  If Palestine had remained under Ottoman Turkish rule, or if it had become an independent Arab State in 1918, Jewish immigrants would never have been admitted into Palestine in large enough numbers to enable them to overwhelm the Palestinian Arabs in this Arab people’s own country.  The reason why the State of Israel exists today and why today 1,500,000 Palestinian Arabs are refugees is that, for 30 years, Jewish immigration was imposed upon the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own.  The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy for the world, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the world’s peace.”  [quoted in Robert John & Sami Hadawi, The Palestine Diary, Vol. 1, New World Press, New York, 1970, pps. xiv-xv.]

     It is indeed.  We westerners should at least express regret for the betrayal we dished out to the Arabs and Kurds (currently being slaughtered by Turkish forces.), and our dismal failure to protect over 600,000 Palestinians from being driven from their land and homes (often in the middle of the night) in the name of Israel. Al Nakba should perhaps become a better-known phrase in the English lexicon.

     Let us remind ourselves of the second clause of Balfour’s ‘Promise’: “it being clearly understood that nothing will be done [by the establishment of Israel] which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, . . .”

     And it will continue to be a menace all while we in the West keep listening to those Hamletian whispers:  Don’t upset the Jews!  Don’t forget what Hamas did to them! And don’t forget the Holocaust!

     One final Hamletian whisper may be found embedded in that French ‘Promise’.  The expressed “renaissance of the Jewish nationality” is preceded by what to us today – especially those of secular persuasion – seems a vapid throw-away phrase: “the Holy Places being safeguarded.”

     Pious Christians the world over pay lip-service to this tangible notion.  Even in far-off Philippines – where extraordinarily little attention is paid to what happens abroad – almost everyone buys into it.  “Sad [about the slaughter of Palestinians], but sige na [ok now]. Don’t worry,” they whisper.  “The Jewish people are looking after the Holy Land for us! Jesus has a plan.  Bahala na [che sèra, sèra].”   

     When, at the start of the Gazan conflict, I expressed my horror at the bombing of women and children to a well-educated Protestant vicar, his immediate riposte was: “Well, they’re a hard-headed crowd.”  He very obviously had no sympathy for them. 

     Another professional Filipino, surfing through an Israeli propaganda website on his CP as he entered our house, immediately began endorsing to us the achievements of the Jewish state since its inception.  When I agreed, but pointed out that those things were only enabled via enduring western assistance, military protection, and huge sums of imported cash, he changed the subject.

     But as I said above, even in the 1940’s people were generally more pious than now.  To the colonial powers of the day (embedded in Church and State), Jews would ‘safeguard the Holy Places’ – that is Jerusalem with its sites of the Christian Nativity, Gethsemane, Golgotha and so forth – not to mention Al-Aqsa, the Dome on the Rock, for Moslems.

     What an irony.  Seventy years on, most of Israel, but especially East Jerusalem and that Christian ‘Holy of Holies’, Manger Square, is being thoroughly Judaised. From the Diaspora, rich Jews have for decades been sending funds to Israel to buy up every property, either by terminating the leases, weaponizing tax laws, or by compulsory purchase orders based on incomprehensible ancient prerogatives.  The Armenian Church, for example, one of the original custodians of Manger Square, are currently engaged in a stand-off with the Israeli authorities, who are trying to evict them.   Demolition of Palestinian homes – one of the most sickening sights depicted in the media – is always justified by Israel claiming that the owners did not have the requisite permits or zoning permission – which according to most impartial observers are virtually impossible for non-Jews to obtain anyway.

     The Right-wing governing Israel today and prosecuting the war, is not the least bashful or repentant about any of these processes, which are roundly and regularly condemned by the United Nations (one reason why Israel always regards the UN as an enemy of the Jewish state.)  Speaking before the UN General Assembly back in 2011, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu said:

     “I often hear them accusing Israel of Judaising Jerusalem.  That’s like accusing Americans of Americanizing Washington, or the British of Anlicizing London.  Do you know why we are called ‘Jews’?  Because we come from Judea.”

     He has a valid point.  Together with other races and tribes, Jews have been there since the Iron Age.  But extrapolate to the world scale:  Malaysians might expel all non-Malays; Filipinos might expel all non-Filipinos; Aboriginal Australians might expel all non-Aborignal Aussies; Russians might expel all non-Slavs; Hindus might expel all non-Hindus; Han Chinese might expel all non-Han Chinese.  And so on.

Chimera

     History has now revealed to us a worrying development, one which the makers of that ‘Promise’ did not foresee.  Writing in 1937, when World War II was brewing on the Hitlerian sidelines, the author of Great Britain & Palestine (from which I took the inspiration for this essay, especially the political shenanigans which led to that ‘Promise’), said this as the Conclusion to his book.  It’s worth quoting in full:

    “It is sometimes made a reproach toward the Jews that they have caught the malady of nationalism, which in its chronic state of inflammation since the war [i.e. World War I] we are coming to regard as the curse of the world [i.e. under Hitler].  Why, it is sometimes asked, should Jews, whom history has made internationalists by nature, throw away this distinction in a naughty world, so that in Palestine the issue, according to the Commission, has become their nationalism against the Arab, and an impartial trustee can think of no remedy but separating the two races for the sake of peace.  But the answer of the Jew is simple.  It is that his nationalism is not the rival of the Arabs but has at all times been anxious to join in the foundation of a new Palestinian nation by the mixture of the two racial elements – a big thing for the Jew to offer, seeing that Zionism is an attempt to grow Jewish civilization on its own roots. . . . And he may plead that his nationalism is free from the taint of ambition and self-seeking, is but as a cry of a people in bondage, and that from his State . . . may come the voice of international reason that will conduct the world to liberation through justice and peace.” Great Britain & Palestine, Herbert Sidebotham, Macmillan & Co., 1937, pp. 304-5. 

     We now know that Sidebotham’s optimism was hugely misplaced.  Within a mere eleven years of his published hopes, that magnanimous Jewish promise of a sharing nationalism evaporated like a desert chimera.  Warplanes and tanks replaced fancy words.  And no one doubts now that Zionism is a passionately nationalistic doctrine, cemented firmly in place by the expansionist wars of 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982 (and others) – and now augmented in 2024 through what Israel justifies as ‘self-defense.’  There are even rumours that right-wingers in America (and elsewhere) are planning to build real estate on Gaza’s seafront once the Palestinians have been killed or driven out – even as Yahweh told His chosen Jews to do long ago – according to Bible chronology, thousands of years ago.

     Perhaps that Hamletian ghost haunting the Western conscience might have a chat to its Hebrew counterpart in Netanyahu’s soul until they reach a pleasant and humane compromise of some sort – preferably one void of political ‘Promises’ and hideous outmoded religious instruction. If not, the powder-keg that is the Middle East might well explode in all our faces. 

    Then no one will have a home worth living in.

***

     Next Posting: Bardocrat will add more poems to this month’s cache plus a short analysis of a subject hardly ever discussed in the West:  the Russian viewpoint in that other ongoing conflict, Putin’s war on Ukraine. 

‘Satyrista’

November Exclusive:

‘Red Cabbage’

[by ‘Villastultus’]

     What is all this fuss about China’s patrols and construction activities in the West Philippine Sea?  Surely poor China needs defending against foreign propaganda and calumny?  And surely the Philippines, which is leading the misinformation drive, needs to be taken firmly to task on this sad matter?  Just consider this:

      Philippines has grossly offended China by:  (1) answering back when shouted at; (2) by several violent acts, such as sailing in seas off the Philippines’ coast in pursuit of fish which belong to China, and objecting to Chinese ships within the Philippines’ 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone; (3) by swimming in sea water, all of which south, west and east of Hong Kong Island belongs to China (which is why it is called the South China Sea); (4) by vandalism and by eating food on Ayungin Shoal; (5) by enjoying themselves conspicuously on Pag-Asa Island, and on other islands they impudently claim; (6) by interfering with Chinese fishermen loading their holds with endangered species; (7) by stubbornly insisting on remaining a transparent democracy; and (8) by heinously refusing to accept that China’s reclamation work on the Spratly Islands is merely for the purpose of growing vegetables.

     Let’s look in detail at these disgraceful acts.

     (1)  Filipinos have stubbornly refused to stop challenging China.  They should understand that when China speaks, everyone must listen.  Yes:  everyone. Major newspapers in Asia have weekly full-page colored supplements explaining the utter superiority of Chinese culture.  In the face of this ineffable superiority Filipinos should realize that their purpose in the universe is just to listen, not to comment or challenge.  Instead, they impudently insist that their own culture has a right to be heard.  They refuse to stop living on islands in their Exclusive Economic Zones, where they have brazenly lived for decades. 

     They are also a noisy people.  In fact, they talk so much that they are using up precious supplies of oxygen, which of course is also claimed by China, along with the rest of its airspace.  ‘Air space’ means just that:  space to breathe air.  And yet Filipinos keep crying to other bigger nations to help them out.  Crying uses even more Chinese oxygen.  Filipinos must learn to breathe less!  Ideally, they should stop altogether.

     (2) Filipino violence is inexcusable.  Fishermen off Zambales had the audacity to catch fish off their own coast; they even cried loudly when the Chinese trained water cannons upon their flimsy wooden boats.  Passive resistance and prayers to Christian or other monotheistic deities are offensive to the atheist ears of the Communist Party, therefore aggressive and dangerous. 

     Filipinos have invaded Ayungin Shoal.  A contingent of marines has occupied a rusting WW2 ship which, in an act of deviant vandalism, they grounded upon a coral reef.  There they insist on eating and merry-making in defiance of China’s attempts to dislodge them.  They indulge there in a wild Saturnalia consisting of eating stale rice and dried fish (employing cutlery instead of chopsticks!), and singing about the families they have abandoned for three months’ duty.

     (3) Since all sea water belongs to China, swimming off Philippine beaches is only permitted by appointment, and even then swimmers must not go too far out.  Moreover, even when permission is granted, Filipinos must not swim fast or shout or laugh since that consumes far too much Chinese oxygen [vide supra].

    (4) The marines on the aforementioned Ayungin Shoal are eating far too much rice.  One bowl a day is quite sufficient for small stunted people.  Any proportion over that ration will be claimed back when China removes them from its rightful territory.

     (5) Filipinos are doing criminal things on Pag-Asa Island.  They are building houses, eating too much in a place where they shouldn’t be eating anything, making love and babies, hanging out washing, smiling and laughing, and generally behaving like an established society – which they have rashly continued to do for forty years.  They claim they have over 7,000 islands; but since most of these are in the China Sea, or in waters connected by seawater to the Chinese mainland, then they also belong to China and therefore should not be inhabited by Filipinos at all – nor any other nation for that matter.

     (6) Chinese fishermen off Palawan, while innocently filling the holds of their ships with pangolins, sea turtles and giant clams, were arrested and fined by Filipino coast guard officers.  They had the nerve to charge them with poaching and illegally collecting species declared critically endangered by CITES.  Don’t they realize that CITES is a western concept?  It is not mentioned in the I Ching, Tao, Mencius or any Confucian writings. 

     Contrary to western propaganda, China’s researches have revealed that pangolins, sea turtles, giant clams and sea cucumbers, and numerous other wildlife, are superabundant everywhere.  In the seas surrounding Mischief Reef there were so many sea turtles and giant clams that officers from the Chinese Liberation Army were able to walk upon the water without sinking!  In fact there were so many that it was feared that they might impede the passage of the hundreds of Chinese vessels which patrol the area (for a historical parallel, confer the way pumice impeded ships’ movement during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on AD 79).  So, in the interest of maritime safety, the excess sea creatures were trawled up, and later ground down and used as backfill for the 3,500-metre runway they constructed there for the transport of their vegetables. 

     Besides, China has the divine right to eat anything it likes, especially anything living in or beside its own seawater.  Why?  Because it has a unique conduit to heaven:  li.  This li does not exist outside China, so the West cannot benefit from it.  It manifests itself in many ways and in different places according to the phases of the moon.  Its most dramatic manifestation came in 1989 in Tiananmen Square when thousands of student patriots committed mass suicide to demonstrate their undying love for the Communist Party.  (Nota bene:  Ai Wei Wei, par example, has so much li that the Communist Party advised him to leave China lest this plenitude should bring down the heavens and cause alarm among the uninitiated populace.)

     (7) In the face of continuing demands, Filipinos wilfully continue to insist on running their country through a transparent democracy.  For some extraordinary reason they don’t seem to comprehend the superiority of Fiscal Communism. 

     (8) Filipinos – and, nota bene, all other similarly decadent nations – must drop this ludicrous idea that China is constructing military bases on its islands in the West Philippine Sea.  As China has insisted for years, all their building on islands and atolls and shoals is simply for the production of vegetables.  China has gone to extraordinary lengths to show the rows of glasshouses filled with aubergines and cabbages, broccoli and zucchini.  The adjacent airstrips are merely for the convenience of the aircraft which will transport these green commodities back to the Chinese mainland – to be cooked together with those super-abundant pangolins, turtles and giant clams.  It must be understood, of course, that they have to station a few batteries of anti-aircraft guns and air-to-ship missiles because other nations may be tempted to steal their vegetables.   With such irresponsible neighbors as Filipinos – not to mention other interfering foreigners – China has to protect itself.

     Finally, it is necessary to refute one further prominent international canard:  that China has a political philosophy of overpowering other nations via something known as the ‘Cabbage effect’ – in other words, a way of slowly surrounding the heart of a problem or nation by gradually enveloping it in a succession of anodyne ‘leaves’ – anything from investment to doublespeak – until it is completely contained and thus rendered innocuous.  This is another scurrilous western notion put forth to destabilize China. As China has always maintained, it is producing vegetables only.  Vegetarians worldwide should be proud of China!

      Other nations might learn good things if only they would listen to China.  They might then realize that China is right about everything. If they did, they might even be granted li one day.

     Might is right.  And China is mighty, therefore it is right.

Villastultus’s advice:  Filipinos better start developing a taste for Red cabbage.

Next Posting:

A follow-up piece on China: ‘Albatross Guano’. We will also publish Satyrista’s own contribution to the poetical genre.  And, space permitting, we shall be analysing the apparent bromance between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Headlines

‘Sceptic Tank’ – its inventors doubt whether it will work.  But they don’t wish to create a stink about it.

A shocking outbreak of common sense in UK.

A huge sinkhole has appeared just outside Malacañang Palace. The Euro Com on Human Frights is looking into it.

Ministry of Onerous & Pointless Exercise