h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Melvyn,

I´ve read all the four parts of that essay and I´m going to post here those parts I find interesting and related in relevance to the topic itself. It´s a short cut by picking just the parts that as I think serves the topic more directly with some background information that is relevant in the bigger picture.

“THE PEN IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD” AND OTHER THOUGHTS ABOUT ‘CHARLIE HEBDO’

A. WHAT SHAPED THE ATTACK ON ‘CHARLIE HEBDO’?

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings many people seized upon Oliver Cromwell's famous remark that "The pen is mightier than the sword", largely ignoring the fact that Oliver Cromwell was reviled for centuries as a dangerous “king killer” before he underwent an almost total re-evaluation.

A WORLD OF PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY

… USA and the UK that had proved so crucial after the 9/11 attacks, when Great Britain be-came Americas major ally when President Bush responded by launching the War on Terror starting with Iraq, in spite of President Chirac of France’s veto on the last motion on the Iraq WMD issue that the USA/UK tried to get through the UN.

But under President Sarkozy France abandoned that its previous attitude towards ‘the Anglo-Saxon’ way including the war on Islamic terrorism, not only acting in concert with the “Anglo-Saxon” powers for example in support of the Arab Spring, but also as the former colonial power acting in support of the struggle against Islamic Fundamentalism in some of France’s former colonies.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET PROJECT

But, as a Marxist, much of Hobsbawm’s sense of living through a “Golden Age” followed by a “Landslide” was associated with the emergence during the Second World War of two large multi-national, multi-racial and multi-cultural Federal Republican “Superpowers”, the USA and the USSR, both in their different ways committed to building a “new world” that would be more immune to the pressures exerted by “savage Capitalism” because of new and developing Political Economies that could take advantage of the latest fruits of the evolution of Human knowledge, the Civilization of Science and Technology. And Hobsbawm’s “Golden Age” was essentially a return to the Balance of Power tradition as eventually the USA and the USSR accepted to live in a divided world of ‘peaceful co-existence’ in a great experiment that would show which of the two had the better “scientific model”, the one that placed the emphasis on LIBERTY or the one that prioritized EQUALITY.

It was a ‘struggle for hearts and minds’ in which each side was under pressure at home and abroad to show that it did not sacrifice all other Human Rights for the sake of the one it priori-tised: and so the Capitalist world had to respond to demands that Liberty should be tempered by Equality, and ‘vice versa’ in the Communist world. Even by the early 1970s, however, the “We do not know where we are going” condition applied to both sides of the Cold War, the Opec Oil Crisis providing the first major pocket of “global fog” that had “the experts” reduced to merely tapping their way out of a crisis, and eventually both sides were forced to accept the need for radical re-structuring as their Economic systems lost dynamic growth potential that was needed to power their experimental Social constructs.

Both the Capitalist and Communist parts of “Western Civilization” were obliged to cut down on the suppressions of Liberty that had been involved in the pursuit of Equality, in order to try to release more dynamic and spontaneous forces that would kick-start Economic growth and put their projects ‘back on track’.

THE TIDE IN THE AFFAIRS OF MAN

For the moment, however, this attempt to shape the tide of History has been more successful in India and China than in the Islamic world, for those two most populous states on Earth have emerged from the experience of Imperialism and Colonialism as the world’s two most “power-house” economies having taken from Western Civilization what it found of value and making just one more in a long history of dynastic adjustments.

But “Western Civilization’s” experiences with Islam, with which it was only too familiar, were very different: and by the Nineteenth Century there was already too much history between “Christendom” and Islam that is essential background knowledge for anyone wishing to un-derstand the ‘Charlie Hebdo affair’ or the current appeal of Islamic terrorism and the Islamic State to young Muslims, for whom the idea of an Islamic order in place of Hobsbawm’s dis-ordered reality that offers no future, merely an endless tapping forward through global fog, has all the appeal of a fast-track, even if savage, ‘escape route’ from purgatory.

THE RELEVANCE OF MARXISM TO ISLAM

The weakness of the full Marxist analysis when applied to Islam is the questionable relevance of the most fundamental principal that Marx embraced, that is David Ricardo’s “Labour theory of value”, which says that all value in things is really is due to the work of those who actually produced it”: for it is impossible for someone considering the purely material world to ignore that the revelatory experiences of the Prophet Mohamed were shaped and informed by his own life experience, which, prior to his taking up his ministry, was spent working in the camel-train industry that took goods produced in the wonderful and exotic Civilizations and cultures of Asia and the Pacific islands from the dead-end of the Red Sea and into the dead-end Mediterranean Sea, where such goods from had long been marketed going back to the great days of Ancient Greece and Rome.

The journeys of Mohamed seem to have taken him often enough to Jerusalem from Mecca, both of them ancient centres of pilgrimage often suffering from the temptation and tendency to turn Holy Places into “a den of thieves”. In the case of Temple at Jerusalem it was a place where Jesus replied to someone, who asked a leading question, “Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s”. Jesus had asked to see what money his questioner had in his pocket, either the Roman money for doing general everyday transactions, or the special temple money that was only used for religious purposes. Most people probably had more of the former than the latter and, in short, Jesus was pointing to the fact that the region at the time was benefitting from ‘the Peace’ of the Roman Emperor Augustus, conditions that were conducive to a Gospel of love and peace, as opposed to the terrorist violence of groups like the ‘sicarii’, who hoped to drive the Romans out.

More than five hundred years later Mahomed was born into the age after the Fall of Rome and the descent into the Dark Ages in what we now call Europe, as well as much of the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Then too there seemed to be no system or order, and therefore a great deal of unpredictability for all those like the Arabs who had made a living through their unique ability to act as “the middle men” between the Mediterranean and Asia: and, still in purely Marxist material terms, through the force of Islam the Prophet Mohamed was able to create a new Civilization centred on Mecca that was not dissimilar to that of Ancient Greece, with Athens at its heart, or the Roman Empire.

But, perhaps even more than those Civilizations, the Islamic World seems to have owed much its power and prosperity to its virtually monopolistic control of inter-continental traffic and trade between the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, because of what happened when their monopoly was broken. For eventually the real or feared consequences of these monopoly powers under the control of an Ottoman Turkish Empire that threatened Europe with further conquests and submissions persuaded Europeans to try to “cut out the middle man” and deal directly with the producing countries: and when the “Narrow Seas” around Great Britain formed a new nexus of trade routes that offered all the advantages of direct water transport the Islamic world was denied its “stock in trade” and declined inexorably until European technology and investment put the Middle East ‘back on the map’ with the Anglo-French Suez Canal and the German-Turkish Berlin to Baghdad Railway.

It was, however, the Oil Revolution that gave much of the region of the old Islamic Empire a new global importance of a totally different order to those important freight routes, for oil has allowed transport the freedom of the air, the sea and the land. And the BP crisis in ‘Persia’, which resulted in the establishment of the regime of the Shah, was an early sign of things to come. In these disordered and difficult last decades the whole question of the legitimacy of the existing governmental regime and the possibilities offered to the masses by regime change that would put the their oil wealth at their service has energised the Islamic world even more, if that is possible, than these issues energised Scotland in the Year of the Referendum, 2014, or Venezuela of the Chavez regime and its successor.

… the August 1990 invasion and occupation of Kuwait by Iraq that raised all those aforemen-tioned oil issues, seems to have come ‘out of the blue’, with Saddam Hussein quickly seizing on the possibilities of the changing times and the possibility that the former “superpowers” lacked the courage of their former convictions. It is interesting to reflect that Ronald Reagan was presumably primed to ask Mrs. Thatcher not to take military action over the Falklands Invasion, and her memoirs note that on the day that he announced her resignation as Con-servative Leader and Prime Minister to the Cabinet the Cabinet meeting had also doubled the British military capability in the Gulf region.

It does seem possible that George Bush Senior may have wanted to be able “to wear the trousers” over the Kuwait crisis: and, as my 15-16 year old pupils from London’s Banglatown insisted throughout the whole First Gulf War, that what the USA was most interested in was not the legalities and illegalities involved, but the US Oil Interests. …

"LIKE BEING IN A SCENE FROM THE MOVIES”

The pen had definitely been mightier than the sword in 1947 when a British ultimatum had a withdrawal of British power had forced the Indian-sub-continent to settle its future on the basis of partition. The subsequent Partition Riots ensured that the new nation states of India and Pakistan had been born amidst a blood-bath murder now estimated at two million people. …

… with monstrous evil pitted against the “good guys” the story moves into a raging storm of conflict between the seemingly overwhelming evil and the super-powered-advanced special emergency forces. Eventually the ‘special forces’ defeat the threat and there can be a swift re-entry, which brings a homely sense that “it’s good to roam, but it’s good to come home”, “until the next time” so it is reassuring that the ‘special forces’ are still there ‘guarding our backs’. For there is no longer a steady-state reality that can be restored, no horizons in a global reality and no way out towards a promised land, where people can still just race through their life at full tilt, filling their lives up with the simple pleasures of labour and “harvest”, reaping the rewards of lives lived in love and harmony.

And it should surprise no-one that some people caught up in action of the ‘Charlie Hebdo affair’ attacks could only say, as had been the case in New York in 9/11, that they had suddenly felt like they were living in a movie and not real life, for this was no accident, the terrorists having learned “the way of the world” in this period that lacks system and order …

A WORLD BEYOND FRIENDLY PERSUASION

… the Brandt Report, “North and South”, dealt with the whole challenge of trying to develop at least the non-Communist parts of the global economy in order to prevent a dangerous global divide between rich and poor, suggesting remedies like international taxation in order to achieve the kind of internal redistribution of wealth policies of “New Deal” politics. But the element of danger in the wealth gap was greatly increased by the proximity of a belt of the poorest countries on Earth, which were not, in fact, very far “South” at all. They were, in fact, Muslim states that stretched from Bangladesh, through Pakistan, through the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, and across sub-Saharan West Africa, forming a continuous spine of want and discontent through the Islamic world that had once been so wealthy and powerful through its possession and exploitation of this very strategic centre ground.

In 1989 the Chinese Red Army showed that the Red Chinese Communist regime was not prepared to accept “Western-style” student protest with the Tiananmen Square Massacre. In 1991-2 Russia showed a similar willingness to deploy overwhelming force in South Osse-tiawar, in 1992-3 in Abkhazia, and in Chechnya in 1994. And the response to Saddam Hus-sein’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait, was eventually the USA-UK led alliance “Operation Desert Storm”, with critics of British-American policy over Iraq consistently highlighting that it was “the West” that had ‘made’ Saddam Hussein, which is true, and why Desert Storm and later Overwhelming Force fit this picture of the ruthless deployment of monstrous force in places that were considered “our own back yard”.

‘THE CHARLIE HEBDO AFFAIR’- A DRAMA IN THREE ACTS

The warning from History is that “For the Devil to triumph it is enough that good men do noth-ing”, or as Yeats put it “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed”. or that when you decide to sacrifice your honour and principles by ignoring the plight of “people in far off lands of whom we know nothing” things will probably only get worse.

But History also offered the lessons of experience, so for example it was as early as the Commonwealth Conference of 1965, the first to really feel the full effect of Harold McMillan’s “Wind of Change” that Field Marshal Ayub Khan, President of Pakistan, a product of Sandhurst and the British Army, ruling Pakistan as a dictator raised the thought that for a country like Pakistan an English-style judicial system with its full cast of be-wigged barristers for prosecution and defence, its judges and juries was just too expensive, whereas, for a country that had been deliberately created as an Islamic state, the traditional system of sharia law was an obvious alternative.

1965 was also the year when Malcolm X, the most prominent and publicised member of the Black Muslim movement was gunned down and killed, by three members of another branch of the Black Muslim movement. The movement itself had been founded back in those hard times of the 1930s and argued that Islam had been the true religion of Africans, that Christianity had brought slavery, oppression and exploitation, and that it was time for African- Americans to fight back.

So it looks very much that, though will probably never establish the full facts about the Charlie Hebdo killings, we can hazard a guess at some of the things look most likely to have shaped them.


(a) After attacks on Washington, New York and London, all of them important both as sym-bolic and functional world centres, Paris was an obvious challenge, with every chance that the standing of President Hollande and the representational democracy that had produced his leadership would be damaged in much the same way as President Bush and the New Labour duo of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were damaged along with the democratic systems of the USA and GB.


(b) The matter of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that were considered offensive to Islam helped to make these killings something that would “play well” in their core constituency i.e. places that the Islamic Fundamentalists could regard as populated by suffering and deprived millions within the Islamic world including diaspora pockets in the “West”, places where hundreds of thousands of innocent and inoffensive lives have been taken in the last few years by more powerful military machines. But there were surely important elements of opportunism and symbolism that were possibly more important.


The Charlie Hebdo offices were above all a “do-able target” for that strike force. Indeed one of the lines of enquiry that investigators may well wish to follow up is the fact that, apparently, one of the Kouachi brothers worked as a Pizza delivery man. The pizza-delivery “boy” is one of those almost universal and ‘invisible’ ‘functionaries’ that fly around our modern cities helmet- clad and largely unnoticed. And it seems that the Charlie Hebdo killings were made easier because the staff were grouped around one table for a weekly meeting at that time, which sounds like the kind of ‘working lunch’ that lends itself to just ordering- in some pizza, so that a pizza-delivery man gets allowed in habitually on a regular basis. And the attackers seem to have been in and out in no time at all.


(c)This, of course, is pure speculation, but what seems certain is that the very fact that “Charlie Hebdo” was a small and ‘fringe’ publication, working from a small office just off the street at street-level, probably did as much as the occasionally offensive cartoons themselves to identify it as a good target. And it was an achievable and well-chosen target if the intention was to strike a blow that would resonate round the world, for it was seen as a strike that at the special role that Paris has held in the world of world culture, civilization and the arts, for centuries. A Paris of “promiscuity” in all of the senses of that word, including all of the human energies that become intensified when brought together in an culture of small-scale, start-up “entrepreneurship” where the main obsessions are the pursuit of art and “reason”. Voltaire had said “The secret of the arts is to correct nature”, and the masterpieces of Paris could famously be produced in a garret or a small workshop: and quite correctly the Charlie Hebdo attacks were seen as an attack not just on Paris itself, but also on the global Western Civilization with which Paris has its own very ‘special relationship’.


(d) It further seems most likely that the attack was planned and mounted with every intention of creating a real life drama that would play out across Media outlets all over the world, not least because it has become part of the terrorists’ strategy to record their own attacks and post video material on line. Obviously Act One: the actual raid on the Charlie Hebdo offices was supposed to go according to the script. Act Two- The interaction between the terrorists and the “Emergency services” called for more improvisation, but leaving an Identity Card in the abandoned car allowed the security machine to show what it could do with modern information technology and surveillance cameras, and then, when they were cornered, how, in the city of the Napoleon’s “whiff of grapeshot”, and the rebuilding by Haussmann under Napoléon III after another revolution brought volatile masses to the streets, and the special CRS units of General de Gaulle, Paris is as well-equipped as any city to respond to an emergency in a warlike manner."

The other parts which I omitted to quote are imo too much distracting and it takes a long way until it gets to the point. There is one error regarding the coming down of the wall which was not by Christmas 1990 but by November 1989. That´s just for the record because in 1990 Germany was already re-united and the Gulf Crisis was unfolding.

The most interesting parts are those referring to that part of Mohammeds biography and how the West treated countries with a Muslim majority. The historical aspects are indeed important in relation to the present time, as well as the competition for spheres of interests between the USA and the USSR are too.

As I´ve often noticed, you´re repeating your special interests on the Anglo-Saxons and some selected writers and poets. Well, I´m one who has read most of your essays and therefore I´m familiar with your hobby horse topics and I know how important you regard them to be. Others might have a different view and frankly with no offence intended, they might find your excursions far away into history periods that doesn´t deal directly with the subject at hand, a bit tedious because it´s not often to grasp at once how and in which way these are connected to the topic itself.

Even by the shortened version of your essay, it still makes five pages.

Cheers,
Thomas

Hi Thomas

Thanks for that-- and especially the factual correction...I will keep in mind your comments about History further back... But this all did just start out as a mere introduction to my answer to the question of that I was asked, which was what I thought about "Je suis Charlie" reaction to the killings... And that begins with consideration of those old mantras from Western Civilization.. "The Pen is mightier than the sword".. and "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the last your right to say it"...I would be foolish to assume that the rest of the world are as ignorant of the History behind these quotes as most people in our ignorant developed world are..So I have now started this morning re-working what I have already written about the men who said those things and why and how they could hold those views...I am calling this section "Standing Steadfast in Support of our Gods and Prophets."

Cheers

Melvyn

Hi Thomas

Part Five posted.. and in the light of it I have spent the last couple of days drafting a letter to French publishers in Paris... Nothing to lose, and they may accept my view that Paris needs to respond to the Charlie Hebdo attacks that avoid the negative consequences of the way that New York and London reacted to 9/11 and 7/7.

Cheers

Melvyn

Hi Thomas

Hope things are well with you as we hit mid-spring. We came back from four weeks in Burgundy last Monday and, as my birthday gets closer, I feel my annual mood of getting ready for a new chapter in my life... We had the great pleasure of having our daughter and grand-daughter with us in Burgundy for almost a week, which allowed us to really begin to form a connection and, in fact, a few days ago our daughter told us that she has booked a week in a chalet up in the little village in our favourite family spot in the French Alps for the last week in July, which holds out the prospect of spending time together as we used to do...And I suppose that this has all given me good cause to try to focus on "putting my own house in order". Perhaps understandably I have received no response from my letters to French publishers, and, as you have noticed that the main thrust of what I have to say has already been written, if anyone wants to read it, it is probably time to focus on my real life, what future I have and the daily satisfactions of chipping away at more mundane and realistic goals.

Hope life is treating you well.

Cheers

Melvyn Cass

Hope

Hi Melvyn, I am glad to hear from you again. I might say that things regarding myself are �so la la�. It is good to notice that you enjoyed your time with your Daughter and with your Granddaugh-ter. After our last exchanged of posts, regarding CH and your letter to the French publisher, I didn�t know what to reply. As you told me now, they didn�t respond to you for whatever reasons. In the meantime, I was reading on subjects regarding Northern Ireland and I�ve made my first entry ever on this site just a couple of days ago. If you�re interested to read it, there�s the link to the entry: http://h2g2.com/review_forum/A395589/conversation/view/F48874/T8313199/page/1/ http://h2g2.com/entry/A87852351 I�ve posted this book review on another site where I have been the past years before and after some break from it, returned there in the absence of a real better alternative site. I guess that the American didn�t answered your emails regarding your own blog which is a pity. I�m still on reading books about Northern Ireland and the last one I�ve finished was �The au-tobiography of Terence O�Neill� Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1963 to 1969. That was an interesting reading because he tells the story from his personal angle and experiences, seeking to have it as balanced as possible in regards to the still problematic situation in that part of the UK. I do welcome your change of mind regarding taking the focus on your real life and I hope that you�ll benefit from that. I know about your birthday coming up on Wednesday and if you hadn�t posted today, I�d have at least left a post for you with birthday congratulations and best wishes. I think that, as you did so in the past years, I might use this place to write a bit more entries about the subjects I�ve been reading and I was and am interested in. The advantage of this place is that one doesn�t gets tormented by trolls like on other message boards, the disad-vantage might be, that there is less of a conversation to the topic itself. But it doesn�t matter too much because it might as well just count that it is written and installed on this site, open for everyone to read it who is interested in that thematic. I hope that all things are well over there in France and I was wondering whether it�s been a bit early this year to go there. We�ve had, after some few weeks of nice weather, a backlash of chilly weather over Easter. Very nasty indeed, but things have improved and my favourite season of the year, which is spring, finally started and there�s nothing more that makes me delighted than to see the trees and the flowers in blossom and the temperatures getting warmer. Thanks for your kind words and hopefully we�ll be in touch. Kind Regards, Thomas

Hi Melvyn, I am glad to hear from you again. I might say that things regarding myself are �so la la�. It is good to notice that you enjoyed your time with your Daughter and with your Granddaugh-ter. After our last exchanged of posts, regarding CH and your letter to the French publisher, I didn�t know what to reply. As you told me now, they didn�t respond to you for whatever reasons. In the meantime, I was reading on subjects regarding Northern Ireland and I�ve made my first entry ever on this site just a couple of days ago. If you�re interested to read it, there�s the link to the entry: http://h2g2.com/review_forum/A395589/conversation/view/F48874/T8313199/page/1/ http://h2g2.com/entry/A87852351 I�ve posted this book review on another site where I have been the past years before and after some break from it, returned there in the absence of a real better alternative site. I guess that the American didn�t answered your emails regarding your own blog which is a pity. I�m still on reading books about Northern Ireland and the last one I�ve finished was �The au-tobiography of Terence O�Neill� Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1963 to 1969. That was an interesting reading because he tells the story from his personal angle and experiences, seeking to have it as balanced as possible in regards to the still problematic situation in that part of the UK. I do welcome your change of mind regarding taking the focus on your real life and I hope that you�ll benefit from that. I know about your birthday coming up on Wednesday and if you hadn�t posted today, I�d have at least left a post for you with birthday congratulations and best wishes. I think that, as you did so in the past years, I might use this place to write a bit more entries about the subjects I�ve been reading and I was and am interested in. The advantage of this place is that one doesn�t gets tormented by trolls like on other message boards, the disad-vantage might be, that there is less of a conversation to the topic itself. But it doesn�t matter too much because it might as well just count that it is written and installed on this site, open for everyone to read it who is interested in that thematic. I hope that all things are well over there in France and I was wondering whether it�s been a bit early this year to go there. We�ve had, after some few weeks of nice weather, a backlash of chilly weather over Easter. Very nasty indeed, but things have improved and my favourite season of the year, which is spring, finally started and there�s nothing more that makes me delighted than to see the trees and the flowers in blossom and the temperatures getting warmer. Thanks for your kind words and hopefully we�ll be in touch. Kind Regards, Thomas

Hi Thomas

Good to hear from you-- I have just had a quick look at your post, and will get round to reading it later.

Your mention of reading immediately reminded me of one of the key features of our time in France, where I seem to get lots of reading done, and especially because of the rather eclectic mix of books that I find in the book section of the local branch of a Charity organization called Emmaus, which is also active here in the UK.. So this holiday I finally finished the last part of the life of Christopher Columbus as written by his son.. I also read a book based on interviews with the first French woman to be selected to the prestigious Academie Francaise, Margaret Jourcenare, who discussed her whole life's work and gave me useful input should French publishers finally show any interest. I then read the autobiography of the African-American-Swedish soprano and human rights activist Barbara Hendricks, and finally a fascinating personal account of life in the Ukraine before 1914 up through 1917 and the impact of the Russian Revolution and the tug-of-war between Russia and Germany over the Ukraine. Lots of contemporary relevance.. And had bought all of these books last year. But one of the new purchases a couple of weeks ago was Hillary Clinton's account of her life published in 2003, as she seemed likely to become active in the US Presidential race..

I posted this on Facebook yesterday:




THOUGHTS ON THE SPIRITUAL VACUUM AT THE HEART OF AMERICAN SOCIETY

In the light of the expected Hillary Clinton campaign to become the next President of the USA I started reading her 2003 autobiography last week: and last night I read the chapter "The End of Something" that dealt with a difficult period early in the Clinton Presidency when her father was dying.

Having cleared her diary as First Lady she nevertheless felt obliged to keep one commitment that was to speak in an event in support of the Mrs Bird Johnson's (wife of L.B.Johnson) charity. So she left her bedside vigil and boarded a plane with no idea of what she was going to say.

On the plane she found a magazine cutting in her casual note-book with some reflections by Lee Atwater. Atwater had been a high-profile and "brutal" Republican political operator, but had suddenly found himself dying of a brain tumour at the age of 40. And in this interview for "Life" magazine in 1991 he said:

" The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumour of the soul".

And more-

Facing the reality of human mortality, and love and loss, herself Mrs Clinton took the spirit of the Attwater comments for her speech, urging "us all" to take up the challenge that he had outlined, only to find herself, a few weeks later, being mocked as "Saint Hillary" in a cover article in the New York Times.

The need for a Roosevelt "New Deal" or a Johnson "Big Society" seems to be undiminished, and sadly the world has not really "moved on" from the Twentieth Century reality when it was accepted as a basic law that whatever happened in the USA would happen in other "developed countries" a few decades later.

********

Cheers for now- better get back to my house projects in this lovely sunshine.

Melvyn Cass

Thanks for your reply Melvyn and excuse the bad shape of my two previous replies to you. I don´t know that happened there and I´ve reported one of them to the moderators to remove one of this double post.

I´d very appreciate your views on my entry. I know that it´s a long one but such was the way in quoting just a few passages from each chapter of that book.

As this year is the 50th anniversary of Sir Winston´s dead, Bloomsbury published several of his own written books to be available this year. That was a very welcome opportunity to get a copy of a book one would just get as an antiquarian book and to some prices. It is the Volume IV of the series “The World Crisis”. That part with the title “The Aftermath”. I have the first book as well but found it rather not to be that of my favourites because he´s dealing with many details of battles and other military campaigns in WWI.

As for I receive newsletters from the Churchill Centre, I was lucky to get that hint to the new published copies of Churchill´s works.

Interesting piece of reading you´ve quoted from your Facebook site regarding Hillary Clinton eventually becoming the next President of the USA.

I hope you´ll enjoy the day.

Thomas

Hi Melvyn, I am glad to hear from you again. I might say that things regarding myself are �so la la�. It is good to notice that you enjoyed your time with your Daughter and with your Granddaugh-ter. After our last exchanged of posts, regarding CH and your letter to the French publisher, I didn�t know what to reply. As you told me now, they didn�t respond to you for whatever rea-sons. In the meantime, I was reading on subjects regarding Northern Ireland and I�ve made my first entry ever on this site just a couple of days ago. If you�re interested to read it, there are the links to the entry: http://h2g2.com/review_forum/A395589/conversation/view/F48874/T8313199/page/1/ http://h2g2.com/entry/A87852351 I�ve posted this book review on another site where I have been the past years before and after some break from it, returned there in the absence of a real better alternative site. I guess that the American didn�t answered your emails regarding your own blog which is a pity. I�m still on reading books about Northern Ireland and the last one I�ve finished was �The autobiography of Terence O�Neill�, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1963 to 1969. That was an interesting reading because he tells the story from his personal angle and experiences, seeking to have it as balanced as possible in regards to the still problematic situation in that part of the UK. I do welcome your change of mind regarding taking the focus on your real life and I hope that you�ll benefit from that. I know about your birthday coming up on Wednesday and if you hadn�t posted today, I�d have at least left a post for you with birthday congratulations and best wishes. I think that, as you did so in the past years, I might use this place to write a bit more entries about the subjects I�ve been reading and I was and am interested in. The advantage of this place is that one doesn�t gets tormented by trolls like on other message boards, the disadvantage might be, that there is less of a conversation to the topic itself. But it doesn�t matter too much because it might as well just count that it is written and installed on this site, open for everyone to read it who is interested in that thematic. I hope that all things are well over there in France and I was wondering whether it�s been a bit early this year to go there. We�ve had, after some few weeks of nice weather, a backlash of chilly weather over Easter. Very nasty indeed, but things have improved and my favourite season of the year, which is spring, finally started and there�s nothing more that makes me delighted than to see the trees and the flowers in blossom and the temperatures getting warmer. Thanks for your kind words and hopefully we�ll be in touch. Kind Regards, Thomas

Hi Thomas

Instead of removing one they just added a third, unless I am mistaken.

No matter

Melvyn

Good Morning Melvyn,

In fact, it was me who posted the same post for the third time because I thought if I don´t use any smilies, the text might appear with paragraphs and all in the same shape I´ve written it. But I have no idea why this post went that wrong.

I´ve written the whole post on a word document as a draft, copied and pasted it into the post frame of h2g2 and this what you see here was the result. I was rather puzzled because this never happened to me before.

Greetings,
Thomas

Morning Thomas

Good day. I hope you have a lovely Spring day as we have..I have just got up to find my wife showing someone round our garden, which is looking spectacular and absolutely bursting with life- which is hardly surprising since she has made herself its slave, because she loves producing and managing all kinds of life and plant-life seems to me the most submissive...I overheard her arguing with her Mother who worries about her excessive gardening, but then a day like today can be a good day.

Since we came back a week ago, she decided that she would have to do a "Friendship Plant Sale" especially as we had not lost too many plants while we were away. Last year she developed this format so she had all the templates saved on her computer and yesterday she finally got around to distributing 'flyers' to the immediate neighbourhood offering people the chance to come and get plants, many just free and others, that will grow into bushes or trees, she puts a nominal price on and asks people just to put the money in an envelope (providing envelopes) and put through our letter box...But this often results in her chatting with people and then inviting them in to see what they plants grow into 'in situ, which is all good for her-- and us, because, though she says angrily, that she hates our house through the eyes of other people, she is reminded of just how boring this garden was when we moved in over 30 years ago and began planting, building and growing memories.. The first visitor was our neighbour who got a pre-sale preview and her little girl now four, asked me to take her into the garden, where she found our largely disused swing, and used it.. This, of course, made me look at it now with the eyes of a grandfather, spotting one or two things that would need to be done before our granddaughter gets to use it.

Actually, while talking in that vein, when our daughter etc were with us in Burgundy she announced that, as she has accepted to be a godmother to the son of her best friend, the vicar is insisting that she should be Christened, so she is being Christened on May 3rd: and this is the friend who moved a few years ago to the village in the Cotswolds where my mother's family lived. Because of our family story I have not been there for more than fifty years and this really looks like a "must do" opportunity to make contact with things past and things to come...My grandparents lived in the farm just opposite the village church, and in retirement moved to a house just next door..I wonder how much will have changed?


As for your post your draft was saved in something like text only so that the formatting was lost when you copied and pasted, you probably could check. I was recommended to use Rich Text Format many years ago but modern machines seem more adaptable, or perhaps Microsoft has just become dominant.

Have a good day.

Hi Melvyn,

Thanks for your interesting reply, especially for the parts of the gardening you wife does.

I imagine that the house you live in is something of the typicall English houses, planned and built on the same architectonial patterns as I know them.

My Grandmother, when she lived in Oldham, lived in some house too. The garden was always in the backyard and a small stripe for gardening in the front. I can´t remember that there were much flowers in her garden, or as you might say alottment. My late Step-Grandfather, the native Englishman she was married to, used to have pigeons in the backyard. The Kitchen and the living room were to the backyard while the dining room was to the front. The other rooms upstairs. When they moved from Oldham to Clitheroe, they sold the house and moved in a flat, but still with the rooms up stairs. I suppose that they were fit enough to walk up the stairs back then when they moved. The last time when I visited my Grandmother, some ten years ago, she had a lift to get up to her flat because the rooms at the ground floor were rent to some other family. That was the only occasion where I saw something different to the houses I was used to when my parents and I visited her the last time in Oldham in 1984.

It´s really very good to notice that you enjoy your time with your granddaughter and think for what has to be done for the near future to provide her a safe playground. It also seems to me that this is a welcomed distraction from the efforts you´ve had with the publishers to get your book published. It looks that you might adjust your priorities which is also good for you.

We both know, that your approach on history and the way you combine subjects to get a new angle from which to look at them, is what we can call a niche, probably for the few who like to read and consider different approaches. I mean that in a positive term and in regards where this has its place. That´s my opinion and also a way of explaining to myself the reasons why publishers were not inclined to publish your books. They are probably more to serve the masses and they prefer to read books for their casual pastime.

I still think that it´s a pity that publishers are not open enough to new approaches, but there you go you can´t bring them to change their view when commercial aspects have their priority. But leaving that aside, I was wondering why some University Colleges in England might not at least take some of your works for their students. Well, that´s a matter you know better about how they handle such things.

We have some warm days here but the weather is due to change a bit over the coming weekend. It seems as if the usual weather patterns are on their way, like in the last years when you have sunny and warm days during the week and over the weekend it´s getting raining.

As for my post draft, I have no idea about the different text formats for I don´t have my own computer, neither do I have a notebook.

I´ve been asked by Bluebottle to consider some alterations in my entry to give some explanations on used terms in the context of the subject to make it better understandable to the reader. I have to consider how to do that and where to place them, after I´ve detected where the edit facility is on this site.

As for Cotswolds, there rings a bell - somehow. I think that aside reading about that from our post exchanges where you told me about that, I´ve noticed that place being mentioned in a film or some series. Must be some special place there. I understand, going to such a place after 50 years being away from it, one might find the place very different to what it looked back in the days when one left it.

Have a good day too.

Cheers for now.
Thomas

Hi Thomas

Thanks for your reply...As you have detected grand parenting gives a new dimension even to parenting, since our daughter very obviously wishes her own daughter to know the same joy of having grandparents as she did during her own childhood...It was why she came to Burgundy not least to show off her daughter to her grandparents. In order for her to become truly French we actually left her (as we had done her brother) to spend a summer term with them and attend French primary school when she was nearly 8 years old...As we normally camped with them every Easter and Summer it was a natural extension, and one of our latest pieces of news (which distressed my wife, though it is marvellous) when we came home last week was that she has booked a week in the last week in July in the village near her/our favourite campsite in the Alps. My wife's first concern was for her diary.. But I am just delighted that we can expect them to come and spend time with us during the day either around our caravan or tackling some of the simple walks that we love, and we may even end up baby-sitting our granddaughter when her parents want to go up really high, if they feel up to it. There are some walks up to mountain top refuges: but perhaps not this time.

Some of that reading also helped me to feel more philosophical about my writing, especially the Yourcenare interviews. Her "great" work was in 1948 when she had lived in the USA for ten years and had high hopes about the Brave New World. Her next "great" work was 1968, when she was less sanguine. By 1980 shortly before she died, she was worried about the way that the world was going...Perhaps even more personal was the Barbara Hendricks book. She was born in 1948 and has taken great inspiration from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was issued a few weeks before her birth.. Like her I was born to be a singer. She became one of the great singers of the world, a great artist with an impressive catalogue of recordings of the great classical pieces and then branching out into Jazz and Blues... But about 14 years ago she found that EMI were not interested in her work, or her recording. When she contacted them they contrasted her sales with their latest "star"- a 12 year old girl who sang popular "cross-over" music without any of the foundation work that Ms Hendricks put in, having mastered five languages in order to deliver the text with true meaning and having learned how to study a score in depth... She ended up creating her own recording label and recording studio that is dedicated to trying to capture the genuine acoustic sound of the kind of live performance which the great composers had in mind... In this as in much else, I found in her a fellow spirit and felt less alone... In fact, though she now lives mostly with her new husband and family in Sweden, I suspect that she still has the house she lived in just a few hundred yards away from my wife's sister and family near Montreux.. It all helped me to feel less isolated in this disturbed and disturbing world.

Must eat.

Cheers for now.

Melvyn Cass

It´s a bit difficult to imagine someone one knows just from an internet message board having singing talents. I believe what you told me, still it lacks the sound on this site to have an idea of it.

Wherever one finds common ground with other people, one doesn´t feels alone and isolated. So if I dare say, as it was me who was reading your essays and exchanging comments with you on them, you have at least one reader which is better than no reader at all. I don´t know how many of the people you´ve on your facebook site have done likewise as I did, but in case there are some of them, that´s even better.

Your example regarding music and the story of that Lady tells one just more about the service for the masses. When one thinks about the composers in classical music and how famous they still are, their compositions still performed and when you look at how fast living and also short-living the success of modern singers are, it´s worlds apart. I´d dare say that with this service for the masses, there might be some decline in standards involved too. People forget about them very easy.

The Roling Stones, people of your age, are still a difference to our modern times although they stay modern. They are a music institution of modern music (which includes more than Pop Music and Rock & Roll).

Enjoy your evening and till tomorrow.

Cheers,
Thomas