Nothing is for certain in any war — as the savage ironies of Iraq have shown the last four years. Few envisioned the initial brilliant three-week war, and the utter and rapid defeat of Saddam. Fewer foresaw the ensuing bloody four-year occupation. And the fewest of all anticipated that out of that mess, the present chance at stability and a real reconciliation under a constitutional framework could come.
The lessons are only the eternal ones: that wars won’t be fought as believed and won’t end as planned, but that adaptability, self-critique, and persistence, in an effort believed to be both right and necessary, will eventually prevail.
One impact of these strikes in France is that it’s confused some of the people who write about such events. Which is why you get articles that seem to go “In a modern globalised economy, old-fashioned militancy simply has no power. That’s what these train drivers must realise as they bring the entire country to a stand-still, their powerless union wrecking the economy, not just of France but of Europe and most of outer space. And now loads of other workforces are coming out on strike as well! Haven’t they read my book explaining how this can’t happen any more? So now, because of them, to get to my lecture entitled, ‘The utter futile pointlessness of ever imagining a strike these days could have the tiddliest impact’ I’ve got to bloody well walk!”
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“It was one thing having these pensions back in the 1960s when we were much poorer, but now society is much richer they’ll have to be scrapped. Because as everyone knows, the richer you get, the less you can afford things.”
“Now the law is regarded purely as an instrument of regulating our personal affairs, completely separate from morality and religion.” Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, speaking in a Lords debate on a bill which will make it easier for gay and lesbian couples to have children by artificial means. Would it were indeed separate from religion. To infer that the law is separate from morality is a piece of typical religionist arrogance which equates religion, frequently a loopy farrago of mad-as-a-meat-axe treatment of anyone ‘other’ and equally batty, but marginally less lethal, diktats on what you can put in your alimentary canal, with ethics, suggesting that there can be no morality separate from religion and overlooking the existence of Socrates for one. This, remember, is the cult that predicates all morality on the ‘Judæo-Christian tradition’ as if the genocidal behaviour of the deity of the Hebrew scriptures, Blake’s Nobodaddy, a figure whose petulance makes the general outlook of two year olds look mature, was any role model for ethical behaviour. As Hitchens has eloquently pointed out it is not necessary to be religious to be moral. And where did Dr Sentamu deliver this wee jeremiad about the diminishing influence of religion on the process of law-making? In the House of Lords, a law-making chamber where he and several of his fellow prelates sit as representatives of a church whose origins lie clearly in the satyriasis of Henry VIII. A small irony failure here, Dr S: why should you and other men in frocks have this right to a voice in the law-making of the land? Who exactly do you represent and how many of them are there? And how can we vote you out?”
