READING SEYMOUR M. HERSH

The reader is swept up by the words and the ideas of Seymour M. Hersh. Their density is exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. Can this be true? Is it the rantings of a man so convulsed by American conspiracies that he spews complexity and travesty to such an extent that what he writes could not possibly be the case?

And yet what makes Seymour M. Hersh's words chime is the very ring of truth they have been sounding since his shocking 1969 revelations about the My Lai massacres in Viet Nam. He has sources inside the military, political and secret service institutions of the most powerful country on the planet, the United States of America. He writes forcefully and compellingly. He grips.

In the first 2016 edition of The London Review of Books (Volume 38, Number 1, 7th January) Hersh writes about a source, a close adviser to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.

A former senior adviser to the Joint Chiefs told me that the document was an ‘all-source’ appraisal, drawing on information from signals, satellite and human intelligence, and took a dim view of the Obama administration’s insistence on continuing to finance and arm the so-called moderate rebel groups. By then, the CIA had been conspiring for more than a year with allies in the UK, Saudi Arabia and Qatar to ship guns and goods – to be used for the overthrow of Assad – from Libya, via Turkey, into Syria.

But the military chiefs felt that the politicians in Washington were fixated on getting rid of Assad, in the classic 'regime change' strategy that led to the chaos the peoples of Iraq and Libya endure. They felt this would lead to another disaster, for the US. So they embarked on a subterfuge, circumventing political direction and supplying intelligence to Assad via allies, including Germany, Israel and even the Russians.

It was clear that Assad needed better tactical intelligence and operational advice. The JCS concluded that if those needs were met, the overall fight against Islamist terrorism would be enhanced. Obama didn’t know, but Obama doesn’t know what the JCS does in every circumstance and that’s true of all presidents.

The reader is mesmerised. Is this the back story of a Hollywood Middle-East political drama? Then, the reader enters the sewers of rendition torture chambers.

Later that year, Syrian intelligence foiled an attack by al-Qaida on the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, and Assad agreed to provide the CIA with the name of a vital al-Qaida informant. In violation of this agreement, the CIA contacted the informant directly; he rejected the approach, and broke off relations with his Syrian handlers. Assad also secretly turned over to the US relatives of Saddam Hussein who had sought refuge in Syria, and – like America’s allies in Jordan, Egypt, Thailand and elsewhere – tortured suspected terrorists for the CIA in a Damascus prison.

Can this all be true? And can it make sense of the dead boy on the beach, of the thousands fleeing by sea, drowning in the Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) of the Roman Empire, in today's 21^st Century battle of the Empires? This is Star Wars written on our own broken, blue planet.

Seymour M. Hersh's sources cross the planet. He writes of unlikely allies and macro-alliances, played out above the heads of citizens.

A senior adviser to the Kremlin on Middle East affairs told me that in late 2012, after suffering a series of battlefield setbacks and military defections, Assad had approached Israel via a contact in Moscow and offered to reopen the talks on the Golan Heights. The Israelis had rejected the offer. ‘They said, “Assad is finished,”' the Russian official told me. ‘“He’s close to the end.”’ He said the Turks had told Moscow the same thing. By mid-2013, however, the Syrians believed the worst was behind them, and wanted assurances that the Americans and others were serious about their offers of help.

The reader is not surprised but is nonetheless forcefully struck by Hersh's assertions regarding the relations between the militaries in the regimes in the US and Russia. Is this a background paper to a John Le Carré novel? See how, supposedly neutral, Ireland gets drawn in?

In August, a few weeks before his retirement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dempsey made a farewell visit to the headquarters of the Irish Defence Forces in Dublin and told his audience there that he had made a point while in office to keep in touch with the chief of the Russian General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov. ‘I’ve actually suggested to him that we not end our careers as we began them,’ Dempsey said – one a tank commander in West Germany, the other in the East.

Yet again, this is not a surprise. Hersh writes what many people know to be the case.

One of the constants in US affairs since the fall of the Soviet Union has been a military-to-military relationship with Russia.

Hersh writes about macro-events, amidst the political/military and secret service elites. He cites US militarist amazement at the Obama Administration’s support of the Erdogan regime in Turkey. He offers no explanation of the US political administration's much-criticised insistence on 'moderates' in Syria, and the support offered by the regime in Turkey.

Dempsey and his associates remain mystified by Obama’s continued public defence of Erdoğan, given the American intelligence community’s strong case against him – and the evidence that Obama, in private, accepts that case.

As a journalist who writes on such heated matters, with access to named and unnamed sources in very critical circumstances, Hersh attracts praise and criticism in fair measure.

The reader listens to oud players while reading.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnLfbiHuoko

Is there more to be gleaned about the lives of peoples in the region from the music?

Read Seymour M. Hersh yourself. Listen for the chimes of truth that you may hear. And listen to the oud players, for the human heart of it all.

All good wishes to the peoples of Syria for 2016.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n01/seymour-m-hersh/military-to-military

Le Trio Joubran on France 2 TV

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3Y_FOq8DoY

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

SEASONAL SHAME

The Irish Times is a major newspaper in Ireland. The weekend edition is published each Saturday and includes a magazine with human-interest features on celebrities, personalities, food, fashion, travel and gardening. There's a comprehensive listing of TV programmes and a scattering of ads. It provides the 'lifestyle' supplement to the news coverage in the paper.

In the pre-Christmas edition of 19^th December 2015, there is a one-page photographic feature entitled Gifts for Him. It includes an image of a stainless steel self-winding watch by Tiffany and Co., priced at 5, 650 euros.

Who is the Him and has He no shame?

Has the newspaper no shame?

They sold me a dream of Christmas

They sold me a silent night

The front page stories concern strictures applying to judicial inquiries into matters of serious public concern such as the banking crisis and the sale of Sitserv, a private building services company that instals water meters. There is also a story on bonuses paid to the partners of officials in the police service's representative body.

Perhaps Him received one of those bonuses? Or benefitted from the sale of Sitserv? Or escaped, quids in, when the banks re-invented themselves with public money? On page 2 of the News Agenda, there is the statistic that the government baled out one bank with 20.8 billion euro of public money, of which the bank has repaid 1.64 billion euro. Is Him a banker?

And they told me a fairy story

Have Him and the government no shame?

And I believed in Father Christmas

And I looked at the sky with excited eyes

On page 9, in World News, there is a report from the UN that there are 60 million refugees in the world. It is also reported that there are 2.5 people with pending requests for asylum. Is Him among them?

They said there'll be snow at Christmas

They said there'll be peace on earth

But instead it just kept on raining

The political consequences of the suffering wrought by the flooding along the river Shannon are considered on page 6. The human suffering is not addressed in any detail, though there are assertions that eliminating or preventing floods is no longer sustainable and that the recent devastations are the results of Acts of God. So Him is not responsible and can get on with admiring His new watch.

Has Him no shame?

There is report of a UN-backed road map for a Syrian peace process on page 10 in World News. Tensions exist between regional powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, who engage in proxy wars on behalf of allies further afield. Iran and Russia line up with the Assad regime. Saudi Arabia want that regime brought down, as do the western powers. What does Him want? And what do the people of Syria want? Is Assad Him? Is Him an arms' dealer?

I wish you a hopeful christmas

I wish you a brave new year

Has Him no shame?

Have Assad, the many militants and their arms' suppliers no shame?

Some insight is offered on page 11, in columnist Simon Carswell's American Letter. A man (Him?) with business interests in casinos in Las Vegas bought an influential American newspaper for 129 million euro. Could this be Him? Perhaps Him is closer to home. In Business News on page 17 there are details of houses sold in Ireland in 2015 for 26.5 million euros, 10 million euros, 7.5 million euros, 6.35 and 2.2 million euros.

It is evident that Him has no shame. And will brazenly assert  "Everyone wants a 10 million euros house and a 5 grand watch? Or if they don't they're fools.”

Him was at the auction for the personal effects belonging to Margaret Thatcher, described in Fine Arts and Antiques, page 19, as her 'Free market' triumphs. Michael Parson's column indicates that the purchasers of the Iron Lady's memorabilia got real bargains, including a pair of shoes which sold for over 4, 000 pounds sterling. Him bought them? For Her?

A veil of tears for the virgin's birth

Has Her no shame?

The ability to hold all the world together in a brazen, bare-faced, shameless assertion of the current order is a miracle, a Christmas miracle, that lasts the whole year round.

What use is shame at this or any at any other time of the year?

Newspapers like The Irish Times have a powerful capacity to hold a compartmentalised range of material together and present it to readers as if it were all of a piece, as if this is the only reality that counts and that nothing jars. The ability of a newspaper to encompass such a variety of stories and promotions is evidence of its quality. It is how it is.

It is the mechanism of the watch, complicated and complex, difficult to unravel, a marvel to behold. It simply ticks along as Him would have it.

The use of the word 'we' is an essential element. We are all part of it. There is no shame in wanting a five grand watch or a ten million euros house or a four grand pair of shoes. There is no hypocrisy in such wants and, at the same time, the impulse to feel bad about poor people who go hungry at Christmas.

It is just the way things are. As told to us by Him.

'till I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn

And I saw Him and through his disguise

The readers of The Irish Times, including this writer, are brazenly capable of holding an image of a five grand watch together with images of business corruption, banking collapses, flood devastations and war catastrophes amidst rising profits for arms' manufacturers, whilst not feeling the slightest degree of shame.

It's Christmas.

I believe in Father Christmas; Emerson, Lake and Palmer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPm6CheT6rs

The Irish Times; newspaper, Dublin, 19^th December, 2015

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

BLOG POST SPECIAL: PORTRAIT OF A MOTHER

BLOGPOST SPECIAL: PORTRAIT OF A MOTHER

The text delivered by Dave Duggan at the Portrait of A Mother event, organised by WoW Derry Londonderry, at St. Augustine's Church, 10.12.2015.

I’d like you to meet my mother, Margaret Spillane. But she died in 2001, so we’ll have to rely on some memories and a film clip or two. I invite you to visualise. You might want to close your eyes, every now and then. And pardon a smidgin of false memory and a leavening of poetic licence.

There she is, in this first clip. Margaret Spillane, just seventeen, a robust girl, born in 1936, there, on the quayside in Waterford, beside her father, Jack. The steel wall of a ship rises behind them. Funnels belch black smoke. The quay is thronged with families. Cattle slither up a gangway. My father, Eddie Duggan, ten years older than Margaret, stands off. He is afraid of Jack Spillane. Jack's a War of Independence veteran. Margaret and her ten siblings are alive only because her father's death sentence was commuted with the signing of the Treaty. He's the Sergeant of the Guards and a noted pugilist.

Margaret isn't afraid of him. She is not pregnant, despite what he might think. She is set for London. For betterment. When I come along, 2 years later, Margaret and Eddie are married and making their way among immigrants, despite the signs reading

No Blacks, No dogs, No Irish.

Three words outline the portrait of my mother:

working; laughing; singing.

See her skip up the gangplank. She's crying, but she's seventeen and she is Ava Gardner, in the musical Showboat. She waves to her father and climbs aboard her future.

(Sings) Fish gotta swim

Birds gotta fly

I gotta love one man

'til I die

Can't help loving that man a' mine.

My first memory of my mother shows her lifting me to safety. Another film clip. We are in a basement flat. Our neighbours are Cypriots, Hungarians, Windrush Jamaicans and Irish. There is a glass door leading to a patch of scrubby grass. My uncle Donal crashes through the door and deadly diamonds scythe the air. My young mother sweeps me out of harm's way.

I see my mother working. Close your eyes and you can see her in a gingham shop-coat. She has previous retail experience. Here's an earlier photograph of her and another girl, aged fourteen, both auburn-haired, even in black and white. The shining black of the spaniel Margaret is holding. The gleaming white of their dairy-girl coats. Margaret parlays this dairy experience into the shop job in London, where she recites this rhyme for a forgetful shopper:

bread, brown or white;

sugar, brown or white:

tea, butter, milk or marg

rashers of bacon; slices of ham

bread soda, caustic soda

liniment, ointment; unguent

toothpaste, blades, bars of soap;

bars of chocolate

Margaret laughs.

I have more of it forgotten than I have remembered.

Her real party pieces are songs. A common phrase around Margaret is

Go on Margaret, give us an aul' song.

She gives a little half-cough of self-deprecation.

Ah, I don't know. I have a bit of a tickle.

See the rapt faces of the men and women ….

Go on Margaret, girl. The Harbour Lights.

… as Margaret picks the song of her choice.

(Sings) They tried to tell us we're too young.

Too young to really be in love.

She's a life-long romantic. She carries a fierce commitment to the idea of betterment. An experience in a hospital, aged nineteen, when she didn't know the word 'urine' sees her vow

that no child a' mine will never not know the words.

And she has her own words. That's her with her dog, Archie.

Get offa tha' sofa Archie or I'll give you a verk.

Her voice is enough for Archie, who is so much part of her life that some of her grandchildren name her ….. Nanny Archie.

When a film I write, Dance Lexie Dance, goes to Hollywood, Margaret goes to Derry, for the local celebrations. She has a ball, possibly better than we film makers in Tinsel Town.

She's a romantic. A working woman. A singer. And a babe. She puts the razz into razzamatazz. She enjoys a bit of glamour. Showbiz! That's part of her portrait.

We can watch another film clip. See her, singing in the Theatre Royal in Waterford. Not from the stage. Rewind a bit. There. Margaret, Chrissie and Hannah are in the front row of The Gods, for the inter-factory variety shows competition, The Tops of the Town. Tonight, the Glass Factory faces The Chipboard Factory, where my father works.

He says Dem fellas? Shur they can't work, no mind dance.

Margaret agrees. Ah, God love 'em. They're not really front row material.

Disappointment strikes when the on-stage electrics fail. You can see steel toe-capped boots dashing under the fire-curtain. The packed house grows restive. There's some gentle barracking from The Gods.

A performer calls from the stage

Are ye up there, Margaret? I can't see ye, ye're that high up. Go on, Margaret, give us an aul song.

See her laugh, Chrissie and Hannah pinching her until she stands, grasps the metal rail in front of her and charms her audience with song, as they crane their necks upwards from the dress circle, the stalls and the stage.

(Sings) I was born one morning when the sun didn't shine

I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine

I load sixteen tons of number 9 coal

And the boss man says wella bless my soul

Here's a video of me and Margaret on a road trip. I'm her white-headed boy: a man or boy, who is highly regarded or favoured; a pet; a darling. Ask my sisters. See Margaret in this video still. It's a mid-shot, taken at Gougane Barra, in west Cork. Margaret is half-turned to the tungsten corrugations of the water and the shimmering drapes of the cliffs that ring the coum, cupping the lake.

We drive on to Killarney and hire a jaunting car. The jarvey is a pipsqueak Margaret describes as scrawnier dan your father. She urges him to speed up. He's soon galloping like Barry Fitzgerald in The Quiet Man.

Back in town, Margaret waves at everyone. So do I. Everyone waves back. Margaret often says:

Remember the day the Yanks all waved at us in Killarney. God love their innocence.

I have a photo. It's framed in blue, like her life. We perch on a rock beside the lake. Killarney's hills undulate behind us. There are trees, dense upon a crannóg. A red boat, The Eanna, lifts its prow. It could be Irish, but it is the ancient Sumerian name for the temple of the Goddess Ishtar. Heaven, you could say.

Margaret's earthly concerns find her working in the laundry at Waterford Regional Hospital. If we edit some clips from the film Suffragette, we portray her ankle-deep in water, hauling sopping sheets from cavernous machines.

As a perk, Margaret and her colleagues provide a laundry service for their families, and many others, from their 'one woman, one bag' allowance. Here's another film clip. See that red car. Yeh? But you can't see the women, such is the pile of black bags on top of them.

She lives a tempestuous relationship with my father, Eddie Duggan. He's a well-read, factory-working intellectual and, as they say in Waterford, a martyr to the drink. He's mercurial and melancholic. She's robust and romantic. They have six children, a white-headed boy and five strong women. Listen ... the wheels of a pram clatter up the wooden stairs of the Housing Office, as Margaret pulls her family with her, presenting her demand to be re-housed.

She meets Bill. He's widowed then, like herself. My sisters name him Sailor Bill, a retired steward from the Rosslare-Fishguard ferry. She brings vivacity and gregariousness to his life. He brings a gentlemanly demeanour and a well-kept car to hers. Here's a film clip, as they set off on a weekend to Clonakilty. See my sisters banter with her.

You and Bill are off to Clon? For the weekend? What's the set-up exactly?

See Margaret grinning, girly once more, the perennial seventeen year old.

Dat's for me t' know and ye, ta never find ouh.

She loves Christmas because of what she calls the bit a' plenty.

Margaret and her work colleagues have a Diddly, a small, weekly savings club that pays out at Christmas. So with the bit a' plenty my mother enjoys Christmas, giving generously to all her friends and family.

She loves us all, to this very day. One of her catch phrases, one I use with my own children, is to shout Up our House. She doesn't just mean our house. She means everybody's house. Your house too.

Another song then. They all sing it. Forever. Ella. Lena. Billie. Margaret.

(Sings) Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky

Stormy weather

Since my man and I ain't together

Keeps rainin' all the time.

WATCHING BLACK MASS

Has Hollywood given up on drama? Film-makers there seem to be going for spectacle and elegy, recently with Spectre and now with Black Mass, a slow-paced narrative, the most memorable element of which is the strings-based soundtrack by Junkie XL (as Tom Holkenborg).

The film seems 'old'. It feels like this type of gangster/cop rivalry and collusion drama has been handled better in films like Good Fellas, Scarface, Donnie Brasco and many others.

It's not clear if Jimmy 'Whitey' Bulger, played by Johnny Depp, is the protagonist or the victim. Bulger never seems to set against anyone or anything. The FBI and policing services are his allies, not antagonists. The Italian Mafia are the enemy but are never seen close to the action, apart from a killing in which mixed ethnic messages are given by a motorcycle with Italian (Moto Guzzi) and British branding (Triumph).

Johnny Depp is mis-cast, though it may simply be the problem of being The Johnny Depp. A sense that his mask and hair line could ping off at any time persists. Slick though it obviously is, that it doesn't ever become ruffled creates a vivid impression and a mystery.

There are no African Americans in the film, except perhaps in street scenes or far back in an office scene. Was South Boston so homogeneously white through Whitey's reign? This adds to the sense that the film is 'old', dated rather than historic.

Women are secured to the kitchen sink. Bulger dotes on his aged mother. He and his crew help a little old lady with her shopping. Young women are mothers or victims. Marianne Connolly rages that her husband could bring Bulger and his associates into their home for beers and barbecue. She screams that they shouldn't be in her kitchen. She later endures a murderously sexual groping from Bulger, one of the more chilling scenes in the film.

It is chilling because it is not blatant or predictable, as the many back-of-the head gun shootings or the strangulations are. They are not chilling. In a world full of images of beheadings and killings by drone-delivered weaponry, Bulger's atrocities are disengaging. Instead of feelings of shock and horror, discomfort and outrage, feelings of boredom and disconnection prevail.

If Johnny Depp is miscast, Kevin Bacon, FBI officer Charles Maguire, and Benedict Cumberbatch, as Jimmy's politician brother Billy, have very little to work with. There's a scene of a spat in the FBI office when Charles Maguire seems on the verge of uncovering the duplicity of his star investigator, John Connolly, played very well by Joel Edgerton. It has the low-energy huffiness of a faux-fight among Ivy League dorm mates, pretending to be 'street'.

The elegy rolls along as a series of voiced-over testimonies by individuals involved in the story, told in a time-line manner which grounds the storytelling in a slow-staccato 'and then and then' rhythm, to produce a downbeat biopic and, ultimately, a sense of 'so what'.

There never appears to be anything at stake for Bulger, the bent cops and agents or for the people of South Boston. The first character with agency and urgency is Fred Wysack, the late-arriving DA, played by Corey Stoll, who's actions begin the ending of the film.

Perhaps the film-makers reliance on narrative rather than drama comes from the book. Perhaps they sought to cleave firmly to it and the film suffers from a reliance on the ordinariness of the grim actions of Bulger and Connolly, without managing to require audiences to engage beyond thinking 'right, that's what happened'.

Mystic River, (Clint Eastwood, 2003) is set in South Boston and involves vicious gangsters and cops caught between collusion and conviction to much better effect. It is based on a book. A novel not a history. Thus it gives us an affecting drama, not an underwhelming bio-pic. Like Black Mass.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1355683/?ref_=nv_sr_1

http://www.junkiexl.com

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

DENIS STAUNTON FINDS NOSTALGIA IN ENGLAND

Denis Staunton, a columnist with The Irish Times, finds nostalgia at the heart of two recent films in his column on 20.11.2015. The latest James Bond film, Spectre, is set in a globalised England. The Alan Bennett bio-pic, The Lady in the Van, is set in Camden and Yorkshire, urban and rural bi-poles of England. Denis Staunton writes that the films take us deep into political values there.

If you want to drop a plumb line into the soul of England today, you could do worse than to watch the two biggest-grossing films in Britain last weekend – Spectre and The Lady in the Van.

He connects these films with forms of political nostalgia he observes in England.

…. each is soaked through with an idea of England and English values under attack, a nostalgia which is shared on the political left as well as the right.

Denis Staunton situates Spectre on the political right. The dramatic threat is from

a global conspiracy bringing government and business together in a sinister public-private partnership.

He cites a former Conservative Party MP and an MI5 director-general in support of his observation that

What is arresting about Spectre, beyond the killing, car chases and special effects, is the film’s melancholic, almost elegiac mood, as if the spirit that made Britain powerful, democratic, free and tolerant – in a word, great – is smouldering in the ruins of the MI6 building on the Thames.

That's quite a list: powerful, democratic, free and tolerant – in a word, great. Denis Staunton offers them as descriptors of an England that the political right hanker for.

He puts The Lady in the Van on the nostalgic left of the political spectrum.

Bennett’s nostalgia is for the England that created the welfare state, nationalised the railways and introduced comprehensive education, all rolled back by Margaret Thatcher and her successors.

And he connects Bennett's nostalgia with the current leader of The British Labour Party -

Corbyn himself also embodies a very English style of left-wing radicalism.

- without giving us a helpful list of adjectives.

It's not clear which of the two films Denis Staunton likes. Or if he likes either one of them. He appears to be uncomfortable with nostalgia. What does he make of the nostalgia-fest Brooklyn, an emigration drama set in Ireland and New York? Is it the case that simple notions of left and right are not as readily deployed in Ireland and placing a film in that way is not straightforward?

The two films Denis Staunton writes about are not nostalgic. They are different treatments of the same political contest that rages through time, for all time. One of their core elements is 'scale'. Is it to be 'great' or is it to be 'human'? Another is given by the old Cicero line, cui bono? Who benefits? This is the political contest of the past, present and the future.

Would Cameron oversee the

​successful implementation of a global surveillance system?

Would Corbyn?

This is not nostalgia. Cameron is not bringing people backwards. Neither is Corbyn. They are both seeking to drive England, and the world, forward. The questions are 'to where?' and 'how?'

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/james-bond-alan-bennett-and-a-nostalgic-view-of-britain-1.2437039

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

FIONOLA MEREDITH IS ANGRY

Fionola Meredith writes an opinion column in The Belfast Telegraph, one of Northern Ireland's leading daily newspapers. In today's edition (20.11.2015), she is angry. She is forceful, polemical and vehement. Writing trenchantly, under the headline

Mealy-mouthed excusers of terror should just shut it

she draws readers in, with an appeal to a shared experience.

You know what people mean when they talk about that Friday feeling.

She, quite rightly, castigates the people who committed the atrocities in Paris and locates the responsibility for the deaths and injuries with them.

The truth is the terrorists who committed last Friday's outrages don't care whether their victims are anarchic old cartoonists or little boys at a rock concert with their mum.

She is right. The actions of the perpetrators are wrong and can be universally named as wrong. Her ire in today's column is directed not at the perpetrators of the atrocities but at people who might, as she sees it, equivocate about them.

Her article highlights a real problem for people living in the Developed North of the world. Events unfolding in Bamako, Mali, where guests and staff at an hotel are being held under threat of violence further underline this problem. In raising the Bamako events here, in the context of the aftermath of the atrocity in Paris, this article may face Fionola Meredith's ire.

but failing to mention Beirut or Syria sees you instantly slapped down as a crass cultural imperialist.

Her most vehement challenge is to

the default recourse to equivocation 






What is the appropriate response then, apart from the unequivocal assertion that they were wrong, to the recent atrocities in Paris, Beirut, Syria, Bamako and elsewhere?

There are language problems here. The use of the term 'we' to imply all-inclusive circumstances is often unfounded. The use of the word 'you' to imply a collective experience of the world is complex, even if by 'you' is meant 'the readership of The Belfast Telegraph, in print and on-line', for it includes people who do not share the experience Fionola Meredith uses to lead us into her column. Her anger heats her language and narrows her assertions.

Later that night 129 of them were cut down by barbarians with Kalashnikovs, and scores more injured. What had they done to deserve this? Nothing, except live a life of liberty in Paris, the first home of free thinking.

The term 'barbarian' poses problems. Certainly the people who did this are cruel, violent and death-dealing. And as human as Fionola Meredith and this writer. There are no monsters out there. Only people.

Who benefits from the use of such language by public writers in the press of a liberal democracy like Northern Ireland? Readers across the world may wonder at the special privileging of Paris as a home for 'free thinking'.

Fionola Meredith has no time for the

awful sanctimonious, supercilious piety which passes for modern liberalism

and wonders, in listing some of the victims,

What reasons could be found for their murders?

Fionola Meredith's appeal is to Reason, in the Enlightenment values of liberty and democracy. She fears 'we' are in danger of 'going under'. One of the problems with many people's experience of these values is that they are not all they claim to be.

Fionola Meredith, towards the end of her column, encounters this problem, but shies away from it. She is not alone in that. It is thoroughly scary and complicated. It is a problem of language and of action.

When are the excuses going to stop? Hand-wringing appeasement or well-meaning attempts at understanding do nothing to restrain nihilistic death cults (neither does a mad blitzkrieg of bombing, but that's another story).

There isn't 'another story'. There are many millions of stories and they are all linked and they are all human and live.

Ironically, on the same web-page as Fionola Meredith's opinion piece, there is an advertisement for no-risk investment opportunities in France. Might this include arms manufacturers? The world goes on and the atrocity in Paris can be used as fuel for the ad-makers.

To end. A small language note for equivocators and, thus, for all people. It's not 'either/or'. It's 'and/all'. Consider the word 'but' and try the word 'and'. As in.

The killings in Paris are wrong. 

And so is the French arms' industry.

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/fionola-meredith/paris-attacks-mealymouthed-excusers-of-terror-should-just-shut-it-34217085.html

www.facebook.com./DaveDugganWriter