So many war books, so little understanding: a look at three volumes, two grand and one small.

Do we need any more books on the Second World War?

 

            Yes we do. Next question?

           

            Alright: which book?

 

            Good question, glad you asked. (And aren't you glad you did?) There are three actually that I completed quite recently – I could go further back and include five, but these three are the ones that lodge in my mind, completed very nearly one after the other. Two very large doorstops and one piddly little pamphlet. Two excellent, mind-expanding volumes, and one I wouldn’t use as a high school text-book. Each useful in its own way.

           

            The first, Europe at War: No Simple Victory by Norman Davies, a mind bogglingly extensive and exhaustive tome (actually less than five hundred pages, which is actually quite astonishing – I could have sworn it was twice that) basically arguing that we need more WWII books (hence, my intro).

 

            See, for all the extensive scholarship on this subject – probably more than on any other topic ever – according to Davies, we still don’t get it. All our national mythologies, the comforting myths we the victors soothe ourselves with – are wrong.  The good war, the noble crusade, the Great Patriotic War. Britain’s finest hour, and all the feel-good smugness of Saving Private Ryan. All fantasies of nations who each needed to glorify their own role in the greatest organized slaughter in history.   

           

            It’s not that we are unaware of the facts. The funny thing about this book is that nothing in it really new – none of it should come as any surprise to anyone who’s actually studied the war in depth – it still feels shocking to realize how divorced our illusions have been from the reality.

            Each country has its own set of mythologies. We in the west tend to maximize our role in the defeat of Hitler, out of all proportion to our actual contribution; the fact is that for the most part, we were bystanders, watching from the sidelines while the fate of the world was decided by Soviet Russia. For it’s part, Russia tends to maximize its virtue, playing the innocent victim driving out the evil invader, downplaying or ignoring altogether its early role as a Nazi ally, its role in the dismemberment of Poland, its invasion of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland, the campaigns of mass rape by the Red Army, or any number of atrocities which Davies recounts in stomach churning detail. Nor do contemporary Russians make enough of the tremendous amount of Lend Lease aid they received from the Americans (who themselves tend to make far too much of it).

 

            Nor does is the virtue of the west unblemished. How could it be after the strategic bombing campaigns which killed hundreds of thousands? The incineration of enemy infants was not an unfortunate by-product of war, but official policy for both the British and US governments.  This evil tends to be downplayed before the all-encompassing evil of the Final Solution, and excused as one method of bringing the later to a halt. Whether the policy actually worked or not is another matter entirely. At the very least, it should not sit comfortably on the side of virtue.

 

 

            Democracy has been sited as one of our great causes, but can we forget that Britain at the time was subjugating vast populations in Asia and Africa? Or the United States, even as it fought for democracy segregated its own people among racial lines (to say nothing of its origin in slavery and the displacement or out-and-out murder of Native populations)?

 

            Davies isn’t interested in moral equivalence (and funny how even mentioning these undisputed historical facts opens one up to such a criticism). But he does think that sanitization and romanticism have blinded us to history, causing us to simplify what really is not a simple victory.  

 

            Which brings me to the second tome-like volume: All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings. At first glance, Hastings is a much more straightforward historian than Davies (from a journalistic rather than academic background); his book mostly just recounting facts rather than a call to re-evaluate our perceptions. But there are so many, mainly from first hand accounts and primary sources, that we can’t help but re-evaluate our perceptions anyway. Confronting this Sargasso Sea of information fresh from the reading of Davies book can be a helpful exercise.

 

            What are we to think of the Battle of Britain after Hastings’ asserts that “the Luftwaffe’s clumsy offensive posed the one challenge Britain was well placed to repel”? Or the Battle of the Atlantic when we learn that “the submarine force commanded by Donitz was weak” and that “99% of all ships which sailed from North America to Britain arrived safely”? We’re not accustomed to thinking of these battles from that perspective.

 

            National mythologies of any kind don’t fare very well. The French might prefer to forget that more of them served Petain than DeGaul (660), and modern anti-racists probably won’t believe that Moorish troops pillaged and raped their way through Italy.  I myself was not thrilled to learn that Canadian troops did indeed murder helpless prisoners of war in Northern Europe, and that our Merchant Marine performed poorly against Kriegsmarine U-Boats. (283). I do wonder what the Canadian media, which aggrandizes this country’s war record to an almost Soviet degree, would make of this.

 

            Like Davies, the East is of paramount importance to Hastings. He does not openly state but quite strongly implies that it was Stalinist brutality, more than anything else, which ground the Wehrmacht down. The relentless, suicidal offensives, the scorched earth policy, the murderous coercion of the NKVD blocking brigades, and the sociopathic indifference to human life: could it all have been necessary? Is it possible that this was the only way to stop the Nazi machine, and that the democracies, lacking these inhuman qualities, didn’t have what it took? It’s a hell of a thought. 

 

            For me, the single most shocking revelation was that as early as November 1941, leading German industrialists, believed the war had already been lost for Germany. Long before Kursk, long before Stalingrad,  before the Germans had been repulsed before Moscow, before the Germans had suffered any real defeat and still lay at the height of her powers, the practically indestructible masters of Europe, those in the know had already given up hope. There is an eerie, gloomy foreboding about the passage. It presents a picture of an entire nation heading inextricably towards its doom. Imagine if Germany, with all its grand industry, its economic might, its technology and phenomenal powers of social organization, had devoted itself to good? What might it have achieved? Instead, it chose the path of evil and was destroyed as if by Divine decree. This is Greek tragedy on an epic scale.

           

           

            Now, we come to the pamphlet. Norman Stone’s World War Two (did he trademark that title?) is clearly meant as a “short history” rather than a game changer, like either of Davies’ or Hastings’ books. It limits itself to just the briefest of outlines and comes in at less than two hundred pages (199 to be exact).

            This tremendous brevity becomes a problem as Stone continually fails to explain his statements or justify them with evidence. There are no footnotes either, so we’re often left to guess just where Stone got his ideas from. Where for instance does he get the idea that the Russians “could not have held out” if the Germans had maintained air superiority? This is not an idea I have encountered in any other account. For much of the war the Germans did have air superiority in the East, and the Russians did hold out. How was the invasion of Norway “one of the moments at which Hitler lost the war”? (It has to do with the Kriegsmarine I gather). Again, it’s not a thesis I’ve heard elsewhere. Why does he think an invasion of the continent “should have been possible” in 1943? Much in here is unspecific and unsubstantiated.

            Stone also shows an aversion to chronological order, jumping to the future then back again, often in the same paragraph. So we get a description of Hitler’s marriage to Eva Braun just before a description of Market-Garden, and Stalin’s declaration of war on Japan before the dropping of the Bomb on Hiroshima. There are long tangents into entirely new subtopics and then back again, as if Stone were following some stream of consciousness process, when perhaps a separate chapter might have been more appropriate. The effort feels disjointed.  Anyone not already familiar with the events described would probably not feel any wiser having read it. It would be no use at all as a textbook.

            That said, this little book is not without its charms. The final chapter on Europe’s reconstruction is quite well done, as if Stone felt himself on firmer ground. And a lot of the minutiae are more interesting than the (non-existent) analysis. We learn that Hitler and Eva were married by the deputy chief of garbage collection for Pankow, that Hitler suffered from flatulence after the Bomb Plot (is there no indignity that man didn’t put himself through?), that the descendants of Richard Wagner presented Hitler with the original draft of Parsifal then demanded it back when the war was lost. (Hitler was a fan of Parsifal? Why am I not surprised! There's no one else who deserved to own it more.) Details which are perhaps not appropriate for a “short history”, but nevertheless the saving grace of this volume.  One wishes Stone had devoted himself to more of these little details rather than compiling a “short history”, of which we have plenty (though still not enough, if Davies is to be believed). It’s stuff like this that keeps it all interesting.

The Greatest Story Ever Told, or One of Them Anyway: Doctor Who and the Rings of Akhenaten

            Right oh. . .

            Teenaged suicide, school shootings, conspiracy theories and Wagnerian Opera. No wonder nobody wants to read this blog!

           So, just this once, I’m going to write about something happy. In this post, I am not going to write about Rehteah Parsons (damnit, will we never learn??) and I’m not going to write about the Boston bomber. I’m not to write about Margaret Fucking Thatcher, and I’m not going to write about Climate Change, and I’m certainly not going to write about my bleedin’ Visa Bill.

            Nope, I’m going to write about something happy for a change. To make up for lost time, I’m going to write about the single happiest thing in the world, the one thing guaranteed to carve a smile on the most granite of grumpy faces. I’m going to write about the 100% effective, never been known to fail diamond-tipped happy drill, the best thing humanity’s ever come up with, the great compensation of dwelling on this merciless mud ball earth. . .

            That’s right: I’m going to write about Doctor Who.

            Doctor Who is the Greatest Story Ever Told. It is so much better than that other one, for reasons we shall see. Doctor Who is magic. Is joy. Is the repository of all that is great and wonderful in the human imagination. If you don’t like Doctor Who, then we’ve got nothing in common and you need to go away. Shoo.

            Now I’m not going to write about this week’s episode of Doctor Who, which I haven’t seen yet, and I’m not going to write about last week’s episode with the Ice Warrior (why bring back the bleedin’ Ice Warriors if you didn’t want an Ice Warrior style monster? Why bring back a big, hulking monster if you didn’t want a big hulking monster for the story?). I’m definitely not going to write about how next November’s 50 Year Anniversary story is apparently only going to celebrate the last eight years (No Baker, Davidson or McCoy??? Wtf Moffat?) No no, I’m going to talk about the episode before that one, the “Rings of Akhaten”, by Neil Cross.

            I’m going to write about “Rings of Akhaten” because it made me happy, and that’s the theme for today. It made me righteously, uproariously happy. It made me sing, dance, laugh and cry (and every time they interrupted it with adverts for Tim Hortons Panini rolls, I did cry). I loved this story. It was the best story I’d seen all year, the best story I’d seen in many years, possibly the best story I’d ever seen.

           Yes you read that right: “The Rings of Akhaten” may very well be the greatest Doctor Who story I have ever seen.

            Is that enough hyperbole for ya? Well too bad, I’ve got a whole lot more on the way. . .

             I may of course change my mind next time I watch Genesis of the Daleks, or Logopolis, or Earthshock or The Caves of Androzani. But here’s the thing:

            When a franchise has gone on for this long, when a story’s been told for this long, sometimes the only thing left to do is make the story about itself. Not in some stupid post-modernist sense – I don’t mean textual self consciousness, or self parody or winking at the audience or any of that nonsense. I mean just getting to the heart of the matter, finally recognizing what the story’s been about all this time.

            “The Rings of Akhaten” is a story about stories, what they are and why they matter. Basically, they’re two things: memories and hope. Memories “of love and loss and birth and death and joy and sorrow”, or in other words, all the things that make us human. And Hope, for the future, for what May Be.

            (I suppose Fear may be the other side of the same coin, but happiness is the theme for today, so I’ll stick with Hope).

            It’s an explanation I think would have made Bradbury proud (Peace be Upon Him). 

            That is was said here in the context of Doctor Who is all the more appropriate: after all, who is the Doctor but an eternal storyteller? What does he give us week after week after week but another story? And what is that makes us human if not stories?

            And what a story. . .

            “ All the elements in your body were forged many many millions of years ago in the heart of a faraway star that exploded and died. That explosion scattered those elements across the desolations of deep space. After so many millions of years those elements came together to form new stars and new planets and on and on it went. . .until eventually they came together to make you. . .

            Writer Neil Cross is basically paraphrasing astronomer Lawrence Krauss here, who once said "nevermind Jesus, the stars died so you could live!" The context here is that the Doctor is telling the story to the Mary Galhel, the "Queen of the Years", a little girl of no more than ten.  Young Mary has been raised from birth to sign lullabies to, and if necessary, give herself up to her planet's angry god. In a breathtaking display of cultural insensitivity, the Doctor imposes his values on her by basically insisting this is bollocks:

           " You are unique in the universe. There is only one Mary Galhel, and there will never be another. Getting rid of that existence isn’t a sacrifice: it is a waste!”

            In other words, no God is worth more than the life of a child.

            Or anyone for that matter.

            Let the Boston bombers suck on that!

            In a world where people are told to give their lives at the drop of a hat. For Gods and Ideologies and Causes. Either to throw away their lives or devote their whole lives to something else. Here we’ve got something different:

             You matter. Not those invisible men in the sky or their petty jealousies. You matter.  People matter, human beings matter. Nothing’s more precious. That, deep down, is the message of Doctor Who. It’s always been the message, since William Hartnell landed the TARDIS in a scrapyard on Totters Lane. But it’s never been put more beautifully than in “The Rings of Akhaten”.

           The STARS died so you could live!

            Now isn’t that a much better story than that OTHER one they always tell which goes on about how wretched and sinful you are?  

No Wonder Goebbels loved it: a take on Wagner's Parsifal

            Folks out there who’s exposure to Wagnerian opera extends no further than “The Flight of the Valkyries” may be forgiven for thinking that Wagnerian opera might kick ass.

            Those suffering said delusion may be forgiven for being lured to a production of Parsifal by buzz words like “Holy Grail”, “Knights”, “Holy Speer” and “Evil Magician”. Maybe it will be exciting! Maybe it will kick ass!  Such misguided folk could be forgiven for thinking so, and for actually seeking out a Met production of the Wagnerian opus  Parsifal at their local Silver City. 

 

What could go wrong?

 

                       Such folk will be punished all the same: Parsifal is the single most boring experience it is possible to have in a theatre. Watching Parsifal is like watching paint dry, like watching grass grow, like watching frozen treacle drip down a gently sloping hill. Parsifal is slower than continental drift, slower than evolution by natural selection, slower than fossilization, a dour, dreary, utterly joyless affair that slowly drains the audience of the will to live.

Neitzsche:"A work of perfidy, vindictiveness, of a
secret attempt to poison the presumptions of life."

            Worse than that, Parsifal is a manifesto of a repugnant philosophy, a repudiation of human feeling and earthly existence, a work Nietzsche called “a work of perfidy, of vindictiveness, of a secret attempt to poison the presumptions of life.”

            Did I mention it was slow?

            So what’s Parsifal about then? Basically, it’s the story of one young man’s journey to find a magic stick. He leaves home one day, manages not to get laid, brings home the stick, and everyone lives happily ever after.   That’s it. I swear that’s all that happens. I am not leaving out pertinent details. Parsifal leaves. Parsifal does not get laid. Parsifal returns. That my friends is the first, second and third act, summed up in their entirety. There are no plot twists, no sub plots, no secondary characters, no red herrings, no comic relief, no action of any kind.  

             That is all that happens.

 
            So how does a plot so paper thin sustain itself over 340 agonizing minutes?

 

            It takes Parsifal a good forty minutes to take off his hood. It takes Amfortas the better part of two hours not to die. It takes Parsifal the better part of three not to get laid. There is not a single action, a single word, a single bloody thing isn’t slapped onto a torture rack and stretched to triple, quadruple, quintuple its natural length. It makes Peter Jackson look like a master of brevity, and Stephen King a model of self restraint. There’s not an idea that isn’t repeated, a statement that isn’t prolonged, a theme that isn’t pounded into the head and relentlessly stamped into the ground.

 

Give us a smile then!
 

            Hundreds of people stand on stage doing just about nothing. Most of the time, they don’t even sing; Wagner never let his puppets sing overtop one another (so much for harmonizing). The music never wavers from one long, slow, dour, indistinct dirge, not even during the supposedly triumphant moments, which here feel more exhausting than triumphant, like marathon runners crawling toward the finish line, just glad that it’s over.

           

            “Please Dickie, please! I’m beggin’ on my knees! Just once, just once, once in the almost six hours you’ve demanded of me ! Pick up the tempo, or give us a crescendo! Something, anything, to please the ear or awaken the soul.

 

 

            But don't just take my word for it:

Twain: didn't like it either

"I was not able to detect in the vocal parts of Parsifal anything that might with confidence be called rhythm or tune or melody... Singing! It does seem the wrong name to apply to it... In Parsifal there is a hermit named Gurnemanz who stands on the stage in one spot and practices by the hour, while first one and then another of the cast endures what he can of it and then retires to die."

 

 

            Everyone on stage looks like they’re waiting to die. Amfortas is the one with the gaping spear wound, but everyone here exudes pain and exhaustion. Even when the king is healed by the magic stick, and the grail is revealed and the cast sing of meadows and flowers and “highest joy of miracles”, nobody smiles. Nobody looks remotely pleased by the events which have transpired. This is an opera bereft of feeling, bereft of joy, bereft of life. It’s a purgatory of muted death. It’s the kind of stage production a Dalek would enjoy.   

          The funny thing is my friends, none of this is the fault of the director, or the choreographers or the set designers or the costume designers, or any of the good folk down at the MET. No, all the other stuff looks quite extraordinary. The plain stage and the spectacular recorded backdrops and the pools of blood are all most impressive. The interpretation is as vivid as it’s possible to be. No, it is the source material itself, as set down in the score by Dickie Wagner himself that will allow for nothing but suicidal boredom.  See, Dickie would never allow such trivial things as suspense, or humour, or melody or genuine human feeling to sully his work. He wanted to transcend all that, and in so doing help the audience transcend any desire to ever return to the opera.

 
            We are introduced to the wounded  king in the first act, but it is difficult to care about his fate, since we never really see what difference his death will make: his world is so dreary to begin with.

 

The King, Amfortas (Peter Mattei) is finally saved by the holy grail; by this point it's impossible to care.

               The entirety of the second act is given over to Wagner’s hatred of humanity. As Parsifal struggles to free himself from Kundry’s embrace, we get the idea that in Wagner’s world there is no sin more heinous than sexual love, and no sinner worse than the sexualized woman. Kundry, the only character in the entire opera capable of any warmth, of any life at all, is constantly told how wretched she is, “The devil’s whore!” suffering from “desire sent from hell!”, and finally dies at the end for no reason at all. In Wagner’s world, a whore is any woman who enjoys human contact apparently, and in Wagner’s world, the only good whore is a dead whore apparently.  Parsifal rejects the human touch and throws his life away in search of some magic stick. In Wagner’s world, this is a good thing. In Wagner’s world, earthly things are full of sin, and only in cutting ourselves off from our earthly existences can we achieve spiritual transcendence. That being the case, it becomes impossible to care about this opera.

 

Paragon of virtue: it takes Parsifal (Jonas Kaufmann) takes three hours not to get laid.

            How can one care, with the story so thoroughly drained of life?

             I honestly didn’t give a damn about Parsifal or his magic stick. I couldn’t care less whether Amfortas lived or died. I didn’t give two flying. . .farts about the knights of the round table or their lousy grail. The only character I cared about was Kundry. Who died.  With a story so drained of human content, so too is drained any reason to care. Any character to sympathize with, any want or need or desire to identify with, anything at all to cling to.  There are no people on stage; only religious ciphers. Personally, I don’t give a damn about ciphers, which renders the entire story pretty much worthless to me.

 

The temptress Kundry, here played by Katarina Dalayman. The only character in the whole opera of any vitality (to even display a pulse really), mercylously condemned and killed off to satisfy Wagner's masochistic vision of virtue.

            I walked out of Parsifal feeling my time had been wasted and my afternoon ruined. My cold was also worse from sitting for six hours in a drafty cinema. I had a pounding throbbing headache, a nose like a leaky faucet, and a throat that felt it had just been cut with a rusty razor. Furthermore, my brain and my soul felt like they’d just been stuffed with cigarette ashes. What a grey, dry and dusty world this is. . . I had to counteract the effect with something, anything. Some Bizet, some Tchaikovsky, some Beatles, even some Sharon Lois and Fucking Bram.  Anything to remind myself that music could still reflect life and that life could still be beautiful and warm.

           No wonder Goebbels loved the experience. 

"My greatest experience at the opera. . .by the end, I was completely overwhelmed."

Enemies of the Faith: A review of "Among the Truthers" by Jonathan Kay

            You will recall not so long ago the post I wrote in response to a conversation I had with a friend of mine, who happens to be a self proclaimed‘Truther’, (“Puppet Master vs. Naked Ape). That is: an individual who believes that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were “an inside job”, orchestrated by the US government for the purpose of pushing through certain pieces of foreign policy legislation  (say that ten times fast) and implementing certain pieces of domestic policy (including but not limited to gun control legislation, improved airport security, the confiscation of personal property and the genocide of the human race).
         Or in other words, the government did it. Said individual believes this, and has dedicated himself to exposing the truth - pardon me, Truth - of this claim.

   

         What struck me most about the exchange were not the arguments he made, which were not very impressive, but the ardour with which he made them. It wasn’t just a theory for him, but a capital T Truth, which gave new meaning to his life.  Thus, no amount of counter-evidence would sway him, or even interest him, because it wasn’t the theory itself that really mattered. What mattered were the cozy answers the theory provided.

            So there were many moments I had to nod in recognition as I read Among the Truthers by National Post columnist Jonathan Kay. I recognized the sorts of people he interviews and profiles here, the paranoia, the disillusionment, the righteous anger and the evangelical zeal. Kay doesn’t spend much time in the way of debunking (readers looking for this would be better served by Aaranovitch’s Voodoo Histories or The Journal of Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Theories), but is more interested in the why the Truthers think the way they do, and how so many people came to think this way - namely, why do so many people in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave now think their own government wants to slaughter them??? It's a fascinating, absorbing and often witty book, which bafflingly decides to wander out into left field on the very last pages with conclusions which are. . .let's call them problematic for now. 

             (Dangerously misleading and disingenuous might work as well, but I want to emphasise the positives).

            For Kay, the popularity of 9/11 conspiracy theories is not an innocent eccentricity, but an alarming, even dangerous trend.“ The Truther phenomenon. . .is simply too important to ignore.”  he writes in his introduction. “ Truther theories may be nonsense, but the disturbing habits of mind underlying them. . .have become threats all across our intellectual landscape.”   Kay nicely summarizes these habits as follows:

            - a nihilistic distrust in government

            - total alienation from conventional politics,

            - a need to reduce the world’s complexity to good-vs-evil fables

            - the melding of secular politics with apocalyptic End-is-Nigh religiosity

            - a rejection of the basic tools of logic and rational discourse.

Jonathan Kay

            It’s as neat a summary of the conspiracy mindset as any I’ve read, and will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to engage a conspiracy theorist. Personally, I find the last one the most significant, the one which enables all the others. The refusal to think rationally allows one to think anything. I’m consistently amazed for example, how Truthers accept with perfect ease the layer-upon-layer-upon-layer of cover-up and deceit (to say nothing of the thousands of necessary participants) required by their conpsiracy, but cannot accept that a lone lunatic could hijack a plane. They’ll insist your is the incredible one. It is the most significant piece of Truther psychology, and unfortunately the one Kay appears to appreciate the least. 

            Kay divides Truthers into eight basic archetypes, and profiles one of each. The profiles themselves are fascinating, though the categories seem cosmetic, as their commonalities are much more striking than their differences. While Truthers may have come to the “Truth” for their own, personal reasons, they share the same basic tendencies of thought outlined above. Whether it’s from a Right perspective or a Left perspective, young or old, a response to trauma or plain insanity (less common than one might think), Truthers all see patterns where there are none, and have a need to assign meaning to the meaningless.  It’s the all too human tendency to assign agency to things.

No truther book would be complete without Dave Mustaine

            Ultimately, no conspiracy theory is actually about the theory. It’s about a world view; a world where someone, somewhere, is still in charge, if not a God, then definitely people with God-like powers. Kay refers to “the myth of hypercompetence”, coined by Popular Mechanics editor James Meigs. “ Even as the conspiracy theorist imagines a world –controlling cabal that is subhuman in its lack of pity, morality, honesty, and empathy, he is simultaneously awestruck by their superhuman intelligence, ambition, guile, discipline and singularity of purpose.” To the conspiracy-theorist, there is simply nothing beyond the powers of this cabal. They have a mind-boggling ability to cover their tracks and micro-manage events. Often they have super-science fiction technology at their disposal. They have near omniscient powers of oversight and foresight. There is practically nothing that happens anywhere in the world, or has happened in history, that is not their doing.    

            Once you accept this scenario, everything else falls into place. Conspiracies unfold as a matter of course, and doubts can be dismissed. The absurd level of deception and planning to pull off a 9/11 are no problem at all: simplicity itself for anyone who controls the world to that degree.  Lack of concrete evidence is if anything all the proof you need: after all, they control the information. So conventional arguments won’t get you anywhere because you’re not debating a theory: you’re debating a world view in which small groups control everything, and all the psychological adjustments which such a view entails. According to Kay:  “ Their entire identity is based on a nest of riddles that will unravel if they allow themselves to step outside their conspiracist mindset”.

            Most conspiracies are thus closely related to each other. Kay demonstrates for example how practically every Truther is also a JFK conspiracist, and how every conspiracy theory, even the supposedly innocuous UFO/Roswell types, attracts anti-Semites like flies. He traces the history of American conspiracism back to the days of anti-Masonic/Catholic/Templar//Jacobin suspicions, to the paranoia of Ignatius Donelly, through to the Protocols of the Eldars of Zion (the conspiracist’s Bible, even for those who aren’t anti-Semitic) to more modern phenomena like the Birther movement and End-of-Time evangelism. These provide the most interesting and informative moments of the book.      

I shouted out who killed the Kennedies: after all, it was you and me!

            I also was also struck some of the book’s more personal moments. Kay is actually quite sympathetic to many his subjects, taking pains early on to paint them as “outwardly normal, articulate people who kept up with the news and held down office jobs” and stressing the movement’s non-violent nature. At one point, he almost seems saddened by their obstenacy:

   “ I imagined it would possible for us to remain on friendly terms, even on the understanding that we disagreed on say, the origins of 9/11. . .This usually proved impossible: Every conversation with a conspiracy theorist tends to migrate in one way or another to their central obsession; and my refusal to accept their revealed truths always strained the relationship to the breaking point.”

Naturally, I thought of my own Truther friend, the one who prompted me to pick up this book in the first place, and wondered how much longer a mutual love of Godzilla movies can continue to bridge this rift. Each day he sends more “information” to my inbox, practically begging me to embrace the Truth. Not surprisingly, Kay writes of “Truther widows” in the same paragraph.

   

         How so many of these supposedly normal people came to embrace such a “Truth” is Kay’s main focus in the second half of the book.

            The internet naturally shares a large portion of the blame. While conspiracies themselves are nothing new, technology has enabled conspiracists to prop each other up and insulate themselves from contrary opinion to an extent never before possible (Kay uses the term “echo chamber”). The situation mirrors the decaying political discourse, in which no citizen is under any obligation to read anything that doesn’t confirm opinions they’ve already formed.

            That’s all very fine and good, but how to explain the quasi-religious quality of the movement?

            For this, Kay looks to the fickle nature of modern intellectual discourse, which he traces to the “Deconstructionists” like Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. They believed in the “limitation of textually authority”: basically, truth was not something we could prove with fact, but something we constructed to suit our needs . Kay paraphrases Foucault: “All knowledge – including historical knowledge is merely a pretext for justifying existing power relationships”. In other words, we make it all up.

Whada you know? A scarry looking Jacques Derrida.

            As someone with three university degrees, I can see how these ideas have seeped into academia. “Facts”, as they are generally understood, are very unfashionable things in the Humanities today. Instead, the emphasis is on finding “narratives”, or the aforementioned existing power relationships. “Studies” just aren’t good enough anymore: we have Women’s studies, Queer Studies, African studies and Native (or whatever term is currently permissible) studies. “Study” here meaning reconstruction of the past to suit present day sensibilities. There’s something creepily Stalinist about the whole thing, and Kay examines a bunch of examples, including a truly bizarre meeting with a group of self loathing anti-racists.

            All very interesting, but what’s it got to do with the 9/11 truth movement?

            Well, if truth is something we just make up, something malleable, what’s to stop belief in different “Truths”?  

            For Kay, the stifling political correctness that has emerged is fertile ground for Truthers:

“ It has left. . .a vague but powerful baseline belief among educated liberals that mainstream society is divided into victims and oppressors – and that the latter are largely white, male, straight middle aged men who look a lot like George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. After a few years spent wandering this coastline, the belief that these people might fly planes into the World Trade Center doesn’t follow automatically, but it certainly becomes a lot easier to assimilate.”

            There is a logic to the idea – I myself spent enough time among student radicals to know some of them wouldn’t put anything past the Bush administration (though I never heard any of them express Truther ideas) – but it is problematic. Many truthers are simply not “educated liberals”. Does Kay really blame anti-racists for a movement so dominated by right wing libertarians? Do end-of-time evangelicals really owe that much to Foucault? From my own readings and conversations, the Truther movement seems more a continuation of the anti-New Deal isolationism of John T. Flynn than the ideas of Paul de Man. Granted, no one in the book mentions Flynn (not even Kay, oddly), but no one mentioned Derrida either.

John T. Flynn: Pearl Harbour Truther

            Could extreme disillusionment not also have its roots in recent history? The past half century has given us the Vietnam war and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Kent State and J. Edgar Hoover, Watergate, the Iran Contra scandal, and WMD.  Salvatore Allende, Bloody Sunday, Jean-Babtiste Aristide, and the Rainbow Warrior. Great promise has been followed by great disappointment, as an unprecedented rise in middle class living standards has been ruthlessly clawed back by Government and Industry. Across the pond, the Margaret Thatcher casually destroyed the livelihoods of entire segments of British society, and actually referred to them as “the enemy within”. In times of Austerity, the common man is told he must scale back his aspirations, his living standards, his working conditions and his quality of life, but is told in the other ear that aspirations of Big Industry must never be interfered with. Trillions of dollars in public money are spent bailing out the banks, but not a penny of private profit is proffered to the public when it's in trouble. It is Healthcare, Education and even Infrastructure that gets pinched for pennies, and even as profits skyrocket, wages are slashed to be more "competitive".  The proverbial Big guy is always seen to win. Always.
          In such an environment, is it so shocking that disillusionment festers? And is it really so inconceivable that some of the disillusioned might, just might, come to believe that their own government is dead set against them, and actually means them harm?

  

          Such speculation does not find its way into this book. Instead, Kay, a Konservative, chalks it all up to a decline in religious belief: “ When the appeal of traditional religion becomes weak, darker faiths assert themselves.” It’s a variation on Conrad’s assertion that a man who doesn’t believe in God will believe in anything. Kay asserts that a decline in faith has lead to a kind of “militant skepticism”, indeed, a “Church of Skepticism” (capitals his) which has lead Truthers to disbelieve everything, since “there is no fact, historical event, or scientific phenomenon which  whose truth cannot, in some way, be brought into question.” Kay singles out new-atheists Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris for special blame here.

   

         Does Kay really blame the new-atheist movement for what amounts to a quasi-religious revival?

            Really?

            Nevermind that not one of the conspirators in this book cites those three as an influence (they don’t cite Derrida either), I would challenge Kay to find anything in the work of Hitchens, Harris or Dawkins that would suggest they would endorse a deconstructivist view of reality. If anything, they all share a passionate belief in an objective truth which is accessible to us via evidence.  It is a last minute attempt to connect two largely unrelated phenomena with little more than personal distaste in support.

            Likewise, it is quite rich of Kay to condemn a “Church of Skepticism” while elsewhere crediting Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptic’s Society and editor of Skeptic magazine, as “likely the most effective debunker of junk science and conspiracy theories in America”. Or listing the “atheistic” James Randi Educational Foundation as a possible antidote to Trutherism (indeed, the Foundation maintains a forum for ex-Truthers) just a few pages before blaming atheism for the whole damn thing. Kay must surely be aware that Randi is also on the editorial board of Skeptic magazine, as are – guess who? -  Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Surely the “Church of Skepticism” is part of the solution rather than the problem?

            Granted, Kay probably doesn’t mean healthy skepticism, but rampant disbelief for its own sake. It can be a problem when trying to establish baseline facts (and a very useful way of dismissing inconvenient ones). The thing is, this is not what Truthers do. What's clear from the interviews here (and my own experience) is that Truthers don’t just disbelieve facts: they disbelieve certain facts. Facts which are inconvenient to them.  They actively select which facts to believe, and which to discard, based on which support their pre-conceived notions. This is not skepticism; this is faith. Faith is belief without reason, trust which doesn’t have to be earned. Faith is immune to argument, faith doesn’t change just because the facts do. Belief in a “revealed truth” is faith, not skepticism.

            Kay bemoans the decline of traditional faith in society, but makes nothing of the fact that the biggest Truther of all, David Ray Griffin, was a theologian in his pre-truther days. He must also be aware that there are twice as many theologians as engineers among the membership ranks of Scholars for 9/11 Truth. He himself describes how Dave Mustaine of Megadeth embraced conspiracism after becoming a born-again Christian. He mentions the religious parallels again and again. Clearly, faith is not in short supply in the 9/11 Truth movement.   

            Might it have something to do with the need to believe without evidence?

            Conspiracism is not an innocent phenomenon. Thabo Mbeki’s belief that AIDS was spread by the CIA, and Jenny McCarthy’s promotion of vaccination-autism links (both dealt with in the book) has cost lives. Conspiracism, like pseudo science, new age thought or ideological fanaticism, comes from believing what one wants rather than what evidence suggests.   Truthers are no different: they embrace evidence which supports their claims and disregard that which doesn’t (what Shermer might call “cherry picking the data”). They beg questions, they dismiss co-incidence, they know little of history and less of politics, they will make grand leaps of logic, they are utterly credulous. Their faith, far from lacking, is unshakable. They could use a good dose of skepticism: an embrace of the tools of logic and rational discourse. To suggest the opposite, that things would sort themselves out if we just trusted in God (because apparently no one believed ridiculous things in more pious times) is frankly unhelpful.

Links:

Read Jonathan Kay's blog here:

http://amongthetruthers.com/

The Skeptic Society:

http://www.skeptic.com/

The James Randi Educational Foundation:

http://www.randi.org/site/

The Journal of Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Theories:

http://www.jod911.com

Keep your guns, and enjoy the funerals: on the shootings in Newton Connecticut

            Just once, I’d like to talk about something nice on this bleedin’ blog. . .

            How many?  Twenty? Twenty six? According to this morning’s Toronto Star, it was twenty seven. Most of them six years old.

            Twenty seven. Six year olds. Twenty seven little lights snuffed out. Twenty seven smiles, twenty seven laughs, twenty seven little voices. Twenty seven little bodies torn to shreds by bits of pointy lead, which are perfectly legal to own.

Victoria Soho

            Not all the twenty seven were quite so little; one of them was twenty seven years old. Victoria Soto her name was. She must have been new. She was the grade 1 teacher. Apparently she hid her kids in the closet and told the killer they were in the gym(1). Did she know it would be the last thing she would ever say? I’ll wager she did. She had thirty seconds to live, and chose to think of her students.  

            And someone out there is still probably bitching about how long teacher vacations are.

            The principal of the school, Dawn Hochsprung, and a school psychologist, Mary Sherlach, were shot down while trying to charge the gunman(1). They could have hid, but they chose to lunge at him, thinking maybe just maybe they could have stopped him, probably knowing they probably couldn’t.

            Teachers don’t live in the real world you see.

Dawn Hochsprung- principal

            So some of the victims were adults, but most were kids, not one more than seven years old. Eight boys, and twelve little girls with flowers in their hair.

            I taught Kindergartenders (called “Reception” in England) in the past. I taught munchkins like Emillie Parker, and Noah Pozner, and Ana Marquez-Greene, and Olivia Engel, and Caroline Previdi. I can picture them now: they’d come only up to your waist, and cling to your leg as you walked by. They’d call your name in high pitched squeals and laugh at everything you said. They’d sit nicely on the floor with their hands folded in their lap, and liked to sing songs about zoo animals or Santa Clause. They'd crowd around to show off their lunchboxes or new shoes. They loved you unconditionally just for showing up. They were so alive.

           

            Twenty little ones. Twenty mini-people. Shot at close range, up to eleven times each. Twenty little bodies, chewed up by legally purchased bullets.



Top row: (L-R) Ana Marquez-Greene, Caroline Previdi, Jessica Rekos, Emilie Parker, Noah Pozner. Second row: (L-R) Jesse Lewis, Olivia Engel, Josephine Gay, Charlotte Bacon, Chase Kowalski. Third row: (L-R) Daniel Barden, Jack Pinto, Catherine Hubbard, Dylan Hockley, Benjamin Wheeler. Fourth row: (L-R) Grace McDonnell, James Mattioli, Avielle Richman, Rachel Davino, Anne Marie Murphy. Fifth row: (L-R) Lauren Rousseau, Mary Sherlach, Victoria Soto, Dawn Hochsprung, Nancy Lanza.



            Oh yes, they were legal. You see, the killer’s mother, Nancy Lanza, was a gun enthusiast. She apparently owned seven of them. She liked to take her kids to shooting ranges(2). Doubtless it was here that her son, Adam, learned the skills he would later put to good use at Sandy Hook Elementary school. It was from this collection that Adam drew his weapons of choice: a Glock pistol, a Sig Sauer pistol, and a .223 Bushmaster, all legally bought and legally owned (4). Presumably, they were his favourite.

The Adam Lanza special: own yours today!

            I wonder if Ms. Lanza was one of those types who balked at the notion that her collection, legally bought and legally owned, could be a danger to anyone. I wonder if she ever argued how laws to restrict her collection would have been an infringement of her second amendment rights. I wonder if she ever said “You’ll take my gun from my cold dead hands”. If she was the sort who’d rather die than give up her firearms.

            If so, she got her wish: Adam shot her first. (2)

            Americans cling to their guns like pacifiers, and would rather see schools shot up than limit their availability.  Even now, many will claim that “guns don’t kill people”, as if Adam could have killed just as many people with a ball-point pen.  They believe the ability to dispense instant death is the only thing safeguarding their democracy, (presumably from tyrannous school children), and see the blood of six year olds as the price of freedom. Just watch: the first response of many will be concern for the legal status of their weapons.



            Many will say the solution is to arm teachers. If Victoria Soto or Dawn Hochsprung were given pistols they could have prevented this. Every school an OK coral. As we speak, Michigan’s Senate Bill 59 is proposing to end gun free zones, allow concealed hand guns into schools and hospitals, and make it easier to own such weapons(5).

           

            More guns. More bullets. More blood. Fewer school children. The people have spoken. They must  understand that with rights come responsibilities, and with gun-rights come the responsibility to bury twenty- seven bullet ridden people.

            Seven big ones, and twenty little ones. 

1).Quinn Jennifer, "The Victims", Toronto Star p. A1, A8. Sunday, December 16, 2013

2).Flegenhemer, Matt and Ravi Somaiya. " A'High Strung', gun-loving mother. A shy and nervous boy"Toronto Star, p. A9. Sunday December 16, 2013.

3).http://ca.news.yahoo.com/connecticut-shooting-suspect-described-quiet-honour-roll-student-002314789.html

4.) http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/1303336--connecticut-school-shooting-adam-lanza-s-mother-kept-trials-of-home-life-hidden

5).http://www.mcrgo.org/mcrgo/view/news.asp?articleid=6501&zoneid=100