'1969 and All That' . . .

Went to see the film Avatar some weeks ago. The CGI effects are quite spectacular. Beyond that, it is much as it has been portrayed in the various reviews—a cowboy-and-Indian picture set in outer space. I must say I found the 3D effect somewhat underwhelming, but that may be just a matter of the eyes adjusting to it. The other aspects of the film—the new age and ecological mishmash—have also been extensively dealt with elsewhere. Overall, I would say, it is worth seeing as a well-made and quite undemanding piece of entertainment.

However there is one part of it that arguably has all the appearance of a piece of liberal wish-fulfilment. That is the scene near the end where the forces of the defeated industrialists are embarking and heading for home, and the impression is given that they have accepted the outcome and are going for good. Now if we accept the view of human nature given in some recent mailings—that it is, in general, and at root, selfish, greedy, envious, vengeful, malicious etc.—then that scenario is not at all believeable.

The Battle of the Little Big Horn and the events leading up to it, which the plot of Avatar closely resembles, was not, to adapt the Churchillian phrase, just the end of the beginning for the native American, but also the beginning of the end. It represented both the high point of the tribes’ resistance to the European invasion and the starting point for the ultimate collapse of their power. It may have stayed the impetus of the colonization for a short while—but the fact is that the numbers of white settlers and soldiers and prospectors and buffalo hunters came afterwards in an even greater flood, until the natives were finally subdued.

In terms of the description of human nature given above, and in terms of overall plausibility—especially in circumstances where the ore being mined on Pandora is supposed to be worth $30,000,000 (?) a kilo—then the withdrawal of the industrialists in Avatar could be more truthfully viewed as tactical. They would be withdrawing in order to regroup and increase their firepower with an eye to returning. That would be the visceral, not to mention, logical, reaction . . .

And yet . . .

And yet . . . the other side of the argument given in recent mailings is the contention that our reactions and ideas are predominantly the product of our cultural environment, and that the suggested aspects of human nature mentioned above have little role to play in the matter, if even they exist at all. The sensible view, of course, is that both sources of influence exist and play a part in the formation of human behaviour. The natural or instinctive response to an itch is to scratch it; the fact that in certain circumstances we refrain from doing so is a consequence of acculturation.

Following the Good Friday Agreement there were television pictures of nationalists celebrating and tooting horns in the North and proclaiming that they had ‘won the war’. Of course, there hadn’t really been a war; or if there had, it had been a very strange war, a war that involved one of the sides fighting with an arm, if not an arm-and-three-quarters, tied firmly behind its back. The fact is that had the British Army and British intelligence forces been given absolutely free rein in the North then the likelihood is that they could have wiped out armed Republican resistance fairly quickly, at least for a generation.

Arguably what restrained the British response was sensitivity to world opinion, international law, and probably the reluctance of British governments, for both moral and practical reasons, to open even wider the Pandora’s Box of the Irish situation. In other words, cultural factors, in the broadest sense of the term . . .

Of course, it is possible to pose a notional question here, and ask: Are there any circumstances that might have allowed, or might at some future time allow, the British army to employ a mailed fist policy in the North? And what might those circumstances be?

Well, the first obviously would involve a general collapse in the world order, so that nations would be so deeply involved with their own problems—and also perhaps so compromised in their strategies for dealing with them—that there would no longer be a basis for such a thing as a generalized ‘world opinion’. By the same process, any enforceable idea of international law would equally lapse—especially in a circumstance where international law, as it currently operates, is anything but international, and seems unilaterally to be aimed only at the weaker countries.

As to the role of the British government? Look at present times and we can see the three main parties of British political life—Labour, the Tories, and the Liberal-Democrats—all fighting for the same small corner of what should be a much wider political blanket. Certainly, there is a degree of reassurance in this against any possibility of the type of draconian military measures that we are talking of ever actually occurring.

[Really, I can’t help it—but every time I see the front bench of the new Tory party, for some reason I am automatically reminded of the young prince and his advisers in Braveheart.]

But what if the British economy and social order were to collapse?—admittedly, an unlikely idea, yet at the same time an idea much more entertainable than it might have been, say, two years ago. In such a situation, the one thing that can be said with any certainty is that the three parties mentioned above would disappear fairly quickly into what Marx called ‘the dustbin of history.’ What would happen then would depend on the capacity of Britain to restore a unified rule, and on the exact nature of that rule. In such a situation, if a renewed nationalist itch presented itself in Ireland, it might no longer be unthinkable to scratch it. And the exact nature of such a scratching would depend on the radicalism of the new ruling force and its local allies.

As I say, this is all pure speculation, not prophecy. It is a ‘what if . . .’ type scenario, akin more to a philosophical thought-experiment than to anything else. It is just a matter of following the logic of it—for one’s own amusement, if nothing else . . .

In October 1943, Heinrich Himmler gave a secret talk in Posen to the Gauleiters [Nazi regional leaders] and certain Reich ministers, where he outlined openly to the broader echelons of the Nazi leadership the extent of the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem. In the course of the speech, he said:

‘I ask that you only listen but never speak of what I am saying to you here today. We, you see, were faced with the question “What about the women and children?” And I decided, here too, to find an unequivocal solution. For I did not think that I was justified in exterminating—meaning kill or order to have killed—the men, but to leave their children to grow up to take revenge on our sons and grandchildren. The hard decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the face of the earth . . .’

Himmler, of course, was being somewhat tendentious here. The implication is that the Jewish race posed a military, or at least a physical, threat to Germany. Something which had never been the case—if for no other reason than that the lack of a national territory of their own made them a military danger to nobody.

I mentioned in a recent mailing the opinion of Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the extermination camps, to the effect that by allowing the Holocaust ‘to happen, God was telling humanity something, and we don’t know what it was’. This is something I have thought about long and hard, and my conclusion was that if there were lessons to be learned from the Holocaust, then one of them, and maybe the most important of them is: This is how things are going to be!

Whether we like it or not, Hitler put on the modern political agenda the possibility of—or the temptation to—a root and branch annihilation one's 'enemy' population. The Hitlerian adventure may well have ended in disaster for some of its architects (and the whole of the German people), but the idea has nevertheless not disappeared. It is still there, provocative, tempting—especially in circumstances that might suggest the possibility of getting away with it unscathed. Or as a consequence of the dam-burst of some long-suppressed atavism.

Winston Churchill, writing in the 1920s of the changed international landscape at the end of the First World War, could say that the ‘whole map of Europe has been changed . . . but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.’ As I say, that was written in the 1920s—but it might equally have been written almost at any time since.

To follow the thought experiment to its logical conclusion: would it be feasible [again, I have to emphasise, I don’t mean ‘likely’], in the suggested altered circumstances, for a policy analogous to that of the Nazis to be applied in Ireland? Strictly logically, I don’t see why not. Two factors would be especially favourable to its success: one, the relative smallness of the Catholic or nationalist population; secondly, the fact that, unlike the bulk of refugees in today’s world, there is no convenient border to step over as a means of escape, short of drowning.

Again I have to emphasise that all this is purely speculative . . . probably laughably so. If nothing else it is at least an interesting diversion. But it does give rise to two other much more realistically grounded thoughts.

Firstly, if the way we think and act is influenced by cultural and environmental circumstances, then changing those circumstances must logically change, or at least begin to change, the way we think etc. A case in point is the radically different experience East European Jewry had of the German army—changing from favourable to fearful—over the course of the two world wars; the specific factor underlying this transformation being, of course, Hitler and the rise of Naziism.

The second point is that history is not science. Replicate the exact conditions of a scientific experiment and one can repeat it over and over with no alteration of result. But in terms of history, people and circumstances change over time—even from moment to moment—and to the extent that history sometimes seems to repeat itself, it is generally nothing more than a matter of superficial resemblance. Any attempt to take it as being somehow more literal than that is the guaranteed road to disaster.