The Old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.

I took a wrong turning at the weekend coming back to Bath from Bristol and somehow ended up going through Keynsham (where Cadburys used to make a bit of chocolate  before they were taken over by Kraft). There were lots of soldiers in their desert fatigues selling poppies. Then in the evening, we watched a bit of Strictly Come Dancing and there they were again in the front row. 

Soldiers, soldiers everywhere.

After our daughter went to bed, we watched the final episode of The Wire, the one where the useless, corrupt and incompetent take over the reins of power at the expense of just about everybody except those who are incompetent, corrupt and useless. 

Last night I saw the typhoon in the Philippines reported on the news, a disaster striking the most fatalist and hope-free country I have ever visited, a country where the incompetent, corrupt and useless have ruled  for hundreds of years (with a little help from the Spanish, Japanese and Americans along the way) -"There is no hope in the Philippines" the locals used to tell us when we visited.

But last night, there on the TV were the Filipino soldiers who were helping with the aid effort, looking terrifically smart and busy. It reminded me of the Indonesian tsunami where some in the military were more concerned with their own appearance than with helping survivors. That might not be the case with the Philippines, but it sure looked that way.

And the reporters on the news spinning tales of heroism and effort and survival reminded me of Scott, the Baltimore Sun reporter on the Wire who rises to the top despite his dishonesty and cowardice. Again, it probably isn't the case, but it sure felt that way. Give it a few days and we'll have the miracle survivors, the prayers to god and the hallelujahs. 

I've been looking at old family albums this week - from my English side and my German side. My English grandfather fought in the First World War. I still have his medal. So instead of wearing a poppy, to his memory, to how lucky he was to survive, and to the memory of the friends he lost and the suffering he saw and endured, here's Wilfred Owen's Dulce Decorum Est (and the 10,000 Maniacs song version at the bottom of the page)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!---An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime... Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

And here's Robert Fisk writing about his father and why he doesn't wear a poppy.

...as the years passed, old Bill Fisk became very ruminative about the Great War. He learned that Haig had lied, that he himself had fought for a world that betrayed him, that 20,000 British dead on the first day of the Somme – which he mercifully avoided because his first regiment, the Cheshires, sent him to Dublin and Cork to deal with another 1916 "problem" – was a trashing of human life. 

In hospital and recovering from cancer, I asked him once why the Great War was fought. "All I can tell you, fellah," he said, "was that it was a great waste." And he swept his hand from left to right. Then he stopped wearing his poppy. I asked him why, and he said that he didn't want to see "so many damn fools" wearing it – he was a provocative man and, sadly, I fell out with him in his old age. What he meant was that all kinds of people who had no idea of the suffering of the Great War – or the Second, for that matter – were now ostentatiously wearing a poppy for social or work-related reasons, to look patriotic and British when it suited them, to keep in with their friends and betters and employers.

Andy Kershaw on Haiti

Andy Kershaw calls bullshit on TV reporting from Haiti in today's Independent and comes pretty darn close to calling BBC reporter Matt "Mine's a Beef Wellington" Frei the kind of names that this blog does not see fit to publish. He particularly takes issue with the notion of a massive "security threat" and the implicit  need for military intervention that comes with it - intervention Matt Frei called for earlier this week.

"This assumption that there is a security threat has gone completely unchallenged by an army of foreign press, equally unfamiliar with Haiti and the character of the Haitians. Indeed, TV reporters particularly, having exhausted the televisual possibilities of rubble, have been talking up "security", "unrest" and "violence" when all available evidence would indicate anything but. 

Astonishingly, among these TV dramatists, I am sorry to say, is the BBC's Matt Frei. An incongruously ample figure around Port-au-Prince, Frei has been working himself up all week into what is now a state of near hysteria about "security" and the almost non-existent "violence". 

Over the weekend we saw him anticipating an outbreak of unrest, standing before a crowd of thousands of hungry, humiliated Haitians as they waited, patiently and quietly, to be given rations by UN soldiers. Their dignity and stoicism seemed to escape Frei who was, in any case, looking away from them while ranting about the inevitability of looming bloodshed – conspicuously unlikely, judging from the evidence of his own report. (When he is not almost tumescent about violence, Frei speculates and pontificates pompously to camera, or booms at earthquake victims in French. Most Haitians don't speak French. They speak Creole). 

Frei's reluctance to recognise the amazing self-control of these desperate people, and instead to amplify the hysteria about violence for which he has scant evidence, has brought him at times worryingly close to calling the Haitians savages.

Disgracefully, on Monday's Newsnight, Frei had the audacity – and again, anything but the evidence – to declare: "The dignity of Haiti's past is long forgotten." 

No, it certainly is not. And it took Bill Clinton, being interviewed by Frei on Monday, to correct him on that one, and to point out that Haiti still has dignity, immense quantities of it, especially in the present catastrophe. Their chat was turned by Frei, inevitably, to his appetite for imminent violence. "But what about this history of violence," he asked, "and civil unrest in this country?" 

"When you consider," explained Clinton, "that these people haven't slept for four days, haven't eaten and have spent their nights wandering the streets tripping over dead bodies, I think they've behaved pretty well." 

Clinton might have added that Haiti's history of violence has been state violence against its own people. And the Haitian enthusiasm for civil unrest has always been directed bravely at brutal and corrupt rulers. 

Most journalists were also reporting breathlessly that Port-au-Prince's main prison had collapsed. Good story. But not for the reasons we were told. The inexperience – and indeed arrogance – of every single reporter who drew our attention to the jail, missed the real significance of its destruction. 

It was not that "violent criminals", "murderers", "gang bosses" "notorious killers" or "drug dealers" had "simply walked out the front gates". (And just how did these escapees miraculously avoid being crushed to death in their cells?) Even if true, that was a minor detail to the people of Port-au-Prince, who had more urgent concerns. 

The true significance of the prison's implosion was that it represented for ordinary Haitians, like the wreckage of the presidential palace and the city's former central army barracks, exquisite revenge upon the prime symbols of decades of state cruelty and oppression. 

And many of the prison's inmates were surely not the dangerous stereotypes of these lurid reports. Haiti's jails were, notoriously, full of petty thieves and other unfortunates who shouldn't have been in there anyway. I once had to go into that Penitentiaire Nationale, where I saw hundreds of men kept in cages, without room to lie down, shuffling around literally ankle deep in their own shit, to get out of there the son of a Haitian friend who'd been arrested so that the local police could extort money from his father for the release of his boy"

Read the whole story here.