Peter Nolan

Flags of our Fathers

Compared to Fahrenheit 911, V for Vendetta or Syriana, Flags of our Fathers makes for a subtle portrait of the hell of war in general and an historical allegory on our times.

It's shot in slate grey tones, matching the sober treatment of its subject. Little iin the way of violence or body parts is concealed, unlike in John Wayne's version, the Sands of Iwo Jima.
On top of the traumas of combat come the distortions of propaganda and politics, as  the three survivors of the iconic photograph of the flag-raising are toured around the country to sell a desperately needed war-bond drive.   The authenticity and tragedy of it all is, that given the needs of the war, these noble lies, regardless of the high costs to the marines, are inescabable.   

The Marines fighting for Iwo Jima are all recognisably human, ultimately all broken by their war. The country they return to, to a menial job as a janitor, to a miserable existence blighted by racism on an Indian reservation, disastrously anesthatised with binge drinking. The lucky one is left to quiet desperation as a small town undertaker, never sharing his memories except through silence and nightmares.

The Native American finds his menial labour interrupted by tourists seeking photos. In a bitterly ironic echo of the iconic photo, he keeps a small Stars and Stripes in his pocket, the myth shrunk to hankerchief-sized reality amid the dirt and humiliation.   

What next for Eastwood, even if a deserved third Oscar doesn't materialise? Maybe after him debunking cowboys, war and sport, we might see Dirty Harry make a film about police brutality?

Occupation Diary

"Cities are like women - they only give themselves to their conquerors", writes Ernst Junger in occupied Paris in 1944. His countrymen and the charmed circle of collaborators were, he writes disgustedly, like gargoyles, feasting in the midst of starvation, as the sign of power when others grow hungry.

Thursday evening saw me disturbing with my coughs and sneezes the other two dozen dedicated souls who turned out for the showing of "Ernst Junger in Paris: An Occpuation Diary".

Junger seems to be seldom read in English, so apart from his obituary in The Economist and Thomas Nevin's biography, I've never seen any mention of him. He seems tobe much more prominent in France though, where the documentary was made by the TF1 TV channel in 1986, adapted from the diary which had been published in French years before. Junger was at the centre of the ceremonies marking the 75th anniversary of the battle at Verdun, which claimed over a million French and German lives, hosted in a showcase of Franco-German reconciliation by Helmut Kohl.and Francios Mitterand, as an exemplar of the veterans of World War One.

In many ways, this was ironic, as he had made his reputation with his memoirs of his time as an infantry officer in the trenches. As one of a new breed of fit, lightly-armed and mobile shock troops who relied on surprise and tactics, he led the way past the mechanistic and static operations of the war. As the bravest of thes stormtroopers, as these troops were named by the German army, his memoirs were an inspiration to the Nazi cult of the frontline comrade, the frontkampfer. Nevertheless. he comes to his life in Paris as a writer, cosmopolitan and an opponent of the regime. One of his first actions, he relates, was to install safes to keep the Wehrmacht's dcuments out of the hands of the Gestapo, a harbinger of the struggle that culminated in the bloodbath after the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler and the dismantling of the conservative traditions of the officer corps that followed it, including the compulsory use of the Hitler salute.

The film shows the newsreels produced by the Vichy government, with Petain, Laval and others strutting through the haberdashery of their propaganda - bouquets in the shape of the Vichy militia's double-headed fasces - ceremonies for workers going to work in German industry and even a lecture by an intellectual pedantically seeking to give the exact meaning, definitional and spiritual, of collaboration. We also see cheeses, potatoes being offloaded for Paris, and the increasing damage and disruption to the home front caused by war and bombing, epitomised by the spinning of dogs' hair for clothing.

Amongst this, we hear Junger's diary entries in chronogical order. He seeks out the artists and intellectuals like Cocteau. Over wine one evening, after coming to Picasso's apartment, he agrees with the artist that both of them could negotiate an end to the war, were they ever to be given such a commission. In a rough smock, Picasso seemed to him a sorcerer.

Germany, under the control of a genration of men that Junger writes might have been made from iron and leather and hatched from animal sperm in factories, has no interest in such a deal. Instead. travelling through Germany, he sees the results in the destruction of his childhood haunts in Hanover.

Eventually, with the Allied advance, comes the time for leave-taking, with his barber wishing him well "until all this is over".

The diary, as it might for others, have been Junger's death warrant, but shows a rare and intimate humanity in circumstances that we overfed and bored moderns cannot imagine.

New Statesman: Nick Cohen Doubleplusungood

John Kampfner responds to his renegade columnist Nick Cohen (whose book What's Left I greatly enjoyed) in this week's New Statesman, largely by ignoring what he actually written. 

Cohen may or may not be right that much of the anti-war protests were shameful in being driven by a mixture of the ugliest toilet-mold of the British left, in the shape of the Socialist Workers Party and George Galloway.  However, Kampfner makes no response to Cohen's key criticisms, of the magazine's revolting editorial after 9/11:

American bond traders, you may say, are as innocent and as undeserving of terror as Vietnamese or Iraqi peasants. Well, yes and no. Yes, because such large-scale carnage is beyond justification, since it can never distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. No, because Americans, unlike Iraqis and many others in poor countries, at least have the privilege of democracy and freedom that allow them to vote and speak in favour of a different order. If the US often seems a greedy and overweening power, that is partly because its people have willed it. They preferred George Bush to Al Gore and both to Ralph Nader.

Here precisely, is what I think is Cohen's main point, that the "left" is saying "I don't like George W Bush and since al Qaeda don't either, then al Qaeda is, I assume, motivated by the same values towards the same objectives as I am, against globalisation, for the Palestinians etc".   To be charitable, one might say that this is as a result of falling into a psychological trap.  As I wrote in Magill in April 2006,

However, even the most brilliant and best-funded scholars and intelligence analysts struggle to avoid falling into the comfortable trap of "mirror imaging", subconsciously assuming that foreigners will think in the same way that they do. Hence, the CIA imagined that Saddam Hussein was acting like the American bureaucracy did –consensus-driven, risk-averse and seeking to avoid war, rather than understanding him as an adventurer prone to rash gambles like the invasion of Kuwait. Similarly, academics studying the Middle East, especially since the late Edward Said published his book Orientalism in 1979, have noted how political interests, especially the imperial ambitions of West in the Arab world, led to scholars and writers to fit their portrayals of the region to their political agenda.

In effect, what the New Statesman, and much of the British left is guilty of, is of an orientalism of opposition: Even in the explicit rhetoric of bin Laden, who sets out an agenda in his statements that is both totalitarian in its vision of opposition to a liberal democratic model of the state and makes demands that no western government would willingly accomodate, they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.   The irony is, as Cohen aptly notes, is that th right in Britain - or in America, as figures such as former CIA bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer show, make the same mistake.

I'll post a fuller review of the book after I hear Cohen himself speak at Frontline on Tuesday 20th February.

Web 2.0

Everybody else seems to be linking to this YouTube introduction to Web 2.0, so I might as well also.  That's what it's all about, isn't it?

Cover boy

My interview with Steve Forbes, the US magazine publisher, twice contender for the Republican presidential nomination and flat-tax advocate is in the  current issue of Business and Finance, now on sale in Ireland.

This is my first cover story anywhere, so I'm especially sasta  on that account.   

A night at the pitchers...

I feel like crap, although I'm still hoping to get out by tomorrow night to see this documentary at the French cultural centre on German writer Ernst Jünger, who was one of the military administrators of Paris during the occupation. It makes a break from the oestrogen overdose  I've been accumulating today from going through my backlog of unwatched DVDs - The Thomas Crown Affair, Dirty Dancing, Ghost and Jerry Maguire. 

Update

I have to concede that Dirty Dancing is actually very enjoyable.  I doubt that many people would have picked up on a lot of the themes, of class and of the segregation of Jews from wider society, as epitomised in the resort.  It's happy ending, the blending of old and new generations in a reasonably harmonious synthesis is probably either unrepresentative or only short-lived.  Baby may well have been out of college by the time "the sixties" really kicked off, with Jane Fonda's trip to Hanoi, the Weathermen terrorists, the Manson family, the PLO, the Black Panthers and the rest took centre stage. 

Top o' the morning

I feel terrible today. I'm nursing a flu and I've no energy even to read, which is unprecedented for me. I hope that I don't have bird 'flu, which is a pity as I appeared as an "expert" (mar dhea) on the Big Bite this time last year to talk about it and how my five-person company has more realistic planning in place for a pandemic than the Irish government had, or still has.

Apart from setting up mobile blogging from my PDA, another long-standing project has been to catalogue my ever-expanding library, which by now no longer fits in my bedroom, in spite of most of it being in storage. A selection of my current reading is on display in the photo for the morbidly curious.

Renewable energy and Ireland

In the Sunday Business Post in October, I wrote on the elevation in Irish politics of renewable energy to the same position already occupied by motherhood and the flag.

However, as usually happens in Irish politics, politicians are instead granting privileges to special interests at the expense of the public. All that is new is that this is now justified by doubtful claims as to the environmental benefits and cost advantages of renewable energy. In the 1970s, haunted by the fear of ever-more expensive oil, the government invested in the huge Moneypoint generating plant in Co Clare, powered by coal. The feared oil shock never materialised.

By the mid-1980s, around the time JR Ewing was on our TV screens, many real-life Dallas oil barons were in the poorhouse as the oil price was touching $10 a barrel. Bad choices over fuel mix meant that the ESB was saddled with high costs and excess capacity for years afterwards.

All this was the outcome of that classic mistake in planning - the failure to consider the whole possible range of outcomes. Instead, energy policy makers, then and now, assumed that the trends of the recent past would continue unaltered, even over decades. Ireland’s future energy strategy looks likely to fall into this trap of trying to drive safely by looking only in the rear-view mirror.

Again, there was a reaction, largely ill-informed, in the letters page the next week.   My responses are in the comments to the last SBP opinion article. 

East Pier, Dun Laoghaire

Taken on Christmas Eve 2006 on a walk along Dun Laoghaire's East Pier