Joyce for Dummies
Yesterday was the 100th Bloomsday, as it were, and Joyce's Ulysses was all about.

As a historian I read a fair amount, but it must be admitted that history books, and still more the sources for the kind of political history I mostly research, are ostensively straightforward, straining for lucidity and with the preferred prose form transparent in an attempt to reveal the substratum of truthful 'fact' unrefracted. Clever word games or the drawing of the reader's attention to the language itself is usually discounted. In a way, this applies even to post-modern history of the linguistic turn, as the mode is one of 'scientific' anatomising of text, a de-coding rather than a reconstruction.

So I have been largely trained out of reading 'difficult' prose, I think. Joyce's Ulysses, therefore, long glowered at me as a tome demanding time and attention, when most prose I encounter practically invites skim-reading.

My cunning plan a few years ago was to buy one of those lengthy audio-books (at 10 hours or something it was still considerably abridged). Having listened to this at leisure, I found it much easier to plough into the book itself. I knew where everything was going, I could even jump about hither and thither as my patience waxed and waned. And when Joyce decides to itemise in deliberately dull glee the contents of a dresser or whatever, I could slide over it knowing that a certain stupefaction on my part was actually rather appropriate. So, in due course, I read all of Ulysses. And it wasn't half bad.

Mind you, Finnegan's Wake might have to wait a bit yet.

P.S - You'll be glad to know that even Non-Dummies approve of audio-Joyce. Hooray!

MI5 on IRA
The Sunday Herald has an interesting article on a MI5 seminar on the Provisional IRA:

MI5 has caused outrage after one of its spies stated publicly that the IRA “fought a just cause” and won a “successful campaign” during the 30-year Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The controversy centres on a briefing given by the MI5 officer, a former Royal Navy commander, at a maritime security conference on Orkney.

... the MI5 officer said the IRA was “the biggest threat to British national security”. But the officer then said “in our opinion they [the IRA] have fought a just cause”.

“The conclusion of MI5, according to this officer,” said Hirst, “was based on the fact there had been legitimate grievances among, and discrimination against, the nationalist community and this had sustained the IRA through the length of the campaign.”

The MI5 officer then added: “Has it been a successful campaign? The answer is yes.”
He referred to the fact Sinn Fein had two ministers in power. “What better success can you wish for”, he said, “than to have your people in positions of power in government.”

... the comments were “not off-the-cuff as they were supported by an official MI5 PowerPoint presentation, complete with the official crest”.
William Frazer, who runs Fair (Families Acting for Innocent Relatives), a Northern Ireland support group for victims of paramilitary violence, was horrified .

Frazer’s father, a member of the security forces, was killed by the IRA, as were two uncles and two cousins. Five of his friends were also murdered, and his home was bombed five times.

Hardline unionist MP, Jeffrey Donaldson, said it was “totally out of order” for an MI5 officer to make such statements. “ How would MI5 explain this officer’s comments to people who lost loved ones in Enniskillen, La Mon House or the Shankill bombing? It is incredible that a man in his position would justify the slaughter of innocent civilians and the security forces.

“It is still an offence to be a traitor and this man’s comments are treacherous. He is betraying Britain. He should be removed immediately.”

Republicans are happy to hear this now, but of course during the war the Provos never argued that discrimination was the real justification for their campaign. Rather, discrimination was a consequence of the unviability of the 'failed' state of Northern Ireland, and the destruction of partition was their war-aim.

From the point of view of British security, blaming 'discrimination' is another way of blaming the unreasonableness of the natives in general and the unionists in particular. It gets them off the hook.

Euro-Results
I remember reading somewhere that the percentage of the electorate attreacted to the demagogic hard-right - anti-welfare, pro law and order, anti-immigrant, anti-'political correctness' etc - is fairly consistent at about 20% in all European countries. The disciplines of First Past the Post system and the historic duopoly in Britain have meant that these tendencies have been subsumed within the main parties. The relative weakness of unbrella parties on the continent have allowed space for all sorts of radical right parties to take advantage Haider's FPO in Austria, Vlaams Blok in Belgium, Le Pen's FN in France, the Pim Fortuyn List in the Netherlands, and so on.

The success of the UKIP, winning 16.8% of the vote in England and Wales, plus the 5.2% (up from 4.1%) for the even more distasteful BNP seems to indicate a growing potential for such a 'break-out' in British politics. Not good news.

Council Election Results in Oxford
A bad day for Labour (of course): they lose nine seats and it falls to No Overall Control. The Greens do well, gaining four and the Lib Dems gain three.

Interesting is the success of the Independent Working Class Association, who had all three of their candidates elected: in Churchill, Blackbird Leys and Northfield Brook (on turn-outs hovering around 30%, rather less than elsewhere). This group is not 'ideological' as such, but defiantly sectional. They may have benefitted from a working class consciousness heightened in Oxford by being laid over the old Town / Gown divide. In May 2002 Stuart Craft became the IWCA’s first elected representative after he was elected for Northfield Brook. He has kept the seat

The position is now thus:

Labour: 20 seats
Liberal Democrats: 18 seats
Green: 7 seats
Independent Working Class Association: 3 seats

Total seats: 48

Good News from Savanah
I'm quite enthusaiastic about some of the US agenda at the G8 Meeting.

Middle Eastern leaders have been invited. Iraq, Turkey and Yemen have weighed in while Saudi Arabia and Egypt hold aloof. Bush is pressing upon the region's leaders plans for democratisation.

These include reforms such as free elections, an independent media and improved legal systems. Excellent stuff, but possibly hard to enforce on the regimes. Of great practical benefit are plans for the training of judges and lawyers and loans to small businesses. Best of all is a proposed campaign to reduce illiteracy by 20 million people. This would be with the creation, by 2008, of a "literacy corps" of 100,000 female teachers who would focus on reading and other basic skills for women.

This is particularly valuable as currently religious schools carry much of the burden of education in the region - and deliver it adulterated by the most reactionary theological dogmatism. These schools are often breeding grounds for fanaticism.

Unfortunately, it looks like the initiatives might be much watered down because of the cost, resistance from Middle Eastern regimes, and sniping from Chirac. The shabby Occupation of Iraq and the Israel / Palestine crisis are at hand to be used as fig-leaves for self-centred resistance. Expect lofty condemnations of 'interference' and 'culturally insensitive' attempts to foist democratic reform. I hope, nevertheless, that Bush and Blair can win through with this aspect of Neo-Con strategy.

What's in a Word?
Michael and I have been discussing Old Labour, New Labour, and nomenclature over at Fisherblog. Why not go see?

Isaac Deutscher's Prophet
Christopher Hitchens has written a fascinating essay on Isaac Deutscher's marvellous Prophet trilogy on the life of Leon Trotsky. (Hat-tip to Norm. Norm always refers to Hitchens as The Dude. I don't know why. Hitchens is anything but the amiable hippie slacker I would have thought.)

Deutscher's work had an enormous impact on me when I read it years ago. The greatest influence was, I think, the second volume: The Prophet Unarmed. I think this is fairly unusual, as this ‘continuity’ volume recounts Trotsky's losing struggle with Stalin in the 1920s, and moreover showed him at his worst. Trotsky refused to engage whole-heartedly in a vital struggle partly because he was out of his element in the scholastic and bureaucratic intrigues of a tiny and anti-democratic closed elite (an elite he would not repudiate). Partly Trotsky condescended to those whom thought his inferior and preferred to resign in contempt rather than risk the humiliating defeat of his fully mobilised powers.

The drama of the first volume - depicting a revolutionary agitator, organiser and thinker of the first order - and the pathos of the last volume - Trotsky struggling heroically as doom stalks him, his family and indeed Europe - are preferred by most readers.

So why did I most value The Prophet Unarmed? I approached the biography convinced of the moral and political superiority of Trotsky to Stalin. I have no reason to change my mind on this, and I'm eternally grateful that my ultra-left enthusiasms were in the Trotskyist rather than the official Communist or Maoist modes.

But the very arcane nature of the struggle in the USSR in the 1920s, as a piratical cadre in command of the listing Russian hulk groped for a way forward in ignorance of the disasters to come, highlighted for me the terrible difficulty of plotting one's way though political morality. There were no pain-free options for the Soviets in the 1920s, and Deutscher brought home the 'reasonableness' of Stalin's rejection of dependence on world revolution and his stolid willingness to practically build socialism with the resources at hand.

I could empathise with the Stalinists, the Rightists, and the renegades of the Left Opposition. More to the point I could see that, in the same circumstances, I could not be sure of my own unimpeachable probity. I appreciated anew that the road to hell is paved, if not necessarily with good intentions, then with indeterminacy, caution, uncertainty and fear.

This has effected much of my historical reasoning since, and made me hostile to the moralising 20:20 vision in hindsight of Amis's Koba the Dread and suchlike. My sympathy since has been with the mass of the confused and mistaken, rather than with the sainted individuals who pointed steadfastly to the sun-lit uplands from where we now contentedly survey the wreckage of blasted hopes and dreams.

Losing, after all, is the natural human condition, the outcome of every individual life. Shame is the honest consequence of reflection on our past. Only this gives us warrant for decent hope and ambition. Deutscher’s work, for me, reflected this with unique scholarly art.

Terry Eagleton
My brother Niall has written a fine review of Terry Eagleton's memoir, The Gatekeeper. Eagleton was, before he moved to Manchester, an adornment here at St Catherine's. I overlapped with him for a year or so, but he generally kept himself to himself and, as I was rather in awe (though I don't particularly agree with much he writes, he has still a first-class intellect), I never worked up the courage to accost him.

Just as well, perhaps, as Niall notes his opinion of Oxbridge academics:

"Petulant, snobbish, spiteful, arrogant, autocratic and ferociously self-centred, they were pretty a squalid bunch".

Oxbridge was "full of people who were there largely because they could not conceivably be anywhere else, as some people can only be in top-security psychiatric institutions ... There is a kind of lumpen intelligentsia in Oxbridge who have no real jobs".

In a manner of speaking, I was in a psychiatric institution for a year, but as its historian rather than patient.

Niall ends:

The Fellows of St Catherine’s College must be spitting fire over Eagleton’s memoirs. Amongst them, no doubt, are ex-Marxists who have jumped to the side of the ruling class and who like to prove their worth by mocking the Left. Terry Eagleton resisted this well-worn path. He quips: "Sheer horror of cliché, if nothing else, has preserved me from this fashionable fate".

No doubt indeed!

Mary Holland
Mary Holland - fine journalist, feminist, trade unionist and socialist - has died, after a long illness, aged 68.

Here is an article she wrote for the Irish Times, looking back at the 1970s from the vantage point of the turn of the millenium:

A bloody learning curve

It was the most violent decade of `The Troubles': a time when both communities had to learn, in blood and tears, the reality of the other's right to exist, writes Mary Holland

The 1970s were a period of simple - deadly - certainties in both parts of the island. A time of passionate convictions, it was also the most bloody decade of "The Troubles". Two thousand people, more than half of the total who were to die in the following 30 years, perished between l970 and l979. The decade began with internment and ended with Margaret Thatcher in power in No. 10 Downing Street. Or, viewed from a Dublin perspective, it started with the Arms Trial and ended with Charles Haughey's election as Taoiseach. But, more important than any of these things, it was a time when both communities in the North had to learn, in blood and tears, the reality of the other's right to exist. ...

Just two years previously, it had seemed that the problems of Northern Ireland might be solved without resort to the atavistic cruelties of the past. The late 1960s had brought the Civil Rights Movement, drawing its inspiration largely from similar campaigns in other countries. Nationalism was no longer an issue. A young priest in Derry said: "Sure, we've all been reared on the BBC's Home Service and Welfare State milk". There were mass demonstrations at which young and old linked arms to sing "We Shall Overcome".

By the early 1970s that already seemed an age of innocence ago. The new order of justice and an end to discrimination, which Jim Callaghan had promised from the top window of a house in the Brandywell, had not materialised. The unionists still ruled at Stormont and, inevitably, when the British army was used to quell riots and break up marches, it came to be seen as another instrument of the majority's power.

After the introduction of internment in l970, there was no going back. ...

Both governments miscalculated the determination of the unionist community to resist [Sunningdale], a unity of purpose which meant that civil servants and respectable members of the middle classes supported the Ulster Workers' Strike led by paramilitaries and extremist politicians.

BRITISH ministers, exasperated by their own impotence, spoke of the mainland taxpayer being bled dry and of growing impatience with Northern Ireland's politicians. Plus ca change! Merlyn Rees admitted that withdrawal was discussed as part of a doomsday scenario around the cabinet table, as was repartition. Such rumours served to fuel unionist paranoia, which was then given practical demonstration in loyalist attacks on innocent Catholics. At the same time, the speculation encouraged the IRA to believe that a united Ireland was within reach. An IRA truce in 1975, accompanied by the existence of incident-centres jointly monitored by the Provos and the NIO, did nothing to reassure either the unionists or the SDLP. The latter was being squeezed and this inevitably led to a "greening" of the party from its early years. ...

There were attempts to build bridges, most notably by the Peace Women in the mid-1970s. But the trouble with all such efforts was that they took place against a background of continuing death and suffering. It was almost impossible to talk, or even think, of reconciliation against a background of atrocities such as Bloody Friday when the Provos set off 26 bombs in a single day in Belfast. To list the deaths, or even to try and imagine the grief, would take too long in this space. But no journalist who covered those days will ever forget the desolation of the funerals - the small police band piping an RUC man to his grave, the weeping of young widows, the bewildered faces of small children as they begged to be told what was happening.

Other factors added to the bitterness of those days - the mistreatment of suspects, the terrible miscarriages of justice which did such damage to the reputation of the whole British legal system. Perhaps one of the worst omissions, again looking back, was the lack of care and support for victims who were all too often left alone to come to terms with their pain.

Mercifully, my space is running out. No, that's not quite accurate, for it is a salutary experience for us to look back at how things were in the 1970s and how far we have come. I'm often accused of being over-optimistic about the present peace process and too inclined to ask for patience for the politicians in the North. Their task is a dreadful and a noble one - to lay to rest this terrible weight of history. Looking back at the 1970s we cannot but give thanks that they have come so far and wish them Godspeed on the road ahead, however long and difficult it may be.

Corner of Ulster Field Forever England
My mate Richard Michaelis has noted an offer in today's Sun: face-paint , St George flags for attaching to one's automobile, etc. It advises, however: 'only available in England and Northern Ireland'.