Visit to Sark (7): the speech by Graham Robinson
June 2nd, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve done a series of posts about my weekend on the Channel Island of Sark in order to attend the launch of a book by Eric Lee. The work is called “Operation Basalt: The British Raid On Sark And Hitler’s Commando Order” and I’ve reviewed it here.
At the launch event, we heard a short speech from Graham Robinson, the son of one of the 12 commandos who were on that raid in 1942. You can now read his moving contribution here.
Posted in History | Comments (0)
Some good news: renewable energy smashes global records
June 2nd, 2016 by Roger Darlington
If you follow the news – and I’m a bit of a news junkie – most of it is depressing, so it’s a good idea to highlight positive news stories when they come along. Like this one:
“An upsurge in new wind, solar and hydro plants and capacity saw renewable energy smash global records last year, according to a report on new supply.
Some 147 Gigawatts of renewable electricity came online in 2015 – the largest annual increase ever and as much as Africa’s entire power generating capacity.
Clean energy investment increased to $286bn (£198bn), with solar energy accounting for 56% of the total and wind power for 38%.
Overall, more than twice as much money was spent on renewables than on coal and gas-fired power generation ($130bn in 2015), the REN21 global status report found.”
More on this story here.
Posted in Environment | Comments (0)
Visit to Sark (6): the video from James Edgar
June 1st, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Regular readers of NightHawk will know that I recently spent a weekend on the Channel Island of Sark in order to attend the launch of a book by my good friend Eric Lee. The work is called “Operation Basalt: The British Raid On Sark And Hitler’s Commando Order” and I’ve reviewed it here.
We had a special guest ‘appearance’ at the book launch: a video message from Corporal James Edgar the last surviving member of the 12-man commando team that launched the raid in 1942. He now lives in Australia. On the day of the launch event, he had his 96th birthday and all those present at the launch sang ‘happy birthday’ to him.
You can see the message from James Edgar here.
Posted in History | Comments (0)
The continuing debate over the Oxford comma
June 1st, 2016 by Roger Darlington
If you don’t know what the Oxford comma is, why it’s called that, and why it’s controversial, this short news item explains all. If you already know what I’m talking about, you probably have an opinion on the subject.
If you want to know my view on the Oxford comma, check out my advice on punctuation – look at Note 4 under the sub-heading ‘How to use the comma’.
It’s not the kind of issue that will decide the EU referendum in the UK or the presidential election in the US, but it does excite teachers, educationalists, linguists and others [note that I didn’t use the Oxford comma there].
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of a new book on the Kurds and Kurdistan
May 31st, 2016 by Roger Darlington
The Middle East is perhaps the most turbulent and complicated region in the world in terms of the conflicts and parties involved. A recently-published book, entitled “The Kurdish Spring: A New Map Of The Middle East”, looks at events since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, examining the history of Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Iran from the perspective of the Kurds in those four countries. You can read my review here.
Posted in History, World current affairs | Comments (0)
Two birthdays in the family today
May 30th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Two members of our family have birthdays today: Lucas is 8 and Peter is 78 – which has a certain symmetry.
Now, I’m guessing, dear reader, that you’re aged somewhere between 8 and 78, so I have two questions for you: do you remember what it was like to be 8 and can you imagine what it will be like to be 78?
That’s the thing about life: it’s one thing after another – but it’s better than the alternative.
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (5)
Why a visit to Hiroshima is more complicated than you might think
May 28th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
This week, Barack Obama became the first serving American President to visit Hiroshima, the site of the first atomic bomb to be dropped on a city on 6 August 1945 – a weapon used, of course, by the Americans. A lot of the media coverage mentioned that Obama did not apologise for the bombing, but that would have been wholly inappropriate and quite wrong.
It is easy – and indeed totally right – to be horrified by the death and destruction that was wreaked that day and the deaths and injuries that followed up to this day. But what most media reports failed to highlight was Japan’s culpability for this event and the country’s continued failure to acknowledge the role it played in the Second World War.
In October 1998, I was a member of a trade union delegation to Japan that visited Tokyo and Kyoto. Afterwards I stayed on in the country for a few more days on my own because I wanted to go to Hiroshima. I spent a whole day in the city and some three hours at the Peace Memorial Museum.
Of course, I was horrified by the photographs and films that I viewed and the statistics for death and injury that were displayed. But I was also disturbed by the account presented in the displays, all of which were in English as well as Japanese. The whole emphasis of the narrative up to the dropping of the bomb was one of the Japanese as innocent victims rather than as ruthless aggressors.
In effect, the Second World War did not begin with German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 or German invasion of Poland in 1939, but with Japanese occupation of Manchuria in China in 1931. What the Chinese understandably call ‘the rape of Nanjing’ by Japanese soldiers in December 1937-January 1938 was played down at the museum with the figures for Chinese deaths being disputed.
Then, when it came in the museum’s description of the start of the war between Japan and the USA in December 1941, this occurrence was represented as some kind of accidental outbreak of hostilities rather than an unprovoked and undeclared attack on Pearl Harbor with the substantial loss of American lives.
The museum gives little attention to the well-substantiated fears at the time that an American land invasion of mainland Japan would have resulted in months of further war and hundred of thousands of further American (and Japanese) deaths. All the evidence of Japanese resistance on island after island made it clear that the Japanese would have fought long and bitterly with massive further casualties and only the clear demonstration of the effect of the atomic bomb prevented this scenario.
In some ways, the most memorable thing I saw in Hiroshima was not in the Peace Memorial Museum; it was in one of the nearby parks; it was a monument to the Korean victims and survivors of the bombing. The English label explains that, of the roughly 200,000 people who were killed that day, some 20,000 were Korean. What were they doing in a Japanese city? Well, Japan had ruthlessly occupied Korea since 1910 and forced Koreans into both military and civilian service in the war effort.
The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 but it took until 1970 for this monument to the Korean victims to be erected. Could it be that the Japanese valued Japanese lives above Korean lives?
What I am describing here is part of a much bigger picture: the failure of so much of Japanese society even today to acknowledge their culpability for what happened in the Pacific theatre of war. School text books present a whitewashed version of the Japanese role in the war and some Japanese politicians still attend ceremonies at the burial site of Japanese war criminals.
This is in stark contrast to the situation in post-war Germany where, to their credit, Germans have acknowledged the horrors of Nazism and freely discuss and debate all aspects of Germany’s actions in the war.
Posted in History | Comments (1)
A review of the movie “X-Men: Apocalypse”
May 26th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
I’m a sucker for superhero movies and this is the third such blockbuster this year. You can read my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of the film “Our Kind Of Traitor”
May 26th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
This is not the best film adaptation of a novel by John le Carre – that could be “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” [my review here] – but the new film “Our Kind Of Traitor” is entertaining enough and I’ve reviewed it here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
U.S. presidential election (27): could Trump really become President?
May 25th, 2016 by Roger Darlington
Can Donald Trump really win the White House? All the serious pundits who look at the data, say that he can’t and several come to the same prediction for the Electoral College vote. In this piece for the “Huffington Post”, Richard North Patterson points out:
“A look at the electoral college map pretty much tells us all we need to know. However absurd it may be as an institution, the electoral college neatly captures our political polarization. A few pertinent facts from recent elections:
19 states and the District of Columbia have voted for a Democrat in the last six presidential contests. These alone account for 242 electoral votes — a mere 28 short of the 270 needed to win the presidency.
By comparison, the 13 states which voted Republican in the last six elections contain 102 electoral votes. You can take it to the bank that the GOP would carry these states were its nominee Charles Manson or Benito Mussolini — or even Donald Trump. But even were the GOP to draft Jesus Christ himself, upon resurrection he would have to round up another 168 electoral votes.
This effort did not work out terribly well for another man of faith, Willard Romney. In 2012, Romney received an additional 104 electoral votes. That left him at 206 compared to Barack Obama’s 332. In electoral college terms, a landslide.”
For the forthcoming 2016 election, Patterson’s prediction is as follows:
“Like the Times and Larry Sabato, I give Clinton every swing state and throw in North Carolina. The result? Clinton 347; Trump 191.”
Let’s hope he’s right.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (2)