Remembering Syria’s suffering people and threatened heritage
May 17th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
In the spring of 2011, Vee and I had a holiday in Syria and Lebanon [for account of our visit, see here]. We crossed the border from one country to the other on 9 March 2011. Mass protests erupted on 15 March in Damascus and Aleppo, and spread in the following days to more cities, while growing in size. The week of 15–21 March is considered by news media as the beginning of the Syrian uprising.
Since then, something like a quarter of a million Syrians have been killed and the deaths, injuries, displacement and destruction is not over. Every time I read or hear a news report from the region, I shiver and I remember our time in the Levant.
Although one cannot compare lives to structures, another terrible feature of the Syrian civil war – accentuated now by the emergence of ISIS – is the destruction of the country’s heritage which includes remnants of the world’s earlier civilisations.
Already major parts of Damascus and Aleppo – both with a claim to be the oldest continuously inhabited cities in history – have been destroyed. Now ISIS threatens the obliteration of the ancient ruins of Palmyra [for account of our visit, see here].
As an article in today’s “Observer” newspaper puts it:
“Palmyra is an ancient Roman site whose significance and value is exceeded by very few others: those in Rome itself, Pompeii, possibly Petra in Jordan. Its temples, colonnades and tombs, its theatre and streets are extensive, exquisite, distinctive, rich. The loss of Palmyra would be a cultural atrocity greater than the destruction of the Buddhas in Bamiyan. It is hard to think of deliberate vandalism to equal it, despite the grim examples offered by the last hundred years.”
Rowan Moore writes:
“If Isis raze Palmyra, it would be a new demonstration of the evil and stupidity they have already abundantly displayed in their slaughters and enslavements, and in their videos of beheadings and burnings. It would also confirm Isis’s littleness: how could anyone be so threatened by ancient ruins, unless they lacked belief in their ability to create something themselves? It would make manifest Isis’s nihilism, their vision of the world as a desert populated only by themselves and their slaves. It is, of course, precisely the diversity of Syria’s heritage that Isis hate.”
Posted in History, My life & thoughts, World current affairs | Comments (2)
A review of the new blockbuster movie “Mad Max: Fury Road”
May 16th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
If you like action movies, then George Miller’s fourth “Mad Max” movie is a must-see. You can read my review here.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Should the North of England become part of Scotland?
May 16th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
Of course, it’s a crazy idea – but tens of thousands apparently support the bizarre notion as you can see here. I have relatives in Scotland, I was brought up in Manchester, and I live in London. I want to see a United Kingdom.
Around the world, people think that redrawing boundaries solves political and economic problems. It rarely does. Instead of changing boundaries, we need to change attitudes as I have argued in this essay.
Posted in British current affairs, World current affairs | Comments (5)
My 10th short story: “A Face At The Window”
May 15th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
It’s Friday; it’s almost the weekend; time to sit down and relax and read a short story. My piece this week is called “A Face At The Window” and you can read it here.
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (0)
Has the new Cold War already begun?
May 14th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
It seems that, for the Russians, it already has. In the West, we see the Russians as the aggressors: intervening militarily in Georgia and Ukraine, constantly testing the security defences of other European nations, and backing a president who seems to want to isolate his country more and more from international norms.
Of course, the Russians see it totally different as this article in today’s “Guardian” newspaper makes clear:
“Rather than disbanding our cold war defence arrangement, Nato, we reinvented it as an alliance that could be construed only as being arrayed against Russia. We kept expanding it ever eastward, closer to Russia’s borders.”
Whichever interpretation we endorse, it is essential that we maintain a dialogue and seek to understand the intentions of the other side. Susan Richards makes the telling point:
“In America and Britain, government support for research on old Soviet bloc countries was slashed. The State Department and Foreign Office disbanded research units that kept politicians informed. Embassies focused on opening up commercial opportunities. Meanwhile, the press, facing its own economic crisis, also cut back on foreign correspondents. The west simply stopped thinking seriously, and in depth, about Russia and its neighbours.”
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (1)
Do you enjoy a good blockbuster movie?
May 13th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
I do. Indeed I enjoy most types of films, all the way from the blockbuster to the art house, and all genres except musicals and horror (although even there I can make exceptions).
So at the weekend, in an effort to forget about the terrible General Election result, I went to the City Lit, a further education college in central London, to attend a one-day course on blockbuster movies run by John Wisbey.
We started with a discussion of what constitutes a blockbuster. The straightforward definition is one that has taken a really large amount of money at the box office. But other factors also come into play. Blockbusters usually have big budgets as well as big box office. They are usually grand affairs in the sense of having big sets or big themes or deploying big effects or big stunts. And they tend to be event movies with lots of pre-release speculation, grand openings, and substantial media interest.
So, what have been the biggest blockbusters in cinema history? Well, there are different ways of measuring box office. One method, used by the web site Box Office Mojo, ranks films by worldwide and domestic (US theatrical releases) grosses. You can see the top 100 here.
On this measure, the top ten are in order: “Avatar” [my review here], “Titanic” [my review here], “Marvel’s The Avengers” [my review here], “Fast & Furious 7” [my review here], “Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 2″, ‘Frozen” [my review here], “Iron Man 3” [my review here], “Transformers: Dark Side Of The Moon”, “The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King” [my review here], and “Skyfall” [my review here]. I have seen eight of these 10.
But, over the years, very different films have dominated the box office. In the course of the day, John Wisbey showed us clips from the following blockbusters: “Gone With The Wind”, “Ben Hur”, “The Sound Of Music”, “The Graduate”, “Love Story”, “The Godfather”, “Jaws”, “Star Wars: A New Hope”, “E.T. – The Extra-terrestrial”, “Titantic” and “Avatar”. I have seen all but one of these 11 movies, the exception being “The Sound Of Music”.
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A poem which appealed to me: “Dust If You Must”
May 11th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
The poem is by Rose Milligan.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (3)
The 70th anniversary of victory in Europe
May 10th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
This week marks the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe as the Allies finally smashed the Nazi war machine. All around Europe, there have been various commemorative ceremonies.
Today Vee and I attended a small but special ceremony at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey where Czechoslovak airmen, killed during the war while serving with the Royal Air Force, are buried. This is very meaningful to us because Vee’s father, Karel Kuttelwascher, was a Czechoslovak fighter pilot with the RAF and became its most successful night intruder ace.
The Brookwood memorial to
the fallen Czechoslovak airmen
Arnost Polak (L) and Ivan Schwarz (R)
Posted in History | Comments (0)
British general election (18): some interesting facts and figures
May 10th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
- The new Parliament has 182 new members, including 74 new Conservative, 53 new Labour and 50 new Scottish National MPs.
- The new Parliament will see a record number of female representatives, with 191 women (up from 143) which represents 29% (up from 22%).
- The new Parliament will see a record number of ethnic representatives, with 41 from an ethnic minority (up from 27) which represents 6% (up from 4%).
- It is known that 32 of the newly elected MPs are lesbian, gay or bisexual.
- It is estimated that a third of the newly elected MPs and more than half of Conservative MPs went to private schools compared to 7% of the population.
- Of the newly elected MPs who went to university, 31% went to Oxford or Cambridge.
- The youngest MP since 1667 is 20 year old Mhairi Black who won the Paisley & Renfrewshire South seat for the SNP.
- The largest swing was 39% which was from Labour to SNP in Glasgow North East where the winning candidate was Anne McLaughlin.
- In my own constituency of Brent North, the Labour Party now has a larger majority (10,834) than the Conservatives had when Labour took the seat from them in 1997 (10,131). This is Labour’s largest ever majority in Brent North with a swing of over 7% to Labour.
- In Milton Keynes North, my daughter-in-law Emily Darlington stood as the Labour candidate. She increased Labour’s vote share by more than twice the national average, adding some 3,000 votes to the Labour tally and keeping the Conservative MP’s majority at under 10,000.
- This General Election was officially the least proportional result in British history. If the result had been exactly proportion. 24.2% of MPs would be different.
- The political composition of the House of Commons would have looked very, very different if, instead of our first-past-the-post electoral system, we had a system of proportional representation – see the figures here.
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (0)
British general election (17): how did all the polls get it so wrong?
May 9th, 2015 by Roger Darlington
The failure of all the polls to predict the actual outcome of the General Election has rightly caused many questions to be asked. There is to be an inquiry commissioned by the British Polling Council into what went wrong.
But this is a wider problem than Britain, In other countries, like the USA and Israel, polls have recently got things badly wrong and some hard thinking is taking place.
Posted in American current affairs, British current affairs, World current affairs | Comments (1)