Sunday 16 February 2020

TIME TO STOP CELEBRATING WAR.

The words of Albert Evans, a survivor of D-Day, make me think about the practice of continuing to commemorate the assorted dates of WW2 - its beginning, Dunkirk, D-Day, the assorted bombings, the liberations and so on. A couple of weeks ago, Albert Evans, was awarded the Legion d'Honneur, for his part in the allied landings at Pegasus Bridge in 1944 but, when interviewed, merely said :

"All your mates who were standing by your side one minute were gone the next

Is that not the truth and is it not such a horrible truth that those who survived need to be allowed to forget or, at least, not to be harassed by those who want to make a celebratory remembrance out of the horrors that it involved. ?

War is terrible. Old fashioned war, man-to-man with swords, axes and other sharp weapons was grotesque and more modern war in which the opponent can be killed at a distance may be less immediate but is even more destructive of both people and property. It seems that Albert Evans didn't see himself as being any sort of hero, he was just doing his job while his pals died.

He was right. He should be left alone with his memories. If he wants to share them, that's fine by me, but if he wants to try to forget, that's fine also. As someone who never had to face the horrors of warfare, I'm more than happy to allow those who did to try to put those horrors behind them. It seems that Albert Evans was rather badgered into accepting his honour, his granddaughter apparently saying that it had taken a lot of persuasion to get him to accept the award.

If he was my granddad, I'd have left him to make up his own mind; surely he suffered enough in WW2 without it being brought back to torment him so many years later. We remember the victims of warfare every 11th November and on every Remembrance Sunday; by inventing ceremonies for every imaginable date, particularly from World War 2, we diminish the meaning of those November events. We also risk ignoring the other conflicts - World War 1, Korea, Palestine, Kenya, Malaysia, The Falklands, Iraq and others - for which notable dates are less well known. 

We've already long consigned the dates of the many engagements of the middle ages, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Sevastopol, Balaclava, Omdurman, Khartoum, Mafeking and many more, to history; it's now time to stop creating so many other excuses to celebrate warfare and its horrors under the guise of remembrance.

CAROLINE WHO ?

Who on earth was Caroline Flack ?

The media seems to be full of a story about this person killing herself and has turned the event into a front page tragedy. As far as I can gather, never having heard of the woman before, she was the presenter of a particularly crude and unsavoury television programme, one of the awful "reality shows" which are actually nothing of the sort. In truth, the programme that she fronted was aimed at the moronic masses and was little more than an excuse for crudity and generally disgusting behaviour.

I've also seen that Flack had recently been in trouble over an assault on her boyfriend and was being prosecuted for it. Following her suicide, the authorities have been criticized by some for taking this action and have tried to present Flack as a victim; how they've arrived at such a judgement is a mystery. Flack was wealthy and famous, at least in the circles in which she moved. If she couldn't ultimately cope with the life she created for herself and then pursued, why is that worthy of blanket media coverage ?

The simple answer is that Flack was a "media celebrity" and the media loves nothing more than to celebrate or commiserate over its own and their triumphs and tragedies. No doubt there have been other suicides over the last few days and weeks, suicides of people who had none of Flack's advantages or success but which the media has ignored as being of no interest. Some of these may well have been far more tragic and have had far greater consequences than Flack's over-hyped demise, but they have been deemed to be of 'no interest'.

I despair. People like Flack live the high life but expect sympathy and support when it goes wrong. The rest of us just have to get on with life whatever it throws at us. Good riddance to Caroline Flack, no doubt there'll be another blousy bimbo along to take her place any minute now.

Sunday 2 February 2020

WUHAN VIRUS - OVER-HYPED POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM.

No doubt people in the 14th century thought that the 'Black Death' was going to wipe them all out - it didn't. Later the deadly scourge was smallpox which again failed to kill off the human race. Today, it's a newly rampant coronavirus from China which has the world's politicos in a lather.

There is an obvious difference between the world of today and that which endured the Black Death and smallpox, that is, today we know what causes such diseases and can treat them while the people of earlier centuries could do no more than trust in the Almighty to save them. However, these days it's our political masters who have taken it on themselves to play the part of God and do the saving. In order to do this they have to first inflate the scale of the potential catastrophe to mind-boggling proportions.

This is what was done with the HIV / AIDS epidemic which we were all told would destroy us unless we did as we were told and employed 'safe sex' methods. In truth, anyone who was not a homosexual, did not engage in anal intercourse, did not use the services of prostitutes, was not an intravenous drug user and did not have regular transfusions of blood from potentially infected sources, was never very likely to contract the disease. In fact, it was highly unlikely that they would but this did not stop our masters from telling us a very different story. We were all at terrible risk, but they would save us from ourselves.

A few years later, SARS came along and, again, panic ensued. In the end, the outbreak did not last long and affected a few thousand people mostly in China and its surrounding area; a mortality rate of around 10% sounds rather frightening but the total recorded deaths was less than 800. Despite the facts, politicians of all sorts still exaggerated the problem and used it to their own advantage. 

Next it was MERS, although far less may have been heard of this one, and now it's the Wuhan Virus which doesn't yet seem to have gained an acronym - perhaps WRVS (Wuhan Respiratory Virus Syndrome) or is that one already taken (Women's Royal Voluntary Service !). As with SARS, this infection is almost wholly contained within China and the few cases recorded outside of that country are in people of Chinese origin or who have recently visited China. Also as with SARS, the actual number of cases is small, a few thousand at most, and the mortality rate appears to be far lower at around 2-3%. However, the media has behaved as though Armageddon is upon us and politicians have behaved accordingly. Borders have been closed, masks issued, travel curtailed, migration denied.

Set against the outbreaks of SARS, MERS and the latest Wuhan pandemonium, every year several million people contract influenza and several hundreds of thousands may die. EVERY YEAR ! Why, then, is the world in such a panic about a virus which has infected no more than a few tens of thousands, almost all in one country, China, and which has a mortality rate of around 2% only ? Yes, it's a new challenge, yes it may spread beyond China but is it really the horror that's been suggested ? Surely, as long as people are sensible and hygienic (that is, they stop sneezing and coughing all over their hands, sleeves and passers by) the danger is minimal.

Of course, I may be wrong and the Wuhan virus may spread much further and become far more dangerous, though I doubt it. The likelihood is that the outbreak will fade away as quickly as it's arisen and will be virtually forgotten in 5 years time, unless someone comes up with a really snappy acronym for it. The chances of it killing any of us first are remote, although that won't stop the politicians of all flavours making a huge song and dance about protecting us, in the hope that it will put them in a good light with their electorates. They will, of course, be egged on by every manner of special interest group and all the loonies who see nothing but gloom and despondency around every corner, not to mention the media which likes nothing more than a good scare story to increase their audience or readership.

We need reality and common sense, not political hype, when confronted with such issues. What chance we will get either ?