Notebook
Between news bulletins of the Lufthansa hijack, the BBC on Saturday showed Beethoven's opera Fidelio about a girl who d.-esses up as a man and takes a job as a jailer in order to save the life of her husband, who is languishing in a political prison. It seems that the modern German girl who wants to get her man out of prison is more likely to kidnap a banker, hijack a plane and threaten to blow up its passengers in Somalia.
It has been said that Somalia helped the Germans to rescue the plane because they need Western help in their war against Ethiopia. Most of the fighting so far has been around Jigiga, Harar and Dire Dawa, three towns of which we have vivid accounts from Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Balfour (now Lord Kinross) who went there as correspondents during the 1936 war against Italy. They both liked Harar, the old walled City where Burton went as a spy, where Rimbaud traded and where the late Emperor Haile Selassie served as provincial governor for the Amharic regime in Addis Ababa. Balfour described the Hararis and Gallas as 'amiable and friendly by comparison with suspicious, hostile Amaharas who had conquered them', but did not detect any desire to be ruled by Italians. Indeed Waugh called the Hararis 'a pacific People who did not want to get involved on either side in the coming struggle' —or in the Present dispute, so one hears. When Balfour and Waugh reached Jigiga they got an exclusive story about the arrest of a French countess and spy, only to be reproached by their newspapers for not getting a much more sensational story about an American oil concession.
The Somali-Ethiopian war is peculiar in two respects. It is the only war in Africa to have been fought between nation states rather than tribal factions within a state. And both governments claim to be Marxist. Oddly enough there is another, smaller war going on in South-East Asia between two other Marxist nation states — Vietnam and Cambodia. According to vague rumour these two countries are, like Ethiopia and Somalia, disputing those border regions Whose population is mixed or, like the Hararis, a different people. There are said to have been artillery duels in Vietnam's highland province of Darlac, most of whose People are Rhade tribesmen, who used to live. in pleasant wood long-houses, passing their time in feasts, drinking rice wine, banging gongs and beating animals to death m.sacrifice. The Rhade feared and hated the Vietnamese and looked for protection first to the French and then to the Americans, especially the Green Berets or Special Forces, with whom I once went on elephant patrol to the Cambodian border. First the Green Berets and then all the Americans went, leaving the Rhade to the mercy of the Vietnamese, first Nationalist and then Communist. On my last visit to Darlac province, a drunk American aid adviser recited Kipling ('Take up the white man's burden'), waxed maudlin about the fact that the Rhade were doomed to extinction and then said, 'Why should we care. I don't care. Do you?' Yes I did. The Rhades, like the Hararis do not fit in our modern civilisation, which is a good reason to mourn their passing.
A Northern Irish politician, Paddy Devlin, has said of the 'Peace Women' who won the Nobel Peace prize: 'They don't exist, except as a figment of media imagination'. That remark is unknowingly most revealing because of course Mr Devlin himself, John Hulme, William Craig, Brian Faulkner, Ian Paisley and all the other Ulster gasbags would not 'exist', in the sense that we would not have heard of them, but for the media, and in 'particular TV. Literally dozens of Irish people have in the last nine years been given a quite unwarranted fame and also a great deal of money in appearance fees. Some, like Mr Devlin, enjoy the fame while others (I have in mind a certain Protestant militant) are more interested in the money. To almost all of them, I suspect, it must have occurred that if Northern Ireland dropped out of the news, their faces would drop off the screen. This may help to explain why so many prominent Ulster politicians, Catholic and Protestant, unite in condemning the women who threaten peace. Or have I just got a suspicious mind?
Why do 'militant' trade unionists always pretend to be both 'working class' and 'left-wing'? Most of the militant trade unions represent what used to be called the middle-class jobs like doctor, journalist, skilled engineer, teacher and civil servant. In eastern Europe and countries like France with a strong left-wing political movement, the unions are feeble. In the United States and Argentina, trade unions are politically to the right, and indeed in Chile they overthrew the Allende government by their strikes. In countries today like Italy, Spain and Malta, it is the middle classes that tend to strike while Communists remain quiet. But what about Arthur Scargill and his miners picketing Grunwick? Are they not militant, and working class? Yes they are in the same way that working-class white South Africans are militant, and for the same reason: to keep out non-whites prepared to work for lower wages.
The reviews I have seen of a new book on Thackeray seem to agree that he was not much of a novelist, comparing him unfavourably with Dickens. For example Benny Green in the Spectator wrote that 'not even the most fanatical Thackerayan would argue that his hero commanded the compensatory psychological and social insights that Dickens did.' Although an adorer of Dickens (and recent discover of Thackeray) I have never thought of him as having much psychological insight, indeed apart from the comics and grotesques, his characters tend to be pretty insipid. Compare for example Mr Pecksniff and Sarah Gamp with Martin Chuzzlewit and Tom Pinch. Perhaps Mr Green's preference is explained by what he called Dickens's 'social insights'. He was radical on most issues (although reactionary on some) and roasted the Victorians for their complacency to injustices. He can in fact be seen as a prophet of modern, social welfare Britain although I suspect he would soon have seen through our own modern humbug. Perhaps it is modern humbug about class, race and 'compassion' that makes us feel rather shocked by Thackeray's cynicism, snobbery and even callousness. It was callous of an Englishman to write,' in Barry Lyndon 'that which seems to be pretty unsparingly exercised in Ireland by those natives who have it, the right of looking down with scorn upon all persons who have not had the opportunity of quitting the mother-country and inhabiting England for a while'. Yes, it was callous, especially since Ireland, at the time Thackeray wrote, was both oppressed by the English and starving. Nevertheless that remark, like so many Thackeray wrote, was amusing and true.
Richard West
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