What Is History ?

I've been reading lots lately on the 1989 revolutions that brought down the Iron Curtain, especially accounts that were written at the time or not long after.
Looking back 20 years, it is the first bit of history I experienced as an adult and, given I had a personal interest in the outcome, it wasn't something that simply passed me by at the time. Given that, I have clear memories.
What are they ? News reports of Poland's round table and elections, although nebulous, still made an impression. Hungarian border guards out with the wire cutters opening the border with Austria is a sharper memory, as is the film of East Germans jumping through the gap.
But most of all it is the Czechs standing in Wenceslas Square jangling their car keys, Dubcek standing on the balcony while the crowds cheered. And Marta Kubisova singing. The more I read the more the song won't leave my head.


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My Dad

It's a year to the day since dad died. It's not been too stressful, low key in fact. Mother's mind has been kept off the anniversary by matters at hand and that, I think, is a good thing.

His death had been a while coming but looking back 12 months it amazed me, even though I had prepared for and maybe even rehearsed ahead of it, the event still packed the power to shock when it did arrive.

Now I look back fondly and without any of that pain. Except.

I can see him in my mind's eye and remember how he used to be and laugh, or curse, or cringe. But looking at photos of him I feel a sense of loss I don't get when simply thinking about him. He's no less real in my thoughts than he appears in the pages of a photo album, so it's not something I can even properly rationalise. It's harder to explain.

I'll go on looking, turning the pages, seeing the face and remembering the man with all his goodness and all his faults, no matter how sad the albums make me. You need all the tools at your disposal to keep memory alive and abandoning one simply because it illicits a response which surprises me and which, to be honest, I don't like would be wrong. It would be selfish to keep the albums permanently closed.

Hier Wo Ich Lebe

Strictly Come Griffin

If the BBC had wanted Nick Griffin on air simply as a ratings-winner surely it would have made more sense to have him appear on Strictly Come Dancing than Question Time ?
For once, I fear, Mark Thompson is right. He is only following the same rules that allow other small parties to go on the programme. It’s not the BBC’s fault the BNP won 6% of the vote in certain parts of the country at June’s European elections. That’s democracy, folks.
And if you don’t like it and you don’t want them either to get the lifeblood of publicity or votes, then you ban them from the airwaves a la Sinn Fein, or you stop them standing in elections like the Spanish did with Herri Batasuna.
The question that hasn’t left my head since Griffin’s Question Time appearance first came to light is, why would we want to reason with fascists anyway ? When it comes to discussions with the far right, I’m with Woody Allen’s character in Manhattan; baseball bats are a better weapon than words.
Politicians like Peter Hain, an honourable man with a genuine record of fighting racism, who say Griffin shouldn’t be on Question Time, should be hounding their leaders demanding the organisation is proscribed rather than browbeating the BBC.
And those who choose to share a platform with the BNP in the hope that people will be persuaded simply by the power of argument that British fascism is a bad idea, well, they must know they are on a hiding to nothing; preaching to the converted majority while failing to convince the minority who may be swayed by the extreme right.
Our political leaders, of all hues, should really be asking themselves how it ever came to this ? How could the BNP garner enough electoral support to even warrant the attention of David Dimbleby ? How is it possible for 1,048 people in Falkirk to go into a voting booth and put their X next to the party’s name at the Euro elections ?
They might find an unwillingness to confront these questions is in direct proportion to their complicity in creating the conditions for an increase in the BNP’s attractiveness.
Two things come to mind. The so-called ‘War On Terror’ and, secondly, the neoliberal-inspired global financial meltdown.
The pathetic attempts of our political leaders to justify imperialist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has amounted to just one argument; if we don’t stop them at source the Muslim extremists will come here and blow us all to bits.
In the misguided eyes of some that has been twisted into young white kids in shopping centres across Britain shouting “Taliban” at any passing Muslim. The fact that a few (less than 12) Muslims living in Britain have actually carried out attacks here has not only made the UK Government’s position seem stronger, it has also negated attempts by the Muslim community to paint the picture as false.
It bears all the hallmarks of a self-fulfilling prophecy; the more we are mired in these wars the more some people will see Muslims as “others”, outsiders not to be welcomed but instead feared. For the politicians to make a strong statement against such logic would undermine their own position, so instead we get ineffective, if well-meant, platitudes that don’t address the problem.

It’s easy for the like of the BNP to fill the gap with their hate. In a clever role reversal they suggest if we didn’t have so many Asian people here, spongers some of them, then we wouldn’t have so many problems dealing with the fuzzy-wuzzies abroad. And some people buy it because the counter reasoning is not just weak but undermined by the position of those making it.
If we mix in a recession and unemployment, short-time working, financial misery then the right-wing extremists can again rub their hands with glee. Because our leaders refuse to tackle the cause of all this misery, the bankers and international capitalists.
Instead they get our money to help them make more money, while the economy shows little sign of substantive recovery. And the BNP gets a double whammy; look, they say, the Government’s doing nothing to stop this greed, and while you’re sitting on the dole some Polish guy’s coming over here getting work and claiming benefits for his wife and kids. Some will make the connection and agree with Griffin and his cohorts.
The failure lies with the mainstream parties. If we get a sensible foreign policy then one line of BNP propaganda is pulled from under them. Should we have a Government committed to economic fairness then another argument is shut off. But it doesn’t happen. And they compound their errors by mistaking diversity for equality.
Polish and Pakistani people can come here and live and work and enjoy life and, by and large, they do so. Nothing in the law stops them. They achieve it through hard work and a sense of self-fulfilment. Ask them whether they need special attention from the state to help them and they will say no. Inquire as to whether the whole raft of diversity and equal opportunities legislation makes much difference to their lives, the answer will generally be negative. Self-help, in the form of ethnic support groups, generally suffices.
And yet positive discrimination is where most politically-inspired anti-racism initiatives take shape. Equality legislation in the field of race has not ended racism nor is it likely to, at least any time soon. And yet its very existence is the rod the far right uses most effectively to beat anti-racist campaigners over the head with.
But then again, how can our main parties argue that we should treat all people who live here equally, regardless of ethnicity, when we put the rich on a pedestal ? Surely their inability to create a more equal society in terms of wealth is a breeding ground for the kind of resentment of “others” that breeds the racism they want to try and eliminate ?
If we tackle the rich, take a strong stand against bankers’ bonuses by capping them, make the very wealthy pay more tax, stop large companies avoiding their fair share of the burden, then we can pour some revenues back into the country’s coffers and strengthen the public services that are funded by all our contributions.
We might then start feeling better about ourselves and, you never know, stop worrying about the “others” in our midst, a phantom really, but an economically and socially-based one that is doing us lots of harm. It’s a better option, surely, than going on the telly to say Nick Griffin is a bad man.

Multiculturalism

A crushed, empty can of Tyskie not on the streets of Warsaw, but Falkirk. It’s sometimes the simple, mundane things that draw your attention to the connectedness of Scotland and Poland.
When we were kids in the seventies and eighties it was different, of course. Then, it was the sense of distance and separation that was the most obvious link between the two. Mr Domowski’s Saturday morning Polish language lessons and Monsignor Drobina pressing a krowka into the palm of your hand, father and mother in ‘the club’ where the Poles would gather, that was our Poland.
But it was different one from the real Poland a thousand miles away. Divided not just by difference but also by ideology. I got a real sense of that when I went there aged eight, travelling in dad’s car all the way from Falkirk to Warsaw, through a hole in the Iron Curtain where I saw Red Army soldiers for the first time.
And it all seemed so alien, not just to my little bit of Poland in the heart of Scotland, but also to my Scottish life away from the confines of the exiles, our parents. Maybe also irrelevant, to some degree. We were Polish Scots, with the latter more important to us than the former, or at least that’s how it seemed to us whose ‘Polishness’ was diluted by one of our parents’ choice of partner.
We had our heritage which was different from our day-to-day existence and that meant our ability, and desire, to in some sense be Polish was lost. Scotland, and Falkirk, was where we were meant to be, not in the Communist world where they were supposed to be our enemies. But 1989 pulled that rug from under our feet.
Two things immediately struck me about the end of the People’s Republic of Poland, that far off place which seemed to have cut me off from my heritage and family.
First, I could travel to the new Polish Republic more easily and less bureaucratically and without coming under suspicion simply because I was from an émigré group. Second, I could, if I so wanted, become a Polish citizen with a passport and everything.
As the trips to the forgotten land began, the wasted opportunity of not being able to fully legitimate your Polish identity began to strike home. For some of us it felt as though the chance “be Polish” had gone completely at exactly the moment where it should have been possible. Like Alex Haley’s Roots, it was where I was from but was not really part of the person I was. There was a sense of regret at that, maybe for the first time I wanted to be a Scottish Pole.
So I read and I learned and used the internet to increase my understanding and connections with people allowed me to seem a bit more Polish, at least to myself.
Then the EU influx opened up my eyes to how I really wasn’t that Polish at all, at least not next to those with real lived experience of the place. In one sense it was good to have your own home, and the people in it, exposed to the kind of culture you had grown up understanding you had some, often tenuous-seeming, link to. There was the ability to buy Polish food in the shops, hear it spoken on the streets, have Poland and the Poles discussed in the media.
But, deep down, it created a feeling of somehow being an outsider. The eventual realisation was having a foot in both camps left me with a sense that I didn’t really belong in either the group marked “Scottish” or the one labelled “Polish”.
I am one thing but want to be the other, knowing full well I will never be able to tie myself to one identity. Is that multiculturalism ?

Our Postie

Our postie doesn't look like one, if anyone can "look like" the job they do, that's to say ! What I really mean is that there is nothing in his appearance that says, 'I am a postman.'

He's young, has long brown hair which he ties back with a rubber band in a grunge-rock kind of way and wears jeans, a hoodie and trainers. The only way to identify his 'Royal Mailness' is the bright red bag full of letters to deliver.

I suppose I should be grateful that I recognise our postal worker because, from what I gather, many people have a different person turn up every day. He certainly may be regular but his timing isn't. He can arrive any old time.

Our block of flats is next to a traditional corner shop selling newspapers, tobacco and hot filled rolls. It is the place he delivers to prior to coming in our front door and, if his arrival coincides with lunchtime, he hands over the mail to the shop staff and buys a roll filled with sliced sausage while he's there.

He then comes out of the shop and stands in the street eating his lunch. Only then does he move on and deliver our letters. His dress and behaviour hardly deonte a public servant, but then he probably doesn't think of himself as one and his bosses have perhaps done nothing to inclucate in him any sense of that.

It is a picture of the terminal decline of the post as something of geniune importance. Rember when all our postal workers had to conform to the Postman Pat stereotype ? No more, and it is so because those who run the Royal Mail no longer see any need for it. Delivering our letters, less important now because of e-mail, is just another business not a public duty. It's all about profit.

Thankfully, some who still work in the postal service see it as just that, a public service. That is the reason why they are going on strike this week, to make sure those standards are not lost completely. They believe the Royal Mail is worth saving, that it can be both modernised and retain its essential spirit. We can still move with the times and yet preserve the seriousness of duty conveyed in John Grierson's great film, Night Mail.

But politicians can only see money flowing into the Exchequer's coffers by hiving part of it off to the private sector, and can only but blindly follow their great dictum that greater choice in mail deliverly services will benefit the public. You get the feeling they believe allowing orange-jacketed TNT posties to compete with the Royal Mail is a good thing. The bosses want more profits and want staff to jump through more hoops in order to achieve it, even though that profit is not being ploughed back into making the service anything of the sort.

There is only one thing for it; if you think the post is too important to put profit first then don't complain when there are no deliveries on Thursday and Friday. Support our striking posties.

They're At It Again

Peter Hain when will you ever learn ? He's on about the BNP again in the papers and he's the latest New Labourite to blether the same old rubbish about Nick Griffin's European election success in June.

Mr Hain has a great record in fighting racism, so you would expect him to know more about identifying it than most of us. But there he is in The Guardian telling us that folk who voted BNP only did so as a protest against the big parties in the wake of the Westminster expenses farago.

What's more, he says voting BNP is, in such circumstances, not an endorsement of racism, per se.

He's not the only Labour politico to fall into the same trap of refusing to accept that some outwardly upstanding British people have some sympathies with racist thinking. If voting for a party at an election is not an endorsement of their policies then what's the point ? Is he saying the very act of voting has all the foresight of a sticking the tail on a donkey contest ? If people who voted BNP in June aren't racist then why didn't they vote Green, or Lib Dem as a protest ?

Labour have tried to come back by saying they chose BNP simply for its power to shock. Certainly they did that if that was the objective. But no person who rejects racism would ever commit such an act.

So Hain, and his friends, have to at least admit those whose X went next to the BNP on the ballot paper were at least prepared to countenance being represented by people with racist and extreme right-wing views. Don't kid yourselves, and us, that the Great British Public have clean hands when it comes to viewpoints on nationality, identity and race, irrespective of how they vote at elections. The truth says something different.

They can congratulate themselves all they want about changing attitudes everytime a TV presenter is told off for saying golliwog but that kind of gesture is not based in the reality of the everyday. Not every Briton is racist, far from it. Most are probably don't have to think about race in their daily lives. But those who are suddenly confronted with race as an issue can sometimes deliver a viewpoint which can chill you to the bone and shock you, simply because you have never heard them ever say such a thing.

Mr Hain says less than one per cent of people in Britain harbour racist opinions. He should correct that to say "admit to" racist opinions. It's the ones who keep it to themselves we should worry about because the day may come when it will rise to the surface.

God Help Latvia

You would think Latvians would have more to worry about than grandad’s wartime service record. The tsunami that is the global economic crisis washed over the Baltic country leaving devastation in its wake.
The Latvian economy is scheduled to shrink by 18% in the next year. The government’s had to slash public spending which has put doctors, nurses and teachers on the dole as schools and hospitals close. Wages have been cut by 30% or more. As it is, unemployment’s running at 17%.
And as for the property boom ? Well, it seems most mortgage payers are now in negative equity and, as those mortgages are in euros, many are facing repossession. Banks aren’t lending. The IMF is demanding Latvia reduce its national debt to 8.5% of GDP this year, thus almost certainly meaning more budget cutbacks. There have been riots on the streets of Riga and one change of Prime Minister.
And it the midst of all this chaos the Latvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs calls in the British Ambassador to complain about David Milliband’s outburst that some politicians in Latvia glorify Hitler’s Waffen SS.
The Foreign Secretary’s comments were a barb thrown at the Tories for including an MEP from Latvia’s For Fatherland And Freedom Party in its rag-tag army of Brussels Eurosceptics (I’ve blogged about this mob often enough before).
The timing was pre-planned to coincide with the arrival of the Baltic party’s leader at the Tory conference fringe. Roberts Zile says he isn’t a Nazi apologist and has never glorified the SS. But their history is a murky one.
After the Germans kicked the Soviets out of Latvia in 1941 there’s no doubt some Latvians helped the Nazis kill Jews. Some of them later went onto become members of the Waffen SS when there weren’t enough Germans left to fill the divisions.
Many were just teenagers who were told they could fight in an SS uniform or become a slave labourer in Germany. Others were anti-communists who wanted to stop a Soviet re-invasion of Latvia. Some more were those guilty of war crimes. But not according to the Latvian government.
Its official policy is that grandad had no choice, he had to go off and put on a German uniform and he certainly didn’t kill any Jews. So, in its eyes, there’s nothing wrong with visiting memorials (constructed after Latvia gained its independence from the Soviet Union) honouring those who died wearing SS colours. The official line is they were only doing either what they were forced to do or what they thought was right to save Latvian independence.
Hence the ticking off for Milliband. And most ethnic Latvians agree with their government, and Zile, not the UK one, so they are not, on the whole, likely to take very well to lectures from foreigners about moral choices people in Britain didn’t have to face.
And across Nazi-occupied Europe, in almost every country Hitler invaded, locals either joined the SS because they were right-wing fanatics or were press-ganged into donning German uniforms to make up for a shortage of manpower.
While some Latvians are still in denial over their wartime past and some certainly need to admit the truth over their countrymen’s participation in the Holocaust, Milliband’s attack on For Fatherland and Freedom won’t stick.
He no doubt chose the SS subject matter because of the emotional resonance it has in Britain. But it is far too easy for Zile and others to deflect. Milliband might have had more luck had he tried homophobia and bizarre attitudes to who is, and isn’t Latvian.
For Fatherland And Freedom don’t stand out from the crowd in Latvia over attitudes to the country’s wartime record, but in matters of who actually is a Latvian then they do.
More than ten years ago they attempted to give Latvian citizenship to people who had never set foot in the country but deny it to those who were born there. Because Latvia had a huge Russian and Ukrainian immigrant population they feared the indigenous culture would be strangled.
So they proposed all the Latvians who had fled abroad to escape the Soviets in 1945, and all their descendants, should AUTOMATICALLY get a passport. But the Russians and Ukrainians who were born there shouldn’t. They lost a referendum, only narrowly, and the Russian-speakers still have to jump through hoops to get citizenship that is freely available to Latvians born in Britain, the US and Australia. (One hoop is admitting the Soviet backed influx of Russians into Latvia was illegal).

Today there are hundreds of thousands of Russian-speaking "non-citizens" who won't jump to the Latvian tune and who can't get a passport to travel abroad. Some have undergone "naturalisation" but Zile's party stood in the 2006 elections on the ticket of stopping the Russians gaining any kind of Latvian citizenship.
Even today Zile told the newspaper “Latvijas Avizei” that the country should be “very cautious” about who is Latvian, citing the example of his French teacher in Brussels who “might have been from one of the Indochinese countries” who declared themselves to be French.
In Zile’s view, then, to be Latvian you have to speak the language, be “a patriot” and, it would appear the case that you have to look Latvian as well. Anything which seems foreign has to be guarded against. And he gets away with this in an EU country ?
His attitude to the Russian-speaking minority is barely contemptuous. “I see Latvia as a country dominated by the Latvian language and culture and by the political determination of the Latvians,” he told Latvijas Avizei. Of ethnic minorities there is no mention. He dismisses co-operation with the main party that represents Russians.
And this guy is in government. He is one of the main “experts” that is supposed to lead Latvia out of the economic morass it finds itself in.
Maybe Milliband should have been highlighting this as the kind of European partner Dave wants to encourage ; a near-miss xenophobe with extreme right-wing and anti-gay ideas. Imagine a member of the UK cabinet going around shouting 'Britain for the British'. And they want him to lead the economy back on the straight and narrow ?
There is a blogger who calls his site “Failed State Latvia ?” Maybe soon he can drop the question mark.

One Day

One day I will find more things to say. The words will flow, one after another, and take shape on the page, making some kind of sense, forming some kind of an opinion or maybe a statement of fact. But now ? Now I am struggling, not with the time to write things down, not with thoughts in my head, but struggling nevertheless.

Struggling, perhaps, with the pointlessness of it all. Of scribbling and creating things hardly anyone will read and even fewer will agree with. Strange, the internet has made the world a tower of babel, but the more people speak, or write, does it mean the fewer there are to listen or read ?

At the moment I will listen, read, watch, observe. And then, at the moment when it feels right, I will write.