A Shameful Year

Letters

Vol. 26 No. 2 · 22 January 2004

From Rob Close

Like Alan Bennett I first came across Andy Goldsworthy's sheepfolds by chance, on the moor road between Brough and Middleton-in-Teesdale (LRB, 8 January). I fear, however, that Bennett may have been misled by his market gardener: I obtained a leaflet, produced by Cumbria County Council, giving the locations of the folds, from the Tourist Information Centre in Middleton-in-Teesdale.

Rob Close
Drongan, Ayrshire

From Richard Thomas

I, too, was captivated by the video of planes flying through an apartment that Alan Bennett reports seeing at Kettle's Yard; it was part of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition at the Barbican about a year ago. Unfortunately there were no catalogues available, and, like Bennett, I failed to make a note of the artist's name. Perhaps it was the hypnotic effect of the planes. Later, I discovered that he is called Hiraki Sawa.

Richard Thomas
London W2

From Ian Leslie

The title of Alan Bennett's copy of Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer was changed to 'Man Eating Primer'. At my school, we had to manage with the Shorter Latin Primer. The covers of this had been amended, more palatably, to 'Shortbread Eating Primer'.

Ian Leslie
Ludlow, Shropshire

From Keith Flett

2003 was notable for many things, but in particular I see that Alan Bennett and myself were on two of the same demonstrations in Central London. All the more reason, surely, to get an LRB banner for concerned readers to march behind on such occasions.

Keith Flett
London N17

From Graham Brown

Alan Bennett's references to the Iraq debacle were admirably restrained. Even so they should remind the previously loyal Labour voters among us to consider more carefully than usual how we vote at the next general election.

Graham Brown
King’s Lynn, Norfolk

From John Lloyd

'Shameful' is the word that comes to mind on reading the extracts from Alan Bennett's diary for 2003 – but for the opposite reasons from the ones he gives. Shameful to hear two democratic leaders, George Bush and Tony Blair, slyly likened to Hitler through their common use of a phrase; shameful that one who publishes his comments on current events should so unthinkingly parrot the charge that the Prime Minister is 'parroting the American line'; shameful, way above all else, that he should wish to see published a paragraph, the relevant part of which reads: 'The news breaks of the arrest of Saddam Hussein. It ought to matter, and maybe does in Iraq, it certainly does in America. But here? Whatever is said it does not affect the issue. We should not have gone to war.' It ought to matter that the larger part of the British intelligentsia – at least that which is published – thinks like Bennett, but the emptiness of the views expressed makes it matter less and less. That the arrest of one who murdered and tortured on the scale of Saddam; who attacked two neighbouring states with the consequence of hundreds of thousands of deaths; who gassed tens of thousands of his own country's inhabitants (they were never allowed the status of citizens); who took personal, sadistic delight in the tortures he inflicted on his opponents; who sought to build up stocks of weapons of mass destruction so that he could cow the region; who starved his country to build palaces – that this should not matter to the British, who joined the war against his hideous regime, is a stupefying conclusion to come to at the end of a year's diary writing. That this should be the response – world-weary, cynical, smugly and narrowly certain of the outcome and meaning of a series of events whose consequences for good and ill cannot be known but which has included, at the very least, the nailing of one monster of a man – is shameful. That some readers would find this response agreeable is shameful. That so many who opposed this war should be so immured in the righteousness of their contempt for Bush and Blair as to be incapable of recognising that the world as a whole, and Iraq in particular, is the better for the capture of Saddam Hussein, is shameful.

John Lloyd
London NW3

From Colin Armstrong

Alan Bennett's eminence as a dramatist is beyond question. It is a pity therefore that his diary displays the political outlook of a hysterical schoolgirl.

Colin Armstrong
Belfast

Vol. 26 No. 3 · 5 February 2004

From Nick Simpson

Over the last year, comment on the Iraq war in the liberal intelligentsia's house journals has been so unreflective and spiteful that the aside in Alan Bennett's recent diary provoked no more than a resigned shrug. How welcome, then, that Bennett's position should be demolished so swiftly and thunderously by John Lloyd (Letters, 22 January). What will puzzle historians a century on is not that opposition to the war was so widespread – after all, postwar US foreign policy had generally been incompetent when not actually brutal, the war's legality was at best dubious, and our Governments did exaggerate the threat Iraq presented and, in cuddling up to other dreadful regimes, had indeed helped make Saddam the monster he became. Instead, it will perplex them that so many people preferred to turn a blind eye to the likelihood that a war to remove Saddam would result in far fewer casualties than even a year or so of his own continuing rule. The logic which says that it's worth killing ten or twenty thousand Iraqis to prevent the deaths of more than a hundred thousand is a brutal one, but one which the anti-war faction prefers nevertheless not to contemplate.

Nick Simpson
Manchester

From Julian Bell

John Lloyd is wrong. It is shameful that, in 2003, our Government lied to us about a non-existent threat from non-existent weapons of mass destruction; shameful that, as a result, hundreds of British and American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians died in an illegal, unnecessary, unjustified, immoral war; shameful that the President of the United States should now take credit for the capture of a tyrant who was actively supported by members of his current Administration until it no longer suited their interests; shameful that the same Administration continues to support tyrants across the world in the defence of its interests; and, above all, shameful beyond belief that these cynical, evil actions should have been justified in the name of democracy, human rights and morality. The only thing that is not shameful is that millions of people all over the world took to the streets in 2003 because they could see all this, and they knew that it was wrong. That makes me proud.

Julian Bell
Twickenham

From Edward Pearce

John Lloyd's petulant outburst at Alan Bennett will surprise no one familiar with his petulant outbursts. I recall the time when he took his ball home from the New Statesman, refusing to write further for such pinko subversives and anti-Americans.

There is no reason for the capture of Saddam to register heavily with Alan Bennett or anyone else familiar with the essential history. Saddam's wickedness was blazingly familiar when Donald Rumsfeld (as Secretary of State for Defense last time round) shook his hand on camera and assured him of America's continuing goodwill. His crimes were then without weight or notice to the US Government. It took another of the lefties whom Lloyd delights to savage, Dafydd Elis Thomas, then a mildly Marxisant Welsh Nationalist MP, to raise the Halabja gassings in the House of Commons in 1987, only to receive an embarrassed, unhelpful non-acknowledgment from the Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe. British foreign policy, then as now, lacked any capacity for civil dissent from the US view.

The little reported, not at all denounced Halabja gassings had taken place while the Iraq-Iran war was still going on. At that time, the object of hostility for the US was Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini had taken American hostages, denounced the US and given all-round offence. Saddam, as a man fighting the identified enemy, was indeed a criminal and conductor of massacres. But 'objectively', as they used to say in Stalin's day, Saddam was on the side of peace, light and democracy. And he was killing Iranians. During that eight-year war, 800,000 people are thought to have died, something regarded in official American circles as an acceptable price for setting back an enemy of the US. Saddam Hussein was, in the term coined to describe the Dominican gangster dictator Raphael Trujillo, 'a bastard but our bastard'.

It was only on his invasion of Kuwait that Saddam became a bastard against US interests, and American politicians, four years late, began to talk about Halabja. Alan Bennett recognises cosmic humbug when he sees it. John Lloyd, exemplifying what Orwell called 'transferred nationalism' and doing his bit as a pom-pom girl for the invasion, does not.

Edward Pearce
Thormanby, North Yorkshire

From Vanessa Coode

If, as Colin Armstrong puts it, Alan Bennett displays the political outlook of a hysterical schoolgirl (Letters, 22 January), the sooner one is lined up to replace Tony Blair the better. Would Armstrong, I wonder, hold the political outlook of a priapic schoolboy in higher regard? Possibly so, since another implication of his letter is that he finds Alan Bennett insufficiently manly for his taste. If Mr Armstrong would let us know his age and occupation (we know his gender), we might have the formula for a brand-new insult. Wouldn't that be nice?

Vanessa Coode
London N16

From Martin Ward

It's a tough call, but if it comes to choosing between the 'likes' and 'unlikes', put me in a gymslip and I'll scream at the sight of Virginia Wade.

Martin Ward
Northampton

Vol. 26 No. 4 · 19 February 2004

From Jane Binyon

I can quite believe that Alan Bennett's patience with Tony Blair is exhausted, but when he and Graham Brown (Letters, 22 January) want me to consider carefully how to vote at the next general election I need further advice. Have I missed Michael Howard's anti-war speeches, can I imagine Charles Kennedy in Number 10, or should I believe in the miracle of St Gordon, sitting in cabinet, providing the money yet somehow not implicated? Staying at home isn't an option for me.

Jane Binyon
Oxford

From Colin Armstrong

Vanessa Coode may rest assured that I intended to impugn only Alan Bennett's politics (Letters, 5 February). 'Hysterical schoolgirl' as a term of political abuse is not original. Attacking Lord Carson's speech against the Anglo-Irish Treaty in the House of Lords on 14 December 1921, the Earl of Birkenhead said that 'as a constructive effort of Statecraft' it 'would have been immature upon the lips of an hysterical schoolgirl'. It is unlikely that Birkenhead thought Carson insufficiently manly.

Colin Armstrong
Belfast