A Time Of Fear

Terror Drives Them Westward: Syrian refugees trudge the dusty roads of Serbia en route to "Angela's" country - Germany. It is impossible to view the great throngs of migrants, piling up like driftwood against the newly-erected fences of the European Union, and not recall the Great Migration of uprooted peoples into the Western Roman Empire between 300-800 AD.

 

IT WAS A TIME of fear. People cast worried glances to the East, where rumour reported whole peoples on the move. Travellers said they were fleeing in terror from men who laid waste to villages, towns and cities without scruple or regret. Women, children, the temples of the gods: none were spared. Military commanders looked to the strength of the Empire’s defences: to the mighty walls and high gates that had stood for so long – and they wondered.

 

Between 300 and 800AD successive waves of migrant peoples beat against and washed over the borders of the Western Roman Empire. During these turbulent centuries, the component peoples of the “Great Migration” laid down the ethnic foundations of modern Europe. Some of its most powerful nations still bear the titles of these “Dark Age” migrants. The Frankish tribes settled in what is now France. The Angles gave their name to England. Rome’s empire, however, did not endure. The West fell.

 

It is impossible to view the great throngs of migrants piling up like driftwood against the newly-erected fences of the European Union and not recall the Great Migration. Impossible, too, not to imagine the panicky communications between all those provincial governors and the Emperor’s servants back in Rome. “What are we supposed to do with all these people! Should we feed them – or slay them?”

 

Rome’s answer, then, was the same as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s, now: “Let them in.” Like the ranks of Rome’s fourth century legions, the ranks of Germany’s industrial workers have been thinning of late. Dangerously low birth-rates dictate that the Empire of Porsche and Mercedes Benz admit as many auxiliaries as it can lay its hands on.

 

No doubt the bureaucrats in Rome, fervent believers in the Empire’s ability to make loyal Roman citizens out of the most unprepossessing of barbarian material, reassured their provincial governors that all would be well. These Goths were doughty warriors, they said. Properly trained they would ensure that the Emperor’s legions remained invincible.

 

Chancellor Merkel is equally upbeat. The upwards of a million refugees pouring across Germany’s borders from the civil war in Syria, and all those other great concentrations of misery along the North African coast, will soon be made into “Good Germans”. In the coming decades, the Fatherland’s complexion may grow a few shades darker, but Germany’s culture will survive unscathed.

 

The Romans’ optimism was misplaced. The migrant peoples admitted to the Empire may have swelled the legions depleted ranks, but they were never accepted as equals by “real” Romans. In the years ahead, ethnic rivalries would erupt into riots: blood would be spilled; hatreds flare and burn. The legions, increasingly composed of “barbarians”, would hear of these massacres, and the Emperor’s military resources would haemorrhage like an untended wound. In 410AD, the Visigoth chieftain, Alaric, sacked Rome. Saint Jerome, hearing the news in far off Bethlehem, lamented: “The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken.”

 

Alaric's Visigoths conquer Rome 410 AD.

 

Chancellor Merkel’s confidence may be equally misplaced. As the so-called “Summer of Smiles” – during which trainloads of exhausted refugees were met by Germans beaming with love and goodwill – gave way to Autumn gales and cold driving rain; and the refugees’ tent cities began springing up outside quiet German villages and towns; anti-immigrant demonstrators started appearing in the streets. The German people would appear to be much less confident of their assimilationist capacities than their increasingly unpopular Chancellor.

 

Forty years after the sack of Rome, Visigoth and Roman fought side-by-side on the Catalaunian Plains of Western Gaul against Attila and his Huns. It was from such fierce Asiatic tribesmen, the Huns especially, that so many of the peoples who joined the Great Migration were fleeing. By combining their strength, and defeating Attila, the Roman general, Flavius Aetius, and his Visigothic ally, Theodoric, were able to give the civilised communities of the Western Empire a few more decades of security and stability.

 

Modern day equivalents of Attila's Huns - Soldiers of the Islamic State.

 

How sad it is that the modern-day equivalents of Flavius and Theodoric – Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin – cannot emulate their predecessors’ success by putting aside their differences and combining their strengths against the modern-day equivalent of Attila the Hun – Islamic State and its army of jihadis.

 

What other means is there of stemming the human tide lapping at Europe’s borders? The West looks down from its crumbling walls – and it wonders.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 23 October 2015.

Making A Desert And Calling It Peace: Why I Agree With Winston Peters.

Syria In Agony: It is such a mess. And all the horrors that fill our screens are the progeny of the West’s intervention. Every hostage beheaded. Every gay man hurled to his death from a high place. Every 9-year-old girl traded in the slave-markets of Raqqa and Mosul. Every screaming reproach and accusation wrenched from the victims of IS and Assad, alike, is ours to answer. Only the West possessed the power to break this world, and only the West can fix it.

WINSTON PETERS wants the men of Syria to fight for their homeland. By all means, he says, let us give succour and safe haven to the women and children of that bloody dystopia. But, let us not offer a permanent residence to Syria’s misery. Not unless the world is ready to swallow every last Syrian. To leave their home a desert – and call it peace.

 

The Left finds it easy to dismiss Winston and his gnomic pronouncements. They look at him the way they’ve always looked at people who wear suits to protest planning meetings – with a mixture of disbelief and suspicion. That prominent leftists are now willing to vouch for him only pushes the comrades’ eyebrows higher. “Don’t let the flash suits put you off,” say Matt and Andrew, “Winston’s okay. A little old fashioned, yes, but don’t worry, we all hate the same people.”

 

Okay, but, really! How are we supposed to take Peters seriously when he comes out with stuff like this? Send the Syrian men back to fight? FFS - the guy’s an idiot!

 

But when our tears for little Aylan have dried. When the global news cycle has rolled over enough times for the images of the Middle East’s wretched human refuse to have lost their power to shock and shift public opinion. What then? When the razor-wire fences have all been made people-proof. When the sleeping dogs of European racism have all been kicked awake and are howling down the bleeding-hearts and do-gooders. What will we do then?

 

Because the great engine of all this grief; the motor of all this misery, will not have stopped. Not for a moment will the death machine that is the Syrian civil war have ceased to pump out its torrents of innocent blood. Four million human-beings have already been driven beyond Syria’s borders by the combined efforts of Bashar al-Assad’s Baathists, the Islamic State, and whatever loose assortment of Saudi-funded and US-trained jihadis are currently passing themselves off as the Free Syrian Army. That just leaves another 20 million souls to decant into the already overflowing vessels of Syria’s immediate neighbours.

 

Who cannot possibly take so many, and so will drive these new waves of refugees northward and westward, following the trail of tears to the European Union. Which, in spite of its name, will offer only increasingly divided counsels – and higher walls.

 

Yes, the injustice of all this rises to heaven on a reeking cloud of Western mendacity. Having broken the Middle East and North Africa into a thousand pieces, the United States and its Nato allies now refuse to own the desolation their own hands have wrought. They smashed Afghanistan for no better reason than to sate the Great Hegemon’s thirst for vengeance after 9/11. Then they invaded Iraq – this time in pursuit of some delusional NeoCons’ dream of inculcating capitalist democracy in a made-up country with virtually no history of either capitalism or responsible government.

 

It is such a mess. And all the horrors that fill our screens are the progeny of the West’s intervention. Every hostage beheaded. Every gay man hurled to his death from a high place. Every 9-year-old girl traded in the slave-markets of Raqqa and Mosul. Every screaming reproach and accusation wrenched from the victims of IS and Assad, alike, is ours to answer. Only the West possessed the power to break this world, and only the West can fix it.

 

But not just the West. The Russian Federation and the Peoples Republic of China must also be part of the solution. A truly global force, assembled under the banner of the United Nations. Hundreds-of-thousands of soldiers: men and women of all colours and creeds, drawn from every continent, to cauterise the bleeding wound that is Syria. And in their wake the agents of international justice – for the sake of ruined Palmyra and its martyred guardian; for the sake of tiny, helpless, innocent Aylan.

 

And in the vanguard of that mighty host, the young men of Syria: leading the attack; hewing down the flags of tyranny; setting their nation free.

 

It’s all Winston Peters is trying to say: that Syria cannot be saved by emptying it of Syrians.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 9 September 2015.

Passing The Turing Test

Conducting The Turing Test: The distinguishing of replicants from real humans lies at the heart of the Blade Runner movie. If thousands more refugee men, women and children are not to be lost in transit, “like tears in the rain”, then the First World’s leaders must prove that they, too, are human.

 

BLADE RUNNER is one of my favourite movies. From the film’s opening sequences, introducing a compellingly dystopian Los Angeles, to the stark poetry of the doomed replicant, Roy Batty’s, final moments, we are invited to consider, exactly, what it means to be human.

 

Based on the science-fiction writer, Philip K Dick’s, novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the movie raises all sorts of intriguing possibilities vis-à-vis the future of the human species. Not the least of these is the possibility that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, our technology may be able to replicate human-beings that are not only indistinguishable from the original – but more honourable and compassionate.

 

The distinguishing of replicants from real humans lies at the heart of the Blade Runner story. How to prevent these bio-mechanical devices from deceiving men and women into misidentifying them as fellow human-beings – that is the challenge.

 

From the moment they were conceived, the potential power of “thinking machines”, computers, troubled their creators. As the capacity of these machines increased, and the scope of their capabilities expanded, the ability of average human-beings to differentiate the computer from one of their own kind would, presumably, diminish. It was certainly a possibility that intrigued the father of the modern computer, Alan Turing.

 

Looking fifty years into the future, Turing, the mathematical genius who, by helping to crack the Germans’ Enigma Code, shortened the Second World War by two to four years, saw the need for some sort of test. The question he posed was: “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?” His answer was an emphatic “Yes”. He predicted that the computers of the future, responding to human questioners with text only answers, would be able to pass the “Turing Test” (i.e. fool the interrogators) about 70 percent of the time.

 

Blade Runner was released in 1982. Thirty-three years ago, the year 2019 seemed far away enough for all the technological wonders appearing in the movie to have been realised. Sadly, or, perhaps,  fortunately, humanity has yet to develop a significant “off-world” presence. And, while the science of robotics displays considerable momentum, replicants of Roy Batty’s sophistication still seem a long way off.

 

And yet, the questions raised by Philip K Dick, and translated into film by Ridley Scott, have not gone away. Indeed, computers have become so critical to human existence that it is now possible to ask whether the age-old desire to make machines that replicate humans has been abandoned in favour of a new mission to make humans that replicate machines.

 

More and more human-beings are defining themselves in terms of the networks they log-in to – so much so that to suddenly find themselves shut out of those networks would severely curtail their ability to function successfully. Increasingly, we are redefining and reprocessing experience in technological terms. A century ago, people marvelled that the moving images projected onto the cinema screen were “Just like real life!” A century later, people observe real life events and exclaim: “Just like the movies!”

 

Except that the real world is nothing like a movie, or, at least, like no movie any First World audience would willingly sit through. The ridiculously short and tightly edited clips of reality that appear on our devices convey only a fraction of the enormous scale and intensity of human suffering occurring out there in unmediated space – the real world.

 

The intrusion of tens-of-thousands of refugees into the European Union; a flood tide of human misery unprecedented since the end of World War II; is setting up a kind of Turing Test in reverse. In effect, the crisis is posing the question: “Are there imaginable First World human-beings who would do well in the imitation game?” Will the people fleeing from the unending stress and horror of the Middle East and Africa still recognise them as fellow humans, or, have they become so integrated with their devices as to be indistinguishable from machines?

 

The good news is that not even in the highly-networked, hyper-mediated nations of the First World has the capacity for human empathy been totally eliminated. Indeed, the devices that objectively distance us from reality are, paradoxically, without peer in carrying powerful emotional messages across all manner of boundaries. This is by no means an unqualified good, but in relation to the global refugee crisis it is proving to be a powerful goad for official action.

 

Less certain of passing the Turing Test, however, are the First World’s political leaders. Indeed, their responses are so emotionally out-of-sync with the rest of humanity that they seem more replicant than representative. If thousands more refugee men, women and children are not to be lost in transit, “like tears in the rain”, then the First World’s leaders must prove that they, too, are human.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 9 September 2015.