Category: Essays

The phenomenon of suicide bombers and suicide pilots came up in a recent conversation. There are similarities between today’s Islamofascist suicide killers and the Kamikaze pilots of the second world war, but there are significant differences too. It thus seemed worth examining indoctrination, brainwashing and how the mind can be manipulated as well as reviewing suicide itself. There is also the vexed question of whether killing can ever be justified. One of the ten commandments is often stated in English as “thou shalt not kill” but in other translations it becomes “thou shalt not murder“. Many things are not black and white even when it involves causing death.

We are all indoctrinated from childhood – especially within the family and the culture we were raised in. There is no such thing as a Muslim or a Christian child but there are children who are the offspring of Muslim and Christian parents. It is strange that people can say, for example, “those are Muslim or Catholic or Jewish children” but people do not say “those are Socialist or Republican or Democratic children”. Faiths, Religions and Creeds are the primary indoctrinators of most people and the seeds that they sow are, too often, allowed to grow unquestioned. Some of those seeds will lie dormant in the unconscious and can be reactivated in the future depending on certain actions and by propaganda.

My own skepticism about faith began in one memorable moment. One day I suddenly realised that I was saying the creed for the umpteenth time without ever having considered what I was saying. How had that happened? How had words been simply put into my mouth? How dare they have induced me to say “I believe” no better than a parrot.

Religious indoctrination is one thing but there are other forms that are harder to define and these relate to tribalism, race and nationality. There are very many tribes. Some are nations (the English and the British and the Irish and the Japanese and the French); some are class-based (the proletariat and the bourgeois and the aristocracy); some are conflations of faith and inheritance (Hasidic Jewry and the descendants of Mohammed); some are simply racist (white or yellow or black supremacists); some are religious sects and organisations (Orange order protestants and Mormons and Scientologists) and some are, often bizarre, cults (formed under such people as The Rev. Jim Jones  or Aum Shinrikyo or Charles Manson). You can make your own list, but the point is that if one comes from any “pure” tribe there is a tendency to identify with that tribe and to rebuke and repel outsiders. In Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan”, the maid of Orleans makes such a point when she says, about liberation from the English, “… for a France free and French”. One of the problems for a mongrel like me (a mélange of Anglo-Irish, Scottish & Polish ancestry and a mixed Catholic & Protestant upbringing) is where to find my tribe. Possibly my tribe is everyone who is outside a tribe, but let no one forget the  parable of the Good Samaritan. To embrace the stranger, the dispossessed, the other and even the leper is a deep Christian message that, hypocritically, is neglected far too much by far too many.

We are all thus inherently indoctrinated even though we had no choice about being born in the first place, but becoming “brainwashed” involves deeper consideration. It involves wiping the blackboard clean and then rewriting it. It is surprising that the recent suicide bombers in Sri Lanka were mostly well-educated and well-off people and not the more common religious freaks. Richard Dawkins (whom I much admire but also dislike) believes that our religious upbringing predisposes or augments an ability to consent to the killing of non-believers in later life. He also sees close parallels between the intolerance of today’s islamofascists and the white supremacist evangelicals of the deep south of the USA. Not for the first time, a “radicalised evangelical” shot Jews in America last week, whilst quoting such well-worn stories of how the Jews killed Christ. Many within Islam agree that apostasy and blasphemy can or even should be punished by death. Such beliefs make my blood run cold and yet these punishments are not so different from those of the Roman Catholic Church in the not very distant past. Any faith that does not allow someone to change their belief is inherently hollow. Any faith that cannot withstand satire is similar. We are told that the God of Islam is merciful and compassionate. It is not without irony that many of its followers are not.

One of the problems with any form of fundamentalism is that it does not encourage changing one’s mind freely. It thus subverts science and harms the intellect. Kathleen Taylor has shown that, once brainwashed, those same neural pathways become resistant to change and although it is often credited to the Jesuits, it was Aristotle who originally said: “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man”.

Is brainwashing any different from indoctrination? I don’t know but they are not miles apart. Possibly brainwashing involves attempting to bend another to one’s own will in a more aggressive or systematic way. It very often starts with propaganda from media that is servile to a dictator, to a religious leader/idea and even to the great god, greed. Nowadays such propaganda much too freely permeates all our lives through television and the internet. It nearly always progresses with distortions of truth and the demonization of “those outside the tribe”. There may be promises of a reward after death or with the much simpler reward of just becoming notorious. Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand Prime Minister, hit the mark when she refused to name the Christchurch mass murderer and concentrated her talk about the lives of those who were killed or were suffering thus denying the desired news-exposure of the killer.

Radicalisation in the UK is known to often start in prison with people who are dropouts with low self-esteem and who find themselves in an environment from where they cannot escape being prey to radicalising predators. The attackers in Sri Lanka had a different background. They came from a background of wealth and privilege just as did Osama Bin Laden and an easy-going professional man (a Palestinian that I once knew) who went away for a holiday to the Middle East and came back with his wife in a burka, cursing the USA and a very much changed man. Such radicalisation/brainwashing/indoctrination of people who are far from being fools is hard to grasp but it perhaps illustrates that immunity from indoctrination seems to be rare.

The study of psychology can be useful because it can awaken us to our own susceptibilities and abilities to think clearly. One of the most interesting experiments about group pressure is the use of a lift with one normal door. The subject enters a lift full of people but after it starts to move everyone else inside turns to face the back of the lift. Only very rarely does the subject remain facing the door.

The term brainwashing was first used in the context of the Korean war by the Chinese and it almost certainly continues to this day in North Korea. I have read an analysis of brainwashing techniques and it is fairly easy to understand why an isolated person with low self-worth is open to manipulation. However, also of importance is the emphasis of the difference between “us and them”. These differences are then magnified and distorted by smothering the novitiate within a group of like-minded people. The concept of “love bombing” is new to me but I can see how it could be an effective tool for a manipulator. “We all love you and the rest of the world is bad so you should join us” could be the refrain.

Radicalisation, for want of a better word, is one thing. Everything that deals with suicide is another. When both are combined – producing the deadly effects of pilots flying into the twin towers, the recent killing of hundreds in churches and hotels in Sri Lanka and Kamikaze pilots dive-bombing the US fleet – then some new thinking is needed. It is one thing to commit suicide out of depression or to abolish pain or even to make a political point (the monks who burned themselves in Vietnam or the Czech students, when the Soviets invaded their country). It is a different thing to want to harm others as part of the act. I can understand (but not get into) the mind of a miserable person (usually a man) who wants to kill both himself and his spouse and children (out of shame for example) and even a suicide whose real aim is to hurt another by hoping to make them believe they were the cause of the death (a final selfish act) but I find it much harder to grasp how anyone justifies and wants to indiscriminately murder huge numbers of people – whether it includes their own suicide or not.

One should never gloss over horrific events that are indiscriminate because this is often the hallmark of fascism. As the SS developed it did not only target Jews, Slavs & communists. It also targeted ordinary Germans in a completely arbitrary way. This terrorism created an environment of fear that helped the perpetrators achieve their ends. The silent majority in Ireland failed to speak out enough against the paramilitaries during “The Troubles” and it was eventually (in the aftermath of the Omagh bombing) the words of John Hume that sounded the truth in public. He gave the perpetrators of the appalling crime their proper name. They were not just murderers. They were, in the literal sense of the word, fascists, seeking to overthrow the wishes of the people through terror. And, as with all fascists, they were skilled at utilising violence to give themselves an influence and power which they were unable to secure at the ballot box.

The thoughts inside the mind of any intended suicide are complex. One must also raise the question whether there is any difference between killing soldiers or civilians. Which was worse? To kill the almost defenseless soldiers trying to escape at Dunkirk or to firebomb the militarily unimportant Dresden (and which included that day of love, St Valentine’s day, in 1945 in the last days of WWII in Europe). I spent last Christmas night in Dresden and, knowing its history, I couldn’t get rid of the same sort of thoughts and gloom that flood into my mind when visiting Auschwitz. Is there any difference in suicidal bombers massacring churchgoers and those dive-bombing naval vessels, when one’s country is at risk? I don’t think there are easy answers.

Leaving ISIS to one side as an anomaly, it is interesting to note that suicide rates in the Middle East tend to be low. Not as low as in most of the Caribbean, where it can be as low as 1 in 200,000 but not nearly as high as most of the countries of the former Soviet Union, where it is usually about 1 in 3,000 per year. Such great divergences are quite peculiar and hard to understand but it also shows that suicide statistics are very mixed and must therefore have many different causes.

So today’s Islamist bombers (from the Twin Towers to the recent massacres in Sri Lanka) have been spawned in a culture where suicide has long been condemned (by both the state and the majority of the faithful) whereas the Kamikazes came from a nation, where loss of honour and any defeat had traditionally been resolved by committing suicide. The former usually do not discriminate who they kill but the latter only targeted the military. So there are similarities, but these are two significant differences between the two.

When any mass murder or genocide is planned the targeted victims must first be dehumanised. This is almost beyond question when it comes to the genocide as was carried out by the Nazis in Europe and by the Hutus in Rwanda. It is also why the Irish Journalist Fintan O’Toole is perceptive when he says that “there is no safe dose of fascism” for any such demonization starts in small increments. He has also analysed Trump by pointing out that he makes deliberate outlandish comments just to see what the reaction is. He can then either expand them or retract and modify them until his base is even more encouraged. He refers to this real danger in this way:  “Forget post-fascist – what we are living with is pre-fascism”. This pre-fascism in America is sadly being ignored by most of the Republican party and if things go very sour that legacy must not be forgotten. I have just enjoyed reading a “Dear GOP” article by Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan’s daughter.

Fintan O’Toole also recently made a point that we must learn (and indeed practice) the art of political dentistry: “For even in this age of social media, conversation is still a moral arena. People form their prejudices in all sorts of ways but they test them in ordinary talk, at work, in the cafe, on the bus, in the pub, over the dinner table, at the match, after Mass. It is in these unremarkable encounters that we establish what is and is not okay to say about others. It is here that prejudices either spread and become normal or are checked and exposed. It is here that political dentistry must be practised and the bad teeth of sweeping generalisations, paranoid conspiracy theories and mendacious “facts” pulled out. It requires a willingness to overcome embarrassment and break the uncomfortable silences that are taken for assent”. It appears that not enough bad teeth are pulled out in mosques nowadays.

So it could be argued that The Kamikazes did have a legitimate military target and that there was a tradition of death instead of defeat, capture and shame deeply entrenched in Japanese military culture. I think it is too simple to say that the suicidal Islamofascists killed the infidel so that they would be gifted with virgins in heaven. They must have been made to believe that their intended victims were less than human or at least so “lacking in the true faith” that they did not deserve to live. Such ideology is just as warped as that which must go on in the mind of a white supremacist mass murderer. The murderous zeal of ISIS is however very alarming and has parallels with the way the SS operated. It was not enough to kill as many as possible but also to do so in the most shocking way and with the most cynical methods.

Socrates was forced to commit suicide as a death penalty even though he had spoken against suicide in a parable that I paraphrase: “just like a farmer with his animals, the gods had put us in a field with a locked exit gate to which only the gods should hold the key”. Suicide is in fact so common that in the West it is the third most common form of death in people under the age of 45. Most “normal” suicides appear to result from despair or a lack of hope or a need to escape from pain, although some are also involved in the infliction of pain or death on others. The controlling partner who kills himself (nearly always a him) along with his wife and children is usually about to suffer some form of shame. What is probably more important from a pragmatic standpoint is how to prevent suicide and of how to prevent the radicalisation of mainstream Muslims (or anyone for that matter). Probably it can only be brought about from within Islam. Perhaps Islam is in need of its own “age of enlightenment” even though the European enlightenment of the 17^th century was a forerunner of the French revolution and much else.

So suicide is interesting and very incompletely understood. Freud talked about a desire for death that later became called Thanatos. He noted, if I am right, that thoughts about past bad events can become very dominant and repetitive in both the conscious and the unconscious and that this tendency to keep reliving a horrible past can take precedence over the desire for life and happiness! Of course there can also be repression, which usually makes matters worse. I think that such observations make much sense but the reasoning behind them is not deeply understood. It is my observation that individuals (and animals such as dogs and cattle for sure) have innate personalities that don’t fundamentally change over time – that is unless an individual undergoes some significant trauma. Both Bruno Bettelheim and Primo Levi bore testament to this. Both were deeply affected and changed by their treatment by the Nazis, despite their knowledge of both science and the psyche.

Other paradoxes about suicide are that the rates commonly go down when there is war or revolution but that they also can go down in places that are peaceful. There is no constant. Suicide is also more common in men, but attempted suicide is more common in women.

I was going to write about the pointlessness of revenge, but this essay deals with different matters and is long enough. The effects of revenge are well laid out in Esther in the Old Testament. Writing helps to clarify my thoughts. They are not “written in stone” and I hope I am always open to change. I hope that my neural pathways are not fixed in time. We should never forget the past but not live there too much. We can always make progress by asking questions and by realising how little we know. Most children start out as experimenters with an open mind but too many of them are driven or sucked into the beliefs of their educators with an indoctrination that can quench that zeal for true knowledge. The other terrible thing that happens to children who suffer sexual abuse or violence is that, having been exposed to such behaviour, they then so often repeat it themselves in later life. This too is a form of indoctrination.

Back in the sixties, Mary Whitehouse was a prominent campaigner against the permissive society. Often portrayed as a prude, she campaigned about too much sex and violence being portrayed in the media. I am not going to defend her but things have gone too far. Too many people (especially children) are now indoctrinated in another malign way. Historically films were given age categories but the almost unlimited and uncensored exposure to the most lurid and extreme pornography on the internet and the profusion of video games with themes of sex and violence must be part of some of today’s problems. Is there much difference between children coming from a home where there is incest and violence, compared to very early exposure to uncensored access of the internet? Another growing phenomenon is the huge amount of bullying via social media. Probably the bullied are more likely to become bullies themselves.

Don’t forget, at difficult moments in life, that the past and the present can contain bright pearls that, without any nostalgia, can be brought into the open and enjoyed. I always hope for a sunny future even though, in these uncertain times, there are many dark clouds on the horizon. Be wary of trying to influence others too much. I say this because all examples of what I would call evil have resulted from the imposition of the will of one entity on another. The free will granted by the creator is thus, for me, the very opposite of evil. It is Lucifer, that brightest star, who would entice you down his path.  Know false prophets by their fruits and be wary of idols. Not because it is commanded, but because a falling statue may crush you.

I have a cousin to whom I had been explaining how Roman Catholicism in Ireland is going through a crisis. The hypocrisy that underlay Bishop Casey’s love affair and then the problem he had in fully acknowledging and supporting his son may have been a starting point for many on this green island.

The protection of paedophile priests by the clergy up to the level of Abbot Kevin Smith and Cardinal Desmond O’Connell and the lack of support for their victims was another huge saga that alienated more and more of both the faithful and the secular in Ireland.

Another huge scandal that has become more and more apparent is how “Industrial Schools” and “Mother and Baby Homes” run by religious orders of Nuns operated both before and then for the most part of the 20th Century. The fire in Cavan that killed 35 girls and one adult in 1943 was bad enough in itself but the truth about how the children lived from day to day and the circumstances of their deaths was suppressed for a very long time.

The Magdalene Laundries in Ireland became an object of review in 1993 when a mass grave containing 155 corpses was uncovered in the convent grounds of one of the laundries. In the past 20 years or so it has become abundantly clear that the “fallen women” kept in these institutions were mistreated and used as slave labour. The last of these institutions was only closed in 1996.

The latest scandal is that of the Mother and Baby home in Tuam, where “significant numbers” of infant corpses (from premature to 3 years old) have been found following research by a historian who found a
discrepancy between approximately 800 death certificates issued and the number of official burials in the town. The investigation into this is on-going. There will also be a review of all the other similar homes that operated in Ireland with some saying thousands of bodies are yet to be discovered in the country as a whole.

After I had related some of the above to my cousin, she retorted “it is lies; it is fake news”. I was simply astounded to hear this but I looked up ‘Tuam Fake News’ on Google to discover the almost certain source as the American president of the Catholic League. I am sorely afraid that it his statement that is fake. Respectable politicians, the mainstream press and the public in Ireland do not doubt that some very disturbing things happened in association with these homes and that it relates to a very sad and scandalous episode that has been kept largely hidden from the public view for too long.

In this day and age of social media and information technology it may be ironic that it is so hard to tell fact from fiction, real from virtual and lies from truth. Whatever the truth about the actual numbers interred in Tuam, what is quite clear from interviews with living survivors (both children and mothers) was that to be kept in such “caring” institutions was an almost complete misery. The death rates were much higher than the national average; the children were marched to school, en bloc, and kept segregated from the other children before being marched back to the home again; the mothers were encouraged to have the children adopted and even encouraged to give them names that would be most attractive to potential adopters.

The general attitude towards such  mothers was made clear to me by a story recently told to me by a close friend. Her aunt had had a neighbour who was not the most intelligent of girls but who, after she became pregnant, asked her if she could live with her along with her new born child and that in return she would work for her for nothing. The parish priest heard of this and said it was impossible and that she must go into one of these homes. Subsequently, after the birth of the baby, the young mother wrote to my friend’s aunt asking again if she and her baby could live with her. The aunt was quite happy to do so but again the priest intervened. He was furious saying that it would be a complete scandal to have such a woman and her baby living in the parish. In the end the girl came home but never saw her child again. This was not a million years ago but it is just one real case that I know about personally and that shows the total lack of humanity and the total abuse of power of such clerics.

For sure, something is rotten in the current state of Catholicism in both Ireland and the Vatican. Pope Francis set up a “Commission into the Protection of Minors” to which one of the victims, Marie Collins, was appointed. The inaction by this commission has resulted in her resignation from it in protest. It seems that even the Pope cannot overcome the entrenched, retrograde and reactionary position taken by the Vatican elite.

The title of this essay is taken from a face to face interview with the philosopher Bertrand Russel after he was asked what message he would offer to people living a thousand years hence. It is of an additional relevance to me because just before my cousin told me that Tuam was false news she had stated that “God is Love” and I had added Bertrand Russel’s statement that “Love is Wise”. His full reply goes like this:

I should like to say two things, one intellectual and one moral:

The intellectual thing I should want to say to them is this: When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed, but look only and solely at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say: Love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other. We have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way, and if we are to live together and not die together we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

Last year a really huge dragonfly flew in through a window in the car giving everyone inside a fright. I made a mental note that seeing an animal like that had become a rarity and this followed a winter when all my honey bees, those stoical workers in their seven hives, had perished.

The main thrust of an article by Anthony King (“The altered flight of the humble bee” Irish Times 2nd March 2017) was aimed at the neonicotinoid insecticides. His article made me remember DDT because it took far too long before the invidious effects of its widespread use as an insecticide became apparent. The poor birds of prey at the top of the food chain, which had fed on birds and rodents, which had fed on insects poisoned by DDT, trying to hatch eggs so soft that they would collapse. So perhaps it should be no surprise that another substance with zoocidal properties released into the environment in substantial amounts might be at the heart of the ongoing threat to the insect pollinators and to many other insects and arthropods, as well as to those animals that feed on them. It is, for example, now postulated that the massive decline in the once ubiquitous and cheeky house sparrow may have resulted from the lack of insects needed in the diet of the hatchlings during their first few days of life. Indeed so common and widespread were they that one of the collective terms to describe the group was the very word ‘ubiquity’.

When I was a child growing-up in the fifties I remember how, at our family home in County Leitrim, crickets and grasshoppers, many varieties of butterflies and moths, dragonflies, earwigs and pissmires (both the walking and flying varieties) were all commonplace. The sometimes sultry summers were punctuated by much bird and insect noise and the buzz of a humble bumble bee searching to escape through a window or tangled in a spider’s web was a signature sound of a sunny day. The same countryside nowadays seems so sterile and the rivers, once so full of fish, also much diminished in life.

Something really rotten is going on. Perhaps it really is too late for many species but repeated comprehensive audits of the insect world would seem to be a useful prognostic tool for measuring the future health of both the environment and ourselves, just as a miner’s canary warns of impending asphyxia or an explosion. The global threats to large land mammals are much easier to transmit to the public than threats to the relatively inconspicuous insect world but the destruction of the latter may have much more serious consequences for us all. We are the inheritors of the Garden of Eden and even though the mortal taste of its forbidden fruit is supposed to have opened our eyes to the knowledge of good and evil our eyes seem almost totally blinkered to the ongoing and almost wilful desecration of that inheritance.

There are other threats of course but it is perhaps corporate and individual greed that ultimately are changing not only the environment but also rural society so much. Just a half a century ago milk would have cream on the top of it in the morning and usually came from hand-milked cows, which had come in from flowery pastures and which was distributed through small farmer-owned cooperatives, where neighbours met each day. Now there is a move towards zero-grazing of cows, which seldom leave their sheds, fed from monoculture prairies, milked automatically and distributed centrally, even internationally, and onto the supermarket shelves as a watered-down and homogenised product in plastic containers. “Every little counts”. Really? Every little insect does however count.

I would love to be able to wander through wild flower meadows down to the lake’s edge, once again, in the certain knowledge of catching some perch or a pike for supper. Watching rabbits hopping into their burrows and rising snipe, curlew and lapwing on the way there. To watch cranes and coots and moorhens busy themselves at the mouth of the river, while my float, made from a cork from a bottle of Guinness and a match stick, bobbed up and down on the rippling waters of Dunaweel Lough. But, alas, all I have now are these little pearls of distant memories. I ponder can suchlike ever return, just as I mourn the almost complete loss of the jarring corncrake’s call, the twit-twooing of barn owls flying, like white-faced ghosts, past a window and even the terror caused by a bat circling round my candlelit bedroom not unlike what that dragonfly did, in the daytime, last summer as I was driving leisurely through the lakelands of Ireland.

On July 1st The Financial Times concluded that the Brexit result was a Pyrrhic victory for Boris Johnston but this mad and unnecessary referendum, forged on foundations of deceit, self-agrandisement and opportunism, has huge potential to be a Pyrrhic victory for every man and woman who voted to leave.

We hear mealy-mouthed appeals for unity and calm but it is hard to see how politics can ever be the same again in what is likely to become the former United Kingdom. “Put the Great back into Great Britain” is not only an anachronism but somehow also perverse. There was once a Great Britain but it had become “Great” mainly because of its history of slavery, conquest and colonisation. One of the legacies of that colonisation has been the immigration from large parts of Africa and Asia yet, just as with the American West Indians (and indeed their Aboriginal Indians too), these groups remain the butt of much overt and occult racism.

The “West” has to live with that legacy just as it has to live with the legacy of the politics of greed and deregulation ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan. It was the almost complete deregulation of the markets, massive public and private debt and all sorts of insider dealing and misdealing that essentially spawned the economic crash of 2008. The austerity that resulted and the unequal way in which it has affected the rich and the poor is the real catalyst of the belief in Little-England that getting rid of Johnny Foreigner will solve these problems.

When times are bad there is a tendency to look for a scapegoat just as the Jews were latched onto by the Nazis in the depression of the 1930s. Such thinking is fundamentally wrong because it does not grasp that the heart of the problem nowadays is that the traditional working class population in a post-industrial UK is practically non-existent. It has been replaced by an underclass. A large underclass who have been ignored by all the traditional political parties. The disparity between the historically industrial parts of Britain versus the South-East has been blatantly obvious for a long time but no caring political group has addressed this problem in an open or pragmatic way. Only UKIP has tapped into this vacuum for their own xenophobic ambitions.

This underclass is also a group who, since “winning the war”, have had a particularly insular outlook towards the continent of Europe and who still believe that they are somehow “owed a living” – if not by having a cushy number then directly from the nanny state. It would probably be anathema to them to hear the words in J.F. Kennedy’s inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country“. It is mostly immigrants who do jobs which many Little-Englanders consider beneath their dignity. “They are taking away our jobs” they say but how many of them would actually go into the fields and pick vegetables or work in hospital laundries. Not too many, I guess.

The thing that could have helped keep the Great in Great Britain was to have embraced Europe more and not less. The European Union is unwieldy and also undemocratic when vetoes can be invoked. The British needed to be wholeheartedly involved to help to affect change within that institution, because this large economic bloc with the best of social aspirations needs to succeed if the totalitarian states, terrorists and a reactionary and insular USA are to have any effective counterbalance in an increasingly unstable world.

The big issues are not Johnny Foreigner in Little England but the increasing power of the multinationals, the concentration of capital in the hands of a few, the monopolisation of the media by oligarchies, the exponential growth of world population, the increasing incidence of severe weather and of global warming, the horrors brought about by islamofascism, the xenophobia of the far right, the neo-tzarism in Russia and even the prospect of an American President running the country like he ran “The Apprentice” on TV.

These big issues were hardly touched-on in the run up to the referendum. All one heard about were conflicting views about the economic effects and about the fear of immigration; of immigration that may well turn out to be less likely to be controlled in isolation. Nor did I hear any sincere discussion about the possible impacts on Scotland, Wales and Ireland (North and South) as well as on Gibraltar and any British Expats living within the European Union.

The Little Englanders (and some of the WASPs in Northern Ireland) can slap themselves on their backs and rejoice but if this result stands then these islands and indeed the world at large is a much more unstable and dangerous place. UKIP can moan that the politically induced assassination of Jo Cox was not of their making but for me she was a rare politician and human being who understood the difference between a Syrian refugee and an economic migrant; who loved her Yorkshire homeland and who might still be alive if Johnny Foreigner was not perceived as so rotten by Nigel Farage and his ilk. Never forget that it is individuals who really matter and not our institutions and that as Bertrand Russell once stated: “Love is wise; hatred is foolish“.

That this result can be called democratic is perverse. One can blame individuals for not having voted at all but it still seems crazy that about 35% of those with a vote could determine the fate of everyone and particularly against the will of Gibraltarians, Scots and the Irish as well as for those over the age of consent, who had no franchise at all. The electorate were lied-to and we now see the true colours of the main Brexiteers. Unfortunately National Polls were believed once again and the result undermines not only the Peace Process in place in Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Belfast Agreement but also all other decisions made by expats and others on the basis of an intact EU. Fintan O’Toole’s fine article “English nationalists put a bomb under the peace process” puts the case better than I can. That the “losers” of this referendum feel betrayed is completely understandable because the UK has reneged on so many of its obligations. This is not the result of a caring liberal democracy and for those, in areas where there was a majority desiring that the status quo be retained, they might now understand the iniquity of gerrymandering – even though no boundary changes have (at least yet) been involved.

The sovereign British Parliament needs to consider that the Referendum was fatally flawed, actually undemocratic and not obligatory and consider all other options before it triggers Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. The fearful and downtrodden underclass needs proper attention and the EU still needs reform. Baling-out now it is the worst possible option and can only be seen as morally bereft.

As I start to write down these thoughts, the year is 2015 AD and it is the 1st of March (St. David’s day), when the daffodils outside the door of my home in Ireland are normally in bloom. I love the way, how I love the way, they return each year just as I love the way the swallows return, up in the sky, a little later on. Right now an Irish spring is beginning at my Irish home and it is so unlike all the Arab and other “springs” that have burst onto the world stage in the last few years.

I have to say that I am less and less happy about being a member of what is commonly called the “human” race and what has prompted me to start this piece of writing today is the news that Raif Badawi, the Saudi Arabian blogger sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison, could now actually face the death penalty for alleged apostasy. This is mediaeval justice and I use the word mediaeval in the specific sense of it being the justice of men and not of god. The ‘dastardly’ crime of this thin, diabetic with high blood pressure was to organise an internet forum to allow some free expression by other people and so was charged with “insulting Islam through electronic channels” and with “violating Islamic values and propagating liberal thought”.

Now make note that this is being imposed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (a state which has adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights even though it abstained on the vote in the UN in 1948 especially with regard to Article 18, which states that everyone has the right “to change his religion or belief”; and Article 16, on equal marriage rights) and not by a bunch of terrorist islamofascists attempting to coerce everyone to submit to their particular form of inhumanity and barbarism. This is crazy to anyone, such as myself, that subscribes to the simplest, hopefully self-evident and rational, aspect of loving one’s neighbour as oneself. To “love thy neighbour as thyself” is invoked not only in the New Testament (Mark 12:31) but also early in the Old Testament (Leviticus 19:18). Such an exhortation must thus be relevant to both Christians and Muslims.

The crowd that watched the first fifty lashes (the first installment of twenty such planned public floggings) were cheering incessantly with what is fast turning into an infamous phrase: “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”). So what of submitting and allowing the one and only deity to decide who is guilty and how they should be punished. Man it seems knows better than his maker especially (and with the greatest irony) when it comes to matters of faith. All societies have civil laws and codes and this is always particularly the case with regard to such things as property, marriage and murder. But the punishment must also fit the crime. Deterrent punishments may have a different role but a punishment designed to deter others (rather than be simple justice for the perpetrator) has always seemed somehow suspect to me. Capital punishment itself never seems to be an effective deterrent for murder though it would probably stop people from parking illegally. This flogging and imprisonment of the Saudi Blogger can only be described as barbaric and not a judgement but a form of arbitrary revenge.

I don’t normally quote scripture because by “cherry picking” through the bible one can often find a passage to suit many points of view. Whether one takes its content literally or metaphorically doesn’t detract from the fact that it contains the collective wisdom of western society put together over millenia. It forms part of the canon of all three of the major semitic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam that had their origins in what can be loosely called the Caucasian peoples. It is in the best sense a “good book” and worth reading. I believe it is much better read than preached from so give thanks to the invention of the printing press that you can nowadays read it for yourself. We are no longer confined to hear it interpreted by a priest from the pulpit. I have already referred to the self-evident and logical statement of “love thy neighbour as yourself” and I will now add some of the words about judgement for everyone to ponder. Not only to the Saudi state (in respect of what started me to write these thoughts down) but to everyone. I believe the words have merit so please re-read them and reflect.

In the Old Testament (Jeremia 22:3) it is written “Execute judgment and righteousness, and deliver the plundered out of the hand of the oppressor. Do no wrong and do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, or the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place” and in the New Testament (Matthew 7:2) it says “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you.” So why is it that the barbarity of the literal “Eye for and eye and tooth for a tooth” seems to have centre stage under Shariah law and not the more temperate “Judge not that ye be not judged”. Man once again interpreting God’s will and not allowing God to be the judge.

Ever since the twin towers were toppled in New York I have been trying to get some inkling of what could be going-on in the minds of those assassins who flew airliners into those buildings. It was with the most grievous horror that I watched that tragedy unfold live on television. One of the most enduring memories is of a man at a window hundreds of feet in the air waving a white sheet or tablecloth in a hopeful but ultimately hopeless call for help. The two towers came tumbling down killing all and sundry in what was a unique moment of globally-watched horror. I read on the news next day that ordinary people in some places in the Middle East instead of lamenting or sympathising were cheering in the streets.

There also followed a deafening silence from the Islamic establishment as the identity and motives of the perpetrators became fully known. We are told that suicide is against the Islamic faith and yet this cult of mostly young male Muslims (for want of a better word) who kill themselves along with their perceived infidels seems not to lessen apace at all. A Muslim, I have learned from Wikipedia, translates as ‘one who submits’. But submission is passive and not active and there is a world of difference between the submissive actions of Gandhi and his followers and those of such “radicalised” members of Islam.

Time has moved on since I started writing these thoughts down and it is now November 2015 and a week after the terrible events in Paris on Friday 13^th. In the last couple of days I watched a video of a minute’s silence in respect to all of those killed and injured, which was held before the start of a football match in Turkey against Greece. There was no respectful silence because a significant section of the Turkish fans booed and whistled and the infamous “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”) could be heard from what I hope was a minority of the Turkish fans. It is the same term said by those beheading their kneeling victims with a knife, by those before blowing up a bomb in a crowded market and by those about to machine gun and kill over a hundred victims inside a hall as they watch a concert. Those who broke that minute’s silence were obviously not only emboldened enough to do so but should they also be numbered amongst the not-so-actually-moderate moderate side of Islam?

Over the past year or so there have been so many horror stories. The things that have been happening in the self-proclaimed Islamic State/Caliphate and similar areas occupied by such Islamic “fundamentalist” groups nearly defies my intuitive comprehension. I felt similar when wandering round Auschwitz and allowing the depths of depravity and evil perpetrated (and with the greatest cynicism possible) by Hitler’s fascism to fully invade my consciousness. My mind would have preferred to be able to suppress such horrors but it is important to acknowledge that humanity is really capable of such abominations and I am simply thankful that I was not around at the time. But what if I was? Could I have been coerced into that collective mindset? Could I have resisted not shaking hands when meeting someone in the traditional manner but giving instead the Nazi salute? Islamofascism is the best term I have come across to describe the “philosophy” of IS and Boko Haram and such-like groups. They, like all fascists, must force their ideals because there is no peaceful path to their ends.

Having now read more about apostasy in Islam it is obvious that the penalties for this have nearly always been severe. To me this does not make the religion more so but rather less robust. Any belief that is only sustained by a climate of fear is likely to be as hollow as any denunciations that are obtained by torture. Those in fear will probably do or say anything that will end or prevent their torture. I have said it elsewhere and I repeat it here: “all evil only comes about by the imposition, the imposition, of one person’s will on another”. Religions and their foot-soldiers do not escape this and before anyone gets too carried away with the state of Islam today it bears remembering the atrocities carried out under Christ’s banner in the past. It is bad enough when a sadistic dictator is in power but it is probably worse when the perpetrators are the so-called spiritual leaders of a faith. Only their creed is OK and only their creed will bring eternal happiness. Pooh!

As a child, I (having been brought up as a Catholic in a Protestant home) remember being told the story of someone arriving in heaven and being taken down a corridor with doors in it and that there was one door in it for each religious group. As this new arrival was being walked along the corridor a huge noise could be heard behind one of the doors as if everyone inside was having a wonderful party. The guide turned and said “Oh don’t mind. That’s just the Roman Catholics – they think they are the only people up here!” I guess it must be just the same for all the branches of the Islamic faith today.

I digressed a bit maybe but the point was a serious one. Members of many faiths obviously believe that their way is best and some believe it is the only way to find salvation. This mindset is particularly often found in the mind of an “evangelical” – a person who has “seen the light” – and not only seen it but who must now convert all those perceived to be in the dark. I am increasingly sure that this pertains to most Muslims as well as to various branches of the Christian faith – particularly to the avowed evangelicals. I am no theologian but Judaism, the third of the three main Semitic religions, seems less concerned with converting Gentiles to their way of thinking. They themselves are the ‘chosen people’ and so there is not a lot they can do about those not so chosen I guess. Religious elitism of one sort or another unfortunately affects so many faiths.

It is time to reflect on the terrible events that have happened recently in Paris: first ‘Charlie Hebdo’ and more recently what happened on Friday 13th. Time to reflect in the cold light of day and try and find a better way forward. It is not a nice contemplation and knee-jerk reactions are unlikely to help. Terrorists (and by any definition that is what the agents of these atrocities were) have always been hard to beat by systematic conventional force. Terrorism may eventually implode from a lack of support. More often the terrorists eventually evolve into some other politically “acceptable” entity. Such a metamorphosis would seem very unlikely just now and it is just as hard to see that the current support (that is the support from within mainstream Islam) is going to suddenly vanish. And let me be clear that silence from the mainstream is not silence. It is a silent vocal support – loud and clear.

I am sure there are many “moderate” Muslims who probably do not agree with what is being done in the name of Islam. No more so than there were many Germans who did not like what Hitler was up to. No more so than a large proportion of the population of Irish Catholics who disagreed with the tactics of the IRA. Yet all these silent majorities are complicit in the actions of those acting “in their name”. All these three silent groups kept quiet for basically the same simple reason; from fear. It was John Hume who bravely “came out” and trumpeted exactly what the IRA were at that time; they were fascists. They were fascists because they created a climate of fear. They may not have gone to the extremes of the Nazis but moderate men and women all over Ireland did not “speak out” until the twin tragedies of Enniskillen and Tyrone made people begin to lose their fear. Or at least if they didn’t lose it they were no longer prepared to tolerate what was being done “in their name”. It was different in Germany because the Nazis (though terrorising in the most brutal, cynical and arbitrary manner) were part of a state machine that was eventually destroyed militarily.

I suppose there were many moderate Germans in Hitler’s Reich and I have met what at least appear to be moderate Muslims (notably a self professed Sufi woman in Brussels and a previous colleague in Cavan General Hospital) but I more and more question just how “moderate” they are for, behind it all, they not only believe that they are right and that everyone else should bow to their faith. This has to be coupled with the fact that to leave their faith is a capital offence. Yes it is frightening, when polled, just how many (moderate) British “Muslims” uphold that an apostate deserves to be killed.

So what of the Islamofascists (a good term I think) of today. The fear they produce is not random or ill thought out, it is deliberate and is focused to be as brutal and horrible as can be imagined. It also has a huge arbitrary element in that whether it is bombing an airliner, bombing a market place, shooting the occupants of a building or whatever, that they know there will not only be many innocents and children but even good members of their own faith killed.

I fear that moderate Islam will never rise up and maybe cannot rise up and thereby effect a change. At this point I want to mention Richard Dawkins. He himself doesn’t believe in God but that is not what I want to talk about. He has written some truly fantastic science and my only problem with his stance on religion is mostly one of style. He too quickly uses sarcasm, for example, and in doing this he belittles much of what he sets out to inform about. Having said that I find myself more and more agreeing that it is the moderate Muslim or “moderate Islam” that one needs to fear. Perhaps to fear most of all. If interested then read him for yourself. He has affected my thinking to now believe that what is instilled into the minds of the vast majority of children (in this context by their Muslim parents and pastors) remains deeply embedded within them for life. These fundamental ideas and beliefs instilled within them are the rich soil in which radicalisation can, oh so easily, be instilled. It was little different when Christendom was brutal. The concept is little different than the Jesuit motto: “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”.

The reactions and statements and fatwas of some of Islam’s clerics, particularly in the relation to real or imagined blasphemy, is something I would love to be able to abolish. It strikes me just how fragile the basis of such a faith must be when the faithful have to be controlled by fear. It is not all that different (historically at least) from most of the Christian churches except that the punishments (at least for centuries) have not been capital ones. “God is great”, “God is omnipotent”, “God has the power to grant or reject salvation” but it is the priests, the clerics, the ayatollahs, the inquisitors and so forth that take it on themselves to judge and condemn individuals instead of simply leaving it to the almighty to do the work that he is perfectly capable of doing. For me this is a great and fundamental hypocrisy; an absolutely gigantic hypocrisy; a hypocrisy only designed to maintain the power and influence (and oh so often the treasure chests as well) of those that preach in such a way.

When Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” was released it was rebuked by certain members of the establishment for being blasphemous. It, like much satire, may have been irreverent but it was not, from my standpoint, blasphemous. There was a renowned TV debate with the Bishop of Southwark and Malcolm Muggeridge on one side and John Cleese and Michael Palin on the other that I must revisit sometime. The po-faced establishment rather at a loss against the fun and health and healing power found in real humour is what I remember. Indeed it is so often the lack of humour, the inability to laugh from their hearts or their stomachs that seems to be part and parcel of the puritan, the reactionary and the foot soldiers of all forms of fascism.

The frailty of Islam in the face of any such humour is manifested by the outrageous actions that its adherents are invoked to do “in God’s name”. Whatever real harm did Salman Rushdie ever do or a cartoon of the prophet Mohammed do? The reply by the Nigerian journalist Isioma Daniel (in the context of a Miss World contest taking place controversially in Nigeria) when asked; “What would Mohammed think?” she replied, “In all honesty, he would probably have chosen a wife from one of them.” This was enough for a fatwa and so a death sentence was passed on her. Unbelievable.

It is worth stating that in the last five years or so there have actually been Fatwas against terrorism, Al-Qaeda and ISIS. They may be steps in the right direction by some in the Islamic world but for me it is not only too little too late but of dubious intent – other than that of self-preservation. At the moment ISIS and suchlike are on the upsurge and it seems pretty obvious that there will be more and more murderous incidents and thus more and more reaction to them. An emboldened far right will thus be able to garnish their ideologies and move onto the political stage with much greater success. I fear that happening and I am sure there are more and more adherents of Islam (in countries where they are now in a minority) that will feel increasingly fearful for themselves and their communities. These fatwas remind me a little of the so-called infallibility behind Papal bulls. The invincibility and conceit of certain mortal men over and above those of its faithful are abhorrent to me.

There is another question that I now ask myself : “How did Islam co-exist with its ‘neighbours’ for so very many years without the overt and pernicious way that its radicalised elements have evolved in recent years?” It seems too simple to blame the Taliban in Afghanistan , the Iraq war and its consequences and all the revolutions that have taken place around the Mediterranean but a deeper understanding of the nature of all of the divisions within Islam. No more so than with Christianity there have been divisions and schisms right from the start. And with every split comes the inevitability of “I’m right and you’re wrong” like little children unable to agree. Unfortunately however the consequences are severe – only too often deadly severe. In a way that is the hardest thing to understand about all these different monotheistic religions and their offshoots. They all believe in one almighty supreme being but, but, their own interpretation of things is the only one that can be correct.

At this point I will interject that I was born of a Roman Catholic father and an Anglican Catholic mother and educated as a Roman Catholic. I pursued that faith until one day I realised that I had been saying the creed, like a parrot, for years. What appalled me and what made me stop “blindly” following that faith was not that the words were right or wrong but that they had been instilled into me. I was saying “I believe” in things I had never ever considered for myself. This just seemed to be so wrong that it started my rejection of such a church as run by men. Over the years I have vacillated a bit and right now I am really not sure in what I believe. I am neither agnostic nor an atheist – I am simply perplexed. For me it shouldn’t matter whether there is a God or not as to the manner in which we should all lead our lives. I am a reluctant “muslim” only in the sense that I submit to my maker and to whatever unfolds in the future.

My maker whether a deity or not has not yet empowered me to understand what has always been an unanswerable paradox that centres on the nature of time and infinity. Did “stuff” always exist or was there a time when “stuff” came out of nothing. I don’t pretend an answer. I don’t understand the rather mystical “I am the alpha and I am the omega” nor do I understand the imagined singularity at the source of the Big Bang. In all probability it may be impossible for anything to understand its own existence let alone its own creation. I don’t want to waste time or lose any sleep on such “unanswerables”. Like others before me I simply wonder at the nature I have been blessed to live within and of the unbelievable sight of the night sky particularly when devoid of both the moon and artificial night: it can be literally overpowering to see the limits of the visible universe and it can make one feel very small indeed. Yet, small as I am, I am yet a part of that whole. That is what I believe in; that is the most part of my credo right now.

It is a creed supported scripturally by “Live and let live”; “Judge not that ye be not judged”; “Love thy neighbour as yourself”; Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us” and never forgetting that “Straight is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it”. If you are a professed Christian it will bear you well to fully comprehend and understand the last two of the above statements for to ignore or misunderstand them could be fatal for your soul. If you come from a different persuasion I think it will still be hard to better them as the tools for a good and productive life. So, just as the Irish comedian, Dave Allen, used to end his shows I will just say “Goodnight and may your God go with you”!

A lie can be defined in more than one way. I have found it useful to define a “real” lie simply as the intention to deceive. There are members of our species who can tell such lies with the greatest of ease and unfortunately they are far too often believed. We, as a species, seem to be particularly vulnerable, even naive, in this respect. Maybe that is because we concentrate too much on the meanings of words and have, unlike dogs, lost the innate ability to immediately see/feel deception when it is staring us in the face.

Neurologists have understood that there are a group of patients that cannot be lied to. They suffer from aphasia and so because they can no longer grasp your words so they can no longer be deceived by them. This dog-like behaviour is very well described in “The President’s Speech” a chapter in the strangely named but wonderful book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by the neurologist Oliver Sacks.

I try very hard never to lie and those that ever lie to me really do risk losing my friendship and respect. Trust flies away at the same moment and is unlikely ever to return. My reasons for avoiding lying do not stem from any high moral standpoint. They are far more functional than that.

In the first place, very few lies stand the test of time. The truth nearly always eventually comes out. I was once told of a Polish expression whence “a lie has short legs”. This provided me with an amusing vignette of a lie trying to escape detection but unable to do so because it couldn’t run fast enough.

In the second place, a lie once told has to be remembered or else the game is likely to be given away in the future. This involves unnecessary effort and usually it gets more and more complicated as subsequent lies have to be created to cover-up for earlier ones. The ability to remember what had been told in the past gets worse if  different lies get told to different people. If you prefer a simple life then avoid lies. Some “economy of the truth” may be necessary at times but even then be careful.

Most of us know the oath taken by a juror: “To tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. This may apply in court but in real life the whole truth can sometimes be too much. If a patient is diagnosed with cancer should one immediately explain this and all the ramifications or is it acceptable to use some euphemism and then wait to truthfully answer any follow-up questions? How explicit should one be when a child asks “where did I come from”? To say “the stork brought you” wont satisfy the child for long so some restraint in “telling all” whilst not saying anything untrue would seem sensible. There are no real guidelines in such cases because each case is unique and will benefit from good judgement. Good judgement is more likely if such dilemmas have been thought about and discussed with others in advance.

It is so, so easy (perhaps even natural or instinctive) to want to always be seen by others in a good light and to never be in error. So much so that a lie can so easily slip out. We all have a degree of innate pride that is necessary for our psychological well-being and yet our stature can (paradoxically or not) actually be increased by being able to openly acknowledge when one has been wrong. No one is always right. We are all fallible. Thank goodness for it.

For me, amongst the most destructive lies are the ones that one tells to oneself. It takes the sort of courage that DH Lawrence’s poem refers to in order to live with the greatest integrity. It reads: “What makes people unsatisfied is that they accept lies. If people had courage, and refused lies and found out what they really felt and really meant and acted on it, they would distil the essential oil out of every experience and like hazel-woods of Autumn, at last be sweet and sound. And the young among the old would be as in the hazel-woods of September nutting, gathering nuts of ripe experience. As it is, all that the old can offer is sour, bitter fruits, cankered by lies“.

The complexities of truth lie at the heart of Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon” in which at least four different characters relate different versions of the murder of a man and the rape of his wife. Other complexities of truth can be seen when police witnesses of the same event tell different tales. The point is that truth is easily distorted particularly when people intend to deceive but also because the mind can fill in or alter holes in its own memory to make everything “fit together”. So untruths can told without any intent. That is why an untruth differs from a lie. One is a mistaken fact the other pure deceit.

The word deception is a “false friend” between the English and the French. Deception in French means disappointment in English and deception in English becomes tromperie in French. So be neither deceived nor disappointed by such usage. False friend is a good description of such words that don’t translate literally but there is another sort of false friend and that is the sort that bears false witness. For me amongst the most invidious lies are those that involve false witness. The reasons for blackening someone else’s character are bad enough if true but disgusting when they are untrue. Such false witness may come from envy or to hide one’s own fault but when it comes from pure bigotry and prejudice (and especially from state institutions) the results for mankind can be devastating. If the world stands silent at such times it has to share in that culpability and share in the shadow that it creates in the unconsciousness of us all. The dark shadow in our collective, hidden, instinctive and inherited unconsciousness that we would love to deny but which we cannot escape from.

Caution too is needed when making any promise, for a broken promise very rapidly can become a lie that not only hurts the other but also damages one’s own integrity. To borrow and never to repay is a well known way to lose friendship, whether by intent or by simple default. Either way such a debt is often rationalised as being something the lender can afford to lose. If that is the mentality in place it denigrates both borrower and lender. The same is true of any broken promise be it by intent or not. Hurtful to everyone.

Lies can also be “told” by omission and these are no better than those that are explicit. My sister and I were half-siblings because of an affair my mother had with her dying father’s nurse. We were brought up believing my father to be our father until we were aged twenty or thereabouts. Once we knew the truth it became clear why there had been certain ambiguities in the past. Why, for example, there had been an awkward silence in the room when someone said to my sister “Oh Mary you are so like your father”. During our childhood my sister and I had seldom been really close but knowledge of this particular truth brought as much closer together. In the end she was almost certainly my best friend and a person whom I still love unreservedly.

The extent to which one can fool oneself can be exemplified by the human ability for self-denial. One of the grossest examples of this that I recall was a woman (she was in fact the wife of a GP) who presented in an out-patients’ clinic with such an advanced breast cancer that it had perforated through the skin and was purulent and ulcerated. “I only noticed it last week” she claimed. I, myself, carried-on smoking cigarettes until, one night, I had a heart attack having previously lived in a state of denial that nothing bad would ever happen to me.

There is another sort of invidious and often unrecognised deception when an individual (or group) manipulate or selectively collect data to “prove” their own ideas or concepts or, possibly worse, to disprove or denigrate opposition. I have seen specific examples of this in so-called scientific medical research. I remember a professor at university, who had an unconventional theory but instead of initiating proper research to prove it he spent an inordinate amount of time in the medical libraries searching for anything that he could quote in his favour but also, and crucially, disregarding those articles against his belief.

This is a growing problem on the internet, which can so rapidly disseminate deception and misinformation and which helps contribute not only to conspiracy theories but also to the promulgation of erroneous theories and frank deceit. The causal relationship between types of immunisation and autism should, by now, have been totally debunked. The chief perpetrator of this idea has not only been proved to be wrong but has also been removed from the medical register for falsifying his results. The sad thing is that too many still believe his findings and many children have suffered, got brain damage, gone blind or died as a result of not having protection from certain and preventable infectious diseases.

An attendant conspiracy theory runs that the advice from the WHO (regarding the benefits to certain groups from influenza vaccination) is simply a result of lobbying from the multinational manufacturers. It is then believed that therefore the advice must be wrong and should be ignored. Whether there be lobbying or not, it is the facts alone that need to be understood and circulated.

There are and always have been (right back to the serpent in the very first garden) false prophets. One of Christ’s warnings (and one that I wholeheartedly endorse) is: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits“. The whole of Islam nowadays rises up in anger if there is the slightest criticism of their prophet and incite their followers to riot. I merely say look at the current fruits of Islam and its associated Islamofascism and judge for yourself. Pretty rotten fruit right now I would say.

I am writing these thoughts down to help me reflect on my own integrity and maybe to cause any readers to contemplate some of these things for themselves. I do not deny that I have sometimes wanted to be other than I actually was. I had, as an example, and like many of the “Anglo-Irish”, a romantic attachment to Ireland for a long time and was appalled by the way the country had been treated by the British for centuries. The lie that there had been potato famines in the eighteenth century being just one of these. It was in fact a starvation because large quantities of grain were exported to Britain during these times as cash for the absentee landlords. It was I suppose because I wanted to identify and feel solidarity with the Irish than I became a bit more Irish than was my natural state. I even developed a sort of Irish accent so that the Irish mostly still thought me English but the English would take me as Irish. It was a sham, of course, but as I have grown in my own self-confidence I have managed to drop these illusions excepting for such times that it is simply for fun or entertainment.

Thus I am wholly fallible in many ways but if I have learned anything in my life to date it is to, at least, attempt to never be afraid of being myself. In important interviews I have twice answered truthfully even though my replies were unconventional and would normally have been viewed badly. On both occasions I got the job – probably because truth is nearly always simple and more easily seen for what it is. I try not to wear any masks and in the end this is important to me in the following “spiritual” sense. If I get to stand on my maker’s threshold I want to be still recognisable as the me that was created; was created naive, naked and wearing no mask or disguise at all. If I am not recognisable what hope for my future thereafter.

That was going to be the punchline of this epistle but in recent months I have been reflecting on many things and that includes the nature and importance of “self belief” because it is real self-belief and not pride; it is real self-love and not vanity; it is real self-confidence and not ones fragile ego; it is real self-truth and not simple belief that can help one sleep well at night and make life on this planet more worthwhile and less nonsensical.

Such self-confidence and self-conviction can achieve much against the odds but to do so may take a lot of effort and a lot of pain. I recently saw the film about “Eddie the Eagle” (the only British Ski Jumper to participate in the Olympics and against all sorts of opposition). But he had great self-belief and although he came last in the competition his personal achievement was simply fantastic. Some people are lucky enough to have various talents. Usually having talent is not enough on its own but if worked-at it can bring huge rewards – materially, physically and psychologically. To deny such development to oneself is a sort of lie if it happens because of laziness or apathy or by being side-lined to other things of little real importance. Few achieve much in life without good work, study and practice.

I believe that to achieve a state of true self-reliance and self-belief one must eschew deceit and question most things that one is ever told in order that they become truly one’s own. Such freethinking is too often decried by the established order whether from a state or from a religion. Without the freethinkers of the enlightenment; without the self belief of such as Saint Joan; without the so-called nihilism of philosophers like Nietzsche and Sartre; without the evidence of “our eyes” and the doors opened by the real science behind Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Darwin and others I believe that the collective unconsciousness of the “West” would be in a much worse place. Those that fear the Islam of today would do well to reflect on the days when Christendom was extremely brutal. It appears that Islam needs some free thinkers more than ever before.

So the world may yet have to suffer much at the hands of the new Russian “Czar” or to the Caliphates of revolutionary Islam or from the effects of global warming and exponential population growth but there is still hope and no need yet for despair. It is individuals who have been the main catalysts for change and not the masses or the results of ‘consensus groups’ or, by definition, the reactionary stance of most of the world’s religions. I believe that there is much truth and eloquence in the statement that: “Individuals are sometimes guided by reason. Crowds never“. It will take much time, maybe too much time, for the world to evolve into a better state of harmony and détente but for it to do so will require that we see more individuals of stature with real courage and not the grey mess being expounded by most of the political and religious institutions of today.

So stay alert, don’t be afraid to be a sceptic and bear in mind Alexander Pope’s words; “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man“.

Postscript 30/3/20

Mendacity derived from the Latin mendax simply means untruthfulness or lying. It is embodied in the 8^th Commandment “Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbour” and so it runs fundamentally counter to all of the three semitic religions (Christianity, Islam and Judaism). That there are those who seem able to turn it into an art form does not give it one iota of respectability.

George Washington’s “I cannot tell a lie” is a myth. A very different president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said somewhere that “repetition does not transform a lie into a truth” and more eloquently, at the beginning of his inaugural address at another very hard time in 1932, said “This is pre-eminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. One might also contrast how Roosevelt, crippled by polio managed to largely conceal this, whilst Trump’s heel spurs saved him from Vietnam though not from the golf course.

What a contrast with today’s incumbent. The gross irony when Donald Trump repeatedly cries “Fake News” should not numb our senses nor our consciences. It is incredible just how so many have succumbed to his denigration of truth and of the press in particular. We must all up the ante of learning how to discern what is fact and what is fiction, what is true and what is false and indeed what is right and what is wrong.