In which the pond isn't vague and settles for a polonial Haig, and a goodly dose of Dame Groan ...

Empathy and coincidence …

The pond is frequently reminded that empathy is of late a much-mocked concept, yet last night it sat down to watch Leave No Trace, which coincidentally featured a great performance by a young New Zealand actor, Thomasin McKenzie (the reliable Ben Foster is pretty good too).

By one of those additional coincidences, it happened to be about a wounded, lost ex-military father living off-grid in the wild with his daughter, a story which had its roots in real events …

Any doubts regarding the validity of Will and Tom’s lifestyle – it’s revealed that Tom, on an educational level, is years ahead of her age group – can be assuaged by the film’s source material. Granik and her screenwriting partner, Anne Rosellini, worked from a novel, My Abandonment by Peter Rock, itself inspired by a news article. In 2004, a Vietnam War veteran and his 12-year-old daughter were discovered living in Portland’s Forest Park. Once rehoused on a horse farm, they fled the area and were never heard from again. 
“I’m definitely imagining their lives,” Granik admits. “I want to know how they keep their camp functional, how their daily needs are met. Part of it was known. People had seen them traversing, coming into that bridge, and walking a certain way. It was even known what shop they got their food from. What happened after they left the farm? It was not known. So then the imagination has to run wild. There’s no further intel on them. The father dies in the novel. I became curious what would happen if he didn’t die.” (That from a more extended piece about the film here).

But why should the pond start off with this, when ostensibly the subject is armchair warrior prattling Polonius blathering on about Douglas Haig?

Well it's about the lost and the wounded, the dead and the maimed, and whether they matter … and here the pond must declare an interest, because the pond's grandfather was one of them, forever transformed by being a pawn of Haig's in the battle of the Somme …

It's true that the sight of the Polonial armchair warrior doing noble battle for Haig would usually just produce a cartoon …

… and perhaps a quotation from Liddell Hart…

He [Haig] was a man of supreme egoism and utter lack of scruple – who, to his overweaning ambition, sacrificed hundreds of thousands of men. A man who betrayed even his most devoted assistants as well as the Government which he served. A man who gained his ends by trickery of a kind that was not merely immoral but criminal.

That from here and from 1935 … because you see, it wasn't - and isn't - just ignorant leftists that took a view about Haig's abilities as a general ...

But now, lack of empathy in motion, and coincidences clicked to 'on', the scene is set, and it's on with the armchair warrior …

Actually, as Polonius well knows, they've been doing that for a very long time …

Books began to appear which criticised Haig. Basil Liddell Hart had been horrified by the revelations of mistakes made by different generals in their war memoirs, and by admissions made privately to him by James Edmonds, the official historian (admissions Edmonds was careful not to put into the Official History). In 1930, Liddell Hart published The Real War, which criticised Haig for his ignorance of conditions on the battlefield, for his lack of realism, and for the hell he put the soldiers through: 
That an officer who had fought so nobly as Lieutenant JA Raws, should, in the last letter before his death, speak of the “murder” of many of his friends “through incompetence, callousness, and personal vanity of those in high authority”, is evidence… of something much amiss in the higher leadership. Basil Liddell Hart, The Real War (1930, page 263) (link as above).

So here's another pond coincidence.

Just before clicking on to see the armchair warrior at work, the pond had finished an early breakfast reading Adam Hochschild's A Hundred Years After The Armistice for The New Yorker, outside the paywall for the moment here …

No doubt our prattler would dismiss Hochschild as a leftie - Greg Hunt him here - but not surprisingly he makes for more interesting reading than our Polonius, and his idle armchair warrior prattle …

Hochschild did a survey of recent WWI literature and the pond decided to drop in here, because Haig scores a mention ...

Well yes, but now we must return to the blithering Polonius blathering on about ignorance ...

Actually there's plenty of evidence that Haig sent in troops with a casual disregard for them being killed.

...There is a very revealing quote in John Terraine’s Douglas Haig (1963, p.484), from one of Haig’s letters to his wife:  

I have myself a tremendous affection for those fine fellows who are ready to give their lives for the Old Country at any moment.   I feel quite sad at times when I see them march past me, knowing as I do how many must pay the full penalty before we can have peace.

Letter, Haig to Lady Haig, 13 April 1917 (start of Battle of Arras)

     

It is given ostensibly to prove Haig’s essential humanity.   But (in a way evocative of the Queen’s televised speech before Princess Diana’s funeral) it rather fails to ‘hit the mark’ for our modern ears.   ‘Quite sad at times’ is an inadequate response in the circumstances.   It reminds us that Haig was a man of his time, not ours; as Rupert Brooke evidences, they felt differently about dying for one’s country in those days.  As always, moreover, Army men were a different breed to ordinary people of the time.   And there is no denying that Haig was a singular Army man.   The men had signed up to offer their lives for their country, and he was taking them at their word.   

Churchill, as he often does, hits the nail right on the head:

He [Haig] presents to me in those red years the same mental picture as a great surgeon before the days of anaesthetics, versed in every detail of such science as was known to him: sure of himself, steady of poise, knife in hand, intent upon the operation; entirely removed in his professional capacity from the agony of the patient...   He would operate without excitement; and if the patient died, he would not reproach himself.

Winston Churchill, Great Contemporaries (1935)

     

But, when all this is said, there has to be something different – something we find deeply unattractive – about a man who can stand almost impassively and watch men whom he knows he is sending off to die.   Like Oliver Cromwell from a different era, whilst we might acknowledge his successes, there is little chance that we shall ever find much to like or revere about him or the way he did it.

   

And perhaps it is better that way.   Perhaps it is a good thing that something in our communal - and individual - psyche prevents us – with John Laffin – whatever the arguments to the contrary – from agreeing that the deaths of all those sons and husbands could ever be ‘acceptable losses’. (source as above)

Well yes, but the deeply unattractive Polonius is always drawn to the deeply unattractive …

And that's before we move on to the even bigger losses arising from the first world war … cue a couple of Hochschild gobbets …

The entire Armistice process reflected a mindless capacity for slaughter and irrational behaviour. 

About the only good thing that can be said about the disaster and the folly was that it reminded people at the end of the second world war not to behave in the same way - so that instead of folly, and blather about the war to end all wars, there came the Marshall plan, and a relatively benign attempt to re-shape Japan into a functioning civilised member of the world … instead of the madness that continued right to the very end ...

And so, with the Armistice setting the stage for a second world war, it might be said, the pond's reading of Polonius ended as senselessly as the pond had begun ...

Actually Terraine's thesis will always be controversial, and Haig will always be a controversial figure. To pretend that this isn't the case is to sound enormously ignorant and silly …

Polonius may play the armchair warrior if he likes and come down on the side of Haig. Others have done so, and he is welcome to join in the celebration of the slaughter …but others disagree, and the dispute has not been settled, and in a way can never be settled.

It will go on, and Haig will always be a controversial figure … in much the same way that making simplistic, stupid statements such as Germany being the aggressor in 1914 - a woeful simplification and misreading of the many causes of the first world war - will suggest to some that Polonius is a fundamentalist barking mad Catholic right wing war mongering commentator destined to produce silly columns born out of historical pigheadedness and ignorance … and perhaps in the process, be a caricature worthy of a David Lowe cartoon …

Sadly Lowe's gone, but happily the pond can now turn to David Pope, with more Pope here …

In the manner of H. M. Bateman? Well it's not from "the man who" series but ...

Take it away Hilaire ...

 p44

The strength of a newspaper owner lies in his power to deceive the public, and to withhold or to publish at will hidden things: his power in this terrifies the professional politicians who hold nominal authority: in a word, the newspaper owner controls the professional politician because he can and does blackmail the professional politician, especially upon his private life.

p48

[The] Capitalist Press has come at last to warp all judgment. The tiny oligarchy which controls it is irresponsible and feels itself immune. It has come to believe that it can suppress any truth and suggest any falsehood.

p51

The big daily papers have become essentially "official," that is, insincere and corrupt in their interested support of that plutocratic complex which governs England... All the vices, all the unreality, and all the peril that goes with the existence of an official Press is stamped upon the great dailies of our time. They are not independent where Power is concerned. They do not really criticize. They serve a clique whom they should expose, and denounce and betray the generality - that is the State - for whose sake the salaried public servants should be perpetually watched with suspicion and sharply kept in control. (quoted here)

Sheesh, not much has changed since 1918 ...

And now because of the mountain of reptile reading piling up in the pond's in-tray, it's finally time to turn to Dame Groan and her ongoing celebration of climate science denialism …

The pond only offers this because it might interest reptile specialists. Many will be replete after finishing off prattling Polonius and won't be interested in an after dinner mint …

And a few will rise to the bait. You see, the proposal is to talk calmly about climate science and Dame Slap immediately proposes that it's more a religion than a science.

How to respond? Well in a calm, reasoned way, which is to assert that Dame Groan is a complete, abject fuckwit of the first theological water, and not a word after that opening paragraph therefore needs to be taken seriously …

If she's going to blather on about theology, it'll be transubstantiation, flesh-lade wafers and quaffing of human blood at ten paces ...

She fancies herself an apostate? Well she's certainly no scientist, but she is in the usual trolling way, someone keen to spread fear, doubt, confusion and uncertainty …

For some strange reason, the pond was reminded of another series by Bateman during the second world war …

Speaking of the foolish, jibber jabbering on about dialling it down a notch, and treating each other as interested, intelligent individuals, when the opening gambit is a fool's mate of science as religion?

Now for anyone interested, Richard Lindzen can be found at Skeptical Science here … you can always spot the low average denialist by the quality of their sources …

...and forget the talk of nuclear power playing a role. That's just Dame Groan trolling, because she knows it's a hot button …

After all, if climate science is mere theology and ideology, and isn't real, and there's nothing that can or should be done about it, why bother with nuclear power? Ah, because it gets the theologians and the ideologues going, and that's the entire point, the trolling and the battle ...

Hmm, how about another reminder of war?

You see, in the end, Dame Groan is really only interested in the trolling. She's no scientist, which is why she tossed up a denialist in the guise of science … and now she can move back into the safe territory of economics … so that she can prove that, since it's not really a problem, why do anything about it? Think of the cost ...

Uh huh …

And so to the last gobbet of the woman who wasted words …

But here's the thing. If you call for respectful debate, don't label those on the other side of the debate as theologians and dumb ideologues …

And don't get to the very end of your piece, and suggest that there's scope for adaptation, without a single word explaining what that might mean …when the real point is that it doesn't exist, likely isn't happening, or if it is, it's impact is wildly exaggerated, and anyhow, why do anything about it, because it's going to cost too much, and who cares if we lose a few Pacific islands ...

And that's why the pond rarely spends time with Dame Groan blathering on about climate science …

 

Turn the lights, and Dame Groan off, and you might not find yourself in hot water …

But it would be wrong to end there … as downloading fake images from Infowars is all the go, and Hilaire Belloc is rolling in his grave, what about a couple of cartoons celebrating the Murdochians?