What level of proof do you need to accuse a state of murder?

If you are the leader of a state, you will want to discourage your intelligence agents from defecting. It’s always been a problem when you employ individuals because they have the ability to act duplicitously. They can bite the hand that feeds them and start taking food from another hand. They will play one state against another for a variety of motives. It might be blackmail, monetary gain, vengeance, political or other motives. What ever the motive these are not individuals either side can trust. They are insincere, loose canons with low or no morals – the opposite of the fictional James Bond if you like!

A state should then be glad when double agents are discovered and run to the side they upset least. Kim Philby was such an agent for the USSR and fled the UK to live in a communist style block of flats. Not so glamorous.

Sergei Scripal defected to the UK and ended up in a semi on a dull looking housing estate in Salisbury. A slightly more salubrious end to a shabby career. He made no attempt to change his identity and walked around in public as if he deserved nothing less. There is now a police investigation into his attempted murder. Perhaps it will come to light who he upset when living in Salisbury. Had he become a keen rose gardener and supporter of Salisbury United football team, or had the leopard retained his spots? You have to really upset people to make them risk murdering you. So who and how many other countries, organisations, people had he upset since his defection, as well as Russia before his leap to ‘safety’. 

It’s like a detective novel in which numerous characters have means, motive and opportunity and the plot moves from one to the other. Each time, the reader thinks the murderer is discovered, another character is introduced, also with means, motive and opportunity.

We should all know by now, that a murder investigation takes time. How often has a senior police officer been interviewed after a high profile, public interest murder to announce that the investigation is ‘on going’ and ‘all leads are being followed’ and ‘we appeal for witnesses to come forward’. Investigations are slow and painstaking because there has to be enough evidence to convict the suspect in a court of law beyond any doubt. Until then, the suspect is considered innocent.

Compare this well understood scenario with the present accusations against Russia and it’s leader, Vladimir Putin. He asks to see the evidence that Russia was involved. Not an unreasonable request, surely?

Initially he declined to comment, when asked by Prime Minister Teresa May if he did it, or knows how the nerve agent left Russia. The ‘no comment’ answer he gave is what most solicitors advise their clients to do. Perfectly legal and not an admission of guilt. Yet the UK government and it’s press, seem to be applying a lower standard of proof that in a criminal court – even though what happened was criminal. If the gun was made in China, this proves the Chinese government committed the murder? Well no! Where a gun or nerve agent is made, does not prove that country is guilty.

But perhaps I am missing the point. Perhaps there is a political agenda here, where accusations are made to suit a general mood of distrust, disapproval and condemnation by the UK towards Russia. Perhaps that agenda is more important than things like facts, in which case you have to ask, why?

Remember that the first world war was started with an assassination of the Arch Duke Ferdinand by a Serb. Austria and Serbia strutted around each other with the backing of their respective European allies. After the first shot, the hell which was to be the ‘war to end all wars’, was almost inevitable. So could there be anything more important than being certain of your facts before starting the next world war? Should we go to war based on evidence or a catalogue of assumptions and prejudices? Even if there will be no hot war, the cold war was no holiday – for those who remember or know their history.

It is as if we have not learnt, as a human race, that history has a way of repeating itself when change does not rectify mistakes.

When we remember the Prime Minister Tony Blair, telling parliament that Sadam Hussein has to be removed and his weapons of mass destruction destroyed, we should remember how most believed him or gave him the benefit of the doubt. Very simplisticly we had been told that Sadam Hussein was a ‘bad guy’ and by inference everyone who opposed him was a ‘good guy’. This some how justified the Allies to commit the evil Sadam was accused of.

Now the United Kingdom has a foreign secretary who wishes to stylise Russia’s hosting of the World Cup as Nazi Germany’s hosting of the Olympic games in 1936. The logic of the metaphor is plain. ‘Bad guy’ and ‘sporting event’ are the same. But isn’t that, well, over simplistic! Does the metaphor really fit? Should heart rule head or head rule heart when it comes to war making?

I am not suggesting Mr Putin is a nice guy…I don’t think even he, would want that name. But he is as cunning as an Arctic fox, an actor with as many faces as suits his need, a master strategist and – look out Boris – a world statesman.

When he asked for the evidence that Russia attempted to kill Mr Scripal, it was a moment he had planned for. For certain he has answers for the events of the next six months because the politicians of the United Kingdom, excepting Jeremy Corbin the labour leader, have reacted exactly as they were meant to react by somebody or some agency. That person or agency is very likely to be behind the attack in Salisbury.

If you don’t follow me, then watch Sergio Leone’s ‘A Fist Full of Dollars’ and take notes. It’s what the British used to be good at – divide and rule – but obviously, now our politicians are divided and being ruled.

The disunited of the United Kingdom, have to get used to the idea that they are now pawns on the world black and white board, not a King or Queen.

(At least that is, until the scaffolding comes down from the control tower of the air craft carrier I saw parked in Portsmouth harbour last week. And when the air craft arrive in 2020 and the software integration problems are solved – Britain will be out of Europe and ‘great’ again – Putin permitting.)

Communism

The Workers Committee of the United Peoples Party (UPP) orders; everyone must be equally miserable. Those who fail to conform will find extra helpings of misery in a labour camp. By the way, labour camps do not exist and anyone who challenges this will be sent to one.

Socialism

We, the brothers and sisters, say; The rich have the least amount of misery and the poor have the most misery. We support the most miserable in their oppression by the least miserable and demand some of it; that is not being miserable, we think, or is it the other way round. Anyway, we want MORE!

Liberalism

The government has decided that research shows; If you are miserable that’s fine, but we need to find out why. All the others, must support those less miserable with a few coffee mornings, knitting marathons and bring and buy sales. Ten pounds could buy beer, mobile phone minutes and cigarettes for a miserable family for a day.

Conservatism

The government would like you to know that; Your money that you see us spending would not have dragged you out of your misery. Everyone knows that you can’t buy happiness, but persevere with those high hopes and tell us when you have dragged yourself out of your misery. Until then, you are on your own and get used to it.

Fascism

The Propaganda Ministry have produced this happy music and colour movie about how you are not miserable, which you must watch, or you will be detained for questioning and possible deportation to an undisclosed destination, with your family, friends and companion animals.

Anarchy

We the people say; Whatever. Either way it doesn’t matter because we are all going to die!

Britain has been floundering under the illusion of being ‘Great’ for many decades. To determine what was ever meant by that word, let us look at the dictionary definition.

The first meaning is ‘large’. As an archipelago in the North Sea, the area of Britain is not as large as France or Spain, and against the super-powers like China and Russia, it is small.

Perhaps it is ‘good’ then, another meaning for ‘great’. If we take good as meaning ‘of high quality’ rather than benevolent, then Britain has produced many high quality goods and intellectual ideas and ideals. That is something to be proud about but hardly enough to warrant a title for the country of Britain. A prime example of passed engineering excellence is the SS Great Britain designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It marked the transition from wooden sailing ships to iron hulled ships with steam engines and a single propeller. That was a ‘great’ move forward for the entire world and Britain’s place in it.

Through dominating sea trade and it’s naval power, Britain became an ‘important’ world player, and I think this is closest to the meaning of it’s present appellation. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain ruled the waves and in doing so, ruled a large number of countries. Empires, however are historically prone to collapse and the British Empire was no exception. Now the Empire not boasted about and has been reduced to autonomous Commonwealth Countries. This includes such countries as Australia who are on the edge of losing patience with a absent, non-Australian, Head of State.

Britain is still a player in world politics, but I would argue it hardly deserves to continue to call itself ‘great’. Some British Citizens think that by leaving the European Union, the UK will be important again. By what merit? I expect it is more likely to sink in the ranks of minor world powers rather than be elevated. Where will it’s influence with it’s immediate neighbours be, let alone countries further away? Without a say in Brussels, it will be lesser rather than greater, I think.

Perhaps the Brits have been leaning on the laurels of their great, great, great grand parents for too long. Greatness has to be earned, not assumed by an illusion of ‘national pride’ and ‘jingoism’. The solution for Great Britain, in my view, is to drop the ‘Great’ and call itself ‘The United Kingdom’.

Consider America. There is another nation that has become rather mixed up in what to call itself. The current president uses the term ‘America’ as short hand for ‘The United States of America’ – as do many. Worryingly some geographical accuracy is lost in the use of the word America. America is after all, a continent stretching from the far north to the far south and includes many other countries, apart from the USA.

Perhaps we should also be worried that Mr. President is going to use the cliché, make America great in his re-election campaign. I wonder whether his use of the abbreviated title of his country, is a kind of bluff that the USA is physically bigger than it is? Is he planning to invade Canada and South America? Or perhaps he is using the ‘great’ adjective to describe importance rather than size. He needs to clarify this if he wants votes from people who think before they vote. Or perhaps not, since most of those who voted him into power are……….(you complete this sentence please).

It is the character of Malvolio, in Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night, who said, ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.’

Britain achieved greatness, as did the United States of America, that is clear. The problem for both is, not so much recognising how they became great nations, but when they stopped being so. Pride is a dangerous and humorous affliction and if you don’t believe me, watch the play. Be warned, Mr. President and you folks who voted Brexit.

Your great, great, great grandparents achieved great things by hard graft. If you have done nothing to earn your ‘greatness’ you will be found out, and that is true for both people and nations.

Dale sat in the security office of the Elysian Theatre, bemused. The screen displayed the images from twelve cameras and he had opened up number twelve -full screen. It showed the stage itself – there in case of any ‘health and safety incident’ they said, and ‘actors have been known to pass away on stage’. Dale thought that must be an odd experience, to be in a make believe world one moment and another totally new world the next.

He didn’t understand this play. Some Shakespeare fantasy about people running around in a wood falling in love and being watched by overweight fairies. ‘What a thing to pay money for,’ he mused, ‘A Midsummer Nights Time-wasting.’

The play was now in the last scene, where the ‘mechanicals’ enter lead by Peter Quince, who perform a play within the main play. The audience were laughing uncontrollably at the antics of the strange looking men – one dressed as a woman called Thisbe. The character Bottom was whispering sweet nothings to Thisbe through a chink in a makeshift wall. The director had a couple of fairies holding up the wall, and they laughed along with the audiences. Two audiences – because the royal household were also being entertained, three if you include Dale.

Dale didn’t know much about Shakespeare but he did remember the line, All the world is a stage and we are all the actors on it – something like that. Tonight he understood what this meant.

‘Everything we do is a sort of ‘performance’. I sit in a glass box every night next to the stage door, checking in the actors as they make their entrances and exits‘ -another part of that quotation that just came back to him. His uniform might as well have been supplied by Wardrobe. Looking at the quality it probably was! This is his world from where he can look down into the multiple worlds contained inside the theatre – dressing rooms, corridors, front of house, offices – they are all set with the correct props every night and the staff perform their roles as diligently as the actors.

This play explains all this. There is a the fairie kingdom, totally invisible but performing a function and influencing the behaviour of the human characters – even though they didn’t realise it. Just as Dale watches everything and makes sure everything is safe and sometimes he changes the behaviour of the actors without them realising. How? Well he has been know to move around the names on the doors to the dressing rooms just for fun as well as useful stuff like keeping out autograph hunters who huddle at the stage door and try to slip in.

And next to the fairie kingdom, separated by a thin wall with only a chink in it for occasional discourse, is the world of humans. They inhabit many worlds. There are the ‘mechanicals’ (who are now called the working class) with their trades and get it done know how. And at the other extreme the ruling classes like the King and Queen in this play, watching the mechanicals behaviour and having a good laugh at their expense. And then there is the audience of the Elysian Theatre who have made their entrances tonight from their ordinary lives, for an escape into another world.

We are all constantly slipping down rabbit holes or worm holes into other universes. There, stories are unravelling with different actors who happen to believe they are enacting a real life situation but they are not.

Dale had the boxed set of The Matrix. He had watched it many times. He knew that the architect was the one in charge, with his white hair and beard – he was like the medieval images of God – except he wears a business suit. And he loved that moment when the machines break through a hole in the ceiling and face a fire-storm of bullets from the human world – like love words whispered through a chink in a wall.

Down the pub he sometimes quoted Morpheus in a deep voice;

What is real? How do you define ‘real’? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.

After the curtain fell he watch actors scuttle home. Titania and Oberon, both obese, left hand in hand.

‘Now that hasn’t happened before,’ he wondered, ‘I wonder what is going on there?’

The exit door spun open in a strong wind. It was raining outside, hard. Car lights flew passed as if propelled by the wind and the Fairy King and Queen, disappeared.

When it comes to the disposal of holy books, there is a problem; how to do it with respect. For burning a Holy Bible or Holy Quran or Holy Torah, is sure to inflame passions amongst the devout as a disrespectful action.

In Pakistan they have a solution. All the old and damaged Qurans are sent to the Mountain of Light, where two miles of tunnels have been dug to become the a respectful resting place for holy books, of any religion.

Quite right you might think, for the disposal of any kind of books cannot be taken lightly. At various times in history, libraries have been deliberately destroyed. Probably one of the worst examples was the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Sacred and secular texts from around the world were destroyed as heresy by the Christian ruling elite.

The Nazi’s in 1930’s Germany, were particular fond of literary bonfires. The more bigoted the ruling power the greater the purge of books, eliminating the ‘unsafe’ from the ‘safe’ reading material, which of course, was most of it.

Such is the power of books, as the custodians of knowledge, that we might be disturbed in our own day by the demise of libraries and book reading. Measure the time the average person spends reading today compared to fifty years ago and I expect the reduction is dramatic.

No longer do children learn poems in schools by heart in the West, any more than they do their mathematical tables. Reading and learning went hand in hand in the pre-internet world.

But it’s not all a sorry tale. Books have been replaced by electronic reading tablets, and audio books extend the audience to those who prefer not to sit for long periods of time reading.

Authors can now by-pass the old ‘publishing houses’ and the editorial dictates of literary agents. As a result, there is a wider range of reading material available than ever before.

And yet, and yet…

Where have our critical faculties gone? In this excess of electronic information, a serious amount of ‘dumbing down’ has taken place. The book readers have become a minority in place of audio and video.

Just take a look at a Saturday evening television schedule and you will see programmes featuring so called celebrities, unskilled game shows and the raising of the cult of sensual pleasures (like food programmes) to high fashion status.

As a society we are making decisions about personal preference using, what I call, emotional reasoning. This is the part of the brain that makes an appraisal in a few seconds when we meet a stranger. Sometimes it is spot on, but we all can think of instances in which it was just plain wrong. When we get to know people better, we use our intellectual reasoning – rational thought – to come to a more balanced appreciation of a new friend or enemy.

Should we be surprised then, that politics around the world, has moved into this area of emotional reasoning. You no longer need a degree in politics be required to work through the complexities of national problems in search of solutions. You no longer need to read broad sheet newspapers, specialist journals or books on the subject. Instead you listen to a report on the television news and if you agree with it – that’s what you think!

Why has this happened? Well I would suggest that complexity can a be a real downer – history proves this point. Mistakes are repeated over and over and over – whether it is trade, war, education, religion, distribution of resources, medicine, agriculture. The list is as endless as the mistakes of mankind. Although we have the capacity to think complex thoughts and make balanced judgements based on a deep and extended examination of a subject – for the emotional reasoner, this is a waste of time. After all – a meal is a meal whether prepared by a three star Michelin chef or a fast food joint.

‘I was hungry before I ate, now I am not.’

This is the power of ignorance. This is how being dumb hands over power to the State to do what it likes, without a single placard of dissent being waved. How bright did the audience in the Colosseum have to be to enjoy the sick spectacles the rulers had arranged for them? Caesar’s – who were slavers, dictators, corrupt, debauched, ruthless hedonists – had their populace worked out and under control.

Compare this, however loosely, to the present day. Are we now making reasoned choices or emotional choices?

The heart can become the master of the head, but if the heart is not focused on love and love alone, it is an ignorant and malign master.

And the first symptom of this taking place, is the burning of the books; the burning of reason, the burning of expertise, the burning of a common good. Amongst the ashes, the powerful and ignorant will dance a shallow, thoughtless dance that just makes them ‘feel good’. That’s enough reason, isn’t it?

But it might not end that way. Some people may climb the Mountain of Light and open up those tunnels and start handing out the Holy Books. Some people may find the digital versions of national libraries, once thought lost. Some people may discover light after the darkness that ignorance brings, just may.

I heard an interviewee on the radio use the phrase ‘joy through suffering’. He had used hard drugs like heroine and cocaine, that had practically ruined his life. He had pulled through and was now a successful restaurant owner and chef in New York.

He was not talking about the ‘joy of suffering’. That is different and reserved for the sadistic. But he had realised that suffering is a part of being human in a way that cannot be avoided.

Suddenly our bodies don’t work, the environment plays dirty tricks – as can other humans, accidents and deliberates* of all kinds shatter or partially shatter lives. (*I made that word up but you know what I mean)

Guatama Buddha contemplated the state of suffering and how to deal with it, from which came Buddhism – sorry if that is an oversimplification to Buddhists. He realised that his life of luxury as a prince was teaching him nothing about the human condition.

I don’t know what he would make of the modern expectation of ‘being happy’. In a largely secular and technology led society, the west has been able to create lives in which we hardly suffer. Being ‘unhappy’ is something to get away from, rather than adapt and learn from. In the United Kingdom we should hardly be surprised when we bring up a generation of young people who have been wrapped in the metaphorical ‘cotton wool’, to whom any discomfort is intolerable. (This was the finding of a recent ‘think tank’)

There is a fairy story called ‘The Princess and the Pea’ which illustrates the point. The Princess could feel a pea under the mattress of her bed and it was causing her discomfort. She orders another mattress on top of her present one, but this did not solve the problem. She continued piling mattress upon mattress, but was never comfortable.

There is something about the nature of suffering which is encapsulated in this story. With an unrealistic attitude to ‘comfort’ you will never rest. Much, or even most of suffering, is in the mind rather than the body. I don’t think the moral of the story was ‘remove the cause’ although this clearly is another dimension. The story is more about the mental attitude which – even today – we recognise as the ‘princess’ syndrome; avoiding suffering and never being satisfied.

It’s a kind of curse on mankind, this suffering business – said to have been introduced by God as a punishment after Eve (maybe a bit of a princess) wanted what she was told she could not have.

In Christianity ‘Jesus died on the cross for our sins’, as if the suffering of one is an reason and / or excuse for others not to experience the same. The flaw in this ‘magical’ doctrine is exposed when Christians experience suffering. They wonder what sort of God gives cancer to a cute child, or kills a family in a car crash.

The only comfort pill offered is the promise that heaven awaits Christians after death. Not everyone however is convinced and it’s not just Christianity who believes in this promise. Muslims are promised an entry to paradise after death. Unprovable statements are not only possibly true, but possibly untrue. Hardly worthy of ways of living, you might think.

Joy through suffering is something more tangible. It doesn’t mean to me a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ but rather a row of lights in the tunnel. Those who really suffer through disability or disease, often display a sort of optimism which is not explainable to the observer. What gets blind people out of bed in the morning? And yet their disability is something they come to terms with and find joy in living, other than through the eyes.

At a mental level, suffering is a meditative state, that requires and exercises the hidden strength that I believe, we all contain. Humans are incredibly resilient – physically and mentally. Mentally we can endure incredible hardship such as solitary confinement, and emerge from the experience stronger, wiser.

So let your children cry a little. Let them experience how hard it is sometimes to be a human being. Let them be aware of others who suffer – other children in war zones who appear briefly – dazed and depleted on our television screens.

Suffering teaches us through experience and observation. Without it we cannot know the opposite of suffering. And that is a joy, the joy of being human and able to embrace contradictions.