Monday, November 09, 2009

David Burchell, the golden age, the Berlin Wall, the Berlin air lift, and the age of leaden social democrats


(Above: a golden age for gentleman readers, who thought worship of the voluptuous female figure only began with the discovery of the intertubes. Not so, as this Corenisz Cornelis painting The Golden Age (bacchanalia) clearly proves).

The quest for a golden age is by definition never ending, and it has to be said, usually the preoccupation of old farts and the odd besotted historian, and Joseph Campbell types in search of long lost mythologies (right down to the buffs even now marveling at the golden age of comic strip heroes and science fiction).

Things, it almost goes without saying, were always better in the golden age, than in the current age which of course bears a suspicious resemblance to either a silver age, or much more likely a bronze, iron, or worst of all, lead age.

Funnily enough the idea's been around since as long ago as the ancient Greeks, or the Vedic time of the Hindus, and if you like you can go back to Hesiod, in the eighth century BC, to discover that even then there was a golden age before he scribbled his poems:

... they lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all devils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods. (Yep, it wasn't just the Garden of Eden. More on the concept here at its wiki).

But why worry about the fanciful delusions of past generations when you've got David Burchell taking a walk down memory lane like a grumpy old fart determined to look around himself and find nothing but lead in his column Berlin anniversary too few remember.

And what's even more wonderful and marvellous is that his golden age got lost only recently, fortunately just after the second world war, which is an event inclined to tarnish talk of golden ages, unless you happen to believe in the pleasures of the warrior class and the virtues of holocaust.

Yes there were giants in those days, and you can forget your pitiful pygmies with their carry on about the fall of the Berlin war. Bah humbug, it's nothing I tells ya, nothing at all, you young 'uns know nothing and remember nothing.

Today every news service in the world will transmit the same gratifying and facile images of the destruction of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago: a moment when -- as solemn-voiced announcers will intone in practised cadences -- not just a wall, but an entire era was ground into brick-dust.

Such commemorations are easy and agreeable because they invite us to celebrate the ending of something, without requiring us to know anything about what it was that ended. What could be more pleasant than to enjoy an obscurely heart-lifting, lung-expanding sensation of liberation without having to trouble ourselves as to what that liberation really consisted of?

Oh you facile simple minded delusional solemn voiced humbugs, listen to your prophet in the wilderness. All is vanity, vanity of vanities, and soon the world will be dust. Hearken unto me as I smite and smote and smitten thee mightily:

The occasion is doubly gratifying because it invites self-indulgent reminiscence from the celebrity intellectuals of that era, many of whom at the time prophesied great things issuing from the wall's destruction (endless democratisation; the triumph of civil society) that never actually came to pass. In many cases they were the same people who a couple of decades earlier had prophesied great things for the workers of the world, which never came to pass, either. (By contrast, people such as Vaclav Havel who lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain, seem to have suffered no such messianic disappointments. They're just pleasantly surprised that everything has gone so tolerably well these past 20 years.)

Now please a moment's silence for the prophet, as he disses all the old prophets, who always get it wrong, unlike him and Vaclav Havel, and makes what can only be termed a grand political prophecy:

If there's one half-reliable lesson from the fall of the Berlin Wall it is this: that it signalled the death of grand political prophecy.

Well it's a grand prophecy, I suppose, and since we're talking of golden and leaden ages, appropriately delusional:

With the wall went the last flickering remnants of dull heat from every radical-messianic fantasy, Left and Right, out of Europe's mad century of radical-messianic fantasies. From this point onwards we could assure ourselves, with tolerable confidence, that every glossy-eyed political evangelist promising deliverance from the manifold insufficiencies of everyday life, and from the world's harshness and injustice, was nothing more than a common-and-garden charlatan.

Oh dear, will somebody bring him a cup of tea, I think he's having a glassy eyed trauma.

"What's he saying Bert?"
"Dunno Gladys, think it's something about Silvio Berlusconi being a charlatan."
"What, good ol' Silvio? What's he done this time?"
"Seems like we can't believe his spiel that he's saving Italy from the manifold insufficiencies of everyday life, and from the world's harshnes and injustice."
"Oh, he's an atheist is he?"
"More likely a social democrat."

Sorry, got distracted there. Back to the main theme:

The clever salon Marxists, the air-castle builders, the adepts of interpersonal hatred turned into political virtue -- those people who had dominated political discussion for the previous couple of decades by the force of their political charisma -- were obliged after 1989 to re-groom and re-clothe themselves in various new guises. Henceforth soi-disant radicals would be forced to satisfy themselves with the maunderings of philosophers so artfully paradoxical that it is impossible to tell whether they are humanists or anti-humanists, foes of the West or tongue-in-cheek devotees. Or else they could swallow their dignity and pretend an interest in the political finger-painting of such kindergarten philosophers as Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy.

Meaning?

Never mind, doesn't it sound exceptionally splendid. And you, yes, you in the back row who said 'pompous git', out, out now and wash out your mouth with soap. We're not with those kindegarten philosophers, we're with a primary school philosopher who ever so soon is going to revolutionize linguistics by publishing his own understanding of generative grammar. Sucks boo to you Noam.

That's why our prophet, the preacher, has to blather a bit, a giant unrecognized in his own time while the finger painters daub their childish pictures of cats on a darkened wall inside a cave known only to Plato, silly radical castle builders when there's a real castle to be built. The golden age of the Berlin airlift! Forgotten by all, except the prophet, and perhaps Gerard Henderson, who also believes that no one except himself can remember anything about history, thanks to the NSW educational system.

Yet while the Polaroid pictures of the tumbling wall are impressed on our memories like an image from a camera obscura, almost nobody remembers an equally significant Berlin anniversary this year: of the event that, after all, made the wall necessary in the first place. In 1948 the Soviet occupation authorities in Berlin progressively shut down transport, power and communications into the western half of the city, purportedly (and what is the essence of the Soviet legacy, if not the lie told without even the pretence of conviction?) because of technical problems. And so the volunteer remnants of the former Western Allied air forces were forced to ferry in by air almost 2 1/2 million tonnes of food and essentials, along three narrow corridors, through fog and rain, and despite the harassment of Soviet fighters and searchlights, every single hour of every day for virtually a year.

Ah those were the good old days when it was a joy to be alive, and when it was a simple matter of goodies v baddies, and the filthy deviant commie bastards almost had us by the throats, so fiendish were they once we'd stopped being allies because we had the bomb and they didn't. And a homosexual like Montgomery Clift could play the lead role in The Big Lift. Don't ask, don't tell!

Many accounts of the Berlin Airlift nowadays revel in it chiefly as a grand military-logistical enterprise, a feat of aeronautics and engineering. Yet the airlift was also our greatest enterprise in humanitarian internationalism, aimed at rescuing the brutalised population of West Berlin from the Soviet maelstrom. Pilots were forced to bring in war-weary transport planes to Berlin's battered Tempelhof airfield at roughly 30-second intervals, along a narrow avenue of trees in the centre of the city, their wing-tips below the roof level of the surrounding tower blocks. During the course of that year several dozen planes crashed and more than 100 air crew were incinerated. All of this in the relief of a population that had been warring against those same air crews a mere three years previously.

Well let's not mock the people who died during the air lift, or for that matter, the thousands who died or were imprisoned trying to escape East Germany during the time of the wall. Let's instead marvel how one event can be seen as a golden age of triumphant human spirit, while the other - the bringing down of the wall - is portrayed as a kind of third rate bronze medal event. As if rating human tragedies and outrageous behavior by dictators was somehow an Olympic event.

No, enough of that brooding, let's get back to the main event.

Equally salutary is this fact: the guarantors of the lives of the West Berliners were two great social democrats, president Harry Truman and British Labour's monumental foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, neither of whom hesitated before wagering their legacies on the survival of West Berlin.

Yes, you see, in those days social democrats were ... social democrats. Nowadays of course social democrats are ... social democrats and therefore either unremittingly stupid or evil.

All sorts of disgraceful acts were committed in the name of the Cold War and the world is still swimming in an ocean of small-arms weaponry distributed in its name. And yet this first signal moment of moral clear-sightedness -- exercised at a time when the population of Berlin must have seemed as little interesting to Westerners as the population of Bosnia in the 1990s, or that of Darfur today -- defined the moral terms. I wonder if the present occupant of the White House will ever feel that same instinctual moral call.

Well of course Obama won't because - it almost goes without saying ... he's a social democrat. He doesn't have an instinctual moral bone in his body with which to heed an instinctual moral call of the kind issued by the preacher. Vanity, all is vanity, saith the preacher.

"Obama, Obama, ya ba oona, ya ba ma," chanted the brave and bruised youths in the streets of Tehran last week. "You're either with them or with us." There is no hint that the President was listening. Meanwhile Obama's ambassador to Sudan, Scott Gration, has explained that he wants to hand out gold stars and smiley faces to the butchers of Darfur in order to persuade them of the merits of engagement. What, I wonder, would Truman and Bevin have made of that?

Well perhaps we should instead hope that he acts like Ernest Bevin in relation to Palestine and Israel? (here). Or perhaps he should instead act like Harry did and form an unshakeable loathing of Joseph McCarthy, and sack mad war mongers like General MacArthur, even if it leaves his enemies calling for his impeachment? (here).

No, I guess not, he'll just have to put up with mad Republicans and not work out what to do with the inherited mess that is Afghanistan.

But then I'm not quite sure, as is usual for me, of the actual point the incoherent Burchell is making. But this is his final thought on the matter:

In 1949 the term humanitarian intervention had barely been coined, yet it was practised when it counted. Nowadays we open our hearts, flutter our hands and talk of little else and do nothing. Or else we put on pious faces and pass unctuous resolutions, which amounts to the same thing.

Or perhaps we just write unctuous columns for The Australian explaining how we're all right Jack, and the rest of the world can just bugger off (Middle-class angst a luxury we can't afford).

Oh yes, talk about opening hearts, fluttering hands, and doing nothing. You see long ago they abolished the slave trade, but that was in another golden age. These days we need to keep the Australian wall up, and those besieging it out. It's the only wise and humanitarian thing to do, and everything else is hypocrisy.

Come to think of it, Burchell is clearly right. The moment we live in is full of moral pygmies and half assed moral equivalences, and self-righteous justification, often dressed up with preening verbiage and self-satisfaction.

I guess the only difference here is the notion that at some time we had a golden age.

Unhappily, the age of lead, and thinkers like Burchell has always been with us, and always will be. Vanity, all is vanity. So it was and so it goes ...

(Below: sadly golden age brew is no longer with us, so you must drink leaden age brew from lead lined tankards. Just be wary of lead poisoning, once extremely rare, but now for readers of commentariat columnists, extremely common).

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