Gerry Lynch

Two Ceasefires and A Coming Out: A Memoir

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Cross-posted at Slugger O’Toole…

I’ve been thinking about coming out. There have been a few horror stories doing the rounds recently: Vicky Beeching’s harrowing life and those of Lyra McKee’s friends. It’s made me think about how it was for me, all those years ago. If I’m honest, it was a banal tale set against a bizarre backdrop.

Maybe it’s just because I’m home, for the first significant amount of time since Chris died, sleeping in the room where I came out to my Mum, and this all happening on the 20th anniversary of the first IRA ceasefires, but I can’t pull the threads of my coming out from the tapestry of mid 1990s Belfast into which they were woven.

1994 is starting to be a long time ago. It was just before the internet arrived; it was a year that started with the last whites-only government in Africa still in office, if only marginally in power. John Major was the Prime Minister, and his government was consumed with moral panic about illegal acid house raves. It seems like a different world, with the tiny details often being the most dramatically different. There were more pubs and fewer pawn shops. Newsagents near schools were wreathed in the fug of chainsmoking Sixth Formers at 4 p.m. There was no Tesco or Sainsbury’s in Belfast, only local supermarkets like Stewart’s.

In Northern Ireland, 1 September 1994 was a great watershed. It is still the most logical point at which to divide recent history into a ‘now’ and a ‘then’. Before, The Troubles simply were and, to my generation, always had been. My memories are of an endless succession of road blocks and traffic jams; of young men in uniform in patrol, with English accents and heavy weapons which would be aimed at you, following you down a street; of dead people on the news and footage of haggard young women in black crying at funerals; of heavy wood beams put across the front door at night, to buy possibly vital seconds in case an assassination squad broke it down with a sledgehammer; of an acute awareness of where was ‘safe’ and where was ‘dodgy’.

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Is Paddy Ashdown right? Is it time for an end to Sykes-Picot?

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ISIS blows up a border post on the Syria-Iraq border. From the ISIS propaganda video 'The End of Sykes-Picot'.
ISIS blows up a border post on the Syria-Iraq border. From the ISIS propaganda video The End of Sykes-Picot.

Paddy Ashdown had an unusually courageous article in the Guardian on Thursday calling for the West to accept that the 1920s-era boundaries of Middle Eastern countries should be redrawn. Courageous doesn’t mean sensible. How does his argument stack up?

“This is the start of a long conflict which could cross the entire Muslim world”, says The Guardian subheader, correctly, “The west’s strategy must accept the end of the old imperial borders.”
 

There’s much that’s sensible here, including the admission that the West neither has the men nor the money to think about remaking the Middle East through force of arms, even if that were possible. So Paddy is essentially calling for Iraq to be allowed to fall apart, for Southern Iraq to be allowed to fall into Tehran’s sphere of influence, for the West to arm the Kurds and for an end to Sykes-Picot.

This is might well happen whether or not “the West”, with its vaunted idea of its capacity to shape events, likes it. Iraq, as an entity, is currently in the last chance saloon. We should not forget that collapsing countries always leave some mess behind. In this case, it will be particularly bad as there is no agreement as to what the boundaries between the various successor entities might be. On off fighting over legitimate ownership of Kirkuk, for example, could last for generations in that context. In fact, I think Paddy knows this so maybe he’s just calling for us to accept that the Syrian Civil War is turning into the War of Syro-Iraqi Succession?

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Nobody loves themselves a conspiracy theory anywhere in the world like they love themselves one in the Middle East

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The latest conspiracy theory doing the rounds in the Middle East: ISIS is a front established by the USA to legitimise a reinvasion of Iraq, and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is actually a Jewish actor called Shimon Eliot. (Of course the actor was Jewish.) Here’s a sample from the Turkish twittersphere:

Of course, conspiracy theories are hardly unique to the Middle East, and some of the commenters in the comments zone on the Guardian website are hardly less convinced that ISIS is a convenient excuse for the Americans to reinvade Iraq: to be honest Fisk isn’t far off that sort of terrain this week.

But there is something spectacular about the sheer scale of the conspiracies that ordinary people in the region imagine are confected in the world. Provincial Turkey in the weeks after 9/11 was fascinating. Of course, the educated provincial secular élite scoffed at the theories and it was generally a fascinating time to hang out with them and talk about the world. But among the ordinary Mehmets on the Yenişehir omnibus, an awful lot happily believed that “Amerika kendini yaptı“ (America did it itself) and “Hiç Yahudi o sabah işe gitmiş“ (they say none of the Jews went to work that morning). Not all of them believed that sort of tripe, by any matter of means, but a lot.

Hussein Ibish has a brilliant piece, Baghdadi Denial Syndrome, on the atonishing unwillingness among Sunnis, across ethnic and national lines, to believe that ISIS can’t possibly be a real phenomenon. Many refuse to believe that Sunni Muslims could be responsible for the sort of maiming/crucifying/baby-starving antics that ISIS gets up to. In a way, that’s sort of sweet: it’s a counter to the Daily Mail coverage that mutters behind it’s hand, you know, they’re all secretly a bit like Abu Hamza. But it’s still nuts, and damagingly, self-righteously, nuts in that it transfers the blame for all problems to other people like Westerners, Jews and Shi’ites sets Sunni Islam on a non-tenable moral pedestal in the process.

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Feast of the Transfiguration: Thousands Face Death on the Mountain

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Mountains are somewhere apart from the mainstream of the world. They are often gorgeous, above the general fray of life, intensitying the beauty and hiding the ugly side of reality on the ground in the vistas they command. Approached wrongly, or in difficult conditions, they can be places of death.

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, when Christians remember the pilgrimage of Christ with Peter, James and John – up an unknown mountain, but probably Hermon or Tabor. The prophets Elijah and Moses appear to them, and Christ’s face and clothes are transformed, and begin to radiate light. God the Father’s disembodied voice pronounces Christ as his son, recapitulating his baptism in the Jordan, and the episode is often held to mark a turning point in Christ’s journey, where it begins to run towards its culmination in Jerusalem.

The mountains of Galilee, on one of which the incident took place, sit at one end of an arc from the mountains of Kurdistan. On a straight line, about 500 miles of flat Syrian desert separate them, desert which for three years, since the start of the Syrian Civil War, been one of the most violent battlefields on the planet.

Two months ago, Syria’s torment blew back across the border into Iraq with a vengeance. The self-styled “Islamic State” has proclaimed itself the resurrection of Sunni Islam’s Caliphate, in abeyance since the collapse of the Ottoman dynasty 90 years ago. In the past few weeks, ISIS has made a serious advance from the Sunni heartlands of West-Central Iraq into the ethnic and religious kaleidoscope of the Far North.

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Interesting posts: autism, WW1, threats to liberal democracy, Iran

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Some great writing around at the moment, too much to keep up with sometimes. Here’s some of the best.

The Kids Who Beat Autism – New York Times

I always worry about articles like this giving false hope to people. Some kids develop quite normally after autism in early childhood. But most don’t. We don’t understand autism very well, or even if it’s a condition or series of entirely unrelated conditions masquerading under shared syndrome name.

Which means I love the way this piece ended, with words from a parent whose son remains, in adulthood, severely impaired in terms of communications and who will never live independently.

“At some point,” she told me, “I realized he was never going to be normal. He’s his own normal. And I realized Matthew’s autism wasn’t the enemy; it’s what he is. I had to make peace with that. If Matthew was still unhappy, I’d still be fighting. But he’s happy. Frankly, he’s happier than a lot of typically developing kids his age. And we get a lot of joy from him. He’s very cuddly. He gives us endless kisses. I consider all that a victory.”

As somebody said, being normal is overrated. Being happy and giving love to the people who care about you most is the most useful thing any of us can do. Matthew clearly lives a life of great worth, however ‘unsuccessful’ it might be by worldly standards.

How The Great War Razed East Africa – Africa Research Institute

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Iraqi Christians in Parliament Square

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I attended the national demonstration on the persecution of Iraqi Christians in Parliament Square, London on Saturday 26 July. There was a large turnout of Iraqi and other Middle Eastern Christians, a healthy and welcome presence of Iraqi Muslims, a disappointingly small number of British Christians who looked like their ancestry was from these islands … Read more

Prisoners of Conscience on St John the Baptist’s Day

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gxMq7s0ELE

I always had a good appetite as a child, getting stuck into seconds and more whenever I had the chance. My mother, observing this, would often remark, “Son, you’d eat the head of John the Baptist.”

John the Baptist’s messy end is one of the best known of Bible stories. Like most Gospel stories, it is a short narrative and doesn’t go in for detailed descriptions of personalities and motives. As so often, much of the popular memory of the story doesn’t come from Scripture at all.

Oscar Wilde’s grotesquely brilliant play Salomé, later turned into the first true 20th Century opera by Richard Strauss and then into a Holywood epic by Columbia Pictures, has added much to the popular perception of John the Baptist’s death, even among those who have never seen any. Scripture does not record the nymphomaniac, borderline necrophiliac, Salomé of Wilde, Strauss, and Rita Heyworth, but instead a girl very much under the thumb of a ruthless mother with a personal grudge against John because of his uncompromising sexual moralism.

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Why is Cathedral Evensong Growing and What Does It Mean?

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This piece appeared in the May-June 2014 edition of Salisbury Cathedral News I’ve always preferred the intimate parish church community to a cathedral’s grandeur. I came to mature faith in Belfast’s city centre parish of St. George’s, walking past the door of the Cathedral to do so. Since arriving in Salisbury last summer, I’ve yet … Read more

The Good Samaritan Visits North Belfast

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And, behold, a certain pastor stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?

And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down the Whitewell Road, from Bellevue to Greencastle, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

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