Margaret Elphinstone (2000) The Sea Road.

I might have read Margaret Elphinstone’s book, The Sea Road before. Everybody loves Vikings, especially President Putin. The Rus people, he claims, are directly descended from The Sea Road and not from the Asiatic hordes in the East. Another way of saying, white is right. White is might. Pass the longboat and invade Ukraine where it all began.   

I know what you’re thinking, Alzheimer’s. That’s what really scares me. Memory loss. Not being Valhalla less. Being exiled as a ghost that can’t scare up a broth to the place beyond the sea. When I nail down a book review, it no long rises like Dracula from the grave to suck out my brain.

Every book is a dream, in which the writer is a Viking that sets sail. Grit doesn’t work. 10 000 books published annually by HarperCollins and 11 000 and more published by Amazon every week. True grit works even less. Luck now there’s something to be in thrall to. Thrall is a slave. Like the gods of Fate, but only smaller. No writer I know would say they were fated, but some might claim to be lucky. Being a Viking means you’ve got to consider the Fates, or else—

The Viking renegade Erik Raudi (Eric the Red) from Norway, who became an unsettler in Iceland, then a lawmaker in his settlement in Brattahild, Greenland was not thralled with the new religion of Christianity. He thought it made them soft.     

Gudrid’s story is told on 5^th July 1051 from the centre of the world an English Convent in St Peter Rome. She tells it to the Agnar, son of Aslief, a monk from Iceland. She’s an old woman, and he’s a young monk.  He transcribes a rough copy of their conversation onto vellum. Please don’t make the mistake of meaning I mean Vellum software.  

Agnar, in making his mark, notes like all Vikings,: ‘When you write down a person’s story…it becomes yours.’

Character building. Gudrid knew hunger as a child. Her father was a chieftain and her mother dead. He was a follower of Erik the Red.  Everyone had Irish slaves. Her father claimed like every Irishman I’ve met to be descended from the kings of Ireland. We all are. It’s not a matter of genetics, but simple mathematics. Just as we are all from out of Africa. No one needed to tell him his daughter, Gudrid, was beautiful. That was a matter of record in which she had two husbands and two sons.

World building. Seasons are short and winters are long. The boundaries of the world become very large and very cold. The sea gives life and takes it. Ghosts haunt the living. Gudrid is a childish witch, but her powers untested. Everything in their season. Nothing wasted. Bird and their eggs are taken for food. Sheep and cattle, the mainstay. Crops are sown. But it’s never enough for life. A ship is needed to hunt enough sea meat for the winter months.

But there are few trees that can withstand the gale-force winds. Wood needed for the keel and stern. The keelson trunk of the mast. Thick oak for planking. And little bog iron for the smithy to make nails. Ropes made from sea hide. Loose wool and thread for caulking.  For people not only to survive but to thrive, they must trade. Trade is a form of plunder. Winner and losers.

Winds must be favourable and Fates dictate heaven or hell.   

‘I’m old and I’m tired,’ says Gudrid. ‘Sometimes I think the more we see, the less we know.’ Read on.

How the world laughed when the moron’s morons’ foot-soldiers stormed the Congress buildings.

 Captain America.

But the price of freedom is high, it always has been. And it’s one I’m willing to pay. And if I’m the only one, so be it. But I’m willing to bet I’m not.

I was scared the moron’s moron would, inadvertently, take us into the Third World War (delayed). I’ve got a roof over my head, enough to eat, and quite like being alive. As Malcolm X said before he was murdered ‘the chickens have come home to roost’.

The 45^th American President, the pedlar of hate and conspiracy theories—who got into the highest office in the land, with Fox News help, a Facebook disinformation campaign, and the Russian President Putin providing logistical support—under the pretext of a taking back control, incites riot and unlawful assembly. A mob army to dispute an election he lost, we’re back at Charlottesville here, with ‘those very good people’ that are gun-toting, flag-waving white and right.

Not since 1812, we’ve been told has this happened. General MacArthur brutally dealt with a citizen army, many of them veterans of the first world war, that had come to Washington and demanded government help during the hungry thirties. It will be interesting to see what happens to those moron moron’s supporters, who, for examples, filmed themselves sitting in Presiding Officer’s chair. That’s how dumb they are.

They believe that the purity of their brand of patriotism will protect them from the law. Without the moron’s moron in office how can there be any law? Just or otherwise?

The bankrupt 45^th American President, who when called to fight for his country in Vietnam, but said he’d a sore foot, ends in farce. When it comes to taking money from the poor and giving it to the rich, I’m a revolutionary. This was no storming of the Congress by Captain America surrogates, but was dis-United America showing its face for the television and the mass media. Andy Warhol’s everyone requiring their fifteen minutes of fame in La-La land. Poetic justice as the moron’s moron bows out.   

The Trial of Alex Salmond, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, Director Sarah Howitt and narrator Kirsty Wark.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000lwld

Droit du seigneur

#MeToo in the Middle-Ages – A supposed legal right in medieval Europe, allowing feudal lords to have sex with subordinate women on their wedding night (or whenever).

#MeToo in the twenty-first century, Scotland’s former First Minister Alex Salmond, March 2020, at the High Court in Edinburgh,  was found not guilty of thirteen charges of sexual misconduct, including an attempted rape in which the witness, ‘woman H’ (identities were kept secret and actor’s voices used for dramatic purposes) alleged that after dinner in 2014, at Bute House, she was sexually assaulted and Alex Salmond held her down on a bed and would have raped her, but he passed out drunk. This charge was found ‘Not Proven’ (a verdict that only exists in Scotland’s courts). One charge was thrown out by the procurator fiscal’s office before going to trial.

 ‘Woman A’, one of ten women, alleged, for example, Alex Salmond had placed his hand on her thigh while in his chauffeur-driven car and had sexually assaulted her.

Salmond’s Queen’s Counsel, the bumptious Gordon Jackson, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, was himself censored after being overhead naming some of the women witnesses on board the Edinburgh to Glasgow train. Salmond had crowdfunded his defence costs and reached his target of over £80 000 claiming he was being unjustly vilified.

Jackson was more forthright in his train journey. The same old tactics that victimise the victim which mean, on average, 95% of rape allegations never reach court and aren’t prosecuted by the procurator fiscal, were referred to by the QC: ‘All I need to do is put a smell on her’.

Discredit, discredit, discredit.

Jackson also referred to Salmond as sexual bully and being a nightmare to work for, but not being quite the kind of person that should be on sex-offender register. He was, in effect, one of the middle-class chaps that had made a mistake and it was his fame that had got him punished. He was being victimised.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/mar/29/alex-salmond-qc-to-be-investigated-after-naming-trial-women

Kirsty Wark also established that female workers at Bute House were advised not to work out-of-hours and to be alone with Alex Salmond. Alex Salmond and his friends suggest there was a conspiracy against him. He was right, of course, about this. It’s called POLITICS.

The latest opinion-polls suggest fifty-five percent of the Scottish population would vote to leave the British union and become an independent nation.

‘Should Scotland be an independent country? Yes or No’ was the question asked of voters in September 2014. I voted YES. The country voted NO, with a 55-45 percent split in which there was a turnout at the polls of almost 85% of registered voters. I was ungracious in defeat. You can fuck off with your Better Together campaign was how I and many others felt. A Labour Party cosying up to the Tories wiped them out in Scotland. All this is history, of course, but it’s still being played out.

The futures green and the futures SNP, but an SNP without its leading light of the 2014 Scottish referendum. Alex Salmond stood down and his ignominy was compounded by losing his Parliamentary seat to a Tory bastard. Salmond then tried to revitalise his career as a talk-show host, which would be fair enough, but like the former Communist Jimmy Reid decrying the rat race as Rector of the University of Glasgow, but writing for Rupert Murdoch’s Sun tabloid made strange bedfellows, Salmon’s show was backed by Russian television and Putin’s oligarchs. Talk on independence would leave a bad taste in anybody’s mouth.

Where does Alex Salmond go now? A footnote in history? Nicola Sturgeon, now we’re talking.

David Halberstam (2009 [2007]) The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War.

David Halberstam was killed in a car crash in 2007, clichéd as it is, his memory lives on here. This is a book all American citizens need to read before saluting the flag. Old Glory, American Presidents should be handed it when they are sworn in and take office. The Korean War began on 25^th June 1950 and lasted three years. The forgotten war, a stepping stone into Vietnam. Military historian S.L.A Marshall described it as ‘the century’s nastiest little war’.

Karl Marx’s view was that ‘history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.’ Halberstem did not witness the election of the moron’s moron, Donald J Trump, as the 45^th President of the United States. An election victory the mainstream media did not see coming. (I can take a little credit here, predicting he might win, could win, did win, for the same reasons that I thought Boris Johnson this side of the Atlantic might be the next British Prime Minister when he dallied with Brexit all those years ago). The much heralded New York Times, whom Halberstem worked for, marked Hilary Clinton as a shoo-in for President.   You’d need to go back to 3^rd November 1948 for such a shock election result. There was no digital then.   The Chicago Tribune  had already printed copies of its front-page banner: ‘Dewey defeats Trauman’. Harry S Trauman was, as history shows, elected President by a landslide. There’s a lesson there somewhere.

Senator Joe McCarthy’s claim then that ‘the Reds Run the State Department’ have taken until 2016 to having any semblance of truth, or fake news, depending on your point of view. There is little doubt that Russian intelligence provided finance and expertise to get the least intelligent President in American history elected. Reporter George Reedy’s quip at the height of the House of Un-American Activities investigations, that espionage wasn’t Joe McCarthy’s speciality and that ‘Joe couldn’t find a Communist in Red Square – he didn’t know Karl Marx from Groucho Marx ’, now seems the cruellest kind of irony.

Demands for a ‘loyalty test’ still hold true with Trump, but With President Trump inviting President Putin to the White House and Washington in the Autumn and announcing policy reversals be Tweet, reds are no longer under the bed and mainstream media is twittering as it catches up. There’s no doubt the moron’s moron would fail Hoover’s ‘loyalty test’. The only person Trump remains loyal to is himself.

(There is a joke here about them not being in the bed unless a couple of ‘communist’ prostitutes have peed on it, first –but that’s fake news and not very funny).

The Coldest Winter is a topical book about casual racism and hubris. The four-star General Douglas MacArthur and self-styled Emperor of the East took it upon himself to ignore orders from the Commander in Chief, President Harry S Trauman and created a coterie of sycophantic officers and yes men that took up residence in Tokyo to fight a war in Korea. There’s parallels here, of course, with the moron’s moron.

MacArthur claimed in early November 1950 that what fighting there was in Korea would all be over in three weeks and his men would be home for Christmas. He ignored warnings and intelligence reports that the Chinese were about to enter the war to support the three divisions of North Korea communist troops that were routing their Southern (ROK) counterparts. MacArthur referred to them collectively as Chinese laundrymen and a few divisions of white American troops would show up and have them running. MacArthur was right because he was always right. His armoury didn’t include being wrong.

American troops sent to Korean didn’t have enough of pretty much everything required for a war including men, military hardware, rifles that worked and ammunition. Much like the Nazis invading Russia, they were in summer uniform in temperatures thirty-below zero. Most non-conflict casualties for American troops and their NATO allies were due to frost bit. But there were lots of casualties. Americans were running, but in the wrong direction, not towards the North Korean capital as planned back at MacArthur’s headquarter, but back towards the 38^th parallel, that still divides North and South Korea. Many of them never returned. MacArthur’s call for a larger war against China were downplayed.

Satellites looking down at night see only the South Korean towns lit up. The North remains in the darkness of the 1950s, when Chinese troops used horses and musical instruments to coordinate their punishing attacks.

General Douglas MacArthur presided over one of the worst military defeats since Custard at Little Big Horn. This was the same general, of course, that refused to believe the Japanese would attack America – until Pearl Harbour – and then got stranded in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded. He had that God complex.

In comparison, there’s nothing casual about the moron’s moron’s racism or hubris. It’s who he is and what he stands for and stood for in the Presidential election.

The Korean War was an unpopular war, largely ignored at home in the United States. Fighting Communism, fighting the North Koreans, fighting the Chinese, with the Russians standing on the side-lines, fighting for free Asia, to protect Europe, the word ‘crusade’ was used. Escalation of a small war, to a larger war, to a nuclear war and nuclear winter.  North Korea’s Kim Il-Sung, the Great Leader also had that God complex, which he passed on to his son, and grandson, Kim Jong-Un like a bit of stale cheese. Chinese historians, those running dogs, were not pleased that little mention was made of China’s part in saving North Korea from capitalism in a museum documenting the war in Pyongyang.  History repeating itself. God I hope not.

China, the workshop of the world, is at the stage where America was at the end of the Second World War. Where Russia was after winning the Great Patriotic War (let’s forget, like President Putin does, the sticky bit about the agreement to invade Poland and parcel up Europe with the Nazis). The rise of fascism all over Europe.  The moron’s moron in the White House. Hubris and racism meeting and having spoilt kids we call oligarchs. The rise of eugenics, populism and the belief that the atomic bomb can be deployed in a limited capacity. There lies World War III and Armageddon. The seeds of that right-wing madness is all here in the 700 pages of David Halberstam’s classic book. A must buy. A must read. My book of the year.