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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
6 2 Nov/Dec 2016
W
HY HAS rebel-held East Aleppo
taken so long to fall, despite
being besieged for months by
Syrian Government soldiers,
backed by Russian war-planes?
Will ISIS-occupied Mosul hold out similarly
against Iraqi troops supported by the Kurds and
Americans? Or will agreed escape corridors in
either case help the rebels/terrorists steal away?
World War 2 showed how costly it can be for
troops to take besieged cities in house-to-house
fighting against well-motivated defenders hold-
ing out in cellars, rooms and on roof-tops, with
good sniper positions on all sides. The sieges of
Stalingrad, Warsaw and Berlin are good exam-
ples. Even our own Easter Rising’s Battle of
Mount Street Bridge showed the heavy losses a
small group holding a building can inflict on a
much more numerous attacking enemy.
President Assad’s soldiers are presumably in
no hurry to get killed, so the miserable Aleppo
story goes on while the international media try
to make our hearts bleed at the thought of the
unfortunate civilians, especially children, in the
besieged city.
The Assad Government and its Russian allies
are judged heartless for not permitting enough
truces to allow in food and medicines. But who
decides the allocation of aid once it gets behind
rebel lines? Presumably the rebel leadership,
who are unlikely to allow themselves starve
while they dole out food to the women and
children
Last year I saw a TV film of food aid being
distributed in another besieged Syrian town.
Some children grasping for the food tins being
handed down from the back of a lorry looked as
well-nourished as their Irish counterparts. Other
children beside them were clearly starving. One
could count the ribs of their thin bodies. The
scene pointed to a pecking order among aid
recipients, with unseen people in the back
-
ground, presumably the rebel leadership or
administration, giving aid supplies to those they
favoured and denying supplies to others, when
there were no TV cameras around to film them,
This is likely to be the reality on the ground as
regards aid being delivered along ‘humanitarian
corridors’. While Assad is the West’s current
“bad guy” in Syria and we are urged to wax
indignant at the thought of his bombs falling in
Aleppo, we hear little of the bombs which Saudi
Arabia, that staunch ally of “the West”, is drop
-
ping simultaneously on a different group of
rebels/terrorists in Yemen. One of these recently
killed a hundred mourners at a funeral.
This selective indignation is encouraged by
the aid agencies which echo the political rhetoric
of the Western Governments that supply most of
their funding. It is startling to learn that the
income of Ireland’s aid agency, GOAL, increased
three-fold from €60m in 2012 to €210m in 2015,
according to the Irish Times, mostly for its Syrian
operation. This money came from the US and
British Governments which have their own politi-
cal agenda in Syria. Syria has turned GOAL into
Ireland’s biggest charity.
Political allegiance follows donor money.
GOAL spokesmen have strongly criticised the
Syrian Government’s attempts to suppress the
rebellion against it, although such suppression
is the right of any lawful internationally recog-
nised government, which, whether one likes it
or not, the Assad regime happens to be.
Likewise spokesmen for Medicins Sans Fron
-
tières Ireland echo French Government policy on
Syria as it assumes a continuing right of inter-
vention in France’s one-time mandatory territory.
These aid agencies serve the internationally
orchestrated campaign to delegitimise the
Assad Government and give moral sanction to
those attempting its overthrow. Yet if the Assad
Government were to be overthrown thousands
of Shias, Alawites and Christians could expect
to have their throats cut by the fundamentalist
‘freedom-fighters’ who would then take over in
Syria.
INTERNATIONAL
Contextualising
continual conflictual
conflagration
The Middle Eastern mess is caused by the
usual imperial suspects, and their agencies
by Anthony Coughlan
If the Assad Government
were to be overthrown,
thousands of Shias,
Alawites and Christians
could expect to have
their throats cut by the
fundamentalist ‘freedom-
fighters’ who would then
take over in Syria
Nov/Dec 2016 6 3
Concern at the fate of civilians in Benghazi,
Libya, in face of Colonel Gaddafi’s threatening
rhetoric was what ostensibly motivated Britain,
France and America to intervene in Libya in 2011.
This led to Gaddafi’s overthrow and gave us the
current failed State there. Hilary Clinton, then
Obama’s Secretary of State, pressed hard for
that intervention and got a UN Security Council
resolution to authorise it.
Mrs Clinton has called for a no-fly zone in Syria
to stop President Assad’s forces dropping bombs
on East Aleppo, ostensibly because they hit civil-
ians. If the President tries to push through such
a policy while the Russians are still supporting
Assad, it could have the potential to start World
War 3!
The Syrian conflict shows alarming evidence
of tension between the military hardliners of the
Pentagon and the diplomats around US Secre-
tary of State John Kerry. On 17 September last US
and Australian air attacks on Syrian army troops
killed 62 and wounded 100. The Americans said
it was an accident. Others thought it a deliberate
attempt by hardliners in Washington to scuttle
the partial ceasefire which Kerry and Russian
Foreign Minister Lavrov had agreed with the sup-
port of Presidents Obama and Putin, and which
had taken effect just five days before.
In public remarks bordering on the insubordi
-
nate, senior Pentagon officials showed unusually
open scepticism regarding key aspects of that
Kerry-Lavrov deal. One can assume that what
Lavrov told his boss in private was close to his
blunt words on Russian TV on 26 Septem-
ber: “My good friend John Kerry is under fierce
criticism from the US military machine. Despite
the fact that, as always, they made assurances
that the US Commander in Chief, President
Barack Obama, supported him in his contacts
with Russia, apparently the military does not
really listen to the Commander in Chief”.
Lavrov also criticised General Dunford, chair
-
man of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, for telling the
US Congress that he opposed sharing intelli-
gence with Russia “after the agreements
concluded on direct orders of Russian President
Putin and US President Barack Obama stipulated
that they would share intelligence…It is difficult
to work with such partners”.
It is scarcely surprising in the light of this that
the Russians and the Assad regime are desper
-
ate to get the siege of East Aleppo over and the
authority of the Syrian Government re-estab-
lished in the country’s second largest city before
a new US President takes office in January, when
a more confrontational American policy towards
Russia could ensue.
Meanwhile the ‘merchants of death’ of the
international arms trade have been rubbing their
collective hands at the rise of international ten-
sion over Syria and Ukraine. A new Cold War with
Russia, stoked by tension over both those areas,
guarantees that government orders for high
quality weaponry keep flowing in and their com-
pany profits keep going up in tandem.
Anthony Coughlan is Associate Professor
Emeritus in Social Policy at Trinity College
Dublin
Selective indignation is encouraged by
the aid agencies which echo the political
rhetoric of their Western Governments.
GOAL became Ireland’s largest charity
Britain and France connive at pushing
Turkey into joining the Central Powers in World
War 1 so that they can divide the Ottoman
Empire between them after the war.
The Constantinople Agreement, a
secret treaty sees the British and French prom-
ise Czarist Russia that it will get Constantinople
and the Dardanelles in the post-War victory
settlement.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement, also
secret, promises Palestine and Iraq to Britain,
Syria and Lebanon to France, and Armenian
Turkey to Russia following the expected defeat
of Germany and Turkey.
The Balfour Declaration sees Britain
promise to champion a homeland in Palestine
for the Jewish people. At the time there were
some 660, 000 Muslim Arabs in this Ottoman-
ruled area, coexisting with some 60,000 Jews.
The October Revolution removes Russia from
World War 1 and leads the Bolsheviks to pub
-
lish the secret treaties. The Balfour Declaration
sought to suffuse Britain’s grab for Palestine
in a more altruistic light, now that America had
joined the Allies and Russia had pulled out of
the war. One reason for it was to appeal to the
ardent Zionists around President Woodrow
Wilson.
- Britain rules Palestine and Iraq
while France rules Syria and Lebanon as man-
datory territories under League of Nations
auspices. Britain facilitates Jewish migration
to Palestine.
America, Britain and Stalin’s USSR
agree to establish the State of Israel in
Palestine. Israel’s population in 2016 is 6.5
million Jews and 1.8 million Arabs.
The USA and Britain overthrow Moham-
mad Mosaddeq, the Iranian Prime Minister
who had sought to nationalise the Anglo-Ira-
nian Oil Company, and replace him with Shah
Reza Pahlavi, who ruled as a Western puppet
until the Shia leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s Ira
-
nian Revolution of 1979.
S TO TODAY The hostility of Britain,
France and America to secular nationalist lead-
ers in the Middle East – Najibullah in
Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Gaddafi
in Libya and today Assad in Syria continues -
and tension between Sunni Muslims and Shia
Muslims, backed respectively by fundamental-
ist Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, to help
overthrow them, is encouraged.
THE LITANY OF WESTERN INTERVENTIONS BEHIND THE MIDDLE EAST’S CURRENT MESS
6 4 Nov/Dec 2016
I
HAVE FOR the last month been based in Eastern
Europe, lecturing and contributing to the Anglo
American University in Prague. The University has
been very nice to me in light of the bedraggled and
somewhat shaken image I must initially have
presented.
Prague, though it has its deficiencies as a city, is
conveniently located in middle Europe, a kind of rarefied
transport hub, a fractious, ravishing touristy polyglot
cosmopolis. As someone of mixed Irish and Austrian
blood I feel more at home and safe here than I do in Ire-
land, given some of the outrages that have been
perpetrated upon me by the vicious bullyboy elements
of that society, especially its state and
at times thuggish professional classes.
Nonetheless, I have not completely
severed my ties. For over 16 years I lec
-
tured on Jurisprudence in Ireland and,
for the last number of years, in particu-
lar I have been gradually winnowing my
thoughts down on questions of moral
good and evil and the intersection of
such concepts with questions of legal-
ity. What are the good and bad things
lawyers do? What is justice?
In three hours or so from Prague you
can be in Germany, or more precisely
in Nuremberg, a city I have always wanted to visit but
have never before been able to.
"Nuremberg shines throughout Germany like a sun
among the moon and stars", according to the normally
unimpressionable Martin Luther
Nuremberg was for centuries the undeclared capital
of the Holy Roman Empire particularly because the Impe-
rial Reichstag and courts met at Nuremberg Castle. It was
the preferred residence of most German kings, who kept
their crown jewels there.
It was never a bastion of tolerance or Semitism. In
1298, the Jews of the town were accused of having des-
ecrated the Christian host, and 698 of them were killed.
In 1349, there was a pogrom of Nuremberg's Jews. They
were burned at the stake or expelled, and a marketplace
was built over the former Jewish quarter.
Rich and groaning with architectural wonders, it was
also a magnet for famous artists. Albrecht Dürer, the
great German painter of the Renaissance, was born here
and we visited his house. By the 19th century, the city
had become an engine room of Germany’s industrial
revolution.
The Nazis saw a perfect stage for their activities in
working class Nuremberg. It was here that the boycott
of Jewish businesses began and the infamous Nurem-
berg Laws outlawing German citizenship for Jewish
people were enacted. Because of the city's relevance to
the Holy Roman Empire, the Nazi Party chose the city to
be the site of huge Nazi Party rallies.
On 2 January 1945, Allied bombers razed the entire
city, killing 6000 people.
After World War II the city was chosen as the site of
the War Crimes Tribunal. Later, the painstaking recon-
struction – using the original stone – of almost all the
city’s main buildings returned the city to a measure of
glory.
Bavaria’s second-largest city and the unofficial capital
of Franconia is an energetic place now where the night-
life is intense and the Reinheitsgebot determines that
Lessons from
Nuremberg
Time for judgment and renewal
after excess, in Ireland
by David Langwallner
Understanding
Nuremberg depends
on recognising that
surfaces are very
deceptive, starting
with the resurrected
architecture
INTERNATIONAL
Nov/Dec 2016 6 5
the wide-ranging drinking culture observes the
highest quality standards,
There are a number of ways of approaching
Nuremberg but all depend on recognising that sur-
faces are very deceptive, starting with the
resurrected architecture. My own instinct was to
look at the city geographically and historically.
The War Crimes court is some distance from the
vibrant and wealthy re-created city centre. The his-
toric footage gives the impression of a grand court
but it is in fact quite small so the distances between
the judges and the gallery of evil, condescending
to the last, is arrestingly short - a matter of ten inti-
mate feet.
If you get a tram from the central station in the
opposite direction to the court you come to the
futuristic stadium of the infamous Nazi rallies,
designed by Hitler’s deputy Albert Speer, and
immortalised in the spectacular film, 'Reichspar-
teitag - Nuernberg' by Leni Riefenstahl, the
memory of which flooded back to me as I climbed
the steps and approached the podium where the
Nazis spread their gospel of hate and evil to the
enraptured, the hysterical and the merely
cynical.
It got me thinking about the failure of the Euro
-
pean experiment and the recrudescence of fascism
and extremism, in Russia and Hungary, in the US,
the UK and incipiently in Western Europe, in Ire-
land. A new age of barbarism is upon us, the most
forgetful generation. It advances on the founda-
tion stones of civilisation.
Ultimately globalism has ineluctably and
insidiously led to growing economic liberalisation,
the new age of robber-baron banks, vampire
squids like Goldman, and bloodsucking multina-
tional firms, including law firms.
Under the guises of economic advance, interna
-
tionalisation and anti-racist tolerance we have had
a race to the bottom and the gradual destruction
of the quality of life of many world citizens: longer
working hours, short-term contracts, the sidelin
-
ing of the elderly.
The Nazis promulgated serfdom and unques-
tioning corporatism. Of course Weimar Republic
stagflation and economic collapse, social unrest
and meltdown may come to Ireland, a compliant
population, controlled, self-satisfied, uncivilised
and valueless. Our robotically-globalised social-
media-fetishing youth seems greedy and
undirected. Ireland is its own epicentre of Social
Darwinism, a technocratic, visionless society with
no moral compass - a country that followed Bertie
Ahern by Brian Cowen and then Enda Kenny.
Of course the left, traditionally and wishfully,
sees political quagmire as an opportunity, but in
reality it too often leads to authoritarianism. Or
dangerously right-wing populism of the sort that
spawned Brexit and the triumph of Donald Trump.
The Nazi-era Christian pastor Martin Niemoller
emphasised the following existential quandary:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not
speak out -
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did
not speak out -
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak
out -
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me - and there was no one
left to speak for me.
So few in Ireland take a stance on the big issues
of our day: inequality, environmental annihilation
and climate change, property parasitism, anti-
intellectualism, consumerism, moral collapse.
Barrister David Langwallner, a graduate of
Harvard and the LSE, leads Ireland’s Innocence
project, was until recently dean of Griffith College
law school and lectures in the King’s Inns and the
Anglo-American University, Prague
A new age of
barbarism is upon us,
the most forgetful
generation
6 6 Nov/Dec 2016
'I
F YOU build it, he will come' is the castles-
in-the-air catchline of the 1989 film 'Field of
Dreams', where the Ordinary Joe character
played by Kevin Costner pushes a quixotic plan
to build a baseball diamond after hearing voices
echoing from his crop field in Iowa.
The idea of building a small folly based on
Midwestern murmurings from your meadows is
non-transferrable. So where does the construc
-
tion of the world's first (real) zero-carbon city - and
in the desert, no less – rank on the scale of delu-
sion and daftness?
In 2006 work began on a masterplan drawn
up by Foster and Partners for Masdar City, which
was trumpeted as a carbon-neutral 'eco-city' -
near Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab
Emirates. Its completion date is meant to be this
year, but things don't look good.
The city was intended to accommodate 50,000
residents and be powered by a 22-hectare field
of almost 90,000 solar panels. Usage of electric-
ity and water was to be controlled by sensors,
and Masdar was supposed to be car-free: resi-
dents and workers would journey in futuristic
pods programmed to go where commanded,
while the compact urban scale would easily
allow travel on foot or bicycle. It was hoped this
utopian vision could be a Silicon Valley for
renewable energy, and so attract global busi-
nesses to locate there.
However, the permanent residents who live
in Masdar are all students at the Institute of Sci-
ence and Technology – just 300 of them – and
design manager of the city, Chris Wan, admits
that Masdar is unlikely to ever pass 50 per cent
carbon neutrality. The travel-pod scheme was
abandoned after two stops were built: the emer-
gence of low-emission cars quickly put paid to
that plan. Only a few international companies
meanwhile have registered a base at Masdar.
They include General Electric, Mitsubishi, and
Siemens (which says it has 800 employees
there) and the International Renewable Energy
Agency (Irena) which has taken over one of the
major buildings, in what seems little more than
a symbol of solidarity with the abusive ruling
powers. Much of the city remains empty,
unloved, and unused.
Masdar City is on the fringes of Abu Dhabi so
many workers commute, and it is said there is
little in the way of human activity (aside from the
students) after office hours. Abu Dhabi Interna-
tional Airport is nearby too, so many workers
shuttle in and out of the city, making the travel
agency in Masdar one of the few places where
there's a thrum of activity.
Other facilities on offer to any prospective citi-
zen are uninspiring: a bog-standard
gated-community checklist: medium-sized
supermarket; couple of cafés; cinema, and so
on: not very exciting for a place where people will
be looking to escape usual temperatures of forty
to fifty degrees on a regular basis. If people do
venture outdoors, admittedly the streets have
been engineered narrow and short to reduce
heat, and pathways between buildings are
shaded. But still, the plans are rather lacklustre
for weaving a social fabric in a new community
ensconced in the desert.
The UAE is one of the world's major oil produc-
ers (globally, its reserve is the seventh-largest)
but the remarkable drop in prices in the last few
years has inspired moves to wean the economy
away from its dependency on fossil
fuels. Masdar City was seen as the antidote. The
President of the UAE, Sandhurst-trained Sheikh
Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, backed the idea of
a smart city, but the most recent estimated cost
of $22bn (which will rise if they ever do complete
the project) will quite a tab to pick up, even for
him and his 23-billion-dollar trove.
Ten years in, and behind schedule, this is in
danger of becoming the paragon of hubristic
gestures to our egotistic mismanagement of the
natural environment. But this is Formula One
central, a country that builds snow-caked ski
slopes in its deserts, and constructs golf courses
and islands in the sea. Its can-do-anything atti-
tude and engineering profligacy offer little to
global models. Moreover the extreme levels of
sunshine that are the norm in the Gulf states, are
not widely replicable.
Just five per cent of the city has been built
accommodating a paltry few hundred. The com-
pletion date has been shunted to
2030. Masdar City was meant to lead the way for
smart, sustainable cities but its future is prob-
ably as an education campus, with a very costly
first lesson built in.
Eco
Keep it frugal:
don’t build swimming
pools in the desert
by NJ McGarrigle
In 2006 work began on
Foster’s masterplanfor
MasdarCity, trumpeted as
a carbon-neutral 'eco-city',
near Abu Dhabi: a folly
INTERNATIONAL
OTHER UTOPIAN VISIONS
DONGTAN, CHINA
It was to be built on a giant island on the
Yangtze River and to eventually accommo
-
date half a million people, with the slogan
'Better city; better life', Dongtan was a joint-
project between engineering company Arup
and Chinese developers conceived at the
2010 Shanghai Expo. But dreams of a
green city with water taxis, state-of-the-art
recycling and energy renewal sank without
trace.
AUROVILLE, INDIA
Envisioned as an international community
free of money, religion, and government, it
was designed by French architect Roger
Anger on a former French colonial area on the
coast of south-east India. It was built for
50,000 inhabitants, but only 2,000 have set-
tled there. It has struggled with crime and
allegations of child abuse and corruption.
Not there yet, or ever
p on!
