Failings

One year. In spite of his increasingly transparent delusions – the word ‘failings’ is far too gentle – Vladimir Putin has not been defeated and the war drags on. They said the Great War would be ‘over by Christmas’ after only a few months of fighting but it took four weary years with countless white crosses and the flower of Europe’s manhood lost to bring the madness to a close. When I was at school, we had a war museum containing artefacts pillaged from battlefields. I still recall seeing a German helmet from WW1 with a neat entrance hole where the wearer’s temple would have been and a gaping occipital exit.

As the song says, when will they ever learn? A German language film loosely based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 bestseller ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ (in German, ‘nothing new in the West) captured the terror and futility as it tracked the progress of German volunteers in the last year of the war and won seven BAFTAs, including Best Film. It’s a chilling, difficult watch not least because it portrays with agonising exactitude the mental torture as well as the utter horror, filth, fear and bloody carnage. The hero’s friends fall, one by one and during a final, futile attack on French positions because of the hubris of a mad German general and minutes before the Armistice, he joins his fallen comrades.

The metaphor with the war in Ukraine can hardly be over-emphasised and this conflict, in addition to any and all of the above has brought us again to another potential Armageddon. Food wholesale prices here have risen by nearly 50% in the past year, inflation is running at over 16%. And we are the lucky ones.

Natural disaster sometimes trumps even the grossest of human failings or, perhaps, compounds them. Two weeks after one of the largest earthquakes of the century – eclipsed only by the great quake in Pakistan in 2004 – with the loss of over 47,000 lives (estimates vary) has left battalions of the bereaved and the bitter in southern Turkey and Syria. The seismology of the quake’s spread is now mostly understood, but how some population centres with a high density of construction near the epicentres avoided the worst damage whereas others fell like a house of cards is an increasing focus of regulators and politicians who face a groundswell of rage. Survivors are claiming that the disaster stemmed as much from human failings as it did from nature. Jerry-built, unregulated buildings thrown together without regard for appropriate permits simply concertina-ed, leaving thousands trapped in the rubble, the stench of both death and corruption hanging heavily in the air. Ironically, a Roman bridge built eighteen centuries ago, survived.

Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister for Scotland has resigned amid a welter of criticism, her legacy in tatters due to her own contumacious insistence that a biological male can ‘be’ a woman which many would describe as a ‘failing’. She could not bring herself to say that a ‘transwoman’, a rapist and in possession of male genitalia was not a real woman and he – yes, he – was incarcerated for a time in a women’s prison. The battle for her successor promises to be an interesting one. Up until a couple of days ago, Kate Forbes, a ‘wee free’ (member of the Calvinist Free Church of Scotland) looked to have a shot at the title. She had been described as “principled, reasonable, articulate and very bright”. Until she opened her mouth about abortion, gender legislation, extramarital children and same sex marriage.  She made a reasoned distinction between public and private views but to no avail. She was immediately tarred and feathered by the “liberal” media and politicians as a “right-wing” bigot and “homophobe” who had thus destroyed her leadership chances, with four of her former backers withdrawing their support. So, in summary, such people are effectively saying that while it is mandatory to insist that a person with male genitalia can define themselves as a woman if they choose to imagine themselves to be one, it is forbidden to say that marriage should only be between a man and woman or that children need both their parents.

By any rational measure, this is both deeply flawed reasoning as well as a recipe for social unravelling. It remains to be seen whether the SNP as an electoral body will see reason or not.