Twitter, Bletchley Park and the meaning of Fascism

Twitter is a funny business, isn’t it?

On September 4th I posted a picture (taken from The Times) of a group of elderly men and women who’d worked as code-breakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, and wrote above the picture, ‘This is what British anti-fascists look like’.

The tweet was ‘liked’ more than 9000 times and retweeted almost 4200 times.  It also provoked a large number of replies: some were interested in how many of them were women; others reminded me of other ‘British anti-fascists’, from the men and women who fought Mosley’s Black Shirts on Cable Street or volunteered to fight in Spain against Franco, right through to front line soldiers in the war against Hitler.  I agreed with these comments and certainly wasn’t implying that this was what all British anti-fascists look like.

I recognise that in some ways my comment was badly phrased, mischievously badly phrased perhaps.  I should perhaps have written ‘this is what some British anti-fascists look like’, or just expressed my gratitude for their contribution to the war effort.  But my comment was deliberately open to misinterpretation, and I will admit that I did have in my mind the row about American ‘anti-fa’ protests at Charlottesville, Virginia, and Donald Trump’s insistence on moral equivalence.  ‘If you want to see what people who opposed Fascism look like’, I was trying to say, ‘look at these highly respectful and immaculately dressed old people’ before you condemn the category of ‘anti-fascism’.  

Nothing, however, prepared me for the flood of likes and comments from UKIP and Trump supporters who seemed to think that my intention was to criticise and condemn the young people who protested against the neo Nazis, White Supremacists and Ku Klux Klanners who are making such a terrifying resurgence in modern America, or the forces of nationalism unleashed in Britain by the EU referendum in 2016.

What was striking about so many of these responses is how contested and misused the word ‘fascism’ is in modern parlance.   These old people were praised because they seemed respectable, white and intensely ‘British’.  My tweet, I realised to my horror, was being liked and retweeted by Ukippers and Trumpeteers because they thought I was making a distinction between them and the young ‘riff-raff’ who opposed torchlight processions, anti-semitic chants and swastikas and confederate flags being paraded through the streets or opposed the whites-only racism unleashed by some of the followers of Nigel Farage and English nationalism.

And I suddenly remembered another tweet of mine, when I took my two children (aged 8 and 20, but profoundly disabled) on one of the protests against triggering Article 50, and tweeted a picture of all us, saying that this was what ‘national saboteurs’ looked like.   Not only was I trolled by people saying that I was indoctrinating my children, they claimed that I was behaving like a ‘fascist’ in denying the will of the people.  It seemed to escape their notice that freedom of assembly and speech was one of the first things the European fascists banned.

And it’s struck me again and again over the last dreadful year that the word ‘fascist’ is being dangerously misused, is being turned inside out and used to describe anyone you disagree with, in brief that this towering political evil is being relativised, trivialised and exploited in a way that should worry us all.

Because what is Fascism really?

Well, there are lot of things that it isn’t.  It’s nothing to do with the vile brutality and mass murder of the terrible days of Soviet Communism, despite all the Tweets I’ve seen quoting George Orwell’s argument that ‘fascism’ will come from the left and reminding me that the Nazis called themselves ‘national socialism’.  Nor is it anything to do with the attempt to bring the warring nations of Europe into a political and economic union, which has led to the longest period of peace and prosperity in European history.  

Nor, frankly, has Fascism much to do with the vile kleptocracy and economic nationalism of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and the rest; or the hubris of Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the desperately misguided champions of Brexit, even if in their hatred of the press, expertise and an articulate opposition they raise the spectres of the past.  ‘History’, Karl Marx said, ‘repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce’ and as the lies, vanity and absurdity of 2016 become clear, when the bullshit has finally hit the fan, I’m sure that these two great democracies will find their way back to some version of sanity.

No, Fascism is something much, much worse.

It’s the ideology and thinking that places all authority in the hands of one leader and systematically destroys all opposition; it’s the strutting arrogance and bullying of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco and their uniformed thugs arresting, torturing and murdering socialists, anarchists or anyone who disagreed with them; it’s the screaming hordes at the rallies and parades, tears streaming down their faces as they salute their leader; it’s the brownshirts burning ‘decadent’ books in the main square of respectable German cities and forcing old Jewish men to scrub the pavements with a tooth brush; it’s the bombing of Guernica and the invasion of Poland; it’s the starvation, persecution and murder of whole sections of the population in the vast killing fields of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and the Ukraine; and it’s those piles of skeletal bodies left to die of typhus and starvation at Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau, and the thousands of other camps and killing centres that to this day deface the very name of humanity.

We can debate whether the torture centres of Saddam Hussain and General Pinochet, the vile racism of the Confederate South or the Belgian Congo, and the grotesque violence of the Islamic State and Al Quaeda are a bastardised version of mid-century European fascism.  We can even ask what Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon have learnt from the experience of the fascist movements of the 1930s and 1940s.   But what we mustn’t do is use the word carelessly, as a one-size-fits-all term of abuse: lazy, provocative and counterproductive.

What we should do instead is recognise that the fight against fascism involved an entire generation: the German communists were the first to oppose the Nazis on the streets of Berlin and Hamburg; the International Brigades thought by fighting Franco they could stop Hitler;  during the war social conservatives like Winston Churchill worked alongside socialists like Clement Attlee; intelligent young men and women were code breakers at Bletchley Park while working class Tommies stormed the beaches of Normandy.   And lest we forget (a fact often forgotten in the United States), Hitler’s Germany was defeated above all by the Soviet Union, whose front line troops were hardly champions of the niceties of European civilisation: but then they’d seen in the devastated towns and villages of the Ukraine where that civilisation could lead.   It took all sorts to defeat Fascism, and we should hope that faced with the same challenge, we too would be anti-Fascists.

European Fascism can claim to be the most vile manifestation of mankind’s capacity for violence, cruelty and murder.  We should treat the word with more respect if we are to avoid the unbearable possibility of repeating it.

 

 

Peter Hall (1930-2017)

The scale of Peter Hall’s achievements is almost impossible to quantify.  This was the man who at the age of 25 directed the English language premiere of Waiting for Godot, at 31 founded the Royal Shakespeare Company, in his mid forties became the first Director of the National Theatre on the South Bank, while finding time to run Glyndebourne, the Royal Opera House, and direct television, film and dozens of productions in the West End and on Broadway.  In his later years he published his fascinating theatre diaries, wrote several terrific books about the theatre, ran his own production company (the Peter Hall Company), was the creative inspiration for the Rose Theatre in Kingston and directed a series of remarkable seasons at the Theatre Royal Bath.  He worked with all the great actors of his time, commissioned and produced the finest playwrights, and inspired, encouraged and employed hundreds of directors and designers, lighting and sound designers.  There’s never been anybody like him in the British theatre, certainly since Harley Granville Barker, or perhaps even Garrick.  It’s an astounding set of achievements.

But what was he like as a man?

I first met Peter when I was a raw undergraduate.  He’d summoned me to his office at the National Theatre because he’d heard through the grapevine that I was doing ‘good work’ and wanted to meet me.  I remember him taking the time to show me the masks that Jocelyn Herbert had created for his new production of The Oresteia.  I was struck by his enthusiasm, his energy, and the interest he took in this ambitious young whippersnapper: he was so obviously generous, open-minded and in love with the theatre.  Reading his Diaries I realise that I was probably light relief from his struggles with the unions or the Arts Council, and he was off to have lunch with Ralph Richardson or Tom Stoppard.   But such was the appetite of the man—unstoppable, infectious and quite remarkable—and it had a big impact on my subsequent career.

I’d been brought up on his productions and came to admire him for so many things, but above all his belief in the text itself.  This was a man who loved words, the exact turn of the phrase, its cadence and where the stress falls, whether in Shakespeare or Pinter, Beckett or Stoppard, and his commitment to the nuance of language lay at the heart of everything he did.  He used to tell a story about working with Dustin Hoffman on The Merchant of Venice and being delighted when Dustin turned up to rehearsal one morning declaring that ‘you can’t improvise this shit’.  For Peter, the detail of the language was everything.  A young director mocked him as an ‘iambic fundamentalist’: Peter was thrilled.  Words, words, words were everything.

But although Peter had a brilliant and genuinely scholarly understanding of the great writers, and his roots were in FR Leavis, Dadie Rylands and Cambridge University, his work in the theatre was never drily academic, and he had a showman’s instinct and loved the power, commitment and animal energy that the great actors bring.  He wasn’t scared of big personalities, big emotions, and we all devoured his stories about Larry Olivier, John Gielgud and Edith Evans, and his two favourites, Ralph Richardson and Peggy Ashcroft, or Noel Coward, Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.

I kept in touch with Peter over the years and was thrilled—and terrified—when he asked me to take over from him as Artistic Director of the new Rose Theatre in Kingston.  There were a lot of challenges about the Rose, but we worked together happily for six years, with him as Director Emeritus and myself as his boss (!), which is when I got to know him better.  And there I saw a man who, in his high 70s, still loved his chosen profession, who still cared about the great ideal of theatre of the highest quality which was accessible and open to all.  I’d been warned about his Machiavellian streak, but all I saw was passion, laughter and an almost childlike enthusiasm.

The Rose had had a difficult birth, and we were struggling to pay the bills, so one day at his favourite Italian restaurant in Chelsea I told Peter that we needed to find a play for his great friend, the finest actress of our time, Judi Dench.  He looked at me mournfully (as he sometimes could) and said, ‘yes, but she’s done everything’.  I suggested impishly that it would be fascinating to  have a Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream modelled on Queen Elizabeth I.  Within hours Judi had agreed and the Rose had its most successful production ever (which saved our skins).  And it was that combination of artistic intrigue, get-up-and-go energy and commercial nous that made Peter such an astonishing figure, and the undoubted architect of the entire edifice of the modern British theatre.

But no account of Peter’s life can be complete without paying tribute to his family.  He’d famously had a complicated private life and been married several times (with Nicki Frei, he told me, he’d ‘finally got it right’); but what I observed was a remarkable pater familias who adored his six children and nine grandchildren, and they in turn loved and respected him.  At first nights an entire row would be set aside for them.  Peter expected to be paid handsomely for his work.  But this was a man who loved life and knew how to live.  He was sensitive, inquisitive and astonishingly charismatic.

The theatre keeps changing and one generation’s firebrand is the next generation’s dead wood.  And, of course, much of what Peter stood for and championed has been challenged and rejected in recent times.  This is entirely natural and I think Peter in his old age understood that.  But it’s impossible to overstate just what an extraordinary contribution Peter made, not just to the world of the theatre, but to culture at large.  

We shall not see his like again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why it's wrong to call Theresa May a 'bloody idiot': my response to the cover of the New European

‘Oh he’s an idiot’; ‘don’t be idiotic’; ‘what a bloody idiot’.  This is the language of everyday life, isn’t it, heard in families and at work, on buses and on trains, in schools and offices, over and over, wherever you turn?  And what other term could be used to describe an action so obviously self-destructive as Theresa May’s decision to call a snap election to secure a fat majority, which she thought would allow her to push through the hard Brexit that so many of her supporters are keen on.  How could anyone possibly object to The New European splashing ‘bloody idiot’ all across its front page in scornful glee?  After all, isn’t that what the whole country thinks after last week’s fiasco?

So why did the phrase jump out at me when I saw it on the newsstand this morning and feel like a kick in the teeth.  More importantly, why do I think a progressive paper like The New European should be more careful in its language? My concern is the careless use of a word that carries with it a history of abuse and discrimination when applied to people with learning disabilities¾ people like my second son, Joey, who, aged nearly 21, has no speech, intractable epilepsy and very limited cognitive abilities.   

In his very agreeable Twitter spat with me, the editor argued that I was making a category error: after all the paper wasn’t using the word ‘idiot’ to abuse people like Joey.  And what, he asked, was the ‘politically correct’ term he should have used if ‘idiot’ was to be avoided.   I’m not sure if I can give him a clear answer, though perhaps ‘foolish’ or ‘misguided’ or ‘unwise’ is a less charged term.  Even to say that she acted ‘idiotically’ would have been better.  What I do know from bitter experience is that people with learning disabilities are the last forgotten minority and that our language should find ways of addressing that.  

And it’s striking that many other apparently progressive institutions haven’t processed this issue properly either.  The other day I saw a play at the Almeida in which one character called a black character a ‘nigger’.  There was a huge gasp of shock, and in the subsequent action of the play the man was shown to embody antiquated and undesirable attitudes, and eventually got his comeuppance.  It was certainly clear that the playwright thought the word was disgusting.  But in a play at the National Theatre someone was delighted that her child wasn’t ‘retarded’ and the comment didn’t raise a flicker in the audience, and had no consequences on the subsequent action.  My point is that we’re rightly sensitive to the use of the ‘n’ word because of its dreadful history, but don’t notice a word used endlessly to categorise and diminish a group of people who have little enough power or status already.  Progressive intellectuals don’t have a good good reputation when it comes to people who, whether objectively or subjectively, aren’t as clever as they are, and I think this needs to be challenged and, where possible, changed.

Intriguingly, the word ‘idiot’ was originally used to describe someone of no social status (‘a tale told by an idiot’ in Macbeth is a tale told by a very lowly servant or peasant) and the modern sense didn’t emerge until the seventeenth century (when the two were to conflated).  In the nineteenth century it, like ‘retarded’, was a technical term to describe people like my Joey.  It’s only in the last hundred years or so that it’s gained such a pejorative connotation, above all because it’s used to describe actions that others deride or think are insufficiently thought through.  After all, who wants to be described as an ‘idiot’ today?  Or have an ‘idiot’ for a son, for that matter.   For many people - me too, before Joey was born - nothing could be worse.

To be fair to The New European, it didn’t use any of the other much worse terms of abuse.  But by calling Theresa May a ‘bloody idiot’ it contributed, however subtly, however unknowingly, to an atmosphere which encourages us to dismiss people with Learning Disabilities as beneath contempt, as if the worst thing you can be is stupid, as if all the problems of the world are caused by people with cognitive difficulties.  For the fact is, surely, that Theresa May (and Donald Trump and Nigel Farage and Marine le Pen and all the rest of the politicians whom The New European quite rightly oppose) aren’t stupid, and by calling her - and, by extension, the army of dedicated Brexiteers - a  ‘bloody idiot’, the paper simply alienates further those who support her.  I like and admire The New European and, of course, defend its right to offend and use whatever language it likes, but I think to conflate arrogance, misjudgement and bad advice with something as extreme and real as idiocy isn’t really good enough.

Do I protest too much?  Perhaps.  All I can say¾ provocatively, perhaps ¾ is that if The Daily Mail insulted us Remainers by calling us ‘saboteurs’, The New European used a word that the modern, diverse, inclusive European society that the paper admirably champions, should leave behind in the dustbin of history, where words like ‘moron’, ‘imbecile’, ‘retard’ and ‘cretin’ so evidently belong. 

I’m hardly one to talk.  The other day I told my 8 year old daughter that she was being an ‘idiot’.  She’s been brought up with an older brother who cannot read, who has no speech, who has no voice in the world other than the one that his family and friends can lend him.  And she told me off in no uncertain terms, saying that it was a horrible word and that I should say sorry for using it.  She’s right and I¾like The New European¾was wrong.

 

ALL OUR CHILDREN before the critics get to it.

Well, tonight is the last of the previews for All Our Children.

Audiences have been small.  I suspect people fear—incorrectly—that the play is going to show disabled children being wheeled into gas chambers, and are nervous about coming.  Then, it’s a long run (closes June 3rd), so people haven’t yet got their act together.  And people are waiting for the reviews to see whether they want to stump up the money and time to come and see it. 

I’ve directed enough plays to know that there’s something to savour in that moment when audiences are watching with an open mind, when the actors are still exploring the text, when everybody involved is still working on the weirdly messy and creative process of giving birth to a new production.  It’s provisional, it’s free, it’s unencumbered by reputation or settled opinion. 

But having written this as well makes the whole thing doubly fascinating.

Various things have struck me: first the quality of listening in the audience.  There’s a real sense that this stuff matters, that there’s a conversation going on which, for all the historical and cultural distance, has a worrying relevance to our own times.  After all, the Nazi persecution of the disabled was driven, above all, by arguments over cost.  Looking after such people was just too expensive, it was said, and such views can sometimes be heard today.

The second thing is the sense that the fate of the disabled is just the most clearly defined example of a broader problem: the reduction of human beings to their productive capacity, and the contempt for those who can’t work, for whatever reason.  When an old friend gave me a huge hug after the first preview, I said that I’d written it for Joey.  He knew what I meant – he’s met Joey - but said it was bigger than that, and I suspect he was thinking of his wife, who has Alzheimer’s.

But the thing that’s really touched me are the responses from parents of children with disabilities.   Several have come already, and I know others who’re planning to come.  They know the scale of the struggle, they know how much it has radicalised them, they know how it’s made them question everything they thought they knew about society.  And their responses mean more to me than I can say.

On Saturday night the wonderful Caroline came with her husband.  She’s looked after Joey probably more than anyone outside of his family – through epilepsy, illnesses and all his vulnerability, as well as the joy, the laughter and silliness – and she was in floods of tears, not for Joey but for all the kids who need care, who need help, who in so many ways cannot help themselves.  And we agreed that if the play showed anything, it was that fighting for a better world had made a difference.  The courage, not just of Bishop von Galen but thousands of people ever sincewho’ve campaigned and fought for the rights of the profoundly disabled to live a decent life, has not been in vain.

It would be absurd to claim that disabled children face anything like this level of discrimination today.  Nevertheless, there is a huge amount to be done to ensure that they’re given the same opportunities as their able-bodied siblings.  It’s often said that you can judge a society by the way that it treats its most vulnerable.  If Nazi Germany failed that test in the most abject way imaginable, we should never forget its terrible lessons.

Who knows what the press will make of it.  It’s all such a bloody gamble, and no doubt some of them will savage it.  What I do know is that I’ve seen more this last week about the ability of 90 minutes of drama to engage with some people’s lives than I thought possible.  And I’ll always be proud of that. 

A guest blog from my Associate Director, Nathan Markiewicz, about ALL OUR CHILDREN

I have been lucky enough to call Stephen Unwin my friend for the last few years. Since we met we’ve worked together in numerous contexts: professional and academic theatre, large workshops and intimate rehearsals, we’ve even sat alone together in cafés clacking away at our laptops, sharing ideas and provocations—but we’ve never done anything quite like All Our Children. Over the years I’ve become close to the Unwin children too, sometimes I even feel like a member of the extended family. The play is dedicated to Stephen’s son Joey, who has learning disabilities not unlike those discussed in the play, and I have lately witnessed the intersection of two sides of Stephen’s world: theatre and disability rights.

Everyone knows that a playwright is a creative artist and a director is an interpretive artist, but what about when they are one in the same? While Henrik Ibsen was writing Ghosts, one of his most personal and intimate plays, he famously described the process in a letter to a friend: “To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. To write is to sit in judgement of oneself.” The sentiment makes for a rosy soundbite, but the reality of dragging one’s subconscious out of the guts and onto the page isn’t quite so romantic. The flurry of transatlantic emails that Stephen and I exchanged while he was writing the final drafts of All Our Children never included anything as nearly as poetic as that—after all every problem in the theatre is a practical one. Our correspondence, and my observations during the first week of rehearsal, have led me to reformulate Ibsen’s dictum: To write is to wrestle with the trolls inside, but to direct one’s own writing is to truly sit in judgement of oneself.

The grim subject of All Our Children is T4, the Nazi program of exterminating the disabled, but the play isn’t really about that, any more than Ghosts is about sexually transmitted disease. As a young student of the humanities, I found the great question of Twentieth Century history impossible to answer: how one of the most progressive societies in the world managed to commit such atrocities. It was only an academic consideration anyway, wasn’t it? In recent years, that question doesn’t seem so hypothetical. After all, I come from the nation which brought you the iPhone and the Tomahawk Missile, the smallpox vaccine and crack cocaine, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Contradictions everywhere.

It is this kind of cognitive dissonance which takes center stage in All Our Children. The play is a study of the emotional toll that such transgressions take on the perpetrators. It is not so much a history piece as a personal drama which asks us to consider our own complicity in the sins of our society. Nearly every day in rehearsal there is a moment when I wonder, “What would I have done?” A question which inevitably leads me to ask, “What am I doing now?”

In order to write a play, the author must face his own “trolls in heart and soul,” without self-consciousness, and in All Our Children, Stephen Unwin has certainly done so. As rehearsals progress, I see him “sit in judgement,” each day learning more about himself—the true pursuit of an artist. All Our Children is not only a play, it is also a love letter from the author to his son, Joey, and indeed to all our children.

'Trahison des Clercs'

I’ve just finished a fascinating book, called The Reckless Mind (2001).  Its subtitle is ‘Intellectuals in Politics’ and the author Mark Lilla charts the way six key European philosophers and thinkers made compromises—and worse—with totalitarian regimes through the twentieth century.  It’s a shameful story, as you read how Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmidt supported the Nazis, while Walter Benjamin, Alexandre Kojeve, Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida all lent their support to varieties of Communist totalitarianism.  ‘Tyrannophilia’ was a real phenomenon, and some of the most brilliantly people of the time stand charged of it.

In an excellent new epilogue to the book, Lilla writes that the collectivist ideologies that attracted these intellectuals have all but disappeared, replaced by ‘a dogma for which we have hardly any name’.  This, Lilla explains, ‘begins with basic liberal principles like the sanctity of the individual, the priority of freedom, and distrust of public authority, and advances no further.  It is politically democratic but lacks awareness of democracy’s weaknesses and how they can provoke hostility and resentment.  It promotes economic growth with unreflective faith in the cost-free benefits of free trade, deregulation, and foreign investment.  Since it presumes that individuals are all that count, it has next to nothing to say about collectivities and their enterprises, and the duties that come with them.  It has a vocabulary for discussing rights and identities and feelings, but not class or other social realities.’  Lilla goes on to say that this ‘dogma is at once anti-political and anti-intellectual’ and ‘cultivates no taste for reality, no curiosity about how we got here or where we are going.  It has no use for sociology or psychology or history, not to mention political theory, since it has no interest in institutions and has nothing to say about the necessary and productive tension between individual and collective purposes.’  It’s an extraordinarily powerful critique of our own cultural mess.

Lilla's epilogue is dated June 2016, and was written before the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump.   So my question is this: what is the trahison des clercs of our own time?  How did leading intellectuals, artists and thinkers collude in creating an atmosphere in which the current wave of nationalistic, anti-science, anti-intellectual, popularism could thrive.  Who will the ‘guilty men’ be when the philosophical and cultural history of the first quarter of the twenty-first century is written?  It's not good enough just to blame the gutter press and the politicians.  Artists, intellectuals and thinkers have to examine their own consciences.  In other words, how many of us are Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’, clearing the path for the worst to triumph?  And which of us are able to articulate a resistance and lead the fight for better times? 

Historic attitudes towards people with Learning Disabilities and Epilepsy

Historically, people with learning disabilities and epilepsy have frequently been regarded as legitimate objects for scorn and derision and bullied, abused and persecuted as a result.  Most of the time, they’ve been dependent on the care of their families, as well as on charities of one kind or another but, where this has failed, they’ve been at the mercy of an uncomprehending world, often to disastrous effect.  In Britain, until the late 1960s, most families were persuaded to place their learning disabled child in a medical institution.  Indeed in many societies such people have (and still are) been murdered or simply abandoned as being too challenging, too distressing or too expensive.   Although the lives of most learning disabled people in Britain are better than they’ve ever been, we should not forget the history of persecution, nor the belief systems that made it possible.  Advances are all too easily reversed and we should never forget, as Edmund Burke warned us, that ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.‘

Christianity, it seems, has come up with two contradictory ways of talking about parenting a child with a profound disability.  The first is that he or she is God’s punishment for past misdeeds.  Thus, an American politician, Bob Marshall, Republican Member of the Virginia House of Delegates, has repeatedly claimed that disabled children are God’s punishment to women who had aborted their first pregnancy.  And the devoutly religious, but deeply confused, Glenn Hoddle, the one time manager of the England football team, was sacked when he declared: ‘you and I have been given two hands and two legs and half decent brains.  Some people have not been born like that for a reason; the karma is working from another lifetime.  I have nothing to hide about that. It is not only people with disabilities.  What you sow, you have to reap.’  And there are historic accounts of terrible cruelty and abuse towards people with learning disabilities in various Catholic care homes and institutions in Ireland and elsewhere.

Fundamentalist Christianity doesn’t have a monopoly on such pernicious nonsense, however.  The explicitly secular Nazis labelled those with profound disabilities as ‘life unworthy of life’, or ‘useless eaters’, and the persecution, forced sterilization and subsequent murder of perhaps a quarter of a million of such people under the T-4 programme paved the way for the even greater genocide of the European Jews.  More recently, one of the most extreme animal rights philosophers, Peter Singer, a Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, argued that human beings who fail to develop the ability to speak are in some ways less than human, on a par with animals.  In Practical Ethics he insisted that ‘killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person.  Very often it is not wrong at all’, basing his argument on the relative capacities of animals: ‘If we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig, for example, we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities, both actual and potential, for rationality, self consciousness, communication and everything else that can plausibly be considered morally significant.’ 

Closer to home, the UKIP councillor, Colin Brewer, argued that ‘disabled children cost the council too much money and should be put down’, while his fellow Kuiper, Geoffrey Clark, called for compulsory abortions of disabled foetuses. And a Tory deputy mayor, amazingly enough a retired GP called Owen Lister, argued that disabled children should be ‘guillotined’, explaining that ‘It's merely a matter of caring for them until they die.  The only difference between a terminally ill patient and a severely handicapped child is time.’ 

Perhaps most shocking of all—because it’s so surprising from such a card-carrying liberal—is Virginia Woolf’s diary entry for 9th January 1915—where she writes that:

"On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles.  The first was a very tall man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; and then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare.  It was perfectly horrible.  They should certainly be killed."

Woolf, of course, was simply mirroring the common views of the Eugenics Society, whose Chairman, the distinguished biologist Julian Huxley, wrote in 1930:

"What are we going to do?  Every defective man, woman and child is a burden.  Every defective is an extra body for the nation to feed and clothe, but produces little or nothing in return."

Many public figures, including birth control pioneers Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes, politicians Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt, and proud liberals such as H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes and Sidney Webb all supported eugenics.  Thankfully, it has now been dismissed as pseudo-science of the worst kind that, in Britain at least, does little but discredit the speaker.  More recently, the eminent geneticist and proselytising atheist Richard Dawkins, in response to an enquiry from a woman about what to do if she discovered that she was pregnant with a foetus with Down’s Syndrome, replied ‘abort it and try again.  It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.’  He denied that he is a ‘eugenicist’, but it’s hard to understand what he means by the word ‘immoral’ in such a context.

Lower level discrimination exists too.  Research by the leading health and social care provider, Turning Point, showed that a bias against those with learning disabilities is widespread in modern Britain.  The Foundation for People with Learning Disabilities concluded ‘that people are more comfortable interacting with people with physical or sensory impairments in social situations than they are […] with individuals with learning disabilities or mental health conditions’. The consultancy Lemos&Crane produced a devastating report entitled Loneliness+Cruelty about the bullying of people with learning disabilities, and the Papworth Trust has published research showing that 90% of people with learning difficulties have experienced hate crime or bullying, with almost a third saying that it takes place on a daily or weekly basis. And, finally, UNICEF concluded in 2012 that ‘Disability is not the impairment itself, but rather attitudes and environmental barriers that result in disability.  Children with disabilities are often ‘invisible’ to service providers, and they are at greater risk of violence than their non-disabled peers.’  This is all deeply dismaying stuff.

 

Epilepsy: Episode 2

They say it's not over until the fat lady sings and my post about Joey's epilepsy on Saturday was horribly premature. It was a dress rehearsal for the shit storm that greeted us early on Sunday morning.

When Joey is away from his residential college he wears a little sensor round his ankle at night which measures his heart rate (his BPM) and this is linked to an information screen and an alarm. On Sunday morning at ten to seven the thing started to bleep and I jumped out of bed and rushed upstairs. The poor lad had pissed himself and was trying to take off his pyjamas, but the seizures were kicking in and he was all over the place. I had managed to get his top off and his pyjamas trousers had fallen round his ankles, when the full on status epilepticus kicked in. Still in my boxers and teeshirt I struggled desperately to shift him back onto his bed but failed miserably. I glanced over his shoulder at the screen and his BPM was at 140 something (about twice as fast as it should be) and in all this mayhem I got an image of the dead Christ being taken down from the cross: pure naked agony, with me as some kind of hopeless cross, his pyjama trousers as a slipped loin cloth. Once a Catholic, I suppose, but he was certainly in real trouble.

So I shouted to G who came rushing upstairs with the emergency meds and together we just about managed to drag him onto the bed. She then squirted the first round into his mouth as I held his head back and his mouth open. We then started to count the minutes as he shook and shook and shook. This isn't just upper body seizures, it's everything, all over right through to his toes and feet all bent out of shape, grotesque in its twists and contortions. Seven, eight, nine, ten minutes and still he was thrashing. And so we give him the second round and, as attentive readers of my last post will know, called for an ambulance. But still the seizures went on, for something like half an hour, maybe 40 minutes. Typical of Joey, they stopped just before the ambulance crew turned up and we were able to give him his full medication and ourselves a cup of tea. He very slowly returned to normal, smiling shyly and licking my hand. Joey was finally back. 

But this time, of course, he had to go into hospital and after careful discussion (including on the phone with a brilliant out of hours GP), Joey and I went off in the ambulance through the beautiful early Spring Norfolk sunshine. As we drove past Holkham Beach I remembered that we'd promised Joey that we'd walk to the sea. But instead, here he was drugged up to the eyes, asleep on a stretcher. The hospital in Norwich was great and eventually he was discharged and we managed to get him back to his college in one piece and they tell me that today he's fine. God save the NHS and let's keep it free at the point of delivery was my conclusion on Saturday, and the same is true today. 

But I found myself thinking about something else too, and I really don't want this to sound self-indulgent or self-pitying. But a severely disabled child has a huge impact on his family, on the people who love him and everyone who comes into contact with him. And that, believe me, can be seriously bloody hard. I spent half the night lying next to Joe on Saturday worried that he was going to have another clusterfuck of seizures and that the alarm wouldn't work. G and I are completely knackered and found it hard to get back to work today, and I ended up shouting at poor little Bea (8), Joey's half sister, in exhaustion and, of course, grief and delayed shock. It's hardly surprising that there's such a high incidence of divorce, nervous breakdowns and poverty among families with severely disabled kids and the impact can be huge.

And we all have to recognise that there are no miracle cures for a kid like Joey, and the thousands of others like him. This ain't no movie, no West End show, there are no simple happy endings or consolations. And, no, epilepsy isn't a punishment from God for my many misdeeds, nor are the angels speaking through him when he has seizures. It's just hard and frightening stuff. Shit certainly happens.

But there are some brilliant organisations which help us get through. I'm the insufferably proud Chairman of KIDS, a national charity which offers an amazing range of services. Imagine, for example, being a couple looking after a profoundly disabled child 24 hours a day, and once a month your child is taken somewhere where he's looked after, given a great time and is totally safe, while you can give your marriage another chance. A short break like that is sometimes the one thing that stands between having a decent life and total bloody chaos. Or imagine being a parent of a disabled baby and feeling completely confused by the whole situation (I was that) but getting the chance to talk to, and learn from, parents who've done it before. This stuff makes a difference. Really it does.

Support KIDS if you can, and other charities like them: Joey will thank you, probably with a tickle, but, if you're really, really lucky, with a head lick too. He's that kind of guy.

Calling the ambulance

Those of you who're gripped by my every utterance on Facebook will know that my Joey has epilepsy. You may even remember our trips to various hospitals over Christmas. Well, we're in Norfolk right now for half term and have had another adventure today. 

I gave him his usual drugs at 7 this morning and it was immediately clear that they weren't really working. And so G and I decided to give him the first dose of his emergency medication. He eventually came round (stopped seizing) and all seemed good. But then at about 11 this morning, he started again and it wouldn't go away, and so, after some agonising debate, we gave him the second dose of the strong stuff and - as instructed - called for an ambulance. 

Please understand why this is something we really didn't want to do. The idea of spending all Saturday in A&E in King's Lynn isn't our idea of fun, especially if the epilepsy had cleared and he was just being monitored. But we did it because that's the protocol and we know that you can't fuck with epilepsy. But, inevitably, by the time the ambulance arrived (North Norfolk is a big place), Joey was giggling and smiling and back to normal. The brilliant team took all the usual measurements (blood pressure, heart rate etc) and, after a careful discussion, headed off without him. And since then everything's been fine (touch wood, God knows what tomorrow will bring). 

But what struck me, as ever, was this: imagine if our decision had been affected by cost. I'm feeling broke at the moment and imagine if I'd had to stump up £1000. It's all too easy to say that Joey is my responsibility and so I should carry the cost (or insure against such eventuality). But although I'm pretty seasoned at dealing with Joey's epilepsy, I'm no neurologist or paramedic. We took the decision to call the ambulance to be on the safe side, and I know that we were right. But if it was going to cost a ton of money, we might well have gone without. And that could have had the most serious consequences imaginable.

So I think we'd better keep the NHS free at the point of delivery, hadn't we? We all need it like that.

‘Lives Unworthy of Life’: Bishop von Galen and the Nazi persecution of the disabled

The persecution, sterilisation and murder of hundreds of thousands of disabled people is one of the most overlooked chapters in the whole ghastly history of Nazi Germany.

Between 1939 and 1941 as many as 100,000 people with a wide range of disabilities were dismissed as lebensunwertes Leben (‘lives unworthy of life’) and systematically killed in six converted psychiatric hospitals across Austria and Germany.  Initially, lethal injections were used but soon, at Hitler’s personal recommendation, carbon monoxide was employed.

Aktion T4, as the programme was called after the war, was a logical extension of the eugenics movement, which had attracted support from a wide range of people, many with impeccable liberal credentials, across Europe and the United States.  Few had suggested murder (although Virginia Woolf, confronted by a group of ‘imbeciles’, wrote in 1915 that ‘they should certainly be killed’), but the Nazi programme of compulsory sterilisation of people with ‘congenital conditions’ was widely accepted.

With the outbreak of war, the persecution escalated dramatically and, on September 1st, 1939 (the day of the invasion of Poland), Hitler signed his notorious Euthanasia Decree which stated that, ‘after a discerning diagnosis’, ‘incurable patients’ should be ‘granted mercy death’.  Intellectually justified by Social Darwinism, this policy received popular support on the grounds of cost, with a poster claiming that a man ‘suffering from a hereditary defect cost “the People’s Community” 60,000 Reichmarks during his lifetime’.  As a leading Nazi doctor said, ‘the idea is unbearable to me that the best, the flower of our youth, must lose its life at the front in order that feebleminded and irresponsible asocial elements can have a secure existence in the asylum.’

By 1941, 5000 children, many only a few months old, with a wide range of conditions—Down syndrome, ‘idiocy’, cerebral palsy, and so on—had been assessed, registered and murdered.  Initially, their parents were asked for their consent and a panel of three ‘medical experts’ was convened to agree on the course of action.  In due course, however, deception and social pressure were deployed, and children were sent to so-called ‘special sections’, apparently to receive medical treatment, but instead bussed off to their deaths.

Public opposition to the programme was limited.  Probably the most striking intervention came from the churches, especially the Catholic Bishop of Münster.  Clemens August Graf von Galen (1878-1946) belonged to one of the oldest aristocratic families in Germany.  He spent 23 years (1906-29) working as a parish priest in a poor district in Berlin but, as a staunch conservative, had opposed what he perceived to be the immorality of the Weimar Republic.  Indeed, the Nazis, who saw him as an ally, welcomed his installation as Bishop of Münster in 1933.  From the outset, however, he objected to many aspects of the regime, and took editorial responsibility for a volume of essays criticising the paganism of the philosopher and ideologue Alfred Rosenberg.  He voiced his disapproval of Nazi racial theories and helped draft Pope Pius XI’s anti-Nazi encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (1937). 

He is best known, however, for his criticism of the murder of the disabled and, in July and August 1941, delivered three sermons which didn’t just criticise the programme they challenged the entire Nazi value system.   In one of them he asked why these ‘unproductive citizens’ were killed:

'The opinion is that since they can no longer make money, they are obsolete machines, comparable with some old cow that can no longer give milk or some horse that has gone lame.  What is the lot of unproductive machines and cattle?  They are destroyed.  I have no intention of stretching this comparison further.  The case here is not one of machines or cattle which exist to serve men and furnish them with plenty.  They may be legitimately done away with when they can no longer fulfill their function.  Here we are dealing with human beings, with our neighbours, brothers and sisters, the poor and invalids ... unproductive—perhaps!  But have they, therefore, lost the right to live?  Have you or I the right to exist only because we are ‘productive’?  If the principle is established that unproductive human beings may be killed, then God help all those invalids who, in order to produce wealth, have given their all and sacrificed their strength of body.  If all unproductive people may thus be violently eliminated, then woe betide our brave soldiers who return home, wounded, maimed or sick.'

Thousands of copies of the sermons were illegally circulated and local protest groups broke the silence that surrounded the programme.  Copies were also dropped by the RAF and inspired various resistance groups.

The Nazis were in two minds about how to respond to the ‘Lion of Münster’.  Some advised Hitler to execute von Galen or, at least, send him to a concentration camp; but others, especially Goebbels and Bormann, recognised the danger of alienating German Catholics at such a crucial time in the war, and von Galen—a close friend of the new Pope, Pius XII—was subjected to house arrest from late 1941 onwards.  Hitler declared ominously in a private conversation that ‘the fact that I remain silent in public over Church affairs is not in the least misunderstood by the sly foxes of the Catholic Church, and I am quite sure that a man like Bishop von Galen knows full well that after the war I shall extract retribution to the last farthing’.  But von Galen survived Hitler, dying of natural causes in 1946, and was beatified by his fellow German, Benedict XVI, in 2005.

Astonishingly, partly as a result of von Galen’s intervention, the programme was formally discontinued in August 1941.  It would be overstating the case to say that he stopped the murder (a further 100,000 disabled people were killed before the end of the war), and many of the techniques and personnel were employed in the far greater Jewish Holocaust that escalated so dramatically after 1941.  Nevertheless, his denunciation was one of the most courageous and outspoken acts of resistance in Third Reich.

All Our Children is very much a work of fiction.  There is no evidence that von Galen had a meeting of the kind that I have dramatised (though he did talk with senior figures in the SS) nor do we know of a doctor involved in the programme having qualms about what he was doing.  What’s clear, however, is that his intervention raised the most profound questions about the innate value of the human being, regardless of cost or productivity, and his voice, for all its stubborn absolutism, deserves to be heard.

It would be absurd to claim that disabled children face anything like this level of discrimination today.  Nevertheless, there is a huge amount to be done to ensure that they’re given the same opportunities as their able-bodied siblings.  It’s often said that you can judge a society by the way that it treats its most vulnerable.  If Nazi Germany failed that test in the most abject way imaginable, we should never forget its terrible lessons.                                    

Why I hate Harry Potter

No, of course I don’t.  I’ve neither read the novels nor seen the films and have no right to a view.  What’s more, my older son belongs to the original Harry Potter generation and I loved the sight of a playground full of primary school kids clutching novels the size of War and Peace to their brave little chests.  My eight-year-old daughter has read and reread all the books, and tells me I’m talking nonsense, that I’m a terrible ‘muggle’, and no doubt she’s right.  And—before you point it out—I know that JK Rowling is an articulate and committed champion for many of the things I care about, and has been notably generous with her millions.   Harry Potter is surely a good thing.

So what’s all this about then? 

Well, the fact is I’ve never much liked fantasy fiction.  This may be because I’m cold hearted and literal minded, or possibly something much more sinister.  I don’t know.  But when I was a kid the Mad Hatter scared the life out of me, and Tolkien—with his mixture of medieval religiosity and paganism—gave me the creeps.  I never got Star Wars with its Death Stars and Droids, and have no desire to play the Game of Thrones.   I’m not wild about fantasy in classical literature either: I much prefer the blood and passion of the Iliad to the chimeras of the Odyssey; I can’t stomach the courtly incantations of magical consolation in late Shakespeare, and Ibsen definitely got a lot better when he ditched trolls and Norwegian nationalism and started to write his ‘dramas of everyday life’.   

I’m happy to live in a time when this stuff is no longer meaningful; I’m glad we don’t believe in monsters, in fairies, in knights in shining armour; that we have electric light and aren’t frightened of the dark; that we know that lightning isn’t an expression of divine displeasure and that disabled kids aren’t punishments from God.  And I’m thrilled that most of us don’t expect our leaders to be macho and engage in physical combat, or insist that women have to be fair and beautiful and chaste.  In other words, while I acknowledge the psychological power of the ancient myths, they offer little more to me than the most obscure books in the Old Testament.   ‘Happy the land that has no need of heroes’, cracks Brecht’s Galileo, and I agree with him.  I’m happy to be a modern and am, frankly, suspicious of all claims to cultural universality.

Please don’t misunderstand me: it’s not that I don’t like metaphor or the imagination.  It’s that I want it rooted in the everyday stuff of the world.  So I find As You Like It—which, of course, riffs subtly on various myths—mesmerising until the moment Hymen appears: at which point I want to know who the hell he actually is and what Shakespeare thinks he’s up to.  Yes, I know all the ‘characters’ are just ‘texts’ and, of course, the postmodernists are very clever, but give me Rosalind’s ‘men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love’ over the desperate woodenness of this symbol of marital bliss any day.   I reckon Coleridge’s distinction between the active, creative Imagination on the one hand and Fancy’s mechanical recycling of received ideas on the other, is still useful.

But I’ve still not explained what all this has to do with poor old Harry Potter.

Well, it’s this.  Teaching a group of twelve clever students from a world class American university over the summer I was astonished to discover that the only book they’d all read was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.   Not Hamlet, not Great Expectations, not even Of Mice and Men.  What’s more, they still loved it, and reread it often.  They were desperate to visit the Oxford college where it had been filmed, they wore Harry Potter t-shirts with pride and they loved platform 9¾ at King’s Cross Station.  They were amazed when I told them that I had no interest in the whole thing and the sense of outrage was palpable when I explained that in my time at university, liking fantasy fiction was regarded as the sign of an immature mind, with a dangerous proclivity towards mysticism and authoritarianism. 

And it’s this sense of a children’s book taking hold of the adult imagination that bugs me.  I’m not suggesting that Harry Potter is responsible for the twin curses of Brexit and Donald Trump, but in a time when ‘post-truth’ is the new normal, when speculation is instantly rendered real through the alchemy of social media, and when evidence-based policy and scientific expertise are routinely derided, I wonder whether a culture which celebrated the achievements and wonders of the tangible world, and turned its back on wizardry, monsters and fantastical versions of the English public school, wouldn’t make a more helpful contribution. 

I’m a terrible snob, I acknowledge, and I’m agnostic about whether Harry Potter is part of the problem or part of the solution.  But I’m sure we can all agree that it’ll take something more than magic wands to find a way out of this mess.