GREECE KEEPS TSIPRAS BUT DISCARDS THE MIGRANTS

Alexis Tsipras is a most fortunate politician. After 8 months in office, his policies of defying Austerity, releasing Greece from EuroZone control and lightening the burden on his people have all turned to dust and ashes. He has had to submit to the disciplines of the euro, agree to a further tightening of taxes and start a radical overhaul of the tottering governmental institutions of Greece to win his €85bn bailout. His SYRIZA party was badly split, many unwilling to ignore the thumping anti-Europe verdict of the 5 July referendum, with 30% of his parliamentary members defecting or fleeing. Tsipras called elections and in many a democracy he would be out on his ear. In fact he strolled to a comfortable enough victory, albeit on a low 56% turnout, winning 145 seats out of 300, sealing his power by renewing his coalition with rightist Independent Greeks with their 11 seats. His re-accession has been greeted with the mother and father of a storm in Athens, thunder, lightning and a tornado – he has clearly upset the gods, but then we always knew that Zeus was a crusty backwoodsman Tory, itching to hurl his deadly bolts at any impertinent upstart.

Alexis Tsipras and Panos Kammenos celebrate their renewed coalition

     

The vanquished Vangelis Meimarakis

Tsipras’ road back was eased by the weakness of his opponents. There are now 9 parties in the Greek parliament and SYRIZA’s only serious rival was conservative New Democracy. It had an interim leader, Vangelis Meimarakis, a genial Cretan with the eyebrows and moustache of a taverna-owner. He is very much of the old guard and Greece needs a vision for the future. The other parties range from the horrible neo-Nazi Golden Dawn to the joyless hard-line Communists, with some oddball centrists in between. The once mighty PASOK is now led by lady Fofi Gennimata, easier on the eye than obese and snarling Evangelos Venizelos, but basically ineffectual. The SYRIZA dissidents, mainly from the far Left, only polled 2.9% and failed to reach the Parliamentary threshold of 3%.

Tsipras will have his work cut out to satisfy Brussels and Berlin. There is no goodwill towards Greece anywhere in Europe and the feeble Greek civil service will need stiffening by Germans and French just to keep pace with the changes. Home evictions and pension cuts are certain to raise popular tensions. The Greek economy needs to grow and there is scant sign of that as yet. Greece and Grexit may yet come back to haunt the chancelleries of Europe.

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A much bigger problem for Europe has been the Migration Crisis. An unprecedented wave of people (a “swarm” in Cameron’s accurate but rather unsympathetic phrase) has illegally entered Europe. Many are Syrians, Libyans and Afghans fleeing civil war or the horrors of ISIL. More are economic migrants from Turkey, Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea and sub-Saharan Africa seeking a better life in prosperous Europe especially in Germany and Scandinavia. Refugee camps have long bulged in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey (Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States offering no sanctuary). This summer, the often calm Mediterranean has been an irresistible magnet for a quick sea journey from Turkey to the Greek islands or from Libya to Italy. Many drownings have wrenched the consciences of the West.

3-year-old Aylan Kurdi drowns

A Syrian father in desperation

Emotions have run high and many individual kindnesses, charitable instincts and actions have been stimulated to which all honour is due. Governments in Europe have been totally confused. Early attempts to fortify or close borders have manifestly failed. The numbers have been overwhelming around 500,000 arriving in 2015, already twice the total for 2014, a busy year. There are said to be at least 4m more wanting to come to Europe. The Greek islands of Lesvos, Cos and Chios have been inundated. The small port of Mytilene on Lesvos had 3 port policemen – now swollen to 60 but still not enough. The Greeks have given up controlling this influx and merely send them to the border with Skopje-Macedonia and onwards to Serbia, Croatia and Hungary to be met variously with open arms, pepper-spray and razor-wire. Austria has been generous (20,000 got there last weekend) and refugees were warmly welcomed in the streets of Munich, with Angela Merkel hailed as an unlikely Mother Theresa figure. However second thoughts are beginning to appear there.

Germany and France are backing a quota system to spread the migrants about, but Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania do not want any (Slovakia only might take Christians!). Britain will take 20,000 over 5 years.

Migrants storming the ferry at Lesvos

What to do with them all?  In the 1930s there was talk of settling stateless Europeans in Uganda or Madagascar (doubtful if the locals were consulted) but it was deemed impractical. I guess we will just have to live and let live together. Germany claims to have absorbed 8m Turks in the 50-odd years since 1960 and the migrants are only treading the well-worn path of the Goths, Vandals, Huns and Vikings. No doubt New Aleppos will spring up around Augsburg and Sheffield and there will be a resounding culture clash. I simply plead with our guests to be tactful. It is not quite the done thing to practice halal ritual slaughter on the Promenade at Folkestone and do not even think about inflicting FGM on our Rita down at the Barnsley chippie!

SMD

22.09.15

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015

THE JESUS MYTH

My readers will know that I am a sceptical humanist, with great interest in the ghostly sciences but wholly devoid of any faith. Before I am encouraged by others humbly to present myself at the Pearly Gates I wanted to explain my take on the Christian religion and why my admittance by the angelic host would be inappropriate and by me unwanted.

There are myriad objections to religions in general and Christianity in particular, but my road to scepticism is dominated by the alleged events of Jesus’ life and the extravagant conclusions derived from them by theologians on invisible evidence. The first myth is the accretion of supernatural events and qualities to the supposed person of Jesus. Even most modern theologians would agree with my assessment. The second myth is the historical existence of Jesus, which I deeply doubt; I am in a minority on this.

Information about the historical Jesus is almost all from Christian sources. The only “outsiders” are very oblique, single sentence, references in Tacitus, Josephus and Suetonius. Chronologically the first Christian source is St Paul in his epistles, probably written in about 45 AD, some 10 years after the supposed crucifixion. Paul’s attitude to Jesus is very odd. He writes of him as a remote historic personage, shows no interest in his person or ministry but only in his death and supposed resurrection. He preaches the risen Christ, the fulfilment of the Judaic Messiah fable.

The 3 “Synoptic” Gospels start with Mark in about 65 AD, with Matthew and Luke rather later essentially composing expansions of Mark, who seems to have had an undiscovered source known as Q. The Gospels (translated as Good News) are not biographical works but purport to describe the birth, teaching ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. None of the Evangelists saw Jesus or witnessed any of the events described, which had reached them from oral sources and community tradition. The story of the death of Jesus was slanted prudently to blame the Jews rather than the Romans who had destroyed the Temple in 70 AD, suppressed a Jewish revolt and Mark was probably writing his gospel in Rome itself. The gospel of St John, dating from about 100 AD is a quite different narrative from the other three, basically a theological treatise, expounding the Greek notion of the Logos and incorporating elements of Judaic, Samaritan and Gnostic philosophy.

From this rich stew, we are presented with the Good News that the Messiah is coming soon to expel evil demons (code for Romans) and bring justice and freedom to the world, especially to the Jews. The flavour is apocalyptic and the ethical injunctions are “eschatological” (that is, suitable for the short wait until the Second Coming.) There were many religions at this time with a sacrificial figure who rises from the dead, many eclectic cults borrowing from others and it was merely the fluke that Christianity penetrated Constantine’s imperial family in 312 AD that gave Christianity its prominence.

Constantine, the first Christian Emperor

By this time, the Jesus myth was well advanced. The Nativity, Epiphany, the miracle stories, the Resurrection and the Ascension, then boldly proclaimed, are now not accepted as literally true and all the later accretions like the Atonement, the Trinity, Mariolatry et al are speculative daydreams. Many scholars will claim that two seminal events have a basis in fact – the Baptism of Jesus and his Crucifixion. The reason they support the truth of these two events is the “embarrassment factor”: Christians would hardly admit to the submission of the supposedly omnipotent and all-blameless Jesus to the authority of another preacher, John the Baptist, were it not true. Similarly it is a miserable fate for a Messiah to be executed by crucifixion like a common criminal, ergo, it must be true! I do not find this convoluted logic to be compelling.

Moving on to the second myth, the historicity of Jesus, (whether he ever existed) I admit that evidence of the lives of many modest people in the ancient world is scanty. But the evidence for Jesus is gossamer-thin although an army of writers have sought to interpret and analyse the later Christian message.  There were doubtless many Jewish hedge-preachers in Galilee and the human capacity to distort and magnify such a life is considerable. The Gospel accounts of Jesus are flat and colourless giving no hint of personality. Honest Christian writers like Ernest Renan, David Strauss and Albert Schweitzer have plunged into the thankless task of tracing the origins of Jesus and writing his biography in the so-called “Quest”. Strauss’ reward in 1845 from the leading Anglican Lord Shaftsbury was to have his book described as “the most pestilential book ever to be vomited out of the jaws of hell!” which epitomises the passions aroused in those days.

I weary of all this palaver about events in first century Judea. Just as there is no Athena, goddess of Wisdom despite the Parthenon in Athens, and no Hera, wife of Zeus, despite her Heraion in Samos, there is no Jesus despite the splendours of St Peter’s in Rome. There is a sound philosophical rule called Occam’s Razor "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" (Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate).  If there was no Christ, why waste our energies on investigating a supposed carpenter’s son from Nazareth?

I contend that all the theological battles of the last two millennia have been in vain. Christianity has brought much poetry, much beauty and much high-minded intelligence to our world but also too much suffering, too much prejudice and too much cruelty. But we have as civilised societies moved on and I apologise to those readers I may have offended. I cannot write otherwise.

SMD

14.09.15

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015

Sources

The classic works on Jesus are The Life of Jesus, critically examined (1835) by David Strauss translated into English by George Eliot and The Life of Jesus (1863) by Ernest Renan.

The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) by Albert Schweitzer is much admired.

Progressive Anglican theology is represented by Saint Mark, (1963) with a magisterial preface by D.E.Nineham and by The Myth of God Incarnate (1977), 10 essays edited by John Hick.

Much the most lively atheistic protagonist is G.A.Wells, one-time professor of German at Birkbeck, whose Did Jesus Exist? (1975) stimulated the whole historicity debate and asked questions many Christian scholars were not able to answer.

TALKING THE TALK

To bring peace and calm to our troubled world, we must first learn to communicate with each other in more or less intelligible terms. That sounds blindingly obvious but it is certainly harder than we suppose to avoid misunderstanding, confusion and comic incomprehension.

I am a native of Aberdeen and in the North East of Scotland rural and proletarian people still speak in the so-called Doric dialect, often quite difficult for even other Scotsmen to penetrate. Our handyman would appear and ask “Shall Ah gie yer carie a wee dicht?” (Shall I give your car a brief washing down?), simple enough once your ear is attuned. I remember a BBC TV interviewer asking a Peterhead trawler-man for his views on a recent EU fisheries edict. The trawler-man launched into a tirade in the broadest Doric for two minutes at the end of which the interviewer mumbled a word of thanks – he and no doubt 99% of viewers had not understood a single word!

My family owned local cinemas and one of the perks was free admission. I recall my eldest brother going to the pictures and on being challenged for his ticket by a recently recruited attendant (do you remember cinema attendants and usherettes?) whispering discreetly “I am Mr Donald’s son” to which the unimpressed attendant replied “Fit aboot it?” (So what? what about it?). My luckless and nonplussed brother did not catch the phrase and thought the young attendant had made some disparaging remark about my rather stout father comparing him to Fat Bob, a comic strip character in the Scottish newspapers. Thus do misunderstandings multiply!

It is not only in Scotland that the dialect or accent can fox others. Yorkshiremen, not least the poet Ted Hughes, can expatiate on the ways of the world with mordant wit, speaking in a richly idiosyncratic dialect. We are mostly familiar with “’Eee by Gum” (Oh, my God!) or even the Yorkshire anthem “On Illkla Moor bar t’at” (on Illkley Moor without a hat) and some will know the Yorkshire motto: “Ear all, see all, say nowt: eat all, sup all, pay nowt: if ever thou does owt for nowt, allus do it fer thissen.” (Hear all, see all, say nothing: eat all, drink all, pay nothing: if ever you do something for nothing, always do it for yourself.) This motto may explain why a Yorkshireman is defined as a Scotsman without the generosity!

Yorkshire' poet, the late Ted Hughes

A visitor to Britain could easily be confounded too by the peculiar accents of the Glaswegian, the Geordie, the Brummie or the Cornishman. He may think a spell in London will restore his belief in cut-glass English oral precision until he encounters Cockney rhyming slang and is floored by: “I ran up the apples to have a butcher’s at my trouble and I was knocked off my plates – she was wearing a syrup!” (I ran up the stairs – apples and pears=Stairs - to have a look – butcher’s hook = look – at my wife – trouble and strife = wife – and I was knocked off my feet – plates of meat = feet – she was wearing a wig – syrup of figs = a wig.) Not easy for the uninitiated, it must be admitted!

It was well said that England and America are two nations divided by a common language. I am going to the US for October (after a 30 year interval) and I expect to be bamboozled by many ordinary words and expressions, let alone by accents, and to be confused especially if I wish to buy some clothes. Thus, with English usage first followed by American we have trousers/pants, waistcoat/vest, braces/suspenders and pullover / sweater. Watching the many sports TV channels, I imagine Americans struggle with cricket terms (silly mid-off, leg breaks, maiden overs, following on et al) or the jargon of rugby union (ruck and maul, line-outs, Garry Owens or penalty tries) just as my eyes will glaze over at talk of home runs, line backers and slam dunks. But Americans are friendly and articulate people and I will do all I can to catch up quickly and try to master the idiom.

Language and communication is a fascinating subject and I have an old friend who leads a Facebook blog with some rather learned discussions on correct English usage and grammatical niceties. I am only a silent observer with nothing much to contribute but I applaud the way his group of expert enthusiasts is not judgemental but insist that language is a constantly evolving and eclectic science where “coining a phrase” is a regular new occurrence.

SMD

4.09.2015

Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015