I was very into modern music. Still am. A fan of creatives of various genres – Punk, Funk, Folk, Blues, IDM, Gothic, Rock, Rap, Hip hop, Bluegrass, Country.. The list could go on for at least one side of A4 paper, but I’m not going to bore you with that.
I seem to have lost the ability to be a fan of anything these days. All idolatry contained within seemingly disappeared a few years ago, but the fascination with the music still remains.
I used to make what some might describe as mixtapes. I became obsessed with song number 8 of any given album, and would make playlists of eight songs from various artists, the only rule that it had to be track 8 of whichever album I picked from.
It made for some interesting results. The eighth song of an album tend to be one of the strongest ones, a reward for making it that far. Well, in my mind it was. Some people search for the biggest hits on an album they haven’t heard before, the first song I listen to is track 8. There are some albums that do not have more than seven songs on it.. but that is quite rare, at least it is in my experience.
I do not read as much as I’d like, and when the opportunity arises I find it hard to choose what to read. I am going to start getting in the habit of copying the first eight paragraphs of the eighth chapter of any book at hand. As well as risking making your spam box bulge, I will save the words I copy, and when struggling to decide on what to read, I can refer to these paragraphs and it may make my decision slightly easier. There is also the risk that it’ll make the decision infinitely harder to make. It is a risk I am willing take.
I am also hoping that getting in the habit of doing this will help me ‘get to know’ all the books in my possession a little bit better. So many of them have never be read by me at all.
Also I hope that it’ll help me get in the habit of writing at least eight paragraphs a day of own words, no matter how short, long, lame or unreadable, fictional or non-fictional they may be.
This is the eight paragraph of my own words.. Now, much more interestingly the first eight paragraphs of the eighth chapter of some books that are within my reach…
Twelve angry persons
by Peter Hitchens
(Chapter VIII of ‘A Brief History of Crime’, 2003)
The jury is more noble in theory than in reality. There is nothing especially elevating in the sight of twelve people crammed into a room trying to decide whether to ruin a fellow human being’s life. Yet for once, the idea is more important than the practice. As long as these strange committees continue to exist, governments are less powerful and citizens are more free.
Two things happen to trials when a jury is present. First, there I an element of doubt about the outcome that is quite beyond the control of the state. This turns the presumption of innocence from a mere slogan into a real possibility. Some on the jury may actually be prepared to believe that the police have the wrong man, Secondly, the prosecution’s huge advantage over the defence is greatly reduced. The defence is not an interloper among officials but one of two contestants before a panel that owes nothing to either side.
Regrettably, this arrangement can help some criminals escape justice, although it is certainly not bound to do so. This is the price we pay for its benefits to freedom of thought and speech. It is why it is better, not just in general but for human liberty, that a hundred guilty men should go free than that one innocent man should be imprisoned. The question ‘better for whom?’ is often asked. The answer must be ‘better for everyone’. These freedoms have until recently been considered so valuable that wise people accepted the painful cost. Now, however, that wisdom is repeatedly overruled on the grounds of expense or convenience. Governments constantly make it easier for wrongdoers to mock the law or escape justice by changing the rules of evidence, by weakening the police, by seeking to empty the prisons and reducing penalties to the point where they are meaningless. The same governments become piously self-righteous about plans to remove or reduce jury trial, claiming that restricting this right is a ‘crime-fighting’ measure designed to strengthen the law. They even claim that jury trial is not a right at all. The blazing hypocrisy of this attitude is matched only by its sheer nerve, its oppressive brutality and its small-mindedness.
Without a jury, the legal process is like any other government action. Strip the process of arrest, trial, conviction, sentence and appeal down to its basic parts and it is quite simple. A series of state employees, few of them especially brave or intelligent or preceptive, are asked to approve the original decision of another state employee. The chances are strong they will do so at every stage, and will feel that this is what they are paid to do.
Police, prosecutor, and judge are all representatives of power, reluctant to admit that they might be mistaken. there is a danger that the defence lawyer will become the state’s advocate to the defendant, rather than the defendant’s advocate to the state. In fully totalitarian countries, lawyers are either too afraid to act for the defence, or accept their client’s guilt and do no more than plead for a lower sentence. In those without juries but with a measure of freedom, the defence starts at a disadvantage and the defendant is required to co-operate in the investigation of his own alleged offence long before he comes to trial. And when guilt is assumed, habeas corpus and other protections against long pre-trial detention seem idle.
In short, jury trial is a grave nuisance to the authorities, especially to governments which believe they have a moral purpose, as the Blair administration does. It is constantly under attack because of the benevolent state’s instinctive impulse to take absolute power so as to be more effectively benevolent. Even where juries exist, they can face severe intimidation from judges and governments. Their right to exist at all, let alone to act freely, is not always guaranteed. When, as in the USA, they are part of the holy of the constitution, they can still be avoided by such methods as the use of military tribunals under the excuse of a ‘war against terror’.
When, as in England, they are supported by nothing but ancient custom, they can be attacked on the grounds of incompetence, delay and cost, and gradually removed from the courtroom. All too many democrats and libertarians will not come instinctively to the defence of juries. Totalitarians, quicker to see their true purpose, unfailingly recognize them as an enemy and attack them on sight. French juries were abolished in 1940 by the German National Socialist occupation authorities. Dictators fear not only what juries do now but what they might do in a tight corner. However, it is not only naked tyrants who mistrust them. All governments do so, and when France was liberated and the republic reborn juries did not return.
The assault on juries in England has been far more subtle than on the Continent where, after a brief vogue following the French Revolution, jury systems were established and later suppressed or abandoned in several countries, including Prussia, Hungary, and the Netherlands. In England, and in a different form in Scotland, they simply continued uninterrupted. However, thanks to a series of changes and reforms, the institution is now significantly weaker in England than it was at the start of the 1960s. It is soon likely to become weaker still.
THE FIGHT AT THE LAMP-POST
By C. S. Lewis
(Chapter Eight of ‘The Magician’s Nephew’, 1955)
“Ho! Hempress, are you? We’ll see about that,” said a voice. Then another voice said, “Three cheers for the Hempress of Colney ‘Atch” and quite a number joined in. A flush of colour came into the Witch’s face and she bowed ever so slightly. But the cheers died away into roars of laughter and she saw that they had only been making fun of her. A change came over her expression and she changed the knife to her left hand. Then, without warning, she did a thing that was dreadful to see. Lightly, easily, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, she stretched up her right arm and wrenched off one of the cross-bars of the lamp-post. If she had lost some magical powers in our world, she had not lost her strength; she could break an iron bar as if it were a stick of barley-sugar. She tossed her new weapon up in the air, caught it again, brandished it, and urged the horse forward.
“Now’s my chance,” though Digory,. He darted between the horse and the railings and began going forward. If only the brute would stay still for a moment he might catch the Witch’s heel. As he rushed, he heard a sickening crash and a thud. The Witch had brought the bar down on the chief policeman’s helmet: the man fell like a ninepin.
“Quick, Digory. This must be stopped,” said a voice beside him. It was Polly, who had rushed down the moment she was allowed out of bed.
“You are a brick,” said Digory. “Hold on to me tight. You’ll have to manage the ring. Yellow, remember. And don’t put it on till I shout.”
There was a second crash and another policeman crumpled up. There came an angry roar form the crowd: “Pull her down. Get a few paving-stones. Call out the Military.” But most of them were getting as far away as they could. The Cabby, however, obviously the bravest as well as the kindest person present, was keeping close to the horse, dodging this way and that to avoid the bar, but still trying to catch Strawberry’s head.
The crowd booed and bellowed again. A stone whistled over Digory’s head. Then came the voice of the Witch, clear like a great bell, and sounding if, for once, she were almost happy.
“Scum! You shall pay dearly for this when I have conquered your world. Not one stone of your city will be left. I will make it as Charn, as Felinda, as Sorlis, as Bramandin.”
Digory at last caught her ankle. she kicked back with her heel and hit him in the mouth. In his pain he lost hold. his lip was cut and his mouth full of blood. From somewhere very close by came the voice of Uncle Andrew in a sort of trembling scream. “Madam – my dear young lady – for heaven’s sake – compose yourself.” Digory made a second grab at her heel, and was again shaken off. More men were knocked down by the iron bar. He made a third grab: caught the heel: held on like grim death, shouting to Polly “Go!” then – oh, thank goodness. The angry, frightened faces had vanished. The angry, frightened voices were silenced. All except Uncle Andrew’s. Close beside Digory in the darkness, it was wailing on “Oh, oh, is this delirium? Is it the end? I can’t bear it. It’s not fair. I never meant to be a magician. It’s all a misunderstanding. It’s all my godmother’s fault; I must protest against this. In my state of health too. A very old Dorsetshire family.”
The eighth chapter of ‘Covenant of Death’ (1961), by John Harris
Part Two
I
Yea, how they set themselves in battle array
I shall remember to my dying day.
The first sight of France had a sobering effect on us all and the excitement seemed to die out of us suddenly.
This was what we’d joined up for, this was why we’d trained through eighteen or more solid months. this was why we’d learned to march and shoot and discipline ourselves. France! In spite of the Dardanelles and the side-shows in Mesopotamia and Salonika, this, we all knew—because we’d been often told so by the newspapers—this was where the war would be fought and won.
“Well, there it is, Murray,’ I said, staring at the flat-fronted pink-and-blue houses of Marseilles through a thin driving rain that had flecks of snow in it. ‘That’s it.’
‘That’s what we came for.’Murray seemed to be sniffing the air like an eager terrier, his eyes bright, his fingers gripping the ship’s rail in an intensity of emotion that made his knuckles white.
Mason was on the other side, staring at the shore, his eyes sombre, and his voice sounded strangely flat, as though he were trying to control emotions that were in danger of making it uneven. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘for better or worse, like marriage, you’ve got it now. And, like marriage, before you’re much older, my lad, you’ll probably wish you’d never seen it.’
Murray was gazing at the square shuttered houses of the distant port, glimmering faintly in the rain through the sails and masts and smoke-stacks of all kinds of shipping—from transatlantic liners and sleek destroyers to barges and gaily painted Mediterranean fishing craft. Even he seemed to be suddenly impressed by the immensity of what he was facing.
Here was death. I could almost see the thoughts passing in procession through his mind; here, possibly were wounds, and maiming. But here was the enemy. Here was glory.
My own thoughts were a confused mixture of excitement and dread. Here, I thought, was the unknown, and with the realisation came a mild depression that reached all the way back to childhood bogeys and dim back-streets and darkness.
Looking Back
(From Forgotten Voices of the Somme by Joshua Levine, 2008)
Half of the men, I’m sure, had no idea what they were fighting for.
By the end of the Battle of the Somme, 419,654 British and Dominion soldiers had become casualties, of whom 127,751 had been killed. There had been no Allied breakthrough, and 1917 would bring renewed bloody attritional struggles on the Western Front, at Arras and Passchendaele.
Second Lieutenant W. J. Brockman
15th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers
The people at home did not understand the conditions under which we were fighting. I don’t think they wanted to. Just as it is not fashionable now to talk about war – it wasn’t then. It’s a very strange thing. I’ve never told any of these stories to anybody before; people just don’t want to know.
Major Murray Hill
5th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers
I’ve read the poems of Owen and Sassoon. I thought they wrote nonsense. Writing poetry about horrors. No point. It goes without saying. No need to write it up. Sassoon went off his head. He threw his medals into the sea. But he wrote a very good book about fox hunting.
Private Leonard Gordon Davies
22nd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers
I wasn’t at all a brave man. I wasn’t one of those who volunteered to go over the top, whenever there was a chance. It was an experience that you knew nothing about. You just jumped up on to the trench and that you wouldn’t meet a bullet. Actually going over, and seeing one man drop, and another man drop, and you’d wonder why you were still going. I always put it down to the prayers of my mother and father. But I didn’t deserve to get through it all.
Private Donald Cameron
12th Battalion, York and Lancaster Regiment
I wasn’t frightened. I was bloody petrified.
Corporal Frederick Francis
11th Battalion, Border Regiment
A pal of mine was blown into a shell-hole and there was already a German in there. And they started to fight each other. To kill each other. But in the end, they gave it up and shook hands. They decided it was just a wasted of life and they started talking to each other.
Corporal Wilfred Woods
1/4th Battalion, Suffolk Regiment
You didn’t hate them as individuals, no, no, you felt sorry for them. I remember, on the Somme, in a German dugout there was this poor little drummer boy, about sixteen. He had been left behind in this dugout and he was scared stiff. We felt sorry for the poor little chap.
Private Harold Startin
1st Battalion, Leicestershire Regiment
There was no bitterness at all. There’s many a German that helped our wounded people down the communications trenches, even carried them down. There was no hatred between the forces. Although we were shooting at one another.
Private Leonard Gordon Davies
22nd Battalion, Royal Fusiliers
The trenches were very close together. Vimy Ridge was a very important vantage point, and both the Germans and us were at the top of it. The idea was to get the Germans off it. The fighting was extremely fierce, when it was on, but when it was off, it was very quiet. We were just fifteen yards form each other and we used to speak to them. They spoke quite good English. We agreed a ceasefire and we got out of the trenches and met each between the two in no-man’s land. It wasn’t very easy to get across, because there was wire in the way. I was smoking in those days, and they gave me some tobacco and we rolled it up into cigarettes. Then we got back into our trenches and we started to fight each other again. It had only lasted about five minutes. But we didn’t shoot to kill, because we liked these people and they liked us as well.
It was a most extraordinary experience. It wasn’t common. We must have been lucky to have particularly friendly opponents at that time. These were not military people by desire – one of them told me that he had been a waiter in London/ The stupidity, the absurdity of war really struck me then, that this could happen, and the next moment you’re trying to kill the man you’ve just been talking to. I began thinking it then, and I still think it. War is ridiculous.
If it Bleeds It Leads
by Patrick Cockburn
(From Chapter 8 of ‘The Rise of Islamic State’, 2015)
The four wars fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria over the past twelve years have all involved overt or covert foreign intervention in deeply divided countries. In each case the involvement of the West exacerbated existing differences and pushed hostile parties towards civil war. In each country, all or part of the opposition has been hard-core jihadi fighters. Whatever the real issues at stake, the interventions have been presented by politicians as primarily humanitarian, in support of popular forces against dictators and police states. Despite apparent military successes, in none of these cases have the local opposition and their backers succeeded in consolidating power or establishing stable states.
But there is another similarity that connects the four conflicts: more than most most armed struggles, they have all been propaganda wars in which newspaper, television, and radio journalists played a central role. In every war there is a difference between reported news and what really happened, but during these four campaigns the outside world has been left with misconceptions, even about the identity of the victors and the defeated.
In 2001, reports of the Afghan war gave the impression that the Taliban had been beaten decisively, even though there had been very little fighting. In 2003, there was a belief in the West that Saddam Hussein’s forces had been crushed when in fact the Iraqi army, including the units of the elite Special Republican Guard, had simply disbanded and gone home. In Libya in 2011, the rebel militiamen, so often shown on television firing truck-mounted heavy machine guns in the general direction of the enemy, had only a limited role in the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, who was mostly brought down by NATO air strikes. In Syria in 2011 and 2012, foreign leaders and journalists repeatedly and vainly predicted the imminent defeat of Bashar al-Assad.
These misconceptions explain why there have been so many surprises and unexpected reversals of fortune. The Taliban rose again in 2006 because it hadn’t been beaten as comprehensively as the rest of the world imagined. At the end of 2001, I was able to drive, nervously but safely, form Kabul to Kandahar. But when I tried to make the same journey in 2011, I could go no farther south on the main road than the last police station on the outskirts of Kabul. In Tripoli two years ago, hotels were filled to capacity with journalists covering Gaddafi’s fall and the triumph of the rebel militias. But state authority still hasn’t been restored there. In the summer of 2013. Libya almost stopped exporting oil because the main ports on the Mediterranean had been seized as a result of a mutiny among militiamen. The prime minister, Ali Zeidan, threatened to bomb “from the air and the sea” the oil tankers the militiamen were using to sell oil on the black market. Soon Zeidan himself was forced to flee the country.
Libya’s descent into anarchy was scarcely covered by the international media. They had long since moved on to Syria, and more recently Egypt. Iraq, home a few years ago to so many foreign news bureaus, has also dropped off the media map, although up to a thousand Iraqis are killed each month,mostly as a result of the bombing of civilian targets. When it rained for a few days in Baghdad in January, the sewer system, supposedly restored at a cost of $7 billion, couldn’t cope: some streets were knee-deep in dirty water and sewage. In Syria, many opposition fighters who had fought heroically to defend their communities turned into licensed bandits and racketeers when they took power in rebel-held enclaves.
It wasn’t that reporters were factually incorrect in their descriptions of what they had seen. But the very term “war reporter,” though not often used by journalists themselves, helps explain what went wrong. Leaving aside its macho overtones, it gives the misleading impression that war can be adequately described by focusing on military combat. Irregular or guerilla wars are always intensely political, and none more so than the strange stop-and-go conflicts that followed from 9/11. This doesn’t mean that what happened on the battlefield was insignificant, but only that it requires interpretation. In 2003, television showed columns of Iraqi tanks smashed and on fire after US air strikes on the main highway north of Baghdad. If it hadn’t been for the desert background, viewers could have been watching pictures of the defeated German army in Normandy in 1944. But I climbed into some of the tanks and could see that they had been abandoned long before they were hit. This mattered because it showed that the Iraqi army wasn’t prepared to fight and die for Saddam. It also pointed to the likely future of the allied occupation. Iraqi soldiers, who didn’t see themselves as having been defeated, expected to keep their jobs in post-Saddam Iraq, and were enraged when the Americans dissolved their army. Well-trained officers flooded into the resistance, with devastating consequences for the occupying forces: a year later the Americans controlled only islands of territory in Iraq.
In one respect, war reporting is easier than other types of journalism: the melodrama of events drives the story and attracts an audience. It may be risky at times, but the correspondent talking to the camera with exploding shells and blazing military vehicles behind him knows his report will feature prominently in any newscast. “If it bleeds it leads” is an old American media adage. The drama of the battle inevitably dominates the news, but is oversimplified if only part of what is happening is disclosed. These oversimplifications were especially stark and deceptive in Afghanistan and Iraq, when they dovetailed with political propaganda that demonized first the Taliban and later Saddam Hussein as evil incarnate.
They helped cast the conflict in black and white, as a struggle between good and evil, something that was particularly easy in the US amidst the hysterical atmosphere following 9/11. The crippling inadequacies of the opposition in these countries were simply ignored.
Chapter VIII of ‘Animal Farm’, 1945
by George Orwell
A few days later, when the terror caused by the executions had died down, some of the animals remembered – or thought they remembered – that the Sixth Commandment decreed: ‘No animal shall kill any other animal.’ And though no one cared to mention it in the hearing of the pigs or the dogs, it was felt that the killings which had taken place did not square with this. Clover asked Benjamin to read her the Sixth Commandment, and when Benjamin, as usual, said that he refused to meddle in such matters, she fetched Muriel. Muriel read the Commandment for her. It ran: ‘ No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.’ Somehow or other, the last tow words had slipped out of the animals’ memory. But they saw now that the commandment had not been violated; for clearly there was good reason for killing the traitors who had leagued themselves with Snowball.
Throughout that year the animals worked even harder than they had worked in the previous year. To rebuild the windmill, with walls twice as thick as before, and to finish it by the appointed date, together with the regular work of the farm, was a tremendous labour. there were times when it seemed to the animals that they worked longer hours and fed no better than they had done in Jones’s day. On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a long strip of paper with his trotter, would read out to them lines of figures proving that the production of every class of foodstuff had increased by 200 per cent, 300 per cent, or 500 per cent, as the case might be. The animals saw no reason to disbelieve him, especially as they could no longer remember very clearly what conditions had been like before the Rebellion. All the same, there were days when they felt that they would sooner have less figures and more food.
(*I’m too tired to continue, my eyelids are in nap mode.. until next time…)