We need armed defence and a military capability that can offer protection to the oppressed in distant countries
We need armed defence, and a military capability that can offer protection to the oppressed in distant countries. Namely, what the hell are we doing selling weapons to anybody, let alone to a psychopath like Saddam Hussein?Why do we develop, manufacture and supply ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction? Who profits? The British arms industry is run by a cartel of wealthy industrialists, government ministers and senior military personnel, who decide how our annual military budget of pounds 23.4 billion is spent. Of this, 40 per cent – that’s pounds 9.6 billion – goes on hardware. They choose what weapons our forces buy, and our arms industry manufactures.
They dictate the increasingly remote and dehumanised nature of warfare.In the film A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson shouts at Tom Cruise words to the effect that, “We live in a world with walls, son, and some men have to guard those walls so that people like you can sleep sound in your beds at night.” And that’s the Faustian bargain, right there. In effect, we pay these men to take care of our dirty business, no questions asked, so that we can look the other way. Because these men are “respectable”, we call the business “defence” But if we were honest, we’d call it a protection racket. After all, we’re paying pounds 9.6 billion a year to make sure our weapons are just that bit more dangerous than the ones our “defence industry” sold to Johnny Foreigner last year, right? We’re paying for that critical edge.I was mesmerised by that “smart bomb” footage on television. Because amid all the denials and supposed debate about ministerial and governmental accountability, no politician, of whatever political hue, once asked the real question at issue. “What is war for? Humans spend $1 trillion a year on war. If you earned $10,000 a day, the going rate for Claudia Schiffer, it would take you almost 300,000 years to make that much money.”
With these words, Colors, the Benetton-sponsored “magazine about the rest of the world”, opens its latest issue, which is devoted to war.
The facts beggar comprehension: 2,700 people die in wars every day, about one every 30 seconds; Third World countries spend $125 billion annually on defence, a fraction of which could pay for universal health care in those same countries; the world’s biggest suppliers of arms – the US, the UK, Russia, China and France – also comprise the UN’s so-called Security Council (conflict of interest here, or what?).
The pictures in Colors are even harder to assimilate: a child’s face almost bisected by a machete blow; a man’s head opened like a tin can by a single shot from an assault rifle; bloody ganglia of flesh, muscle and naked shin bones of a land mine victim who has lost his feet.Colors’ war issue coincides neatly with the aftermath of the Scott report and its attendant breast-beating. She became, instead, especially when Chopin performed, cool and aloof, the detached observer. It was a role played for his benefit, but Chopin did not know that yet. “I have made the acquaintance of a great celebrity: Mme Dudevant, known by the name of George Sand,” he wrote home to his family in Poland. “Her appearance is not to my liking and doesn’t please me at all”. Chopin clowned about gently for his guests, trying not to be appalled by Sand, who puffed away at her cigar, philosophised madly, and addressed all alike in the second person singular Tea was served.Later both Chopin and Liszt played. The latter exuded his usual virile charm, but in deference to the assembled company, Sand did not take her accustomed position, crouched in an ecstatic ball under the piano.
Chopin, fragile and charming, with his aquiline nose, long, tapering fingers and aristocratic manner, found himself greeting a small (less than five foot tall) dark- haired woman clearly older (by six years) than he, who wore – as he had been warned to expect – trousers.
It was an exceptionally relaxed evening. Mme Sand had therefore to be included in the small soiree at Chopin’s on 5 November Franz, Marie and George arrived together. He abhorred intellectualising in general, and by women in particular His tastes were as delicate as his constitution. He liked his women young, beautiful, of impeccable ancestry, preferably innocent, at the least discreet George Sand was none of the above. An introduction became inevitable, however, when Sand moved into rooms below those shared by Liszt and his mistress, Countess Marie d’Agoult, at the Hotel de France, not far from Chopin’s apartment at 38 rue de la Chaussee d’Antin.
Franz Liszt, intimate friend of both, had long wished them to meet, but Chopin had resisted. Like one of his own preludes, Chopin’s first encounter with George Sand arrived at its logical conclusion with no promise of there ever being more to come It took place in Paris in the autumn of 1836. These are two radically different ways of looking at food, but like holidays and home they are the same in the value they assign to food and pleasure.I think that is why I toyed with but ultimately rejected that 18-day cruise through northern Russia and will probably never spend seven leisurely days steaming towards Luxor I know what I like, and I need to eat well, even on holiday So goodbye Russia and Egypt. The purpose of the new American cuisine is aggressive distinction, separateness.