Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

In SWALK, my father mentioned “Palestine Troubles” and “Palestine Police”, putting into context just how far back Israel’s colonization of Palestine has been, and how it is now.

I have spent two years or more writing this book. One problem of writing a book is that ‘contemporary’ events can overtake what you have been writing about. Thus, since I have started writing this book, the world has been impacted by the Covid-19 epidemic, climate change catastrophes, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Israeli – Palestine War (aka genocide), and the death of Bobby Charlton! (as of October 2023). 

In other words, some of the topics of the 1940s are still ‘alive-and-kicking’ in the 2020s. So it would be absurd to ignore this. On the other hand, this book is not meant to be a political analysis of so-called ‘world problems’. Thus, I will briefly comment on recent events, but try to keep it ‘brief’.

Garden and Land occupation

Admittedly, my parents had purchased the house at 372 Mountnessing Road, but had ‘occupied’ areas outside the property for her victory gardens. As mentioned elsewhere, my mother is descended from murderous Irish gypsies, the MacKinnons; so she was perhaps carrying on the tradition of ‘settling’ on seemingly derelict land. But this is perhaps not so much a tradition of the gypsies, but a tradition of all the ‘grasping’ races, such as the British, the Russians, the Zionists, the Americans, the Chinese, the Spanish, …. the list is endless!

Or it is perhaps an animal trait. Our ‘cousins’, the chimpanzees, are also ‘imperialists’ and ‘colonists’ it seems.  Humans like to imagine they are ‘human’ and above the apes, but they still behave like ‘apes’ in the twenty-first century. I am no expert on zoomorphism, the tendency of viewing human behavior in terms of the behavior of animals. But a quick search on Google seems to show that chimpanzees have ‘colonial’ and ‘imperial’ tendencies:

“Chimpanzees in large groups have been reported to kill most or all of the males in smaller groups over periods lasting several months or years, acquiring portions of their territory in the process.”

Palestine Police

In one of the SWALK letters, this ‘unknown page’ makes reference to the “Palestine Police”. This is another complex topic which we don’t have the opportunity to discuss in detail here – the ‘creation of Israel’. My father mentions the “troubles in Palestine”. Without going into a deeper analysis, it seems the great powers have an interest in keeping conflicts alive in certain lesser countries. The “Palestine troubles” are almost 100 years old. Of course, one could argue they are 2000 years old, that is, ever since Pontius Pilate washed his hands of the execution of the Jew, Jesus Christ. 

Ronald Storrs, a British governor of Jerusalem between 1917 and 1926, wrote in his memoirs, “Orientations”, that an implicit purpose of the Zionist colonization in Palestine was to form ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.

Comparing Hamas to the Russian Dictator (RD)

This seems to bring to mind the recent impassioned demented speech by Joe Biden, the American president:

“Hamas and RD represent different threats but they share this in common; they both want to annihilate a neighbouring democracy.”

This statement seems to falter on many accounts. First of all, calling Israel a democracy. I will be the first to admit that my knowledge of Israel and the Middle East is at best quite poor. But even a casual observer can ask: Can Palestinians vote in Israeli elections? The answer seems to be mainly no. Moreover, Netanyahu seems intent on ending democracy in Israel.

What is worse is the fact that Netanyahu probably knew about the planned attack by Hamas. Similarly, Churchill had been given at least forty-eight hours’ warning that Coventry would be hit. In other words, Netanyahu was willing to sacrifice a few hundred Israelis in his bid to establish a dictatorship. In this context, the US have always found it easier to support fascist dictatorships than social democracies.  

The second error of Biden is that Russia’s regime seems intent on ‘grabbing’ Ukrainian land. So it is a poor comparison comparing Hamas to RD. It would seem better to compare the regime to the Zionists; both are intent on ‘grabbing’ Palestinian lands, which is even objected to by the US and UN. Of course, it’s only a feeble objection, which, in reality, only validates such illegal occupation.

In other words, ‘grabbing’ land seems to be a negative human endeavour. Thus, it seems humans have not advanced far beyond their animal cousins, urinating and shitting on the lands of others to mark the area that they consider to be theirs – their territory.

Prolonging the Russian Invasion

In the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, it seems to be the case that Western countries want to keep the conflict alive for as long as possible with the aim of weakening Russia. RD is shown in the Western media as a ‘mad man’. But it seems to be the case that the West in the long run would like to see the demise of the Russian regime, and the break-up of the Russian ‘empire’.

It is not so difficult to read between the lines when reading the news. It is easy to understand the fork-tongued utterances of politicians suffering from dementia. Thus, President Biden said in February 2023 that “the US wants Ukraine to win, but it does not seek to control or destroy Russia.” In other words, you can guess the meaning of this statement if you remove the word ‘not’.

It is unlikely that the US will directly engage Russia in a war in the immediate future; on the other hand, there are probably many influential people in the US who would like to see internal strife in Russia, and the disarming of their nuclear arsenal. Of course, it is not completely unlikely that a type of ‘internal strife’ could also erupt in the US, due to the polarization of politics in that country.

War Crimes and Hypocrisy

One of the easiest games today, for those not suffering from dementia, is to spot the hypocrites in today’s international politics (October, 2023). Of course, I’m not the only ‘enlightened’ individual that has noticed these obvious ‘double standards’:

“Western leaders accused of hypocrisy over response to Palestine, Ukraine. Social media users, including journalists and observers, are calling out what they call a ‘double standard’.”

“Benjamin Netanyahu expressed gratitude toward Britain this week for backing the latest major attack on Gaza. According to Israel’s prime minister, Britain gave ‘staunch, unwavering support’ to the offensive. It is virtually certain that Israel used British weapons or components while bombing Palestinians.”

The media in the West has invested a lot of efforts in saying that Russia is guilty of war crimes, related to the deaths of civilians amongst other things. On the other hand, they are not concerned with the mass slaughter of Palestinian children:

“At least 1,756 Palestinian children in Gaza have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 7, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, with more than 4,000 injured.”

Global Armageddon

The threat of a global ‘Armageddon’ is ever present when two great powers have such large nuclear arsenals (US and Russia). I forget exactly which of his books the British philosopher, and CND activist, Bertrand Russell, advocated a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union; this leads to the US becoming the supreme global power, and thus rule out the possibility of a ‘nuclear Armageddon’.

Russell suffered from hubris – an arrogant belief in the superiority of his own ideas. Like many of Russell’s hare-brained ideas, this is not based on any kind of logic, despite the fact he was a renowned mathematician. A single supreme global power could obviously result in all kinds of undesired consequences. The ‘balance of nuclear power’, since the post-war period, seems to have served humanity better, despite the absurdity of the idea. Man should always be wary of constructing ‘dubious plans’ for the future. In this context, I can perhaps refer to one of my mother’s favourite poems:

“To a Mouse”, by the Scottish national poet, Robert Burns: 

The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley, (often go wrong)
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy! (instead of joy)