A Brown Study

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness and Sigri estate coffee from Papua New Guinea and central heating: an autumn to savour. Looking at frost is so much more pleasant when you see it through double glazing.

It’s rather sad looking at the more fleshy plants in the garden some of which have now been reduced by an icy kiss to a rather depressing mush leaving the remnants looking like a series of gaunt reminders of vegetation blasted by war in no-man’s-land in a canvas by Nash. In the midst of this killing coldness the chrysanthemums are thriving, indeed the weather seems to have brought on a second growth and the two plants provide the only real splashes of colour in the garden. Amazingly, a lone snapdragon has chosen this time to burst into a restrained bloom, with autumn pansies seemingly oblivious to the weather reminding one, if you want to continue the First World War analogy, of Brave Little Belgium! There is one rose left in the garden dying decorously and held together by the frost. (See yesterday’s pictures.)

The roses in today’s photos come courtesy of Tesco. I did not actually step outside the house to take any of the pictures today: so much for the ‘wandering further afield’ assurance of yesterday!

The news from Iraq is depressing if predictable. Saddam has been sentenced to death. Saddam used chemical weapons on his own people; he was instrumental in the death and torture of countless others and, in common with other dictators had execrable taste. And now he is going to be legally murdered. The moral questions around this trial are the questions that we shy away from. We always behave as if we were right in the western world. And let’s face it, to a large extent I think we are. We pay at least lip service to fundamental human rights which are enshrined in the UN Charter; however cynical we may be about our institutions they do give us a level of protection which is only a fond dream in the countries around Iraq.
The response to the death penalty is surely a litmus paper test of the degree of civilization of a country. I do not pretend for a moment that if any one I love were to be harmed then I wouldn’t want to kill the perpetrator myself: but laws are put in place to limit my actions when logical response is lost in passion. The desire for the ultimate revenge is understandable, but can never be justified; and please, don’t trot out the old ‘What would you do if you could go back in time and take a pot shot at Hitler’ argument. I am not a devout believer in the Great Man of History Theory where the forces of historical change are concentrated in the hands of one person who directs the flow of history rather than acts within in.

I can see many arguments for the death of Saddam but none of which do I find convincing. So I sit in my comfortable living room looking out at my garden, safe in the country with the fourth largest economy in the world, governed by a parliamentary democracy which, in one form or another has been around for a very long time and as I sit here, I pontificate about what country, whose history is a shameful catalogue of cynical intervention by western powers; racked by a bloody sectarian civil war after a recent history composed of bloody wars and invasions, should do. Their ‘democracy’ is, to put it mildly, fledgling and their understanding and belief in the institutions we take for granted is limited. But how far should the, admittedly horrific, situation be allowed to dictate (ha!) their actions? Remember the Diplock Courts; the suspension of habeas corpus; policemen with guns; the suspension of mobile phone lines after the Tube Bombings; restrictions of movement – all the concomitant paraphernalia of tin pot regimes which have at some point in our recent past been part of our experience in this country too, as a, perhaps, justified response to terrorist action or its threat. Our fundamentally solid society can wobble with depressing ease at the slightest touch: what the situation and mind set is like in Iraq we can only guess at.

So does that justify legal murder? For me no; it never can. It’s a conviction which is close to a belief which seems to me to be necessary for our continuation as a society for which I can have any respect.
Should I expect a country in chaos to have the same convictions as I: yes, a thousand times, yes. It is only at times like these that the quality of the moral basis of a society is tested. If it fails now, when it needs to be strong, then the actions taken in the good and easy times are irrelevant – there are unlikely to be any.