What we did for Greece

So should we bail out the Greeks then?

Or rather should we bail out the banks who've got themselves in up to their necks in bad debt, a lot of it owed by Greece?

Well I guess it's a bit like the question of whether you should give your pocket money to the bully who's dangling you over a railway bridge. In principle no, but in practise....

What's interesting I find though is how little is being said about the debt we owe Greece. This I can only put down to the tragic decline in the study of the Classics in our schools.

The Romans conquered the known world thanks to their Classical education, and so before we sent out our sons and daughters to carve out an Empire we gave them a thorough grounding in Latin and Greek history. What else would a future District Commissioner in Utter Pradesh ever need?

An unintended blow back from this policy was that whenever things got a bit sticky at the bottom of the Balkans, we tended to side with the guys who spoke Greek.

It all started in 1821 when the Greek speakers, who'd carved out a nice role for themselves in the bureaucracy of the Ottoman Empire, launched one of their regular uprisings and for once actually made a bit of progress.

The revolt inspired the Classically educated Brits and so Romantics and demobbed officers from the Napoleonic Wars made their way over to the Peloponnese. Lord Byron went, and died shortly after arriving, and the rebel Greek Navy ended up being commanded by Lord Cochrane, a former Royal Navy officer and the model for Jack Aubrey from Master and Commander.

Many of those who went to help though ended up a little disappointed to find that they weren't standing shoulder to shoulder with modern Leonidas's. Instead of fighting to the last bullet, the rebels often as not didn't even fight to the first bullet, and battles often consisted of no more than just shouting insults from cover.

The climax was equally bizarre. Worried that imperial rival Russia was going to gain from the insurrection, a joint British and French fleet was sent to lend moral support to the Turks. Instead it ended up obliterating the Turkish fleet in an action that was the last to be fought purely by wooden sailing ships.

An independent Greece then emerged, and to show how independent they were they were given a Bavarian king. When they did a stock take they found a few things missing though, including the Parthenon Marbles, which had been given to Lord Elgin by the Turks just before they scarpered.

As a Balkan nation they took part in the confusing series of wars that eventually triggered the First World War. Greece was a late arrival in the conflict and for most of the war did very little. After the defeat in Gallipoli the British and Australian forces regrouped in Thessaloniki where they spent the next few years camped out in the sunshine in what must have been one of the easier postings of the conflict.

Greece then sent a delegation to the Versailles conference where they presented a grandiose vision of a Greater Greece, which included a huge chunk of what is now Asiatic Turkey. That there were very few Greeks in these new areas, and many of them were lukewarm about the idea, was overlooked by the British and French leaders. They were committed to dismantling the defeated Ottoman Empire and thought they may as well give as many of the bits as they could to Greece, and so the nation emerged from the war twice as big as it went in.

The new country didn't last very long though, thanks to Kemel Ataturk and resurgent Turkish nationalism, and Greece retreated back to its original borders.

However just as it appeared that modern forces were now sculpting the former Classical world, history repeated itself and Greece soon faced the return of an ancient foe: Rome.

Mussolini and the Italian King didn't agree on many things, but they both shared a low opinion of the Greeks. The Italian army, woefully prepared for war, crossed the Adriatic only to be soundly thrashed by the underrated Greek army and, just as in North Africa, Hitler had to send German troops to bail out his fellow dictator.

Churchill meanwhile was as romantically attached to Greece as Byron had been and sent the Eighth Army across from Africa to help. The intervention was a disaster and the British Army soon had to be rescued by the Royal Navy. Some, notably General von Manstein, have claimed that this diversion delayed Operation Barbarossa just enough to save Russia, but the evidence seems scanty. Others have point out that this diversion occurred just as we were about to kick the Italians out of Africa. This allowed Rommel and his tanks time to save the day and bat the Desert Rats all the way back to El Alamein.

Greece suffered far more under German and Italian occupation than it ever did under the Turks, and its a now nearly forgotten fact that the first shipment of food aid sent by Oxfam was to Greece, in defiance of the Allied blockade, although it didn't stop 100,000 people starving to death. All told eight percent of the population died, a million were homeless and a third of the nations wealth was destroyed.

The Greeks themselves fought back, with the most effective resistance fighters being the Communists. As the Russians advanced the Greeks then fought themselves with the Germans as bemused onlookers. The Communists gained the upper hand and with the Red Army on the way it looked like Greece would join the rest of Eastern Europe in the Soviet sphere of influence.

However Stalin didn't actually want Greece and so Churchill sent in British troops again, this time to fight the people he had described months before as "gallant guerrillas containing thirty enemy divisions" but who were now "the miserable Greek banditti". With the help of rearmed collaborator Security Battalions the EAM and ELAS were driven out of Athens and soon Greece was standing shoulder to shoulder with old enemy Turkey as a bulwark of NATO.

Indeed so keen was the west to save Greece for democracy that when a military dictatorship took power in 1967 it took Britain a whole 24 hours to decide that torturing fascists were better than Godless communists and agree to recognise the regime. In the end the Turks helped oust the Colonels, by delivering a stinging military defeat in Cyprus.

When democracy was restored the way was open to join the European Economic Community, as it was then called. Greece was soon at the heart of the European community of nations, and that's where the problems started.

Once again Greece was the victim of the kindness of its friends. Instead of a left leaning rural nation channelling the spirit of the ancient world, they saw in her an industrialised democracy with a neoliberal market economy waiting to burst forth.

Waived into the the Eurozone despite some distinctly non-neoliberal domestic policies, it took the Credit Crunch to reveal the ghastly mistake that had been made. Worse, rather than just letting the country go bankrupt, drop out and relaunch a devalued Drachma, which would allow them to offer cheap holidays and consumer goods to rebuild their economy, they are being forced to stay so that our banks won't go bust.

So we've sent them our Romantic poets and taken their marbles, failed to save them from the Nazis but rescued them from communism, ignored their foray into military dictatorship and allowed them to blag their way into a club they can't afford.

You could say that the West has been pretty good friends to Greece, but they might well reply that with friends like us, who needs enemies?

Abortion (And Unleaded Petrol) Prevents Riots

No I can't prove it to level of statistical significance, but then again neither can anybody else who has put forward their various ideas on how to make our underclass behave themselves and stop helping themselves to free consumer goods. However at least my theory has some peer reviewed research behind it, which makes it stand out slightly.

The reason I post such a obviously shocking claim is due to the miles of column inches being given to Cameron's 'Supercop' Bill Bratton. Bratton is everywhere these days, and in a curious trans-Atlantic about face he is now about the most liberal commentator on the riots going.

Take last Sunday for example. Whilst the supposedly serious Daily Torygraph had "Police to Adopt Zero Tolerance" as its headline, the usually more rabidly right wing Daily Mail had an article by Bratton saying Zero Tolerance was a meaningless phrase coined by Jack Straw and that the solution to the riots is better race relations. It's a bizarre day when liberal England has to import US cops to teach us about the value of social cohesion.

But Bratton's claim to fame is not his take on structural racism, but his aggressive action on gangs and his adoption of the Broken Windows of crime prevention. Nothing worng with either if done properly, but how effective were they really?

Firstly we have to be clear we are looking at relative reduction in crime here. Even after having Bratton for years the chance of getting yourself topped in LA is still about four times the UK average, whilst the City still boast a good thirteen hundred or so street gangs.

However lets assume for the moment that with legal guns and massive inequality, Bratton wasn't going to achieve more than a relative drop in crime, and look at what he achieved: six straight years of crime going down and a 27% reduction in the murder rate over five years. Well done Mr Bratton.

But then crime went down over the USA as a whole during this period, having peaked in 1991. Why is that?

Now the problem you get with this sort of thing is that the amount of data you need to wade through is just phenomenal, so I'm not going to offer my own cod theories, but just quote the academics who have the skills to dot he job properly.

And the answer is that, whilst Reagan's attempt to put every black American in prison has had some impact, the main reasons for this are the legalisation of abortion in 1972, and the banning of lead in petrol from 1986/7. 
 
The link with abortion is fairly dramatic. Those foetuses aborted in 1973 would be reaching 18, the peak age for committing crime, in 1992 - the year in which crime started to fall. What's more, the states that legalised abortion before Roe versus Wade saw crime peak earlier. Also, research carried out on women who were denied abortions in Sweden from 1939 to 1941 found the 'unwanted' child to be more likely to commit a crime (Forssman, Thuwe 1966).

The link with lead in petrol meanwhile is so clear, and so obvious, it need no explanation. Brain damage doesn't make for well behaved children.

So how should we deal with the recent unrest? Well, the evidence from those that know appears to indicate that progressive social and environmental policies are the way forward.

But then, as the Dunning-Kuger Effect shows, those who don't know tend to shout loudest.

Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Eighties

The eighties, now this is when I started reading sci-fi, so there are going to be some real favourites here. And it was a pretty good decade to get the sci-fi bug really. As well as new books we also had new sub-genres, which is a sure sign of rude health.

Firstly the graphic novel really came of age during this decade. Perhaps they should have their own category, but personally I'd rate Alan Moore's V for Vendetta (1982-5), The Ballad of Halo Jones (1984-6) and Watchmen (1986-7), and Neil Gaiman's Sandman (1989-96) as up their with the best novels.

Given how visual the graphic novel is it's a bit of a surprise that the film versions have only been mediocre, but I suspect perhaps that's because people underestimate the subtlety of a good graphic novel. They may have pictures, but they still require you to have an imagination, whereas cinema doesn't.

A genuine new sub-genre was Steampunk. It's difficult to say when this began, but the novel that brought it to my attention was The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. A menagerie of weird and wacky ideas including sinister stilt walking clowns and an attempt to catch a body-swapping werewolf by opening a hair removal clinic. It really has to be read to be experienced.

Then there was Cyberpunk. I suppose an unbiased list would give this decades award to the book that begins "The sky was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel." Not really my genre but still, great book. And those of us who've grown up with the Information Revolution sometimes forget how new ideas like this are. When I were a lad sci-fi computers were, at best, avatars of HAL from 2001. The one in the original Star Trek seems little better than a Sinclair Spectrum. Arthur C Clarke may have said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but it took William Gibson to show us how close we were to that point. This may not have been the first cyberpunk novel, that may have been Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad, serialised in New Worlds in 1969, but it in the book that popularised the genre.

Another novelty was in Bob Shaw's The Ragged Astronauts , about a binary planet with shared atmosphere, hence interplanetary travel could be accomplished in a balloon.

Rather more complex was Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer. Set in a future where the galaxy has been colonised but the earth has slipped back into medieval barbarism, the titular hero is a Journeyman of the Guild of the Seeker After Truth And Penitence. The layers of deception laid down by the author are Byzantine in their complexity and nobody is as they seem.

Another almost winner is a novel in an unlikely location for a science fiction story; a wood in Kent. This is Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock,a place that is it not only bigger on the inside than the outside, but also a place where myths take physical form.

I read the book whilst living in the woods of Newbury during a record cold winter, which probably increased its effect on me a touch, but it is a magnificent and thoughtful book. Alas I have to admit that although you could make an attempt at explaining all this by means of Relativity and Jungian archetypes, I have to ultimately classify Mythago Wood as fantasy and not sci-fi.

Gosh that's a lot of worthy winners, and I haven't had time to mention Carl Sagan's Contact, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaiden's Tale, Greg Bear's Eon, Frank Herbert's Dune and many others.

Instead I'll skip straight to the winner; Consider Phlegas by Iain M Banks, the first of his Culture novels.

It is difficult to describe how much I love these books. Firstly here is top notch space opera, lasers, battles, robots, The Works. Secondly we also have something that has largely disappeared from the silver screen - an optimistic, liberal future.

Banks's Culture is a strange beast. It is not only Post-Scarcity, it's also post-human. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat has been ditched in place of the Dictatorship of the Artificial Mind. It clearly works, because Banks says it does, but does beg some interesting questions. Do the controlling Minds really have the best interests of human being at heart?

And what do those humans (and not quite humans) actually do? Banks describes their spaceships in details. Communist from the inside and Anarchist from the outside, they skip merrily about his stories. However as we only ever get to hear about how the Culture interacts with other civilisations we don't learn alot about the daily lives of its less adventurous denizens. Oodles of sex and drugs are clearly on the menu, but its not clear how they avoid the pointless debauchery of Brave New World.

But most of these questions are for the future for in Consider Phlegas we are catapulted into the middle of the best space war since Bob Heinlein passed on as the Culture takes on the Idirans, a bunch of space faring warriors who make the Klingons look like a bunch of boy scouts.

We have not yet seen a film version of any of these books, which is probably fortunate, but thanks to his non-sci-fi output Banks has at least received the critical acclaim he deserves, and which previous writers have been denied. As a book of the decade Consider Phelgas could well mark the high point of the genre.

Winner: Consider Phlegas by Iain M Banks (1987)

Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Seventies

In the sixties the sci-fi novel had managed the quantum leap to serious literary style, but still nobody took them seriously. Still it was a strong decade for the genre.

In 1970 Larry Niven gave us Ringworld, an artificial habitat the size of three million earths. Unfortunately it's an idea bigger than his imagination and instead of a thriving civilisation of several trillion people we land in an almost abandoned desert, which is a bit of a disappointment.

Another big concept novel is Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke, a welcome return to top form by the British master. Once again though the idea is bigger than novel and once it's all over we are not much wiser about Rama or its designers.

One writer who could take the Big Concept and run with it though was Philip José Farmer, who in 1971 gave us To You Scattered Bodies Go, the first of his Riverworld series. Here we had everyone who had ever lived brought back to life and youth for some unknown reason on a specially made planet whose surface is a 20 million mile long version of the Mississippi.

Eventually pretty much everyone would turn up in Riverworld, from Herman Goering to Jesus. Framer himself even has a cameo under pseudonym. The series would run to five books and an anthology of short stories and although such high concept stuff often disappoints in the final real, Farmer does a pretty good job of bringing it to a conclusion. Basically the Buddhists were right.

Meanwhile back in Blighty John Brunner had two more classics left in him. Sheep Look Up gives us a vision of environmental apocalypse with corrupt corporations, a compliant legal system and a President chosen because the "public obviously wanted a figurehead who'd look good and make comforting noises."

Then he wrote Shockwave Rider, which looked at the social effects of technology. A natural disaster reveals the truth, quickly suppressed by the authorities, that people are actually happier with less gadgets. The hero then sets out to destroy the corrupt system by means of a computer program that reproduces itself - the first computer virus in sci-fi. I'd dearly love to give Brunner an award, but I will once again have to pass him over.

Another writer from the sixties still knocking them out was Philip K Dick, and this decade he produced A Scanner Darkly and Flow My Tears The Policeman Said. The latter is set in a future police state in which a television star wakes up an finds he no longer exists. Boy, aren't there a few people I'd like that to happen to in real life.

Another author I feel guilty about not manging to give a winners medal to is Ursula Le Guin. Having started strongly in the sixties, in the seventies she gave us The World for World is Forest, which is Avatar for grown ups. She also wrote The Lathe of Heaven , a moral tale about being careful what you wish for, and Eye of the Heron, a feminist view of both men who oppress by violence and those who choose to get themselves beaten up by opposing them.

Best of all she wrote The Dispossessed, a political novel that compares a planet split between capitalism, with the anarchists who live on its moon. It's clear where the author affections lie, but fair play to her she gives her opponents a fair hearing and her capitalists are environmentally friendly whilst the authoritarians do seem to actually be trying to be a Dictatorship of the Proletarian. However its the anarchists who are the interesting ones. Two hundred years into their experiment centripetal forces are threatening to create hierarchies and everyone is still dirt poor.


But my winner is neither a grim prediction of the future or a meditation on political realities, but something completely differnet. Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is really a radio show, but it turns into a decent book (or decent pair of books really as it makes very little sense without The Restaurent at the End of the Universe.

I started my review of the decade by discussing authors who went for the Big Concept, and you don't get many bigger questions than the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. You also don't get many better answers than 42.

Winner: The Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams(1979)

Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Sixties

Now its getting really hard. Heinlein, Clark and Asimov were still busy, the former writing his best stuff. But there were new kids on the block, and a very new style of writing.

At the heart of this revolution was a British magazine called New World's, especially after Michael Moorcock took over editorship in 1964. It never made any money, and was funded by the success of the Elric books (and apparently by the regular sale of dirty jokes to Playboy magazine written by Christopher Priest), but it helped launch a whole galaxy of sci-fi greats; J G Ballard, Brian Aldis, Harlan Ellison, George R R Martin, Norman Spinrad, John Brunner and Philip Jose Farmer. However when it comes to the best book of the decade I'm torn between three Yanks and a Brit.

Firstly there's Kurt Vonnegut, maybe not Slaughterhouse 5, but the rather better Cat's Cradle. Having survived the fire bombing of Dresden whilst a POW and then been sent to search for survivors using candles made from victims of the death camps, Vonnegut has a certain view on life. However he leavens his grim stories with ironic humour. He also introduced us to the world's best science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout, but unfortunately he's fictional so can't win.

Then there's Ursula Le Guin. Best know for Earthsea, her science fiction books are at least as good. Her debut novel, Rocannon's World, gave us Lord of the Rings in space, and The Left Hand of Darkness, and everyday tale of life on a planet of gender-shifting humans in which the king gets pregnant.

The final American is Philip K Dick. Drug addled and by the end of his life arguably clinically insane, his books resemble the decade as a whole: brilliant and revolutionary, confusing and conservative all at the same time. Unlike some of the space operas and nuts-and-bolts sci-fi stories his tales of warped realities and fractured identities have aged well and are as unsettling and believable today as when they were written. His stand out stories of the decade include Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book that became Blade Runner, and The Man in the High Castle, an outstanding alternative history (or is it an alternative reality?) story.

The token Brit is the scandalously underrated John Brunner. He wrote a lot of mediocre storied for money, but he also wrote four absolute classics and in the sixties these were Jagged Orbitt and Stand on Zanzibar . The first gave us a twenty-first century America where arms manufacturers and racial tensions had stoked an arms race in personal weaponry, whilst the second gave a grim vision of the world in the year 2010. This is a planet straining under the weight of 7 billion people, a place characterised by random spree killings, anti-technological eco-terrorists, an obsession with cosmetic beauty treatments and powerful corporations.

Picking a winning out of these is going to be tough.

Whilst I was planning this blog I was sure Stand on Zanzibar would be the winner. If sci-fi is about predicting the future then the winner has to be Brunner.

However he is typical of the decade only in so far as he represents that strand of the New Left who still clung on to rationality whilst everyone else went to discover themselves by meditating in an Ashram in California.

But if sci-fi really reflects contemporary themes then it's got to be Philip K Dick. Picking his best book is difficult, but my personal favourite is The Man in the High Castle. Alternative history, life in fascist state, five overlapping sub-plots, a book-within-the-book and a meditation on the nature of reality, Philip K Dick shows us why this was the decade that the sci-fi book grew up and became serious literature.

It was also massively ahead of it time. Psychedelia, opposition to the Vietnam War and the whole counter-culture thing were years in the future in 1962. So Dick isn't just a product of his time, he is, as much as Jack Kerouac and the Beatniks, a foretaste of the wackiness and rebellion that was to come. And it was to be quite a trip.

Winner: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick (1962)

Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Fifties

Now it's getting hard.

The fifties was when sci-fi really took off. The age of the Atom Bomb and the Space Race people were split into believing we were on the verge of curing all the world's ills, or else that we would blow ourselves to oblivion. In the end we did neither, but we did write a lot of good books.

This was the decade that defined sci-fi, and for me four authors stand out.

Firstly there was Bob Heinlein, an all American right wing individualist nut job, but a first rate writer. Starship Troopers is scarily fascistic, but pretty much gave us the well known Star Trek future of minimal states with massive navies as well as Avatar-style power armour.


Then there was Ray Bradbury, who this decade wrote The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury though was more of a stylist than an ideas man, so he only gets the bronze medal.

So this leaves the two giants of the fifties to battle it out: Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. It's a tough choice, in no small part because both have written an awful lot of guff over the years.


Asimov gave us the big picture, the fall and rise of space empires in the Foundation Trilogy , time travel in The End of Eternity, space opera whodunnits in The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun and robots by the bucket load.

Clarke, the man who invented the communications satellite, eventually became the master of the 'nuts and bolts' style of realistic near-future stories. However in the 50s he was writing about broader topics and his great books of this decade are The City and the Stars, Childhood's End and the short story The Sentinel - which eventually turned into 2001 A Space Odyssey.



It's a close call, and I'm tempted to give the award to Asimov's Foundation for the breadth of its vision. However the sheer 1950ishness of a space empire with atomic powered spaceships and a filing system based on microfilm lets it down and, to be honest, it's not that well written.

So maybe it's just patriotism, but I'm going to give the award to the Englishman for Childhood's End. Clarke may not have predicted the future of space travel, but he did predict the future of sci-fi as he gave us giant alien spaceships hovering over our cities and the world's children being rounded up to give to the aliens fifty years before District 9 and Torchwood: Children of Earth.

Winner: : Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke (1953)

Seven Decades of Science Fiction Books: The Fourties

Funnily enough there weren't all that many great sci-fi books written in the 1940s.

Partly his was because H G Wells died in 1946, a year after the war he predicted had been brought to an end in a flash of heat rather similar to a Martian death ray.

The winner then is rather obvious. It is of course George Orwell's 1948 taster of what life might be like during the Cold War - Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A sombre book made even darker by the fact that Orwell died just after finishing it. It appears to be his last will testament, a pessimistic look back at his life's futile struggle against totalitarianisms from Barcelona to the Blitz.

But of course he didn't mean to die when he did. "Don't let it happen" was his motto, and he certainly didn't want anyone who read his book to give up and let Big Brother take over.

Optimists have even seen hope in the essay on Newspeak at the back of the book. It's written in the past tense, so does that mean it was written after the time of Big Brother?

Neither was he sure that English Socialism would mutate into IngSoc. His near contemporary essay The Lion and the Unicorn sets out a curious vision of a post-war England after the Revolution in which the judges still wear wigs and the pubs still serve warm beer.

Compared to Huxley's globalised world of trivial hedonism and slick advertising, the world of Big Brother seems rather old fashioned. Doublespeak is mere crude propaganda compared to the delights of the Feelies. But

Orwell still packs his punch.

Maybe the future of 1984 came crashing down with the Berlin Wall, but maybe not.

We are still Airstrip One, 'Compassionate Conservatism' and 'Blue Labour' show Doublespeak is alive and well but today called Triangultion. Rupert Murdoch does a good line in Prolefeed and despite the Credit Crunch the Ministry of Plenty is still trying to convince us we've never had it so good. Perhaps today we call the Ministry of Truth Fox News, Room 101 Guantanamo Bay, and as for English Socialism? Well, it has clearly been to see O'Brien and now thinks two plus two equals five.

Winner: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1948)