Strange Places, Questionable People

By AM Friday, April 5, 2013

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Often the size of an MP’s ego seemed to be in inverse proportion to his or her quality as a human being - John Simpson.

What is particularly useful about a journalistic memoir is its ability to take the reader to the scene of many of the main news events that have long since faded in our memories. A quick guide of the world’s trouble spots, they are a handy refresher for all the stuff our cluttered minds have accumulated over the life lived thus far and then involuntarily discarded, due to lack of mental space. There may be some shallowness to the accounts, resulting from quick gliding rather than slow methodical excavation. The ‘first draft of history’ is often the end product of alacrity in dialogue with that lack of understanding presumed to exist within the target audience. Yet, even in the bullet point format that they ooze, the better written memoirs convey something of the ambience of the time in which the journalist was reporting.

Strange Places, Questionable Places by John Simpson is a snapshot of the then world’s most violent hot spots. 1989, he regarded as the most single important year in the second half of the 20th Century and he was at all the major newsworthy site, ‘the only reporter in the entire world, I believe, who was.’

Before setting out on his voyage Simpson has something to say about the culture of the BBC which he joined when he was 22 having completed a Cambridge education. The corporation was something he had a love-hate relationship with. Throughout his career his bonding instinct remained with the reporters rather than the editors whom he viewed for the most part as soccer pitch crabs who play a square ball, lacking as they are in the forward adventurous of the reporter.  The real meat of the book lies elsewhere.

The reader gets a sense of the dictatorial instincts of Thatcher from this book. Growing more imperious by the year, particularly in the wake of her Falkland victory, she conceived herself as the state every bit as much as Louis XIV had. And for all her aggression against the murderous Argentine dictatorship in 1982, only two years earlier her trade secretary, Cecil Parkinson, had visited Buenos Aires and while there proclaimed both Argentina and Britain as allies in the same battle. He understood only too well that while he was referring to inflation the military dictatorship ‘would interpret his words as meaning that Britain supported the junta’s crusade against communism.’  And again, as has so often been the case since the election of an Argentine cardinal to the office of pope, this book conveys the horror of the Dirty War where women could be arrested simply because military men found them attractive and could rape them before torturing and murdering them, perhaps even blessed by the Catholic priest, Father Christian von Wernich, in the course of doing so. Without success Simpson tried to hunt down the ‘blonde angel of death’ Alfredo Astiz, the public face of the Dirty War, the killer of French nuns, now serving life in an Argentine jail, where he is probably safer having been physically assaulted so many times in public by angry victims.

Simpson’s problem with political leaders was not restricted to the Tory variety alone. He was once punched by Harold Wilson during his tenure of Number 10 Downing Street. He had a contempt for the Labour boss and pointedly reminds his reader that LBJ once said the reason Wilson backed the US in its Vietnam War policy was because ‘I’ve got his pecker in my pocket.’ It seems Bush had the pecker of Blair in his pocket too.

In a chapter headed A Different World Simpson writes about the state of Israel ‘supported instinctively by most European socialists.’ That was a long time ago. Much of the change in instinct  has to do with the Israelis, who with glaring insensitivity to irony, have managed to invite comment on their having emulated some of the barbarism of the Nazis. Simpson goes to this directly when citing from a conversation he had with an Israeli Colonel. The military man, appalled at what the government of Israel was implementing, candidly stated: ‘we are like Nazis here. Sharon is a war criminal and we are helping him do his dirty work. It’s genocide. All of us are guilty.’ He also met a captain who was desperately trying to save Palestinians while imploring Simpson and the BBC to tell the world about the atrocity that was Sabra and Chatilla.

The great genocide of our time, Rwanda, he believed was an abomination ignored because so much media attention was focused on the Balkans as a result of the ‘herd activity’ of journalists too eager to see the conflict there through the filter of the Holocaust, oblivious to the fact that the Serbs had nowhere near the organisational capacity of the German war machine to put a final solution in place.

The murder in custody of Steve Biko by police ‘thugs’, some of whom ‘had the ugliness of Hieronymus Bosch torturers’ angered Simpson so much that he organised a group of press photographers to snap them in court, puncturing their arrogance and humiliating them, making it clear to them that could in some way be brought to account. Never much of that on display when the PSNI was called the RUC.

Which brings him to our own conflict in Ireland. He heavily contrasted the attitude of the Dublin government to the British in the wake of serious bombing incidents. Dublin beat nobody up or jailed the innocent to appease the public mood whereas London did just the opposite.

His chapter titled ‘Dissidents’ is an interesting reminder of how the inflexion given to language rather than the language itself is what matters for purpose of positioning. Dissident when applied to oppositional currents in the Soviet Union was a terms of respect, if not endearment. In the North of Ireland today dissident, phonetically hissed out to sound like ‘deviant’, is a label used to smear, showing just how ineffective the republican PR machine has been in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement. 

He approvingly cited Anwar Sadat’s view of Gadaffi as ‘that madman from Libya.’ In the North African country, in the arrivals lounge of an airport, he found the notice ‘committees everywhere.’ That would be enough to make the average Joe turn around and make for the first exist sign to ensure a place on the first available flight out. 'Death by committee' - the last words of many a great idea: something that is literally true in the case of six republican hunger strikers in 1981.
    
It was instructive to read of an MI5 operative using the term ‘agent of influence,’ a concept that almost certainly did much to secure the defeat of the IRA and bring it to the farcical embrace of everything it fought against. Today we are able to witness those who best fit the job description so easily alarmed when they see the term in print.

Simpson's sojourn in Ireland led him to conclude that ‘a British government was behaving like a Latin American dictatorship’. He would later come to learn enough about a Latin American dictatorship through his delving into the phenomenon of the disappeared of Argentina. But any notion he might have harboured that the IRA was a romantic entity evaporated one March evening in 1971 when the organization killed three unarmed Scottish soldiers its members had earlier been drinking with. In mildly irritating fashion to the informed reader he refers to an IRA funeral in Glasnevin Cemetery in Belfast rather than Milltown while wrongly dating the truce talks in London attended by Dave O’Conaill and other leaders of the IRA. More puzzlingly he traced the descent of O’Conaill within the Provisionals to an alleged 1971 affair with Maria McGuire. But it was the joint arms buying trip by O’Conaill and McGuire to Amsterdam that really thrust O’Conaill into the public eye where he would remain for number of years.

Simpson preferred the Southern leaders within the Provisionals to Northerners like Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams whom he came to fear, both having ‘gave orders which resulted in murder and torture.’  He suggests that Ruairi O’Bradaigh never seemed to value killing for its own sake and therefore expresses a degree of surprise when O’Bradaigh rather than his northern colleagues emerged as the die hard. He seemed impressed by O’Conaill whom he found much less sectarian than the Provisional IRA’s first chief of staff, Sean MacStiofain; his disdain evident in his accusation that MacStiofain had drunk his shower water while on hunger and thirst strike in 1972.

Simpson recently wrote that if ever the moment arose he would end his own life if the choice was to allow his son, currently six, to see him as a gibbering wreck. I could be glib and praise him for his decision to commit suicide before becoming a politician, but as the point was seriously made I will compliment him instead for what he had to say on the matter. Yet given his clear disdain for Martin Bell who made the voyage from journalist to politician – generally a trip from Accuracy Central to Terminus Fudge – it was hard to suppress the thought that Simpson may have considered suicide a better option than the slow moral death by denial.

John Simpson, Strange Places, Questionable People. 1996. London: Macmillan, IBSN 0 333 72420 8