The French say that everyone has two countries–their own and France. Some of us are even luckier. I have three countries and my lifestyle has involved living in all three. I was born in Australia, I live most of the time in Britain and in 1960 I discovered India.
It was a good time to do so. Bombay, where I landed from the old British India ship, the Dumra, was still a sleepy city where you had to beg the taxi-drivers to go a little faster. The Raj had not quite gone. There were still a few British banks pretending nothing had changed, with the occasional English remittance man queuing to collect his monthly cheque. A posse of English jockeys came down for the racing season, the Bombay Gymkhana still played Rugby, and if you were an Indian it was not easy to get into Breach Candy swimming pool.
Using Bombay as a base I explored the rest of India but found nowhere else if would rather live. Then in 1962 the Indian Army liberated Goa and as soon as the shipping service from Bombay to Panaji opened I was on the first ferry.
The Great War for Civilisation:
The Conquest of the Middle East
by Robert Fisk
(Fourth Estate, £25)
This brilliant but enormous book (no less than 1,366 pages) has been sixteen years in the making. Its obvious ingredients are 328,000 notes, documents and dispatches and Robert Fisk’s thirty years’ experience of reporting the Middle East. But there is also a hidden element - the author’s ethical, philosophical and moral approach to his life’s work.
Fisk believes that most journalists who have reported from the tragedy-strewn and bloody countries of the Middle East have failed their readers and viewers. He has decided that they have been competent - even outstanding - in giving the who, how, where, what and when of events but have left out the “why”. He says that every journalist in the Middle East needs to walk around with a history book in his back pocket to remind him or her why we got to where we are; why the injustices and horrors of yesteryear are engraved in the people’s minds and why they have a powerful influence on what happens next.
After watching the England v India one day cricket match at Lords last summer, I had a drink with Peter O’Toole and then walked with him to his car. Outside Lords Tavern we passed a large group of young Indians having a few beers to celebrate their team’s victory. The moment they spotted O’Toole they broke into a chant of “Lawrence. . . Lawrence . . Lawrence.” Thinking about it later I realised how extraordinary this was. It was not O’Toole’s presence as an actor that excited them but the image of Lawrence of Arabia, a man who had lived and died before they were even born.
So 70 years after his death–an anniversary marked by a exhibition in his honour at the Imperial War Museum and the publication of a lavish new book packed with illustrations, some of them not seen before–Lawrence of Arabia rides again, exercising his fascination for yet another generation in an age where heroes are noticeably scarce.
It is four years since President Bush declared a global war on terror so it is fair to ask: how is it going? Well, the first point to make is that it is not a war on terror anymore. One of Washington’s sneakier tactics is that if a crucial policy begins to lose public support, you don’t change the policy, you just change its name and carry on. So it is no longer the war on terror. It is the “global struggle against violent extremists”.
But whatever it is now called, the answer to how it is going is: very badly. Not only is there no end in sight, but the al-Qaeda, leader Osama bin Laden, the man Bush vowed to get “dead or alive” is, despite a $25 million bounty on his head, as elusive as ever. Bush’s reaction to this inconvenient fact is to stop mentioning the man’s name, perhaps in the hope that we will eventually forget about him.
It does not matter whether England or Australia triumphs in the fifth Test which begins at the Oval tomorrow–the significance of this clash of two cricketing titans has already been established. England is again a power in the game and Australia is the struggling underdog. I see this this an early sign that England and Australia are trading places, not just in sport but in other walks of life as well.
England has been regarded as a class-ridden, arrogant, unreliable, condescending nation, in mourning for its lost greatness. Its sporting efforts have invariably ended in disappointment. Australia was the young, forward-looking, egalitarian country and its many sporting triumphs a symbol of its confidence.
Suddenly it is the other way round. Australia has become a harsher, less friendly and open nation, uncertain of where it is heading or where its best interests lie. It has tied itself politically and militarily to the United States, but its economic future lies with China, Japan and South-East Asia. Its politicians vacilate and its people are divided.I England is now seen as sure of itself, a vibrant, dynamic place, on the cusp of all the exciting things that happen in the world.
A couple of years ago at Britain’s premier literary festival, Hay-on-Wye, two star performers dominated the programme: ex-President Bill Clinton and journalist/author/commentator Christopher Hitchens. Clinton arrived in his Secret Service car, attended a few parties, hit a few golf balls, made a politically-stirring speech and departed to a boo or two for keeping a crowd of well-wishes waiting.
Hitchens arrived jet-lagged after a seven-hour plane trip from America and four-hour car journey from London, dishevelled and clearly under the spell of an indeterminate number of whiskies. To the barely-concealed alarm of the festival organisers, he went to the performers’ hospitality room and ordered more. It was going to be a long-night.
All of These People
A memoir by Fergal Keane
HarperCollins £18.99
395pp
Hooked on bullets and booze
This is a book about two Fergal Keanes. The first part tells in lyrical terms of his boyhood in an Ireland that has since disappeared. His father Eamonn was an actor whose talent was sabotaged by a lifelong love of drink that ruined his marriage and alienated him for many years from his son.
In fact, drink runs like a leitmotif through the book. In Keane’s early days in journalism, one gets the impression that there was hardly a reporter on the Irish papers who was sober long enough to write a story. Practical jokes were common, the victims usually junior journalists. One was sent to a council meeting to deliver to the city manager an important letter about the approaching St Patrick’s Day celebrations. The manager interrupted a speech, heaved with laughter and passed the letter back to the reporter. It read, “My name is John Breen and I want my arse painted green for St Patrick’s Day.”
Even at that early stage, Keane was dreaming of the day he would be a foreign correspondent, preferably in Africa, an area for which he had developed a passionate interest. He discovered his talent for reporting conflict in the 1984 marching season, when the police were trying to prevent Orangemen from marching through flashpoint areas in Co Armagh: “Surrounded by violence and chaos, I was focused and calm, observing and recording the battle”.
The second Fergal Keane now comes on stage. He made it to Africa, which he loved, and began covering for BBC radio the violence in South Africa between the ANC and Inkatha. Soon, he was as hooked on the addiction of conflict reporting as on the alcohol that addicted his father. Keane writes: “I felt afraid so much of the time and yet I felt at home in this craziness. I was more alive than at any time in my life.”
He was a member of what he and colleagues called the Bang Bang Club: a group of hardened war correspondents who did their best to pretend that what they watched, photographed and reported did not affect their psychological well-being. But some became emotionally crippled and at least one committed suicide.
Keane was himself by now fighting a battle against alcohol, but unable to break from the job: “I am on the front line, risking it all, our own correspondent calling out his news down a crackly line”. He reported the genocide in Rwanda and, with other correspondents, remains disturbed by it to this day. How were they able to leave threatened people behind to be slaughtered? He survived his alcohol problem but was still addicted to war. “We knew that when that war ended there would be a lull, then there would be another drama and the same media faces would turn up,” relieved by a new sense of purpose. “Alive again, yes, that’s the word, alive”.
But after Kosovo and Iraq, the death toll for war correspondents soared. It became safer to be a soldier than a reporter. Keane now had a son and “when the call came to return to Iraq, I told my editor I would not go”. When he now sees a colleague in a flak jacket, he feels “a momentary pang. It is a loss of a kind, I know that. But… I cherish the life I have.” This is a completely honest account of reporting conflict by a journalist who got out in time. He is one of the lucky ones.
Phillip Knightley’s updated history of war reporting, ‘The First Casualty‘, is published by Carlton.
The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth-Maker is recognised as the definitive book on war reporting and war propaganda.
From William Howard Russell who blew the whistle on the appalling conditions of the British forces in the Crimea, to the correspondents who lifted the lid on the reality of the Vietnam War, through to the modern day, it is a story of heroism and manipulation, censorship and espionage.
The lengths to which governments lie to fool the citizens of the enemy and, even more so, fool their own, has not diminished with the years, it is argued - it has grown.
Chosen as American Book of the Month Club main choice 1975, and Winner of the 1976 Overseas Press Club of America Award for the Best Book on Foreign Affairs, the book has been continually revised over the years as new wars occur. An updated paperback edition of the book is now available that includes the US-led war in Iraq.
Disturbing, even dismaying, yet also in its painful way, enormously entertaining - New Yorker
[This book] may make us all a little more free to talk about and find the truth.
- Garry Wills, New York Times Book Review
In war, truth may be the first casualty, but in Phillip Knightley’s compelling examination of the war correspondent as journalist-mouthpiece-propagandist, the truth survives unscathed. Myths are exploded, scoundrels unmasked, the best and worst of the history of a century plainly revealed.
- Morley Safer
Few books have deserved an updated edition more than Phillip Knightley’s history of war reporting since the 1850s . . . Invaluable for anyone with an interest in the media, it is equally recommended as a modern history of government lies.
- Times Literary Supplement
Published in The Independent on Sunday, 8 August 2004
For a nation on a heightened state of alert, we’re remarkably calm. Should we be?
There are no tanks at Heathrow - yet. There is no ring of troops around London’s financial district - yet. But Britain is on a “heightened” state of alert as police at Paddington Green station continue to question terrorist suspects arrested at gunpoint in raids across the country earlier in the week.
Across the Atlantic, the Americans are on “orange” (the second highest) alert as the Homeland Security chief, Tom Ridge, said new intelligence suggested that al Qaeda planned car or truck bomb attacks on the Citicorp building, the New York Stock Exchange, and the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank buildings in Washington. American banks in London could also be targets.
Published in The Independent on Sunday, 25 July 2004
Paul Foot was one of its finest exponents. But, says Phillip Knightley, it is a craft in decline
Paul Foot’s death last week is an even greater tragedy than realised: it marked the end of investigative reporting in Britain as we have known it. Foot’s working life spanned what can now be seen as a golden age for investigative and campaigning journalism, before greedy proprietors and their cost-cutting accountants killed it off.
Paul Foot’s death last week is an even greater tragedy than realised: it marked the end of investigative reporting in Britain as we have known it. Foot’s working life spanned what can now be seen as a golden age for investigative and campaigning journalism, before greedy proprietors and their cost-cutting accountants killed it off.
