From August 1938 to the start of 1939, Irish Poet Louis MacNeice kept a poetic journal, as if all to aware that the hand of ‘history’ was exerting itself, moreso than say five years previously. The resulting work Autumn Journal is a profoundly moving poem, that highlights hopes and fears in a time of looming war. In his introduction he explained that “in a journal or a personal letter a man writes what he feels at the ‘moment’. to attempt scientific truthfulness would be – paradoxically – dishonest”.
Jonathan Schell, in his collection of columns published in book form under the title A Hole in the World, has tended to the same territory as MacNeice, though obviously without the poetry. His book is a fascinating record of emotions and arguments that have been current, from the immediate aftermath of September 11th, through to March 2004. History it ain’t, but authentic and gripping it is. Like MacNeice, Schell has bravely decided to let his mistakes and mis perceptions stand, being as they are a representation of a mood in American thought. As such it’s a telling account of how we’ve gone from the shell shocked days post 9/11, where sympathy for the United States seemed to be the prevalent mood, to the carnage of Iraq.
Days after 9/11, Schell started his Letter from Ground Zero column in the liberal minded magazine The Nation. In his introduction, Schell has said “What now interests me as much as the things that happened are the the things that faded away – the sprouts that never grew, the doors that wouldn’t open, the baselsess hopes, the unwarranted alarms”. It makes for interesting reading, particularly on the European side of the fence, where it becomes quickly obvious that there isn’t necessarily a shared view point between liberals worldwide, or conservatives for that matter. To put it simply, many Americans, be they liberal or conservative, have seen the world from a different perspective to that of, for example, Europeans.
In his first entry, written on the 1st of October, almost as quickly as the Bush administration were turning towards Iraq, Schell was also turning to the theme of weapons of mass destruction, though with his eye more on his own nation rather than the Middle East: “It’s already clear, however, that one aspect of the catastrophe is of supreme importance for the future: the danger of the use of weapons of mass destruction, and especially the use of nuclear weapons. This danger includes their use by a terrorist group but is by no means restricted to it”. It’s interesting to see, in retrospect, how quickly both liberal and conservative alike sought to place the attacks in a more familiar paradigm, that of the cold war and the debate about the efficacy of nuclear stockpiles. The fact that the September 11th attacks were surprisingly simple but deadly in their outcome, needing no James Bond style ‘madman steals cruise missile’ plot, is alluded to, but in the background. In our technologically obsessed society the immediate thought was “if they can do this with knives and a jumbo jet, think what they could do if they had some real weapons”. That’s not to say that the terrorist plus nuclear threat doesn?t exist.
Schell continuously argues, convincingly, that nuclear deterrence inevitably goes hand in hand with nuclear proliferation, and in this it seems, so far, that his fears have been borne out, as we hear rumblings of Iran’s weapons programme. The argument being that in the age of the Bush doctrine, if you don’t have nuclear weapons you’re a sitting duck for a ‘regime change’ invasion. The war on terror, as being waged in Iraq, perversely means that any State that finds itself in ideological opposition to the US, must, as a priority, find themselves some weapons grade plutonium pronto.
In one of the forgotten mysteries of the immediate post 9/11 world, there are interesting entries about the anthrax scares. On November 6th Schell wrote, “The weapon of mass destruction that has actually been used, of course, has been ‘weaponized’ anthrax – delivered, however, only in miniscule amounts. The world awaits the terrorists’ decision whether to follow up these retail murders with mass murder”. Afterwards, there’s no mention – instead it’s straight back to the spectre of nuclear annihilation.
One of the problems of a book like this is that it is by its nature polemical, and repetitive. That works for a weekly column, re-inforcing positions and re-contextualising them, but for a collection like this it can all too quickly become the exercising of, to quote Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, “hobby horses”, which borders on being both earnest and boring. It seems a petty quibble though, considering the subject matter, and the fact that Schell is eloquent enough, for the most part, to avoid straight repitition. On top of that, it’s a weakness that Schell owns up to himself, “but then I realize that these things are by now obvious, and to state what is obvious is boring. I want to say them not because they are fresh and interesting, but because they are not heeded. But if to state the obvious is boring, then to repeat it is the very definition of boredom”.
As I write [November 2004], perhaps the most gripping entries relate to the choosing of the Democratic nominee for the Presidential race of 2004. John Kerry is remarkably absent throughout most of the entries, being overshadowed by the author’s obvious enthusiasm for both Denis Kucinich and Howard Dean. In his September 1st 2003 column, entitled How to Win, discussing the Democrats’ options, he doesn’t even mention the Senator from Massachussets. Presciently he said that “it’s one thing for Bush to fail, another for the Democrats to succeed”. In his last entry of the book, in March 2004, he argued that Kerry needed to put his ‘electability’ at risk by admitting that he had made a mistake by voting for Bush’s war in Iraq. “Someone who is ducking responsibility for his own actions is hardly in a strong position to call someone else to account”.
It seems so obvious now…
A Hole in the World by Jonathan Schell is published by Nation Books, New York.