Responding to Don Giovanni

Don Giovanni is a tragic person, his concluding condemnation and death a tragic outcome? I think so. After all, a tragic person is one who comes to a bad end because of some flaw in the person's character. The person, Don Giovanni in this instance, is unable to turn aside from the path to personal destruction, positive traits notwithstanding. Don Giovanni is fluent with words. He sings. He does so to lovely music. But he is mercurial, changing quickly from amiability to anger. He is arbitrary, he is tyrannical, he is insensitive (or just uncaring) to the consequences of his actions.

He suffers from an addiction, an addition to copulation. Whilst we remember him for his quick thinking, his music, his command, we leave the theatre remembering his total commitment to the seduction of women, any women. It is that addition which brings him down. He kills an old man, he tyrannises his servant, he casts aside those whom he has seduced. In the end, the combination of forces, including extra-terrestial ones, require him to repent or to be consumed by the flames.

Now as he has his last meal and is assailed by his enemies, he has to choose. And so do we. We have to choose between a regret that he refuse to repent and a sympathy for his resistance. Hurrah for the last-ditcher. And what of Don Giovanni himself. To what extent is a his choice a calm, considered one; to what extent is he driven to hell because of a realisation that a life of repentence will be a life without consummation and thus a life which will not be worth living. Hell on earh or life in a hell in the company of women who have fallen and who will thus be available to a satyr.



Think too about the scale of his predations. In Spain, 'one thousand and three', in Italy 640, in Germany 230, and in France and Turkey 290 - a total of of over 2100. Now of course we don't know how long he's been rapacious, afflicted. And we an remember that, in the castle amongst the wedding party, he alerts Leparello to the possibility, perhaps the likelihood, of ten - ten - additions to his list.

But there little in the way of self-awareness. The tragic hero realises the personal weakness and the conclusion to which it will lead. Don Giovanni exhibits no such awareness. His indifference to the feelings of others, be they women, servants, or old men, is total. Cursed by an addiction and by the means, material as well as physical, to feed the addiction, he follows the path to perdition. The direction, the invitation to repent, uttered in however sonorous a voice, must be meaningless. Such an addiction calls for expurgation by fire.

What are we doing in Afghanistan?

Thinking about the Taliban

Whoever they are or whatever they represent, I know little about . Of course, I hear or read about the entity more-or-less every day; yet the way the term is used, on one of the BBC’s news pages today, for instance, assumes that I know about ‘the Taliban’ or at least know sufficient about them (or it) to make sense of the rest of the article.

Let me set out what I do recall. At one time, the Taliban (whoever they were or are) were the good guys. They were the white hats whilst the Russian invaders were the black hats. If I recall correctly, the white hats won the war (with assistance, I seem to remember) from external sources, captured Kabul, and formed a government.

From then on, things went awry. The Taliban government governed in a way which turned them into black hats. NATO military forces expelled the Taliban government from Kabul. A different government is now in place there as the result of an election.

I can see the holes in the story, but that the story as I recall it. Not for the first time, foreign affairs, even when they include the deployment of British forces, take up less of the memory than domestic affairs.

I ought to know more about these Taliban forces; I ought to know more about the purposes of the war which is being fought between those forces and the British and other NATO ones. There are well-nigh daily accounts of engagements between the two forces.

I want to know something about the known or assumed purposes of these Taliban forces. I also want to know the composition of these forces. Suppose that the bulk of the Taliban forces are Afghans (that is, people who were born or lived in Afghanistan) then the NATO forces are taking one side in an intra-national dispute. If the Taliban forces draw their soldiers from tribes which inhabit the territories close to the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, then the dispute may be an international one.

War, as ever, is diplomacy which is conducted by other means. Wars are fought because one side seeks a settlement which, it is believed, will not be available by non-warlike means. So what are the NAT)O (British) political purposes, the achievement of which is to be accomplished by war.

It seems to me to be too easy, much too easy, to answer with the one word ‘Terrorism’. There may indeed be connexions between the Taliban forces (whoever they are) and the purposes of international organisations who seek to achieve these purposes by large-scale criminal destruction. However, if there are connexions, they must be exposed. Assertion alone is not enough.

A peace may be a Carthagenian one or it may be a negotiated one. Which settlement is NATO (and the UK) seeking?

Fidelio - the domestic and the public

The quartet in Act 1 is one of the joys of the opera. A father, his daughter, the young man he hopes will marry his daughter, the other young man who wishes to marry the daughter - each sings about the hopes for the future. The quartet is intimate. Everyone in the audience empathises.

And yet how incongruous it is, the private expressions being voiced in a jail where the daily work of three of the four is that of jailer and of the fourth to get on with the ironing and the other domestic chores. There are at home in the jail. And the challenge to the designer is to present this homeliness within the jail.

Rocco has a job and gets on with it. He has a daughter whom he loves and for whom he has found a husband, a young man who may make his way in the prison service. Marzelline is dutiful, knows her own mind, and has come to love the young stranger (about whom they know nothing). Jacquino, he too has a steady job. And he seeks a wife to complete his life.

Once we leave the domestic scene, we do not return to it. We are taken from the domestic to the public, to the unjust imprisonment of political prisoners, to the unjust treatment of one special prisoner, and to the personification of oppression. Rocco, for all that he releases the prisoners for a brief time in the light, is a willing collaborator. Fidelio opposes. The events in the darkest of the dungeons, followed by the finale, send us out to the street with the triumph of the light over darkness. The opera could have been called Resurrection.

And the quartet? They will work out their own domestic concerns in their own way.

Don

British military forces in Afghanistan

The excellent, remember, is the enemy of the good. For weeks I have been seeking the opportunity to draft a considered exposition of my thoughts about the British contribution to the war in Afghanistan. So far the opportunity has not arisen; alternatively, there have been opportunities, but I have chosen instead to do something else. So I determine: let the good be sufficient. If this first piece requires a continuation, so be it.

It was the public debate in London last February which prompted me to think about the matter. So far as I can recall, there have been British forces in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan for three, may more, years. But I have thought about other things. Now I am about to engage for the first time with the matter.

The case against the continuation of a British component in the NATO deployment in Afghanistan was opened by a fluent, well-organised major-general (Winchester, Balliol, National Defence College, Islamabad) who had no doubt that the NATO mission in Afghanistan was bound to fail. I relished the coherence of his exposition. Substance aside, the presentation, in my view, was the best one of the six we heard.

He was focused and damaging. In his view, there was no clear aim; there was no agreement on the strategy. There were insufficient resources for the task (which I take it is the subjugation of military forces hostile to the presence of NATO forces in the country). There was no clear chain of command. And the necessary political commitment to the military operations within NATO was lacking.

Such was the general’s contribution to the debate. At the time of hearing, and ahead of hearing anyone else, I would have liked to have heard him present the case again. (What I should do, I guess, is to seek the oral or written record of the debate.) My recollection of his presence and delivery, along with my written notes of what he said, impressed me. Others who spoke have left little or no mark. He did leave one.

Later I listened to the air commodore who had been seconded to the High Commission in Kabul. He reminded us of some relevant generalities. The people in Afghanistan are illiterate. Loyalties are tribal. Practices which we regard as corrupt are endemic. It is with these generalities in mind that we must view the challenge of cultural reconstruction as well as the physical.

So we can wonder what will constitute success. If the physical reconstruction could proceed unhindered then, in ten years time or so, Afghanistan might have reached the present condition of Bangladesh. The improvement of Afghanistan will take a long time. That is, the physical improvement will take a long time.

The cultural improvement, or development, will take longer. If there is to be schooling for all, then not only must the schools be built in distant parts but they must be staffed by teachers who are committed to the new ways. If those new ways are to be supported by the parents and other adults, then those others also must be willing to tolerate, if not to adopt, the western approaches.

Here the cultural and the military intertwine. Suppressing the hostile military forces is not an end in itself. The military subjugation of a territory is a means towards an end, the end being a political accommodation. So we need to think about the people with whom we will be negotiating the political settlement. Whoever they will be, the must be the people who will command the loyalty of those for whom they speak. Maybe they will be Afghans, as we understand the term, who constitute the present military opposition. It seems sensible to suppose they will be. If it is sensible to think in terms of a commanding tribal loyalty, then the hostile forces in Hellman province, or any province, may be Afghans who, unlike the Afghans in the north, are resisting a hostile invasion in much the same way as other Afghans have resisted other hostile invasions, including the Russian.

There will be more to say about this matter. For the moment, as I move to conclude this first chapter, I want to return to the warfare between the British forces and the military forces which oppose them (in Hellman province and maybe elsewhere). I know little of these battles, even though I have read that they are akin to the battles of the Korean war or even of the First World War. Those comparisons suggest, to my mind, trenches, close encounters, artillery exchanges, and so on, battles, that is, with a well-organised, well-equipped army.

Yet as someone who reads The Times and similar papers and who listens to news on the radio I read or hear little about these battles. I hear of British casualties and sense that they are few in relation to the purported scale of the battles. I hear about British estimates of the other side’s casualties, but I hear nothing about prisoners (and nothing of prisoners of war). Compared with the news of the war in Iraq and with the news of the insurgency over the years, the news from the front line in Afghanistan is scant.

And there is no news of what is happening in the northern, peaceful territories. No interviews, no photographs of NATOsoldiers as they build roads or schools. No news.

After all the years of engagement, I know little about military or political events in Afghanistan. I sense that the reach of the present government does not extend beyond Kabul. I have no idea what political settlement is being sought. I have no sense of the people with whom the political settlement is to be reached.

So when I am asked to support the continued engagement of British military forces in Afghanistan I must refuse my consent with the words ‘You have not told me enough about the purposes of the present engagement and the likelihood of its success’.

Don