CZYTANIE 4 EN [#16]

Nigel Farage warns that Europe’s unemployed are coming here to take British jobs, while employing his German wife as his secretary. He accuses Eurocrats of living high on the hog, while fully exploiting his own allowances. He claims to speak for “ordinary people”, and to be the voice of “common sense”, while being a public school-educated former banker who “allies himself with every variety of gay-hater, conspiracy crackpot, racist, chauvinist and pillock”. The media give Farage an easy ride because he’s entertaining. But what people need to realise is that behind this amusing charade is a pretty unsavoury party.

1. Farage might be considered ... between his proclaimed ideals and his real life.

Sir J. Heywood is a backstairs Bertie, a smudger, a whisper-in-the-PM’s-ear sort who shrivels from public view. The worry for Conservatives, and the rest of us, is that this shrewd murmurer, this eminence grease, has also acquired unprecedented power over Nick Clegg, Cabinet, the coalition and much of the rest of the state apparat. There is talk of Heywood obstructing secretaries of state, and organising Downing Street to his own convenience. We have gone beyond ‘Yes, Minister’ and now have ‘Yes, Sir Jeremy’. Worryingly, no one seems more in hock to him than our soigné, someone-take-care-of-that PM.

2. According to the text, Conservatives worry that Sir J. Heywood ... the British Prime Minister.

Do fish have loins? Last Tuesday, in a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a 'loin of sea trout'. It looked just like an ordinary piece of fish — a bit small, as is usual in pretentious restaurants — on a plate sprinkled and drizzled as though the chef had perhaps coughed over it rather violently or vigorously scratched his head before giving it to the waiter. In Australia, I was once offered a shoulder of some other fish, so I suppose one might even be able to enjoy a ramp of whitebait or even a saddle of flounder. But generally speaking I don't mind loin when applied to the loinless, and somehow a loin of fruitcake sounds appetising, or even a loin of sourdough bread. After all, a loaf of bread has a 'heel', which I always pluck out of the proffered basket. It's crunchier.

3. The author of the piece makes ... dishes seen on restaurant menus.

"In an infamous December 2012 press release, Citigroup announced that it would begin 'a series of repositioning actions that will further reduce expenses and improve efficiency', resulting in 'streamlined operations and an optimized consumer footprint across geographies.'

4. The Citigroup’s announcement meant that some people ... the company.

Andrew Marr’s first work of fiction is a “highly improbable” story set at the time of an EU referendum in 2017. The Prime Minister dies shortly before the poll - and his team try to hide this in order to keep up the pressure on the opposition to the very end. For some reason, their plan involves cutting the head and hands off his body, an event which disgorges “a tsunami of preposterous tosh”. Quite apart from the absurdities of the plot, the book is stuffed with cliché and wincingly pitiable characterisation. “There are plenty of good moments but coming from such a distinguished source it is still rather a feeble effort,” said David Robson in The Sunday Telegraph. Marr is a shrewd observer of Fleet Street and Westminster, and some of his private jokes are "mildly amusing". Ian Hislop is seen in a Soho café, eating a large cream bun. Marr even makes a bid for the Bad Sex Award: "And the sex worked: they bucked like deer and squirmed like eels. And after that, vice versa." But in the end, the novel is sunk by its "ludicrous plot".

5. The author of the text ... of the book with another newspaper reviewer.

Faced with the atrocities committed by the Islamic State, compassion demands that something be done. Yet, over the past century, every western act in the Middle East – every national boundary drawn, every move to protect our “vital interests”, every subsidy to supposedly friendly regimes or rebel groups, every bomb dropped, every soldier’s boot on the ground, every rocket, tank or gun supplied – has made things worse, culminating in the horrors we now witness.

6. The author suggests that should the West take action against the Islamic State, it will ... effect.

To this pedestrian philistine the examples you pictured of high-end Nordic restaurant cuisine were bewildering. The few sprigs of greens on the plate probably cost a small fortune and would appeal only to some ruminant. The tiny specks served up on the flat rock appeared to be bird droppings and the abdomen of an insect. It truly strains rational belief that people pay for the privilege of putting such titbits into their mouth. It would be faster, easier and certainly less pretentious just to flush the money down the toilet.

7. The piece was written to ... an illustrated food review published in a newspaper.

On 10 June 1944 in Oradour-sur-Glane in France a Panzer division of SS massacred 642 men, women and children as a reprisal operation against the Resistance. Seventy years later in another part of the world, strutting young men are behaving in almost exactly the same way, though with even greater cruelty. And they’re doing it for a surprisingly similar reason: a fanatical belief in purity. Once large numbers of people are convinced that there is only one route to human felicity, whether it is Aryan racial purity or extreme Sunni purity, massacres and sadism follow. Yes, I know there are other factors, from obedience to fear and the natural cruelty of young men in gangs. But they only remind us that we humans are too dangerous to be allowed simple, one-size-fits-all solutions to anything. Ideas are only good or bad in terms of their effect on actual societies, and I go back to Isaiah Berlin, who warned that a single approach resulted in ‘the vivisection of actual human societies into some fixed pattern dictated by our fallible understanding of a largely imaginary past or a wholly imaginary future.’ Spot on. That vivisection carries on in Syria now.

8. The author draws a parallel between World War II and Syria to prove that the lack of ... leads to deaths and massacres.

9. mentions the condition to fulfill when deciding about an intervention abroad

10. stresses the difference in obtaining the manpower and other military assets

11. hypothesizes how a change in the army might put a halt to international co-operation

12. argues that to gain full control, the deployment of land forces is a necessity

13. speculates about the possibility of a different course of a past military operation

14. implies that the reductions in the army’s manpower might affect a specific force

15. shows the dubiousness of the government about the involvement of land troops

A
“Not only do we remember it for the rain that fell, the mud that weighed down the living and swallowed the dead, but also for the courage and bravery of the men who fought here,” spoke the Prince of Wales at the centenary commemorations of the battle of Passchendaele – more properly “Third Ypres”. I wish he had also said we should remember it not only for the incompetence of the high command, but because the majority of the British troops were at best only half-trained.

B
One enduring myth about war is that armies can be raised quickly, which, as a matter of fact, they can’t, as armed conflict is the most complex human interaction known. A soldier’s skill is nine parts judgment and takes time to acquire – as true today as it was 100 years ago, perhaps even more so. Yet, we’re on the verge of making the same mistake as before, saying that we can steer events without boots on the ground and shrinking the army to a token force. The view in much of Whitehall seems to be that intervention leads only to entanglement, and that intervention with land forces induces even bloodier entanglement.

C
‘Mission creep’ isn’t a term heard much these days, but its spectre seemed to be haunting Mark Sedwill, the National Security Adviser, at a Royal United Services Institute conference. “What is our core national interest?” he enquired. “What can we live with in terms of outcomes? What should a western comprehensive strategic plan look like?” Only after answering that first, can the volume of our engagement in international conflicts be settled.

D
Yet the questions could become academic, for the latest Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), which Sedwill is leading, looks like shaping our armed forces in a way that makes cuts in the army a foregone conclusion. The review’s starting point is that the books don’t balance, largely thanks to financially challenging navy and RAF equipment programmes.

E
But let’s be clear. Never has a defence review resulted in more spending, so the army will feel the squeeze, and the danger is that the guts will be squeezed out of it, too. Politicians like Sedwill are “interested in effect, not in numbers”, but if the effect you need is mass? Numbers matter because in war, people count, and the army’s significant and unprecedented lack of mass is its greatest capability gap; unlike other urgent operational requirements in case of war, it’s the only one you can’t fill by buying off the shelf.

F
The army’s propriety will be to keep a mechanized division of two “manoeuvre” brigades and combat support. Without it, we could not play our part within NATO; nor would we be able to fight alongside the Americans in high-intensity combat, which would mean the cessation of that military kinship. But what of the lighter, more agile units? Reductions would make the army little more than a shell. Even now, it could not sustain a brigade on operations indefinitely without huge recourse to the reserves. So when intervention is no longer available, it may have to be on the lines of Libya or Syria: air support, a few advisers on the ground, some trainers perhaps, and special forces for strategic targets.

G
But so-called stand-off interventions have two inescapable flaws. With only air operations, you don’t influence the strategy. Threats to take away support don’t cut much ice with local forces, which call the shots, metaphorically as well as literally. And even when there is minimal collateral damage from stand-off weapons, they excite moral repugnance, especially with drones and cruise missiles killing from afar, sometimes continents away.

H
So as the fighting muddles on, the intervention risks slowly losing whatever legitimacy it had, the prime example of which is the long lasting NATO bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999. Had it not been for the build-up of Allied Command Europe’s ground forces on the Kosovo border, under General Sir Mike Jackson, the Serbs would probably have toughed it out until NATO, with no worthwhile and legitimate targets left, was forced by the growing weight of international opinion to stop bombing.

I
That is the second limitation of stand-off interventions: the pace and duration of the campaign is determined by those on the ground, whose priority will probably not be speed. Strategic patience is needed, therefore – a commodity that both has been scarce in the past and is unlikely to be plentiful in the future. That wars are short is another myth; even in campaigns against regular troops, although the initial phase may be accomplished quickly with air raids, as in Iraq, the ultimate consolidation of power is long drawn out and requires boots on the ground.

J
Another figment of the imagination is the conviction that special forces – clandestine, deniable – can do it all. They have operational precision, best directed against strategic targets, but not mass. When briefing Tony Blair once, the then chief of the defence staff began to get the impression that the PM believed the SAS were much bigger than they really were, he asked him how many he thought there were. “Forty thousand?” replied Blair. To begin with, take off two noughts. Thus, being a scarce resource, special forces will always need a large recruiting base to operate – the rest of the army. And finally, the last myth is that wars can be won from afar. The truth is that the last shot always comes out of an infantryman’s rifle.

To wear?

Recently an Arab woman in a niqab, the Darth Vader outfit, little slit for the eyes, was evicted from the Parisian opera house for exactly this misdemeanor. The whole bunch of warbling luvvies agreed to resume performing provided she was chucked out. In France, a niqab is illegal, as is not wearing one in some Muslim countries. Either way, it is women who get the rough end; whether in a Roman Catholic state or in the Muslim UAE, the female sex is liable to be picked on for contravening the local dress code. “Too modest” or “not nearly virtuous enough”– neither is morally justifiable, and the French legislation racist to boot. It is spite directed at a bunch of people who, too late, the French fervently wish they hadn’t let into the country.

To my mind, it is the sexist thinking behind the niqab, posing the thorny problem, not the niqab itself – and you address it by abandoning our multicultural mindset which insists that all competing cultures are equally valid; and some especially valid if they oppose the oppressive, imperialist white, Christian hegemony, such as Islam. But surely we should let people wear what the hell they want. That’s what we value over here, isn’t it, freedom?

Generally, we have become deranged by Islam. More often than not, we act towards its adherents in ways which must be mystifying and contradictory to ourselves. I find Islam in general an illiberal, arid, vengeful creed and nothing gives me a longer belly laugh than western politicians insisting it’s magnificent and peaceable, while locking up Muslims for stating the tenets of their religion and then sending in bombers to Iraq. Come on – it is not that peaceable, is it?

Another example of our derangement came in the bizarre notion that young jihadis returning from chopping off people’s heads in Syria might face charges of treason. Atrocious and brutal though their crimes could have seemed, a couple of years ago, unhesitantly their impunity would have been granted. Not only were they being cheered on in their fight against the monster Assad but the top brass here were also contemplating aid for their cause. If our then foreign secretary, William Hague, really was dumb enough to think the rebels were all Jeffersonian Democrats, yearning for nothing more than a free and open secular society with a decent minimum wage and equal rights for the LGBT community, then he is possibly the least perspicacious foreign secretary in British history. Every time the mass of Muslims exert their popular will, it is to create a regime considerably more punitive, illiberal and hostile to us than the undoubtedly ghastly regime which was peremptorily overthrown. When will we grasp that?

But I digress. The British jihadis were answering a call to arms from the very political leaders who are now hell-bent to incarcerate them. That they ended up fighting on the side of an organization with the aims and values of the Islamic State should be stupefying only to someone with the IQ of a bowl of butterscotch Angel Delight. At the time of writing, it is estimated that some 30 homegrown Muslim fanatics have been killed fighting alongside IS. I have to say that any man’s death must diminish us, however, barely does this grieve me and I am tempted to suggest free transport to the Turkish border should be offered for any fanatic itching to donate his life, or they can stay and watch the opera, dressed however they so wish.