The Age of the Warrior: Selected Essays by Robert Fisk

541 Pages·2008·1.61 MB·English

by  Robert Fisk

THE AGE OF THE WARRIOR
Also by Robert Fisk
The Point of No Return:
The Strike Which Broke the British in Ulster
In Time of War:
Ireland, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939–45
Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War
The Great War for Civilisation:
The Conquest of the Middle East
THE AGE OF
THE WARRIOR
SELECTED ESSAYS
ROBERT FISK
New York
Copyright © 2008 by Robert Fisk
Published in the United States by Nation Books,
A Member ofthe Perseus Books Group,
116 East 16th Street,8th Floor,New York,NY 10003
Published in Great Britain in 2008 by Fourth Estate,
an imprint ofHarperCollins
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the Nation Institute and the Perseus Books Group
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A CIP catalog record for this book
is available from the Library ofCongress.
ISBN-13:978-1-56858-403-4
LCCN:2008929645
British ISBN:978-0-00-727073-6
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
acknowledgements xi
preface xiii
1 A firestorm coming 1
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war 2
Flirting with the enemy 14
‘Thank you, Mr Clinton, for the kind words’ 20
Brace yourself for Part Two of the War for
Civilisation 25
The pit of desperation 29
The lies leaders tell when they want to go to war 34
‘You are not welcome’ 38
Be very afraid: Bush Productions is preparing to
go into action 42
‘Our guys may kick them around a little...’ 46
The wind from the East 51
2 Publish and be damned? Or stay silent? 55
So let me denounce genocide from the dock 56
You’re talking nonsense, Mr Ambassador 60
Armenia’s 1,500,001st genocide victim 64
Sneaking a book out in silence 66
‘A conflict of interest’ 70
Bravery, tears and broken dreams 74
A holocaust denier in the White House 78
vi the age of the warrior
3 Words, words, words... 83
Hack blasts local rags 84
We should have listened to Bin Laden 96
The jargon disease 101
Poisonous academics and their claptrap of
exclusion 105
Soft words – hard questions 109
The pen, the telex, the phone and the despised
e-mail 113
The forgotten art of handwriting 117
‘Believe it or not!’ 121
Murder is murder is murder... 125
Ah, Mary, you poor diddums 129
‘A very edgy situation’ 133
‘Abu Henry’: what diplomats can get up to 137
A lesson from the Holocaust 141
4 Cinema begins to mirror the world 145
Applause from the Muslims of Beirut 147
Saladin’s eyes 151
My challenge for Steven Spielberg 155
Da Vinci shit 159
We’ve all been veiled from the truth 163
When art is incapable of matching life 167
A policeman’s lot is not a happy one 171
Take a beautiful woman to the cinema 175
A river through time 179
5 The greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis 185
A long and honourable tradition of smearing
the dead 186
Tricky stuff, evil 191
‘Middle East hope!’ – ‘Europe in crisis!’ 195
A poet on the run in Fortress Europe 199
contents vii
6 When I was a child ... I understood as a child 203
Another of Arthur’s damned farthings 204
First mate Edward Fisk 208
‘Come on, Sutton!’ 212
Cold war nights 216
‘All this talk of special trains...’ 220
Fear of flying 224
7 The old mandates 227
God damn that democracy 228
Gold-plated taps 232
The man who will never apologise 236
The ‘lady’ in seat 1K 239
Whatever you do, don’t mention the war 242
‘The best defender on earth of Lebanon’s
sovereignty’ 247
Alphonse Bechir’s spectacles 251
The cat who ate missile wire for breakfast 254
The torturer who lived near the theatre 257
The temple of truth 261
We are all Rifaats now 265
The ministry of fear 269
‘We have all made our wills’ 273
‘Duty unto death’ and the United Nations 276
8 The cult of cruelty 281
The age of the warrior 282
Torture’s out– abuse is in 286
‘The truth, the truth!’ 290
Crusaders of the ‘Green Zone’ 294
Paradise in Hell 298
‘Bush is a revelatory at bedtime’ 302
The worse it gets, the bigger the lies 306
Let’s have more martyrs! 311
viii the age of the warrior
The flying carpet 315
The show must go on 319
‘He was killed by the enemy’ –but all is well
in Iraq 323
9 We have lost our faith and they have not 327
God and the devil 329
The childishness of civilisations 333
Look in the mirror 336
Smashing history 340
So now it’s ‘brown-skinned’ 344
The ‘faith’ question 348
Hatred on a map 351
‘If you bomb our cities, we will bomb yours’ 355
The lies of racists 359
Dreamology 361
10 ‘A thing invulnerable’ 367
What the Romans would have thought of Iraq 368
In memoriam 372
Read Lawrence of Arabia 376
A peek into the Fascist era 380
Who now cries for the dead of Waterloo? 384
Witnesses to genocide: a dark tale from
Switzerland 388
‘You can tell a soldier to burn a village...’ 392
Should journalists testify at war crimes trials? 395
Where are the great men of today? 399
11 America, America 403
Free speech 404
It’s a draw! 408
Fear and loathing on an American campus 412
How Muslim middle America made me feel safer 416
Will the media boys and girls catch up? 420
contents ix
Brazil, America and the Seven Pillars of Wisdom 424
From Cairo to Valdosta 428
Trying to get into America 432
12 Unanswered questions 437
Is the problem weather? Or is it war? 438
Fear climate change, not our enemies 441
Just who creates reality? 445
A letter from Mrs Irvine 449
Who killed Benazir? 453
The strange case of Gunner Wills 457
13 The last enemy 461
In the Colosseum, thoughts turn to death 463
Dead heroes and living memories 467
The ship that stands upright at the bottom of
the Sea 471
‘Thanks, Bruce’ 475
Those who went before us 479
Farewell, Ane-Karine 483
They told Andrea that Chris had not suffered 487
postscript
The dilution of memory 491
A street named Pe´tain and the woman he sent
to Auschwitz 492
‘I am the girl of Ire`ne Ne´mirovsky’ 496
index 499