Dunkirk, British, and the Germans

OK. So I went to see Dunkirk, because the reviews have been almost universally excellent, and because (a) it was endorsed by Nigel Farage, and (b) everyone pointed out that Farage had missed the point.  Farage missing the point is hardly news; but I wanted to see how he'd missed it.

 

(In what follows, there may be spoilers.  But since what actually happened at Dunkirk is a matter of record, and since there're no twists, I'm not too fussed about that.  I'll say a little about a couple of characters, but nothing that'll mar the film.)

Now, I can see why Brexiteers are getting all excited about the film.  Dunkirk is part of the British national story, and anything that tells a story about plucky British fortitude in the face of a threat from Ze Hun is going automatically to have them wanking themselves square then round again.  In other words, it matters little what the content of the film actually was: it'd've been coopted into the Brexit narrative somehow.  No contortion would have been too wild, because if you've got a fixed idea about that threat and a need for the British to retreat back to the safety of Blighty in the face of a threat from the Continent... well, you get the picture.

And I know I have an idée fixe about Brexit from the other side, too.  But this is my blog, so you'll have to lump it.

Anyway: back to the point I was going to make, which is that those Brexiteers have missed the point entirely.  Dunkirk's an avowedly anti-nationalist film.  And that's apparent from the first minute - from before any character appears on the screen.

The first thing we see is a one-sentence preamble telling us about how the British and French armies have been forced into retreat by "the enemy".  Note that Christopher Nolan doesn't talk about the Allied forces being forced into retreat by "the Germans" or "the German Army" or anything like that.  "The enemy" is in a way more menacing - but it's hard to see how it's anything other than a deliberate move so as not to name the Germans.  One might go a bit further, and infer that Nolan is indicating that Nazism was not German, or at least that there's a clear distinction to be made between what might have been done in the name of Germany and what was done in the name of the Third Reich.  There might be mileage in that - lots of contemporary Germanophiles thought so - but it's not a rabbit I want to chase here.  It's enough to point out that, in the most obvious way, Nolan has deliberately avoided making this a story about Germans and Englishmen.

Thus primed, I would encourage anyone who's not seen the film to count how many times the word "German" or its cognates is used.  I did: I think it's four.  In all cases (which appear over about 3 minutes in total), it's used as an accusation of untrustworthiness.  So far, so standard war-movie.  But it's always from the same character.   And that character is a terrified, paranoid, dangerous idiot, who is looking for someone to blame, and someone to shoot.

That is: the only person who makes a direct reference to Germans is someone with whom you wouldn't want to be in a confined space.  Other British characters are, by turns, doughty, brave, or - in a couple of cases - cowards.  In other words, they're exactly like most people.  They are not made saintly by dint of being British.

Now, there are atrocities committed by the enemy.  A ship that's clearly marked with a red cross is bombed.  I don't know if that happened in reality.  But even there, the bomb is from a machine.  We don't see the face of the pilot.  By and large, the enemy is unseen.  There is a brief moment when we see actual members of the Wehrmacht; but in that moment, when it would be very easy for them to kill a defenceless man, they don't.  They are not made evil by dint of being German.

In other words, the enemy can't be identified with a particular nation.  We know the origin of the enemy, but Nolan doesn't labour the point.  Nation doesn't really matter to the film he's made, which is about people in a situation behaving as people do.  He could have made appreciably the same film about any conflict, real or fictional.  Hell, he didn't even really need a conflict.  Except that, by making a film set in the second world war and not talking about nations or national character, he gives quite a clear message about nations and national character.

Quite clear, but not clear enough for some.  Farage doesn't really do nuance, and he can't really see beyond the nation.  It's little wonder he misunderstood what he saw.

MIFfed

I've got a bit of a dilemma.  It's a nice dilemma to have, and I know which way I'm leaning, but someone may tell me I'm being a fool.  They're wrong, but it's not quite as clear-cut as I thought it would be.

First things first: I love Manchester, and one of the things I love about Manchester is the Manchester International Festival.  It's two weeks of new and interesting art and culture, and even when a show doesn't work, as with Damon Albarn's Wonder.land a couple of years ago, it's still something that makes me proud to be a part of the city.

When tickets for MIF17 went on sale, I immediately went and spent an unholy amount on them.  I've crammed all the things I'm going to go to see into the second week of the Festival, because during the first week, I'll be in France.  This is at the invitation of one of my closest friends and her family; she lives in Australia now, so I only get to see her (and them) every couple of years.  So the final few days of June and the first few days of July are going to be packed, but great.  I'm really, really looking forward to them.

Except...

Law Changes and Slippery Slopes

(Cross-posted from the other place)

Apparently, there was a TV programme in Australia the other day in which a there was a discussion of assisted dying.  It got reported in The Guardian, largely on the basis that an 81-year-old audience member kept calling Margaret Somerville "darling" and then got mildly sweary.  I've only seen those clips from the programme that are linked in the Graun's report, so I'm not going to comment on the tone of the debate in particular.  Rather, I'm interested in one of the responses to the programme, from Xavier Symons, writing in The Conversation.

Symons takes the opportunity to unpick the idea of a slippery slope argument - in this case, the claim that allowing some forms of assisted dying will commit us to allowing... well, that's open-ended, but it's sufficient to say that it'd be terrible.  We'd want to avoid terrible things; therefore, the argument goes, we shouldn't allow any of it.  This is well-worn stuff in the seminar room, but it's a mode of argument that refuses to die.  Quite correctly, Symons points out that

there is a need for empirical evidence or sound inferential reasoning to support the claim that event B will necessarily (or probably) follow on from event A.  Without this evidence, the argument is invalid. I can’t just claim, for example, that the legalisation of medicinal marijuana leads to the legalisation of ice - I need to show some empirical or logical connection between the two.

So far, so standard.  (I'd say "unsound" rather than "invalid", because the validity of an argument doesn't depend on its evidence - or, at least, not in the same way; but that's a small matter.)  He then makes another move, which is a bit more interesting:

But (and it’s a big but) there is such a thing as a good and valid slippery slope argument.  A good slippery slope argument demonstrates a causal or probable relationship between event A and B, such that event B can legitimately be expected to occur if event A is allowed to occur. [...] There are, nevertheless, compelling empirical and logical slippery slope arguments available to defend more modest claims about the “normalisation” of assisted dying.

Is this correct?

Persian: Lesson 7

15th November 2016

I make no claims to be particularly academically able.  I'm not.  I've trundled along for many, many years, never setting the world on fire, never being particularly impressive, but never being utterly shit either.  I've only ever failed one thing: having wanted to go to Oxford since about the age of 4, I took the entrance exam in 1994, passed that, and then failed the interviews quite spectacularly.  There was a voice in my head during the politics and economics interview at Christ Church telling me that if I shut up, I might be able to salvage something; but I blundered on anyway.  My interview at Somerville the following day went better, but the damage was done by then.

I did not get admitted.

The letter telling me to sod off arrived on the 17th December.  I forced out a laugh for the sake of appearances - Mum was looking over my shoulder - though really I wanted to throw myself out of the nearest window.  There was then a bit of phoning to be done, to the other people who'd been interviewed at the same college for the same degree: I think there was about a dozen of us, though most of their names escape me, and most of us had shared the same train back to our various hometowns in a coach where there were the lights and heating had packed up.  Only one had been offered a place, and she'd not even been on that cold and darkling train home; everyone else - except me - was resolved to go on to Bristol or Durham or impressive places like that.  For my part: it'd never occurred to me to apply to Bristol or Durham or impressive places like that.  I think I had a 2-Cs fallback offer from an ex-Poly in Dundee to study business law, but I had no intention of taking that up.  (Odd, isn't it, that had I passed the interview, my Oxford offer would have been two Es?  My fallback for a shit course was, on paper, going to be harder to achieve than Christ Church.  As it happened, I got 5 As.  Something else that never occurred to me was to take a year out and have another pop.  Good lord, I was stupid back then.)

Anyway:  I thought it important to memorialise that failure, so framed the letter as a testament to my own fundamental rubbishness: it's on the wall just in the line of sight of my desk in the study at home, to serve as a constant reminder that I'm not all that able.  I've got a photocopy that I sometimes put on my office door at work, too, so that passers-by know that they're being taught by someone who didn't even get into university.

Why mention all that now?  Because we've a Persian exam in a couple of weeks, and I think I'm about to fail - possibly quite badly.  It'll be the second proper failure of my academic career, and it's terrifying me.

The basic problem is that the vocabulary is killing me.  Not so much that it's complicated - I wouldn't know.  The problem is that I've simply not got time to learn it.  I'm still not au fait with the stuff we were supposed to learn after week 1, and we're now in week 7.  Every week there's more, so I'm just getting further and further behind.

I'm gutted, because I'm really enjoying the language; but I'm really considering giving up.  OK, so it's £300 down the drain... except it's not down the drain, because I'd happily spend £300 to avoid the utter humiliation that's coming my way in 28 days' time.

So there we go. I don't think there'll be any more Persian updates. I've all but failed already, so there's no point taking the exam; and if I'm not going to take the exam, there's no point turning up to class.

It's been fun, but I think I'm at the end of the line.

But what about this week's lesson?  What did we learn in class?

Buggered if I know.  I can't speak for others, but I learned nothing.

Persian: Lesson 6

8th November, 2016
This is quite a short entry, I think; and it's also - in its way - an upbeat one.  There's a few take-home points from the past couple of lessons.

1. Grammar. This is beginning to worry me - less because it’s complicated than because it isn’t. Nouns and verbs have to agree, but we’ve started to pluralise things, and – so far at least – nouns don’t decline.  Nominative, genitive, ablative: all the same.  Neither is there a clear difference between the singular and the plural: one chair, two chair.

I say that there's not a clear difference - there is a difference.  You can pluralise by adding the suffix "ها"; but how that's used isn't obvious.  As things stand, it looks like it's sometimes used and sometimes not; I've not got my head around what the rule is that governs that.

Why is this worrying? Because it can’t be that simple, can it? I fear we’re about to get bitten.

2. Let’s talk about diacritics and dipthongs. There aren’t too many vowels in the Persian alphabet. Aleph (ا) does a huge amount of work – it can function as ø, æ, or ɒ:, and possibly more besides. Much depends on what accents and diacritics are used – and these don’t really have to be written. Thus ا is pronounced differently from آ, and أ, and إ, though (as far as I can make out) أ and إ are likely to be written simply as ا.

In an previous entry, I mentioned the sentence "This is Sara", pronounced something like "Een Sarā ast/ ist" - the verb "to be" can take a couple of pronunciations, because "To be" is nuts in all Indo-European languages. Anyway: here's that sentence, with the alephs highlighted:

این سارا اَست.

Potentially, we're looking at four different pronunciations from just one letter.

On top of that, there’s the semi-vowel ye, which is written as ﯾ, or ـﯿ, or ی, depending on whether it’s an initial, medial, or final letter.  (Did I mention that letters have three written forms, depending on where they appear in a word and which letters appear to their left?)   It can also modify the aleph; hence the word "Iran" is pronounced "Ee-rōn", though it contains two alephs - you spell it "ایران". (That does explain the American pronunciation: "Aye-ran" does make a kind of sense.)  Correspondingly, my name would be written as "ایان"; I'm not sure how a Persian speaker would cope with the "ya" sound in my name: my hunch is that they'd want to extend it into a longer "ō".

There’s another semivowel, vav (written as و as an initial, or ـو as a medial or final letter), which is sometimes pronounced as “u”, and sometimes as “v”. That depends on whether it’s next to a vowel or a consonant. (Come to think of it, that's fairly straightforward: the Latin v usually has a “u” or “w” sound, except when it doesn’t.  And there's something in the back of my mind telling me that Hebrew does something similar - which'd make sense, on the basis that there's a close relationship between Hebrew and Arabic, and Persian took the Arabic alphabet.)  But what I’ve not worked out yet is whether the invisible vowels count to modify it. We shall see…

Oh, and writing the letter s - س - is difficult, and "st" (ست) and "sp" (سپ) more so: it's like writing a w from right to left, which is bad enough; but once you've started, it's hard to know when to stop. I have no idea how I'll cope if I ever need to use a double s. "سس" might be an orthographic black hole, from which one never escapes.

Actually, there is the number 6.  Pronounced "shesh", it looks on the page like this:

 شش

Yipes.

Persian: Lesson 5

25th October, 2016
So... it's Tuesday, which means a Persian lesson, which means a Persian update.

By what I'm coming to take to be the standard of this thing, I can say that I'm feeling a bit more chipper about some aspects of this than I have been.  This doesn't mean that it's not frustrating, because it really is.  But - on pain of jinxing the thing - the reading and writing, unexpectedly, are fairly straightforward so far.  Granted that I'm still only at beginner level, I think I'm on top of them. The grammar and syntax, too, seem fairly simple - at least so far; maybe that'll all change soon.

What's killing me is the vocabulary. I don't have the time to sit and learn it. I need to find some way to force industrial quantities of new words into my head. They're percolating slowly, but that's not enough.

If I could set aside half an hour a day, I think I'd be laughing. But with things as they are, I'm spending a lot of time sitting in class with my mouth open in horror. After all, there's no point understanding the sentence structure if you've no words; no point in mastering the alphabet if you've literally nothing to write.

Eeeeep.

Persian: Lesson 4

18th October, 2016
Let's focus on the writing for a bit.  Being able to read the Arabic alphabet is something that I've wanted for years and years, because I like being able to read stuff.  (Not necessarily to understand what's been written, but to be able to sound it out.)

To begin with the basics.  Persian adopted the Arabic alphabet.  I think that there's a couple of minor differences, like those between, say, the English and Welsh or Icelandic versions of the Latin alphabet; nothing significant.  However, it means that there's a degree of duplication, because Arabic makes use of some sounds and conventions that Persian doesn't.  Our teacher mentioned that there's one letter - I forget which at the moment - that gets used, but that Persian "doesn't like", whatever that means.  Damnit, they're repudiating their own alphabet!

Anyway: to illustrate what I mean.  There're 5 different versions of the letter "Z".  Officially, they have different sounds; in practice, not so much.  Your bog-standard "z" looks like "ز".  But on top of that, there's zal, pronounded (on Wikipedia's telling) ẕ, and it looks like this: ذ.  Zhe - pronounced ž - is written as "ژ"; za, pronounced ẓ, is written as "ظ".  And then there's zad, pronounced as z̤, and written as "ض".  The transliteration available via Wikipedia is different from some of the suggested pronunciations I've seen on other sites, but I've no reason to suppose that it's wildly out of the way.  And there might be a subtle difference between them all (though the Wiki suggestion that we differentiate between ẕ, ž, ẓ, and z̤ is mystifying in its own right.

So far so good; and though I know there's no relationship between the shape of a letter and its sound, it's reassuring that there's a family resemblance between three of the letters, and another one between the other two.  On the other hand, the equivalent of "R" - ر - looks painfully like "ز", so that'll only take us so far.

The number and location of the dots can make a big difference, too.  Here are the equivalents of "B", "P", "T", and "S": ت ,پ ,ب, and ث.  Well, I say "S"; it turns out that there's multiple versions of that as well, with, س, and ص standing for sounds in that kind of are too.