The Sharp Side

Michael Buerk’s autobiography The Road Taken is out in paperback and available in all high street bookstores, usually in the ‘3 for 2’ section. Strangely, the index contains no entry for ‘Iraq’ or ‘al-Amiriya’.

Apart from having a paperback to promote, Buerk also has a new Channel 5 show to plug. By a dazzling coincidence he has made a “controversial” claim that women have taken over society, edging out men, which has provoked Anna Ford to call him a “poor miserable old bat”. Cue media frenzy and half page profile of Buerk in the Guardian on August 19. The Guardian’s profile includes the claim that he is “the most important journalist of the post-war period”, “a terrific journalist” and (according to John Humphrys) “one of the sharpest journalists I’ve worked with.”

The reality is that Buerk, Ford and Humphrys are the same species – highly paid corporate vendors of misinformation. They earn between £100,000 and £250,000 a year, topping up their earnings in all kinds of other ways. They are members of the ruling class, though they endeavour to represent themselves as basically ordinary people. As journalists they like to see themselves as ruggedly independent, though their prominence relies on their willingness to adapt their reportage to corporate news values, which serve the interests of the British capitalist state and its foreign policy.

Let me give one long forgotten example of Buerk’s culpability.

It occurred on 13 February 1991, during the first Gulf War. At around 4 a.m. local time a US plane bombed the civilian air raid shelter in the middle class suburb of al-Amiriya in the west of Baghdad. One missile hit the structure’s weakest point – its ventilation shaft – and a second missile was then fired into the hole. Almost everyone inside was vaporized, burned alive or killed by concussion. Those present in the air raid shelter were families – mainly women and children. Over 400 Iraqi civilians were killed, 142 of whom were children under ten years. The deaths from this one incident exceeded the total of 214 coalition troops killed in the war with Iraq.

The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen was quickly on the spot. “I think all the signs are that this was indeed what the Iraqis say it was, a civilian shelter,” was his interpretation. He based this on his visit to the shelter, the uncontrollable grief of Iraqi officials and conversations with local residents.

Bowen’s analysis met a deluge of denials. Group Captain Niall Irving, spokesman for the British army, said there was no RAF involvement in the bombing and emphasized that the policy was to avoid civilian casualties: “we’re going for the Iraqi military machine and taking enormous care over doing that”. Brigadier General Richard Neal of the US Army pugnaciously asserted that, “I’m here to tell you that it was a military bunker. It was a command and control facility.” Dick Cheyney, then US Defence Secretary, backed him up, as did a host of other official US spokesmen. The bombing of the shelter was entirely justified.

On the main BBC TV news that night David Shukman, BBC Defence Correspondent, toed the Pentagon line, insisting there was unambiguous evidence of military activity at the bunker. Michael Buerk then gravely remarked: “One suggestion going the rounds tonight is that the Americans were somehow tricked into killing lots of civilians.”

Excuse me? Whose suggestion? Going on what rounds? The US military “tricked” into killing civilians? Didn’t the most important journalist of the post-war period think to ask some hard questions about this hypothesis, especially with him having the sharpest mind on the block?

Shukman agreed that this was almost certainly what had happened. Alas, far from expressing the slightest scrap of scepticism towards the lie-mongers of the Pentagon and their cronies in British intelligence, Buerk simply commented that it was, a “pretty chilling thought”. Shukman solemnly agreed that indeed it was.

And that was the official conclusion of the main BBC TV news that night. Jeremy Bowen was wrong. His report was marginalized. The shelter had a military purpose. Worse, the devious Iraqi regime had deliberately tricked the US military into killing hundreds of civilians! Chilling! Horrible! What monsters these Arabs are!

The only problem was, of course, that all the US spokesmen were deliberate, conscious, knowing liars. The bunker, as they well knew, had no military function. It was, as Jeremy Bowen rightly concluded, purely a civilian shelter.

The reason the US military slaughtered the people inside it remains a mystery. Perhaps they thought Saddam was hiding out there, thinking he’d be safe among civilians. Perhaps it was military incompetence. Not a single journalist in the USA or Britain has ever bothered to follow up the story. The incineration of over 400 Iraqi civilians, 142 of them children under ten years, is simply of no interest to Western culture. We remember Lockerbie, Bali, 9/11. We are not encouraged to remember the names of all those faraway places where the West has carried out atrocities on a stupendously greater scale (what happened in Lebanon when Israel invaded and occupied it between 1982 and 1983 makes 9/11 seem rather minor in the atrocity spectrum).

On 13 February 1991 Shukman and Buerk did their duty as corporate journalists. They both happily and willingly bought into those Pentagon lies. They misled millions of viewers. They performed their function as stooges of the US military and the story died. Television news has no memory. It never corrects its lies, it just moves on to the next sequence.

Four days later the Royal [“taking enormous care”] Air Force bombed the market place in an Iraqi city, killing 130 civilians and injuring 68. The war moved on and the bombing of the shelter at al-Amiriya disappeared as a news story, never to return.

The name of that Iraqi city? In 1991 a place few TV viewers had probably ever heard of before.

Fallujah.

What were the defining experiences of Nabokov’s life that shaped his fiction? The first, I suppose, was to be brought up in a very wealthy, cultured family, which lost everything when the Bolshevik revolution occurred. Nabokov had a fabulous, enchanted, privileged childhood and early adolescence and his fiction is infused with nostalgia for lost paradises.

The second was the shocking, unexpected death of his father, who was shot dead in 1922 at a Russian émigré meeting in Berlin (White on White violence, you might say). This fuelled a bleak sense of a dark, brutal, arbitrary, catastrophic absurdity at the heart of things – which he conveyed with a lightness of touch and a great stylistic panache. Nabobokov is one of those writers for whom every sentence has to sing.

Nabokov is now an accepted classic, though my impression is that the enormous enthusiasm his work generated between the 1960s and 1980s has started to ebb. A few years ago I was taken aback to come across a blistering attack on Nabokov by (of all people) George Steiner. I think it was in the New Yorker. Steiner asserted that Nabokov was a vastly over-rated, fussy mannerist, the modern equivalent of George Meredith, a novelist who in the nineteenth century was regarded as a major writer but who nowadays almost nobody reads.

Here’s my Vladimir Nabokov top ten. Take it or leave it, pop pickers.

1. Lolita (but make sure you get the edition annotated by Alfred Appel Jr).
Appel’s notes include such treats as “ ‘fifty-three’: the 1958 edition omitted the hyphen; the error has been corrected.” Marvellous!

2. ‘Spring in Fialta’ Quite simply the best short story in the universe. (Yes, of course I’ve read every short story ever written. A pagan upbringing gives you magical powers.)

3. Transparent Things A bit of an idiosyncratic choice, admittedly, but to my mind the best novel Nabokov wrote after Lolita. Whereas Lolita is congested and dense and dripping with flavour, Transparent Things is stripped-down and light and bleak. The difference between a full-blooded Beethoven symphony and something delicate and desolate by Bartok.

4. The Gift Dense, mock-historical, very clever. This is where, in part, Nabokov’s gift came from. The tradition. It involves a lot of Russian writers most of us haven’t read. It’s also very unkind to socialism. I forgive you, Vladimir, you right-wing let’s-drop-more-bombs-on-Vietnam loon.

5. Pale Fire Inside a narrow, deranged, obsessive mind (no cheap quips, please). And very, very funny. Naturally it should be read alongside Nabokov’s magnificent two volume Pushkin edition, which is its reputable scholarly twin. (Nabokov’s Shandean commentary on Pushkin’s use of Sterne – the life of the literary intellect doesn’t get much better than this, eh?)

6. ‘A Dashing Fellow’ The narrator is coldly self-centered, repellent, predatory, unfeeling and diseased. It’s a study of the banality of evil, of the damping down of human feeling for others. Possibly not one of Nabokov’s most highly regarded stories, but I could go on reading and re-reading that last paragraph forever.

6. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight Yes, I know Martin Amis adores it, but you really shouldn’t let that put you off.

7. Despair Compare this taut little masterpiece with the work of many highly praised contemporary novelists and weep. With laughter. Fiction reviewers in major national newspapers just have NO IDEA, have they? Nick Hornby! Zadie Smith! Jeez…

8. Look at the Harlequins! Commonly regarded as Nobokov’s worst novel. Foolish, foolish critics! I think when I’ve finished this post I am going to write down this sentence and pin it to the wall: “The fiends of my incurable ailment, ‘flayed consciousness,’ were shoving aside my harlequins.” Nabokov’s Tempest.

9. Ada Obviously intended by Nabokov to be his magnum opus. It’s not (that has to be Lolita). It’s a bit too cerebral, inert and smartly self-satisfied. Yet it’s still exquisite, dense, compelling. And I’m running out of adjectives.

10. ‘The Vane Sisters’ No, I didn’t spot the joke in the last paragraph either, until I was alerted to it. But then again, who does? Like just about all of Nabokov’s short fiction, dazzling.