Sirât (2025)

 

I wouldn't recommend this movie any more than I would advise anyone to consume some strange herb, knowing that while many might not find any of the flavour, others may end up having a very bad trip.

My alternative title for the film would indeed be Bad Trip. (V suggests The Wrong Trip).

Oliver Laxe's chosen title refers to an apparently Islamic concept — a bridge leading at once to paradise and perdition — yet this seems a bit crowbarred on to me.

It won the Jury prize at Cannes, yet Peter Bradshaw described it in the Guardian as a 'path to nowhere', ending frustratingly in a 'wildness of un-meaning.'

Yet the thing is that it does begin as a journey to somewhere, which only around the midpoint abruptly segues into this un-meaningful trip to nowhere, and some people are undoubtedly going to connect with that, even as they discover it to be existentially rather jarring.

Having invited us to invest our curiosity in various narrative hooks (a missing person, a fun fiesta somewhere over the next hill, and a rapidly declining North African and possibly wider geopolitical backdrop) we reach a point where any resolution has suddenly turned inconceivable.

And this is either going to seem like one big cosmic 'meh', or it will do something to you like it did to me, which is send me to sleep thinking about many things I have not thought about in a very long time.

It does seem like a masterful piece of film-making, expended on what also seems to be some very un-masterful storytelling.

How deliberate and useful this latter aspect of it is will be a highly subjective take-out I suspect. The characters are sketchy and no effort has been made to fill them out better via dialogue. They are mostly interesting as a collective.

Even before the film's sudden mid-life switch presents itself as a possible metaphor for the journey that we all make, Laxe has made it obvious that all of these individuals have already chosen to swerve away from the main road before we first see them coming together in the desert.

There's something orientalist about all this, at least in precisely the same way that the stories of Paul Bowles are orientalist and I don't mind it there at all, but I think I would mind it if a European director used the landscape around here in a similar way to make a perhaps trite point about first worlders adrift in a hostile, near-allegorical landscape.

It has actually been attempted and the only time I enjoyed it was Gareth Edwards's calling card, Monsters — which, like this, also had a fabulous score. And this particular region has been used before, tritely, in Babel.)

Nelson and the Kingdom of Mosquitia

This map (on which Guatemala appears decidedly Chilean) is the one that that lay on the table of Lord George Germain, 1st Viscount Sackville, Secretary of State of the Colonies in London, 1775-82. 

He led a group of British policy-makers, by and large men who had never been to the Caribbean, who collectively had their ambitions sucked into Central America to a large extent by the map's exaggerated, enticing presentation of two water features: The Bay of Honduras and Lake Nicaragua. 

(Appropriate perhaps, given the manner in which the whole Columbian Exchange might be said to have been kicked off by a man incapable of reading a map properly.) 

Spain had been soundly defeated by Britain in the Seven Years War (ending 1763), but seeing that the victors had since lost many of their colonies on the North American mainland, the Spanish decided, opportunistically, that the time had come for yet another war, and duly declared it on June 16, 1779. 

Belize rightly celebrates the Battle of St George's Caye, probably the most decisive moment in the settlement's history, which would take place a couple of decades later in September 1798, but this earlier conflict began with a surprise Spanish dawn attack on the same coral atol by a smaller Spanish fleet sailing out of the Bay of Chetumal. On September 15 that year they sacked the little township on the caye and carried off 101 European-origin and 40 African-origin inhabitants into captivity on Cuba. 

The Brits were especially miffed at this as they had been preparing their own surprise attack on the Central American coast and did soon after stage a raid on the Spanish castillo at Omoa — now Honduras — where they forced a contingent twice as large as their own to surrender and made the unexpected discovery there of a large pile of gold. 

Horatio Nelson had been on the Royal Navy ship which was assigned to lead this little adventure, but was transferred off it and given his own first command at the last minute.

It was the inland lake further south that had George Demain and co really enthralled however.  

The fleet Oliver Cromwell had sent to the Caribbean in 1655, which ended up taking Jamaica, had originally proposed to find a way through to the Pacific and in effect, sever Spain's American empire in two and the idea persisted in London. 

This apparent weak link in the whole extended structure was defended at the entrance to Lake Nicaragua by a humungous Spanish fort — el Castillo de la Inmaculada Concepción — which had four foot thick walls, a moat and a drawbridge. 

Thomas Jeffreys's atlas of the region made said lake look pretty much like a 'Panama Canal' just waiting to happen, but as we can now more easily discern, matters on the ground were just a little bit less straightforward than they then appeared on paper...

The coastline of Central America from modern Belize down to Costa Rica was swampy, 'unwholesome' and largely unsuitable for the then prevalent Spanish economic model. But it very much suited another economic model, which involved a kind of symbiotic arrangement between the Spanish colonies and an offshoot of the British ones known as the 'shoremen', who in turn worked closely with the essentially autonomous Miskito community in the area.  

The nub of this arrangement was the trafficking of contraband. 

Both Spain and Britain forced their colonies to trade directly with the motherland, so that any sideways transfers between neighbours were considered illegal: an open invitation for smugglers and the formation of a kind of informal 'duty free zone' — a bit like the one which has been established more officially along the northern border of Belize today. 

These zones of tierra de nadie were contested during wartime, but at times of treaty or truce they also performed some functions which all otherwise competing entities in the region found useful. 

The shoremen were a mix of buccaneers who were starting to explore more legitimate trades, such as logging and smaller-scale plantation, and former indentured white labourers from the islands who had been displaced by African slaves as the sugar boom got going. 

The Miskito meanwhile, were a blend of indigenes who had arrived from the turn of the millennium via canoe from along where Pete Hegseth is currently blowing up faster-moving boats, with more recently shipwrecked African slaves and mostly-white buccaneers, their name either a reference to the 'mixto' nature of their ethnic make-up or the muskets that they acquired in exchange for the 'Indian' women who became buccaneer brides. 

Back in 1680 the first Miskito King, Jeremy I, had been crowned and handed a treaty in the name of his fellow monarch in London which guaranteed him and his successors a continuing supply of fine uniforms, other fancy clothes and oodles of rum. 

Miskito Kings were not in fact the actual tribal leaders, but instead a sort of ceremonial figurehead for dealings with representatives of the wider British colonial project in the Caribbean. There were other native dignitaries in the 'court' of Mosquitia, bearing titles such as General Tempest and Duke of York (!)

An expedition intent on opening up the Pacific set off from Jamaica at the start of 1780, under the command of hastily-promoted John Polson. This time Nelson was very much present, as the 21-year-old Captain of the frigate HMS Hinchinbrooke. 

The flotilla attempted first to rendezvous with 'our man in Mosquitia', James Lawrie, who had the important-sounding title of Superintendent-General and was in effect the only paid British official of any significance on the mainland. 

From his underpopulated and pestilent patch Lawrie had long been selling the untapped potential of the Mosquito Coast to his distant superiors: ‘The beef I have killed there would not disgrace Leadenhall market.' 

He had also greatly exaggerated the size of the armed force he could gather locally to assist Polson — 'one thousand soldiers' turned out to a motley crew (literally a unit of mixed racial heritage) consisting of a handful of shoremen and their slaves, plus little more than a hundred Miskito warriors. 

Polson's expedition finally settled at Greytown at the mouth of the San Juan river, close to today's border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. It was late March with its imminent threat of precocious downpours. Nelson, sceptical about the whole enterprise, requested to join the up-river raid on 'Inmaculada'. 

Lawrie had quite naturally underplayed the extent of the upcoming San Juan river trip and overplayed its navigability. The assorted Brits, Jamaicans and shoremen had little choice but to allow permit the Miskito in their canoes to exercise de facto operational control. 

Yet upon reaching the island of San Bartolomé, five miles down river from the main fort, it was Nelson who led an attack by boat (possibly his first taste of combat) which resulted in the speedy surrender of the Spanish garrison. However, two of the sixteen escaped, thus costing the expedition any remaining element of surprise, and matters were soon worsened by further dithering by Polson who was now expecting five hundred fresh troops sent by Lawrie and preferred to wait. 

Meanwhile, Inmaculada's comandante Juan de Ayssa had indeed seen the smoke rising above the forest and sent messengers to Granada requesting reinforcements. He had also been able to bolster his water supplies and bring all the nearby settlers in behind the fort's massive bastions. 

These had only ever been assaulted once before — in 1762 — just prior to the end of the previous war, when buccaneers and Miskito warriors had managed to pick off Inmaculada's CO, but his daughter Rafaela Herrera soon gained her revenge by taking out the buccaneer leader with the cannon she had taken charge of herself. 

Nelson and other officers now favoured another frontal assault, but Polson opted for something more akin to delay along with some positive activity. He ordered his men to ascend a nearby hill which overlooked the fort, thinking he might then bombard it a bit from there, but the jungle around the base of this hill was near impenetrable and the whole party panicked after they spooked a jaguar. So then they turned to the other, flatter, bank of the San Juan where they found an abandoned Spanish outpost from which they could prepare to fire at Inmaculada from a concealed position. 

Nelson had established himself as the best artillery marksman and fired the first shot of the battle on April 13. A three day bombardment ensued, with Nelson managing to take down the Spanish flagpole with one well-aimed ball. But this was not really getting the attackers anywhere as they had a limited supply of ammo. They had started out with two hundred cannon balls, but many had already been lost as a result of capsizing on the inbound river journey. 

The Miskito went out at night and picked up any that had fallen outside the walls for re-use, but any that ended up inside the fort, stayed there. 

After a week reinforcements arrived for Polson, but so too did the wet weather and associated sickness. Nelson soon had the chills and was vomiting convulsively. The siege and stalemate looked to be about to turn very deadly for those on the outside, so finally on April 28 Polson gave the order to launch the all out frontal attack. 

Lined up in front of Inmaculada's walls with his whole force and their scaling ladders Polson first sent a Spanish-speaking officer with a white flag up to the gates, just to check if the people holed up inside wanted to surrender. And much to Polson's surprise, they did. They were down to their last few gallons of drinking water. 

Polson installed himself behind Ayssa’s desk and wrote to Governor Dalling in Jamaica: ‘I have the honour to inform your excellency that this castle surrendered to His Majesty’s arms yesterday at 5 o’clock pm,' who in turn informed his own boss Germain of the capture of ‘the inland Gibraltar of Spanish America’. 

Even as these letters were on their way, the new owners of Inmaculada were becoming aware, like Napoleon in Moscow, that the destination of this campaign was not quite the prize they had hoped it would be. 

The Miskito contingent in particular had come along in the hope of a share of fabled Spanish loot, and discovering that there was none to be had here, quickly vanished off into the forest. 

This was also the moment that Nelson departed the theatre, ferried back to Greytown in a state that my mother would have described as 'at death's door'. He signed away his command of the Hinchinbrooke and was taken back to Jamaica where a freed slave called Cuba Cornwallis nursed him back to health using warm blankets and strange herbs. 

The British regulars who remained knew the game was up, but launched a few forward sorties to the edge of the lake to show willing, at least until they were utterly ravaged by further bouts of disease, around ten dying every day. The majority made it back to the mouth of the river known to the Spanish as the Rio Morte, leaving a small contingent at Inmaculada. 

The governor of Jamaica was still hoping to have another push, but a big boatload of troops arriving in Kingston from Britain turned out to be already largely laid low by fevers and dysentery. 

On November 8 the officer left in charge at the fort was ordered to demolish it. This was in progress and only partially achieved when a Spanish force of two hundred men under Capitán Tomás de Juliá approached, and so the last Brits had no choice but to evacuate. 

The San Juan raid is often cited as an example of some combination of bad luck and bad planning. This operation might be said to have sought its own ill fortune, starting with the use of the fanciful map, and then setting off only a short while before 'sickly season' on the isthmus. 

Of the roughly 2000 men who took part, 380 survived. This included Nelson, just. 

Sugar Rush

England drawing Ghana in Group L prompts me to tell a little tale from history...one of those of the 'Hollywood wouldn't touch it with a barge pole' variety.

Tekyi was a Ghanaian chieftain of the Coromantee people who relocated to Jamaica in the second half of the eighteenth century in circumstances that he was clearly none too pleased about. In 1760 he initiated what the locals described as Tacky's Revolt.

This island in the Caribbean was a perhaps unlikely seed of the modern world. It had been one of the most impoverished parts of the Spanish empire and then a redoubt of defiant Jewish pirates, who had assisted Oliver Cromwell in his plan to take it for England's Commonwealth. It might have remained a near-forgotten backwater but for the phenomenon that kick-started global capitalism: a humungous sugar craving.

Slavery had existed in the majority of human civilisations prior to Tekyi's arrival on Jamaica, but already back on Blighty the seeds of the institution's final demise were germinating. The first steps were taken in 1758 when the Quakers prohibited their membership from any involvement in this 'iniquitous practice'.

Yet if anything this was also a period when enslavement was expanding and intensifying. Not in essence because the enslavers had suddenly become more intensely evil and racist than any before them, but because they were responding to the lure of an economic opportunity the likes of which nobody had ever before experienced. They were proto-capitalists.

Capitalism will always prefer machines to human beings, but when no machines are available, it will tend to use human beings as if they were machines. This was basically the situation that the proto-capitalist planters of Jamaica found themselves in. Europe's sweet tooth was calling and they needed a human machine of heat and malaria-resistant, archetypally unfree and rights-deprived labourers.

But the demand was of course only one side of this new economic and dietary imperative. The planters soon realised that the price they got for their sugar was highly sensitive to the supply, and so they deliberately under-exploited their local opportunity in order to suppress the quantity of product available for export.

This meant that large parts of Jamaica remained under-cultivated. And this in turn helped preserve a rather strange phenomenon known as the Maroons (from the Spanish word Cimarrón, meaning wild or untamed.)

The Maroons were a community of thousands of former Africans descended from former Spanish slaves living 'wild' in the island's hilly hinterlands, residing in caves and sinkholes, from which they persistently launched guerrilla raids on the sugar rush.

The sneaky supply side dabbling of the planters meant that the Maroons in the deep interior significantly outnumbered the actual slaves on Jamaica and the conflict became very intense and brutal, placing a burden on the British Army that was only alleviated when a treaty was signed in 1738.

Crucially, as part of this deal, the Maroons agreed to cooperate on some levels with the plantation economy, returning escaped slaves to their masters.

Cue Tekyi/Tacky and his 1760 revolt. Having freed himself and recruited hundreds of others, he stormed the coastal township of Port Maria where many muskets were acquired. There followed a rampage through the plantations where more and more slaves were freed and more and more proto-capitalists were summarily taken off the market.

This little army included Coromantee obeahmen from Africa's Gold Coast who mixed up a powder which could, they asserted, protect the wearer from gunshots.

Things were perhaps looking a bit touch and go for the modern world, but then Tekyi and his team turned inland and sought refuge in the mountains. And that's where the Maroons got them.

In August Tekyi himself died in a running shoot out with a Maroon called Davy and when the rest of his followers were located later on in a cave, they had all committed suicide.

The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden (2013)

Having had our curiosity piqued by Ron Howard's Eden (2024) we quickly turned to 2013's The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, the documentary which borrowed part of its title from Dore Strauch's seemingly rather self-serving first hand account of said 'affair'.

At the same time I have acquired a copy of Margret Wittmer's response to it, Floreana, described rather less luridly as a 'pilgrimage'. Following publication, Wittmer's only further comment on the matter up to her death in 2000 aged 95 was 'a closed mouth catches no flies'. (More on this later, I suppose.)

You may recall that I had noted that the accents on display in Eden were as unique and startling as one might expect of the Galapagos (though obviously non-endemic). In the documentary there is one, for Strauch's own words, which seemed immediately even more outrageous, yet I had assumed the film-makers had employed native German voiceover artists (and in the main they did), and it wasn't until the end credits that I learned that this particularly arch and thespy narration of the Krouty kind had been provided by Cate Blanchett.

It becomes clear early on here that the 'Baroness' was a French woman, something which was absolutely not at all evident in Anna de Armas's performance, and I think both films missed the chance to suggest that the underlying conflict of worldviews might have been fed by an existing continental European divergence.

And neither do either of the movies examine in any depth why it was that Germans in particular were drawn to these Islands in the late twenties. Historians have long been aware that many of the strange compulsions which would lead to the rise of Adolf were widely present in the population at the beginning of the twentieth century even amongst those who would claim to be steadfastly 'anti-fascist' before WWII.

Goldfine and Geller's documentary has some zingers in terms of insights into how the bad blood started to flow, but is ultimately undermined in the second half by bagginess, inconclusiveness and a largely superfluous cast of spare Germanic migrants who were inhabiting a separate island.

At the start one of the talking heads paraphrases Göethe’s sentiment that 'We are our own demons, we expel ourselves from our paradise.' and then again at the end, another two long term Galapagos inmates conclude that 'paradise is not a place', one having already expressed the hope that if there really is a paradise, that 'it is nicer than this'.

This aspect of the thematic material is handled well. I have often noted here in this region that 'paradise' is an umbrella term used by various kinds of outsider, specifically those who come to make and those who come to take, both perhaps slightly antithetical to the basic concept.

This region is not however one of those to which individuals flee as a way to leave civilisation behind. It's more like an environment you turn to once you have somewhat outgrown civilisation...or it has somewhat outgrown you.

The documentary does hint at tensions in the little community on Floreana which Noah Pink and Ron Howard must have consciously passed over in their screenplay: occasionally intense jealousy between the three women, a spark of Romantic interest perhaps between Wittmer and Strauch and a curious love-hate dynamic between Ritter and the Baroness.

In spite of all this it does seem that the most likely candidate for the murderer of the Baroness and Phillipson was the other member of this triangle, Lorenz who, in the later fictionalised account, is excluded entirely from the deadly confrontation, which requires the invention of a 'spark' — the death of Burro — to explain it.

It is also interesting how the boatload of dilettante scientists made more repeated and eventful interventions on the island.

I cannot quite grasp why Eden chose to hide the fact that tge doctor’s last meal was also his last meal as a vegetarian.

Beyond the fact, as noted by one descendant, that people who leave their own native environments are often natively and notably anti-social, some of the agitations which played out here resemble what I witnessed amongst certain fresher cliques of undergrads at Girton. They had paired up almost immediately after matriculation, yet almost within the first term the 'cross border migrations' had begun and by the end of the year many of them had fallen out definitely and the little pack disbanded.

The silent movie element of the story is beguiling and worth including in complete form, even though it adds to the length of the documentary. 

I was rather struck by the self-styled Baronness's resemblance to 2025 Australian Open winner Madison Keys.

Eden (2024)

Ron Howard has a bit of a sideline in dramatising material that has been/could be done as a documentary.

Watching this one is left with the impression that this, however, is precisely the sort of story that needed to be taken up by a European writer or director with a genuinely nasty streak (or the rare American equivalent, such as novelist Paul Bowles.)

Or maybe even someone prepared to do more than half-heartedly hint at the comedy/spoof potential, which is precisely what Howard is doing.

Ana de Armas is constantly twirling around the edge of 'Allo 'Allo! and Jude Law goes full Jack Torrance at one stage when simply banging on his typewriter keys and namedropping Nietzsche and Schopenhauer seems not quite enough.

The premise here is what happens when you decide to live by a set of elevated ideas — in one of those archetypally unforgiving environments — and then a bunch of people with alternative worldviews, capabilities and projects move in next door: Utopia plus neighbours.

Plus some of the worst German accents ever committed to celluloid. Even the actual Germans in the cast are not beyond censure in this respect.

I have to admit I have never really quite understood the appeal of Sydney Sweeney, but hers is the stand-out performance in this film, and arguably this is, after all, her character's story, so it seems a shame that she appears below all her co-stars in the final credits.

Ron Howard has insisted that he was not so much inspired by the 2013 documentary — The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden — as by a family holiday to the islands. This made me recall the remarks of an acquaintance who picked this same archipelago for his honeymoon and found that the Galapagos were not quite the forever sunny tropical paradise that he and his wife had anticipated.

Happy in their (frozen) bubble...

Here we go again with the happy Finns...

If countries like Finland and Guatemala can both figure high up this chart, what precisely is being measured by 'happiness'?

On his recent Scandi-tour Simon Reeve seemed more reluctant to look under the covers in Finland than he was in say Norway. Indeed, if anything he seemed to be quietly in awe of their collective determination to have each other's backs.

The trouble is (or at least one of them is), and this aspect of Finland went unmentioned, is that it tends to score lowest — along with Austria — for race relations in the EU. (viz the European Agency for Fundamental Rights's 'Being Black in the EU' survey.)

It's something of a tenet of American woke dogma that systemic racism is a by-product of slavery and colonialism, yet neither Finland nor Austria are exactly famous for their seaborne empires.

Britain on the other hand, miserable as it may be, is up there with Sweden and Norway when it comes to basic contemporary levels of getting on with other people.

In the 2023 World Values Survey only 5% of Brits objected objected to having immigrants as neighbours and only 2% to having immigrants of a different race.

Sweden scored 3% and 1% here and Norway 5% and 3%. (I'm not sure how these percentages work — like, do they also ask the immigrants about their neighbours?)

Finland's strong national identity seems to come with elements of social segregation.

Yet as always, comparing across data sets reveals complexities. Happiness levels are still apparently robust amongst immigrants in Finland, aligning with those of the natives, which is perhaps a little surprising as many of them will have started life somewhere with less snow and ice.

The happiest Finns I ever encountered were in Leningrad.

Volcanoes and Revolutions

 

I am a bit of a completist when it comes to fiction set in Guatemala.

The most notable exception from my 'dunnit' list being Antigua Vida Mia. I saw the movie, and that was enough for me.

Norman Lewis's 1957 novel is a new acquisition and I am looking forward to it, especially after seeing that positive blurbing by the creator of 007.

Inside the cover the intro continues: 'Lying under the shadow of thirty-two volcanoes, Guatemala is shaken almost constantly by earthquakes and revolutions...'

Rare indeed is the novel about Guatemala which completely eschews the stereotypically problematic aspects of its history. (Even Severina by Rey Rosa is about a woman hueviando books from a little shop in the capital.)

The most notable title of the past decade has been Tiempos Recios by the late Mario Vargas Llosa which is situated unashamedly either side of the 1954 coup.

Lewis on the other hand, noted that while the 'astute reader' would discover certain similarities between the plot of his story and the then recent history of Guatemala, these were to be regarded as 'accidental'.

Other fictional titles tackling the murkier side to this land which I would recommend are El Cojo Bueno by Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Cascabel by Arturo Arias and The Long Night of the White Chickens by Francisco Goldman.

While I do believe that El Señor Presidente by Miguel Angel Asturias remains — objectively — the best novel written about Guatemala, my own personal favourite is Up Above the World by Paul Bowles.

He too makes use of the 'un-named Latin American republic' ploy, but if you read it with some basic knowledge of Guatemala, you do know.

On a separate note, I was reminded recently of efforts by various real world locations to claim or disclaim their appearance in seminal works of the western canon.

For instance, there are numerous spots around the Caribbean asserting their selfsameness with Stevenson's Treasure Island, particularly in the Virgin Islands, yet anyone who has read the novel will surely understand that it is not actually set in the tropics.

Then there is the discussion about the country in Conrad's Nostromo. Juan Gabriel Vásquez's The Secret History of Costaguana begins from the assumption that Conrad was dog whispering 'Colombia' and sets about reclaiming said nation's history from foreign misrepresentation.

Yet a brief Google search reveals that Venezuela and Guyana also want in on this. For my part, I long ago concluded that this composite had one key component that hardly anyone ever mentions: Costa Rica.

We know that Conrad was there during his days as a merchant seaman. And although Costa Rica has lately been famed for its comparative stability, lack of an army and so on, it didn't used to be — and in fact its nineteenth century history features precisely the sort of factional military putsches with armies marching from the central highlands to the coastal zone, which play such an important role in the novel. (And San José has a big pile of gold in a museum, just like Bogotá.)

Unconventional

Naples '44, and Norman Lewis, then serving as an officer in the British army's nascent security services, records two 'secret weapons' deployed in theatre by the Allies — both with a significant blow-back effect and both arguably deserving of prohibition by the same international treaties which prevent the use of chemical and biological weapons — Islamic sexual psychopathy and southern Italian criminality. 

For the Free French had sent in their North African troops, and this went about as well as the use of Moroccans in Spain by Franco had done a decade earlier...

'At last one had faced the flesh-and-blood reality of the kind of horror that drove the whole female population of Macedonian villages to throw themselves from cliffs rather than fall into the hands of the advancing Turks. A fate worse than death: it was in fact just that...

'The French colonial troops are on the rampage...Whenever they take a town or a village, a wholesale rape of the population takes place. Recently all females in the villages of Patricia, Pofi, Isoletta, Supino, and Morolo were violated. In Lenola, which fell to the Allies on May 21, fifty women were raped, but - as these were not enough to go round - children and even old men were violated. It is reported to be normal for two Moroccans to assault a woman simultaneously, one having normal intercourse while the other commits sodomy. In many cases severe damage to the genitals, rectum and uterus has been caused. In Castro di Volsci doctors treated three hundred victims of rape, and at Ceccano the British have been forced to build a guarded camp to protect the Italian women. 

'Many Moors have deserted, and are attacking villages far behind the lines, and now they are reported to have appeared in the vicinity of Afragola to add a new dimension of terror to that already produced by the presence of so many marauders.

'The Psychological Warfare Bureau has been very energetic in its investigations into the crimes committed by the Moors. I wonder if any news of this episode will find it way into the bulletin.'

That sounds all too familiar.

Anyway, 'Let us deal with this...our way' came the response from the good people of the Zona di Camorra just outside Naples. And, sure enough, Lewis reported to his diary on June 4...

'The inevitable has happened with the murder of five Moors in a village near Cancello. They were enticed into a house with the offer of women, and then given food or wine containing some paralysing poison. While fully conscious they were castrated, and then beheaded. The decapitation was entrusted to pubescent boys to prove their worth, but the boys lacked both the skill and strength to carry the task out in a speedy and effective manner. The bodies were buried under cabbages, which were first dug up and then replanted over them in several village gardens, and there has been an undercurrent of sinister merriment in the Zona di Camorra about the prospects of fine vegetable crops in the coming year.'

The black-market activities of the Camorra had been bolstered by an unusual decision taken by the American high command...

'Too many American officers had been chosen to go on the Italian campaign because they were of Italian descent. For this reason it was hoped they might easily adapt to the environment, and this they had done all too well...

At the head of the so-called Allied Military Government was Colonel Charles Poletti, and alongside him is former American mafioso Vito Genovese, in a position of what Lewis describes as 'unassailable power' as the colonel's official advisor and interpreter, from which he has been personally selecting all the key officials in the towns around the city…

'He had been second-in-command of a New York Mafia ‘family’ headed by Lucky Luciano...and had succeeded to its leadership when Luciano was gaoled, after which he had been acknowledged as the head of all the American Mafia. Shortly before the outbreak of war Genovese had returned to Italy to escape a murder indictment in the US, had become a friend of Mussolini’s, and then, with the Duce’s fall, transferred his allegiance to Allied Military Government, where he was now seen as the power behind the scenes. Genovese controlled the sindacos in most towns within fifty miles of Naples. He leased out rackets to his followers, took a toll of everything, threw crumbs of favour to those who kept in step with him, and found a way of punishing opposition.'

The end result of all this is that key supplies that the Allies depended on — such as penicillin — were now easier to come across on the black market than in American military facilities.

And when it came to addressing this increasingly pressing problem, Lewis noted rather ruefully, 'Justice was never seen to be done; and if ever there was a place where it was on sale, it was Naples.'

Scandinavia with Simon Reeve (2)

The second instalment of Scandinavia with Simon Reeve featured one of those set piece eye-openers he does rather well, a visit to a volcano buried and supposedly suppressed by a glacier which seems to be slowly melting away. 

Having already made his point about the historical impact of another eruption on Iceland c1780, with crop failures and famines feeding into the French Revolution, he and his expert companion mooted this potentially cataclysmic collateral impact of climate change...and then departed rather hurriedly from the cave. 

He'd waited until leaving Norway before delivering a proper lament about fossil fuels. 

Though in fairness he had teased an appreciation of the essential hypocrisy underlying Norwegian affluence, comparing them to drug dealers (Pablo Escobar is the one who most springs to mind) who are notably reluctant to indulge in the substances they peddle to willing consumers abroad. 

He did however pause to reflect, ruefully, that we Brits may have missed a chance to be as collectively wealthy and smug about it as this lot over the other side of the North Sea. 

This reminded me that Reeve always seems to have an innate sense of balance in his narratives. (One could even say he has a rather sly appreciation of it.) 

In this he compares favourably with many of other BBC 'treasures', who are often more cranky in their obsessions and less alert to the complexities and compromises going on in the world around them. 

You might say that they take the sensibility of the dinner party with them out into the field, whereas with Reeve there is an attempt to switch the direction of this flow. 

This was apparent in the previous episode when he visited the Sámi people, and it was again obvious here when he visited the boss of Norway's sovereign wealth fund, pressing him on the apolitical, 'bottom line' mandate behind his overall management strategy, which makes it environmentally and in some ways also ethically neutral, placing just 0.02% of this Viking hoard in renewable energy holdings. 

Reeve might have mentioned that over the border in Sweden a focus on faddish eco-investments has been catastrophic for many speculators from the bottom line perspective, but maybe he'll cover that in part three...though I somehow doubt it.

Religion-free religion...

All mentions of the Enlightenment should perhaps come with an intellectual health warning.

Right thinking people cite the E word as if it is blindingly obvious that this late 18th century cultural movement was unimpeachably a good thing.

Yet, as we have lately seen with the liberal progressive ideals that said right-thinking people most commonly espouse today, some of the core notions of the Enlightenment evolved into a dangerous cult...the cult of Reason.

It's not hard to see why, because Enlightenment thinking often involved swapping out the Medieval world's predominant way of conceiving humans and their imperfections with a godless alternative....a religion-free religion, where Nature itself is elevated to near enough divine status.

Whereas previously it was understood that innately flawed and contingent beings like ourselves were engaged in some sort of cosmic drama with the Absolute, Enlightenment thinkers envisaged a more earthly (or at least 'Natural') path towards fulfilment. The idea became that we were not so much born imperfect, but had somehow lost our true selves within imperfect societies. The basic imperative to correct the problem was retained.

Given that this infinity-aspiring imperative was naturally less wishy washy and spiritual, it is not hard at all to see how this replacement for religion might lead to crimes against humanity on an even vaster scale — specifically in the form of totalitarian regimes aspiring to unattainable utopias or at least some kind of standard that is 'out there', but which ordinary human beings in their weakness cannot attain without some robust encouragement.

To be fair, some of the most significant minds of the time anticipated this defect in the programme. One could say that there were two Enlightenments, an upbeat one and a downbeat one. Early members of the pessimist crew were Mandeville and Swift, and they were joined later by Voltaire. It's hardly surprising though that it was the optimists who set us on the path to the gas chambers.

Scandinavia with Simon Reeve (1)

Much enjoyed the first episode, especially the part where he visits that country which doesn't actually exist...Finland. 

At least according to a well documented conspiracy theory which has engrossed a few subreddits. It turns out that this imaginary land mass is actually a secret maritime fishing ground set up as a result of some sort of dodgy agreement between Russia and Japan, and thus anyone claiming to be Finnish — and yes that includes the lovely Sanna Marin and also lovely Valtteri Bottas — is nothing but a crisis actor. 

Strangely Simon didn't mention any of this, but he did take part in training alongside Finland's vast horde of armed extras: military reservists and young conscripts. 

What really fascinated me however was the fact that this country which does not exist may well end up being the only one to exist after the apocalypse, nuclear or zombie, because they possess around 50,000 underground bunkers which, in the event, could accommodate 'almost' all of the 5.6m Finnish citizens. 

There's probably already a list of the suckers who will have the missile-proof doors slammed in their faces with one of those enigmatic grins they have up there instead of chuckles — e.g. Finnish, but with a discreet -ed suffix attached to their names.

The Finland doesn't exist belief system appears to have already experienced a sort of schism, like others we could mention, into one group who adhere to this as literal truth and others who see it as a kind of metaphor for a bigger mystery.

Espandrels

In spite of all the jibber-jabber about perfidious 'ingleses' when it comes to the discourse here on Belize and its territorial apartness from greater Guatemala, long before full admission into the British Empire in the 1860s, that settlement, founded by a buccaneer by the name of Wallace — from which its modern name derives — had been in many ways always something of a Scottish venture, more 'off the books', yet more lasting and ultimately successful than that other one down in Darien.

I was recently struck by this passage from Norman Lewis's A Letter From Belize, which contains his observations from a visit in 1955.

'One constantly stumbles upon relics of provincial Britain preserved in the embalming fluid of the Honduran way of life, and often what has been taken over from the mother country is strikingly unsuitable in its new surroundings. The minor industries, for instance, such as boat-building, are carried on in enormous wooden sheds, the roofs of which are supported by the most complicated system of interlacing beams and girders I have ever seen. One thinks immediately of hurricanes, but on second thoughts it is clear that all this reinforcement would be valueless against the lateral thrust of a high wind. It turns out that such buildings were copied from originals put up by Scottish immigrants, and were designed to withstand the snow-loads imposed by the severest northern storms.'

He went on to say however that while 'The Spaniard took Spain with him. The Briton was always an exile, living a provisional and makeshift existence, even creating for himself a symbol of impermanence in his ramshackle wooden house.'

Over the years I have wondered just how well adapted the 'colonial' style of Antigua might be to Central American conditions.

In modern Spain the nearest equivalent would be the architecture of the cooler northern zones, such as Cantabria. One doesn't come across much 'terraza española' in the south, but this may well be because around the likes of Seville they improvidently hacked down most of the trees in order to build their gargantuan galleons.

The Guatemalan version has a number of perhaps local idiosyncrasies such as cúpolas, campanas and brick vaults all of which can be problematic in the environment: quakes, dampness, exuberant tropical insect life and so on.

Meanwhile, a contemporary visitor to Antigua Guatemala could be mistaken for thinking that the conquistadors built their homes with internal patios so that they could live around courtyards filled with lush tropical vegetation, trickling fountains and so on, but this could not be further from the truth. All the pot plants and climbers are a far more recent affectation.

And so I have been led to wonder whether there might be a kind of reverse colonisation of the building style here, rather like the way the Maya use the steps outside certain key churches around the country (i.e. a bit like the steps leading up to their ancient temples.)

For the 'original' peoples of this land once lived (and many in the most rural areas continue to live) in extended family groups within compounds made up of several single-roomed dwellings.

'The walls of these dwellings are constructed with wooden posts and lime marl (more recently with cement blocks), and roofed with palm thatch or other readily available materials. These buildings are built around an open patio space, usually in the form of a quadrangle, to provide privacy from the prying eyes of neighbours. In many Maya villages, the kitchen is a separate building made of lighter materials, to allow free circulation around the smoky fire. Tools and foodstuffs are often kept in separate storerooms.' (From A Forest of Kings.)

These 'open spaces' surrounded by individualised dwellings sound rather familiar, and were perhaps more likely to contain vegetation than the internal courtyards plotted by the Spanish.