For Whom My Children Grieve

  The blown sand heaps on me, that none may learn Where I am laid for whom my children grieve . . . O wings that beat at dawning, ye return Out of the desert to your young at eve! – Rudyard Kipling –   Karen Knudsen Copenhagen She looks literally dead, Anna thought as…

Che Guevara T-shirts and Jihadi John

        “That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.” This quote could so easily belong on the lips of any political strategist amongst Democrats and Republicans…

Bombing Bogota

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlfoqbwSa0g   Is this the face of the conservation movement? Is this how this Enlightenment struggle is going to be fought? 31 people injured, 12 of them women, most, presumably, with families, children, their own hopes and ambitions. Should they be the victims of a protest? Should anyone be a victim in the struggle for…

Our Poems for the Victims of Nice

Lately, over the summer holidays, I have been writing poetry everyday. But when I woke up this morning and heard the news of yet another devastating, inhuman, ridiculous attack on beautiful France… I found myself speechless.   84 people killed. 10 of them children. Some of the children who survived will grow up to be orphans. All…

Why I Write About Happiness Not Terrorism

    “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” Ernest Hemingway   As artists and reflective human beings we have to find our place in the world. For some its easy. If you’re Nadine Gordimer you will naturally write about apartheid South Africa. If you’re Khaled Hosseini Afghanistan will make you. If…

Benny Hill Terrorism – A Review of The Secret Agent

  “Conrad says the two salient things about a terrorist’s mind, what motivates him, are sloth and vanity. The more I think about it, really, the more telling it is. Vanity makes you want to be famous, sloth means you’re not going to be able to do it out of exertion.” Martin Amis said this…

Paris est une fête

  In early 19th century Greece and Athens were occupied by the thankfully-extinct Ottoman Empire. In March 1821 the Greeks revolted against their Turkish oppressors and Athens fell into their hands without a fight. The entire Turkish garrison of the city retreated up the Acropolis hill and barricaded themselves within the most important temple of Western…

The Sack of Paris

In the year 1651, near the end of the English Civil War which saw the establishment of parliament’s authority and the English Commonwealth, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes published his great work the Leviathan. In this seminal work, comparable in statesmanship to Machiavelli’s The Prince, Hobbes introduced the concept of a safeguarding state that enables its…