[Robin McAlpine Blog] We sacrifice, and so we endure

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We sacrifice, and so we endure

Catching up with the news having been away on holiday for two weeks is undoubtedly depressing. I won’t go over why because basically depressing is just the news these days. But to help with that depression my mind turns to a book I read on holiday which was itself deeply depressing – but with a core message of hope.

That message is a simple one that we will do well to remember in these dark days; that which is good in the world which is under assault will endure. It will. It doesn’t go away. Whatever looks like it might be lost, it will not be lost completely.

The book is called Freedom and Death and is written by Nikos Kazantzakis. I was in Greece on holiday (we have extended family there) and as always I take books relevant to the place I’m going and so Freedom and Death, which I’d never read but knew it to be one of the great works of 20^th century European literature, went on the list. It was a tough choice but one I don’t regret.

The book is the story of an uprising in Crete in the 1880s. Crete had been invaded and colonised by the Ottoman Empire for nearly two centuries and the relations and tensions between the Christian and Muslim communities may have been complicated but not so much so that they didn’t lead to regular uprisings. In fact, they kicked off every ten or 20 years.

The book is depressing because, fairly early on (or if you know Greek history), you are aware that this uprising will fail. It is also depressing because frankly it is virtually an encyclopedia of the reductive idiocy of humans – if there is a character who doesn’t rush head-long into self-defeating stupidity I must have missed it.

It is a picture of human flaws and how those create our history. Everyone you care about dies or is left destitute or shamed or heartbroken or alone. Much blood is spilt for what seems to be no reason – and yet that is not how the Palikare (informal Cretan resistance fighters) see it.

There is a stirring speech in the book about how no blood is shed in vain. It argues that Crete will endure and that one day Crete will be free because of the willingness of the people of Crete to nourish the soil with their own blood. It is the blood spilt by those who went before that makes the next battle possible. In a willingness to sacrifice themselves, the hope for Crete is found, the ability to believe that people will not give up.

Something close to right and wrong endures and will endure, because that is the human condition – to know what is right, to fail to achieve it but to keep trying anyway.

Actually a lot of the bloodshed in this book is utterly stupid. I can take the point that our willingness to sacrifice is a crucial aspect of our determination to win, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t find myself shouting at various characters ‘OK, let your blood be spilled, but not because you started a war before you had secured the weapons you need’.

Yet the principle stands. It is the determination of people to fight even when they are losing that means their people endure. The only way to cease to exist is to stop fighting. That is what I think when I look at the world just now.

Palestine will endure, because there are enough people in Palestine who will not submit to Israeli Ziofascism, who will stay on their land because it is the land of their people. The settlers and the terrorists of the IDF have driven then from that land, but the land remains theirs. In their minds, in their hearts, they endure because their land endures and because their belief in their connection to that land endures.

So too with Ukraine. Ukraine has been taken as part of an empire more than once before, it is under assault by a leader who would make them part of an empire again, and yet as before, it will endure. They will live on that land and believe that land to be their land, their children’s land. It will never not be their land, their children’s land. Therefore Ukraine will endure.

In smaller ways, it is hard to see how the independence movement could have done more harm to itself than the harm it has done since 2014. We have marched willingly into a wilderness of our own making and it is bare and dry and inhospitable, and we can see no road leading us out.

And yet the cause of independence will endure, as it always has. It will endure because people will it to endure. We, the wounded, have not been bayonetted as erstwhile Labour grandee Ian Davidson predicted. He predicted that, after one failure, we would be so weak they could simply wipe the cause from the face of the nation.

It was Ian Davidson who didn’t endure. It was he who was swept away by the enduring belief in Scotland’s freedom. And yet he stood inside a Labour Party which has now made him look like a socialist firebrand so far to the right has Starmer’s Labour moved.

And so in this, it is Ian Davidson who will endure – or his beliefs. Because the fate of egalitarian Labour has not been sealed, it is only deferred. You can look backwards centuries and you will always find those who were fighting for what we would now call ‘social justice’.

Equally, if you look over time, you’ll note that social justice has been winning, pretty convincingly. The rule of law is under assault from Trump and his wannabe fascists, from Starmer and his wannabe authoritarians, from a Scottish establishment that has replaced abiding by the law with a mantra about ‘learning lessons’. They think they are getting away with it, but the law will endure.

That does not mean that change will necessarily be quick, or soon. That is up to us. It does not mean everyone who should be punished will be punished. On the face of it there are a significant proportion of hospital managers who should be occupying prison space next to a not insignificant number of politicians and what seems like countless corporate leaders (even I forget that we should still be seeing criminal trials over Grenfell).

Not quick, not comprehensive, but the future will come for those who believe it won’t. I bet Jimmy Saville thinks he got away with it. Sturgeon does. They’re both wrong. Because something close to right and wrong endures and will endure, because that is the human condition – to know what is right, to fail to achieve it but to keep trying anyway.

We will endure so long as we are determined to endure, and while wrong will win many battles, right will never cede the war

That which feels like it is being lost will, if you feel the loss enough, endure. Your sense of loss is in fact the very continuity of the thing you fear you are losing. It is your sense of loss that keeps it alive, your sense of right and wrong that gives it definition and shape.

At the moment it is too easy to feel despairing. My return to find that Swinney’s SNP sat on its hands and allowed Palestine Action to be banned without a fight ought to have shocked me but let’s be honest, Swinney is the sell-out’s sell-out. I’d be amazed if 90 per cent of his party aren’t disgusted, and so, in time, they will endure, not Swinney.

The housing crisis is a conflagration eating away at the lives of young adults, but our houses endure and our right to live in them without extortion will return. Our climate is killing us but somehow we will endure, like our planet will endure. Somehow we will continue.

But not ‘just because’. Not because you hope it is true. It takes that sacrifice, that nourishing the soil with your own blood (though may that blood always be metaphorical). I know you want to look away from the news. Don’t. That is your suffering to bear for our collective future. It is your anger that will birth the new.

I know many of you are exhausted by activism in a Scotland whose ruling classes positively bristles with animosity towards activists. Why can’t you sit still while we run your lives, they ask? Because you’re making a terrible mess of it and we will not tolerate it is our answer. Not just in whispers and moans but in our actions. We will stand against you.

In the end, this perspective is what I took most from the book. Before the start of its pages is at least 15,000 years of human habitation of Crete. After the last pages of the book it is little more than ten years before the Ottomans are forced off the island and the process of reunification of Greece begins.

So yes, in the pages of the book are suffering and loss and defeat and it is at times painful to read. Just remember, we are living in those pages of our own book, and they come to an end. We will endure so long as we are determined to endure, and while wrong will win many battles, right will never cede the war. Not completely. Not forever.

This is how I can come back to work and tolerate this – because I cannot tolerate this. My focus will endure because what’s the alternative, because what else are we to do? Submit? That I will not do. And, if enough of us refuse to submit, a new future is born, beyond these pages.

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