The Angry Exile: Mr Strangebloke, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love... George Monbiot?

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Thursday 7 April 2011

Mr Strangebloke, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love... George Monbiot?

No, don't worry. I haven't stopped worrying and there's no danger of me making a carbon friendly pedalo with which to cross oceans in an ecological sound way to bring George flowers. Still, with his growing... er, well, there's no other word but reasonableness towards nuclear power (blogged all over the place a couple of weeks or so back) I am starting to wonder if he's been treated just a little harshly and feel obliged to give him a little respect. Of course, if I was one of the committed ecolytes of one or other leader of the Green Cause, perhaps even Georgie himself, I might have read his latest thoughts in increasing horror and now be wondering if a close examination might find a little X on the back of his neck.

Over the past fortnight I've made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.

Fuck me sideways with a broken fuel rod, did he actually just say that or are we dreaming? Hang on...

/headdesk

Nope. It's real.

I began to see the extent of the problem after a debate last week with Helen Caldicott, the world's foremost anti-nuclear campaigner. ...

In the debate she made some striking statements about the dangers of radiation. I asked for the sources. Caldicott's response has profoundly shaken me.

First she sent me nine documents: newspaper articles, press releases and an advertisement. None were scientific publications; none contained sources for the claims she had made.

I hate to say it, George, but... no, you know what, I think I'll come back to it later.

But one of the press releases referred to a report by the US National Academy of Sciences, which she urged me to read. I have now done so. It supports none of the statements I questioned; in fact, it strongly contradicts her claims about the health effects of radiation.

And then of course there's the c-word.

For the past 25 years anti-nuclear campaigners have been racking up the figures for deaths and diseases caused by the Chernobyl disaster, and parading deformed babies like a mediaeval circus. They now claim that 985,000 people have been killed by Chernobyl, and that it will continue to slaughter people for generations to come. These claims are false.

Again, another quick look at the by-line is very hard to resist at this point. George Monbiot is now saying, as many pro-nuke people that George himself has opposed have said before him, that the deaths caused by the world's worst nuclear accident were vastly inflated.

Of the workers who tried to contain the emergency at Chernobyl, 134 suffered acute radiation syndrome; 28 died soon afterwards. Nineteen others died later, but generally not from diseases associated with radiation. The remaining 87 have suffered other complications, including four cases of solid cancer and two of leukaemia.

In the rest of the population there have been 6848 cases of thyroid cancer among young children - arising ''almost entirely'' from the Soviet Union's failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with the radioactive iodine isotope 131.

So a relative handful of deaths and overall fewer than 7,000 people made ill, as much as 98% of them unnecessarily. Props to George Monbiot for being so frank about this, though I'll knock off a few points for not getting in a remark about tinfoil headgear at this point.

Caldicott told me that the UN committee's work on Chernobyl was ''a total cover-up''.

These are UN deer responsible for the mind control rays used on the tourists

George doesn't point out either that such a cover up would necessarily need the Ukraine on board, and it's hardly in their interests to play this down. There are still real problems there and they need money, and the Ukraine is not exactly filthy rich. If the UN was sweeping it under the carpet they'd be calling bullshit as loud as they possibly can.

Caldicott pointed me to a book, which claims that 985,000 people have died as a result of the disaster. Translated from Russian and published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, this is the only document that looks scientific and appears to support the wild claims made about Chernobyl.

A devastating review in the journal Radiation Protection Dosimetry points out that the book achieves this figure by the remarkable method of assuming that all increased deaths from a wide range of diseases - including many which have no known association with radiation - were caused by the Chernobyl accident.

Incidentally, if the idea sounds familiar it might be because it's close to anti-tobacco arguments: nobody dies of anything but whatever the particular subset of Righteous have targeted.

But then George has to go and spoil it all.

Failing to provide sources, cherry-picking studies, scorning the scientific consensus, invoking a cover-up to explain it: all this is horribly familiar. These are the habits of climate-change deniers, against which the green movement has struggled valiantly, calling science to its aid. It is distressing to discover that when the facts don't suit them, members of this movement resort to the follies they have denounced.

Oh, George, they've been at it for fucking years, which is why I stopped believing in warble gloaming back in the mid 90s. Don't you remember the late Dr Stephen Schneider explaining how it was important to emphasise the scare scenarios while avoiding mention of any doubts or holes in the theory?

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

This despite the fact that he much later conceded that man made warble gloaming isn't actually proven, though he personally still believed in it because, reading between the lines, the evidence was convincing enough for him. So is that the kind of cherry picking and distortion we're talking about, or is it different from peddling exaggeration and bullshit about the risks involved in nuclear power generation? Oh, and you missed out character assassination, suppression of contrary opinion, and - and this is quite a biggie - banging on about fucking consensus as if what's objectively true or false is subject to some kind of white coat vote or something. Look, George, this is known as an appeal to numbers and is a well known fallacy. To put it another way, suppose every scientist in the world agreed that according to their theory gravity makes objects fall at precisely - precisely - 10m/sec². It's a nice, neat and above all plausible value. But suppose that you yourself then got a long tape measure, an accurate stopwatch, something to drop and somewhere with different heights to drop it from, and you then repeatedly measured the value at 9.807 m/sec². Do the assertions of hundreds of thousands of scientists count for more than that of one person, even when that person has taken the trouble to actually measure it? Well, George, if you value scientific consensus above scientific method then yes, yes they do, but you must not pretend that consensus is necessarily the same thing as objective truth.

Historically, George, the consensus has got things completely arse about face on many occasions. At one time there was a consensus that everything revolved around the Earth, and those who said otherwise were literally treated as heretics. The consensus was of course, wrong. There was a consensus that light travelled through something called the luminiferous aether, which lasted decades after first the Michelson-Morley experiment cast serious doubt on it and then after Einstein's work showed there was no reason to think there was any such thing at all. There was a consensus, or rather two, that the world was shaped either by volcanoes or by periodic floods depending on which side of the argument you were on. Neither consensus allowed for glaciation, much less continental drift pushing up mountain ranges. There was a consensus that the universe was fixed and had always been as it is now (or since it was made by the deity of one's choice), despite Newton's laws suggesting back in the 17th century, had anyone noticed, that it might either be expanding or contracting but the one thing it certainly couldn't be doing is sitting still. Today the consensus is a fixed speed of light, plate tectonics, the Big Bang and that the only things revolving around our planet are its own moon and anything we stick up there. Consensus has a track record of being wrong, do you see? And that means we should still take that with a pinch of salt, or rather a pinch of healthy scepticism. We certainly should when served up a theory based as much or more on computer simulations of how the climate is thought to work than anything else.

You were doing so well, George, but I suppose two Damascene conversions is a little too much to ask. Still, credit where it's due. Coming around to a balanced position on nuclear power is a pretty big deal.