Godless in Eden - Fay Weldon

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in, not a failure to opt out, and compulsory parental leave (both parents) extends for six years (that would soon cut the birth rate): thirty million is probably a good workable level for the nation. In which school is not compulsory, but in which TV and film fiction is banned by order of the censor general: too much fiction is bad for you. So boredom, not the law, drives the young to school. In which people have enough confidence to see that the cloning of people is a perfectly possible route for humanity’s future. If nature creates the Taleban can human ingenuity do so much worse? Courage, courage!

      

      Okay, I’m joking.

      

      Failing all this, I’d settle for one little simple change in the law. That someone who leaves their employment because they’re expected to do something immoral or disgusting isn’t then declared to be wilfully unemployed and ineligible for unemployment or housing benefit. Employees once had the courage to blow whistles: now it is too difficult. It’s a pity. Societies are self-righting, given just half a chance.

      ‘Oh well, business as usual,’ was my mother’s sighing response to news of NATO’s bombing of Serbia. ‘How the menfolk love a war.’

      Look at the pictures coming out of the Kosovo war. What do you see? Men with blood lust. Men in uniforms, waving guns like phalluses: men in iron tanks, pounding and crushing. The men have got war fever again. Men launching cruise missiles, smart bombs; men having a great time with the toys of death, all the hard metal technology of killing and destruction. Older men back home proving they’re still virile and brave, spouting noble sentiments, sending young men to their deaths. This village must be destroyed to save it! Slobodan Milosevic, the old Stalinist hardman, happy to face death rather than dishonour. Into the bunker like Hitler, while the nation collapses into rubble around him. No-one’s going to give in, no-one’s going to back down, males antlers are locked.

      What else do you see in the pictures out of Kosovo? Women and children suffering, of course, the natural female sacrifice to the God of War. What fun the men have, stampeding them from their homes. Not just ethnic cleansing, domestic cleansing, atavistic, of the pitiable and pitiful, the too young or too old to breed.

      

      Couldn’t we perhaps get a gender perspective on what’s going on? This is the War of Lewinsky’s Mouth, of Tony proving his virility. All the electorate-friendly girlie touchy-feeling sentiments gone like a flash: let’s show some muscle here! Let’s forget about the Euro, about the collapsing Peace Accord, about education, education, education, every Scottish school a computer, the composition of the Second House; all that domestic stuff’s so boring, let’s be men, let’s bring Milosevic to heel.

      

      It’s enough to turn you back into a feminist, holding hands around the US cruise missile site at Greenham, chanting take the toys from the boys: that was when the wimmin were fed up with living in the terror of nuclear threat.

       ‘Take the toys from the boys

       Take their hands off the guns,

       Take their fingers from the trigger,

       Take the toys from the boys.’

      But that was then and this is now. The trouble with the gender perspective at the turn of the millennium is that the sex divide is not so clear. Women are men too. They wear trousers, join the Army, beam blondely from tanks: Madeleine Allbright initiates the hard line: Clare Short declares pacifists to be fascists, Blair’s Babes bay for blood. White feathers are back in fashion. And our reconditioned, therapised men have discovered their anima. They run the Aid agencies, care and share, fund raise for refugees, train the army to keep the peace and not to kill (SAS excepted), pick up the pieces while others make the mess.

      

      But that’s in the NATO countries. In the former Yugoslavia men stay men and women stay women. The God of War found his opening in the gap between the cultures, alighted laughing with his uranium tipped, incendiary wings, fanned the flames of discontent, cried havoc! and that was it.

      

      Once unleashed the dogs of war are hard to recall, no matter what mantra you chant as you let them go. ‘In the name of humanity.’ ‘An ethical war.’ ‘They deserve it!’ If you’re one of the women and children, does the nationality of the bomb that kills you bother you? Whether it was meant or accidental, justified or not, or who apologises? It’s the end for you.

      Once we send in the ground troops, albeit on the side of good, will the uprooted and dispossessed ever be able to return to Kosovo? The favoured weapons of destruction today are tipped with depleted uranium, the metal that’s left over when the radioactive element has been extracted to make even more fearful weapons. Depleted uranium (DU to its friends) is cheap and plentiful and safe, just so dense that when fired with enormous speed, as it is, it pulverises itself and the first thing it meets, without the bother of explosives. A mist of heavy metal rises and falls, permanently poisoning the earth. Such missiles are already being launched over Kosovo. When a shell meets the metal of a tank that turns to dust as well, and falls in a pinkish mist, mixed as it is with human blood. Depleted uranium was used in Southern Iraq in the Gulf War: the level of leukaemia in the children who live there is now, they say, equal to that of Hiroshima. Already, in the heart of Europe, the Danube is polluted, oil and toxic waste runs free.

      

      What form exactly does the ‘unconditional surrender’ we now require take? Are we dogs, that one has to roll over on its back with its legs in the air, to stop the other biting? Wars are not for ‘winning’ any more. The victor has to clear up the mess, pay the costs of the conquered too. Serbia may be punished for electing the wrong man, just as Germany once was, but Serbians can’t be left to starvation and epidemic, any more than can the Kosovan refugees. Massive aid will be required to get the country on its feet again, under the ruler we impose. (Democracy being what we say it is, not what you thought it was.)

      

      NATO, having destroyed Serbia’s infrastructure from the air, and poisoned Kosovo on the ground, will have to follow through its humanitarian gesture by itself taking in the dispossessed, in that same proportion as its members contributed to the war. We can do no less. And the 850,000 Serbian refugees still on the Bosnian border, whom no doubt Milosevic meant to resettle in Kosovo, will have to be dispersed and settled too, with us. We are as responsible, one by one, for the actions of NATO as the Serbians are for those of Milosevic, and we too must put up with the consequences.

      

      But can it really be thought that Milosevic as an individual is to blame for the war, and not the sour dynamics of ethnic and religious antagonisms, cultural incompatibilities, and the legacies of Stalinism, which our bombs can only acerbate? The long-term way through, oddly enough, may lie with gender politics. The way our own macho-war-speak collapses at the drop of a hat into head-girl-speak sounds absurd but may be healthy.

       Question: Why did we bomb the cigarette factory?

      Answer: They may have been making arms and anyway we don’t approve of smoking.

      Let the new Kosovo and Serbia Protectorates stand firm on equal opportunities, equal pay, and emotional and sexual correctness, until the politics of testosterone wither away. In the meantime let Blair and Clinton put their mouths where there bombs are and call a summit meeting with Milosevic, since he’s taken to playing Stalin, the greatest ethnic disperser of them all. Blair as Churchill. Clinton as Roosevelt. Yalta worked okay, didn’t it?

       The Way We Live As Women

      Two

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