Easing the Spring

#19

‘They call it easing the Spring’. The phrase comes from a poem written in 1941 by Henry Reed[1]. Confined to a military classroom, World War II army conscripts are being drilled in the mysteries of the bolt-action rifle. While the instructor drones on about upper and lower sling swivels and opening the breech and sliding the bolt rapidly backwards and forwards, Reed’s attention wanders to the Japonica in the neighbouring gardens where he imagines a different droning;

The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:

     They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy

If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,

And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,

Which in our case we have not got; and the almond blossom

Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,

      For to-day we have naming of parts.

The poem uses two contrasting voices. The first tediously reciting the deadly anatomy of the standard issue .303 Enfield rifle, the second celebrating springtime in the natural world. And the ’spring’ being eased is both the season of awakening and the mechanical linkage by which the bolt opens the breech, thereby loading the next round from the ammunition-clip below.

I hear again this poem whenever ‘The Arab Spring’ gets mentioned – and that, at the moment – is practically every hour, on the hour. If only any of us knew how easing the Arab Spring might be achieved. Use of the term ‘spring’ is more than a convenient marker for the time of year. For me, it carries an intentional reference back to the Prague Spring of 1968 - when it first became possible to imagine that the Stalinist hegemony over Eastern Europe might one day be repudiated by the collective discontent of the people who lived under it.

When my children were much younger, they played with a deceptively simple device which consisted of a helical spring that could stretch and bounce. Our house – then as now - seems to consist mainly of stairs and the spring could be made to progress down a long flight of stairs, tumbling end-over-end with a seemingly unstoppable deliberation. You could hear its slightly chilling rattle as the pent-up steel coils stretched, lunged and then re-formed themselves entirely with the aid of gravity and their own impounded energy. That long-lost spring knew only one direction of travel, once released it could not be made to reverse.

The ‘Arab Spring’ – aka ‘The Jasmine Revolution’ – began with the suicide of a single Tunisian street-trader in December 2010. This led to a protest demonstration, which was broken-up by the police, and then another and another… The Arab Spring and our lost toy both seem to gain momentum from one place and let it carry them to another. Events are suddenly able to bounce across borders impelled by the idea that authority can be challenged by sheer weight of numbers. Our toy was reliant upon gravity to travel down a flight of stairs. Long established dictators in Tunisia, then Libya, then Egypt, then Bahrain, then Syria and Yemen have sought to defy gravity with results we are still seeing. The agonies are particularly prolonged because ‘opposition’ parties have been cruelly suppressed for so long.

One crystal clear advantage of the parliamentary democracies is that they have, in waiting, an alternative government ready to take power when the incumbents are removed. If – like Libya, Egypt, Syria etcetera – a country has a regime which for decades has stunned, silenced, murdered, imprisoned, tortured, exiled or ‘disappeared’ its opponents then, when the regime totters, there is only a cauldron of revenge into which it can fall. What happens after the unspeakable Gaddafi and the chinless but aptly named Basher al-Assad is anyone’s guess. This weekend, tanks of the Syrian army are boldly saving the people of Jisr al-Shughour from – err – the – err – people of - err - Jisr al-Shughour… and blowing away any dissident crops, cattle or olive groves that try to resist.

A few days ago I heard on Radio 4 the words of ‘Abu Sham’, (surely not his real name) a Syrian protestor talking on a cell-phone after Friday prayers. With a voice of despair Abu was saying, “We are afraid to speak even to ourselves”. It could be that he spoke those words at the lowest trough in the waves of protest. Since then, the oppression has continued but now it is possible that a tipping-point may have been reached. Repression by the Syrian regime has been so harsh, so brutal and has continued for so long that it has paradoxically strengthened the resistance rather than crushing it. Dare we believe that oppression only succeeds in the short run? Apart from the grim recognition that in the long run we are all dead, is it possible that the spring will be eased for Abu Sham before much longer?

Most countries suffer from a dearth of wisdom in their public life and nowhere suffers more than the Middle East. Wise men have been in notably short supply in the politics of that region ever since a certain fabled trio of publicity-happy star-gazers wandered through about two thousand years ago. We wouldn't call them 'Wisemen' [or Wisewomen] would we, if they were the norm? They are scarce, but not entirely unknown. One sadly-missed soothsayer was the late Abba Eban. He was not an Arab; he was a Jew – a South African by birth and an Israeli citizen by choice. He is sometimes remembered for his 1973 observation at a failed – (obviously!) - Peace Conference in Geneva:

‘Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’.

This clever remark might now more usefully be re-written as;

‘Authoritarian Governments never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity’

Eban is also remembered for what he said at the time of the Six-Day war in 1967. When the prospects for peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis were at least as bleak as they are today, Eban remained confident that one day a lasting peace would be achieved. As he put it:

“Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.”

This applies to all of us, not just the Palestinians and the Israelis. No one is exempt. Al-Assad is busy exhausting the alternatives. For the sake of the Syrians, we have to hope that wisdom will descend upon their country sooner rather than never. And if a blinding light should illuminate a humble Bus Lane on the road to Damascus, who knows where it might lead?

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[1]  ‘Lessons of the War, 1. NAMING OF PARTS’ by Henry Reed from A Map of Verona, Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1946.