Newportonian in Georgia escape

Red menace

The nightmare of Georgia is brought vividly home with news that Newport woman, Catherine Philpott  was trapped in the town of Batumi. She is Chair of the Newport Kutaisi twinning associataion and was visiting friends there.

The British Embassy drove her to the Turkish Border and put her on a bus to Trabzon. She is still on it as far as we know but should get a flight from there sometime today. Catherine is very active in Caerleon and Newport life. As well as her work with the Georgian twinning she has leading roles in the Celf Caerleon Arts festival and in the Newport West Labour party. We all look forward to her safe return.

Today’s news is very disturbing.  Russian troops have advanced outside of South Ossetia into territory that is indisputably Georgian. Putin is making headway in the propaganda battle. Russian troops are described as 'peacekeepers fighting genocide.' That is not the situation. It is far more complex.

Georgia is no match for the Red Army. If Russia annex South Ossetia and Abkhazia, fear will spread throughout all the independent states that were formally part of the Soviet Union. If there is no effective challenge to them, it will be seen as weakness and they will find excuses to advance their empire throughout their previous sphere of influence.

Russia still resents its loss of influence with the peeling away of their satellite states. Their new immense wealth is already a powerful colonising force. There is no military muscle to challenge the Red Army on any of their borders.

A demoralized, broken-backed American Government is unlikely to be a match for Putin. If Gori is seized, Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn could be next. All the Baltic States have Russian minorities who have festering grievances. Putin would be delighted to exploit them with more 'peacekeepers.'

Nation's giant

One of my regular blog correspondents ‘Jolly Roger’ this morning wrote this monstrous calumny about Saunders Lewis, one of the giants of the Welsh nation.

"This is the bloke, who saw that it was fit,
To leave English children right in the shit.
When Nazi bombers were flattening their house.
Lewis said "Keep 'em out's what I espouse".
This nasty and bitter Nationalist vulture,
Said "Keep 'em out, they'll pollute the culture".
He was prepared to see children die.
In order to support his 'cultural' lie."

Even though I am used to political spite, Jolly Roger’s opinion is a shocker. I knew Saunders Lewis well. He was my tutor in university. That was a high point in my life. Unlike the monster described, I remember him as a writer of genius and a kind and an inspirational teacher. He was also a delightful and amusing companion. The man I knew does not fit into this ugly and absurd caricature of a child murderer.

Along with a clergyman and a teacher, Saunders Lewis started a small fire at a bombing school at Penllyn, and then they gave themselves up to the police.  Snowdonia was to be used for bombing practice. Two other sites in Northumberland and Dorset had been rejected after local protests had been considered.

UK Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin refused to consider the case presented by Wales and backed by a petition with half a million names on it. Saunders Lewis wrote that the UK government was intent upon turning one of the 'essential homes of Welsh culture, idiom, and literature' into a place for promoting a barbaric method of warfare'.

The trial at Caernarfon, with a Welsh jury, failed to agree on a verdict and the case was sent to the Old Bailey in London. The "Three" were sentenced to nine months' imprisonment in Wormwood Scrubs, and on their release they were greeted as heroes by fifteen thousand Welsh people at a pavilion in Caernarfon.

The bombing school was never used and Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, was born out of grievance. Sad that a symbolic act of justified protest should be mis-represented in doggerel seventy years later.

Comments

[Jolly Roger]

Monstrous calumny? Phew, that's a bit strong,
Especially as none of what I've said was wrong.
You seem to seek to airbrush the past,
It seems what I've stated has made you aghast.
Lewis, the fan of Hitler and Il Duce,
Was just too National Socialist smoochy.
At no time have I accused him of murder,
But if you like, I'll go a bit furder.

Lewis, and his National Socialist mates,
Were willing to leave these kids to their fates.
Prepared to see them suffer the bombing,
As long as to Wales they weren't forthcoming.
Polluters of 'culture', those were the words,
Used by these National Socialist turds.
Against these innocent British kids.
Nationalist morals had just reached the skids.

I accept Saunders Lewis' literary merit,
Which Wales is fortunate to inherit.
But I'm afraid that he's blotted his political book.
With his 'pacifist' deed which made him a crook.
Just a "small fire" I hear you explain,
Just like the one in old Pudding Lane.
His 'pacifist' flames were not meant to hurt,
They were just a National Socialist advert.

And whilst you may mock my doggerel tones.
At least it's put some flesh on the bones,
Of the truth of Plaid's murkier history,
Which, to those who seek, is devoid of mystery.
It's all the truth, there's no denying.
Or are you directly accusing me of lying.
You have sought to play down Saunders Lewis's sins,
Perhaps you should change your rose-tinted bins.

"Sad that an act of justified protest"?
What on earth do you mean? Do you have the remotest,
Idea of what you're actually saying?
Justification negates lawful obeying.
Are you saying that if I'm sick of dissembly,
I can burn down our useless National Assembly?
If I were to do so, Heaven forfend me,
Can I be assured that you would defend me?

[Huw O'Sullivan]

It gets difficult if you choose to look at what people thought of the leadership of other countries when their information was less than it would later be, after all Churchill admired both Mussolini and Hitler early on.

Perhaps Jolly Roger has been reading up on the BNP views on Plaid, could that be his political affiliation do we think?

Of course Churchill changed his views.
On those two dictators at least
However in 1943, when the Germans wanted to exchange German civilians who had been interned by the British at the start of the war for 5,000 Jewish children in German controlled lands, the British refused that offer on the grounds that those children were not citizens of the British Empire.

Perhaps we can have more 3rd rate rhyming for that.

[paulflynn]

History will judge the act as a justified token civil disobedience against an unjust decision of Government. There will be a commemoration soon on the site. The evidence is that Saunders Lewis was acting for the conscience of the people of Gwynedd. Their voices were disregarded unlike those from Northumberland and Dorset. The Welsh jury refused to convict and an English jury were called into to send the three to Wormwood Scrubs for six months.

Some of the allegations against Saunders Lewis concerned comments made by characters in his plays that have attributed to him as personal views.

There are some allegiances in the 30s that embarrass all parties - including some luminaries of Venerable Labour.

You know very little about Saunders Lewis apart from some malicious party political propaganda. His contribution to the history of Wales was benign and immense.

[patrick]

"Perhaps we can have more 3rd rate rhyming for that"
Think you have been a bit hard there Huw.
Jolly is doing his best what with blogging and putting together a new Rupert the Bear book!

[Jane]

Unfortunately, I hardly know anything about Saunder-Lewis, so I looked him up on Wikipedia and found this:

In 1936, in the midst of the turmoil of Tân yn Llŷn, Lewis praised Adolf Hitler when he said "At once he fulfilled his promise — a promise which was greatly mocked by the London papers months before that — to completely abolish the financial strength of the Jews in the economic life of Germany."[50]

Do you still think this makes him a "writer of genius", Mr Flynn?

[Jane]

Sorry, typo should read: "Saunders-Lewis" not "Saunder-Lewis", but give me a bad-speller any day to a "writer of genius" who admired Hitler.

[PaulFlynn]

No Jane. You missed the rest of the Wikipedea Comment

Churchill and Lloyd - George also said foolish supportive things about Hitler. Churchill was voted the greatest ever Englishman.

"However, within the context of the 1930s, other UK politicians of other parties offered endorsements for fascist leaders. In 1933 Winston Churchill characterized Mussolini as 'the greatest lawgiver among men',[51] and later wrote in his 1937 book Great Contemporaries, "If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable (as Hitler) to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations". In the same work, Churchill expressed a hope that despite Hitler's apparent dictatorial tendencies, he would use his power to rebuild Germany into a worthy member of the world community. And in August 1936, Liberal party member David Lloyd George met Hitler at Berchtesgaden and offered some public comments that were surprisingly favourable to the German dictator, expressing warm enthusiasm both for Hitler personally and for Germany's public works schemes (upon returning, he wrote of Hitler in the Daily Express as "the greatest living German", "the George Washington of Germany").

..Lewis maintained a strict neutrality in his writings through his column Cwrs y Byd in Y Faner. It was his attempt at an unbiased interpretation of the causes and events of the war.[29]

Outside of the party's initial position on the war, party members were free to choose for themselves their level of support for the war effort. Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru was officially neutral regarding involvement the Second World War, which Lewis and other leaders considered a continuation of the First World War. Central to the neutrality policy was the idea that Wales, as a nation, had the right to decide independently on its attitude towards war,[30] and the rejection of other nations to force Welshmen to serve in their armed forces.[31] With this challenging and revolutionary policy Lewis hoped a significant number of Welshmen would refuse to join the British Army.[32]

[Jane]

No, Paul. Please don’t assume that I *missed* the rest of the Wikipedia article, because I don’t assume that you *missed* the Saunders Lewis’ quote which apparently gloats over Hitler for fulfilling his promise to destroy what Saunders Lewis himself terms as: “the financial strength of the Jews in Germany.” We all know what followed next - or at least, most of us do.

In an attempt to address my previous lack of knowledge on Saunders Lewis, I also did a tiny bit more research on the man you describe as a ‘giant of Wales‘. In a matter of minutes, I found an extract from a book entitled: ‘The Culture of Fascism’ (Gottlieb & Linehan) which examines the growth of far-right fascism during the 1920s and ’30s. It features a poem that Saunders Lewis wrote about the Great Depression which reads as follows:

“Then, on Olympus, in Wall Street, nineteen-twenty-nine.
At their infinitely scientific task of guiding the profits of fate,
The gods decreed, with their feet in the Aubusson carpets,
And their Hebrew snouts in the quarter’s statistics,
That the day had come to restrict credit in the universe of gold.”

I’m no politician, but this hardly seems like a *neutral* position in my humble opinion, Paul.

I also find it a very curious sort of ‘pacifist’ who can find praise for militaristic dictators. Incidentally, if, as a nationalist, his failure to say a bad word against Hitler was only in the interests of trying to assert Welsh independence from England - did he ever, therefore consider that somewhere like Poland, for instance, might have also liked to retain its national independence (for which countless incredibly brave Poles had been fighting and dying for, for centuries)?

Yes, we speak with the benefit of hindsight, but an individual who buys into Nazi-propagated lies such as the “financial strength of the Jews in Germany” and uses ridiculously, vile hate-speak purporting to describe the “Hebrew snouts” of Jewish traders on Wall Street takes things on to a whole new level to those misguided observers who marvelled at the false ‘economic recovery’ of those public works schemes by which trains suddenly ran on time and futuristic autobahns rapidly sprang up all made possible, of course, through Nazi-Fascist corporate state slave labour. And, the gap between a Welsh version of Oswald Mosely is wider still from those trusting, but ultimately betrayed appeasing politicians, whom, fair enough, like many other sane peace-loving people at that time wanted to avoid another ‘war to end all wars‘ if at all possible.

By the way, according to Gottlieb and Linehan, he was also a big fan of Maurice Barres. Looked him up on Wikipedia, too - you bet I did!

I’m sorry Paul, but from the miniscule amount of information I’ve been able to glean on this apparently hate-filled man, at the moment I can only think of one four-letter word to sum up Saunders Lewis and, believe you me, it sure ain’t “giant”!

[PaulFlynn]

Please pursue your inquiries Jane up to the war and beyond, Before the war it was acceptable to express views that are hateful to us now. Among others who shared Lewis' views were G K Chesterton, Yeates, TS Eliot and many other literary figures. The quote you mentioned was referenced on this website.

You make no comment about Churchill or Lloyd George. If they are judged on their views of the 30s they would be classed by you as pariahs too. That would again be a distorted judgment. I refrain from mentioning some heroes of the left who flirted with fascism.

Why not read some of his works? Or perhaps work out why he went to prison. I was there in the thirties and forties. Were you?

[Jane]

No, I admit that wasn't around in the thirties and forties, Paul but I do have a lot of respect for you and your generation and the things that you had to go through. I also find your website and blog very interesting and informative and, obviously, it goes without saying that you're a person who shares none of the hateful views that Saunders Lewis sadly expressed in that poem.

I'm sorry if I came across as a bit aggressive in my last post, but equally I was genuinely shocked at the intensity of some of the ridiculously bigoted sentiments used in the poem that I found. Then again, I didn't know him personally as you did and so I may very well just be seeing the bad side of his character.

Yes, I've never read any of his other stuff or still know very much about him so I'll make an effort to find out more - nobody's perfect and almost everyone's got a skeleton in the cupboard (metaphorically-speaking - not literally hopefully!), although at the moment, with the impression that I got, the bad side of Saunders Lewis seems to outweigh the good.

I suppose I could liken him a bit to someone like Richard Wagner who was obviously a musical genius whether you like his music or not (personally, I do happen to like some of his stuff). Yet, at the same time, although he undoubtedly wrote some beautiful music, Wagner had an extreme hatred for Jewish people and was intensely xenophobic - and years after his death he was also famous for being Hitler's favourite composer.

It really freaks me out when people who are creative, imaginative, with seemingly have a mind of their own and at least some degree of sensitivity can be so easily sucked into totally illogical and ultimately destructive ideologies.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to respond to my opinions even though we differ a bit on this - I really do appreciate that.

[PaulFlynn]

Thanks Jane for your comment and your kind remarks. The caricature as presented by Jolly Roger is an untruth. History will judge him. I believe there is commemoration soon of the bombing school fire.

Drop in again on the site. You are very welcome