Analysis: Pioneers of truth and territory

Friday August 09, 2002 04:18

by McMean

Intrepid, courageous, fearless, truthful, challenging were just some of the words that struck me as I listened to two thrilling lectures poles apart in terms of content but linked in terms of interest at the West Belfast Feile on Monday afternoon in St. Mary's College on Belfast's Falls Road.

The first lecture was given by Johnathan Shackelton and the
second was given by journalist Bob Fisk. Shackelton spoke about
his cousin Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackelton and Bob Fisk
asked the dangerous and unpopular question: "September 11th: Ask
who did it but don't ask why."

John McKenna who accompanied Johnathan Shackelton set the scene
for the lecture by out lining the history of the Shackelton
family's Irish roots. They lived in a small village in Kildare
called Ballytor.

Mc Kenna emphasised their 'separateness', which was due in large
measure to the fact that the family were members of the
'Religious Society of Friends' or more popularly known as
'Quakers', given their propensity to 'quake' at prayer meetings,
a little gem of information unknown to me before. Ballytor we
were also told is a Quaker village untouched by the passage of
time and the Quakers arrived in Ireland from England in the
1600s.

The Shackeltons lived their lives as Quakers. They followed a
religious doctrine whose teachings instil a desire to compromise
rather than quarrel with others, to motivate people to discover
and then use their best qualities.

These were the principles that governed Ernest Shackelton's life
and according to his cousin Johnathan they were the reason why he
was a great leader of men and a great explorer.

Ernest Shackelton was born in 1874, the eldest in a family of
eight sisters and one brother. He attended a local boarding
school, which was started by the Quakers and which educated
notables such as Napper Tandy, Cardinal Cullen and the
philosopher Edmund Burke.

The school took boarders in from all over the world. It was
common for boys to arrive there at four or five years old and
remain there until they left at age 18, rarely seeing their
parents. It was also sadly common for boys to die at the school
from one of the many diseases prevalent at the time.

Shackelton tried on three separate occasions to conquer
Antarctica. Each time the ice cold, biting weather conquered him
and his expedition. His first attempt was in 1897. He landed on
the ice-covered continent but blinding blizzards and perma frost
conditions forced them home. He accompanied the other famous
explorer Captain Scott on a similar journey with a similar
outcome with another Irish man from Kerry, Tom Creane.

Shackelton took the first aerial photograph of Antarctica from an
air balloon hovering precariously 500 feet above the continent.
He took a motorcar to the South Pole to pull provision-laden
sledges only to have the motorcar pulled across the ice by real
'horse power'. This strange sight we saw on the slide show.

On the 9th January 1909 he was 97miles away from achieving his
life long ambition but he turned back in the face of a sixty-hour
blizzard to save the lives of his men. His men were more
important to him. On another occasion he traversed over ice
packed land and mountains for a hundred hours in appalling
weather to save another batch of his explorers.

His ship Endurance himself and his crew were trapped by ice for
eleven months off the Antarctica coast before the ship was
finally crushed. They had no contact with the outside world.
Shackelton led them to safety. Those with him through all these
ordeals regaled him for his irrepressible spirit and his sense of
humour, which he used to entertain his crew and keep up their
moral.

Two Irishmen, Creane and Mc Carthy from Kinsale accompanied him
on his last expedition, in January 1922. He died of a heart
attack and is buried on the small Atlantic island called Sth.
Georgia, one of the Malvinas, which featured prominently in the
war between Britain and Argentina in the 1980s.

Ernest Shackelton's cousin described him as neither Irish nor
British, although he stood as a unionist candidate in Scotland.

Whatever about his nationality he has rightly earned himself a
place in the annals of pioneering explorers and his cousin has
helped put the spotlight on a relatively unknown part of our
history. Danny Morrison wittily concluded the lecture by saying
that Ireland will now be known as a land of 'Saints, Scholars and
Explorers'.

Pioneering of a different kind was offered up to several hundred
people by Bob Fisk Middle-East expert and journalist with
London's Independent newspaper.

If Johnathan Shackelton took us on a journey across the frozen
landscape of the Antarctica then Bob Fisk took us across the
frozen mindscape of some of the key players in Middle East
politics.

He has been writing about the Middle East for nearly thirty years
and spent most of that time living in Beirut in Lebanon. He lived
there during the decade long civil war when most other
journalists and foreign diplomats had left. He stayed on when
'westerners' like Belfast man Brian Keenan and ? were kidnapped
in Beirut.

He quoted a female Israeli journalist who told him that a
journalist's job was to "monitor the centres of power". Fisk does
that and more. He searches for the truth and shines a powerful
light on those dark recesses where politicians on all sides and
media moguls hide or distort reality.

In pursuit of the truth he displays fearless some might say
reckless qualities. Last December in the middle of America
bombing Afghanistan a group of Afghans whose relatives were
killed in the raids turned on him and severely beat him. A man
"wearing a Turban" rescued him he said. He could easily have been
killed.

He is one of the few journalists writing in English who has made
sense out of the political turmoil in the Middle East. He offers
up an analysis broadly based on why those living in that region
of the world view with extreme hostility western powers and in
particular America.

He repeated what he wrote shortly after the attacks on the Twin
Towers about Bin Laden's popularity across an Arab world that has
been humiliated by the west and successive American governments
since the Israeli State was set up in 1948.

Bin Laden is revered not reviled because he opposes Israeli
occupation of Palestine because he is opposed to US 'puppet'
regimes like Saudia Arabia and because he challenges the western
cultural influences in the Arab world.

He reminded us all that those suicide bombers who piloted the
planes, which were driven into the Twin Towers, didn't come from
Palestine, nor the refugee camps dotted across the region nor
from Afghanistan. They were from Saudia Arabia and from middle
class families. Yet Saudia Arabia is one of America's closest
allies.

He also reminded us that twenty years ago Bin Laden was an
American ally when he was fighting the communist occupation of
Afghanistan.

This came home to him very forcefully during one of three
meetings he had with Bin Laden in the mid-90s. He was in a cave
in a camp in the Torra-Torra Mountains of Afghanistan. The camp
was built and paid for by the CIA.

He said Bin Laden had a 'chilling self-conviction' and talked
about 'turning the US into a shadow of its former self', in part
achieved by the attacks on the Towers.

He said he was and still is pilloried by the American and English
press for suggesting that the American government's foreign
policy in the Middle East might have been behind the September
11th attacks.

This policy he said led to journalists ignoring the 'Why'
violence happened and concentrating on the 'Who' done it.

A "poverty of expression" is how he referred to a brand of
journalism which "de-contextualised" Israel's occupation of
Palestine. It led to new language shaping new concepts in the
popular mind. So Palestinian land 'occupied' is now land
'disputed' or in the words of the Associated Press land 'war
won'. The word 'neighbourhood' is frequently being used to
describe Jewish 'settlements' in Palestine.

The BBC use the sympathetic term 'targeted killings' to describe
the Israeli government's policy of state sanctioned killings.

History old and recent was he said being 'twisted' to fit
powerful political interests. He referred to the Armenian
Holocaust carried out by the Turkish regime in 1915. One and a
half million Armenians were annihilated. Today journalists were
describing this massacre as "disputed" history.

Listening to Fisk the phrase about the 'pen being mightier than
the sword' comes to mind.

He is a man of integrity who uses his formidable intellectual
powers and writing skills to tell the story as it is and not as
governments or powerful individuals would like it told.

Those journalists in Ireland and Britain who have and still are
covering the conflict here could learn quite a lot from the Fisk
school of journalism.