War and Peace

Fighting is brutal and uncivilised by definition, isn’t it? Fighters are aggressive – it’s kind of a requirement. Isn’t it? So why do traditional martial arts place such an emphasis on serenity and good character?

I’ve been studying the theory of martial arts, and a recurring theme is the philosophy of the warrior code – the idea that the true martial arts master must also be the ideal cultivated (or civilised) human. It seems almost contradictory to find such emphasis – in a martial arts manual – on pacifism. Part of most martial traditions is respect: when everyone can fight and goes armed, respect is the obvious way to avoid blood on the walls. So respect and cool-headedness is expedient, but it goes beyond that. In ‘The Art of War’ Sun Tzu places a high value on the general who plans rationally, choosing to fight on optimum ground and only when he will win. It reads as cold-blooded, but translates into effective strategy even today.

Calm confidence in the face of attack is unnerving for the attacker, which gives a psychological edge to the best poker face.

Fear freezes, anger doesn’t – this fact can save your life if you tend to rage over fright. But anger makes you rash and impairs your judgement. In a fight, you’re so marinated in adrenalin anyway, you may not notice your recklessness in time to reconsider it. Unless, of course, you can cultivate the serenity of the ideal warrior – something most traditional martial arts propose is a product of integrity and strong morals.

In the modern non-military West, we’ve lost contact with the idea of a warrior caste – and alongside that, with the warrior mindset. Martial arts have kept it far more alive, from the Japanese bushido code to the traditional Chinese salute martial artists use at the start of classes, forms and fights. Even Western fencing has its formal salute to the adversary.

As you learn to fight, you learn discipline and accountability. And surely those are cultivated, civilised traits – however at odds with our generic perception of fighting.

Pen, Sword, Words, Deeds

Do actions still speak louder than words? These days, with all the recording and playback technology available to us, words have a power and immortality long denied them. Before radio, what stuck in people’s memory was achievement – not what you promised to do, but what you did. Now, the speeches of politicians and leaders are recorded and quoted and pass into cultural vocabulary: “I have a dream,” “Never before in the field of human conflict…” and so on. So is it still true that actions speak louder and more memorably?

Why do we remember Churchill, Luther King, Kennedy, and Mandela’s words so well? Is it just a fine turn of phrase by the speechwriter, or the well-trained delivery? Is it the capture of a moment and a mood? Or is to do with timing and what happened next?

The truly memorable speeches came at turning points in history, and sometimes were – or at least appeared to be – the pivot on which events turned. Luther King’s ‘I Have A Dream’ expressed the civil rights movement of the time with an eloquence that still rings clearly (although that may be because it’s still, sadly, relevant).

Churchill’s wartime speeches stiffened British resolve to keep fighting and keep believing in victory. If Britain had fallen before America joined the war, the outcome may have been vastly different.

So the great speeches incite action, and express popular sentiment with a view to affecting policy – in other words, inciting action. We remember the speeches that worked – that had an effect. In other words, the ones that could, arguably, actually be reclassified as deeds.

I guess it is still true that actions trump words.

African Women Do Too…

Of the ten worst countries in which to be a woman, 4 are in Africa, including 2 of the top 5 (or 3, depending on which UN/Amnesty International list you read). And yet the historical accounts of powerful and military women aren’t by any means a EuroAsian phenomenon. In Northern Africa, we not only the powerful Queens of Egypt (Hatsheput, Nefertiri, Cleopatra) but also the Nubian Candaces (or Kentakes) of the Kushites. Amanirenas, who took on the might of Rome after Cleopatra’s death, to oust them from Egypt. She failed to conquer, but did manage to negotiate a favourable peace after her defeat – which must have been quite a feat of political manoevring.

She was succeeded by Amanishabheto, who led the Kushites in a series of attacks against Augustus’s attempts to tax the Kushites. In the end, the harassed Romans sued for peace.

Amanishabeto was succeeded by her daughter Amanitore, the last of the great Kushite builders, restoring temples destroyed by the Romans, and building reservoirs to ensure the  water supply for her kingdom.

Yes, all this is ancient history, and historical references are thin oon the ground, coming mostly from Roman and Greek sources, with a couple of references in the Bible (the Queen of Sheba and Tharbis, wife of Moses being the obvious ones). Is there nothing more recent?

Well, in what is now Benin, the Fon tribe had an elite group of women warriors as recently as the late 19^th century. They called them the Mino, recruited them from the royal harem and imbued them with spiritual and religious significance as well as military prowess.

The Europeans who encountered them called them the Dahomeny Amazons, and recorded their discipline and ruthlessness in battle. In the end, it was superior guns that defeated them, but even the French Foreign Legion cited their "incredible courage and audacity." 

So how on earth did Africa go from this to having some of the worst gender inequalities in the world? Second thoughts, don’t answer that.

Hooves and Harlots

It surprises me how much ink has been spent (and how many trees have given their lives) in explaining the kinks in the Ancient Greek psyche that created the Amazons. I wonder why they bothered.
I can see the argument for the Amazons to be a myth, a fiction, because a tribe of a single gender is ultimately unsustainable. But that doesn't mean the myth is down to some psychological twist any more than the myth of Centaurs is. Surely there's some space for the concept of poetic licence and hyperbole?
The Greeks were contemporary with the Celts and the Botai. The Celts tribal territories extended through Illyria, with detours via Delphi. It's extremely unlikely that the Greeks wouldn't have encountered them, and when they did, they would have been struck by the power and prominence of the women - Celtic women fought in battle, and Celtic queens had real power. Is it so outlandish that this strange set-up would have grown in the telling?
The Botai were some of the south eastern tribes of what we now call Mongolia. They would have encountered the Greeks near Macedon, Troy and the area around Byzantium. They were horse-tribes, who virtually lived in the saddle, and who needed no words or whips to steer their horses. It would have looked like a creature of one mind to a Greek merchant. Again, is it so strange to allow for the hyperbole of wonder in the tale's re-telling?
Why do we feel the need to explain everything in arcane terms when common sense ones will do? Or does that just make a better story?

Deepest Palest Africa

I wanted to write about African queens: Africa has a wealth of powerful, uncompromising women through its history. But my research was hampered by the fact that almost all the potential resources I found had a very narrow-minded agenda.

I was born in Africa. My family has lived in Africa for 200 years. I grew up in Africa, and Africa will always have a hold on me – wherever I end up. There’s something about the light, the myriad people, languages, idioms, colours, cultures, scents and sounds that will never leave me. My blood will pulse to those beats all my life.

But the people who run these websites (often themselves American) are determined to call me a foreigner, an interloper, a tourist. For them, African is black.

For me, that is a racist concept. Especially when you consider that in northern Africa, the demographic is strongly Arabic. Africa has been subject to many waves of migration both out and in, in all directions. Cleopatra wasn’t a black African – she was racially Macedonian; Ptolemy was one of Alexander the Great’s generals.

I won’t pretend the injustices committed by new arrivals against indigenous peoples never happened or weren’t serious. But there isn’t a people in history that hasn’t, at some point, been enslaved, conquered, abused. It’s just that the African slave-trade was the most recent and publicised for the Western world. And at a time when the world we know now was being formed – including some of its injustices, and the different economic development rates in Africa, Europe, IndoChina and America.

Those who point to the lack of black commercial power in South Africa as evidence of an interim government “sell-out to the white European agenda” (for European, read Western Powers) forget that for 40 years, a deeply unjust system denied the majority of South Africans education and training. The only way for the country to emerge with its economy intact was to leave its infrastructure and industry intact and attract foreign businesses back in. Without a functioning capitalist economy, South Africa would have been another Zimbabwe – yet another economic (and subsequently humanitarian) disaster on Africa’s already long list of them.

(Oh, and capitalism isn’t a white concept. It’s something that works, probably because it’s in line with human nature. Some of these sites confuse race politics with political ideologies).

In order for South Africa’s legacy of racial imbalance to be properly redressed, the country needs to take the long view, and gradually move toward a more demographically reflective business powerbase. But to force it too soon would create an economic collapse because companies would be forced to hire into powerful positions people who have not been trained (because they weren’t allowed to be). So the company either holds thumbs and hopes for the best or “double hires” – getting in other people who have been trained as well as the “window-dressing” they’ve been told they legally require to “correct the imbalances of Apartheid”. Both cost the company far more than hiring one competent person. To a large extent, “affirmative action policies” required “double hiring”.

Unless South Africa wants anarchy, war and chaos, it will take the long view. So close to Zimbabwe, most South Africans can see the downside to policies of sudden rebalancing: land-grabs, expulsions and general slaughter of productive geese while the people starve and the politicians live like oligarchs.

Girls on Film

I went to see the movie ‘Hanna’ (warning: this blog contains spoilers) and I’ve decided I don’t get it.

Hanna is a young teenage girl trained by her father (ex-CIA) to be a very efficient spy and killer. He does this because another CIA agent wants to kill them both, and will attempt this as soon as she finds out where Hanna and her father are. It’s a good action movie – chase sequences, fight scenes, a fairly minimum amount of actual gore – and I did enjoy it, as a film. Despicable villains, sympathetic supporting characters and heroes. Given all of these ingredients, the whole Galinka sub-plot becomes a bit redundant.

Yes, it gives a reason why the CIA, particularly the villainess, want Hanna dead. But as the villainess is operating outside normal protocal, the reason could have a been a lot more personal and human. All the Galinka sub-plot really does is reinforce the meme that no female could be that good a fighter or killer without being genetically mutant in some way. Dark Angel worked the same meme. Why?

I’m sure the writers weren’t deliberately thinking that way, and will doubtless point to impeccable gender-equality credentials if confronted, but the fact remains that when the hero is a killer boy, he doesn’t need to be a GM experiment. When it’s a girl, there seems to be a need to explain away her skills. This supports the patriarchal status quo in which we live, which is probably why we do it, but why support and perpetuate a lie?

While there is no hard evidence for it (due to lack of reliable records from the period) most Wing Chun practitioners accept the story of it’s founding by the nun Ng Mui and Miss Yim Wing Chun. Most Shaolin kung fu sources accept Ng Mui as one of the Legendary Five Founders. And, as I’ve tried to illustrate on this blog, there are other legendary female fighters with dazzling tactics and incredible skills – so why does the 21^st Century supposedly equal West feel the need to negate the idea that girls can be that good a warrior naturally?

Just wondering...

Liar Liar

I saw a study recently about just how inherent to our species deception is (conducted by the Psychology Dept of Univeristy of Portsmouth). Even babies lie, apparently. It's a reasonable conclusion - the animal kingdom lies as well. They say it's a sign of intelligence, which is a little bit worrying, when you think about it. But all in all, it seems Sun Tzu was stating the obvious when he said "all warfare is based on deception." According to the conclusions of the study, you can pretty much say everything is based on deception, or at least the ability to deceive.

Survival can be seen as warfare, for any species. We've pretty much removed ourselves - in the developed world at least - from the knife-edge of survival margins. We've used this inborn ability to lie to create fiction and explain the vast mystery of the universe in stories we can understand, and talked ourselves a load of pretty prose and philosophy about peace and generosity, about the value of honour and integrity (rarity value, but we deceive ourselves and gloss over that), but when the chips are down, and the battle is joined, all of that goes out of the window and we revert to natural, combative, deceptive type.
We laugh when we say that All's Fair in Love and War, but we're only half joking. We use it as an excuse for the most underhand and ruthless behaviour, because we want something so much we don't, by comparison, much care about anyone or anything else. We pay the price without hesitation, regardless of how many other people's pain that price involves.
In love, this generates rom-coms and business for therapists and agony aunts. In war, the picture isn't so pretty. It may be overly optimistic, but it would be nice to think that if we recognise the inherent deceiver in all of us, we might then learn how to mitigate her.