My Road to Damascus

by Theodore Dalrymple (April 2016)

Whenever I think of some of the journeys that I made and countries through which I passed earlier in my life that could not be made or passed through now other than by someone suicidally reckless, I feel a certain melancholy. Surely the downfall of communism (almost but not quite complete) was supposed to usher in a new world order, an era of peaceful co-operation and mutual advantage? It did nothing of the kind, of course, and those who saw in the demolition of the Berlin Wall a kind of Hegelian apotheosis of history, after which nothing of meta-historical significance was supposed to happen, have been proved not merely wrong but foolish – as I thought them at the time.

I know two or three people who have resisted the siren-song of communication technology (I am not one of them). A friend of mine, for example, a retired doctor, does not have a mobile telephone, which seems these days almost like the height of eccentricity. Never having had one, he does not miss it and is only dimly aware of the change that it has wrought in people’s lives. He still writes letters – a technology that I hope the young terrorists of today do not discover, for the use of it would make them more difficult to catch in the planning stage before the act.

Another acquaintance of mine, a writer of more distinction and talent than fame, stopped his technological education at the stage of the portable typewriter. I should imagine that he has increasing difficulty in obtaining typewriter ribbons and such commodities as carbon paper. I haven’t tried the experiment, but I wonder whether young people even know what carbon paper is.

It is said that the mobile telephone has transformed the economies of many African countries, one of the previous difficulties being that those who produced had so little ready knowledge of the whereabouts of those who wanted to consume, which limited the possibility of trade and therefore the motive to produce. By contrast, I remember the days when it could be necessary to go several hundred miles to make a telephone call home, and even then success could not be guaranteed – if, for example, it rained. This had its drawbacks, of course, especially where emergencies were concerned, but I feel a little like Talleyrand when he said that no one who had not experienced life under the ancien régime (as an aristocrat, it goes without saying) knew the true sweetness of life. No one who has not known what it is to be incommunicado for weeks or months on end does not know how carefree life can be, and increasingly it is impossible for anyone to know it, at least without aiming for it so self-consciously that the delight of it is lost. We only truly appreciate what we do not aim at directly.

My delight at having been incommunicado for months on end is a very small thing to weigh in the balance against the economic development of a continent in which scores of millions lived, and still live, in abject poverty, but I do not look forward to a world in which the only way not to be in constant contact with others is to become a misanthropic hermit.

The other day I bought a thin paperback book by Joseph Kessel called En Syrie, (In Syria). It was first published in 1926 and is a series of short but graphic articles about the then recent French mandate in Syria (which included the Lebanon), republished because of what the blurb calls – for once quite accurately and without exaggeration – its surprising contemporary relevance.

Kessel was a remarkable man and writer, kind of André Malraux minus the self-advertisement and dishonesty. He was born in Argentina in 1898 of Jewish parents who had fled pogroms in Russia, but subsequently grew up partly in the Urals but mostly in France. He was a pilot in the First World War, he early saw and wrote about the extreme danger of Nazism, he joined the French Resistance during the Second World War, and subsequently wrote very prolifically, including a fine novel about Himmler’s charlatan doctor, Felix Kersten, who was the only person who could relieve the monster’s psychosomatic abdominal troubles, as Rasputin was the only one to relieve the Tsarevich’s pains. He was elected to the French Academy in 1962 and died in 1979. 

Syria was placed under French mandate by the League of Nations at the end of the First World War, though the Arabs had joined the Allied side against the Central Powers and Turkey (to whose Empire all the Arab lands had long belonged) on the understanding that they would be granted independence afterwards. In short, the French and British ratted on them.

Kessel writes:

Syria? What do we know of it? Let us admit without false pride: a few historical memories of the Crusades, a few famous pages, the beautiful names of Damascus, Palmyra and the Euphrates, that is the totality of our baggage for a large and fertile region placed under French mandate.

And he continues:

Who – other than a very few specialists – could draw a political physiognomy of this country? Who could explain why and who we fight there?

There is only one excuse for this ignorance, says Kessel, and that is the sheer complexity of the country.

The French mandate stimulated armed opposition almost immediately. The French had an inadequate number of troops to fight it and tried to fight it from the air. According to Kessel, the French made the mistake of changing their top administrators too often, so that by the time any of them began to grasp something about the country they made way for a replacement who knew nothing. And French policy was almost a mirror image of what it ought to have been. Kessel heard someone who knew the country well say:

ruled with a rod of iron.

And what, asks Kessel’s interlocutor, do the French do?

only want a position, giving it instead to those who want money, and suck up to the masses.

Kessel, who never doubts the French right to be in Syria, ends by saying that it would be better to abandon the mandate than to be worn out by exercising it badly.

It all sounds painfully familiar.

But actually I bought the book ($3) because of the picture on its front, the photograph of a street in a still-Ottoman Damascus taken, I should imagine, about 1914, in the subtle shades of early colour postcards.

In my peregrinations, I occasionally came across somewhere in which I thought, or rather preferred in my ignorance, to imagine that there was such a life. All those places have since descended into chaos and massacre, with millions fled or displaced and the vilest doctrines propagated. Appearances are deceptive.  

 

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Out Into the Beautiful World from New English Review Press.

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