Courtney McGrail“If America and the West don’t like President Assad – even if he is a bad ruler – it’s still not our business to try to affect ‘regime change’”, writes Mary Kenny
I was greatly impressed by some of the points that the American economist Jeffrey Sachs made in his recent visit to Dublin, where he received the UCD’s highest award, the Ulysses Medal.
Prof. Sachs is best known for his work on poverty and sustainable development. Besides being knowledgeable, he often talks common sense. For example, he doesn’t disparage, with an absolute sweep, low wages paid to young workers in developing countries.
He says it is better for people in Bangladesh to have some job than to have no jobs: and little by little, things can get better, and economies prosper. Don’t turn nations into beggars.
Catastrophe
Most recently, he was speaking about the catastrophe of the Middle East – especially Syria and Iraq – and the countless millions of people being made refugees because of the dreadful situation there.
His first, most urgent recommendation, was just to stop the war. Stop bombing people.
And stop meddling in other people’s countries. If America and the West don’t like President Assad – even if he is a bad ruler – it’s still not our business to try to affect ‘regime change’.
America, said Prof. Sachs, should focus on building bridges with the Russians to try and influence them to stop the bombing. That’s the priority. Most refugees from Syria want to go back to their own country if only there was peace.
And here, may I add, is where a modicum of religious education is relevant. The Russians have a special relationship with Syria because the Russian Orthodox Church – to which Putin is strongly attached – has a historic link with Syrian Christianity. This is one of the reasons (besides power politics) that Russia is the key to relations with Syria.
Instead of building bridges with Russia, it seems that Hillary Clinton – likely to be the next American president – is more inclined to sabre-rattling. A disastrous policy.
Jeffrey Sachs is surely one of the wisest, as well as one of the most humanitarian, of international counsellors. Yes, first stop the bombing.
The pace of Irish funerals
The Archdiocese of Dublin is to carry out a review on the speed of funerals in Ireland. The review is prompted by social change – more funerals, fewer priests, more family members needing to travel from abroad, etc.
As everyone knows, the difference between an Irish and an English funeral is that one takes place within 48 hours: the other can follow after a three-week (or longer) wait.
There’s something to be said for each practice. The speedy Irish funeral focuses minds and hearts wholly on the event.
The long-delayed English funeral allows for more preparation – but that also renders it more formal, and possibly more expensive. Let’s see what the review produces.
Remembering Tom Hayden
Some years ago, the American political radical and activist Tom Hayden spoke at a book launch at Hodges Figgis bookshop in Dublin. (The occasion was the publication of a book by John Waters.)
Mr Hayden, who has recently died aged 76, spoke with feeling – even, possibly, sentimentality – about his Irish roots. He had been baptised Thomas Emmet Hayden, the son of Irish migrants, and felt a real connection with his Irish ancestry.
Because of his roots, Tom Hayden took a deep interest in Irish politics, particularly in regard to the North. He was a committed Irish Republican, just as he had been a committed student radical in his youth – one of only two white people to be jailed in Martin Luther King’s first campaign of civil disobedience in the segregated southern states.
Mr Hayden’s political discourses at Hodges Figgis were all very worthy and the assembled company listened respectfully. But I think that what many of the audience assembled there really wanted to know was: “What was it like being married to Jane Fonda?”
But everyone was too polite to ask.
Tom Hayden had a strong influence on the film star when he married her back in the 1970s. He was, indeed, her political mentor, and he is credited with encouraging her to travel to Hanoi in then-Communist North Vietnam in July 1972 to urge American soldiers to desert, and to accuse America of war crimes. She was afterwards dubbed ‘Hanoi Jane’.
Approval
On a domestic note, he ordered his wife to do the family washing by hand, as he did not approve of washing machines, which radical Socialists considered bourgeois. She complied.
So now we know what it was like for Jane Fonda to have been married to Tom Hayden.
Mr Hayden must have yielded to bourgeois values in the end, however. After their divorce – he asked her for a divorce on her 51st birthday – he moved towards the political mainstream and became a senator in the State of California.
Ms Fonda had spent more than $17 million on her ex-husband’s political career.