Word Before Leaving

John Pedler

Description

Sir Crispin Tickell, GCMG, one of Britain's outstanding diplomats and one of the word's leading proponents of 'climate change', says of this book: "Here John Pedler takes the broadest of views, ranging from politics and science to religion and beyond, and paints a picture of the world as most of us have yet to see it. As a former diplomat there is almost nowhere he does not know; and as a writer he puts a thousand stories together and makes elegant and convincing sense of them." This book is for all those worldwide with an interest in foreign affairs who are increasingly concerned about climate change/over-population, and the spread of religious violence - fearing that the world's politicians may be taking us in the wrong direction. John Pedler, now 86, joined the British Diplomatic Service in 1951 and has ever since been involved with foreign affairs. This is his weltanschauung (world-view), a new genre, in which he sets out how he has come to see our world and what may lie beyond. Subjects include: Russia and the EU; our wars: Vietnam, Afghan, and Iraq; sex in politics; 'political correctness'; advertising; media self-censorship and News International; world religions and Islam: 'moderate', Wahabist, and 'Jihadist'. It's in the form of answers to his adult children's questions so it's an easy, and often gripping, read. As well as his diplomatic postings in Europe and the Far East, John Pedler was a war correspondent in Vietnam, a businessman in Mao's China, and the first Director of the Cambodia Trust. He worked for the Bosnian government during the siege of Sarajevo. He was educated at the Browne and Nicholls School, Cambridge, Mass. USA and the London School of Economics (where he took a subsidiary course in Comparative Religion).

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Geopolitics

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 avril 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781784628819
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

A Word Before Leaving
A Former Diplomat s Weltanschauung
Merriam-Webster definition of WELTANSCHAUUNG as an English word:- a comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world, especially from a specific standpoint . Origin of WELTANSCHAUUNG: German, from Welt world + Anschauung view. First Known Use: 1868
John Pedler
Copyright 2015 John Pedler
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 978 1784628 819
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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
BY THE SAME AUTHOR:
Cold war spy stories under the nom de plume Dominic Torr:-

Diplomatic Cover
The Treason Line
A Mission of Mercy
Hoodwink (in print and on Kindle, 2013)
For my children
and, in due course, for my grandchildren

The owl of Athena flies only at dusk
Ancient Greek saying cited by G. W. F. Hegel

I have a theory that the truth is never told in the 9-5 hours
Hunter S. Thompson

With acknowledgements to Microsoft s Word for Mac without which this essay could not have been written.

One of Britain s outstanding diplomats and one of the world s leading proponents of climate change has this to say about this book:
Children like to ask their parents difficult questions. Here John Pedler takes the broadest of views, ranging from politics and science to religion and beyond, and paints a picture of the world as most of us have yet to see it. As a former diplomat there is almost nowhere he does not know; and as a writer he puts a thousand stories together, this time for grownups, and makes elegant and convincing sense of them.
Sir Crispin Tickell, GCMG, KCVO, FZS
Guide to contents:
PART I The material world
FOREWORD
FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE ATOM BOMB
EXISTENTIAL CHALLENGES: CLIMATE AND POPULATION
GOVERNMENTS AND THESE CHALLENGES
POLITICS, IDEOLOGIES, CAPITALISM
OUR WORLD TODAY: HOW DID IT GET THAT WAY?
EXTREMIST ISLAM
MAINLY ABOUT RUSSIA EUROPE
HOW CONFRONTATION RETURNED
THE UK EUROPE: SEEN FROM A BACK SEAT
MY OWN MINI-PARTICIPATION IN EVENTS: BOSNIA, CAMBODIA, LAOS
THE BANKERS, LEADING ON TO ISRAEL/PALESTINE
SOME WORDS ON DIPLOMACY
INDOCHINA - MY TWO WARTIME VISITS
RICH AND POOR
SEX, PROSTITUTION, HOMOSEXUALITY, GAY MARRIAGE PC
THE MEDIA, TRADITIONAL AND ELECTRONIC SNOOPING
GETTING OLD

PART II The Beyond
MY COURSE IN COMPARATIVE RELIGION
STARTING TO PUT TOGETHER WHAT I HAD LEARNED
FROM AHOR TO GOOD AND EVIL
FIVE THINGS THAT STRIKE ME ABOUT RELIGION
1. A plethora of superstitions leading to human sacrifice - leading to religion
2. Few conversions, much doubt but little searching, the appeal of atheism and barbarism
3. The prevalence of empathy and compassion among the religious
4. Religions and the state suppress freedom of religion
5. Beyond dogma, much similarity in the apprehension of the beyond
A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF SOME RELIGIONS
Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Bahai, Mormonism
Judaism, Christianity, Islam
The Prophet Mohammed and Jesus of Nazareth,
their scriptures
The Koran and higher criticism
Jewish and Christian scriptures and the Koran
Islam - a religion with political implications
The Jews as a people
Evil and Religion
COMING TO A CONCLUSION
Peace
MY SEARCH ENDS
Suffering and prayer
The Holy
Envoi
FOREWORD
Children ask questions as soon as they can speak, and they don t stop asking them even when they re approaching retirement. I have three and as I m now 85 I think it s about time that I should look back on what they have asked about my life and provide them with some idea of the way I ve come to look at the world. So the questions in Part I and Part II are a composite of those they have asked over the years and adapted now to meet the answers I m giving.
And here it is - my own essay in weltanschauung. Everyone s world view is formed at a certain time. Mine is very much the spring of 2014 when I put my fingers to my word processer. Soon I realised how much I would have liked to read such world views ordinary people like me had formed in the past - say in 1814, the year before Waterloo, or July 1914 a month before the outbreak of World War I: two earlier years of mounting crisis. How much they would have helped in understanding how people were thinking in the periods in which they lived! A much needed complement to the biographies and autobiographies of those times - and what historians tell us about the celebrities of their day.
But first - a word of introduction:-
After he had died I too, much wanted to know what conclusions my father had reached about the times he had lived in and his conclusions, however tentative, about life in general. But he hadn t left anything written.
When I searched my memory I was only able to glean hints here and there from odd remarks of his, casually dropped and left hanging in time, for me to interpret as best I could. One example will be enough: in the twilight of a warm September evening my father, by then 81, was out on the fifth floor balcony of his Edwardian mansion flat, both hands on the railing, as he gazed out at the large part of West London laid out before him. I was waiting for him to turn and follow me in to dinner when he, speaking more to the sparse traffic below than to me, announced - You know, old boy, it would have been better if we d let the Germans come in 1914. The remark surprised me for he had fought in the trenches in the Great War.
After his death in 1975 at the age of 84 I tried to recall the few remarks he had made about that war. And only then did I come to understand that reaching this conclusion at the end of his life had involved some for him tortuous, even painful, rethinking. I put together what I remembered him saying when I was a child, then during World War II and more recently during the Cold War.
And I think I was able to divine with some probability the progression he had made from a soldier who had hated war but believed he had played a small part in that War to End War , to the realisation - far too late, like the Chamberlain government - that he had ignored the rise of Hitler until another war had become unavoidable. Then it had dawned on him that the destruction of the confident seemingly ever-improving world he had known as a Victorian child in the nineties and then as a young Edwardian journalist had been due to the decision to fight the German invasion of Belgium and France - so obviously right as it had seemed to him. And so it did to almost every one at the time (with the notable exceptions of our leading philosopher Bertrand Russell, and Edmund Morel who had exposed the horrors of King Leopold II s Congo: both went to prison for their pacifism).
So he had volunteered at the declaration of war that fateful August of 1914 - the end of an era when progress towards a better world had seemed assured. He didn t know it then but he had just enjoyed The Last Summer as Boris Pasternak perceptively entitled his memoir of that time.
And I suppose it was in the 1960s, after most of a life lived in the shadow of that decision, of his decision which had brought him his own experience of hell, that my father had begun to question and eventually to reject the certitudes with which he had begun life as a young man. For by then the link was all too easy to see - the war and the harsh (Winston Churchill called it that mad ) treaty of Versailles had given birth to both communism in Russia and fascism in Italy and Germany leading in turn to the Japanese Imperialist invasion of Manchuria and China.
Far from being the War to end War that my father believed he had been fighting, the Great War had initiated a march towards a war even more terrible than the one he knew - one that ended with a fragile peace under the shadow of the atomic bomb. The whole concept of human progress - the unchallenged assumption of his Victorian childhood which only began to be questioned in the Edwardian decade - had been shattered. A century later we know all this only too well - we can read all about it in such books as The War That Ended Peace (Prof. Margaret MacMillan). Indeed it is now the fashion to ask: what if the UK had not joined France and Russia in World War I? It is a question worth asking, and a number of answers are well worth a thought.
I would also have liked to know something of what in the end he had come to believe about what I have called here the beyond - the spiritual side of Man s nature? I knew he had done much searching even before the Great War as well as after it. In particular he had gone deeply into the speculative side of Freemasonry - I have a copy of his Symbolism and the Circle which he, as Past Master of the Authors Lodge, delivered as an address to the Dorset Masters Lodge in 1934. He was by that time a Royal Arch Mason with its famous, or for some notorious, JABULON (can this perhaps best be described as a quasi-divinity?) He concludes his learned address (after some little known quotes of St. Augustine, Plato and others): To know ourselves is to live at the centre of the Circle, realising our brotherhood, living in charity with one another and attaining in thought and in act to that high standard o