In our first visit to the movies for several years, Sylvia and I went to see The Imitation Game a few days ago. (What was the last film we went to see: Lawrence of Arabia? Brief Encounter?? I forget.) We enjoyed it very much: I could forgive most of the liberties taken with history, although the decision to introduce the spy John Cairncross in a case of double-blackmail, with the claim that MI6 had installed him deliberately so that he could leak secrets to the Russians, was palpably absurd and unnecessary. I have a special enthusiasm for Alan Turing, as readers of this site will recall from my posting here at the end of last November, and Sylvia was better able to understand the links between crosswords, cryptography and espionage that occupy the dark side of my character.
Yet you may not have noticed a brief annotation I made in July 2012, when I commented that the Times had published, on the exact centenary of Turing’s birth (June 26, 2012) a Listener Crossword Puzzle (’SUM’ – geddit?) that celebrated his achievements in imagining a universal computing machine. I was a little muted about this event, because the puzzle contained a blatant error, about which I am still sorely embarrassed. Both the Puzzle Editor and I had overlooked a tiny calculation error in the encoding of one of the answers.
Now, in my more thoughtful moments, I reflect on the phenomenon of ‘deliberate’ errors introduced as a means of communicating to the receiver that something is wrong. When the Nazis turned round captured SOE agents, dropped by parachute into the Netherlands in WWII, the radio operators ignored the lack of messages that would have confirmed they were safe, because SOE staff in London did not want to believe that their efforts had been sabotaged. Thus the famous Englandspiel, in which several agents died. A similar mistake happened when the CIA tried to infiltrate agents into Albania in the late 1940s and early 1950s. (See Operation Valuable Fiend, by Albert Lulushi.) And I have always wondered whether Kim Philby’s identification of the Secret Intelligence Service as MI5 (instead of the correct MI6) in My Secret War (p 32) represented a plaintive cry to his old mates that they should recognize that the whole memoir was being ghosted – or, at least, controlled – by the KGB. Lastly, when I noticed in the National Archive at Kew that a Report on the Communist Party written by the MI5 officer Jane Sissmore in 1935 was titled ‘Investigation by SS into Activities of the CPGB and Indentification [sic] of its Members 1935’, it occurred to me that this very capable and literate person may have inserted that error to indicate that she was very unhappy about compiling such a report. So maybe the error I made could be interpreted as saying ‘I am a Prisoner in a Listener Crossword Construction Factory and Cannot Get Out’. No, it was just a really clumsy boner.
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One of the books I read in January was Tony Judt’s Ill Fares The Land. It was rather sad. Sad, because Tony Judt, who must have been a delightful man, died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, at the age of 52, in 2010. But also sad, because the book is an elegy to the decline of The Left and all its aspirations, at the same time betraying all the hopeless impracticality of the so-called social-democrat Left. (I have never been a member of The Left.) It is as if Judt and his kin think that we can all have secure jobs, and nice houses, and travel to work in environmentally-friendly transport, and enjoy free childcare and expert healthcare until we retire and enjoy safe inflation-proof pensions – all without having to worry about the sordid business of actually creating any wealth. The book is scattered with a number of unexplained clichéd terms: ‘social democracy’, ‘market failure’, ‘financial stability’, ‘social market’, ‘rational market management’, ‘endemic inequality’, ‘social justice’, and is liberally strewn with a host of semi-rhetorical questions suggesting that ‘we’ have to do something. It appears to emphasise the role of the nation-state, but says hardly anything about the European Community. Etc. etc.
I think I shall have to return to this subject next month. I am no economist, but I don’t think that matters, as economists disagree about all this stuff anyway. All I know is that I hope my financial portfolio does not hold any Greek debt. When I ponder over the question of how those poor Hellenes are going to pay back their 240 billion Euro debt, I think of Keynes and The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and what he said about economic slavery. (Is there a deliberate mistake here?) So, as an educational antidote to the maunderings of The Left, I borrowed David Stockman’s The Great Deformation; The Corruption of Capitalism in America from the Public Library, but, after reading one chapter, I decided life was too short for me to read 700 pages on economics, and took it back. And maybe we need Sir Stafford Cripps to remind us what Austerity really means. He was the authentic ‘Left’.
The normal set of Commonplace items appears for the month here. (January 31, 2015)
I don’t normally add late notes to my monthly post, but an odd thing happened today. I was reading in the New York Times about Podemos, the left-wing Spanish Political party, and a march it was holding in Madrid. Podemos’s leader, Pablo Iglesias, was accusing Prime Minster Rajoy of ‘wanting to humiliate our country with this scam they call austerity’. (Heigh-ho . . .) Furthermore, Rubén Aguilar, a Spanish telecom technician, was described as waving a Greek flag ‘out of solidarity’, and was quoted as saying: ‘We’re better off economically than our Greek friends, but we share their determinatiom to put the interests of people back ahead of economic goals like debt repayment.’ Yet this hardly inflammatory paragraph does not appear in the on-line version of the piece! What is going on? Is it now not allowed to suggest that debts to the EU and central banks may not be repaid?
I have sent a message to the Public Editor at the NYT to find out what is going on. (February 1, 2015)