By Diana Holbourn
Becky and Other Students Discuss World Problems, How Some Have Been Unintentionally Made Worse, and How Some Have Been Diminished
Book three of the online Becky Bexley series. Chapter 3 continued.
This series accompanies the books about what Becky does at university and afterwards, which you can find out more about on my author website. (The online series is in draft form.)
(To recap: The previous page ended with one student telling a joke story about people being treated for the disease of addiction to using puns.
Then the conversation turned serious again, as one of the group said, "On the subject of the world becoming a better place though, I've read that good politicians can sometimes actually make things better for people. I don't mean by setting up treatment centres to cure people of pun disease - I don't suppose any of them have thought of that one yet, unfortunately. But I mean seriously. They can do things that improve a country's living standards. I've read they can even have policies that transform the country they're running from a poor failing wreck of a place into a successful vibrant one, where the unemployment rate's fallen a lot, and a lot more people are making good money, so their living standards are going up. It's probably easier to do that in some countries than it is in others though.
"But I heard that the Irish government managed to turn Ireland from a depressed poor country into a much richer one in the last part of the 20th century, by changing government policies. I was intrigued about how that could be done, so I had a look on the Internet.
"It turns out that what had made Ireland much poorer than a lot of European countries in the first place had partly been the policies of governments over the sixty years or so before that.
"There's still quite a bit of poverty in Ireland, and the government have been criticised for things like keeping unemployment benefits low, which keeps unemployed people poorer than they are in some countries. But things are at least a fair bit better for a lot of people than they used to be.
"One thing the Irish government did in the 1990s was to make taxes quite dramatically lower for businesses. And they made some of their ports 'free ports', which meant they didn't make people pay tax on things they brought into those.
"For decades before, the Irish government had had a policy of taxing any imports that came into the country, partly so the taxes on them would make them more expensive, so it would put people off buying them. That might sound odd, but countries' governments do that sometimes, to try to protect the jobs of people making similar things in their own countries, because they think that if the imported goods become more expensive than similar goods made in their own countries, people will be more likely to buy the ones made in their own countries, and that'll help keep the people who make them in work, because they'll be able to keep making them, whereas they would be made redundant if no one wanted their products because they were buying the cheaper imported ones.
"They call that protectionism. That policy's worked sometimes. But sometimes it can cause problems. One reason is because if people want more of the things than are being made in the country, and not many can afford them at the more expensive price of the imports of them, a lot of people will just have to go without those things altogether; or it can mean that the companies exporting them to that country stop bothering, because they're becoming too expensive for people to buy, so there can actually be shortages of those goods in the countries with the high import taxes after a while.
"Another problem is that it can put foreign companies off setting up manufacturing plants in countries that have those import taxes and employing workers there, since if a lot of the raw materials they'd need to make the products come from abroad, and they get taxed when they come into the country, so the companies have to pay a lot of extra money every time they import some, they'll be put off setting up branches of their companies in those countries, so all the people who might have been employed working for them won't be. And if the unemployment rate in those countries is high, it might mean quite a lot of people will stay unemployed when they might have been earning quite a bit of money and paying tax on it if the companies had set up businesses there.
"If taxes are lowered so foreign companies are encouraged to come and set up businesses there, it can mean people who were unemployed get to have jobs and earn decent money, and a lot of them can also learn new skills from working there, and some might even leave the foreign companies later on and use those skills to start businesses of their own, that employ more people who might have been unemployed otherwise.
"And another thing is that when the workforce gets more skilled, because quite a few of them are being taught new skills by the companies coming to a place, it can attract new foreign companies to come and set up workplaces in the countries, because they'll think there's a good chance of being able to employ skilled people straightaway, so they can start working for them without them having to spend money and take time having to train them first. The more skilled a country's workforce is, the more it can attract new businesses to set up there.
"And it works like that when the workforce gets a good education at school too, especially if they've learned skills they can use working for the companies, like maybe maths sometimes, and computer skills, and other languages, especially English as a foreign language, in countries that don't have English as their official language, since it's like an international language, since so many people use it. So it can help companies communicate with other companies they might want to trade or collaborate with in other countries. So a government that spends money educating its people can find it's rewarded after a while, when a lot of them can get good jobs with international companies, and start paying decent taxes.
"I think Ireland improved its technical education, which helped a lot when it came to companies wanting workers who were skilled in some kinds of technology.
"Another thing that needs to happen for businesses to be attracted to a country is if good roads and transport systems and houses and hospitals and things are built, since they'll want it to be easy to transport their goods from place to place, and for people to be able to get to their workplaces easily, and that kind of thing. But governments don't necessarily have to worry that they'll need to get all those things built themselves, because if they invite private companies in to build them, they don't have to cope with the costs; the private companies can recoup the costs later. For instance if they've built houses, they can sell them or rent them out, and if they've built rail networks, they can get money over the next decades from train fares; or if they've built roads, they can put tolls on parts of them, or the government could increase road tax, and give a percentage of it to the companies that built them, and that kind of thing.
"So although governments of a lot of countries might need a lot of money from taxes to do all the things they'd like to do, including setting up good schools and hospitals, so lowering taxes on businesses might seem a bad idea, in the longer term it can be a good one, because it can encourage more businesses to set up in the countries, and they can employ people who'll start paying taxes, and the things the companies make can be taxed a bit; so the governments benefit by getting more money in tax in the end.
"Mind you, Ireland did have help to improve. They got a fair bit of money from the European Union, that paid farmers some money to produce food, so they could sell it more cheaply because they didn't have to get back all the costs of raising the animals and growing crops from people who bought the products made from them, because some of the costs would have already been paid for, so their prices could be more attractive.
"And one reason Ireland became attractive for businesses from America to invest in once taxes were lower was that there was no language barrier, so it was easier to start branches there than it would have been in a lot of countries, because everyone spoke English, so the businesses wouldn't have to train people in it or pay to hire interpreters all the time, and so on.
"So Ireland did have some advantages over a lot of other countries.
"But I read that these 'free ports' have been introduced into other countries and have made them better off too. One was China, where most of the population used to be really poor, but where the government in the last part of the 20th century introduced reforms that helped bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
"One thing the government did was to allow peasants to farm their own plots of land, so they had more incentive to put a lot of work into them and make sure things grew well on them than they had before under communism, where they weren't allowed to have their own land, but things were organised so officials might tell them to go and work on different bits of land every day - or so I heard, and that meant they didn't have much incentive to put a lot of effort into their work, because they could take the attitude that there wasn't much point in bothering, since for all they knew, the people who worked on those bits of land next might not put any effort into it, so if they put effort into it themselves, their work might just be wasted. That meant that not as much was grown on the land as there could have been.
"But they could take pride in achieving good results on land that actually belonged to them, that they could work on when they thought it needed it, so other people would know it was their efforts that were producing good results, and they would know their efforts wouldn't be wasted by other people not working hard on the land. So that policy led to fewer food shortages, and made peasants richer, since they could sell some of what they grew.
"Another thing the Chinese government did was to break from the policy of former leaders by inviting foreign companies to set up businesses in China. A lot of companies were keen to do that, since it was cheaper for them to produce things in China than in their own countries, where wages were much higher, and where the costs of renting premises to work in were much higher too.
"And China made trade agreements with other countries where they lowered import taxes, in return for other countries doing the same when it came to their goods, so more Chinese goods could be sold in those countries, which was great for a lot of businesses in China.
"So China became more like a capitalist country, and got a lot richer as a result. Other countries that used to be communist got richer by doing that kind of thing too.
"And introducing better education meant a lot of people could get better-paying jobs.
"Not everyone's benefited equally though. A lot of people in cities tend to be much better off and well-educated than people in the countryside. So there's still a fair bit of improvement that needs to be made. But things are at least a lot better for a lot of people than they used to be.
"I've heard about quite a few other countries that used to be really poor but are now rich as well.
"One's Luxembourg, it seems, which used to be really poor, with most people working on farms and struggling to make enough money to survive at the beginning of the 19th century, and lots of people emigrating to America because of that; but then in the middle of that century it was discovered that there was lots of iron ore under the ground, and businessmen rushed to take advantage of it, setting up mines and factories; and a steel industry grew up that made a lot of people a lot of money. Then its manufacturing industries grew a lot more, and came to include things like computer technology. And banking somehow makes the country a lot of money too.
"Similar things happened all over Western Europe and America. Imagine living in this country a few hundred years ago, or even at the beginning of the 20th century! Chances are you'd have been living in poverty, and working long hours doing something boring, living in bad housing, with not much of an education, and struggling to afford healthcare if you needed it; or when you could get it, it wouldn't have been nearly as good as it is today. Things have improved massively!"
Another student said, "I agree! I read some articles about how although there's a lot wrong with the world, and setbacks are always happening to slow down a lot of plans to improve things, overall, the world's a much much better place than it was a century ago, because of new medical treatments, new technologies, more humane government policies in lots of different parts of the world, lots of people putting effort into trying to improve things for other people, and things like that. You might never hear about that kind of thing on the news, partly because good news somehow doesn't seem to classify as proper news, and partly because things like that usually happen gradually over time, so not enough is happening in one go to be dramatic enough to make the news. But massive changes can be made over time, that not many people know about.
"I read that in the past few decades, poverty and hunger have been massively reduced in lots of parts of the world, and so has disease and child death. I think there's still a long way to go, but in about 1900, apparently over 90 per cent of the world's population was living in absolute poverty, whereas now it's only about ten per cent! That's a massive drop! And a lot more children are being educated than ever used to be. I read that the most dramatic improvements in living standards in all history have been happening in the last few decades, for hundreds of millions of people around the world."
One of the others said, "That's great! Hopefully things are improving in lots of ways all over the world. You can tell things have improved massively in Western Europe anyway. Imagine living in medieval times, with all the plague and other diseases, and starvation that happened when the weather destroyed crops, and death in childbirth, and all the other horrible things they had to put up with! I read that about a third of children would die of diseases or starvation or accidents or violence before they got to seven years old in those days! Imagine being a mother watching your child suffer with a horrible disease, knowing there was hardly anything you could do about it! Life might seem a bit bleak sometimes nowadays, but it would probably have been a whole lot worse a lot of the time in those days!
"I wonder if one reason why it took so long for a lot of progress to be made in people's living standards was because in the old days, when there were lots of killer diseases around, a lot of people thought there probably wasn't much point in working on things that might take a lot of thought and time, because chances are they would be dead long before they ever achieved anything much! I wonder if one reason why technology improves much faster now is because most people can be fairly confident of living long enough to achieve things it takes time to achieve."
One of the others said, "Well, that might be one reason, but I think there are some other important ones, like that most people weren't educated in the old days, and didn't have the money to buy things they could use to make new things with. And I heard that the invention of the printing press in the Middle Ages helped a lot, because it meant information could be made more available and spread further, with all the new books that it was much easier and quicker to make copies of than it was before, when everything had to be written out by hand; and when some people read about other people's ideas, like ideas for inventions, and information about how to do various things, it can spark off new ideas for inventions in them."
One student said, "Imagine what it must have been like to turn an electric light on for the first time, or to be able to turn on a tap and get hot water in your home from it for the first time, or if you'd lived the first years of your life surrounded by horrible diseases, but then you witnessed people being easily cured by new medicines!
"Or imagine what it must have been like to be able to use a washing machine that does all the work for you for the first time, or to be able to listen to nice music or an interesting programme on the radio for the first time, or to be able to talk to someone on the telephone for the first time!
"Or imagine a world where we still didn't have anaesthetics, so anyone who needed an operation had to either suffer from not having it, or suffer having it without pain relief ... unless they knocked themselves out with strong alcohol or drugs, if they could get them.
"There must have been so many medical and technological advances in the last century alone! I think it's easy to forget how lucky we are to have them.
"I've heard that it can improve people's mood quite a bit sometimes if they spend time thinking about things they can be grateful for quite often. Someone else said that, didn't they. But I've heard of people making gratitude lists, where they often think of things they can be grateful for and write them down, so they can start feeling better about their lives when they read them back, like if they've just started feeling a bit down because someone's said something horrible to them or something, since it's easy to forget good things that have happened or take them for granted, or to think life's worse than it really is.
"I mean, obviously a lot of nasty things still go on today, and people can't be expected to be grateful for what they've got while bad things are happening to them, or when they're feeling upset about what's happened to them. But I think it can work for people who are just feeling a bit depressed."
One student said, "Some of this conversation's surprisingly depressing, considering it's about how much the world's improved! Mind you, talking about feeling a bit depressed reminds me of a conversation I had on a forum not long ago, just for a laugh, as odd as it sounds.
"One man said he ought to go out to see a movie to cry over because he was so emo. I was pretty sure he was making fun of the idea of being emo.
"So I joked, 'Yep, maybe you need to get out more. How about a bit of mountain hiking? That'd do you the world of good! ... What's Everest like at this time of year?'
"He said, 'Emo guys like me don't do mountain climbing. It kills our sorrow. I'm emo. I don't do things to make me not unhappy. The world is cold, and it should be that way. Always. I'm emo.'
"I joked, 'Perhaps you need a big crying avatar then, where great fountains of tears are spurting from your eyes and there's a big pool of tears below you on the ground. Is that what your house is like - do you have to slosh ankle-deep through tears everywhere you go?
"'Tell you what: If you want everyone to know you're really unhappy, you could always put your house on the market so people come round looking at it, and then they'll have to slosh through all the tears as well, so they'll all feel sorry for you. Then after a while, you can take it off the market and tell the estate agents you just can't cope with parting from it at the moment. You could repeat the process every few months, putting it on the market so people come around and wade through the tears, and then taking it off again, till you've built up a big following of sympathisers, ... who you can always cynically shut the door on if they try to come around to sympathise and destroy your illusions about how cold the world is.'
"There was another time when some spammer posted a blob of a post in the middle of a thread, that wasn't spam in itself, but her signature advertised some kind of pyramid scheme or product and linked to it, so she might have just posted something so people would see that. Her post said, 'Our flipping human brains are not capable of understanding nothing. We are constantly searching for a meaning. There is no meaning.'
"I joked, 'Really, young woman! Let me take you aside and offer a bit of kindly sisterly advice: If you want to advertise products in your signature, the negativity of your posts really won't do! If people are going to be feeling cheerful enough to feel like facing the challenge of clicking your links and trying out what they find there, you need to make them feel bright and optimistic, by putting positive, cheery and motivational posts on here. They need to think you're offering something good. I assure you your advertising will be at least a little more effective that way.'
"But funnily enough, someone replied to me and said that oddly, what I'd just said had given her a compulsion to click the links."
The students smiled.
Then the conversation turned serious again, as one student who'd been talking before about the world getting better said, "I suppose being able to mess around on Internet forums is one thing we can be grateful for. I wouldn't want to live in some developing country where it was hard to access the Internet to play on it!
"Really though, we're a lot luckier than a lot of people are in developing countries. But I've heard that things are improving a lot in a lot of those too.
"I read that the number of people who can be said to be in extreme poverty has gone down in over sixty developing countries, in spite of their populations growing. Before, when a population grew, it would always mean there would be a rise in the number of poor people, since a lot of poor families were growing bigger.
"Apparently, the number of people living in hunger has gone down a huge amount, and the number of people who can easily access clean water has gone up by millions.
"And I read that before 1980, only half of all girls in developing countries even completed primary school education, whereas now, well over three quarters do; and less than half of all women in the world could read and write, whereas now, over 90 per cent can!
"And apparently in 1990, about five million children a year died of diarrhoea, a lot of it probably caused by things like infections they got because their families couldn't get clean water to drink or wash in; but now the number's gone down a lot. And far fewer people are dying of malaria and TB as well. And life expectancy's gone up a lot, even in a lot of developing countries, because of efforts to vaccinate a lot of people against diseases, more and better food being available to people, and things like that.
"And before 1960, apparently over one in five children died before they were five, but now fewer than one in twenty do.
"And child labour's apparently gone down a lot too.
"And as more children survive, in a lot of parts of the world, people have fewer children, which is good, because there was a time when lots of people were worried that the world's population would rise so much that the planet just wouldn't be able to cope, but now people think the population will rise by another few billion but then stop growing. And when women have fewer children, their families can afford to spend more on each one's education, and also the women have more time to spend helping to educate the children they have got, since they won't be having to spend so much of it looking after younger children; and if the children become better educated, chances are they'll get better jobs, and pay more taxes, so the government of whatever country they live in benefits, and they'll be able to buy more things, so traders who live around them benefit; and when that's going on all around, a whole country's prosperity can increase.
"So it can be in a country's interests to provide family planning advice to lots of people, and to make laws outlawing early marriage. That way, girls might get to stay in school longer, and be able to spend time going into careers themselves where they earn money that means they and their families and some people around them end up more prosperous. And when girls are more highly-educated, they're more likely to want careers, and devote years to them instead of settling down to early marriage and early child-bearing, and ending up having lots of children.
"Obviously all that won't necessarily happen, but from what I've heard, it seems there's a good chance that it often will.
"Anyway, according to what I read about how things are getting better in the world overall, more evidence of progress is that there have only been just over half as many civil wars in the past decade or so as there were a couple of decades ago, and only around a quarter of the number of people who were dying in war a few decades ago are now.
"Obviously there are still a lot of problems in the world, - the article I read about this did say there's a long way to go, - but there have still been massive improvements.
"An article I read said there are three main reasons why things have improved a lot for so many people since about 1993:
"One's that for quite a few decades before then, there was this horrendous power struggle between Russia and America because Russia wanted to spread communism and American governments fanatically wanted to make sure it didn't spread, so lots of little wars were caused in quite a few parts of the world, including countries in Central America and of course places like Vietnam, between supporters of extreme left wing dictators, some of whom were encouraged and backed by Russia with money and arms and things, I think, and supporters of extreme right wing dictators, supported by America with money and arms, and things like that. Loads of civilians were caught up in the wars and suffered really badly, and loads were killed. And it meant lots of people had to live in countries with disgusting brutal dictators who didn't care a thing for their own people, who were kept in power by supplies of arms from countries like America and Russia, and experts from there training their armies, that they could use to put down rebellions, and that kind of thing, for ages.
"I read that during the Vietnam War, where millions of people were killed, there was a man called Daniel Ellsberg, who'd worked as a military analyst - whatever one of those is - who managed to get hold of a lot of highly classified American government documents, and he found some that gave a strong impression that the American leadership didn't even care how many American casualties there were, let alone how many Vietnamese people got killed and injured! And there were some that said presidents had been lying to the American people for ages about what the point of wars like that was, and that the man who'd been president for most of the 1960s had known very quickly that the Vietnam War wasn't winnable, but he didn't want to pull the troops out, because it would look as if America had been defeated, and he thought that would be horrible for his reputation!
"Anyway, this Ellsberg man was so disgusted by what he read that he photocopied the documents and sent them to the media. The New York Times published them, and it caused a massive scandal, and might have been partly why America did get out of Vietnam in the end, although I think it was a few more years before they did.
"I actually read an article once about something that happened in the early 1960s, written by an old Labour MP who was the minister for defence at around the same time as the Vietnam War was starting. As far as I remember, it said that at the time, communist guerillas, along with troops from Indonesia who'd been sent in by the Indonesian president, who wanted more influence over the place, for whatever reasons politicians have for wanting that kind of thing, were raiding an island near Malaysia that was under British control at the time, and Britain got rid of them successfully with a very low casualty rate, partly by sending people in to make friends with the local people and offer them medical aid, and then asking them where the communist and other rebels were hiding out, and recruiting them to spy on them for them and report back, so they could target them accurately, rather than bombing the whole place in the hope that the guerillas would be somewhere in it, so they'd die along with whoever else was in it.
"He said that some government advisers said he ought to order bombing in the island to try to kill the rebels, but he refused, and that turned out to be a really good thing, not only because it meant civilians didn't get killed, but because it didn't cause people in the area to start hating them so they wouldn't want to tell them anything.
"There can't have been all that many Vietnamese people who felt friendly towards the Americans after they heavily bombed the place. Millions of people got killed there, and millions more got injured, I think, where one thing I've read the American government was trying to do was injure lots of people deliberately, so other people would have to spend so much time looking after them they wouldn't be able to spend time fighting, and that so much money would have to go on caring for them that less would be available to be spent on weapons. So they filled lots of bombs with metal and plastic shrapnel or chemicals that would cause serious burns, that would injure people horribly but not necessarily kill them.
"But the Vietnamese people who were fighting the Americans wouldn't give up easily, so the policy didn't really work, and the war turned into a blood bath, whereas according to this former Labour MP, Dennis Healey, in the rebellion the SAS and the people they recruited put down in another part of Asia, fewer of them died than would typically die on the roads on a bank holiday weekend in Britain in those days, and they defeated an enemy who seriously outnumbered them.
"There might have been other reasons why the casualty rates were so different too; but it seems to me that the Vietnam War wasn't even justified in the first place! Actually, I read an article about an interview that was done with the man who was the American defence minister at the time of the Vietnam War, who said that a couple of decades after it, he went to Vietnam to speak to people who'd been in the Vietnamese government at the time of the war, because he wondered if the problems the two sides had thought they had that made them go to war could have been resolved with far fewer casualties or none at all if they'd negotiated and understood each other properly.
"He said a man who'd been the foreign minister in the Vietnamese government at the time told him that the reason they'd wanted to fight so hard was because they were convinced America wanted to take over Vietnam and turn it into an American colony, and then do who knows what to its people! The man who'd been the American defence minister said America hadn't wanted to do that at all, but it was hard to convince the other man.
"And he himself said America had gone to war in Vietnam because they'd been scared that the North Vietnamese government going communist might mean that Vietnam would soon be run by a puppet government that was really ruled by Russia or China. I think they might have thought that if that happened, Russia or China would have had even more forces to call on if war ever broke out between them and America. Something like that. But the former Vietnamese foreign minister said there was no way they'd have wanted to be ruled by Russia or China, and that the idea that they might was really silly, since Vietnam had actually been fighting China on and off for a thousand years, and they'd been fighting other countries not long before the Vietnam War for Vietnam's independence, so they weren't about to just give their independence up again after all that! China did support them by giving them arms, but that didn't mean the Vietnamese were ever likely to do everything the Chinese government told them!
"So it seems the war was at least partly caused by big misunderstandings on both sides; and massive loss of life and injury could have been prevented if they'd only negotiated properly and made efforts to understand each other in the beginning!
"The thing is that governments are probably still making mistakes like that today."
One of the group said, "This is upsetting. To think of all those ordinary people killed horribly because of politicians' schemes that they thought up because they were paranoid or a bit psychopathic, or who knows what!
"You know, I fancy a bit of light relief from thinking about this kind of thing at the moment. Here's how we can have some: I'll tell you a story. I remember a fun conversation I had on an Internet forum not long ago, where I was talking to that man from Sri Lanka I told you about the other day who I've had a laugh with sometimes, who calls himself Chess Master on there. I call myself Carrot Top. I asked him to tell me something about Sri Lanka one day, and said, 'I didn't know much about it, so I had a brief look in Wikipedia. It says it's officially called the "Democratic socialist Republic of Sri Lanka". What? How did it manage to escape being invaded by the Americans with a name like that? They used to be pretty hostile to countries with names like that!
"'It says the culture and language is roughly the same as Indian culture and language. So does that mean you talk with an Indian-type accent? Do you sound like the typical call centre employee someone in the UK might find themselves talking to on the other end of the phone if, for example, they get a bill from their phone company for trillions of pounds with a demand that they pay immediately, and they want to know what on earth's going on and have things put right?'
"Chess Master's got a friend on the board who likes to pretend to be an army commander, one called Memnon from ancient Greek history or folklore, but he really comes from Sri Lanka too. Chess Master joked, 'Oh, the Americans were hostile all right, but my friend Memnon here put a stop to all that. Uncle Sam nearly passed out in fright when, upon rounding a bend in the Indian ocean and catching his first glimpse of the country they were so confident they'd be able to eat for breakfast, he saw through his telescope not a statue of liberty grinning like a Mormon at him from the shores of Ceylon, but Goliath's elder brother giving him the finger in no uncertain terms.
"'This spectre roared out a traditional Sri Lankan greeting to foreign invaders, causing General Eisenhower's freshly starched white pants to turn brown like magic. It turned out that this was a clever chameleon-style camouflage technique used by the US Navy. It was their secret weapon, in fact.
"'As for call centres, well, I've never had the time to listen to a typical call centre employee someone in the UK might find themselves talking to on the other end of the phone if, for example, they get a bill from their phone company for trillions of pounds with a demand they pay immediately. If I did, do you think I just might mistake them for a certain person on the forum who only normally communicates in swear words? Let us have your angle on the matter.'
"I joked, 'I think they'd get into trouble if they spoke to people like that. Here's something odd: By a quirky coincidence of fate, as soon as I mentioned that thing about call centres, my broadband connection, which I get through my phone company, was struck down like a television aerial hit by a hurricane, and I had to phone them to get it sorted out. I was put through to just such a person as I described, someone in an Indian call centre with quite a broad Indian accent. To my surprise, one of the first things he said was, "I sound almost like that Chess Master on the forum you like to visit. The only difference is that he's got a twang in his accent that makes it sound as if he's spent a few years in Singapore."
"'And he said more! I said I was surprised he'd heard of you and the forum I visit, but he said everyone in the call centre's heard of you; in fact he said you used to work there, and you became famous as a result of getting the record for the most calls handled in one day. He said the most calls you'd dealt with in one day was 754!
"'Astonished, I asked him how on earth you'd managed it. He sounded mystified, saying he didn't know; but at the same time he sounded impressed, saying he would feel exhausted after handling a comparatively mere 20 calls in one day, which would seem a long day for him, and that sometimes he was on the phone to one person for three hours while he helped them sort out a complicated fault. So he could only wonder at your amazing feat. So solve the mystery for us: How did you manage to handle an entire 754 calls in one day?'
"Chess master joked, 'That was pretty easy. I had this stern, stiff lipped secretary with iron grey hair tied up in a bun, who had 11 arms, so she was able to manage a lot of calls simultaneously. You'll hardly believe me if I tell you what her name was!'
"I said, 'Presumably she also had eleven heads so she could talk to eleven people at once? No wonder you were famous! Did she also enjoy swimming Loch Ness?'
"Chess Master replied, 'Wait, I'll ask her. AHOY, Carrot Top! Gotta little question to ask you, ma'am - Did you enjoy swimming in Loch Ness? What? You actually tied for second place in the freestyle event with the Loch Ness monster back in 1921, when you were just thirteen? Oh, you were the Loch Ness monster yourself. Well, no wonder, with all those limbs of yours, (not to mention that pyramid shaped body); you'd have made Genghis Khan go white as a stern matron's underwear, and convert to Islam at the speed of sound!'
"Not long after that, I teased Chess Master, saying, 'Now tell me: Is it true that in Sri Lanka, people wear strings of hard-boiled eggs around their necks, so they can eat one whenever they like during the day? But the trouble is that if someone falls over or someone else bumps into them hard, some of the eggs break and the egg goes all over them, and that's the origin of the phrase about having egg all over one's face? I wondered where that came from. What a fun spectacle that must be to watch!'
"Chess Master joked, 'No, that expression originated in Thailand. You see, what happened was that Winston Churchill once visited that place, and someone in the crowds that were gathered to see him called him an egghead. You know old Winnie, always ready with a comeback. What he did on this occasion was to hurl an egg straight at the offender's face, who, unfortunately, happened to be the wicket keeper for Zimbabwe at the time. he caught it easily, and hurled it right back at Winnie, roaring, "Howzat?" when it broke all over Winnie's face.
"'And what do you mean, "Thailand hadn't been discovered at the time Winnie was alive? like you would know ... you were born three whole years after the Boer War! you're too young, Carrot Top!'
"Earlier on, I'd joked to Chess Master's friend who pretended to be an army commander, Memnon, that I had informers who'd been trained at the best propaganda school in Antarctica, who'd been spying on him, and had told me he did a sneeze the night before that was so loud it had sounded as if it was thundering, and that was especially bad because they told me he lived in the ruins of Pompeii, and the sneeze would have set off an eruption like the volcano that had ruined it in the first place if the fire brigade hadn't rushed in to stabilise the place.
"Memnon had said my informers were talking rubbish and that he didn't have a nose the size of a trumpet, unlike them!
"Anyway, after I made the joke about eggs, Memnon said, 'Her informers are so dumb that every time she gets something new from them, she has to ask us and check on the info.'
"I joked, 'OK, game set and match to you boys. Of course, that's just what Chess Master would expect, being a tennis master. ... Or is it really a chess master? Oh yes, I remember now: He was once asked to play Tennis at Wimbledon. He felt quite honoured, but was puzzled when he surveyed the court a couple of hours before the game to notice there were no chess pieces on the court. He thought he'd remedy that right away and set out a full board's worth on it.
"'During the match, he was somehow under the impression that the idea of the game was that each player had to knock the other one's chess pieces over with the ball. He knocked all his opponent's players over with it, but was puzzled to note that his opponent didn't knock any of his down at all. He thought he must be a seventh-rate opponent, and at the end of the match, he considered he'd won a resounding victory! So he was rather irate when the umpire declared the match a draw.
"'He went and complained loudly to the umpire, who relented and said that since he was so upset, a winner could be decided on by a penalty shoot-out. Goal posts were set up at one end of the tennis court, and the idea would be that each player had to kick the tennis ball and try to get it in the net while the opponent tried to catch it. But Chess Master, still thinking it was some kind of game of chess, demanded his opponent dress up as a chess piece. His opponent obligingly did so. Chess Master, still somehow thinking the idea was to knock chess pieces down, kicked the tennis ball straight at his opponent during the penalty shoot-out. His opponent caught the ball every time. At the end, the umpire declared that his opponent had won a resounding victory. Chess Master protested, but this time, there was nothing he could do. The match went down in the history of Wimbledon tennis as the greatest game of football ever played on Centre Court.'
"Chess Master's friend teased, 'I think I've heard that story somewhere; it must be from that sports assignment my five year-old cousin was asked to write. he always gets confused about which sport Chess Master plays. But Carrot Top, your informers should be ashamed of using a five year old's work to impress the great Carrot Top.'
"I said, 'What? You mean it didn't really happen? I'm going to have to scold my informers soundly for this! But then, they tell me it's all written down in the archives of Wimbledon history. And they say the game was played in front of a capacity crowd for Centre Court of 150 thousand, and broadcast on television all over the world, so there are loads of people who could confirm it really happened. With that many people who saw it, I have to believe it.'
"Chess Master said it would be a shame if I scolded my informers, because I knew they couldn't scold me back, because of courtesy. He said, 'You know as well as I do that if there's one thing they would never dream of doing, it would be to be disrespectful to the elderly. I know, they invited me over to tea once. Nice people, aren't they?
"'And they say the story about me's all written down in the archives of Wimbledon history. Ah, now we've come onto a subject we both enjoy - history! After all, you were alive for most of it. Beats me, though, why you turned down all those million dollar contracts you kept getting to pose in public. The fact that they all came from the national museum of archeology shouldn't have made a difference!'
"I teased, 'So were my informers correct? Did you suffer that humiliating self-inflicted defeat 120 years ago on Centre Court at Wimbledon in front of all those television viewers? Did you mistake it for a chess board?'
"For some reason, a bit of an argument started soon after that, and then Chess Master went quiet. I joked, 'Oh dear! It appears poor Chess Master was so shocked by reading that last response I wrote he shrivelled away into nothingness, or dematerialised in some other way. He's probably even now floating in the form of some diluted vapour above our heads, some of his molecules above the Indian ocean, some above Europe, and some spread out in other parts of the earth. Hopefully they're thousands of miles above the earth so we won't be breathing them in. I suppose they'll just contribute to the clouds though. That's a pity. There are enough as it is! Thinking about it, I'd rather he was back on the board. Maybe after his adventures in the stratosphere, he'll reconstitute himself and come back. I hope so. Then he might tell us all about it. That'll be good.'
"He did come back, but he said something I didn't like, and I said, 'Shut up Chess Master. Or I'll launch a blistering attack on Sri Lanka's railway network! Being over 2000 years old doesn't stop me launching blistering attacks, you know! ... Erm, I presume they do have a rail network in your island though?'
"Chess Master replied, 'Dear me, how shockingly discourteous of you, Carrot Top! The expletive "Shut up" isn't anywhere in the handbook of "What Every Little Old Lady Must Know"! And no, they dont. Not anymore. You see, the instant you warned me of the impending assault on one of the biggest assets of our economic structure, I dropped a text to the minister of Trains And The Like, and he had all the railway tracks folded up and stuffed into his waistcoat pocket. And yes, before you ask, we do have waistcoat pockets over here. All you need is a waist, and a coat. You should know - I've heard that both items are available in the UK - a little too much of the former, apparently. It's all the food you eat over there.'
"After we made a few more comments, I joked, 'My informers have just told me about something terrible! WARNING, everyone! BRITAIN IS UNDER THREAT FROM SRI LANKANS PLANNING TO INVADE!
"'I've discovered a dastardly Sri Lankan plot to take over Britain. It's subtle and cunning. It mustn't be allowed to succeed! At this very moment, the Sri Lankans are carrying out plans to try to break the spirits of the British, so we won't be in such a mood to resist when the invasion happens. High above our heads, there are Sri Lankans in the sky, blocking out the sun by using technology to strategically position clouds in front of it, so the rest of our summer's miserable. They're hoping we'll all go down with the SAD disorder. They got the idea for that from reading about the soul-destroying monsters the dementors in one of the Harry Potter books - the bit where there were dementors in the sky above Britain causing misery everywhere.
"'Then, they're going to invade Britain, by sending a small group of their prettiest women into the country, in the guise of students. They're going to hang around the houses of parliament and Downing Street and try to get to know our leading politicians. When they've become friendly with them, they'll start inviting them to parties. Through a combination of drugs and charm, they're planning to influence our government to bring in all kinds of measures that'll eventually mean the country is in effect being ruled by Sri Lankans.
"'If the government resists, the Sri Lankans have people who will be made up to look just like our government ministers, and will be trained to talk like them. One night, the real government ministers will be spirited away and given a house to live in in Sri Lanka where they will remain under house arrest for the rest of their lives. The Sri Lankan doubles will run our country, and put Sri Lankans in charge of all local councils and government departments. They will explain that elections will no longer take place, saying it's because of the incompetent nature of the opposition. Then they'll use Britain's resources to benefit Sri Lanka forever. This cunning plan must be stopped!
"'On the other hand, maybe they should bring their honey-trap invasion on soon, and then perhaps they'll cease this aggravating tactic of hovering in the skies above our heads sweeping clouds in front of the sun. I thought our secret services must have got wind of their plans and had them chased away this morning, because there was glorious sunshine. But they're back!'
"Then I said, 'Hmmm! I don't think this thread's going to win an award for fostering good race relations any time soon.'
"Not long after that, I said, 'There was a Sri Lankan person at my school a couple of years below me. I didn't know her well. In fact I thought she came from South America at first. Perhaps she manages the astonishingly acrobatic feat of coming from both at once, somehow, even though they're far away from each other. I don't think so though.'"
The students grinned.
But then the conversation got serious again, when the one who'd been talking before about millions of people being killed in the name of stopping communism advancing said, "That's funny. But I've got more to say about bad reasons for going to war. One problem is that governments can think it makes good business sense to go to war, thinking it makes their countries more wealthy in the end.
"I read that there was a documentary on television a while ago called Why We Fight, where some people who used to be in the American government were interviewed about why America had gone into various wars. They said it had made good business sense. The documentary opened with the man who'd been president for a while after the Second World War and had been a general in it, Eisenhower, saying the war had been good for America, because loads of things had been manufactured for the war effort there, so lots of people were making money. He warned that governments might find excuses for more wars, to keep all the industry going. In the 1930s, America had been in a big depression where there was loads of unemployment and poverty, and the war turned America's fortunes around, what with all the people who got to be employed in making things that got sold to Britain and elsewhere for lots of money.
"Politicians who supported policies that would mean arms companies having to close down because there wasn't any more demand for their products would be worried they'd lose the votes of all the people who got put out of work. And it turns out that a lot of money has been made by American companies going into other countries and making agreements with their governments to rebuild things after other people with American arms have destroyed them.
"... Actually, I'm wondering if it's beginning to sound as if I'm anti-American. But really, it might be that a lot of countries do the same kinds of things; I wouldn't be surprised! I've just read about a few of the wars that American governments have sparked off to try and help big businesses. Well, it seems that was the real reason, although they might have told their people it was for some kind of humanitarian or other reasons that seemed like good ones, or tried to cover up what the military were doing!
"Actually, I've read a bit about the deceitful strategies governments can use to trick their own people into supporting wars that they really want to start for different reasons than the ones they're saying they want to start them for. It seems that kind of thing's happened quite often, when governments have used tactics like inciting or provoking countries they think of as enemies into doing something they can use to justify declaring war against them, or making stuff up to justify it.
"A famous example is the Vietnam war, when the government deceitfully informed the people that Vietnamese ships had fired on American ships. It turned out later that the story was made up, or that the supposed attack was actually a false alarm generated by some kind of inaccurate radar signals, but that the American government thought the attack alert would be a convenient excuse for starting the war.
"Things like that have happened quite often, it seems. I read that a couple of centuries ago, some Swedish king didn't like the fact that a lot of people were unhappy with how he was governing the country, so he thought a war would unify the country against an enemy so it would take the heat off him, so he actually got some people to dress up as Russian soldiers and attack a group of Swedish border guards, so he could claim Russians had done it, and use that as an excuse to start a war against Russia, which Sweden didn't win. Why Russia, I'm not sure. He was later assassinated. But lots of people died in the war he started.
"I read that another example was when Hitler organised a set of staged attacks that he claimed had been carried out by Poland on Germany, to justify invading it, such as by forcing concentration camp victims to go to the border dressed as German troops, and then having them killed, and claiming that Poland had killed Germans, and that an invasion was necessary to stop that kind of thing from happening.
"But that kind of thing's happened more recently too, like with the claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he could quickly attack the west with.
"But anyway, I've been thinking about telling you about a coup in Iran that was planned by America and Britain in the 1950s. They organised it after an elected prime minister in Iran wanted to turn Iran into a progressive secular state, I think, - although how successful he really would have been at doing that in the end, I don't know, since there could have been a lot of opposition from powerful religious sections of the community, maybe.
"But anyway, he wanted to nationalise the oil industry, taking it out of the hands of the British company that had owned it till then, so it would have lost a whole lot of money. It had taken control of Iranian oil production near the beginning of the 20th century, it seems, after the corrupt royal family in Iran at the time had agreed to sell it off to make money for themselves. The new prime minister wanted Iran to make more money from oil; and it seems that when the oil company refused to give Iran a higher percentage of its profits, he decided to put oil production entirely in the hands of Iranians.
"But the British company didn't like the prospect of losing all the money they'd been making from oil there, and the British government didn't like it either, since they'd been making a lot of tax money from the profits; so they thought it would be nice to get rid of the prime minister who wanted to implement that policy, and tried to persuade the American government to help organise a coup that would put people in power who'd let them carry on as usual, like the leader of the corrupt royal family that had used to govern Iran.
"It seems British authorities did their best to persuade the American government that Iran was in danger of going communist, which wasn't all that hard, since the prime minister there had made an alliance with the communist party there. And Russia had been taking over some countries since the Second World War and turning them communist, so it wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility that they'd be able to influence Iran to go communist. And the American government might also have worried that if Iran succeeded in taking over oil production, it might have encouraged governments of other countries to take over oil production from American companies.
"It seems the American government wasn't interested in overthrowing the Iranian government when the idea of the coup was first brought up; but then another government came to power in America that was more paranoid about communists taking over, so they were easier to persuade. So they decided to arrange a coup, and overthrew the government of Iran. And the American-backed shah who was put in power in place of the old government did do some things to modernise the country, but he became increasingly hated because ordinary people came to think he was favouring the elite classes, and spending too much money on buying weapons and other things, instead of helping them, so they eventually rose up against him decades later, and then a fanatical religious elite came to power that actually repressed them some more."
One student said, "Blimey this is depressing! I'm glad I don't have to do an exam in it! Imagine doing an exam in that kind of thing, and getting so depressed by thinking about it that you just couldn't carry on, and you called the invigilator over and asked them to go out to the doctor for you quickly and get you some tranquillisers so you could finish it! Or imagine if everyone in the room got really really depressed about it, and everyone started crying loudly all together. I wonder what the invigilator would do!"
One of the others grinned and said, "Maybe they'd think everyone must have just gone mad, and maybe they'd run away, worrying that if they stayed around, they might catch the madness bug and start crying loudly too!"
Becky said, "I wonder how they'd explain to the tutors why they'd run away! Imagine them sitting with a group of top university staff, saying, 'I'm sorry I jumped up and ran away in the middle of the exam; everyone suddenly burst into loud sobbing, and I was worried they'd all gone mad, and didn't want to catch the madness infection and start crying too!'
"What would the important university people think? Imagine if all the students denied crying in the exam. The top university people would probably think the invigilator had just wanted time off, and was just making up a daft excuse, and that they could probably win a competition for who could make up the most unbelievable excuse in the world!"
The students laughed.
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