Veni, Vidi, Circunambulati

It has been a strange tour of service, these past three years, showing the ghosts of the Camel and Pilot around the world for which they fought and died. Originally, I had planned to let them see, in both the present and the past which would have been their future, what had been the results of all those deaths. I wondered if they would judge the sacrifice acceptable.

Their war was a peculiar one, for, apart from the destruction to farms, villages and towns; citizens, objectors and non-combatants, were generally not the target. In fact, non-combatants did serve and did get wounded or even killed, but they did so of their own free will, not as the victims of a set of rules and regulations which decreed who should be quickly dead and who should be slow-walking dead. Those latter people did not have the choice of neutrality or non-hostility.

An ancestor of mine, I learned when I was young, was wounded by a bayonet thrust to the thigh in a charge. I had assumed he was a soldier, carrying a rifle. But, I learned, he was a conscientious objector, on religious grounds. He would not kill, but served as a stretcher-bearer. This only puzzled me further until I learned that the stretcher-bearers ran forward in company with their armed and non-non-combatant friends. And if one of them should get lost in the smoke and confusion and blunder into a small group of the enemy desperately hiding in a crater while the charge swept past them, the long shape of the furled stretcher might be mistaken for a rifle or two.

There was a small amount of action against the innocents in the Great war; bombings of cities, shellings of coastal towns, sinking of shipping, but, with the exception of the Armenian genocide, the war was fought between the uniforms and machines. As I steered the camel and pilot on towards the place we are today, we crossed the dirty smoking landscape that was Poland, and briefly visited the camps.

We leaped forwards as the throttle was opened fully, banking sharply round from our intended course and diving into today, to topical news, to satisfy their curiousity as to whether the crimes in Poland and the other occupied lands had been resolved. And found that, even now, some suspected war-criminals were never found, others found but cunningly smuggled into the victors' services, and still more, today, are not to be brought to book because they are too old, or it would cost too much.

As we circled over this ugly story, we passed across another land where yet another strange set of rules permitted decimation; Cambodia. And today, so many years after the piles of skulls were made in the centres of little villages, no war-criminals have ever had a sentence passed. They have had paragraphs written on them, that they are too old to be tried, that the stability of the country could be threatened, that the cost might outweight the benefits.

What price a life? What price a million lives? At what point does one move from saying "here is a murder, that is to be expected" to "This is a serial murderer, we should try to stop him or at least write a book about him" to "This is genocide, we should set up whole institutions to debate upon them" ? (That is so clumsy, having to put the question mark there after the closing quote, but I do not see any other way that I would do it. I didn't say could, some of you might notice.)

So what is the point of our circling flight? The title has aroused curiousity in other places. The camel and pilot were very understanding when I told them that I would not tell them. I would try to show them how they could tell themselves what it meant. Years ago, when I first read Gurdjieff, I was puzzled at his dictum that "one must strive to bury the dog as deeply as possible". What was the point of writing a book about one man's view of the truth if it never said what that truth was? I kept his books, and other writings by people like Crowley, because I hoped that one day I would have time to go back and read them all again, and maybe I could find that elusive truth. In fact, I very nearly opened "Yoga for Yahoos" the other day, but saw that someone was destroying my playground and had to rush to intercede.

But I have recently found out for myself why a truth, any truth, is best buried deeply in the soil and not beneath a marker stone either. Take Veni, Vidi, Circunambulati; which someone the other day asked me the meaning of. Suppose I had said, "well, it means dah de dah de dah de dah de dah." What would I have given that person? They would have had in their mind two linked sets of information, one saying Veni, Vidi, Circunambulati, the other saying "dah de dah de dah de dah de dah". It would have been very much the same as any of a dozen of hundred religious tenets, just resting quietly in the mind like languid lilies on a lake. Pretty, but inedible. Useless, except to perhaps amuse someone at the dinner table.

I did take pity on one inquirer because it was obvious that their English was recently acquired, and so I explained that when a Roman conquered Britain, he said "Veni, Vidi, Vici", taken to mean "I came, I saw, I conquered". And since that person did not understand circunambulate, I told them that it meant to go around the edge of, to skirt a thorny thicket, to wander obstinately in a different route to that which others had intended. To circle around. And they then asked me, now they knew what it meant, what did it mean? And I knew then that to tell them what it meant would spoil the joke, not only for me, but for them too, because it was such a silly trifling thing.

And so it is with truths. Most truths, when you finally wrest them from the friendly soil, are really quite trivial and insignificant. In fact, when you look back at them a few days later on, it seems to you that there was no mystery there at all, the truth was obvious. Our minds are full of obvious truths now floating languidly on the surface, or more often lurking in the deep of what Jung called the collective unconscious. And there they wait, sometimes nudging us, sometimes calming us, but usually ignored by us.

For a seeker after truth, the act of seeking is the aim, I now realise, not the discovery. The discovery is usually something you already knew and is therefore rarely new, but the transformation from the journey is the gift of life. I know now what Gurdjieff's secret was, and why the dog must be buried so deeply, no matter what the size of it might be.

And so back to the truth of the Sopwith Camel and his pilot, was their end worthwhile? If they had not died, if they and many others had refused to fight, would the world have gone a different way, would millions still be alive today? Well, just as with any truth, I shall bury it, and I think I should bury it back where it started.

Veni, Vidi, Circunambulati.

Curious clouds and wandering winds have made the flight path circle strangely round, and underneath us is the pock-marked scabrous face between the lines, and, not by bullet but by chance, a structural failure has sent us spinning round and round into a dance that will not stop. This mission ends in mud and blood and wreckage, just like many other missions. War is a list of casualties and decorations, and for this pair, there are no suitable medals for what they did, just a sudden plunge over the edge of the cliff where one world ends and another one begins. The terminal velocity and the soft soil will ensure the camel and pilot go deeply into that dark Jungian hiding place where secrets lie in peace.

This flight is ended. There will be no headstone, no eulogy, no flowers, and no comments.

Porn and Politicians and Paranoia too

Sometimes I get worried about my obsessions, especially when they lead me astray and I get clobbered with hexually-transmitted diseases. I like to look through the web to see what other people are fascinated by. I think it makes me feel more balanced to know that I am not alone in wanting to see or read about unusual sexual behaviour.

It is, of course, a topical subject here in England at the moment, because of the partner of someone in a high position having watched two porn movies which were subsequently included on an expense account which was then covered by taxpayers funds. The business of who paid for them is, I think, the important issue here, although it is peanuts by comparison to some other "little" fiddles that have been dragged up from the music cupboard recently.

The issue that is really being hammered in the media, though, is that somebody watched porn. I cannot understand why this is newsworthy at all. What, I wonder, is so strange about somebody watching erotic videos? That is why they were made in the first place, isn't it? Are we really still so repressed sexually that the majority of people in this country believe that sex is purely for procreation?

Anyway, I wander about the web from time to time seeing what makes other people tick, and I know from conversations that other people also do, too. Of course, there are risks involved. Some people claim it makes you go blind. Others warn you that porn sites are the ones most likely to give your computer something to make its private parts sore and itchy for a time, and it was one of these sites which I got caught by.

I knew I was taking a risk, not only because I was using Windows XP and not Linux, but because I was using an older version of Mozilla instead of the more modern Firefox. This was because I was fed up with the Firefox updates regularly upsetting plug-ins which had previously worked, and so I had reverted to a Mozilla version which would still do the little tricks I wanted. The browser itself might be irrelevant to what happened anyway, but I cannot say for certain. I had a few tabs open, because I was going through those annoying sites which have collections of thumbnails which you think are going to lead you to a page of pictures, but which instead lead to another site full of thumbnails which lead you to a page, and so on.

What happened is that I had several tabs open, and when a popup popped up saying would I like to download a codec update so I could view the page properly I clicked on the little "x" in the top right corner to kill the popup, not trusting the "NO" button. Another popup appeared claiming that a virus had been detected on my hard drive and inviting me to click to have it removed. I tried the back button to move off the page but was in what is called a browser-trap, I was stuck on the page, which had also switched the browser from windowed into full-screen mode. I clicked on the "x" in the top right corner, and this time heard an ominous beeping. I killed the whole set of open tabs and when the browser window died, I found myself facing a white-coloured desktop with larger than normal icons.

I right-clicked on the desktop, intending to reset the screen size, and found I couldn't. I tried to get the task manage window, and got a message saying that it had been disabled by an administrator. I rebooted, and there was the same white desktop, wrong screen resolution, and lack of task manager.

At times like this it is a great relief to have an alternate, and I fortunately had two; a laptop and a linux partition on the compromised machine. I went online and googled around, and soon got an idea of what I had got, and it wasn't pleasant. Smitfraud, it was called. I found several free tools to play around with and tried to make the problem go away. After a bit of fiddling with Spybot, Hijack this, some malware removal programs and the msconfig utility I managed to get the task manager back, lost the fake white desktop picture, and resized the screen. Now I could start hunting through the windows folders to see what was going on.

I added Zonealarm and began to see what was trying to ask for internet access, and got a name, twice, called Psyche. Google turned up very little about this, just a hint it was a particularly clever tool. On a whim, I called up the dos box and tried netstat, and saw the window fill up and overflow. I found my copy of Tcpview, ran it, and realised that although I had apparently cleaned up Smitfraud with the free tools which said that they would do the trick, what was left behind, or possibly put there in place of the Smitfraud collection, was a spammers delight. My machine was a relay station for 200 or more open connections.

Paranoia is a wonderful gift. Not the mad bad type which leads sufferers to stalk round parks and back streets with carving knives looking for someone that a little voice will tell them is sending them coded messages via a radio receiver implanted in their tooth. I'm talking about the one which says "If your machine is compromised, what else is it being used for besides spam? Supposing someone is using your PC to hack into the Pentagon, or to launch DDOS attacks against a betting shop web-server as part of a blackmail attempt. Suppose the authorities come looking for you based on the IP address? What then?"

My first instinct was to delete the hard disk, refresh it from a backup image I had taken a few weeks earlier, restore the few additional programs I had added since the image, and get back to the serious business of downloading porn. I had now gone for four days without any flickering images, and I was feeling the lack of titillation. But another part of me said that if I did that, and the authorities did come anyway and demand to see my machine because it had possibly been used to breach Pentagon security, the act of having recently wiped and then restored the hard disk could be taken as the sign of a guilty conscience. If the compromised hard disk were still there it would serve as evidence that I was indeed the victim of malicious outsiders.

Then another part of me chipped in to say that the large quantity of porn on the hard disk would then compromise me in a different way. True, it was what you might call "OK" porn, all adults stuffing and being stuffed, but some of it was not what you would call vanilla, and there are laws creeping into place in this country which are not going to look kindly upon people seeing images of other people doing things that are not considered normal by those who make our laws and control the authorities who enforce them.

It is claimed, by several bodies, that there is a direct connection between films depicting violence against women and instance of rape. This is one of the reasons given for bringing in the new laws, that the unrestricted circulation of certain types of films will promote a rise in a certain type of crime. There might be some truth in it, for I have noticed that one of the favourite weapons of the serial psychopath who crops up again and again on the screen is the knife, and there are claims that knife crime has risen somewhat over the past few years.

But here, we get an interesting dichotomy. The government claim that knife crime is not on the increase, rather, that it has decreased in the time that they have been in power. Their figures have tried to show that the UK, when considered as a set of statistics, is a much safer place to live than it used to be. Against this, we have their claim that viewing certain crimes in film and on TV promotes that crime amongst some of the more impressionable viewers. I think that, as an experiment, they should try banning all films which depict wounding and killing using knives, and see if there is a corresponding fall in knife crime.

But they won't bother, because they have it on good advice that they are right. And it still didn't help my paranoia any, in fact, the thought that my collection of porn might have me thrown into room 101 for thought crime against a fantasy figure inside my head made things even worse.

I have been paranoid a few times before, and got given some good, free, advice by someone I shall call Debs. She told me that the best way to deal with paranoid thoughts was to go out and tell them, out loud, to someone. Anyone, but preferably a stranger, because then you could empty your head and run away without worrying that what you had said would come back to haunt you later on.

And so that is what I did. I wiped the hard disk, restored the image, went back to hunting porn but this time using linux, and have told you all about my dark fears and nightmares. and so, if the boots do come though the door and the machines are carted away for forensic examination, the claim that I was the innocent victim of a drive-by download hijack is right here, on the web, visible to thousands of witnesses. Well, hundreds. Well, in the case of this blog, three of four, but you're enough for me. The only problem is, you're not exactly strangers, are you?

The problem still remains that our elders and betters, elected by us to represent us and watch over us, are not expected to do the same things that we do. They will never watch porn, for instance, and so will never understand what it means to many of us. That is possibly why they have decided that taking some of it away might be a good thing.

I really wish that we could be governed by peers, who know what it is like to be human, to have to struggle with masses of junkmail and self-assessment forms and nanny our children ourselves and balance the budget each time we go to the petrol pumps or supermarket or pay our utility bills or try to get onto an NHS dentist's waiting list. But no, we are to be watched over by a collection of puritans who have no inner human needs or desires.