The activist sat down to a traditional Sunday breakfast at his hotel. They did you well here, he considered, in competing for the tourists trafficking through on their way to Hebridean splendour. Popular also were tours of the nearby battleground at Inverlochy where the Duke of Argyll’s birlinn had ignominiously sped the magnate from the slaughter of his Campbells by Montrose’s men under Alasdair MacDonald, no quarter being given to the Campbell men who had been pillaging with abandon until retribution came with that blood soaked morning.
Having ordered eggs-over-easy, he contemplated his fellow guests. Grey heads predominated at the breakfast tables. They would re-form into grey battalions and parade the streets. Annual invasion of the highlands by the aged had begun earlier than usual this year, conveyed to spring sunshine by hundreds of air conditioned tour buses. Gainful employment resulted for locals and itinerants both. It also provided cover for people like him.
He despised the current crop of elderly, a generation of tepid ideals who had eased into comfort on the sacrifices made by a previous generation. The legacy of the current crop?…Sons and daughters devoid of principals, victims of rampant capitalist profiteering which was the western world’s rationale for raping the rest of the planet. Lulled by the American Dream, which encouraged the exploited to view themselves as failed millionaires (an observation attributed to Steinbeck), western society had become the target of intense advertising with self indulgence and avarice its driving force as Hume remarked of commerce more than two hundred years ago.
History moved constantly, carrying its luggage. The activist saw himself as part of that process. Not for him the passive ride. From an early age he had determined not to become a victim of the public school and merchant banking class, which he considered to be the natural condition of everyone he knew. His future path had appeared when, as a child, he first heard of the incident at Balikpapan and shot down his model warplanes in retaliation.
At a corner table, in an ambience dominated by an aroma of bacon and imprecise clickings of false teeth, his memory wandered into a much visited cranny and motivational base.
He had been ten years old when he first asked what had happened to his father’s favourite uncle, a grand-uncle Andy of whom he had heard, and failed to comprehend why there was no corresponding grand-aunt. Keen to be told a grown-up story, he sensed in his father the impulse to talk about this mysterious family member and pleaded with him for information.
His father showed him a photograph of a slim, widely grinning man with a nineteen fifties crew cut, overarching fronds of palm tree amateurishly framing the portrait. The family should never forget Andy. He was your great uncle, dad explained, an officer on board the tanker San Flaviano discharging oil in Balikpapan harbour when an American pilot targeted the ship. Great-uncle Andy burned in the holocaust and came home with damaged eyes and strangely shiny skin in patches all over his face and arms. He never went to sea again and died – before his time, as dad put it.
Much later, he read about CIA bombing missions, pursuing the American government’s policy to destabilise Indonesia and control huge oil and gas reserves. There was a right wing group in place, the Permestas, who were to overthrow the government after disrupting major oil exports on which the economy relied. Had the Permestas strategy succeeded, the influence of the USA and its commercial interests in the aftermath of World War II would have flourished in the far east. America intended to claim they were assisting the youthful state’s emergence from Dutch colonialism.
CIA pilots in unmarked aircraft machinegunned civilian Dutch Shell oil installations on land. They also bombed British, Italian and Greek ships, amongst others, in a campaign of violence. This confused him. America was portrayed as an intrepid crusader for truth and justice in an evil world. Friends and neighbours soaked in a continual drizzle of pro-America on all channelled news, and any anti-American comment was furiously rebutted by oligarchs and parliamentarians alike. He began to research.
He read of the ‘bonesman’, a scion of the Bundy family, who had written to confirm the later transfer of 50million rupiah to the Permestas. He learned of the existence of the Order of Skull and Bones, elitist Society of Yale, and the billionaire families whose male members of that Society intrigued endlessly, and most profitably, in foreign affairs. One became a ‘bonesman’ for life. Each generation appointed successors to controlling positions, particularly in merchant banking and in the CIA. The two Bush presidents, father and son both, were ‘bonesmen’, the elder Bush having previously headed the CIA.
He read avidly in order to become more sure of American foreign policy goals, the violence used to attain them and the power groups that drove the process.
In a historical layby, he became fascinated by a postman’s son whose name was known to history.
Gavrilo Princip, an ethnic Serb, described at his trial as a ‘small, fragile youth’, had intended, as one of a group, to nostalgically assassinate the Archduke Ferdinand at the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo where, a few years earlier, a role model had committed suicide following a failed attempt to murder the incumbent Austrian Governor. Persuaded by circumstances to take up a different position, Princip alone succeeded in shooting to death the 50 year old heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (together with wife), and lighting the diplomatic powder trail that exploded into World War.
How apposite a metaphor Princip had become, the activist thought. That ‘fragile youth’, that Serbian spark, had begun destruction of not simply an empire, but a European hierarchy descended from mediaevalism. He aspired to a less lofty goal. The CIA’s burning of a young deck officer at Balikpapan had not been forgotten, and the bully needed to be thrashed.
The activist’s expression relaxed as he gently chided his journey down leafy lanes of memory. He tried to avoid lapsing into a nostalgia whose bubble was warm and whose shades were pastel. Activists like himself were political; no-one was an ideologue nowadays, everyone was much too cynical. Political philosophies had long since succumbed to avarice, or rather their proponents had. Left and right, both walls of the political ravine enriched themselves once in power and to hell with idealism. He was recalling the first pass thrown by the Liverpool University in-house recruiter for MI5 when a waitress stooped alluringly to enquire whether he wished anything further.
“Thank you, no,” slowly raising his eyes to her challenge, “not for now.” The waitress stretched her lips in a professional response, straightening and smoothing her dress. He drank his Earl Grey and rose, smiling and nodding to balding scalps and blue rinses as he negotiated the tables.