According to the BBC, The UK military is awaiting the launch of Skynet.

Just as long as its neural net doesn't go haywire, causing it to start a nuclear war to erase the virus of humanity from the planet...

Also in HMV last night, I picked up John Thaw’s portrayal of Bomber Harris recorded for the BBC in, I was astonished to find, 1989. I remember watching it first time round, and with hindsight, I could have been twelve at the time but am amazed it was so long ago. Although that might explain why I remembered so little about it.

The film is essentially sympathetic to Harris, presenting him as devoted to his own men and simply doing the dirty work that he felt was necessary to win the war against Germany. It doesn’t gloss over the fact that it involved butchering a couple of thousand people but it doesn’t exactly dwell on the matter either. The Bomber Command Parson who tackled Harris directly about the ethics of area bombardment and who later invited Sir Stafford Cripps to lecture the men on how they shouldn’t silence their consciences even while, say, 20,000 feet over Berlin, comes across as cold, sanctimonious and generally unsympathetic. The film also makes its view clear that Harris was made a scapegoat for others who approved entirely of his strategy and then dumped him, friendless and honourless, when the war was over.

Many regard this as John Thaw’s tour de force, and I’m inclined to agree. Thaw acts Harris wonderfully, with some wonderful support (e.g. John Nettleton as Harry Weldon). Only Robert Hardy’s Churchill feels weak, and that may be simply the price of playing too familiar a figure.

Try as it might, however, this film can’t entirely absolve Harris from his responsibility for the horrors of Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin. Harris was an enthusiast for aerial bombardment from an early stage, having been an experiementer with it in the early 1920s in Iraq and India (no-one worried too much about a few ‘natives’ getting the chop, of course). When Harris became frustrated with the limitations of targeted bombing, he turned to the idea, concocted all those years before, that blowing the smithereens out of cities was the way to shorten the war.
It didn’t shorten the war – German industrial production in 1945 was as great as it was in 1938 – and it’s difficult to make the case that it had a militarily significant effect on German morale, either.

As ThEconomist notes in an interesting article this week (subs required), Harris was the first, but hardly the last, in a line of fantasists who deluded themselves that air power made the infantry soldier obsolete. In the past few years, we’ve seen two classic examples of that delusion – the Anglo-American débâcle in Iraq, and more recently Israel’s war gone wrong against Hezbollah in South Labanon. Luckily for the human race, the Allies did have massive ground forces to hand in 1944 and ’45.

Air power is great for blowing things up, but it doesn’t actually do much if you’re trying to create something.

I'm still amazed at what the chaplain got away with though. This is a sign either of the liberality of Britain in the 1940s or the exalted position the Church of England used to have in English society. Either way, it's hard to imagine anything vaguely like it happening today.

(Pointless aside: the review of the Harris DVD on the amazon.co.uk page linked to above is clearly written about a completely different production.)

Not original, but still amusing:

D'ya wanna know the creeda Jacques Derrida?
Dere ain't no reada
Dere ain't no wreida
Eida

I was in HMV last night and found there was a documentary about Derrida on DVD for sale. Imagine paying money to watch a documentary about that old pseud.

OK, yes I did consider it, but no, I didn't buy it.