The age of the incendiarist

Despite the ravages of floods, polluted air and contaminated earth, it is perhaps to be expected that the most destructive element in an overheating planet should be fire.

The burning of the Amazon is only the most recent example of global pyromania. It seems fire is seen by some as a purification ritual, the cleansing agent which will leave clear spaces, a tabula rasa on which to build afresh humanity’s dream of a future. It is also perceived as a salutary disinfectant, what people in Bangladesh – where yet another fire in Dhaka destroyed more than 5,000 homes in August 2019 – call ‘fire therapy’. This means fire as a means of removing the poor from land required for other purposes by other actors than the people who live there.

So it is with the Amazon and Bolsonaro’s denial of global warming, even as 80,000 fires had been seen by August 2019, an 84 per cent increase over the previous year; so that the skies darkened even over São Paolo, 1,700 kilometres away. The G7, meeting in Biarritz, offered $20 million to combat the vast conflagration in land that Bolsonaro declared would be ‘colonised by hooves’, as ranchers and settlers prepare to export yet more overfed beef to those who already glow with the ethereal refulgence of bovine hormones. As apocalyptic scenes of skeletal trees, stumps and smouldering tropical luxuriance make their own contribution to an overheating planet, the governments of the two most populous countries in the Americas claim overheating a Chinese hoax or a Marxist plot.

The most extensive and notorious slums on earth – Dharavi in Mumbai, Kibera in Nairobi, Khayelitsha in Cape Town, Tondo in Manila – have in recent years created a melancholy gazetteer of catastrophic fires. Survivors of the seventeen fires that swept through Dhaka’s slums in 2017 say that no poor people ever return to the sites of the disaster, which are always replaced by high-rise flats for the middle class. Although cooking fires, illegal electricity connections and exploding gas cylinders are always the official cause, more often than not, the fires are often set by politicians and ‘developers’ whose need of the land is obviously so much greater than those of garment workers and rickshaw-pullers.

Destructive conflagrations are not confined to the dark places of underdevelopment. The firestorms which demolished whole cities in the 1940s have been the template for much subsequent profane fire-worship. It seems these also had a cauterising effect on the human sensibility, arsonists have often been reported as exulting in their work.

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As Grenfell Tower burned in June 2016, I was reminded of Coventry in 1940, my earliest experience of the destructive element. On that occasion, we stood on our flat roof, thirty miles away from the conflagration and collected money from spectators for the survivors of the air raid. Later, my father took my infant brother and me in his lorry to observe the devastation, over which he expressed a certain relish and even furtive sympathy for those who had caused it. I can see the flames, even though I could scarcely have remembered them; the tangerine reflection of clouds on a cloudy sky remains vivid: perhaps a remembrance of subsequent fires merged with a catastrophe so close to home.

I clearly recall images of smouldering cities in Europe: perhaps it was the inferno of Dresden that I later substituted in my memory for Coventry. People wheeled barrows and prams through jagged cliffs of concrete, stepping over rubble and walking from one wrecked town to another. This was the world that reached the senses of children in the 1940s. At the same time, the photographs of the camps opened up at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen were not imaginary: the victims of an epic cremation of humanity, and its skeletal survivors stacked like kindling, presented an iconography of urban ruin, which was the pictorial companion of our childhood; far more compelling than Enid Blyton’s Sunny Stories, whose pallid adventures were intended to distract the attention of juveniles from the infernal images of reality.

It scarcely mattered where these images originated – was it Warsaw, Rotterdam, Manila? – since these settlements were indistinguishable once the bombs had done their work: outer walls remaining, a crater where people had lived, and the sad intimacy of belongings abandoned by refugees – a shoe, a household utensil, a bakelite radio set, and wallpaper fluttering in the wind on an indecent exposure of a bedroom wall.

Such indelible imprints were hard to avoid and impossible to efface. In any case, Hiroshima and Nagasaki soon offered even more arresting views of our capacity for destruction by fire: the outline of a once-human body become a shadow on a wall; melting flesh and irradiated bone suggested fiery extinctions familiar to us from scripture.

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As adolescents, my generation read John Hersey’s Hiroshima. ¹ He spoke with survivors of the bomb, and reported their accounts of incredulity and wonder at the cosmic desolation that swept through the city in August 1945 – a gigantic photographic flash, a brilliant yellow flare, a flash whiter than any white ever seen, a sheet of sun. Hersey described naked crowds, women whose burned skin was patterned with the floral design of their kimono; the silence of the crowds: no one wept or screamed, no one complained as they died quietly. He chronicled the progress of burnt flesh, the skin yellow at first, then red and swollen until it was sloughed off. Fires burned in the winds set up by the blast and threatened survivors who had fled to a park, where trees became pillars of flame.

In 1952, the infinitely more powerful hydrogen bomb was tested, both by the USA and the USSR. Dropped above the Bikini Atoll in 1956, the blast was twenty-five miles high and a hundred across, a squat column of fire and the supernatural cumulonimbus that could annihilate whole populations in the twinkling of an eye. The mutual threat of the USSR and the USA taught us that our own lives, although far more protected than those of any generation before, were nevertheless even more provisional than the fleeting events the poets we studied had lamented. By 1962, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction had been articulated by US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and a new fear seized the minds of the impressionable and imaginative. As 17-year-olds, my friends and I took a melancholy, and not wholly disagreeable, view that ‘we would all go together’. Although we offered desultory support to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the idea of apocalypse held us in thrall; and our youth gave us time to dwell on it.

Everything seemed to confirm the insecurity that the vast urban liquefactions of the 1940s had left in their wake. We asked each other what was the use of studying; since there would be no intelligible society in which to practise such acquirements as we might obtain at university. We should abandon long-term plans, and live for the moment – a philosophy that was gaining adherents throughout society, thanks to the coming of affluence, to which the doctrines of annihilationism and the theologies of ‘deterrence’ gave a significant impetus. It is difficult to know whether the hedonism initiated in the sixties was a consequence of the shivering fear of nuclear war, or of the need to compete with the Soviet Union and demonstrate that the West could ‘deliver’ more tangible delights than a society ostensibly motivated by a more avowedly materialistic ideology. Perhaps both reinforced the growing idea that you were a long time dead, and therefore it behoved human beings to cram life with all the experience and excitement suddenly on display.

The idea of a final conflagration was never far from the surface; the more so in a culture in which the last days, the Day of Judgment, the end of time had been regularly anticipated for 2,000 years. Within a few months of the enunciation of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, the Cuban missile crisis occurred, when the Soviet Union, in response to the surrounding of its own territory by US missile bases in Europe and Turkey, began to establish ballistic missiles in Castro’s Cuba, only ninety miles from the coast of the US. At that time, I was teaching in what was then called a ‘secondary modern’ school in a poor part of town; and during what seemed interminable October days, we suspended lessons, as the world came as close as it ever would to thermonuclear warfare. My class was a ‘C-stream’ (a label which had relegated them unjustly to the barely educable) of 13- and 14-year-olds. The sense of urgency affected them profoundly; and although they asked, shall we not come to school tomorrow, and said, why are we learning anything if it’s all going up in smoke, a deep anxiety underlay their apparent cynicism; and although we spoke calmly about the issues, I didn’t have the heart to tell them that everything was going to be all right, because it didn’t look as if it was.

In the meantime, Vietnam was providing a new fiery pictography – the figure of Thich Quang Duc, the monk who tranquilly immolated himself in 1963, was a precursor of things to come. As the US became more deeply involved in the legacy of France’s Indo-Chinese war, the number of military personnel rose from about 9,000 in 1962 to half a million before the end of the war in 1973. The nature of the war – against the concealment of the enemy beneath tropical vegetation – required new kinds of fire. The clearance of whole villages led to the use of napalm, a gelling agent mixed with petroleum, and also known as ‘sticky fire’ since the flames adhere to the skin. Some of the images from that expedient were among the most memorable of the era – naked children with a crest of fire adhering to their backs, like a race of grisly salamanders, their mouths the dark circle of a scream. In addition, some 20 million gallons of herbicide and defoliant – notably agent orange – were poured onto the jungles, as a consequence of which about 400,000 people died, and over half a million birth defects were subsequently recorded. The cosily domestic process of ‘carpet bombing’ was carried out over North Vietnam; and by late 1966, more bombs had been dropped in the country than in Japan during the second world war. The films showed parturient B52s giving violent birth to a numberless litter of metal progeny over the forest canopy; about 3 million Vietnamese died.

By 1986, there were still 69,000 nuclear warheads in the world, enough to destroy the planet several times over. Twenty years later, these had been reduced to 17,000, a sufficiently ferocious concentration of explosives to ensure a human-made day of reckoning, a balance-sheet of bankruptcy beyond measure.

Nor was the fiery imagination of the US confined to earth. In the 1980s, in a marriage of science fiction film imagery with warfare, Reagan’s so-called ‘star wars’ initiative was unveiled, whereby incoming missiles from the Soviet Union would be intercepted before they reached their destination and fill the skies with prophylactic pyrotechnics in defence of the free world.

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This incendiarism against creation did not generate a commentary of doom. Quite the contrary, it took place as the same time as a constant declaration of ‘progress’ in the domestic arena of the US and Europe, and highly tangible evidence that we were on our way to some known and desirable destination. Indeed, the fire deployed far from ‘home’ was precisely in defence of that goal; and the hymns to production, with the self-congratulation that conflict in the bellicose continent of Europe had at last been assuaged, proved more persuasive than the fires that never ceased to rage without; and the curious phenomenon was observed, in which whole populations turned off the news, which could be extinguished from consciousness by the flick of a TV remote. Increasing numbers disengaged from politics, professed an inability to understand, suspended interest in the fate of the earth. It was sometimes called ‘apathy’, but it was a far more active response than passive indifference – perhaps a willed nescience or the numbness of fear.

W. G. Sebald, in his On the Natural History of Destruction, ² described this in Germany, among people who actually lived in cities reduced to rubble in the 1940s. He wrote of the enigma that had enabled the people of Germany to live with the terrifying annihilation of cities. He evokes Pforzheim, which had seen one-third of its people killed in a single raid in 1945, and Dresden, which was left with 42.8 cubic metres of rubble for every inhabitant of the city. The extent of the ruin had to be denied by the survivors in order for them to go on living. ‘People’s ability to forget what they did not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time. The population decided – out of sheer panic at first – to carry on as if nothing had happened.’

If the people of Pforzheim could effectively disregard the desolation all around them, how much more potent has been our elective unknowing of apparently more distant conflagrations; particularly when everything immediately to hand suggested increasing wealth, prosperity and good fortune.

The fire-raisers of Europe, shamed at a continent laid waste, retreated after the second world war; and the fires they had kindled – and continued to set in other parts of the world – became progressively more distant from their people. For the holocaust had repatriated to Europe the inflammatory dogmas of a racism which the European empires had practised for half a millennium in their overseas ‘possessions’, dominions, territories, dependencies, colonies and settlements abroad. And as the heat from that inferno cooled, the favourable economic terms upon which the rich world prospered and cleansed itself of the stain on its ‘civilisation’, ensured that proxy wars, economic aggression, extractive industries of all kinds would ensure an orderly flow of wealth from poor to rich; even if the charred remains of human sacrifice to its savage economic gods littered the globe.

It is, perhaps, one of the great ironies of our time that as the atrocities ignited by war grew increasingly remote from the political arsonists of Europe, and set ablaze Beirut, Gaza, Fallujah, Aleppo and Damascus, we turned inwards to enjoy the local ‘peace’ that we congratulated ourselves on having achieved ‘at home’; a peace apparently guaranteed by rising living standards and the sense of security to be gained by the provision (more or less assured) of all the amenities that advanced capitalism could provide. We had, it seemed, absorbed the treacherous and ambiguous lessons of history; and if Bosnia rekindled memories of the 1940s, we told ourselves this was a local aberration, affecting the troubled Balkans, whose name itself had come to signify chronic instability and political fragmentation.

How brief the celebrations were over the burnt-out ideology of Communism when the Soviet Union fell, and with it, the scorched hopes of any alternative to capitalism. It seemed that in the temperate atmosphere of a new millennium, the ash and cinders of twentieth-century burnings could be safely interred and forgotten.

Nothing would now impede the serene upward trajectory of an economic growth and expansion without end. But the funeral pyres of Communism had scarcely cooled before a new kind of firebrand struck: the metamorphoses of the enemy had mutated into an other-worldly dream of apocalypse, which had arisen, a malignant phoenix, out of the waste residue of spent pyromania. The hour of the human detonation had arrived, dressed in flammable vestments of destruction, claiming the fire of God’s wrath. Of course, suicide bombers were no new thing: prefigured by Japanese pilots in the second world war and the self-destructive ‘martyrs’ of Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers. And although there has also been a long tradition of self-immolation by protesters against oppressive regimes and social injustice – Tibetan monks, and Jan Palach in the Czechoslovakia of 1968, as well as the tradition of seppuku in Japan, and the ancient practice of sati in India – these acts of self-sacrifice were unlike the suicide bombers of our time, and did not wish to compel others to share their fate.

Human firebombs remain incomprehensible. Perhaps belief in an afterlife which has been forfeited by a majority of the inhabitants of the garden of earthly delights, does animate their eagerness to depart this world of shadows; but it is hard for most human beings to imagine that their unwilling companions in death are going to eternal torment while they will enjoy perpetual bliss.

The mutations of violent ignition reappeared in the world scarcely before the flames of already existing holocausts had been extinguished. Why, it might be wondered, has human aggression had recourse to this element so often in a combustible century? And this before we count the explosions created by malignant ideologies, which have contributed so significantly to the human-made sirocco, the artificial khamsin, that parch the world.

Prosperity was the firebreak that should have shielded Europe and the ‘developed’ world from the firestorms without; but that very shelter has become the source of yet another rise in the temperature of the world, this time, of the atmosphere, as the planet is overheated in consequence of the pyrexia induced by a development which engulfed the whole world like wildfire. When economic growth becomes simply another aspect of the multiple combustions set by humanity in a long incendiary century, should anyone be astonished at the fevers of development? That what was to have provided a solution to every conflict turns out to ensure a rendezvous with the very heat we thought we had successfully fled?

To observe the unprecedented fires that burn in California, Australia, Greece and the Canary Islands, but also, largely unreported, in Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, is to be present at a cremation, the funeral pyre of nature; over which, in certain myths of creation, humanity was given dominion.

Prometheus, who, according to Hesiod, ‘stole the far-seen gleam of unwearying fire in a hollow fennel-stalk’, ³ and gave it to the world after Zeus had withdrawn it, lest, in some versions, the destruction of humankind by fire set the heavens aflame, did so out of love for humanity. Now that Growth has become a perpetual – and apparently desirable – eruption, we are all menaced by the magma, a Pompeii of the future, petrified in attitudes of ease and pleasure for future generations to excavate and learn the sombre lessons of the fire-raisers of a civilisation that chose to pursue the perilous sport of playing with fire.

We may wonder whether Prometheus’ gift of fire to the world, after it had been withheld by Zeus, was truly an act of charity or whether this set in train a long slow-burning revenge of the gods for the hubris of humankind; or does it no longer matter, when the stifling winds of climate change are scarcely to be distinguished from the scorchings of the global economic incinerator?