Pearl Harbor Day

On 7th December 1941, the Empire of Japan attacked the United States' Naval Base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was to bring the US into the Second World War, after more than two years at the sidelines of the conflict. This move signalled the beginning of the end for the Japanese Empire: one of its leaders observed that we have wakened a giant. Three years and eight months later, an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and another one on Nagasaki prompted the surrender of Japan. The war in the Pacific was brutal, and indescribably atrocities were visited upon those under Japanese occupation, not to mention upon any prisoners, or prisoners of war.

The Japanese emperor was stripped of his status as a deity in exchange for not having to face war crimes charges. Japan has never apologised, for whatever good that would have done, for its actions during WW2; and its neighbours, like Korea and China, still regard the land of the Rising Sun with suspicion.

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #30

 NaBloPoMo comes to a close for another year, and once again, I have not blogged every day in November. I have not been in the habit of blogging regularly since I took to writing on Facebook. However, a blog affords you the space to write more expansively, and you have more versatility in posting pictures. Late November sees some very short days here, with sunset before 4 pm. I shall close NaBloPoMo for 2025 with some images at dusk, taken last Friday, 28th November. 

I'll continue to blog irregularly going forward. 

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #29

 I have been in the Isle of Lewis for 21 years now, and things never seem to change. They are going to now in a major fashion. The local authority has granted planning permission in principle for the construction of an electricity converter station, just south of the Lews Castle Grounds near Macaulay Farm. This is near the turn-off for Arnish on the A859 road towards Tarbert. The electricity hub will convert the AC current, generated by on-shore and off-shore windturbines, to DC for transmission down a 50-mile subsea cable to the Scottish mainland. Landfall will be at Dundonnell, south of Ullapool, and the cable will continue further east towards Beauly, near Inverness. 

The converter station will stretch a total of 400 yards, with buildings rearing up to 90 feet into the sky.  It will be visible from far and wide, and basically turn that area of the island into an industrial wasteland. 

Yesterday, I walked down to the Arnish Road, upon seeing reports that the double-tracking of that road had commenced. This is part of the project. It was not pretty, and I find it horrible to see vegetation stripped off the bedrock and diggers tearing up the land. Some call it progress. I don't really agree. 

Who is going to benefit from those renewable energy projects? We are supposed to get £4.5m per annum in community benefit, except this will now be syphoned off into a Scotland-wide pot from whence we'll get zilch. Jobs? Just for a couple of years, and the majority of the work will be done by imported labour. These people will be housed in accommodation blocks at Willowglen and Sandwick - only to move away once the project is complete in 2031. 

Another gripe. The landfall station for the offshore windfarm will be north of the Barvas Machair, in (what the developer admits is) challenging terrain. Initially, they referred to the machair as scrubland. It is in fact a protected habitat. But it's money that talks here. And government policy. 

 

 

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #23

 The war in Ukraine is moving towards its 4th anniversary next February. In 2022, the Russian Federation invaded the territory of its western neighbour, having already occupied the Crimea and areas of the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk since 2014 through proxies. Ukraine is resisting valiantly, but is inexorably, slowly losing terrain and men. As Russia invaded without provocation, any ceasefire that includes ceding territory to Russia by Ukraine would be unfair. However, that is exactly what Donald "Chamberlain" Trump is proposing. Let's not forget what preceded this war. 

Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, assisted a secessionist movement in Abchazia, a rebellious province of Georgia (on the east coast of the Black Sea) in splitting off from Georgia. Apart from loud protests back in August 2008, no military consequences ensued. Putin occupied the Crimea, part of Ukraine, in March 2014, without any military consequences. Putin's forces allegedly shot down a civilian airliner over the east of Ukraine in July 2014, with the loss of 300 lives - without any retalitatory action. Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This time round, Ukraine's allies rallied round with supplies of military hardware and intelligence. When Donald Trump became US president in January, he started off by giving Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zhelensky a row in the White House. Trump likes strongmen, like North Korea's Kim Jong Un and Russia's Putin. And Putin manipulates Trump. 

We saw in the 1930s what happens when you try to pacify aggressors. "Peace for our time", Neville Chamberlain said in November 1938, upon adorning a piece of paper with some more ink in Munich. Adolf Hitler did not pay the slightest attention, but invaded Czechoslovakia the next year, followed by Poland in September 1939. Only then did we have a declaration of war from Britain and France. Had these allies stood up to Hitler upon his incursions into the Rhineland in 1936, for instance, war might have been averted. But we'll never know. 

We'll see what happens if Trump's peacedeal is adopted. 

 

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #19

 Today, Western Isles Council decided to grant planning permission in principle to build an electricity  converter station on the outskirts of Stornoway. The station will be massive, measuring several hundred meters by several hundred meters, rearing up to 27 metres in height. It is required to convert electricity, generated by renewable energy projects across Lewis for transport to the mainland. A sub-sea cable has already been approved; it will have a capacity of 1,800 megawatts. In the 21 years I have been in the island, I have been vocal in my opposition to such on-shore and off-shore schemes. It will have a massive detrimental environmental impact, for one. And the benefit for Lewis will only be short-term, and even the employment may not be locally sourced. And by 2031, we'll be left with an industrial wasteland. I am very disappointed. 

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #17

 Eight years ago tonight, my uncle passed away, at the blessed age of 90. He had been suffering from pancreatic cancer, and had spent the last months of his life in a hospice. When I saw him on his 90th birthday, the previous January, he was a well-to-do nonagenarian, his usual affable, smiling self. Ten months later, there was little left of him. I was relieved he had been spared further suffering. 

My uncle, my father's eldest brother, had been married, but his wife had pre-deceased him in 1998, also after having cancer. They had lived together in the same tied cottage for 44 years, and my uncle stayed on until he died in 2017. It fell to members of the family to clear out ten skipfuls of detritus from years gone by. I don't think they ever bought new furniture, and the books were of similar vintage. I remember a ginger cat, and, from further back, chickens. 

Although he never had a family, my uncle was very fond of my siblings and myself, and supported our mother when she was in the final years of her life, up to 2008. Following the death of my father in 2022, there is only one sibling left of the four. My father's second brother was killed in a motorbike accident in 1954, when he crashed into an unilluminated American army truck, which did not have permission to be out and about. The youngest, my auntie, remains, now aged 78. 

Tempus fugit.  

NaBloPoMo 2025 - #11

 On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the guns fell silent. Fifteen million lay dead. Just because an archduke got shot in Sarajevo? Because the royal houses of Europe decided to have a family tiff? No, it's never as simplistic as that. But this post is not about the reasons for the Great War. It is about those fifteen million. Servicemen from all sides, civilians from all sides. It was the age of duty, you signed up because you felt it was your duty. Duty towards King and Country. If you didn't volunteer, if you tried to dodge the draft, you were a coward. You could be handed a white feather, oh, the disgrace. But that overlooked the genuine panic and fear that had some 3,000 shot at dawn. Only very recently have these unfortunate souls been exonerated, and their honour restored to them.

I compiled listings of the men from the island of Lewis in particular, and from the Outer Hebrides in general, who went to war from August 1914 until November 1918. When focusing on Lewis, their number stands at roughly 6,200. The number of dead is not set in tablets of stone; I have it at roughly 1,300. It matters not. Of that number, 181 were lost seven weeks after the Armistice, when their transport, HMY Iolaire, sank off Stornoway. Twenty others were Iolaire crew.

We all fall silent at 11 in the morning on November 11th. I have marked the occasion for thirty-fiveyears now, initially listening to the event on BBC Radio 4 longwave, 198 kHz. Not until I came to Stornoway, in November 2004, did I start to actively observe the Armistice. I have photographed the war memorials here, each stating the war to have ended in 1919, unlike everywhere else in the UK, where the end year is 1918. I have photographed over 400 wargraves and war-related gravestones in the island's cemeteries. I have compiled my findings on several websites, for all to see - at no charge. It's not for money that I have done this work. 

Lest we forget.