Argo

REVIEW

ARGO

ARGO is some film. I admit I relived more than a handful 'very anxious moments' that I'd completely forgotten, or put back on the top shelf.

I was a flight lieutenant - that’s what you lot across the Atlantic Ocean call a captan - at the time, and I remember feeling emaciated, ineffectual at the UK's refusal to allow shelter in our embassy, although I understood the reasoning.

I remember those blood-curdling yells of Burka clad women and what shocked me more than anything was seeing these women piecing together the shredded papers and holding them up to the camera. We never saw children do this; only ladies in burkas.

I remember, too, being briefed as to exactly what would happen.

Argo is - I now realise - why I write so passionately about Iraq and Afghanistan. The film has pulled all the strands together.

I remember, too, Swissair refusing to be intimidated by a load of gangsters trying to head off the 747 before lift-off. When that was reported to us, you can imagine, the RAF, the German Air Force (then still embryonic) and USAF and the RCAF absolutely PUNCHED the air!

And that is still my stance to this day.

As always, Ben Affleck has directed a masterpiece.

I cannot emphasise enough the fear the western world was gripped by.

When they stormed the embassy, we were watching it live; that in turn emboldened the religious community in the UK to demand that the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain take over all laws for its own community; Parliament side-stepped that, but it has created division, as we feel that 'Christendom' has departed, and often feel we are on the back foot. 

I'm only thankful that Capitol Hill on January 6 this year had slightly less resolve than those people who overran the US embassy.

Let me put it like this (I was 28 and had also just completed 11 years police service). To see the siege and overrun of the US Embassy was a massive shock to everyone. As dad put it, it was like watching the blitzkrieg on May 10, 1940. Suddenly, we seemed to be dealing with people who desired to live literally as if they were 1,500 years earlier.

I remember too, that much work went on behind the scenes in the Commonwealth of Nations, which is largely unreported and is the former British Empire. When it morphed from empire to British Commonwealth and then to its current constitution, originally 8 independent nations now 56 independent nations, on the intelligence circuit and in diplomacy it is still that most important backdoor to government, bound by that old-fashioned phrase now : the English-speaking Peoples.

In 2025, let it be underlined, America is not and never has been part of the English-speaking Peoples. The American-speaking People stand separate and with the way things are going, seem to be staring loneliness and isolation from without, not the glorious splendid isolation it dreams of being.

First Reviewed 19 July 2021