Porter’s Pensées

I used to read science fiction for entertainment, and for cerebral stimulation. By ‘science fiction’ I don’t mean all that Star Wars stuff – ‘Cowboys and Indians’ transposed to a different time and place; but the sort that makes you think: ‘What If’…; and so on.

I was led into SF via the Eagle comic’s Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future, which was, to be honest, a little bit Cowboys and Indians-y’, or rather Britain versus the Nazis-y: the Treens representing the Germans, the Mekon a kind of green Hitler, Dan a public school-educated Spitfire pilot, Digby his salt-of–the-earth working-class batman, and space ships modelled on Wellington bombers shorn of their wings. But how else could we imagine them all, so soon after World War II? (The first issue of the Eagle came out in 1950, when I was nine. I still remember my excitement when it dropped through our letter-box.)

Nonetheless, crude and relatively unimaginative as it was, Dan Dare made one aware of alternatives: different sorts of people, although all with recognisably human features: two arms, legs, eyes and so on; vastly different physical environments (Mercury especially); alternative social and political arrangements, albeit again usually reminiscent of earth’s history, especially the Middle Ages; but still exotic enough to stimulate a small boy’s imagination. And in my case, to lead me on to the more cerebral stuff in this genre: novels by HG Wells, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Olaf Stapledon, Ursula le Guin, latterly Cixin Liu, and others; and to some of the early very political Sci-Fi flicks: Things to Come, Metropolis, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Quatermass and the Pit, The War of the Worlds (1953 version), Forbidden Planet, The Time Machine (1960), The Fly, Them!, Dark Star, The Thing from Another World, Plan Nine from Outer Space (for fun)….and so on. Fellow aficionados will cavil at some of my selections, and at my many omissions; but this list is only meant to exemplify what I mean by ‘cerebral’ Sci-Fi, as opposed to the cowboys-and-Indians sort. I was a huge fan.

Not so much now, I’m afraid. I read far less Sci-Fi nowadays, partly because I’ve got less time to read or watch any sort of fiction; but partly also because present-day reality is starting to give me the same vicarious thrills that Dan Dare’s exploits used to give me as a boy. I’m now addicted to news from the USA, which currently seems as other-worldly as anything I used to read in the Eagle, and consequently as mentally stimulating. (It will appear differently, of course, to Americans.) I don’t need the Mekon, when Trump is around.

Then of course there’s the asteroid (or comet) 3i/Atlas, which has recently come into our solar system from a galaxy millions of light-years away, and may be much older than us. Early reports of it last year raised the interesting possibility that it might be being guided on its journey by intelligence, with many of its course corrections being inexplicable by natural forces – gravity, and the like – and pictured as a kilometres-length rocky cigar, with enough room in it to house scores of aliens, or robots; who perhaps had designs – for better or worse – on Earth. Which of course fascinated an old Sci-Fi buff like me; and especially a historian, who saw his whole subject crumbling into nothing. If an extra-terrestrial object could interrupt history so totally, it would make all our theories about the causes of human progress pointless. Ask any dinosaur who survived the last catastrophic impact from space 66 million years ago. Every dinosaur history written before that time would be worthless.

Now, I don’t believe this about 3i/Atlas; and indeed its Wiki entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3I/ATLAS) casts serious doubt on the theory that it really is a piloted spaceship, out either to destroy us, or alternatively to save the world from Trump. But I’m keeping an open mind – albeit open only very marginally (0.1%?) – that it might be something unnatural; and so am following the latest reports on it with the interest I use to devote to Sci-Fi.

I’m not a great fan of Keir Starmer’s, my main gripe with him having been over his re-categorisation of ‘Palestine Action’ as a ‘terrorist’ movement in August last year. Noisily demonstrating, holding up incendiary placards and even daubing planes with red paint, are not ‘terrorism’. They don’t ‘terrorise’ – or even ‘terrify’ – anyone.

However, I welcomed his elevation to the Labour leadership, and later to Number 10, as a concession, as I thought, to the rabid right-wing press, who surely couldn’t find or manufacture the charges against him that had helped it bring down Jeremy Corbyn.  Starmer, with a distinguished non-political career behind him, and one to boot that required careful thought, forensic objectivity and keen intelligence, would restore what in the 18^th century was called ‘bottom’ to the Labour Party. He clearly has little of the ‘charisma’ that today is felt to be essential in a political leader; but then neither did Clement Attlee, who led the most constructive – even revolutionary – peacetime British government of modern times. (‘A modest man, who has much to be modest about’, as the very charismatic Winston Churchill waspishly called him.) I was hoping that Starmer might follow in Attlee’s path, and at the same time serve to undermine this appetite for personal ‘charisma’, which has blighted British politics in recent times. (Look at Boris Johnson.) Starmer is decent, honourable and pragmatic, and gained a stonking majority – if a misleading one – at the last General Election.

What he appears not to have – this is what the press and even some Labour MPs are throwing at him now – is political judgment. Some of us thought we could see a certain kind of judgment when he appointed Lord Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Washington. Distrusting ‘Mandy’ as many of us did, we nonetheless went along with the idea that, in view of the complexion of the current US government, it might be a good idea to send a snake to parley with the other snakes there, rather than someone more traditional and moral. It was certainly a pragmatic decision, which Corbyn could never have made. Some of us – me included – even thought it might be ‘brilliant’. How wrong in retrospect we were.

I’m glad that Starmer has announced today that he won’t resign over this. His excuse is that he believed Mandelson’s lies when he questioned him over his ties with the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, which at one point involved Mandelson’s passing secret documents to him. Mandelson insists that he knew nothing of Epstein’s dirtier activities, featuring underage girls, which he thinks were kept from him ‘because I’m gay’. Starmer’s acceptance of his lies may say a lot about his naivety; but is that a resigning matter, if it stands alone on the charge sheet? (A historian is reminded of the Profumo affair here; Macmillan didn’t resign over that issue either.) Besides, one is uncertain about his possible successor, and the boost it might give to the quasi-fascists in ‘Reform’. That’s a plus for Starmer, who may be living on borrowed time. But if he uses that time well – more radically, in my view – he might well come to be seen to stand on that pedestal beside the modest Attlee.

In Europe Anarchism was (and is?) usually associated with the political Left. In the modern USA, however, it is definitely a thing of the Right. Unfettered free market capitalism is an essentially anarchist ideology, whether free market capitalists want to describe themselves as ‘anarchists’ or not. It often goes under the name of ‘libertarianism’, or other titles incorporating the contentious word ‘liberty’.

Here’s a meticulously-researched account of the origins and modern history of the movement in America, up to and including Trump, taken from the current issue of Lobster magazine. A long read, but well worth it.

I think I’ve mentioned before my difficulties with my Emails, which I’ve not been able to send or receive for the past couple of months. After numerous enquiries to KCom – my ‘server’ (is that the word? based in Hull) – they’ve have been unable to restore the connection, or to offer any explanation as to why it’s been cut off. That’s until yesterday; when they at last replied back, on a ‘help’ line, with this message:

Regarding your Karoo email access: the reason you’re unable to log in while in Sweden is due to our updated security measures. We’ve strengthened security to protect customer accounts from scams and unauthorised access. As part of this, access to Karoo webmail is now restricted to a small number of approved countries.
You can only access Karoo webmail from

United Kingdom
France
Germany
Spain
Portugal
United States

If you’re outside these countries, webmail login won’t work.

That contravenes what KCom expressly promised when I originally signed up with them – that I could access my account anywhere in the world. It also goes against my experience with them until a couple of months ago, when I used KCom constantly – from Sweden – with no difficulty. Why on earth they couldn’t tell me of this change in their ‘security conditions’ at the beginning – whenever that was – or when I first raised the issue with them, I don’t know. It has been frustrating for me, of course, but also directly damaging to my work. I shall be protesting in no uncertain terms.

I pay £79 a month for this service; which friends tell me seems excessive in any case. What else do I get for it, apart from email? What shall I lose if I cancel it? (And ask for a refund, for the last few months, at the very least.)

In the meantime I have a new backup email address, which is:

bernardporter869@gmail.com.

Please use that from now on.

The thing that might finally turn his transatlantic fans against Trump – the rest of us are against him anyway – is his contemptuous dismissal of the contributions of European armed forces to America’s wars in recent years.

‘The problem with NATO’, he says, ‘is that, we’ll be there for them 100%, but I’m not sure that they be there for us. If we gave them the call, “Gentlemen, we are being attacked. We’re under attack by such and such a nation”. I know them all very well, I’m not sure that they’d be there. I know we’d be there for them. I don’t know that they’d be there for us. They’re not there for us on Iceland, that I can tell you.’ (He meant Greenland, of course.) And again: ‘They’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this or that, and they did; they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines’. That got even the Tory press in Britain wild: the implied slur on their brave boys in khaki, more than 450 of whom were killed helping American forces in Afghanistan after 9/11. (A disproportionate number of Danish soldiers – among the first to answer ‘the call’ – also died.) That was felt to be disrespectful, as well as ignorant, especially coming from a notorious ‘draft-dodger’ (those ‘bone spurs’); and was too much Trumpery even for Trump’s leading British supporter Nigel Farage to let slide. (https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/trump-supporter-nigel-farage-says-president-wrong-to-launch-unfair-attack-on-uk-over-afghan-war/ar-AA1UPhng). The British Right is usually very pro-the military, so it’s dangerous for anyone to criticise the soldiery, except perhaps on the grounds that there aren’t enough of them. So Trump scored a spectacular own goal here; in Europe, anyway.

Are other own goals coming? One would think that the recent ICE attacks on terrified immigrant families granted refuge in churches in Texas and elsewhere (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ice-church-raids-arrests-lawsuit-b2798388.html), as well as ICE agents’ murders of an innocent mother and a nurse in Minnesota just the other day, might provoke the ‘Christian’ Right against this kind of (at least proto-) Fascism. Nothing else – petitions, the courts, huge demonstrations, foreign opinion – seems to be making much impact so far. I still have some hope for the part of America (50%?) that I’ve long admired. But that is rapidly seeping away.

If you could choose, which national leader would you rather have?

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSEycl66RFk; or

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8CRet18ThQ.

Both speeches – Trump’s and Carney’s – were delivered to the Global Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, only yesterday.

Is there any chance that rather than America’s annexing Canada as its 51^st State, Canada might consider taking on America as its 11^th province? Then Americans could get decent healthcare; and might even be persuaded to rejoin the British Commonwealth.

Reading the papers today, everything is ‘Trump’. It’s difficult to get away from him; even Prince Harry (in Britain) and the Epstein files can’t compete. I imagine he’s loving this – even the bad publicity he generates, however much he complains of it; you’ll know how he revels in large numbers, often exaggerated, for example of attendees at his inaugurations, TV viewing figures for his shows, and probably facebook ‘likes’. If only for this reason he’s likely to dominate the accounts of our present times in the history books my successors will write, becoming one of the ‘great men’ of world history, and in all probability with an ‘Age’ named after him. For liberals it must be excruciating, for such a flawed and undeserving personality to set his mark so indelibly on events. Most of us will resile at the idea of Trump being put in the same distinguished category as Lincoln, Churchill, Napoleon and even Thatcher, in the books our children will read.

People are asking – on an LBC phone-in programme this morning, for example – why this is so. Why is it that this deeply flawed character should dominate American and world politics just now, as he clearly does? For those of us historians who – as I’ve said before – are uncomfortable with the old idea of history’s being led by ‘great’ – or at least remarkable – ‘men’ (and a few women); and who further resile against the idea of idiots taking on this role, our whole intellectual world seems to be falling apart. It makes history appear more accidental than we would like to think; dependent on individuals – what used to be called ‘heroes’ – arising to guide or change events, rather than significant ‘underlying causes’. And if we are democrats we should believe that individuals shouldn’t have this kind of power over events in any case, with institutions like parliaments, congresses, elections, separation of powers, the rule of law and ordinary human decency restraining individual excesses. As of course they are failing to do in Trump’s case; which is one reason for America’s problems currently. (The American Constitution could do with a few more ‘Amendments’ when all this is over.)

But there’s more to it than this: an interpretation that could perhaps reconcile the ‘great man theory’ with more general and impersonal explanations of historical events. It’s easy to see Trump’s policies arising from his personal views, and even his character weaknesses, with narcissism being the ‘weakness’ that is usually cited, followed by ignorance, stupidity, disregard of the truth, and sociopathy. But what lies behind this? Looking back into his early biography, we find a ghastly crooked property-developer father, an absent mother, problematical siblings, education at a military school instead of college, a louche teen-age life (‘grab them by their pussies’), immersion in the least respectable field of capitalism, a well-attested habit of lying, and a long history of bankruptcies, all this protected by his family wealth, and by Russian private or state bankers; leaving him able to ‘win’ in life in spite of being a ‘loser’ morally. These weren’t just personal failings, it seems to me, but societal ones: typical perhaps of a certain class in America at this time – the one described in Ayn Rand’s novels – whose whole ‘Art of the Deal’ was founded on cheating, propaganda, and ‘gamesmanship’. ‘Facts’, for example, were only valuable to Trump insofar as they were useful, and so could be manipulated to suit his aims. He could well genuinely believe his own egregious lies, which will make it easier for him to utter them. ‘Facts’ are simply tools in the great game of life; which Trump has proved himself adept at.

The Chicago Professor John Paul Rollert has written that Trump sees capitalism not as an economic system but ‘as a morality play’, whose rules supersede every other ethical system, and so should govern all aspects of life. Which is what for me links him to the rise of capitalism; one of those ‘underlying causes’ that historians like me prefer to see at the root of things, and the latest stages of which he could be said to exemplify. Brought up with no other moral compass than the ‘laws’ of capitalist accumulation, he perfectly represents the ‘stage’ that American capitalism has reached today. So we don’t need his oddities and idiocies to make the ‘Age of Trump’ just a blip in the course of history. They’re part of the essential fabric; explicable in general as well as in individual and exceptional terms. Trumpism is what you get when you allow capitalism to dominate your society, and to pursue its natural path unhindered.

If you doubt his madness, incidentally, replay the speech he gave to the World Economic Forum in Davos today; essentially a recycled political campaign speech, with all his customary boasting, stupidity and lies. I imagine his audience – of leading business people and politicians – saw through it. But with the power he’s wielding just now, they probably won’t like to say.

Everyone now knows what they maybe didn’t know a week ago, about Greenland, and Trump’s designs on it.

They may however wonder why tiny Denmark presently has (partial) control over this vast but sparsely populated island. The Danish connection goes back to the early 18^th century; but before then to Viking times (many of the Vikings were from what today is called Denmark), when Eric the Red rediscovered the country on a sea voyage westwards from Iceland; and even before him to the Inuits who had come down from the North American continent centuries before. (But don’t entirely trust me on this early stuff. It is after all – resorting to the professional historian’s hoary old excuse – ‘not my period’.) The Inuits still comprise the great majority of Greenland’s 60,000-plus population, with the Danes mainly living on the coasts. In 1979 Greenland became formally part of Denmark, as an autonomous territory, or colony, within the Danish kingdom; and with the latter subsidizing it to the tune of 50% of its national income. Which makes one wonder why Denmark is so keen to keep it.

American interest in the island is supposed to derive from the latter’s perceived strategic value, just across the North Pole from Russia. It was in response to this that Denmark and the USA concluded a treaty between them in 1951, granting America more or less everything she wanted, or could reasonably demand, in respect of military bases and mining rights. That’s what makes it even more difficult to understand why Trump should now want to own the place; let alone to take it by military force, as he has threatened to do.

It may have something to do with the sheer size of Greenland; or at least as it’s depicted on those Mercator-projection world maps. What a boost that would be to his ego: to have added so much territory to the USA; with no doubt Canada (the ‘fifty-first state’) to follow. (That of course is unlikely: Canadians I’ve met generally define themselves in apposition to the USA.) In this regard Trump seems to have a very old-fashioned – even imperial – idea of international relations: which he shares incidentally with Putin; seeing the diplomatic game in terms of defeating and absorbing rivals, with the ‘winners’ being those who landed up with the biggest empires at the end. It also has much to do with the economic gains that conquest can bring, turning that 50% debit into to a credit figure on America’s financial account. That of course is how a property developer would see it. And a property developer is what Trump has always been, from his days as a (largely failed) real estate capitalist, whose values and methods have dominated his outlook ever since. Why should he own what he could have without owning it? – He gave us his answer to this in an interview recently: it’s because renters have less interest in keeping their properties safe. Morality, international rules, and the wishes of non-owning inhabitants have no place in this proprietary view of diplomacy. America holds all the cards, he thinks, and so can do what it wants.

Anti-Trump commentators often attribute this to his personal character: his amorality, greed, narcissism, insecurity, lying, small-mindedness, ‘madness’ even, and all the other traits that make up this deeply unpleasant man. If I were more persuaded of the ‘great man’ – or ‘evil man’ – interpretation of history, I might agree. But the interesting thing about Trump is that his personal characteristics also reflect features of general US history which are just as likely to have brought his country to this pass, as does anything more personal about ‘him’. I’ve touched on this in previous posts: the national traditions of slavery, aggression, racism, ignorance, proto-fascism and cruelty which are as threaded into the otherwise democratic, liberal and idealistic story we used to be told of the ‘Great Experiment’ from its earliest days; and are now personified by the president. And – to be more controversial – all these enduring national characteristics stem au fonde from the underlying American story: which is the untrammelled development of capitalism over the last two centuries, reaching its apogee at the present day.

Of course this affects the wider world too. Trump’s use of tariffs as his main weapon against those countries that don’t support his Greenland policy is an original – but of course typically Trumpian – weapon, and surely one that only a capitalist would think of. (The Art of the Deal is all played with money.) Amour propre also comes into it. Disappointed at not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he only recently wrote to the Norwegian Prime Minister to say that he would be imposing 10-25% tariffs on Norway as a punishment. (Also, that he wasn’t interested in peace any more.) This is a dangerous psychopathic bully; leading a nation half of which could be diagnosed the same way.  

Swedes of course are firmly behind the Danes on this. We are only a few kilometres from Denmark after all. And much of southern Sweden, like most of eastern England, used to be ruled from Copenhagen, as Greenland is today. More to the point, however, Sweden is far more wedded to internationalism – the sanctity of treaties, rules-based diplomacy, national democracy, peace – than Trump seems to be. And we’re now in NATO, supposingly representing these values; and so would be fighting against another NATO ally if Trump invaded. Partly for these reasons, we Swedes and demi-Swedes simply wouldn’t trust him with Greenland. Would anybody?

This worries me. What if Trump is proved right? What if his tariffs are successful in bringing manufacturing back to America; if he is instrumental in bringing peace to Ukraine, Gaza and South America; if he builds his luxury condos on the Mediterranean coast; if all the expelled Palestinians are genuinely happier living in Jordan; if the Greenlanders truly welcome American tutelage; if US-imposed regime change really is the best way to unseat despots; if the liberal international order is a piece of wokeish irrelevance, and might, not right, is the only thing that matters in diplomacy: – in other words, if things are simpler than liberal intellectuals presently make out, and so he succeeds in ‘making America great’ again in all kinds of ways? What then for us, his fiercest critics?

We would still of course be stuck with his awful personality: the narcissism, stupidity, malice, small-mindedness, racism, bullying, lying, incipient fascism and all the rest – which make him difficult to like as a man or a leader; but which we might then have to admit could have contributed to some of this success.

Which is why I guess most of us don’t want him to succeed.

That was Donald Rumsfeld’s proud claim at the height of the Iraq war in 2003. Of course it’s untrue. The Americans have always ‘done’ empire, from their very first days as a Republic, and throughout their periods of supposed ‘isolationism’, right up until what I imagine future historians will call ‘The Age of Trump’. (What a boost to his amour propre! To have an age named after him! Far more flattering than even a ‘Tower’. And Trump craves flattery…)

I’ve actually written a book about earlier US imperialism: Empire and Superempire, if you’re interested. But that only goes up to 2006. I wonder whether Yale UP would be open to issuing a new edition, with an additional chapter taking the story up to last month’s invasion of Venezuela, tomorrow’s (query?) attack on Iran, and the next day’s annexation of Greenland? These obviously qualify as ‘imperialism’, by any definition of ‘empire’ you want to use; except perhaps those that require a literal ‘Emperor’ to be at its head. Venezuela was attacked with armed force, involving scores of casualties, the abduction of its President and his wife, the seizure of its oil assets, and with Trump’s stated intention being to ‘rule’ the country afterwards. That’s imperialism, no question. The motives behind it, both overt and hidden, genuine and cynical, also closely mirror Britain’s in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Stopping drugs reminds us of the Chinese ‘Opium Wars’; ‘national strategic interests’ take us to the South African war; reforming corrupt governments was what many of Britain’s incursions into Africa and India were supposed to do; grabbing valuable natural resources was what underlay most of Britain’s African adventures; together with extending ‘free’ markets – her major excuse. If anything this latest phase of American imperialism is more overtly imperialistic than most earlier examples, with Trump’s open ambition being to seize more territory (usually that came accidentally), including the vast snowfields of neighbouring Greenland; and his very old-fashioned belief, apparently, that ‘greatness’ – ‘Make America Great Again’ – can be measured in sheer geographical size.

All this appears to be taking us back to the nineteenth century, when most ‘great’ Powers craved territorial expansion; as the three ‘greatest’ Powers in the world today – China, Russia and the USA – are doing now: China contra Taiwan, Russia seeking Ukraine, and the USA looking greedily at Greenland (for starters). The United Nations of course was supposed to put a stop to this, replacing imperial ambition and the rule of ‘might’ with a ‘new world order’, by which territorial disputes would be peacefully settled by negotiation under an international ‘rule of a law’, which all nations would respect. Trump however clearly has no truck with this internationalist and even ‘woke’ idea; maybe because it doesn’t function in the property market – of ‘deals’ over building land – whose simpler, more Hobbesian ethics clearly dominate his view of foreign relations too. So we are regressing. ‘My man’ JA Hobson, a pioneer of both anti-imperialist and internationalist theory (my first book was about him), must be turning in his grave.