Porter’s Pensées

I share most of the usual old farts’ disdain for T20 cricket (for foreign readers, the shortest form of the game, smashing the ball around the ground, with none of the subtlety and artistry of real cricket, the 3-5 day variety); but was delighted that the West Indies won the T20 ‘World Cup’ yesterday, and in such dramatic fashion. Perhaps it will spur them on to greater success in the ‘Test’ (5-day) arena, which in my boyhood they used to dominate, gloriously. Why the decline since then? Were potential stars lured by bigger financial rewards in other sports, especially in neighbouring America? Baseball? (Which is a bit like T20.) I have no idea. But whatever the reasons: welcome back, ‘Windies’! We’ve missed you. For me, as an Englishman, that easily compensates for your beating us.

And their women (or ‘Ladies’) won their tournament, too. It’s good to see their being given nearly equal billing – in the Guardian, at least. (The influence of its new female editor-in-chief?)  And to think that when I was a boy we used to think girls couldn’t catch.

‘Cricket lovely cricket’ was of course the great West Indian calypso of the 1950s. – (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06P0RdZyjT4).

This morning Robin Ramsay treated me to a cutting from the Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3518400/We-ve-sold-soul-desperate-dash-foreigners-cash-writes-RICHARD-LITTLEJOHN.html); a piece about rich Arab playboys in London, flaunting their gold-painted (or could it be -plated?) Lamborghinis, festooned with unpaid parking tickets, in the streets of Knightsbridge. Richard Littlejohn goes on to contrast this with the present plight of the steel workers in Port Talbot, Scunthorpe and elsewhere; and, more generally, to tie it in with (a) the problems of the housing market in London, with foreign ‘zillionaires’ pricing ordinary folk out of it; and (b) the more widespread recent trend of British industry’s falling into the hands of rich foreigners. Both of which are fair comments, and indicative of the deep problems facing Britain today.

The difficulty I have with Littlejohn’s take on this, however, is that his main target appears to be the Arabs who are exploiting the system, rather than the system itself: i.e. global free marketism run wild. That’s why ordinary Londoners (like my children) have to pay extortionate sums to live in little terrace houses; why the Port Talbot workers are in the position they are; why so many basic British industries – and Premier League football clubs – are now in the hands of shady foreign capitalists, bearing no responsibility to their local communities or even the national interest; and why social and economic inequality is reaching such a dangerous level now. But this would involve questioning present-day capitalism, and so isn’t as attractive a target to the Daily Mail as are evil sheiks with hooked noses (look at the cartoon illustrating Littlejohn’s article: remind you of anything?) driving around in their expensive cars, and the decadent Moslem cultures they are supposed to represent.

Littlejohn is also wrong to claim that this kind of thing has not been seen in Britain before. ‘At least the old British moneyed classes maintained a certain decorous restraint. OK, so they lived in grand townhouses and on country estates, but few ever flaunted their money in the faces of the hoi polloi’. Well, some did. (This is where I don my historian’s hat again.) ‘Flaunting’ was in fact a common charge laid against the nouveaux riches in Edwardian times, illustrated best in the character of Mr Toad in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows: a well-known and much loved children’s story today, but intended by its author – a troubled banker in his professional life – as a cautionary tale warning of the provocative effect of all this showing off. Its climax features a battle between Toad and his cuddlier animal friends on the one side, and on the other the ‘stoats and weasels’ – i.e. the plebs – who have taken over his mansion while he has been disporting himself in his new car. Grahame’s Edwardian upper classes were terribly fearful of the activities of Toad and his like inciting Red revolution; a revolution which, incidentally, might well have come about had it not been for the First World War.

The hope for us on the Left now is that the sort of behaviour Littlejohn describes might provoke a similar reaction here in Britain. Littlejohn’s piece could be grist to the mill. On the other hand, it could also neutralise it. If the Mail has anything to do with it, it will not be the system that is made to suffer, but the toads. It’s been done before, in the 1930s, with the Jews, rather than the Arabs, playing the ‘toad’ role.

At first I thought it must be a second April Fool. (I’d already spotted the first one: ‘Royals pick Prince Philip to lead call for UK to say in EU.’ Very amusing.) This one featured Sajid Javid, our Secretary of State for Business. The Guardian piece claimed that his favourite film is The Fountainhead, starring Gary Cooper and based on Ayn Rand’s novel of the same name. It was ‘articulating what I felt’, he explained to the House of Commons Film Club in January 2015 (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/31/nationalisation-state-save-steel-port-talbot-tata-industrial-policy). Apparently he had read parts of it to his future wife when they were courting. (I remember reading somewhere that Mrs Lenin had had to put up with much the same thing.)

Now, I must admit that I’ve not read any Ayn Rand – or, at least, not completed any of her books. (I have tried. They’re still sitting there, fat, by my bedside.) But it’s pretty well known what they’re about. They are celebrations of selfish capitalist endeavour, and so, by implication, critiques of any kind of outside meddling in the mechanisms of the market. Which could explain why, when the British Steel crisis was brewing (below), Javid did nothing to protect the industry – indeed did all he could to encourage Chinese competition; has absolutely ruled out nationalisation; and when the widely predicted storm finally broke, turned up in Australia, holidaying with his daughter. Why not? After all, there was no reason to take him back to his office in Whitehall; nothing he could or should do from there.

This Conservative government, in fact, seems to be full of people who simply don’t believe in what they’re supposed to be doing. John Whittingale, the Arts and Culture Secretary, responsible for the BBC, is against public broadcasting. His predecessor, Jeremy Hunt, a mate of Rupert Murdoch, felt the same. Now, as Minister for Health, he would clearly like to sell off the NHS. Nicky Morgan’s ‘Academies’ programme is designed, quite blatantly, as a prelude to selling our schools off to private corporations. When the East Coast Railway failed under its private owner, the government had to nationalise it for a while – otherwise the trains would have ground to a halt; but then, when that turned out to be doing far better than the old private company, promptly sold it off again. Eventually, government ministers will have nothing left to run. Everything will work like clockwork, on its own. Secretaries of State will sit in their Whitehall Offices gazing out of their windows at the wonder of it all, before retiring and exploiting their kudos, insider knowledge and connexions to pursue their private gain. They can be replaced on their Ministerial seats by nonentities: Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hands’ (or bums). The government will have achieved its ultimate aim – the same, as it happens, as Marx’s: to render government unnecessary. Murdoch will be in his Heaven, and all will be Right with the world.

Or perhaps it was an April Fool after all…

For patriots who base their pride in Britain on her history, the recent collapse of her manufacturing industry should be a heavy blow; much more so than the fall of the Empire, which was never – as I once spent a 475-page book trying to explain – of very great interest to the great mass of Britons, let alone of pride. It is only in recent years that ‘imperialism’ has loomed so large in our retrospective self-identity; and also in foreigners’ ideas about us, for the understandable reason that it was British activities in the wider world that impinged on them most. It’s also convenient, if you’re feeling unfriendly towards us Brits, to be able to associate us with something which is so widely deplored today. I won’t go into this here; you have those 475 pages to look forward to if you’re interested.

But what does that leave? If it wasn’t her imperial dominion which made old Britons puff out their little chests as they sang ‘Rule Britannia’ (I’ll explain that away some other time; it had nothing to do with empire), then what was it? Not her culture, surely. Just about everyone conceded primacy here to the Continentals. (I’ve written about this, too.) Certainly not banking. And obviously not her weather, or her food. God no.

In fact what elevated Britain above all other nations in her own eyes, in the nineteenth century and at any rate the beginning of the twentieth, were two other proud accomplishments. Firstly there were her ‘liberties’. (‘Britons never never never shall be slaves.’) ‘Freedom’ is of course a slippery word: one person’s ‘freedom’ is, or can involve, another’s ‘slavery’; and it is obvious that very many Britons lost out on it, in practical terms, in the nineteenth century. Then it was mainly defined, negatively, as the absence of government, which did women and the working classes, for example, few favours. It needed the socialists to put that right. Still, ‘freedom’ was supposed to be the great quality that distinguished most Britons from most foreigners. Even the workers and women paid obeisance to that.

Britain’s second great distinction was her industry. The ‘industrial revolution’ started there, of course. (Does this need to be said? I’m told some Americans believe it started in the USA.) It rested mainly on steam power and mass production, and transformed Britain in nearly every way within the space of a very few years, before spreading into the world  – usually not through the agency of formal empire, by the way. Look at those maps of the British rail network at the end of the nineteenth century – far more ubiquitous than maps of the British Empire: the whole country criss-crossed with lines carrying heavy, snorting, smoking steam locomotives. (There’s a big one in Hull Paragon station, Platform 2.)

Britons were immensely proud of these. Look at the ‘Great Exhibition’ of 1851: celebrating Britain’s industrial pre-eminence above everything, far more than her empire, and by contrast with the effeminate ‘art’ productions that the Continent chose to display. I personally remember this pride, watching these great steam beasts from the ends of cold, dirty railway platforms, as I ‘spotted’ their numbers, and crossed them off in my little Charles Allen (?) booklets. Even today, the sight a couple of weeks ago on television of the restored ‘Flying Scotsman’ steaming from King’s Cross to York aroused in me a nostalgia for the power we used to have: solid mechanical power, not the sort exerted over benighted natives; expressed also in the cars and ships and airplanes and factory machinery we used to produce, in huge quantities, until a relatively short time ago. That’s all gone now; replaced by cheap Asian manufactures, tatty diesel trains like the ones that carry me from Hull to Doncaster, and the fragile ‘service’ – or should it be ‘servile? – industries now apparently underpinning our economy.

With it have gone the myriad of values and images that were associated with heavy industry. Hard work. Muscle. Honest dirt. Invention. Enterprise. Honesty. Solidity. Masculinity, if you like. The co-operation and community we associated with industrial trade unionism. The sort of heroism one attributes to the great engineers, and which it’s difficult to see in hedge fund managers. But above all, an essential element of ‘Britishness’, as it was conceived in our industrial heyday.

I understand some of the reasons for this, especially ‘globalisation’: or – alternatively – our too ready acceptance of it, from Thatcher on. It might have been inevitable. I’m not saying. But, as an Englishman who still remembers the old proud industrial Britain – I once worked at Fords in Dagenham – I still miss my steam locomotives, quite desperately.

And now our already diminished steel industry seems about to disappear. That must be the end. And a far sadder one, patriotically, than the largely unnoticed decline and fall of the Empire.

Following on from my last post, here is an old review of Islamic Imperialism: A History, by Efraim Karsh (2006). Originally published in Lobster 51 (Summer 2006).

*

For anyone who believes that ‘imperialism’ is an exclusively Western phenomenon, that Islam has only been the victim of it, and that 9/11 was simply a reaction to that (‘blowback’), this book will come as a bit of a shock. Karsh argues that aggressive imperialism was implicit in Moslem teaching from the very beginning, that Islam was in fact, and remains, far more imperialistic than the West has generally been, and that it was this that inspired the Al-Qaeda attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, rather than any resentment against American aggression towards Moslem countries. In other words, 9/11 would have happened even without those US bases in Saudi Arabia. Islam is the aggressor, America (and Britain, and everyone else) the victims. The imperial boot is on the other foot.

One part of me welcomes this, as a useful corrective to lazy ways of regarding ‘imperialism’ (generally by Leftists), as synonymous – simply – with white oppression of ‘the other’. As well as showing that ‘others’ could do it too (obvious to any historian), and that Moslems did it rather effectively in the 7^th-8th and 13^th-18th centuries, this book also punctures a number of common assumptions about the strength of the ‘imperialisms’ that were supposedly ranged against Islam, particularly the Crusades – a very different creature in reality than they have become in Moslem mythology – and the ‘partition’ of the Middle East between the Western powers in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Karsh is certainly right to say that the latter was usually reluctant, influenced as much by local factors (weakness, power-struggles) as by the will of the European imperialists, and that those imperialists, far from displacing the old Ottoman Empire, were in fact for many years the main thing holding it up. He’s also justified, in my view, in highlighting the atrocities – genocides, other massacres, ethnic cleansings, tortures – that came in the train of many Moslem-inspired expansionary movements well into the twentieth century, which were at least as gross as those perpetrated by European and American imperialisms – maybe worse – and should give pause to those who hold that Islam is always a tolerant religion – towards Jews, for example. This makes salutary reading. If we are against imperialism, we should deplore it wherever it appears.

What I’m less happy with are two things. One is the book’s rather cavalier way with the word imperialism, used here to cover anything from pan-Arabism, through foreign conquest, to religious proselytism. The second is its very one-sided account of recent events in the Middle East, so that, for example, the CIA’s and MI6’s covert toppling of Mossadeq in Iran in 1953 is only mentioned in passing, and the Zionists’ seizure of Palestine on the grounds that they had lived there 2000 years before – a classic case of colonialism, surely, whatever the excuses for it might be – is not even problemetized, let alone some of the extreme measures some of them resorted to along the way. Much is made of the fact that there had been no Palestinian or any other kind of Arab ‘nation’ before then; but then the same could be said of virtually any of Europe’s colonies anywhere in the world. Nationalism in third world countries was nearly always a product of colonialism. Karsh seems to be arguing that if there was no genuine ‘Arab nationalism’ around, then the appeal to it must have been a cover for what were ‘imperialist’ ambitions really; but that doesn’t necessarily follow. I was also unconvinced by his ‘evidence’ that what Osama Bin Laden is really bent on is world domination. I was prepared to believe this, but the quotation he gives to back it up – where Bin Laden refers back to Muhammed’s migration from Mecca in 622 – doesn’t seem a clincher to me. Of course there are numerous examples of Moslem zealots saying this kind of thing, right back to the prophet’s own time (‘I was ordered to fight all men until they say “There is no god but Allah”’); but to connect all these together and claim they represent the main tradition of Islam, and the only cause of today’s troubles, is – it seems to me – ahistorical. You could do much the same for Christianity (though it might be more difficult to find a direct quote from Jesus himself to start it off).

There may be other flaws in the book too, which I’m less competent to pronounce on. The account Karsh gives of the Prophet’s own life and teachings is deeply unattractive – to me, at any rate; so much so that I wondered whether it might not run the risk of falling foul of new legislation about arousing religious hatred. (It certainly aroused mine.) I have no idea whether this is fair. This is clearly going to be a highly controversial book, possibly because of its faults and omissions, as well as the intrinsic sensitivity of the topic. It’s a shame that it reads so partially and one-sidedly, for the central phenomenon it describes – Islamic ‘imperialism’ – needs to be acknowledged and confronted.

There are of course historical precedents for the terrorism of today, but none I think that quite measures up to the modern Islamicist variety. But before we get on to this, let’s define the term. It’s often used incorrectly. It was initially coined to describe the use of fear by governments in order to elicit compliance by their subjects, as exemplified by the notorious French Revolutionary ‘Reign of Terror’ of 1793-94. It was only in later years that ‘terrorisme’ came to be applied more to anti-authority groups and movements. Today the word is often used for any radical group that espouses violence; but strictly speaking it should cover only those that want to achieve change by literally terrifying people indiscriminately. So, assassinating a political, military or religious leader should not be classed as terrorism, nor the blowing up of (say) a government building; although any of these acts might give rise to a more general fear incidentally. On the other hand the World War II carpet-bombings of London and Dresden, followed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, can be called terrorist acts, as their whole aim was to cow general populations into pressing for surrender. The whole point of ‘terrorism’ is the one that is usually held against it: that it targets ‘innocents’. I hope that’s clear.

The terrorists I am most familiar with historically – mainly through my studies of the police and espionage agencies ranged against them – are the Continental anarchists and Irish Fenians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The anarchists were the truest ‘terrorists’. They threw bombs into cafés and theatres, at religious processions, and at underground trains. Charged with murdering innocent people, they replied that no-one was truly ‘innocent’ if he or she supported the political and economic system of the time, even passively – for example by buying a cup of coffee at a capitalist cafe. Occasionally they were marginally more discriminating, for example targeting their theatre bombs at the front rows of the stalls, where the rich were sitting; or only at ‘fashionable’ restaurants. The Irish mainly – but not always: vide Omagh – targeted people and buildings that could be legitimately associated with British colonial power, like prisons (in order to release captive Fenians), barracks, the Tower of London, The Times offices, and Westminster Abbey. The same is true of Indian nationalists in the 1910s. All these groups were enormously aided by the invention of dynamite in the 1870s, which could wreak more damage than gunpowder, and was far more stable. Occasionally the bombers blew themselves up nonetheless, but never deliberately.

These acts certainly drew public attention to the anarchist, Irish and Indian causes. But it is arguable that none of them materially furthered the aims of their perpetrators, whatever those may have been in the case of the anarchists. (They were very vague.) In particular, they didn’t ‘terrify’ people greatly. The British, especially, were quite proud of this. These ‘outrages’ of course provoked counter-measures by British governments, but often behind the backs of the public, who didn’t think the situation merited them, and were more jealous than they seem to be today of their ‘civil liberties’ (see below, March 1); and the measures – increased surveillance, and the like – could rarely be described as draconian. Terrorism was never considered an existential threat. That must be accounted its greatest failure. Terrorism has to inspire terror. Otherwise it hasn’t worked.

So far, so familiar. What you didn’t get in this period, however – so far as I am aware – was terrorism fuelled by religious fanaticism, and exported abroad. You did get religious fanaticism, certainly, some of it murderous, and much of it at the hands of self-described Muslims, right back to the foundation of the religion: see Ephraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: a History (2006). (Yes, Islam has been one of the main practitioners of ‘imperialism’, as well as a victim.) But in olden times its massacres of non-believers usually came about in ‘conventional’ ways, that is, at the hands of armies and rulers; as was also the case with Christian fanatics early on. It is the combination of religious fanaticism with enhanced terrorist methods – especially suicide bombing – that distinguishes the present day. That is irrespective of whether Islam or a form of it can be said to be at the root of today’s political violence – which ‘moderate’ Muslims of course deny – or merely a convenient cloak.

It is difficult to detect this particular combination of factors in previous terrorist episodes. At least Irish and Indian nationalisms, and even anarchism, had a modicum of rationality behind them. Religious ‘faith’ is intrinsically irrational, yet seductive all the same, especially to tortured youngsters; which is where its danger, and the novelty of the present situation, reside.

Yet again, history doesn’t really help.

This of course is the centenary of Ireland’s ‘Easter Rising’ against the British. (Roughly – Easter may have been on a different day then.) In 1966 I was in Dublin for the 50th anniversary, researching the papers of Sir Roger Casement, the Irishman knighted for his revelation of King Leopold’s atrocities in the (later) Belgian Congo, which fed into my doctoral work on fin de siecle anti-imperialism. Afterwards I visited Banna Strand in the south-west of Ireland, where Casement was arrested after being brought ashore from a U-boat. An Irish nationalist as well as a ‘critic of empire’, he had been plotting the Easter Rising with the Germans. He was later shot as a traitor; but not before the British government had revealed to the American ambassador – in order to dampen any criticism of his execution the USA might have – passages in his private diaries detailing in graphic terms (‘it was fully a foot long!’) his homosexual exploits both there and in South America.

The Irish I met were super-friendly – I was never allowed to buy a round at McDaid’s – and fascinated when they learned that I was working on one of their great martyr-heroes. What struck me, however, was that all of them insisted that the ‘homosexual’ passages in his diaries had been forged, by the evil British authorities in order to blacken his reputation. (As if leaking them were not bad enough!) It was terribly important to them – firm Catholics, I presume – to believe that he hadn’t been gay. I couldn’t be sure then; but I think it is accepted now on both sides of the Irish Sea that the diary entries were not forgeries; and that after fifty years the Irish have learned to come to terms with this. I hope so, at any rate.

The first review of my British Imperial in a major journal. And a good one – i.e. it really understands what the book is about. Thank you, LRB. (I can’t believe it’s because I’m one of their contributors.)

(http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n07/ferdinand-mount/lumpers-v-splitters?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3807&utm_content=ukrw _subsact&hq_e=el&hq_m=4202170&hq_l=22&hq_v=1b516b01f8)

A thought has just occurred to me. It must have occurred to many others. It’s not ‘religion’ that’s the problem (see below, March 4), but monotheistic religion. That was the fundamental reform brought about by Judaism, Christianity and Islam in their beginnings. ‘There is one God…’, to replace the muddle of rather silly gods and goddesses that people worshipped before. Muddled, OK, and seemingly less rational than the simplicity of a single deity; but at least the Greeks and Romans and Vikings and the rest had some choice of which god they wanted to follow. And had no need to try and impose him/her on the rest of humankind. They also must have taken their gods less seriously. Many of the Ancients, according to a new book, were atheists or agnostics. Monotheistic religions are inherently totalitarian. Wherein lies the danger.

Where can I sign up for Freyja worship?

The day of the Brussels bombings. But still she managed to get here. Kajsa, that is, from Stockholm. Despite heightened airport security, and a fire at Grantham station. (Don’t they know the Witch is dead?)

The by now familiar conversation over wine and nibbles back home, late at night. What do they think they can gain from bombing us? Don’t they feel twinges of guilt, or at least sorrow, when they see the pictures of the dead and maimed on TV? Hear the sobbing of the children? Sense the hatred they are provoking, including hostility directed at their religion, which may be a ‘religion of peace’ essentially – though I have to say I’m not entirely persuaded? Or do they actually rejoice in it all?

I’m a historian, and historians are supposed to be able to empathise. (It sometimes gets us into trouble. But of course empathy and sympathy are entirely different things.) I think I do understand, intellectually, some of the motives that turn young people into jihadists (or even Norwegian neo-fascists into wholesale murderers): political grievances, real or imagined; marginalization; adolescent angst; imprisonment for petty offences, opening the door to radicalisation; the comfort that ‘faith’, a ‘higher’ cause, and a sense of ‘belonging’ can all bring; the fierier words of the Prophet; a love of violence in itself; and perhaps the prospect of those 72 large-breasted virgins and ‘young boys of perpetual freshness’ they’ll find awaiting them in Paradise – even if that is a mistranslation of the original Arabic. (The martyrs are going to be sorely disappointed when they’re offered a plate of 72 white raisins instead of the houris.) In particular, as a democratic and anti-imperialist socialist, I can actually sympathise with some of their hostility towards what they characterise (misleadingly) as ‘the West’. But of course that can’t justify horrors like this. And I really cannot imagine anyone’s being unmoved by the scenes we saw yesterday. Even a perpetrator. Are their targets somehow dehumanised for them? Just symbols, of something or other?

I have nothing original to offer on these events. But as a historian of the London Police Special Branch I am familiar with earlier forms of terrorism, and of counter-terrorism. The latter – and the question of its place in an ‘open’, liberal and ‘free’ society – is obviously a big issue today. I may write about these topics later. But now is not the right time. Apart from anything else, like everyone, I feel too angry. And anger is the enemy of good judgment.