Porter’s Pensées

Apparently Estonia has surplus prison accommodation which it’s offering to the British government (for rent, I presume) to help ease the latter’s critical shortage: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/prison-overcrowding-labour-mahmood-estonia-b2607985.html. I understand that Britain has turned the offer down, preferring instead to build more prisons of her own, albeit slowly; and to release serving prisoners early in order to make more space in the existing gaols.

But I wonder whether it has occurred to the Home Secretary to ask why Estonia has so many empty cells, when Britain’s are bursting with villains. Are Estonians less villainous than Brits? Are the Estonian police less effective at hunting them down? Are murderers and rapists on the prowl everywhere in Tallinn? Or have they all emigrated to Sweden? (From some Sverigedemokraterna propaganda – and Scandi noir detective novels – you might think so.)

Or is it simply that the Estonians don’t use incarceration so much as a punishment? I know nothing at all about their penal system – I must Google it – but it’s well known that Britain imprisons more offenders than most European countries; and just a little less well known that Sweden – just a short distance over the water from the Baltic States – has a very liberal penal policy, with fewer (and nicer) prisons; which nevertheless appears to be more successful than Britain’s in deterring crime.

Isn’t this what that key-shop man (Timpson?) whom Starmer appointed to his government was meant to be looking at?

A long post, I’m afraid; and on a sensitive and even dangerous topic.

I seem to remember warning in an earlier post that the ‘Israel lobby’s’ scurrilous hounding of Jeremy Corbyn as a supposed ‘anti-semite’, might rebound on them, and actually encourage anti-semitism – or at least hostility to the government of Israel, which of course is not the same thing – in the Labour Party and more generally. Following on from that, Netanyahu’s brutal war on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank could have had the same effect: eroding support for Jews, and in particular getting people who hadn’t previously given much thought to the Zionist project (that is, the establishment and defence of a ‘national home’ for the Jews) to examine its political, historical and moral credentials.

Which are, we must surely acknowledge, extraordinarily flimsy. Apart from the ‘God’s covenant’ argument, which no-one who isn’t a Jew or an American Evangelical is at all obliged to trust, and which in any case may be based on a misreading of the scriptures (see https://bernardjporter.com/2024/08/24/gods-covenant/), the best reason for allowing the Jews to have a ‘national home’ is to protect them from the persecution that has dogged them as a diaspora for centuries, culminating of course in the Russian anti-Semitic pogroms of the late 19^th century, and the Hell on Earth of the ‘Holocaust’.

But there are problems here too. Not all Jews – possibly only a minority of them – have historically wanted a ‘state’ of their own, separate from the rest of humanity. Many Rabbis hold that the idea is heretical. The very notion of a racially or even religiously-defined state doesn’t sit very well with modern enlightened thought. It was almost universally abhorred in the case of apartheid South Africa, with which modern Israel is sometimes compared. It involves a toxic amalgam of ‘racism’ with ‘nationalism’, neither of which is seen as a particularly ‘progressive’ ideology today, and both of which – together with religion, another ingredient in the Israeli mix – could be seen as responsible for many of the problems of the world just now.

The alternative to this – a multicultural and tolerant society, including Jews and giving full scope to their talents, as was the situation in Britain for most of her modern history – seems far preferable. To be fair to the currently much reviled British Empire: this was its ideal in its dying – ‘Commonwealth’ – days. Which is why the Brits of that time couldn’t understand why the Muslims of British India should want a nation of their own, or why Jews and Arabs couldn’t get along better with each other in their Palestine mandate. It’s also why the notorious ‘Balfour Declaration’ – which incidentally only favoured a Jewish ‘national home’ (whatever that meant) on the ‘clear’ understanding that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’ – did not seem so problematical in 1917 as it turned out to be.

Diaspora Jews have played a brilliant part in many areas of European and American life over the past few centuries, especially in politics, the arts, philosophy and science. This was despite their having no state of their own; or perhaps – could it be? – because of it. To attach them to and identify them with a single geographically defined nation, with all the luggage that brings with it, might well undermine this contribution, and would certainly – as we are witnessing today in present-day Israeli domestic politics, and in Gaza and the West Bank – corrupt it.

This in fact must lie at the root of the problem. Jews, having achieved the nationhood that some of them had long hankered for, are now themselves behaving like a nation, and indeed like some of the worst nations in recent history; attracting comparisons – valid or not – even with the régime that was their principal oppressor in the 1930s and ’40s. They are even aggressively colonising, stealing and illicitly settling other people’s lands, just like European empires did in the bad old days.

This is what mainly disturbs philo-semites (like me), who used to hope and believe that the Jews could be better than this. As a community, they behaved more morally and effectively when they were a diaspora: ‘a people without a land’, as they used to call themselves. They could, and often did, live in peace and friendship with both Christian and Moslem neighbours, contributing greatly to their cultures. Their conduct today has nothing to do with their being different, or ‘Jewish’ (well, perhaps just a little, with that ‘Covenant’ nonsense); but far more to do with their becoming the same as us.

And as ‘the same as us’, surely they must merit the same scrutiny and criticism as other nations, when they offend ‘civilised’ standards of national behaviour, as Israel is doing in Gaza right now. Indeed, if it weren’t the Jews who were involved, with their terrible history of persecution, Israel’s behaviour today would automatically disqualify her from any international sympathy or support at all. This is what the Tsars and the Nazis did to them: shielded them from criticism that would clearly be more widely applied if it weren’t for the Jews’ sufferings in the past.

Of course it might be better for the world – and for the Jews themselves – if the state of Israel had never been created. But that is no longer an option; apart from in the dreams of their vicious Islamicist (and undoubtedly anti-semitic) neighbours. What practical measures can now be taken in order to give Jews the security they deserve after more than a century of persecution is not for me to opine. I personally would prefer a single secular state embracing both peoples, like most European nations are, and as India in 1947 was supposed to be. But that seems unlikely. We are where we are.

So any settlement will probably need to be the much canvassed ‘two-state’ one: two nations living side by side, boundaries negotiated fairly between the parties, one nation Jewish- and the other Moslem-dominated, but neither of them theocratic or racially exclusive, and each of them liberal and tolerant of both (and other) faiths. Right now that seems a big ask. In particular the Jewish side is too wedded to being a separate and historical ‘nation’, in a region and a world where all the spaces for nations are taken up.

But at least modern Israelis could be more aware of the underlying problem, as many Jews of course are; which is not ‘anti-semitism’, but is the nationalism that has made things so much more difficult for them, and is alienating so many people – me, for example – who hugely admire and would like to be friends with Israelis, so long as they are not too Zionist; and with more liberal Jews.

I went to a boys-only ‘Direct Grant Grammar School’, part-boarding (I was a ‘day boy’), which desperately wanted to be regarded as a ‘Public’ (private, independent) school, and decked itself out with all the supposed appurtenances of that status in order to foster this impression.

So: we had ‘masters’ rather than teachers, all wearing gowns; corporal punishment; ‘praeposters’ in place of prefects (some of whom were allowed to beat junior boys); sadistic PE teachers; school on Saturday mornings; ‘houses’ (like in Harry Potter); an impressive and complicated coat of arms; a dodgy foundation date, giving us 400 years of semi-fake ‘history’; a Public school-type motto (‘Virtue, Learning, Manners’); a rather good school song; a uniform that included the wearing of ‘boaters’ (flat straw hats) in the summer; a compulsory Cadet Force; emphasis on the (ancient Greek and Latin) Classics; a Gothicky school chapel; huge emphasis on getting boys into Oxbridge, if possible to ‘read’ Classics – other universities and subjects were considered infra dig; a visit from the Queen one year (I had to be in her ‘guard of honour’, dressed in army cadet uniform, creases ironed so you could cut a finger on them); a flourishing Old Boys’ Society (without me); and a general prejudice against ‘townees’, or the local lads, who used to mock us in our blazers and boaters.

But none of this seemed to work. We always felt inferior to the ‘genuine’ Public School products, whose lives and exploits we greatly envied, as they were presented to us in the ‘Billy Bunter’ and similar juvenile stories. I would have willingly endured all the beatings and cruelties to be at Eton, Harrow or the fictional ‘Greyfriars’. But I probably should be grateful to my school. I had some good and inspirational teachers there, who managed to get me into Cambridge. The local ‘maintained’ schools were not half as ‘successful’.

Mine is now a fully Independent school, only taking fee-payers plus a few ‘scholarship boys’ (and girls, I believe); but it doesn’t yet seem to have acquired the cachet it so desperately craved in my day. One thing in particular was missing: a good sex scandal – gay goings-on in the dorms, or kiddy-fiddling masters. The first undoubtedly went on – although as a day-boy I was mercifully and naively ignorant of it. Whenever it came to light the perpetrators were expelled for ‘bullying’. How was I – safely snuggled up innocently in bed at home – to know what that really meant?

The second missing part has only come to light recently. A former music master has been arrested by the police for (and I quote) ‘Indecent Assault, Making Indecent Photographs of Children, and Observing a Person Doing a Private Act‘, during the forty years he was teaching and choir-mastering at the school. His trial comes up next month.

Cheap, I know; but this may be just what my school needs to push it up into the élite ranks. It’s one of the things the great Public Schools are known for. Not them alone, of course, and not it alone; but it goes on a lot in these institutions, for obvious reasons: adolescent boys sleeping together in dormitories, paedophile masters with huge power over them. Most of it is hushed up, as was clearly the case in my school for several years. Which is yet another reason, of course, although not the main one, for abolishing the whole institution; and not just its tax-exempt status.

Of course things may be better now…

What are we to make of the women who have figured so prominently on the Right of British politics over the past several years? Do they shock us – me, at any rate – because they seem so unwomanly?

Women are supposed to be the ‘softer’ sex, kinder than men, and put on earth to compensate for the latters’ grossness. ‘Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low; an excellent thing in woman.’ That’s King Lear, holding in his arms the body of Cordelia, his dead daughter, whom he had banished from his kingdom in Act 1 because she had refused to flatter him. I have to say that this has long been my own ideal of womankind, undoubtedly sexist though it is, and sometimes contradicted by my own experience.

And it’s also contradicted in the play by Lear’s experiences in Acts 2-4, when his two other daughters – Goneril and Regan – turn out to be the very opposite of ‘soft, gentle, and low’. (Also of course Lady Macbeth in the Scottish play; and Kate in The Taming of the Shrew.) Shakespeare knew about evil women, and seems to have thought there was something ‘unnatural’ about them. Which is how I – with my old-fashioned gender conditioning – feel about Margaret Thatcher, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Liz Truss. Vile women all of them; and all the more vile because of their sex.

Obviously there are monsters among Tory men, too; and leading female Labour, Lib-Dem and Green politicians who aren’t or weren’t monsters at all. My great hero Barbara Castle was one of them; Rachel Reeves may turn out to be another. (Also, over the Pond, Kemala Harris.) So it’s obviously not their gender per se that makes Braverman et al monstrous.

Unless it’s their position as women in a male-dominated society. It was always said of Thatcher that she felt she had to adopt a hyper-masculinist persona – deepening her voice, for example – in order to be taken seriously; or, as one of her ministers put it at the time, as ‘the only member of her [all-male] cabinet with balls’. All these villains will have been subjected to condescension or worse early in their careers; two of them – Braverman and Patel – also on grounds of their ‘race’ (they’re both the daughters of immigrants); and Thatcher because of her original ‘class’. This could have toughened them for the unfair wars they would need to wage against the white, privileged, upper-class men who comprised the Conservative Party they were trying to gain a foothold in, and sharpened their political philosophies.

That I think is normal. It affects lower-class men too. (Look at 30p-Lee Anderson.) The most reactionary Fellow of my Cambridge college years ago was a man who was several classes beneath the majority of them (except me); using his Right-wingery, I felt, in order to establish his right to hob-nob with the toffs. Maybe that’s happening with our present-day Gonerils.

On the other hand it might not have anything at all to do, even indirectly, with their gender or origins; but be merely the result, in all these cases, of rational independent thought. The fact that they shock me more than men holding the same views probably says more about my own conditioning and prejudices. Why shouldn’t the fairer sex – as I used to regard them – have its share of proto-Fascists too? After all, the first ever leader of an overtly British Fascist party in the 1920s was a woman. (Look her up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotha_Lintorn-Orman. Is it my prejudice that makes me think she looked a bit butch?)

It’s almost as if – and I’m sure this has occurred to many others – the Conservatives over the past 5-6 years deliberately fucked things up, in order to leave their successors with the unpopular task of clearing up their mess. That – if it’s to be done within conventional fiscal rules – will be bound to require either higher taxation or lower public spending, which people won’t like; or else a revolutionary third way, which hasn’t yet been spelled out, and in any case would probably take too long to be effective soon enough.

This is the awkward dilemma that Starmer and Reeves are presently faced with, and accounts for the political difficulties – over the winter fuel allowance for pensioners – that they currently find themselves in. Luckily for them, the government has an enormous cushion of votes in the House of Commons to protect it against any substantial challenge there; which is why I imagine Reeves won’t ‘U-turn’ on this any time soon. Of course I may be wrong – no doubt we’ll find out shortly – but if so it will leave her open to a new charge, of weakness. You can’t win, in this present-day tabloid headline-dominated political world. And in the meantime you have your next electorate becoming alienated from Labour; and all the latters’ fault.

Where however do the Tories go from here? Leaving a pile of dog dirt on the carpet of the Palace of Westminster may be a clever ruse in the short run; but it will hardly do as long-term strategy. In the long term of course the winter fuel allowance may well have been forgotten, which Labour is probably relying on: ‘get the bad news out early’; but then the clownish stupidities of the last Tory governments will probably also have faded from voters’ memories. In which case the Conservatives might have a chance to rebuild; but on what foundations?

There are two main possibilities. The first is to return to the old Tory principles of ‘moderation’: sensible, middle-of the road economically (I’m talking about perceptions here), reliable fiscally, liberal socially, competent, un-ideological, and ‘conservative’ in its literal sense; in other words cuddly, like that lovely Ken Clarke, bless him. (How he’s missed!) The problem with this is that is that Labour might very well have taken hold of that ground from the Tories, under its more cuddly leaders by then. (That’s why it was so wise to get rid of the very un-cuddly Corbyn, however right he was about almost everything.)

The other road will be to veer off to the ideological Right, and become a proto-Fascist party in effect. That’s what the Tories who are most prominent today – that is, shout the loudest – seem to be aiming for. And it’s certainly the route already chosen by Farage, ‘Reform’, and their ‘populist’ following; which is another factor that might push the Tories in that direction – simply out of fear of being displaced by them. Far-Rightism at least presents a clear alternative to Labour, with very easily-defined policies, spelled out recently by those two Tory monsters Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, and clearly appealing to the baser instincts of (some) Britons. And of course it has wider European and Global support, from Trumpism to the AfD, which must give it even more purchase, and confidence. This is the great danger – for us British social liberals – in the near future; which it will require a great effort by reasonable and moderate Tories, if there are any left, to counter.

It will also require enormous skill and judgment on the part of the new Labour government, to succeed in a way that makes this Right-wing ‘turn’ less attractive to the coming generation of voters. Tax or welfare cuts won’t do it, leaving the country in much the same state. In short, it may need a social revolution, of the kind that enabled Labour to succeed so brilliantly after World War II. How this is to be achieved without a war to help it, with powerful press magnates opposed to it, and in the face of the fuck-up the Tories have – deliberately? – bequeathed to Labour, is the great (domestic) issue of our day.

My ideal solution, as a Lefty, would be to undo most of the traces of ‘Thatcherism’, which lie at the bottom of all this. But whether the capitalist tiger Thatcher rode so effectively in the ’eighties, and is still there growling away in the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, will allow Starmer to even start on this must be doubtful. That’s what is at the root of most of our present woes. Mere cunning – more dollops of dog dirt – will not get over it.

I’ve always thought it ridiculous that Zionist Jews should rest their ultimate claim to Palestine/Israel on the commands of a mythical being in the sky, as recounted in an old magic book. But I never doubted that those were the words attributed to Him. That is, until the other day; when I read this piece by (the Jewish) Naomi Wolf. It’s getting wide circulation now, so you will likely have come across it already; but in case not, here it is.

Okay, so I was challenged below: “Read the Bible! God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people.” So….I may get crucified for this but I have started to say it — most recently (terrified, trembling) to warm welcome in a synagogue in LA: Actually if you read Genesis Exodus and Deuteronomy in Hebrew — as I do — you see that God did not “give” Israel to the Jews/Israelites. We as Jews are raised with the creed that “God gave us the land of Israel” in Genesis — and that ethnically ‘we are the chosen people.” But actually — and I could not believe my eyes when I saw this, I checked my reading with major scholars and they confirmed it — actually God’s “covenant” in Genesis, Exodus and Deuteronomy with the Jewish people is NOT ABOUT AN ETHNICITY AND NOT ABOUT A CONTRACT. IT IS ABOUT A WAY OF BEHAVING.

Again and again in the “covenant” language He never says: “I will give you, ethnic Israelites, the land of Israel.” Rather He says something far more radical – far more subversive — far more Godlike in my view. He says: IF you visit those imprisoned…act mercifully to the widow and the orphan…welcome the stranger in your midst…tend the sick…do justice and love mercy ….and perform various other tasks…THEN YOU WILL BE MY PEOPLE AND THIS LAND WILL BE YOUR LAND. So “my people” is not ethnic — it is transactional. We are God’s people not by birth but by a way of behaving, that is ethical, kind and just. And we STOP being “God’s people” when we are not ethical, kind and just. And ANYONE who is ethical, kind and just is, according to God in Genesis, “God’s people.” And the “contract” to “give” us Israel is conditional — we can live in God’s land IF we are “God’s people” in this way — just, merciful, compassionate. AND — it never ever says, it is ONLY your land. Even when passages spell out geographical “boundaries” as if God does such a thing, it never says this is exclusively your land. It never says I will give this land JUST to you. Remember these were homeless nomads who had left slavery in Egypt and were wandering around in the desert; at most these passages say, settle here, but they do not say, settle here exclusively. Indeed again and again it talks about welcoming “zarim” — translated as “strangers” but can also be translated as “people/tribes who are not you” — in your midst. Blew my mind, hope it blows yours.

Now, I’m no Biblical scholar, although I have read the Bible (nearly all of it; we had to at school); and I’m approaching Wolf’s reading from the perspective of the ‘Four Gospels’ Christianity I was brought up with in my youth. But from a moral point of view, and also a historico-textual one, hers seems to me to be far more convincing, and even – may I say? – ‘Jewish’, than the version we are told legitimizes present-day Israel, and its un-Christian, and possibly un-Abrahamic, policies in the West Bank and Gaza.

There are, I’m sure, many other Jews who would go along with this, including some Rabbis. You don’t need to be ‘anti-semitic’ to share Wolf’s reading of what we call the Old Testament. Indeed, that reading would likely make you more pro-Jewish, or more comfortable as a Jew, if you were one already. And this is especially true for critical scholars like me, who endeavour to base our conclusions on careful analyses of available written and other evidence, viewed in context; which is what Naomi Wolf appears to have done here. Or is she wrong on this?

In Sweden criminal gangs are recruiting children to carry out their most heinous crimes, including even murder. Some of the reasons for this are spelled out in this recent statement by the Swedish police: https://polisen.se/en/victims-of-crime/are-you-worried-that-your-child-will-be-lured-into-crime/. Children have various legal protections that adults do not have; they’re easily seduced and influenced; and they’re better at using modern technology, if that’s what the crime involves. Some of these gangs are now apparently sending kids down into Denmark to do their dastardly and sometimes murderous deeds there. The Danes are not happy, understandably.

This is obviously not a unique or novel phenomenon. (Shades of Fagin and the Artful Dodger. And of the kids in my favourite Cagney movie: Each Dawn I Die.) But how common is it now, I wonder, outside Scandinavia?

As an immigrant here in Sweden – you might even say a refugee – but needing to return to the UK occasionally, I’ve recently become alarmed by the rapidly rising costs of air and rail travel there, even by ‘cheap’ airlines or with the benefit of Euro-railcards. A projected trip at the end of this month (including rail travel in England, grossly over-priced) is likely to set me back about £300. And then the same amount, I guess, to return.

In view of this I’m tempted to switch my political support to the far-Right Sweden Democrats, who are offering money to unwanted foreigners to enable them to return ‘home’. (See https://www.thelocal.se/20240819/sweden-democrats-push-to-overrule-inquiry-on-re-emigration-grants/.) I seem to remember Enoch Powell’s floating much the same idea for Britain in the 1960s. Did anything come of it? I doubt whether it will work in Sweden, either. But then you never can tell, these crazy days.

Of course it would make no sense my taking the money and buying a ticket to Blighty with it, if I weren’t allowed back. On the other hand, could they stop me re-entering Sweden with a Swedish passport (which I have)? And then my re-applying for the grant for another trip? I imagine that even the racists in the Sverigedemokraterna will have thought of that.

Could what we’re experiencing today in Britain – the economic and social problems, ludicrous governments, right-wing extremism, culture wars, riots and general anomie – be a sign or symptom, or even an effect, of what ex-US Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously described in 1962 as Britain’s having ‘lost an Empire, but not yet found a rôle’?

Despite Conservative objections, that did not seem implausible at the time. A little early, perhaps: Britain still had a fair number of colonies to get rid of in 1962, and a pretty extensive ‘informal’ empire – money and influence – parts of which have managed to survive, albeit much attenuated, until today. All the same, once India had gone, then much of Africa, and following the Suez débacle in 1956, the writing was clearly – to everyone save a few deluded ‘Empire Loyalists’ – ‘on the wall’. This was obvious to most of us Brits then, and even more so to our ‘cousins’, like Acheson, across the water.

I don’t want to quarrel with this. Indeed, I’d put the effective loss of Britain’s ‘formal’ empire even earlier – see my The Lion’s Share. And the seeping away of the trappings of empire after the Second World War did leave spaces that needed to be filled by something. Empire Loyalists saw that ‘something’ as a revival – somehow – of the old Empire. Rhodesia – now Zimbabwe – was their final redoubt, which fell of course in 1980. The Falklands didn’t fall, but were hardly the foundation you could rebuild an Empire on. (They had always been marginal to British imperial power in any case.) The ‘Commonwealth’, which survived the breakup of the Empire, was another possible focus for post-imperial loyalty; but a rather too liberal, ‘multi-cultural’, weak and disobedient one for the Empire Loyalists and pro-Rhodesians to feel comfortable with. Much later on this vestigial ‘imperialism’ could also be said to be manifested in the Brexiteers’ ideas of a ‘global Britain’, the ‘Anglosphere’, post-European trade deals with former colonies, and the like.

But there were alternative ‘rôles’ on offer. One was for Britain to ally more closely with the USA. This was one of the earliest solutions offered, by people who as early as the 1890s saw the way things were going, including most notably the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes. The second – anathema to the likes of him – was for Britain to assert, or re-assert, her influence in the evolving (under a succession of different names) European Union. This of course was what eventually came to pass, when the Conservative government of Edward Heath finally negotiated Britain’s adhesion to it in 1973. That could have bestowed on Britain a new replacement ‘rôle’; and arguably did.

But not, of course, to the liking of those Britons who hankered after a more ‘independent’ and by implication ‘powerful’ rôle for their country; or – more importantly – of those who didn’t really care one way or another about what ‘rôle’ Britain should play in the world, but were willing to go along with the Brexiteers’ false argument that her ‘subservient’ one within the EU, and tracing this back, her loss of empire, were at the root of all their domestic woes.

So, in the event Britain has tried out two new putative national roles for herself since the loss of her formal empire. The first was the European one; the second the anti-European one, which seems to be fed with memories of what the old imperial role is supposed to have meant for her. Both have pretty well failed, rôle-wise; and it is this that could be said to confirm Acheson’s view: that Britain had no idea what she should do once the Empire had gone. In other words, we have still not ‘found a role’.

I say ‘we’; but the truth is that only a tiny minority of us Brits really cares a fig about our ‘role’. Most of us – apart from politicians and historians – are almost entirely indifferent about what part our nation plays and played in the world, until that ‘part’ is falsely tied in with more social and individual concerns, like today. I think I demonstrated this in my The Absent-Minded Imperialists; although I should point out in fairness that the reading presented there is controversial. Most people didn’t care about the Empire; and so hardly cared about it when it had gone. So the implication of Acheson’s claim – that it was important to them – is misleading.

In any case, ‘rôles’ can be established in other ways than by crudely political and military – ‘imperial’ – means. Cultural is one. Social is another. Economic is a third – although that way colonialism can lie. Moral is another. (The Dalai Llama has no battalions.) In the broader picture, power, control and empire are arguably less admirable and desirable than these, and many others. ‘We used to have an empire’, as Brexiteer mobs are sometimes heard shouting. – So what? We still have (or had) Shakespeare, Turner, some wonderful mediaeval cathedrals, our language, our universities, and the NHS. Empires never last for ever. Some of these might.

My first great literary (if you can call it that) enthusiasm was Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future. He was the comic-strip space hero of the Eagle’s front page in the early 1950s; in retrospect rather less science-fictiony than we thought at the time – the science all wrong, with for example the planet Venus more verdant than we now know it is in reality; and everything about it more redolent of the Second World War than of any imaginable future: Dan with his fat Lancastrian batman Digby, spaceships looking like Lancaster bombers minus their wings, and so on, and lots of chivalry – but in spite of all this sparking in me a life-long interest in science fiction, and in the questions about ‘life, the universe and everything’ that later more cerebral versions of this genre explored. The art work (by Frank Hampson) was superb too.

I’ve referenced Dan Dare before: https://bernardjporter.com/2021/05/28/dominic-mekon/. That post compared Dominic Cummings – remember him? – to the arch-villain of the strip, the Mekon. He (or it) was the tyrannical leader of the ‘Treens’ of Venus, with a huge green head and a tiny body. The head was the clue. It contained the pure science which was the Mekon’s means of controlling his subjects, but without room to take in what Dan regarded as more human (or ‘British’) characteristics; such as empathy, charity, and simple decency. He (it) was obviously part of the ‘evil genius’ tradition in stories and novels that went back for decades; probably as far as the hyper-fictional ‘Satan’.

Elon Musk’s head is not as big as the Mekon’s; but his ambition appears to be comparable. In common with most people, I first associated him with electric cars and spaceships, which did not seem to be bad things in themselves – indeed, the opposite if you were brought up on Dan Dare. But then I learned of his takeover of Twitter, which as a modern technology dum-dum I knew little about then, and still do. (My only contact with this field is the present one: Facebook.) But now that I know what Musk can do with his immense riches and power, and arguably has done already through his liberation of Twitter from almost any sort of ethical moderation, with results we saw in the riots that took place in England a week ago: fake ‘tweets’ empowering far-Rightists and provoking them to attack immigrants and Muslims; and with what I’ve since learned about his background (South Africa), his own far-Right leanings, and from the testimony of his transgender daughter: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-transgender-daughter-vivian-wilson-interview-rcna163665; I’m now fully aware of the danger he poses. In this regard he can be seen as the digital-age successor to that other media Satan, Rupert Murdoch. Isn’t it interesting – and maybe significant – that both these men originally came from ex-British colonies:  ‘The Empire Strikes Back’? (That of course was bound to occur to me, as an Imperial historian.)

Obviously we shouldn’t allow billionaires to dominate our national discourse in this way. But that’s what happens when you give a privileged ‘freedom’ to capitalist speech.

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Incidentally, I still return to Dan Dare occasionally, in the bound facsimiles published by Titan Comics over the last ten years. I recently acquired The Earth Stealers, reproducing issues from June 1961 to March 1962, which was a few years after I had stopped subscribing to the original. The quality had declined by then – no Frank Hampson, for a start – but I was intrigued to find a story-line based on Dan’s returning to a future earth via a time-warp, and witnessing the near-destruction of the Earth by global warming, graphically illustrated with images of the Houses of Parliament burning, and so on. That looks quite prophetic for its time (16 December 1961). – If I can find a way to, I may post a few frames of it later. (I haven’t yet got to the end of the story, so I can’t tell you whether Dan saves the earth yet again; or whether the Mekon is involved.)