Porter’s Pensées

If Suella Braveman is thinking of using today’s sacking to release her inner fascist, she would be in strong historical company. Fascism (or quasi-fascism, or extreme nationalism, or whatever else you want to call it) is usually thought of as a predominantly masculine – even macho – ideology. Watching the demonstrations in London on TV on Saturday I couldn’t help noticing that the Right-wing ‘counter-protest’ crowd – the one that did all the violence – was overwhelmingly made up of men and boys, rather resembling soccer hooligans; whereas the main 300,000-strong pro-Palestine demonstration – the one that Braverman characterised as a ‘hate march’ – was, as well as being peaceful and indeed pacifist, pretty balanced gender-wise.

If Suella wants to lead the Conservative Right in the future – even perhaps in a breakaway party, if Sunak and the new ‘Lord’ Cameron prove to be too ‘wokish’ for her – she might do worse than to model herself on Rotha Lintorn-Orman. She was the founder of the first British – and the only female-led – explicitly ‘Fascist’ party in 1923. (Google her. Very odd. Rather ‘butch’ in appearance; which might have been a gesture to her fellow masculinists. Suella might need to trim her flowing locks.)

I’ve been busy over the last week reading this book for review. (I really do read, thoroughly, the books I’m sent!) Here’s the latest draft. – Now, hopefully, to get back to proper blogging, in between hospital appointments.

Nicholas Rankin, Trapped in History: Kenya, Mau Mau and Me. Faber, November 2023; 560pp, illust., £25.

Reviewed by Bernard Porter.

Kenya is now generally acknowledged to represent the worst of all the criminal enterprises that helped form the British empire in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and especially in the 1950s, when the colony underwent an ‘Emergency’ – others would call it a war – that was so unrivalled in its savagery that afterwards the British government sought to spirit away most of the official documentation on it to a highly secret archive in Buckinghamshire. (It was a legal case instituted by former African victims in the 2010s that prised it open eventually.) The government at the time, and a public opinion informed by the right-wing press, attributed the whole affair to the innate barbarism of an African organisation known as Mau Mau, whose atrocities both shocked and thrilled readers brought up on popular imperialist and ‘Western’ novels and films. These were genuine. Mau Mau administered dark ‘oaths’ reinforced by bloody rituals, and slaughtered – often ghoulishly – men, women and children, both white and native (if they were seen as ‘collaborators’, or simply refused the oaths). White settlers lived in terror of these monsters, who at any moment could emerge from the forests, dressed in animal skins and paint, to slay them in their beds. Apparently the Mau Mau could ‘smell their victims out’ from two miles away. ‘Only’ twenty-odd settlers were murdered in this way, as against thousands of Africans shot and hanged in reprisal; but the shock was well-founded. It was even worse when the movement was suspected – as most protest movements were in this paranoid age – as being Soviet backed.

The other way of regarding Mau Mau was as an extreme and deplorable but nonetheless understandable response to the equally undoubted crimes of the white colonists; first of all in stealing their best lands from the Africans, and then in subjecting them to appallingly racist treatment as servants and hired hands on their farms. Racism in Kenya appears to have been worse than in most other British colonies, and certainly worse than in Britain itself, possibly because of the distinctive social class – and public school education – of so many of the whites who went out there. (Both Eton and Winchester, for example, crop up in this account. Not may Etonians went to other colonies.) The social lives of these reprobates has become familiar to us through films such as The Happy Valley (1986) and White Mischief (1987). This was the society that the four year-old Nicholas Rankin’s family joined in 1954, at the height of the ‘Emergency’, staying on until 1963, when Uhuru (freedom) was finally won; and the family returned ‘home’, with Nicholas enrolled at his own public school (Shrewsbury).

The Kenya Emergency has virtually a library devoted to it now, most of it focussing on the repression meted out to Mau Mau detainees in the ‘camps’, which the American historian Caroline Elkins has characterised as Britain’s Gulag (2005). Strictly speaking they were ‘concentration camps’; but that term conjures up unfair comparisons today. Nonetheless the Kenya camps were pretty vile, inflicting the most horrendous tortures on detainees, up to and including castrating men and inserting hot eggs into women’s vaginas – you can see why they hid the evidence; which will always sully the historical reputation of British colonialism. This is despite the principled opposition of many on the Left and liberal-Conservative sides of British metropolitan politics, as well as of a few of the more decent settlers; and the generous acknowledgement much later from one ex-inmate, Wambugu wa Nyingi, of the ‘many good things’ that ‘the British’ had also done. (I wonder whether many Palestinians, to cite a superficial modern parallel, would say the same of their Israeli colonists.)

Rankin’s book is an invaluable addition to this library, written as it is from the unusual perspective of a lad planted down in this privileged white community, and accepting its assumptions and racial prejudices initially – and also Shrewsbury’s – as young boys are almost bound to do; but managing to free himself from them in later life. ‘I am sorry’, he writes near the end, that ‘I was part of the torture all around us’. To do him justice he didn’t see the worst of it, sheltered as he was in his English home (apart from the Kikuyu servants), and at his very English-style prep school; but he got to know about it later, and as a result took the trouble to research the prior history of colonial Kenya. That helped him – and now his readers – to put the Emergency in context, and makes up a good third of this book. He also has some sad reflections on the later history of independent Kenya, betrayed, he thinks, by Jomo Kenyatta, whose dreams for a social-democratic post-colonial nation – clearly modelled on contemporary Britain, where he studied and won his PhD – turned to dust.

Rankin also has some interesting things to say about racism generally, including in Britain (this all happened in Enoch Powell’s time), which his Kenyan experience has convinced him has more to do with power, and the fear of its loss, than with ‘race’ per se. He muses on this towards the end; after a section on an imagined encounter with a puff-adder.

‘I have built this book, a papier-mâché memory palace, partly out of what I remember of my own small part of the worldwide British Empire. But in the end, I find snakes coiled inside the house of paper. It is not the snake of racism, but the bigger snake of a hunger for power. Enjoying power over somebody else, fearing to lose it, and then going further, is the path to terror and torture. Terror and torture were widespread in Mau Mau Kenya on both sides, and they lived inside me too.’

Hopefully writing this semi-autobiographical, semi-historical, semi-political and immensely readable account of his colonial boyhood, has helped to exorcise these demons.

In 1957 Ian Fleming’s brother, Peter, published a novel called The Sixth Column, which I read in the ’seventies because I was researching the field of espionage history at the time. It turned out to be very disappointing (by comparison with the ‘Bond’ books, which I devoured eagerly – didn’t everyone?), and incredibly reactionary in its politics. I can’t remember the main plot, set in the near future; but that didn’t seem to matter to Peter Fleming so much as the underlying but persistent theme of the Decline of Britain since World War II; which the author attributed to the nation’s ‘softening up’ by – yes, you’ve guessed it – Labour governments, the welfare state, and what today would be called ‘woke’ ideas. Foreign intervention also came into it, with the Commies (of course) infiltrating a popular TV presenter into the BBC in order to demoralise British youth with his trivial and jokey spiel, and pop music. As I read the book, Terry Wogan (remember him?) came irresistibly to my mind, although The Sixth Column predated him by a couple of decades.

What brought this back to my mind was the England cricket team’s defeat (albeit in the shorter form of the game) by Afghanistan a few days ago. At the end of Peter Fleming’s book, news comes in that the English cricket team has lost to ‘West Africa’; which is taken to be a disgrace – England beaten by black ex-colonials! – and a sure sign, therefore, of her final descent into the abyss.

Personally, I’ve always regarded the global spread of cricket through the world as one of the greatest and most beneficial contributions of British imperialism (perhaps its only one) to civilisation; and often feel a little glow of pride when England is beaten by the West Indies, or Pakistan, or (currently) India. So imperialism wasn’t all bad, then.

*

OK, that’s a trivial comment. I should be writing about more important things: the real decline of Britain at the hands of these almost unbelievably stupid and incompetent Tories (perhaps Terry Wogan got to them); neo-fascism; Ukraine; Palestine; knife-crime in Stockholm; global warming; the eventual destruction of our galaxy… I hope to post about some of these later. In the meantime, however, I still have some more medical procedures to go through; in England unfortunately – I really should have stayed in Sweden – starting tomorrow. Nothing life-threatening, I hope. But mildly embarrassing, which is why I haven’t been more specific.

I’m no expert on present-day Israel/Palestine, although as a British imperial historian I do know something about the origins of the current crisis there. That expertise has persuaded me that some of the charges levelled against the current Israeli state – charges resented by Israel’s defenders, and even characterised by them as ‘anti-Semitic’ – are in fact incontrovertibly true, and certainly not necessarily racist; and so should be accepted as ‘givens’ on both (or all) sides of the argument.

One is that Palestine was essentially stolen from its former occupants by the Zionists, who had no legitimate right to it, therefore, apart from the rights that military conquest gives to an aggressor. Unless, that is, you believe that ‘God’ gave it to them two thousand years before; which of course can carry very little weight for anyone who doesn’t accept the particular God that the Jews have chosen as their own. A second charge is that Zionism was an essentially ‘colonialist’ and even ‘imperialist’ enterprise; so offending against present-day prejudices against both these phenomena, and yet – I would say – undeniably accurate, again. Zionism, as it has worked out in Palestine, bears just about every single characteristic of 19^th century colonialism (enabled as it was by early 20^th-century British imperialists like Arthur Balfour); and is still, under Netanyahu, expansionary in much the same way. The only substantial difference I can see is that it doesn’t seem to embrace the ‘civilizing mission’ aspect of many European imperialisms (including Balfour’s), which were justified (often hypocritically, but still…) by the benefits they were supposed to bring to the indigènes. There’s little sign of that in present-day Israel-Palestine; and least of all in the over-populated Gaza Strip, whose economy and life have been strangled for years by Israel. Zionism is also quite explicitly ‘racist’, or at least ‘culturist’, as historic colonialism generally was too. And its implementation does bear comparison with South African apartheid, that most despised feature of European imperialism (after slavery); although I don’t know enough about life in present-day Israel to know how far that parallel should be taken. But all in all there can be no doubt that Israel is – among other things, to be sure – a ‘colonialist’ state; as of course many other countries – Britain and the US not excepted – have been at one time or another in their histories, if you go back far enough.

Some of this, of course, lies behind Hamas’s latest horrific assault on Israel from Gaza; helping to explain it on some levels, if not to excuse it. In fact nothing can excuse the ferocity of this indiscriminate and murderous onslaught, by all accounts – if, that is, those accounts are reliable, and not just propaganda. (There’s good evidence for a lot of them.) No historical grievances can justify such a massacre in any circumstances.

But then the same must surely apply to Israel’s new counter-assault on Gaza, which appears to be as destructive in terms of the numbers of innocent lives struck down there as was Hamas’s. The Israeli response also seems to be motivated by revenge at least as much as by the strict needs of defence. Could this be a religious thing: based, for example, on the Old Testament morality of ‘an eye for an eye’ (the awful Leviticus, of course, ch. 24 vv. 19-21), and probably Islam’s too? This is why, incidentally, I’ve always preferred the rather more wokeish New Testament morality (Matthew 5:38-39) over theirs. I can fully understand the Israelis’ eagerness for retribution. But’s that’s the primitive, emotional, Old Testament side of me.

Netanyahu is using this event to justify hitting the Palestinians even harder: which, again, was a common response when earlier European imperialists were confronted by rebellions in – say – India or Algeria or Kenya. That’s the purpose of his hoped-for mass expulsion of Arabs from northern Gaza – a type of ‘ethnic cleansing’, surely; and the draconian collective punishment he is meting out for those who stay.

Some critics suspect that Netanyahu actually welcomes the present crisis as furnishing him with an excuse for further Israeli expansion, which may be why he didn’t nip the Hamas invasion earlier in the bud. Wearing another of my academic hats, as a ‘secret service’ historian, it seemed odd to me that Israel was taken so much by surprise by the Hamas attack, when Mossad is supposed to be the most effective spy agency in the world. Is there more in this than meets the eye?

None of this, however, should stop us condemning in the strongest possible terms Hamas’s bestial attack on Israeli men, women and children last weekend. Maybe this is not the best time even to try to understand it, if understanding is taken to be letting the real villains off the hook.

But this will nonetheless be required later, if there is to be any peaceful solution to the seemingly intractable problem of Palestine today. Israelis could make a start by facing up to their past crimes: maybe by paying reparations to the dispossessed. Palestinians should accept the situation that those injustices helped create, as a fait accompli, and learn to live with their colonialist neighbours de novo. History can’t be allowed to rule and stifle them: not even, if this were possible, memories of the Nazi holocaust. As well as the past, religion and race should be taken out of the political equation, too.

All this would probably require a ‘two state’ solution; which incidentally many Jews, especially in the diaspora, still favour – if they don’t renounce Zionism entirely, as some do. (And, they claim, on orthodox Jewish grounds.) Maybe that’s out of the question now, as almost everyone is telling us. In which case we may all be – echoing Private Fraser in Dad’s Army – doomed.

But what do I know? I’m no expert. And my history doesn’t really help.

It pains me to say it, but on the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ in Britain Suella Braverman is essentially right. The upper classes never have integrated into the various cultures of the rest of Britain, or even tried to; by contrast with most of the foreign immigrants that Braverman seems to have had on her mind in her recent Washington speech (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrpAMttlIkQ).

Of course there are examples of Moslems, Jews and other cultural, national, religious or ethnic ‘identities’ deliberately keeping themselves apart from their British neighbours for years on end; but most of them have managed to ‘fit in’ quite comfortably in one way or another, with the cultures they brought with them surviving, but modified by their interactions with their hosts, and often – usually, I would say – enriching the latters’ cultures immeasurably. An obvious example is our culinary culture; but there are others too. (It isn’t widely known that fish and chips were introduced to England by a Dutch Jewish refugee.) The reason for this is that ‘national identity’ – Britain’s, at any rate – is not a static thing, set in aspic, essentially unchanging from (say) King Alfred’s time, and merely threatened by others, as Vladimir Putin seems to regard Holy Mother Russia’s; but always varied, disputed, changing: in other words alive, and all the more interesting and – usually – admirable for that. It certainly is to a historian. How dull, not to say inexplicable, would the history of Britain be otherwise? And change, and fertilisation by other cultures, are essential aspects of Britain’s ‘identity’ (or identities), as they are of most other nations’. We should rejoice in them.

The British upper classes, however, are different. If you want to know what an unassimilated minority looks like, they stand out far more obviously than any ‘racial’ group which is currently living in, or desirous of coming to, Britain. With their segregated schools, distinctive accents, snobbishness, peculiar customs, their own versions of history (vide Jacob Rees Mogg’s The Victorians), social exclusivity, class loyalties, arrogant avoidance of many of the laws and decencies that bind the rest of us (Bullingdon? Partygate?); here surely is an alien population living amongst us with no desire at all to integrate. As one popular slogan has put it, ‘It’s not the Estonians you should fear, but the Etonians.’

Of course they too started off as an immigrant wave, coming over the Channel in small (or smallish) boats in 1066. The difference is that these Norman newcomers stayed on only in order to dispossess and dominate the rest of us. None of our current immigrants and refugees is likely to do that. Unless, that is, they manage to assimilate with the settled upper classes – often via Eton and Winchester, or the Conservative Party – thus exchanging one form of ‘alienness’ for another. Braverman is one of those who has done this. I suppose one could consider that as an example of ‘multiculturalism’ that has ‘failed’.

In fact there is no such thing as a settled British (or even English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish) ‘identity’ or ‘culture’. My Britain’s Contested History. Lessons for Patriots (Bloomsbury, 2022) bears on this. Please buy a copy. (No-one else appears to have done.)

Rory Stewart – ex-Conservative MP (one of the decent ones) and also an Old Etonian (ditto) – writes this in his recent memoir, Politics on the Edge.

‘Campaigning back in Cumbria, I began to notice that if a house was filled with books, the occupants would not be voting Conservative.’

Coming from a Tory, I think that’s revealing. Élitist, of course, which is why a Leftist couldn’t write it; but probably true.

I must say I’m highly suspicious of this recent – albeit mild – fuss about Chinese espionage at the heart of UK government. In the first place, all countries ‘spy’ on each other, in one way or another, and always have done. (See my Plots and Paranoia.) Secondly: the present case – not yet brought to trial – appears to feature a humble ‘research assistant’ with connections, through his or her research, to some minor Tory politicians, who is unlikely to reveal anything that can’t be found out from reading, for example, Hansard, or other open sources in the public domain. Thirdly: isn’t this rather old-hat, reminiscent of the great age of popular spy novels and films (usually with a Cold War setting); and far less significant and scary in this post-secrecy age of CVTV cameras, computer hacking, social media and the rest, when we don’t expect anyone to be able to keep secrets, State or otherwise, any more? Maybe that’s why not more is being made of this. And fourthly: in the age when they did seem to be important, these revelations of foreign espionage were sometimes used to divert public attention away from other more important government failings and scandals; of which there are, of course, myriads today. No better scapegoat than a cunning yellow one.

One of these present scandals may be the extent of Russian covert interference in British politics, recently and currently. There’s a lot just now on Facebook about Russian oligarch millions funding the Conservative party and UKIP; which if true is clearly suspicious, and could be far more damaging to British national interests than anything a few Chinese ‘moles’ could do. We know that Brexit, for example, was considered to be good for Russia at the time. Wasn’t there supposed to be a government enquiry into this a couple of years ago, which should have reported by now? Whatever became of that?

Of course my suspicions may be over-influenced by the material that is allowed to get through to me by Facebook’s algorithms; which are why it’s so difficult to get to the bottom of almost anything these days. If, that is, there is a ‘bottom’.

My work on the late Victorian origins of the London Metropolitan Police Special Branch (The Origins of the Vigilant State, 1987) obviously familiarised me with the ‘Whitechapel Murders’, but not to any great depth, as ‘Jack the Ripper’ was the responsibility of the City police force, and not of the Met. Last night BBC2 carried a programme (I think it was a repeat) ‘reopening’ the case, by using more modern forensic procedures, and fronted by Emilia Fox of Silent Witness fame. It was interesting, but hardly ground-breaking in its conclusion that the ‘Ripper’ was one Aaron Kosminsky, an East European immigrant who lived in the area of the murders at the time. He’s been the main suspect for a while.

What surprised me was that no mention was made – unless I missed it – of Kosminsky’s identity not only as a recent Polish immigrant, but as a Jewish one; a fact that was supposed to be relevant at the time. Not, as you might think,  because of his race directly, but because the police authorities of the day feared that knowledge that he was Jewish might unleash violent anti-semitic riots in that part of London: the poorest part of the city, and already the focus of racist prejudice, directed against the recent flood of immigrants fleeing there from anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia and Poland. Evidence of this – again not mentioned in the programme – was that when graffiti attributing the murders to ‘the Jews’ appeared on the walls of the East End, the City police commissioner ordered that they be erased. This may have protected Kosminsky; and misdirected the popular suspicion into other areas, which included a member of the Royal Family, a visiting American, and a famous artist. These proved to be far more attractive targets for the sensationalist ‘yellow press’ of the day.

I’m still puzzled, however, why the programme made no mention of this. Could it be that ‘anti-semitism’ is such a delicate subject now, and so thoroughly ‘weaponised’, especially by the current Israeli government, that even the mention of a suspected Jewish dimension to a notorious 135-year old crime would have stained the BBC with this appalling prejudice. Or me, now I’ve brought it up again.

[Sorry again for the long silence. More medical issues, But I’m working on my promised recollections of my young days on the far edges of the Public school world, which I’ll post when I’ve finished them.]

Another long silence from me. Sorry. Medical again. I think the Creator was distracted when s/he designed the prostate. (It must have been a She, I think. Women don’t have them. And it probably serves us males right.)

In the meantime I’m thinking of having another go at the ‘Public’ schools. It must be obvious what has triggered this: the sudden re-emergence in British politics of some of the worst but also most characteristic of their products over the last ten years. Cameron, Boris, Jacob – Old Etonians all; followed by a Wykehamist, a dozen others from ‘minor’ Public schools, and a sprinkling from Grammar schools that enviously aped them. As well as inspiring me, the phenomenon has provoked a small flood of books about the Public schools over the last few years –  most of them critical, some utterly damning, as you can tell from their titles – which I’m wading through just now. I quoted from Musa Okwonga’s excellent One of Them in an earlier post. I’m presently into Kynaston and Green’s Engines of Privilege; to be followed by Robert Verkaik’s Posh Boys; Richard Beard’s Sad Little Men; David Turner’s The Old Boys; Martin Steven’s The English Public School… and there are still more to come. I have these books on my mobile phone, so can read them in hospital on Thursday, while I’m waiting for tests. (Hopefully only for a day. I’m not anticipating anything serious.)

But I thought I’d kick off (later) by recounting my own experiences, years ago, at one of those ‘envious’ Grammar schools; and then at Cambridge, where I first came into contact with the genuine Public School crowd. As you’ll see, I found them friendly, in a patronising sort of way, and amusing. But then (in the sixties) we all thought they were on the way out. How wrong we were.

I once – or it may have been twice – wrote to Eton College to ask about its History syllabus: mainly in order to find out what may have lain behind the version of British history presented in the Old Etonian Brexiter Jacob Rees-Mogg’s The Victorians: Twelve Titans who Forged Britain, published in 2019 to almost universal derision. I got no reply from Eton (surprise, surprise!); and so remained with only my suspicions of how it must have been; until I came across this memoir by another Old Etonian, which confirmed those suspicions to the hilt. It’s written by a man of Ugandan heritage, and is well worth reading for its unique account of how Eton appeared to someone who couldn’t be considered to be one of its normal (upper-class white) clientele. The book is One of Them, by Musa Okwonga, and is by no means as critical you might expect. But this passage on the British history he was taught at Eton told me all I needed to know. (And felt familiar to me, having been educated at a school which wasn’t a proper ‘Public’ one, but aspired to be.)

Here’s what he writes (around p.44).

“Given the importance of history, I find it interesting to reflect on what I was taught about Britain at school, as well as what I wasn’t. Upon leaving, if someone had asked me what I knew about the British  Empire, I would probably have told them that the country of my birth had long ruled the world through a heady mix of commerce and conquest. Had I been asked about the details of that conquest, my answers would have been uncertain. I wouldn’t have been able to tell them much, if anything, about Partition or the Opium Wars or the scramble for Africa or the trade of enslaved people, because I covered those pivotal historical events in little or no depth. I therefore grew up with a somewhat hazy sense of the British Empire; it was an edifice as distant grand and unknowable to me as the statues of Easter Island. The conflict in Uganda was already so protracted that there was little discussion of the colonial power that had destabilised my parents’ country long before and had given it its present-day form. But Britain’s imperial machinations were never lost on my grandfather, who once told me in an ominous tone – one that demanded no further clarification – The last man on Earth will be an Englishman.

“It is not as if I am not taught much about Britain. I learn about when Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror invaded the island and about when its barons forced the king to submit with the Magna Carta. I learn about the struggle to resist the influence of the Continent, its stand-off with the Vatican. I spend far more time studying Britain’s role in the end of slavery than its prominent role in promoting and profiting from this uniquely lucrative system of human suffering. In my view, my country was primarily the great liberator, not the cruel subjugator. I could reel off all kinds of facts about how terrifying the Vikings were, but if someone had asserted that the British could be similarly barbaric and on a far greater scale, then at first I might have been very defensive.

“The Britain about which I learn is either heroic abroad or beset by internal turbulence or doing its very best to repel external threats. My Britain is a victim and yet somehow ruling and never being enslaved; it is being free and then breaking further free; a plucky underdog or the victor of fair fights; a reluctant and dignified winner of the rough and tumble of global politics. My Britain is quiet and unassuming, yet somehow stumbled upon the possession of all this territory abroad, a bumbling traveller who wandered about the world and just happened to come home with the lion’s share of its wealth.

“The only time I examine the sustained savagery of which Britain has been capable is during one of my specialist subjects in my final year. Here I look at the First Crusade, whose harrowing climax – the slaughter of Jews and Muslims by Christians at the siege of Jerusalem – fundamentally reshapes the way I look at the Middle East. I begin to see that Britain is not an innocent actor in so many of these scenarios but a much more sophisticated player than I ever imagined.

“It will still be a few years until I find out what else Britain did – about the Amritsar massacre and the Bengal famine and the eviction of the people of the Chagos Islands and the suppression of the Mau Mau, many of whose resistance of British rule was punished by their castration with pliers. It will be even longer until I learn about Operation Legacy, the British government’s carefully orchestrated destruction of the bulk of the records of what it did in colonial times, so that the countries recently released from its rule would not know the extent of its deeds.”