Porter’s Pensées

Just to say, to anyone reading this who may have been trying to contact me, or expecting a message from me (Ragnar Boman, for example), that my email (bernard.porter@kajsa.karoo.co.uk) is no longer working. Why I don’t know. It was working perfectly for years, transmitting my messages across the North Sea, until three days ago. The very impressive Apple ‘Genius’ store in Täby can’t help me; as neither can the ‘K-com’ department in Hull after about two hours on the phone to them from Sweden – trying all kinds of things and pressing lots of buttons. I feel I’m cut off from the world. I think I can still ‘message’; and of course send old-fashioned ‘letters’. And this blogsite I think works. But e-mail was my primary means of communication; as I imagine it is for most people now.

I could scarcely understand what the young ‘geniuses’ in Täby were saying (in English). Modern life has passed me by. If it’s not powered by steam, I’m lost.

Sorry for the recent gap in this blog, but I’ve been in hospital (nothing serious), and on a visit to England with Kajsa to see my children and grandchildren. We elected to travel by train and boat to help save the climate; but a night in an ancient sleeper carriage on a train to Hamburg resolved me never to do it again. Flying would have been quicker, cleaner, and a lot cheaper.

However, the boat from Rotterdam to Hull (again, we slept on it) was pretty good, with all those Asians whom P&O had controversially recruited to replace the dearer British crew a couple of years ago friendly and helpful. Being on the ’high seas’, you see, means that P&O don’t need to comply with British employment law. – It’s difficult sometimes to adhere to one’s socialist and environmental principles.

On the way back Kajsa bought a beautifully produced German booklet on Imperialismus, which features a full-page portrait of my early academic bread and butter: the ‘Critic of Empire’ JA Hobson; but without mentioning my path-breaking 1968 book on him. Ah well!

Serious blogging will resume, I hope, soon. I’ve plenty to write about; including the astonishing report in today’s Dagens Nyheter that the favourite to become the Swedish football team’s next national manager is the recently sacked manager of West Ham United. He’s managed before in Sweden, and far more successfully than he did with us. Perhaps the Swedish air suits him; as it does me.

If ‘Tommy Robinson’s’ great demo in central London on Saturday was designed to alert people to the popularity of his cause, it worked with me. No matter that the ‘million’ protestors that he had asked for beforehand turned out to be ‘only’ 110,000 (by most estimates), it still was an impressive display. 110,000 looks a lot of people, especially in the narrow Whitehall streets. They marched under the banner ‘Unite the Kingdom’; a clever slogan, which must have had a resonant appeal for conservatives and reactionaries on the march – especially the ‘King’ reference.  (Also a highly misleading one, for so divisive and revolutionary a movement.) From my hidey-hole in rational and Left-ish Scandinavia, watching the news on television (yes, SvT covered it), it looked alien and foreboding.

As does the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk in Utah, with Trump immediately attributing it to ‘radical agitators’, his favourite targets; effectively making Kirk a ‘martyr’, in much the same way that the Nazis made Horst Wessel one in 1930. Whether Kirk deserves this posthumous promotion, any more than Wessel did, is for his supporters to say. But it’s useful, for a cause that relies on a sense of victimhood for so much of its appeal.

And the marchers in London last weekend certainly regard themselves in this light. ‘No-one is listening to us’. ‘Governments’ – all governments – ‘are out of touch’. ‘They’re all the same’. ‘Just out for themselves’. (‘Look at that Mandelson’.) – There’s masses of this kind of thing on social media, from a movement that claims that it represents ‘ordinary people’, but which, as we know – we superior ‘élitists’, that is – is being manipulated by very un-ordinary (and disorderly) quasi-fascists.

And yet the ‘people’s’ grievances are real, albeit not strictly attributable to the agencies they claim are responsible for them: ‘boat people’, foreigners, judges, Lefty lawyers, Europe, liberals, trans people, wokeists, welfare scroungers, my sort of élitist; and the rest of that huge but very motley ‘conspiracy’ that the ‘victims’ see standing in their way.

The size of Saturday’s march convinced me, not of course of the correctness of these people’s analysis, but of the strength and wide spread of their feeling; and of our (that is, we élitists’) need to combat it before it turns to ‘Fascism’, or a British variant of it. That seems to be happening currently in America, towards which our proto-Fascists are looking for support. Starmer’s government has done a lot of good during its first year; but it is acknowledged to have also made mistakes – Mandelson is the latest – and has failed to fire up the people represented in Saturday’s march, as Farage clearly manages to. Personally I find it difficult to understand Farage’s attraction, but he obviously has more of it than the learned and solid Sir Keir. Does the moderate Left need a more charismatic leader itself to be able to challenge the extreme Right? Remember that the greatest of all Labour leaders, Clement Attlee, had virtually no charisma, which did the Left no harm then. But times are different now. Politics is all show business. (Look at Trump.)

What Labour may need, in order to counter the allure of ‘Reform UK’, is someone like the blessed Jeremy Corbyn – who did fire up people – but with more of what in the eighteenth century they called ‘bottom’, and with fewer left-wing hostages to fortune. People are saying that Andy Burnham – currently mayor of Manchester – might fill the bill. But then we saw the mess that the last metropolitan mayor to become prime minister made of the job. And of course he (or she) would need some firing-up policies too.

On the latter front my preference, as a bit of a reactionary myself, would be to return to the social democratic policies that Labour represented after the last war, but were then ditched in the ‘Great Reaction’ of 1979, when Thatcher came to power. Those policies broadly ‘united the Kingdom’ then, and could do so again. But today? Probably not.

Otherwise I fear that recent events may mark a turning point in the UK and the US, with democracy’s being supplanted by authoritarianism, and even a form of ‘Fascism’, in either or both those countries. Or am I over-reacting, from my safe refuge over the seas?

A ‘Christian nationalist’ – which is how Charlie Kirk is being described – is not the same as being a ‘Christian’. It’s a tribal affiliation, not a religious one. The intolerance and hatred – of other ‘nations’ – that stem from it, and the white racism that it is often a cover for, are certainly no part of Christ’s teaching, but rather the opposite; which leaves one wondering whether any of these Christian nationalists have got much beyond the Old Testament, if they’ve read any of the Bible at all. (Perhaps they should be called ‘Judaeo-nationalists’; but that might open up a whole new can of anti-semitic worms.) Christianity’s role in this context should be to alleviate the evils of ‘nationalism’ proper, which lie at the root of many of the most atrocious conflicts of the modern world. Instead, and in the USA today, it simply sharpens their edges.

I’m afraid I’ve finally lost patience with our (the UK’s) Labour government: the one I voted for. Its worst policy decision, in my view, was its re-classification of ‘Palestine Action’ as a ‘terrorist’ organisation, leading to the arrest of literally hundreds of peaceful demonstrators over the last month, protesting against the decision, quite reasonably; half of them (if reports are to be believed) over 60 years of age. They’ll be coming up for trial later. It will be interesting to see how the courts treat the old codgers.

Then there are Sir Keir Starmer’s two clever wheezes, both involving Trump, and both showing some imagination – thinking ‘outside the box’ – but with embarrassing outcomes. The first was his appointment of Lord Mandelson as British ambassador to the court of King Donald, probably on the grounds that one moral reprobate (I’m referring to his social rather than his sexual preferences) was likely to get on better with another, than a boring old professional diplomat would. Now of course that has turned to dust. The second clever wheeze was Starmer’s ‘unprecedented’ invitation to Trump to make a second state visit to Britain, with all the fawning ceremony that will involve, and which Trump is clearly a sucker for. We’ll be seeing how that turns out in this coming week, sans Mandelson. Trump is the most internationally despised American President in history. Was it really necessary to suck up to him in this way?

In the background to this there is of course the rise of the Right in Britain, demonstrated by today’s 100,000-strong march of ‘Tommy Robinson’ (Yaxley-Lennon)’s supporters in central London. 100,000 is a lot. Apparently Elon Musk addressed them. I’m scared; as I’m sure Yaxley-Lennon, Musk and the rest want us all to be.

I’ve been off-blog for a few weeks now, for a number of reasons: misery, injury, and trying to write an autobiography, which is proving more difficult than I expected. I’ve covered my first forty-odd years; but reading it back it seems very boring; and my past, although relatively privileged, is sometimes upsetting for me to recall. (Hence the misery.) I’m sure that other people’s autobiographies would be far more interesting. (Lord Mandelson’s, for example.)

Trump has already called Charlie Kirk a ‘a martyr for truth and freedom’, which should thrill the extreme Right no end. Every cause needs a martyr. From what I’ve learned over the past couple of days – I’d never heard of him before – Kirk seems to have had some pretty obnoxious views: obnoxious to me, that is; but ones that are on the rise internationally. Human nature? Or just one side of human nature?

Or a reaction against Western imperialism? – Which is an idea I’m mulling over just now, for a new post, bringing my historical expertise into the picture. That is,  when I’ve got over the misery.

What can I add, as a historian, to all that is being said and written about POTUS 47 just now? He is entirely sui generis. There are no close precedents for him in the past, at least among US presidents, and probably among leaders of any other country – although I shouldn’t be surprised if ancient Rome provides a few. (And of course POTUS 45. And some Mafia bosses?) – But maybe that’s the important historical point to make: that Trump is an entirely new phenomenon. No-one quite like him has been seen in the White House before.

But there’s also an alternative historical reading – my own idiosyncratic one, as it happens. This is that he represents the climax of an underlying historical trend in America – underlying, that is, its presidential history; which trend is the progress of capitalism, a.k.a. ‘freedom’, from the very beginnings of the Republic, to its final(?) crisis today. Other Presidents have gone along with this trend, notably Ronald Reagan; but none has represented, even personified, the chaotic ending of it, in a kind of ludicrous quasi-fascism, as faithfully as Trump does; unfettered as he is by the constraints that the American constitution was supposed to impose on its Presidents.

Ah, Shakespeare! Thou shouldst be living at this hour! Here we have a wonderful tragi-comic hero for you – powerful, but immensely flawed, ignorant, narcissistic, revengeful and childish: all of which would surely be grist to your mill. A combination of Richard III, Falstaff and Othello, perhaps? (Although Shakespeare might not get the ‘crisis of capitalism’ bit.)

Even without the Bard’s help, I have to say that I’m enjoying the drama that is coming out of America today. – Albeit not without some schadenfreude; but combined with genuine sympathy for my American friends.

I wonder whether there are any serious historians out there who support Donald Trump? If it rests on his relationship with the subject itself, there can’t be many. His historical gaffes are becoming legendary: talking of the Revolutionary army capturing enemy airfields in the 1770s; eliding the War of Independence with the Civil War; confused about what the Declaration of Independence says (although it’s hanging on the wall of his Oval Office); uncertain whether or not he should obey the Constitution – ‘I’ll have to consult my legal team’ (although he swore allegiance to it at his inauguration); his claim that ‘we [the USA] invented everything’ – the list goes on; plus of course his utter ignorance of the histories of other countries. All this must read embarrassingly to anyone who knows his or her history, and woundingly to those (like me) who write about it. I imagine – or hope, at least – that my old American students at the Universities of Rochester (NY) and Yale won’t be indifferent to all this. Whether it put them off voting for him, I’ll never know.

More serious than any of this is what Trump is aiming to do to institutions of higher education, like (currently) Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution: forcing them to teach only what he regards as ‘patriotic’ history, unencumbered by critical or what he calls divisive or ‘woke’ thinking; his being an old-fashioned heroic white men’s version of the American story, which will cement students’ loyalty to their flag. That’s a direct attack on the fundamental purposes of history teaching and research at this level: which are (a) to uncover ‘truths’, whether ‘patriotic’ or not; and (b) to open people’s minds to different ways of interpreting or defining those truths, wherever that may lead.

At the root of this appears to be a narrowly utilitarian view of education, and indeed of knowledge itself; which sees it not as a means of understanding, but only for how it can be used, in the pursuit of other objectives. Is it oversimplifying to connect this with the capitalist values – ‘deals’, and so on – that have defined his whole career? And which indeed represent so perfectly the stage of social and political development that the US has reached today.

When I used to research and write about historical anti-terrorism (The Origins of the Vigilant State, Plots and Paranoia), the term ‘terrorism’ had a specific and quite limited meaning. It didn’t cover all violent political activities, even assassinations, if they were directed against political enemies, or for a particular and well-defined political end; but only actions which were designed to terrorize whole populations, in order to make them less supportive of those enemies. (Some violent acts of course could do both.) So, a bomb placed in a café or a concert venue, killing indiscriminately, would qualify (and there were some of those in the late nineteenth century, as there are today); but not the murder of kings or generals, or (to cite a modern example) throwing paint over military aircraft.

Nowadays the word is used far more loosely; but surely not loosely enough to apply to Palestine Action, a march in support of which in London on Saturday led to the arrest of 500-plus demonstrators – many of them elderly – on charges of ‘supporting terrorism’. Painting airplanes, whether you approve of it or not, surely doesn’t qualify as ‘terrorism’ by any definition of that word. The Home Secretary has told us that she knows of other activities that Palestine Action indulges in that make it more dangerous to the common weal, but which she can’t vouchsafe to us yet. So we’ll just have to wait. In the meantime, the events of Saturday do seem somewhat incongruous – to put it mildly – for a Labour government, and in particular for an ex-barrister prime minister who used to specialise in human rights law. Critics suspect, of course, the ‘Israel Lobby’.

Incidentally, the word ‘terrorism’ was first used – in French revolutionary times –  to describe actions not by protestors, but by authoritarian governments, in order to cower opponents into submission.

I may write an Autobiography. I’ve sketched out three chapters; and a Preface – here.

A number of my friends and acquaintances – well, two or three – have suggested that I write a memoir or autobiography. I’ve always resisted this, on the grounds that I’m nowhere near important or interesting enough. (In fact my life’s ambition has always been to rise to ‘average’.) Nor do I really have the stomach for it, recalling as I do most of my early years with embarrassment, rather than pride.

Two considerations however have changed my mind on this recently. One is that I know from my own past researches that the memoirs of ‘average’ people can be as telling to a historian as those of ‘important’ ones; and even more so, in many cases, if one is wanting to plumb the Zeitgeist of a period. (I read dozens of ‘working-class’ autobiographies for my Absent-Minded Imperialists.) Secondly, and more personally, I need to write – I get depressed if I’m not doing it – and have run out of other topics to write about; or rather, at my advanced age, have run out of the concentration and energy that would be required to research them adequately. The last collection of material that I have left to work with now is my own life, locked in my brain; albeit not altogether reliably (more about that later), and not always pleasantly, for a habitual depressive like me.

I’ve also thought of a way of doing it which may be safer for me, and of more interest to others. That is to write a My Life and Times kind of book, with the ‘times’ featuring as prominently as my own petty affairs. For it is incontrovertible that I have lived through ‘interesting times’, from the 1940s to the 2020s – albeit probably no more interesting than any other comparable passage of years; and also in four different countries, which should have broadened my experience. So there must be enough here to be worth recounting, and to compensate for the embarrassing bits; which – in the interest of honesty – I shall need to refer to, but only fleetingly.

Those ‘interesting times’, to summarise, have carried me from the depths of a ‘total’ war to the collapse of the post-war consensus; taking in the loss of a world-wide empire, entry into and then exit from the post-war European Union, the creation and later partial dismantling of a welfare state, the social emancipation (to an extent) of women, foreign immigration and its repercussions, a revolution in popular music, sexual liberation following the spread of efficient means of contraception, a ‘cold war’ that threatened to become hotter under the shadow of ‘The Bomb’, the establishment of television as people’s main source of information and entertainment, the whole computer/internet thing, men on the moon, huge changes in the character of the popular Press, even greater changes in eating habits, several frightening pandemics even before Covid, the commercialisation of ‘the People’s Game’ (football), the entire reign of Britain’s longest-living monarch… and much more. That of course is an Anglocentric list. Other nationalities will have experienced the last eighty years in different – often more gruesome – ways.

My own place in this history has never been a leading or even a particularly active one, but it is one that has enabled me to observe it from a number of different points of view. That is because of my anomalous and shifting position in the all-important class structure of Britain – or of England, anyway – giving me what I think is an unusual insight into the situations, and especially the prejudices, of them all. My immediate family were aspirant lower-middle class; my paternal grandparents working class; at school I mixed with middle-middle class boys; and at university with the upper and public school-educated classes and even a few aristocrats. I got on pretty well with all of them. (The aristos were very kind.) In university vacations I worked in a factory, a dairy, and in theatres. My profession has been as an academic, at different types of university, and in three or four countries; specialising in British imperial history, for which I was sometimes mistaken to be an imperialist. I’ve written about a dozen books. I was brought up a Methodist, but enjoyed the Anglicans’ church services, and their architecture even more. I was a member of the Labour party for a long period, but with gaps when I’ve been unhappy with particular party policies. I’ve experienced marriage with a Scots-Irish wife, fatherhood, divorce, and a new relationship, this time with a Swede. I’ve lived in both the south and the north of England. I travelled extensively in Europe as a young man, and more later, when I also lived and worked for fairly long periods in the USA and Australia. I now live mainly in Sweden. My passions are architecture, music and cricket. The only substantial gap in this catalogue of life-experiences is women and girls, whom I scarcely got to know as a boy, or even at university, in my single-sex college. (This accounts for many of my ‘embarrassments’, which I shall pass over lightly here.) If all these experiences have affected my research, teaching and writing in my adult years, they are at least varied enough to have likely influenced them in divergent ways.

Of course this won’t be as ‘objective’ an account as I hope my other history books are – although it goes without saying that none of us can achieve absolute objectivity. Indeed, this is the whole point of it: to recount the history of the last eighty-odd years simply as it has appeared to and impinged on the life of just one male person who has lived through that time, studied it, and come to certain conclusions about it. Now read on. We average people need to be heard.