Porter’s Pensées

The British (and Commonwealth) World War I dead whom we shall be remembering next Sunday – the centenary of the Armistice – fought and died for a number of reasons. Some of course had no choice in the matter, after conscription was introduced in 1916. For the volunteers however, and for the conscripts once the War had got going, a common motive, maybe the major one, was simple solidarity with their mates in the trenches. A second was to test their masculinity, or experience the excitement – as it was presented to them – of a proper shooting war. Some fought to protect ‘hearth and home’ – wives, girl-friends, sisters and children – from what were presented by the propagandists as unspeakable atrocities, if the Hun were not stopped. Beyond this, and at a broader level, they fought for their country  – Britain, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland or Australia, depending on which nation they felt most identity with. Some fought for the peace that was bound to follow ‘the war to end all wars’. They usually didn’t fight for their commanders, or politicians, or allies in the field. Indeed, they had more respect for their enemy than for any of them. (See my piece on Gallipoli in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/bernard-porter/who-was-the-enemy.) ‘Patriotism’ was a superficial and fragile thing, which for ordinary soldiers generally crumbled under fire.

Still less was there any imperial patriotism at work here. I once undertook a study of the inscriptions on First World War memorials, in connexion with my book The Absent-Minded Imperialists, in order to see how often the ‘Empire’ is mentioned on them. I was genuinely surprised to find how absent the Empire is. ‘For King and Country’ appears quite often; but I could find only one single example of ‘For King and Empire’ – on a stone cross somewhere in Wales. That’s one out of a possible several thousand. (Every village has its WW1 memorial; most cities have several.) The famous Whitehall Cenotaph simply says ‘To The Glorious Dead’. Why ‘glorious’? It doesn’t say.

It may be different with Commonwealth war memorials, in Australia, for example, or those great war cemeteries in France and Belgium, or even India. I haven’t done the research on those; but it wouldn’t surprise me at all. Colonials after all felt far more imperial identity and pride than did most stay-at-home Britons (I think I’ve shown that in my book). What the latter fought and died for was their own folks. By rights, their inscriptions should read: ‘For Their Mates’. Which, to my mind, indicates a far better cause to sacrifice one’s life for, than a country or a King.

But that of course is not what their officers and politicians ever want us to think.

I don’t think you can altogether blame people for their hostility to Islam, in view of the numerous horrific crimes committed in the name  of the Prophet, and incidents like the following: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/01/release-asia-bibi-pakistan-blasphemy-laws. Not her release, of course, but the terrible situation indicated by her original death sentence for ‘blasphemy’, and the popular reaction in Pakistan against the brave judges who have lifted it. (They must now live in fear of their lives.) In view of this kind of thing – which may  be over-emphasized by an Islamophobic press (I don’t know), and can certainly be matched in the history of Christianity, though surely not today? – we can hardly wonder that Islam has a negative and indeed scary reputation outside its own culture, and that its claims to be ‘a religion of peace’ sound somewhat hollow.

In which connexion it was heartening to read of this generous response by the American Muslim community to the recent synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh, PA: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/29/us/iyw-muslim-crowdfunding-for-synagogue-victims-trnd/index.html. Maybe that’s not unusual. If so we should be told about it. More stories like this one would do a power of good for Muslims everywhere.

I was also, incidentally, heartened by the rejection by so many American Jews of both Trump’s and Netanyahu’s offers of support after the shooting; on the grounds, I guess, that the latters’ own positions and attitudes are likely to have contributed significantly to the ‘white hate’ that fuels both anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the USA.

I don’t usually follow Doctor Who, but thought I would look into it now in order to see how its new female Dr Who is shaping up. I thought she was super. Last Sunday’s episode (series 11, episode 4) was up to date in another way, casting a Donald Trump-like figure as its villain. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLAEJW-RjF8; 3’50” in.) He had all the right personality traits, attitudes, and ambitions, including presidential. And was utterly villainous. No-one could miss the parallel. So long, that is, as they weren’t too distracted by the giant spiders. They were super, too.

Further to my recent post on ‘Immigration’ – https://bernardjporter.com/2018/10/15/immigration/ – another important distinction to draw in this context rests on whether the immigrants intend to merge into the societies they come in to, or whether – to put no finer point on it – they come as colonizers. (My special academic area, of course.)

Colonizers migrate in order to set up societies of their own abroad, as for example most British and other European emigrants did in the Americas, Africa and Australasia in modern times. Others come to rule or exploit the indigènes of the lands they move into, in which case it’s called imperialism. Not many recent immigrants into Britain (or the US) fall into that last category, whatever the more extreme Islamophobes may claim. Most of them simply settle, and manage to culturally adapt, at least to an extent that the natives find comfortable with, and after the first generation or two.

The danger may come when they set up settlements of their own which are deliberately cut off from the communities around them, as so many emigrants in the age of European expansion did. It’s not only foreign immigrants that do this, incidentally; my own personal experience of the upper classes (at Cambridge University) taught me how ‘cut off’ they are; although of course they aren’t strictly ‘foreigners’. (Unless we’re going back to 1066.) In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries it was mainly us  doing the migrating – Brits, Irish and other Europeans – to the detriment, in the main, of the native Americans, the aborigines of Australia, Maoris, and others. But today it’s south Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants into Europe that this pattern is generally associated with; as exemplified by this two-year-old newspaper article, sent to me by RR, about ‘ghettoes’ of immigrants in certain northern British towns: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3899540/Go-away-shouldn-t-Don-t-come-corner-Yorkshire-no-white-residents.html.

Now, I don’t think we should take this at face value. It’s from the Daily Mail, after all, and reads as if it comes from Enoch Powell’s time. (Powell’s gross stories of immigrants shoving excrement through whites’ letter boxes, for example, were soon revealed as urban myths.) Nonetheless, I don’t doubt that the Daily Mail story reflects some of the reality of these places – I’ve witnessed it myself in Bradford and elsewhere – and that it can be problematical. The tenacity of Moslem culture among many of these recent immigrants may be one barrier to their – even partial – integration, though it doesn’t seem to have had this effect on the present Mayor of London and Home Secretary. Personally, I take the customary liberal view of this: we should try to make the immigrants welcome, and encourage their integration. Naïve? I hope not.

But I don’t want to pursue this question now. It has little bearing, for example, on the current burning issue of how many we should let in. The only point I want to make here, and to add to today’s debate on migration, is that this sort of immigration should, strictly speaking, be regarded as another form of colonialism, which we on the Left have always been taught to disapprove of historically. So, should we reject this form of settler-immigration for the same reasons?

To tell the truth, I’m not sure what we can infer from this new classification of (some of) our incomers. But as someone concerned about semantic accuracy, and in order to refine the argument, I believe that ‘colonialism’ should always be called out for what it is. – That’s all.

We academics like to believe that people do things for rational reasons. They may not be good reasons, or even remotely credible ones, but they will follow rationales  of their own. Someone has done something because….  His or her aim is…  They have motives and purposes, however deluded and twisted. Most people have put a modicum – if only a modicum – of thought  into what they believe. There are ways in which their belief systems can be stood up to make a kind of sense. Even when in fact they make no real sense at all – I’m reminded here of the Brexiteer who didn’t care about Continental trade being cut off because he did all his shopping ‘down the road at Tescos’ – you can see a kind of logic behind them: some joined-up thinking, however risible.

The obvious way of countering this kind of approach might seem to be to point out how ‘stupid’ it is’. The problem with that is that it runs the risk of positioning you as an ‘élitist’; which however slots into another of your antagonist’s belief systems – which tends automatically to discount just this kind of implied intellectual superiority. It’s also disturbing for an intellectual to think that things might happen for reasons he or she can’t explain, and so are a waste of time trying to analyse. (Analysis, after all, is our job.) Just over a hundred years ago – at the height of popular ‘jingoism’ in Britain – a little-known political philosopher called Graham Wallas dubbed this ‘the intellectualist assumption’. (It’s in his Human Nature in Politics, 1907.) It may be our own ‘intellectualist assumption’ that is one of the things preventing us clever people from truly understanding what is going on in the world today. We’re trying to work it out rationally, even if that ‘reason’ includes aspects that don’t seem very rational to us. Even ‘prejudices’ are based on something. But what if they aren’t?

An excellent article that John Field recently sent me reminded me of one body of belief that might give part of the answer. It’s by Garrret Keizer, and appears in the New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/151603/nihilist-nation-empty-core-trump-mystique?utm_source=social&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=sharebtn&fbclid=IwAR2r05nyGYrqJa-nYeUR_PUGQifJ5teTigBX_naoDGu-prSeEcQGhkE2YnM. It’s a long read, but worth it.

I first came across ‘nihilism’ in the course of my researches into the revolutionary groups that ‘my’ London Metropolitan Police Special Branch was set up to counter at the turn of the twentieth century. (See my The Origins of the Vigilant State, 1987.) At first I confused it with ‘anarchism’; but it was, and is, not the same at all. Anarchists work to abolish government, but only because that will enable a more perfect society to emerge. (In present-day terms, they’re usually found not on the Left but on the Right of politics, among the extreme ‘neo-Liberals’.) Nihilists want to abolish everything. Here’s Keizer:

‘Leaving nuanced definitions to the philosophers, I would define nihilism as a combination of three basic elements: a refusal to hope for anything except the ultimate vindication of hopelessness; a rejection of all values, especially values widely regarded as sacrosanct (equality, posterity, and legality); and a glorification of destruction, including self-destruction—or as Walter Benjamin put it, “self-alienation” so extreme that humanity “can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure.” Nihilism is less passive and more perverse than simple despair. “Nihilism is not only despair and negation,” according to Albert Camus, “but, above all, the desire to despair and to negate.”’

Might that not describe the basic ‘motivation’ (if it can be called that) of so many bombers, shooters, Trumpists (Keizer was thinking of them), ‘shock-jocks’ and even Brexiteers today? And of Fascists in the past? It’s the act of destroying that thrills them. The outcome is irrelevant. Or is that  to over-intellectualise it?

In a way it’s a reversion to a sub-human, animal (or infantile) way of behaviour. Animals and very small children don’t ‘think’ of future consequences, though they may be biologically programmed to prepare for them (birds building nests, babies seeking the breast, and so on). They’re led only by their feelings and instincts. That’s not  the same as being ‘stupid’, as stupidity requires a kind of thought. It’s the negation – annihilation – of thought. Haven’t we all felt like that, for mercifully brief moments? (Oh, fuck all this!) It – non-thinking – can be exhilarating and even liberating. And it may be what leads us – humankind – into the kinds of mess we are finding ourselves in now. It’s our inner nihilism, or bestiality, or infantilism, coming to the surface.

God I’m depressed!

Irrespective of the legality and morality of Peter Hain’s ‘outing’ of Sir Philip Green, under the protection of Parliamentary privilege, as an alleged sexual predator and racist, I’m delighted that he has  been outed, as he’s for a long time been one of my bêtes noirs. That’s because he represents capitalism at its worst: unproductive (he only ran shops, after all), greedy (all his yachts and rich parties), sleazy (always being photographed with half-dressed young women), totally amoral, and probably corrupt. That last aspect of him was exemplified by the scandal surrounding his disposal of the BHS chain of stores in 2016, leaving its employers without their pensions. Later, and under the threat of having his knighthood taken away from him, he gave some of the pension money back. In 2016 he reminded me of the villain of one of my favourite Victorian anti-capitalist novels, The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/26/bhs-and-a-victorian-villain/. In fact he even looks a bit like the actor who played ‘Melmotte’ in the TV version of that, David Suchet.

Melmotte was supposed to be Jewish. Philip Green is.  I’m interested – and relieved – to see that little is being made of that in the accounts I’ve read of his sexual shenanigans in today’s papers; even on the Left, where the ‘Friends of Israel’ must be expecting to find it. But then it’s the unrestrained capitalism we don’t like, and now the sexual harassment; not the Semitism.

PS. (29th) Here’s a good piece on Green by Will Hutton in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/28/damn-philip-green-damn-the-culture-that-allowed-him-to-flourish-comment?CMP=share_btn_tw.

As a boy in the fifties I was brought up on The Goon Show. It was a weekly radio comedy show, deliberately nonsensical and surrealist. (For those of tenderer years, here’s one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuVFFNvyUT8. There are many others – probably the entire run – on Youtube.) We used to listen to it avidly on Thursday evenings, I think, and then re-enact it word-perfectly over school dinners. I wish we could have learned our Latin declensions as easily! I was Bluebottle; my friend Michael Harrington was always Eccles. I can’t remember who was Major Bloodnok. Our parents hated it, because it made ridiculous fun of the holiest things in their lives: church, Empire, the Royals, the BBC, the War, teachers, the military, politicians – oh, the entire ‘Establishment’. It must have been one reason for the scepticism, the lack of respect and then the radicalisation of many of my generation. Later on Monty Python revived the genre. The connecting link between them was the Irish comic genius Spike Milligan. (‘I told you I was ill!’, were the words he wanted inscribed on his tombstone. I still think that’s the funniest joke of all time.) The Goon Show was an essential part of my formative years. But of course, it was only comedy.

Or so I used to think; until the latest bunch of Brexiteers sprouted up. They are so like the original Goons as to make me wonder whether Spike Milligan didn’t have some miraculous powers of divination. There they are: Eccles (Nigel Farage), Bloodnok (Boris Johnson), and Bluebottle (little Michael Gove). Jacob Rees-Mogg outgoons them all. They seem to be no less ridiculous than their original versions; yet they have the fortunes of this country, and possibly the whole of Europe, in their hands. How is it that we’ve allowed ourselves to be governed by cartoon characters? I’m sure that wasn’t Spike’s, Peter Sellers’s and Harry Secombe’s original intention. They must be chortling in their graves. (‘I told you I was ill!’) Not me.

The great national split over Brexit represents a number of things – very few of which have any essential connexion with Europe. I pointed this out even before the actual Referendum: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/20/this-dreadful-referendum/. People used the vote to express their dissatisfaction with all kinds of things that were going on in British politics at that time, most of which had nothing to do with the EU, of which they knew very little, and what they did know, or thought they knew, was filtered through the right-wing press and its contributors, like Boris Johnson, who put out the lies about how Brussels wanted to permit only straight bananas, and the like. If they had been more genuinely interested in Europe the people would have seen through all that. But it was at the very edge of their field of political vision; until people like Farage – who themselves would also have lain at the edge of people’s vision had it not been for the opportunity a foolish, shallow prime minister gave them to take centre stage by calling his (Cameron’s) stupid, simplistic, in-or-out, now-or-never referendum – were quite fortuitously thrown to the front.

And it’s on the basis of this narrow vote, at entirely the wrong time; on the vaguest of terms; corrupted by electoral illegalities on the ‘Leave’ side which – if it weren’t too politically sensitive – should have landed some of the Leavers in goal by now; fed by demonstrably false propaganda; with the majority crucially influenced by a generation which is largely  dead now, and so won’t have to put up with the effects of their vote; and maybe – who knows? – aided by Russia, who of course is desperate to pull the EU apart: it’s this decision that the Brexiteers feel is so sacrosanct that it would be ‘undemocratic’ to challenge it, and so are calling today’s London pro-EU demonstrators ‘bad losers’ and even ‘traitors’.

‘Bad losers’ are those who won’t accept the result of a game. This isn’t a game, it’s the most important existential decision Britain has made since 1939. Brexit can only serve the interests of rich investors and newspaper proprietors – some of whom, even Brexiteers like Jacob Rees-Mogg, are diverting their money out of Britain already. How were ‘the people’ persuaded to go along with these leeches? Ignorant racism may be part of the explanation (‘ignorant’ in the sense that Brexit may not even satisfy the racists). Or love of ‘characters’, however mad. I’ve suggested others in that June 2016 blog. If today’s march has no effect, historians are going to be left with these questions to puzzle over for decades. Well, at least that will give us something to do.

I wish I could have been on the demo, but I’m stuck in Sweden. Where, incidentally, a public meeting of ‘expats’ called by the British ambassador in Stockholm the other day gave some comfort to me personally, as one of Theresa May’s trans-nationals who deserve no consideration; and addressed as it was, clearly and honestly, by civil servants from both countries: Michael Gove’s derided ‘experts’. Thank God for them. And good luck to the brave protestors, including Brits from all over Europe as well as Britain. (As I write, the march has just started off.)

Why is it that so many Brexiters can’t spell? Here’s an example (on Facebook): “…all the fault of remainers who wouldn’t get behind the boarder and put their showlda to the weel and make Brexit work.” You’d have thought that as British patriots they’d have had more respect for their national tongue. There is of course an obvious answer; but we’re not allowed to say it for fear of being labelled ‘elitist’.

I’m trying to think of a positive side to Brexit, to put against all the negatives that are continuously bugging me, and even keeping me awake at night. It doesn’t help when I read – though I know I shouldn’t – all that anger gushing from Leavers on the internet: simple insults, no facts, and usually ungrammatical. ‘The people have spoken.’ ‘You lost – get over it!’ ‘A second referendum would be flouting the people’s will.’ (Eh?) ‘What do you not understand about democracy?’ ‘If Brexit is reversed there’ll be violence in the streets, and I’m willing to join in.’ ‘Traitors.’ ‘F*cking elitists.’ (These all from recent posts, but with the spellings corrected.) I don’t think I ever remember Britain – or is it only her internet trolls? – being so savagely divided. Whatever the outcome of this Brexit farce, I can’t see us recovering from this. Farage, Johnson and Co. have split the country wide open; maybe even destroyed it. And if they win, Britain will probably decline economically, or else become part of a much less benevolent US economic empire (American product standards, and all that); and will certainly never recover any of the (modest) political and moral respect she used to have in the world.

On the positive side, there is still a possibility that the original decision could be reversed, though not without leaving deep wounds in the body politic. There will be a pro-EU demonstration in London this Saturday, which could attract thousands. (Let’s see. I can’t be there.) If there were a second referendum, and re-joining the EU were one of the options, simple demographic trends should ensure a pro-Remain vote this time, with many elderly voters (my generation) dying, and younger pro-Europeans reaching voting age. They must resent their whole futures being put in jeopardy by people who have almost no future at all. The latest polling figures give Remainers a narrow majority already, with the only problem being the number of people who are heartily fed up with the whole thing, and simply want shot of it. Together with the right-wing tabloids screaming against the very idea of a re-run on pseudo-democratic grounds, that might undermine such a vote. Supposing even fewer than the original 72% voted? Wouldn’t that open up the question again? I imagine that’s why Labour are prevaricating on the issue.

If the Brexiteers do eventually win through, there won’t be much for us Leftish Remainers to salvage from the wreck. It has been an educational experience, with people getting to know far more about the European Union than they did when they voted to leave. (I include myself in this.) Two of the constituent kingdoms of the UK voted to Remain; Brexit might energise them to seek their own independence, or union with the Republic of Ireland in Northern Ireland’s case. That would be a shame for their English and Welsh friends, but might be a boon for Scotland, whose political instincts have always been leftwards of ours. I suppose it’s possible that an isolated Britain or England, cast-off into the raging Atlantic, might come to its senses and adopt a kind of ‘socialism in one country’ agenda that some Labour Brexiteers believed the EU had precluded before. But that, of course, would go right against the wishes – and persuasive power – of the capitalists who see the new off-shore Britain mainly as a low-tax haven for themselves. I can’t think of much else on the plus side. Investment will dry up; much-needed immigrant workers too; English Tories will capitalise on the new  situation; the rest of us will become poorer; xenophobia and racism will increase – it will still be ‘Europe’s fault’; those of us who are comfortable with multiple national identities – the people Theresa May scorned as ‘citizens of nowhere’ – will have no natural home; and, writing personally, I’ll find my domestic life – with a Swedish sambo – rather more difficult than now.

Perhaps this is what is needed, however, in order to get the British thinking seriously about who they really are. Since the fall of the Empire, they’ve never been quite sure about this. Boris Johnson’s blatant desire to revive the Empire – or at least the Commonwealth – in some form or another is clearly illusory. When that project crashes in flames we’ll need to re-consider our position in the world more realistically; hopefully – speaking for myself – not as the outpost of the American empire that many early British imperialists envisaged. All this is up for grabs.

Which is exciting, and may well be painful; but will have the advantage, for me, of giving me, at last, a date for the end of the British Empire, and hence a definite conclusion to the sixth edition of my The Lion’s Share, A History of British Imperialism; which is presently in the hands of a young, talented American scholar to revise and complete. I must send him some hints.