Margaret Thatcher features in this report by Jonathan Watts for the Guardian (Wed 27 May 2020), in her historic role as supporter of the Hadley Centre.
At the inauguration, the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, said the UK needed a world-leading climate centre to assess the “serious consequences” of greenhouse gas emissions. “What it predicts will affect our daily lives. Governments and international organisations in every part of the world are going to have to sit up and take notice and respond,” she said.
Thatcher, who studied science at Oxford, needed little convincing, but she had to overcome a sceptical cabinet. Atmospheric physicists had been warning oil companies and policymakers about the dangers of fossil fuels for decades, but the “greenhouse effect” was still a relatively novel concern for the broader public. Nobody felt a change. The world had already warmed by about half a degree from pre-industrial levels, but this was low enough to be within natural variation.
When it comes to the science and the scientists Re:LODE Radio chooses to foreground three sections of Jonathan Watts report:
“The human fingerprint is everywhere.”
The human fingerprint on the climate is now unmistakable and will become increasingly evident over the coming decades, the UK Met Office has confirmed after 30 years of pioneering study.
Since the 1990s, global temperatures have warmed by half a degree, Arctic sea ice has shrunk by almost 2 million km2, sea-levels have risen by about 10cm and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by 60 parts per million (17%), according to figures exclusively compiled for the Guardian to mark the 30th anniversary of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for climate science and services.
The data highlights how a young generation has grown up in a climate unprecedented in a millennium. Future projections suggest that by mid-century a 60-year-old Briton is likely to be living in a climate 1.2C warmer than when they were born.
Scientists at the Hadley Centre, which has been on the global frontline of climate monitoring, research and modelling since it opened in 1990, said early theories about fossil-fuel disruption have been proven by subsequent facts.
“The climate now is completely different from what we had 30 years ago. It is completely outside the bounds of possibility in natural variation,” said Peter Stott, a professor and expert on climate attribution science at the centre.
In the Hadley Centre’s early projections, he said, scientists forecast 0.5C of warming in the UK between 1990 and 2020 as a result of emissions from oil, gas and coal: “We got it spot on.”
With new heat records being broken with increasing frequency, he said global temperatures were now above any level in the Met Office measurements since 1850, or indirectly calculated through tree rings going back thousands of years. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are also higher than anything seen in million-year-old ice cores. “We are seeing an unprecedented climate,”Stott said. “The human fingerprint is everywhere.”
“What stands out is that even in the lowest current scenario, we get warming. We’ll need to prepare and adapt”
By 2050 – the year the UK plans to achieve carbon neutrality – the direct impact on Britain will be moderated by the surrounding ocean and there may be opportunities to plant new crops, but these benefits will be dwarfed by trade disruption, migration, humanitarian disasters and shifting ecosystems.
“Overall it’s bad. The negatives outweigh the positives,” said Richard Betts, a Met Office scientist who is leading scientific analysis for the next UK climate change risk assessment. “It stands to reason that if the world keeps gets hotter and hotter, sooner or later we’ll reach the point where it is first uncomfortable and then hard to function. This won’t be seen in the UK, but in parts of the world that are already hot and humid it could increasingly get too hot to function.”
The Hadley supercomputer calculates myriad possible pathways depending on how much carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere. The good news is that the worst-emissions scenario, known as RCP 8.5, is considered less likely than before because the global coal industry has not grown as feared. The bad news is current emissions trends (which lie between the RCP 4.5 and RCP 6 pathways) could take the planet to 2C warmer than pre-industrial levels by mid-century, which will increase storm damage, heatwaves, sea-level rise and the already great risk that the Arctic will be ice-free in summer.
The climate trends are based on multiple-year averages rather than year-on-year comparisons, which are more subject to natural variation.
Even the current best-case scenario – RCP 2.6, which is roughly in line with the Paris agreement – would leave the world hotter than today.
“What stands out is that even in the lowest current scenario, we get warming. We’ll need to prepare and adapt,” says Jason Lowe, the head of climate services at Hadley. He predicts extreme summer heatwaves, such as those seen in 2018, will become the norm rather than an exception.
"the situation could worsen rapidly if the climate hits tipping points, such as the collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet"
“As a scientist, I want to narrow the uncertainty so the information is as good as possible so we can plan. I think of the generations to come. I have a nine-year-old daughter. I find myself wondering which of these pathways we will be on when she is 80 or 90.”
More extreme results are possible at both ends of the spectrum. The next set of climate assessments will introduce a more ambitious best-case scenario (RCP 1.9) that would mean a faster transition to zero-carbon energy and a greater chance of holding temperature rises below 1.5C. But the situation could worsen rapidly if the climate hits tipping points, such as the collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet.
“There are still dangers out there that we don’t fully understand,” said Stott. “Much of the uncertainty lies on the bad side. It could be terrifying. Can we grow enough crops to feed the population? Can we cope if some places are battered by storm after storm?”
Such concerns explain why the anniversary cannot be entirely triumphant. Despite growing evidence of climate risks, governments have been slow to act. Apart from downward blips such as the 2008 financial crisis and the coronavirus lockdown, emissions have steadily increased. The Hadley Centre’s work now is not only about predicting impacts, but preparing for them.
“Reality has proven that what we were saying 20 to 30 years ago was right. As scientists, that is vindication. But on a personal level, I hoped we would track a different emissions trajectory from where we are now,”Stott said.
“The worry is that we are now taking risks globally that we don’t fully understand ... there will be no winners of climate change if we continue. Scientific evidence has been around for a while. It is time it was taken seriously.”
"Scientific evidence has been around for a while. It is time it was taken seriously.”
As previously commented on in the Re:LODE Radio post:
The principal adviser to the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings (whose moniker poses a screening cum-censorship problem on re-tweets because of possible sexual content), attended the scientific advice committee SAGE, and who may, or may not have taken the science seriously, but who may, or may not have had some part to play in establishing the rules for lockdown in the UK, chose to ignore these selfsame rules. This news story was a joint "scoop" by the Guardian and the Daily Mirror published on-line last Friday May 22 202.
There were denials and obfuscation, followed by further revelations the Observer and the Sunday Mirror reported on the following day Sunday 24 May 2020.
There was some serious explaining to do!
Firstly, Boris Johnson sets out the rules to the UK population, and ignoring Parliament, then Johnson makes excuses for his adviser, in what are claimed to be exceptional circumstances, who behaved within the law and with integrity. Secondly, Channel 4 News asks questions, that are further developed in BBC's Newsnight programme on 25 May 2020.
The obvious and blatant hypocrisy this episode reveals is how some of those in power, and who claim that:
"we are all in it together . . ."
. . . behave in ways that reveal this to be NOT the case. When it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis and the climate change emergency driven by global heating, we need leaders who behave and act as though we are all in it together, because . . .
. . . we are all in it together!
Exceptionalism is a common trait amongst those who think, and behave, as if they are different, or better, especially if they are privileged and possess power of one kind or another.
Much of the mainstream media responded to this story because it was NOT a "Westminster bubble" scandal, it was a story that had cut through to a wide constituency. Most British people would have shrugged this story away if there had been an apology, and an admission from Cummings that he had got it wrong. Instead it has shaped a perception of leadership of a government as being arrogant, weak and out of touch. Even the Tories most powerful media support, the Daily Mail came out with this front page . . .
Q. What planet are they on?
A. Planet exceptionalism?
To partially answer this question, Re:LODE Radio chooses to refer to an Opinion piece in the Guardian Journal by Timothy Garton Ash that was published on-line a week ago (Thu 21 May 2020) under the headline:
Britain's pride in its past is not matched by any vision for its future
Timothy Garton Ash's article has a subheading that runs:
There have been times over the last few weeks when it has felt as if we were living through a looped replay of Dad’s Army
Re:LODE Radio highlights some of the main points of Timothy Garton Ash's argument that:
"In Britain after Brexit, the price of national unity is nostalgia."
Britain’s muddled handling of the Covid-19 crisis has put another big dent into what used to be its reputation for good government. Although Brits have come together across the Brexit divide, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have each had different public health responses, highlighted particularly by Scottish nationalist leader, Nicola Sturgeon. The most striking thing, however, has been the way that Britain in general, and England in particular, has reverted to a nostalgic celebration of our shared past in the second world war, with no corresponding sense of a shared future.
There have been times over the last few weeks when it has felt as if we were living through a permanent, looped replay of Dad’s Army, the TV comedy series about Britain’s Home Guard in the second world war. The unchallenged media hero of this crisis is Captain Tom, the 100-year-old war veteran celebrated for raising millions of pounds for the NHS by doing a sponsored walk around his garden. Not a day goes by without more photographs of him in his blue blazer and campaign medals, and he has just been given a knighthood. Spitfires flew overhead to mark his 100th birthday. Mentions of Winston Churchill and the blitz are two a penny. The forces’ sweetheart, Vera Lynn, now 103, has been back in the charts with her wartime hit We’ll Meet Again – quoted by the Queen in a televised broadcast to the nation in the slightly more Queen’s English version, “We will meet again”. This wartime nostalgia reached a peak around VE Day, helpfully explained by one Daily Mail souvenir blurb as the day Britain celebrates its “victory over Europe”.
I am irresistibly reminded of the comment made by a former US ambassador that the British “seem to know mainly what they used to be”. Now, before some dyspeptic columnist hands me the journalistic equivalent of the white feather, let me affirm that the British are absolutely right to be proud of their wartime record. What our parents and grandparents did under Churchill’s leadership in 1940 really was in many ways our “finest hour”, and if we Brits can still draw strength and inspiration from it, good.
The trouble is that this justified pride in that past is not matched by any corresponding vision for the future. Yet to be a nation in good mental health requires a sense both of where you are coming from and where you want to go. Ideally, you want a narrative connecting the two. It is a somewhat painful irony that Germany has managed to turn its own horrendous second world war record into the starting point of such a positive narrative, as its president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, demonstrated in a magnificent speech on VE Day, while Britain seems to have only the retrospective half.
Partly, this is because the British are so proud of their own wartime role that they misunderstand it. A Times-YouGov poll recently asked people in Britain, France, the US and Germany which of the wartime allies contributed most to defeating Nazi Germany. The clear winner in the other three countries was the US, with less than 10% of respondents saying Britain. But in Britain itself, a staggering 47% said Britain played the most significant part, with less than a quarter of British respondents identifying either the US or the Soviet Union. The historian Michael Howard once rebuked some gratuitous flourish of this “we did it alone” hubris in the pages of the Daily Telegraph with perhaps the pithiest letter ever sent to any newspaper. It read, in its entirety: “Sir, The only major conflict in which this country has ever “stood alone’’ without an ally on the continent was the War of American Independence in 1776-83. We lost.”
The main reason, however, for there being no shared vision of the future is that … we have no shared vision of the future. The Johnson government, in particular, represents an ultra-Brexity “very well, alone!” fantasy which is not shared even by many Conservatives.
In Spain’s transition to democracy in the 1970s, after a bitter civil war and a long night of dictatorship, it was felt that the price of national unity was amnesia. In Britain after Brexit, the price of national unity is nostalgia.
As mentioned above in Timothy Garton Ash's piece, in contrast to the crass Brexiteer trope of "we can stand alone" British exceptionalism, the German p resident in his VE Day address, where lockdown and social distancing prevailed, spoke of the sadness of being alone:
"Perhaps this being alone will take us back to May 8, 1945, because at that time the Germans were actually alone...defeated militarily, politically and economically…morally shattered. We had made ourselves the enemy of the whole world,"Steinmeier said.
Speaking from the Neue Wache in Berlin, Germany’s main memorial to the victims of and dictatorship, the president noted that May 8,, 1945, the day the Nazis officially surrendered, "was the end of National Socialist tyranny, the end of bombing nights and death marches, the end of unprecedented German crimes and the Holocaust’s breach of civilization."
However, he noted, that while it is now called "Liberation Day," at the time, "it was far from being that in the minds and hearts of most Germans." It took years, indeed decades, Steinmeier noted, for Germany to undergo the process of de-Nazification and earn its place back in the community of nations.
Steinmeier thanked the survivors of Germany’s crimes, the descendants of victims, and "all those in the world who gave this country the chance to start again," for allowing that to happen.
The president also struck a positive tone, at one point highlighting that today, Germany "is a strong, solid democracy…in the heart of a peaceful and united Europe. We enjoy trust and reap the benefits of collaboration and partnerships around the world."
But, Steinmeier warned, people must remain vigilant, amidst "the temptation of a new nationalism. The fascination of the authoritarian. Of distrust, isolation and hostility between nations. Of hatred and agitation, of xenophobia and contempt for democracy - because they are nothing but the old evil spirits in a new guise."
Alluding to a recent increase in xenophobic and anti-Semitic crimes, Steinmeier then spoke of the victims of three such attacks in the past year, in the cities of Hanau, Halle, and Kassel.
"You are not forgotten!" he said.
More than a month ago Fintan O'Toole, a columnist with the Irish Times, wrote an Opinion piece for the Guardian (Sat 11 Apr 2020) that bursts the bubble of this "little Britain", or "little England", with his sharp insight that:
There is now the terrible possibility that Britain may match or even overtake Italy and Spain as the country in Europe that suffers most from the coronavirus pandemic. This tragedy has a political, as well as a biological, epidemiology. Those seeking to trace its path may look back on a telling moment – paradoxically the one at which the government finally changed course and fell into line with most of the rest of Europe. On 20 March, Boris Johnson announced the closure of pubs, clubs and restaurants. Even as he did so, however, he made it clear that this decision was an assault on the national character.
“We’re taking away the ancient, inalienable right of free-born people of the United Kingdom to go the pub,” he said. “And I can understand how people feel about that.” Lest his anguish be in any doubt, he underscored the point: “To repeat, I know how difficult this is, how it seems to go against the freedom-loving instincts of the British people.” The message was – what exactly? You must not go to the pub but your right to do so is “inalienable” (which is to say absolute and irrevocable). You must stay at home but, if you so do, you will be a disgrace to your freedom-loving ancestors.
The Sun reported the prime minister’s remarks rather differently: “Mr Johnson said he realised it went against what he called ‘the inalienable free-born right of people born in England to go to the pub’.” In this version, the freedom to go to the pub was conferred by genetics and history, not on the “people of the United Kingdom” or “the British people”, but on “people born in England”. It does not apply to Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish people and certainly not to the 9.4 million people living in the UK who were born abroad. It is a particular Anglo-Saxon privilege.
And since we are in the terrain of the ludicrous, the Sun’s version actually made more sense. There is, of course, no ancient and absolute right to go to the pub – inns and public houses have been regulated in England at least since the 15th century. But what Johnson was really evoking was a very specific English sense of exceptionalism, a fantasy of personal freedom as a marker of ethnic and national identity.
That exceptionalism is not, alas, mere rhetorical self-indulgence. It helped to shape official policy towards the Covid-19 crisis. It lies behind both the idea that there should be a distinctive British response to this global challenge, and the assumption that there was something peculiarly unnatural in expecting Brits to obey drastic restrictions. Its legacy is the globally discredited policy of “herd immunity” and the late introduction, squandering Britain’s head start, of the lockdown.
The prime minister himself has long cultivated the notion that he does not just espouse this freedom-loving exceptionalism – he embodies it. In the early stages of the crisis, Johnson’s admirers could see it as his Finest Hour, the moment when his Churchillian posturing would become real and he would save his country. When the prime minister was hospitalised, his overwrought friend and fan Toby Young confessed in the Spectator to “a kind of mystical belief in Britain’s greatness and her ability to occasionally bring forth remarkable individuals … who can serve her at critical junctures. I’ve always thought of Boris as one of those people – not just suspected it, but known it in my bones.”
Johnson’sChurchill impersonation has always been a way of claiming that his own waywardness is not mere self-indulgence but the mark of a special (and idiosyncratically English) destiny. In his book, The Churchill Factor, he wrote of his idol: “There is a sense in which [Churchill’s] eccentricity and humour helped to express what Britain was fighting for – what it was all about. With his ludicrous hats and rompers and cigars and excess alcohol, he contrived physically to represent the central idea of his own political philosophy: the inalienable right of British people to live their lives in freedom, to do their own thing.” Guess who this was meant to bring to mind for contemporary readers?
Being drunk on freedom is one way for the chosen people to “do their own thing”. Adopting a distinctive national approach to a global pandemic is another. The myth of a unique and defining love of personal freedom as a badge of nationhood underpinned a profound reluctance to impose life-saving restrictions on movement and social gatherings. Other people might put up with that sort of thing, but not the English. On the altar of this exceptionalism, lives have been sacrificed.
This innate, genetic resistance to conformity is a myth. This is obvious from the persistence of an equal and opposite cliche of Englishness: the queue. George Orwell could rhapsodise “the gentle-mannered, undemonstrative, law-abiding English” and “the orderly behaviour of English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling, the willingness to form queues”. The anthropologist Kate Fox wrote: “During the London riots in August 2011, I witnessed looters forming an orderly queue to squeeze, one at a time, through the smashed window of a shop they were looting.” Orderliness is just as prominent as waywardness in the English self-image – which suggests that neither of these truisms is ancient, inalienable or worth a damn when you are making policy in a time of plague.
The exceptionalist “freedom-loving instinct” has little to do with history and much more to do with current politics, specifically the politics of Brexit. Johnson described as “magnificent” a 2014 book by the arch-Brexiter Daniel Hannan called How We Invented Freedom – “we” being the Anglo-Saxons. Hannan expressly reclaimed the idea of exceptionalism, the freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons being the exception especially to European slavishness. Brexit, as he argued, was one imperative of this dichotomy. Tragically, a notion that the UK could ignore the World Health Organization and do its own thing with the virus was another.
Covid-19, as Johnson himself discovered in the most awful way, doesn’t make exceptions. The threat is universal. And the shield against it – the NHS – is cosmopolitan and global. There are 200 different nationalities represented in its ranks by 150,000 doctors, nurses and ancillary staff. One consolation in this disaster is the realisation that Britain is exceptionally lucky to have them.
Q. What is the price of British exceptionalism?
A. As of today, one month after this Opinion piece, the excess deaths in the period since lockdown in the UK is approaching 60,000!
Politico, known originally as The Politico, is an American political journalism company based in Arlington County, Virginia, that covers politics and policy in the United States and internationally. It distributes content through its website, television, printed newspapers, radio, and podcasts. On 5 May 2020 Politico published this Opinion piece by Otto English (the pen name of Andrew Scott, a writer and playwright based in London) under the headline:
Britain’s belief that it is unique has plagued it for centuries
LONDON — As the coronavirus rips through Europe and the world, Britain’s response to the pandemic has shown it’s suffering from another dangerous disease: unshakeable belief in its own exceptionalism.
This is not a uniquely British illness, of course. Many countries put themselves at the centre of the map and at the hub of history. But while the sickness causes sporadic bouts of chauvinism in others, the British seem to have a terminal case.
When that exceptionalism collides with a virus that knows no borders and steamrolls over the “keep calm and carry on” spirit, the results, as we’re seeing now, can be disastrous.
Britain’s belief that it’s unique — and the collective jingoistic conceit that the British are somehow inimitable — has plagued Britain since the time of Saint Bede the Venerable.
It was the Benedictine monk’s eighth-century "Ecclesiastical History of England" that first forged a narrative of a people united by common bond. But the real havoc was wreaked by Geoffrey of Monmouth, a 12th-century scribe who wrote one of the maddest books in history.
In 1136, as Norman England plunged into civil war, Geoffrey took out his quill and knocked off “The History of the Kings of Britain.” The work claimed that Britain had been founded by Brutus of Troy, a descendant of the Greek hero Aeneas, who had captured it from giants.
By 12th-century standards, it was a publishing sensation, with hundreds of copies finding their way into monastic libraries across Europe. It was also overtly political in intent, seeking to create a unifying origin story and a common destiny.
In reality, ancient Britain had been a backwater off the backroads of Europe, but by the time Geoffrey had filed his parchment, the story had been reshaped into a saga of an incomparable people doing phenomenal things.
Monmouth’s clerical contemporaries may have scoffed, but over the next 900 years his fake history became entrenched in mainstream consciousness.
Matters weren’t helped by topography. Island people are naturally suspicious. While the sea acts as a filter and a defence, it can also make islanders tend toward paranoia; they’re shaped by a lingering fear of the horizon, of what might come over it and what the people beyond it are plotting.
As England blinked into the Renaissance, its individualistic tendencies and distrust of other Europeans came of age. Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church, and his successors engaged in a series of prolonged wars with the rest of the Continent.
Contemporary propagandists, including William Shakespeare, played up the distinctive and the extraordinary, setting the country apart from the rest of the region, despite our long and intertwined history. The “Sceptered Isle” as Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt put it: “This precious stone set in a silver sea.”
In the ensuing centuries, as the empire expanded, so too did Britons’ sense of entitlement. But there was a problem. You can’t convincingly lay claim to world hegemony if you’re descended from a bunch of farmers speaking what is in effect a French-German creole.
So, the British pilfered from the Classical Age and pretended that English grammar and spelling were every bit as orderly as Latin. It was a grand deceit — and it worked. Many people still believe that narrative, and the accompanying idea that Britain and her people are somehow unique and special.
The half-serious conceit that God and heaven were English, pushed by poets and shored up by politicians, prevailed until long after World War I. But in the painful years following 1945, when Britain’s empire started to wane and America usurped its place in the world, much of that hubris was consigned to the attic. As the country limped into the 1970s, it increasingly resembled a jaded rock star — a once-great icon seeking contemporary relevance but forever obliged to fall back on old hits.
It could have been a turning point, the beginning of an era of humility — if not for the fact that the United Kingdom joined the European Union.
As the country benefited both economically and politically from membership of one of the world’s great trading blocs, fresh blood seeped back into its veins. But with renewed success came an unwelcome return of the old vanity.
Conservative voices began to complain that history wasn’t being taught properly and that Britain’s central role in world events was being overlooked.
In 2005, the think tank Civitas and the Daily Telegraph led a campaign to get an Edwardian era “history” book called “Our Island Story” back into print and, having done so, donated copies to school libraries.
The peculiar book, penned by eccentric Scottish-born author H.E. Marshall, perpetuated the myths first set out by Geoffrey of Monmouth and reinforced the “destiny” narrative of English history. Conservative voices queued up to sing its praises. And by 2010, then Education Secretary Michael Gove was saying he wanted it put back at the heart of the curriculum.
British exceptionalism’s most notable triumph was, of course, Brexit. The notion took root that the country had no need of Europeans, their pernicious “human rights acts” or their outstanding range of fine wines. We had once ruled the world and invented Marmite. They needed us more than we needed them.
The country had been held back by Brussels and would now reclaim its place among the Gods. With an ersatz Churchill — Prime Minister Boris Johnson — at the helm, the country would return to past glory.
The coronavirus takes a wrecking ball to that conceit — or rather it should.
The country’s initial response to pandemic was, unfortunately, yet another example of Britain’s belief in its own uniqueness and blind confidence in its ability to chart its own path.
Even as the coronavirus spread beyond China and the emergency accelerated, Britain’s political class seemed curiously unconcerned. They were obsessing, instead, about the important stuff: Would Big Ben be able to bong on the night that the U.K. left the EU, and when could we get our hands on those collectable Brexit 50 pence pieces?
On January 31, Brexit Day, Johnson gave a televised speech and recorded bells chimed out across Parliament Square. The news that the U.K. had registered its first two coronavirus cases went practically unnoticed. Johnson then took a two-week holiday in Kent.
When the prime minister finally made it back to the office, he declared people should go “about their business as usual” — a reflexive nod to the wartime notion of “keep calm and carry on” that was as devoid of sense as it was a reckless waste of precious time.
Outside Britain, his approach was already being condemned as “confused, dangerous and flippant,” but the government, unbothered, ploughed ahead with a uniquely British methodology based on “herd immunity.” A U-turn was only evinced when Imperial College researchers suggested it might claim 250,000 lives and overwhelm the NHS.
This was a global crisis that needed a global response, but Britain’s government, newly reacquainted with its sovereignty, seemed determined to go it alone. The U.K. neglected to join a combined EU ventilator scheme, and Health Secretary Matt Hancock told Britons to summon up their “Blitz spirit” and rise to the occasion, just as their forebears had done in two World Wars.
By late March, as the death toll mounted and Johnson was admitted into intensive care after catching the virus himself, news of events beyond these shores dried up. British exceptionalism had lulled the nation into believing that our circumstances were unique and that this was now our crisis and ours alone.
The truth, of course, is that Britain’s past is quite at odds with the myth. The country has never triumphed alone. In all recent major wars, we have won thanks to alliances and common endeavour.
Britain has no pre-ordained destiny. It did not spring fully formed from the primordial swamp either: It was forged by waves of migrants arriving here from the fifth century onward. The nation’s identity and all that is good within it comes from the fusion of languages, people, food and culture that followed.
Only when Britain breaks free from the chains of make-believe history will the recurring cycle of unwarranted superiority end. Tragically, the deceit runs so deep that it’s hard to imagine that such a day will ever come.
Make-believe history . . .
Re:LODE Radio applauds this Opinion piece, but with a reservation concerning the stretched notion of a historical continuity, in a narrative going back to Bede. Bede'sHistoria Ecclesiastica is as much a European as "English" historical and cultural phenomenon. The text was copied often in the Middle Ages, and about 160 manuscripts containing it survive. About half of those are located on the European continent, rather than in the British Isles. Most of the 8th- and 9th-century texts of Bede's Historia come from the northern parts of the Carolingian Empire. This total does not include manuscripts with only a part of the work, of which another 100 or so survive. It was printed for the first time between 1474 and 1482, probably at Strasbourg, France. Modern historians have studied the Historia extensively, and several editions have been produced.
For many years, early Anglo-Saxon history was essentially a retelling of the Historia, but recent scholarship has focused as much on what Bede did not write as what he did. The belief that the Historia was the culmination of Bede's works, the aim of all his scholarship, was a belief common among historians in the past but is no longer accepted by most scholars.
Modern historians and editors of Bede have been lavish in their praise of his achievement in the Historia Ecclesiastica. Stenton (Stenton, F.M. (1971). Anglo-Saxon England (Third ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 187) regards it as one of the "small class of books which transcend all but the most fundamental conditions of time and place", and regards its quality as dependent on Bede's"astonishing power of co-ordinating the fragments of information which came to him through tradition, the relation of friends, or documentary evidence ... In an age where little was attempted beyond the registration of fact, he had reached the conception of history."Patrick Wormald describes him as "the first and greatest of England's historians"(Wormald, Patrick (1999). The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century. Oxford: Blackwell, page 29).
The Historia Ecclesiastica has given Bede a high reputation, but his concerns were different from those of a modern writer of history. His focus on the history of the organisation of the English church, and on heresies and the efforts made to root them out, led him to exclude the secular history of kings and kingdoms except where a moral lesson could be drawn or where they illuminated events in the church. Besides the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the medieval writers William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth used his works as sources and inspirations.[95] Early modern writers, such as Polydore Vergil and Matthew Parker, the Elizabethan Archbishop of Canterbury, also utilised the Historia, and his works were used by both Protestant and Catholic sides in the wars of religion.
The Re:LODE Radio take on this "state of affairs" has its origin in the LODE project of 1992. The Re:LODE blog sets some of this out in the Re:LODE Methods & Purposes page.
The image above is a detail from a painting by John Everett Millais, titled "The Boyhood of Raleigh",
and which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1871. Its afterlife
stretches to a present where its significance as an epitome of the
culture of heroic imperialism in late Victorian Britain has been
overlaid by political and cultural references in newspaper cartoons. The
picture has also appeared in the context of recent explorations of
postcolonialism.
The painting depicts the young, wide-eyed Walter
Raleigh and his brother sitting on the beach by the Devonshire coast at
Budleigh Salterton. He is listening to a story of life on the seas,
told by an experienced sailor who points out to the horizon.
Millais' narrative framework for the painting included some influence from the imperial narratives found in an essay written by James Anthony Froude on England's Forgotten Worthies,
which described the lives of Elizabethan seafarers. It was also
probably influenced by a contemporaneous biography of Raleigh, which
imagined his experiences listening to old sailors as a boy.
Re:LODE uses this painting as a linking "device" to explore a number of contexts connected to the LODE Zone Line about the way make-believe histories shape views and misunderstandings of ourselves, each other and the wider world. This connects with the possibility of the withdrawal of the projections we impose upon each other and the wider world. This was the original purpose of the LODE art project.
A critique of Make-believe history and imperialist ideology are to be found in the heart of this work by Ray Davies and the Kinks.
So, who makes history?
The story behind the concept album Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) is a shared history. This story was shaped by Ray Davies and Julian Mitchell's
take on aspects of modern British identity. British production company
Granada TV approached Ray Davies in early January 1969, expressing
interest in developing a movie or play for television. Davies was to
collaborate with writer Julian Mitchell on the "experimental" programme,
with a soundtrack by the Kinks to be released on an accompanying LP.
This
shared understanding of the shaping power of stories, the stories,
events, opportunities and ideas that shape identity in the era of a
decline and fall of the British Empire, expose how the founding
narratives are shaped through nostalgia, fantasy and denial of actual
events. The original project was abandoned, at the last minute almost,
due to production funding problems.
This article looks at the "horrible history" of Eminent Victorians, an ideological "pot boiler" churned out by Jacob Rees Mogg last year as part of the contemporary "Our Island Story" syndrome and Brexit mythology machine, and which is scathingly reviewed by Richard J Evans in the New Statesman who says it all. Here is an extract from the review:
Naturally,
the darker side of British imperialism is glossed over silently or not
mentioned at all. Palmerston launched the Opium Wars against China to
uphold the sacred principle of free trade with the “vast Asian market”.
The wanton destruction of the Old Summer Palace by an Anglo-French
expedition near Beijing in 1860 was carried out by the French
“indiscriminately and in an undisciplined manner” while the British
behaved “coolly” and carried out their orders “systematically”. This was
not quite what Gordon, who participated in the three-day orgy of
destruction, reported: it was the British, he wrote, who behaved in a
“vandal-like manner”, and he complained that the buildings were “so
large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them
carefully”. Still, he said complacently: “We got upwards of £48 apiece
prize money… I have done well.”
In Ireland Queen Victoria is known as The Famine Queen, and this monument to Victoria was nicknamed the "Auld Bitch" by none other than James Joyce.
While another great "English Queen", Elizabeth Tudor, was known as Bloody Bess. It was Bloody Bess who bestowed upon Captain Raleigh, later Sir Walter Raleigh,
40,000 acres (16,000 ha) (approx. 0.2% of Ireland) upon the
seizure and distribution of land following the attainders arising from
the failedSecond Desmond Rebellion (1579–1583). This was the more widespread and bloody of the two Desmond Rebellions
launched by the FitzGerald dynasty of Desmond in Munster, Ireland,
against English rule in Ireland. In effect Captain Raleigh was rewarded for committing what we would now regard as a war crime. This "war crime" is described in the Information Wrap:
This was for the LODECargo created on the LODEZone Line on the Ceann Sleibhe headland just a few miles from the site of the Siege and Massacre of Smerwick.
This article includes a reference to the trial of Roger Casement for treason, and an article on this trial for the Irish Times by Fintan O’Toole.
Things look very different from across the Irish Sea on an island that was once the place of England's first colonial adventure.
This Opinion piece by Una Mullally, a columnist for the Irish Times, was published in the Guardian (Sat 2 May 2020), and addresses the political impact that the pandemic is having upon growing support for a united Ireland as an integral member of the European Union.
While the Irish government offered grave clarity, the North remained caught up in the UK government’s widely criticised tactics. These divergent responses to coronavirus established an accidental case study of two separate but overlapping approaches to the pandemic taking place on the same island – something researchers will no doubt pore over in the future.
The Irish caretaker taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, had spoken to Boris Johnson about the island of Ireland being one epidemiological unit, but the political divisions north of the border did not allow for that. Instead, different approaches were taken at the crucial first stage of the pandemic. While the British government leapfrogged over the containment phase, largely abandoning the WHO’s mantra of “test, test, test”, the Irish government scrambled to keep a lid on things, gradually introducing early lockdown measures, which benefitted from huge public cooperation. One of the most frequent refrains here in the patter of Covid smalltalk among friends and neighbours is “at least we’re not in England or America”. But of course, part of the island is in the UK.
Border counties are experiencing a different pattern of cases compared with much of the rest of the Republic. The border county of Cavan now has the highest number of cases relative to its population, even though it is only the 25th largest county by population in Ireland. Early on during the pandemic, it was reported that up to 70 healthcare workers in Cavan general hospital had contracted Covid-19, and there are also clusters of cases in residential-care settings in the region. While Dublin and its surrounding counties have been the worst affected, the border counties of Louth, Donegal and Monaghan have a higher rate of infection than those further south.
The tendency to jump to a conclusion that the number of cases in border counties is related to the porous nature of the border itself, and so is a consequence of travel between north and south, may be misleading. We just don’t know yet. Ireland’s chief medical officer, Tony Holohan, who has cut a stoic figure throughout the crisis, has said it is unlikely that the high rate of infection in border counties is due to a “spillover” from the North.
The public health doctor Gabriel Scally, president of the epidemiology and public health section of the Royal Society of Medicine, has said such hotspots require investigation. Scally lambasted the Department of Health in Northern Ireland on Twitter, saying the department “is in deep and very hot water over their provision of statistics about Covid-19. I’ve been very critical of their dreadful performance, and now the UK Statistics Authority have quite correctly, reprimanded them.” He referenced a letter from Ed Humpherson, the director general for regulation at the statistics authority to Richard Pengelly, the permanent secretary of the Northern Ireland Department of Health, indicating that speculation about border cases is just one element of a wider issue about statistics related to the pandemic in the North.
Right now, people are viewing the question of Irish unity through the lens of epidemiology. The pandemic is many things, but it is political, and so too will be its consequences. The DUP showed that it was content to sacrifice the economic stability of Northern Ireland in pursuit of the empty, jingoistic rhetoric of Brexit, and at the outset of this pandemic, it did seem that public health was playing second fiddle to the party’s lemming-like tendency to follow Westminster’s instruction.
Unexpected events often act as a catalyst for finding new pathways towards a goal. Nobody could have conceived that the case for a united Ireland would dovetail with the now urgent practicalities of a united approach to a public health crisis. But the big ideas we have about society often don’t pan out how we anticipate. Eradicating the border’s segmentation of two jurisdictions has been a peacetime issue, a Brexit issue and is now a public health issue.
From Italy to Australia, critics have accused a “complacent” British government of “massively underestimating” the gravity of the coronavirus crisis after the UK reported the highest death toll in Europe.
While Rai Uno, the Italian state broadcaster’s flagship channel, gave prominent play to the news that Britain had recorded “more than 32,000 deaths, the highest total in Europe exceeding even Italy”, the Corriere della Serra daily went a good way further.
The situation in the UK was “like a nightmare from which you cannot awake, but in which you landed because of your own fault or stupidity”, the influential liberal-conservative paper said, adding that Britain seemed “a prisoner of itself”.
The country that was “the most reluctant in Europe to impose a lockdown has become the most cautious to start reopening”, with public opinion frightened of the consequences and Boris Johnson eager to avoid breaking Italy’s “sad record”.
Experts have warned against direct international comparisons of Covid-19 death tolls, saying different counting methods and many other factors make such exercises unreliable and it may take months if not years to draw firm conclusions.
However, Beppe Severgnini, an opinion writer on Corriere della Sera, said it seemed clear Britain had “lost the advantage that fate and Italy gave it – for example, the first two weeks of the outbreak in Italy when it was obvious the virus was spreading”.
The British government “did not pay enough attention to what was happening here, while Germany responded very well”, Severgnini said. “The two great British virtues – understatement and grace under fire – have turned out to not be a blessing.”
He said the UK was served neither by “a very weak cabinet” nor Johnson’s character: “He’s not Trump, though there is something similar in their approaches, but in this kind of challenge you need to really work hard on details. He’s not a details person.”
Beyond Italy – where the Covid-19 death toll, which does not include suspected cases, is just over 29,000 – German commentators were also critical. Britain has emerged as Europe’s “problem child” of the Covid-19 crisis, the DPA news agency’s London correspondent Christoph Meyer wrote.
“Only a few weeks ago, Britain had the reputation of a country in which the coronavirus was only spreading cautiously,”Meyer wrote in an opinion piece published in several newspapers in Germany and Austria.
“Politicians were already slapping each other on their backs and praising the health system, which was better prepared for the pandemic than any other country in the world. But that has quickly revealed itself to be a fallacy … There are now many signs that the government in London massively underestimated the pandemic.”
In a piece this week drawing on the British prime minister’s frequent deployment of classical allusions, the London correspondent of Spain’s left-leaning El PaÃs queried suggestions that the prime minister was some latter-day Odysseus.
“The conservative press tries to present Johnson as a man of reborn wisdom”, whose experience of Covid-19 had led him to “lash himself to the mast to resist the siren calls” of those demanding the lockdown be lifted soon, wrote Rafa de Miguel.
“In fact, it’s far from clear whether such determination is the fruit of careful calculation – or the result of simply closing one’s eyes when there’s no other option.”
Officials in Greece, which has been widely praised for its handling of the pandemic, have watched London’s handling of the crisis with disbelief, with epidemiologists also criticising the UK government’s initial embrace of a “herd immunity” policy.
The progressive daily Ethnos described Johnson as “more dangerous than coronavirus”, saying one of the crisis’s greatest tragedies was that “incompetent leaders” such as Johnson and Donald Trump were “at the helm at a time of such emergency”.
Before changing tack, Johnson “had gone out and essentially asked Britons … to accept death”, wrote the columnist Giorgos Skafidas.
Irish commentators also expressed dismay at the UK’s record. “Ministers of slim talent have bumbled through daily briefings and now big business-Conservative donors are impatient to reverse a shutdown so contrary to Brexiteer dreams,”Fionnuala O’Connor wrote in the broadly nationalist Irish News:
“Boris Johnson needs all his showman’s tricks now to sell the phasing out of a lockdown which was less than effective, at least in part, because of his stubborn libertarianism.”
Outside Europe, criticism has been strongest in Australia and New Zealand, both of which imposed strict, early lockdowns and have contained their outbreaks. Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, said no country that had pursued herd immunity had achieved it, describing the strategy as a “death sentence”.
David Hunter, an Australian-educated professor of epidemiology and medicine at Oxford University, told the conservative Sydney Morning Herald the British response was “not a model to follow. It has one of the worst epidemics in Europe and the world … Some aspects of the response have almost certainly contributed to the high mortality”.
Hunter particularly criticised the British decision – in contrast to Australia and New Zealand – not to close its borders early. Mike Rann, a former Australian high commissioner to Britain, told the paper Britain had “handled the earliest stages negligently”, lamenting “a shambles of mixed messaging, poor organisation and a complacent attitude that what was happening in Italy wouldn’t happen here”.
A UK government spokesperson said: “This is an unprecedented global pandemic and we have taken the right steps at the right time to combat it, guided by the best scientific advice.
“The government has been working day and night to battle coronavirus, delivering a strategy designed to protect our NHS and save lives. Herd immunity has never been a policy or goal.”
Ministers of slim talent in a UK government saddled with a cabinet stuffed with Brexiteers, struggle with reality, because the pandemic crisis is a reality and Brexit is a fantasy. The drama leading to the "ersatz gongs of Big Ben" heralding in Brexit says everything about the capacity and competence levels of the UK government. Some of these politicians probably believe this Victorian Empire builders made-up history, a version that conveniently avoids mention of colonialism, of capitalism's, and imperialism's, catastrophic impact upon peoples across the world. However, this is a fantasy, an already internalized fantasy, but nevertheless becomes highly functional for those narrow commercial interests reliant on a future de-regulated British economy, and a race to the bottom.
Campaign to raise £500,000 for Big Ben Bongs for Brexit
The Committee believes that it is still possible to interrupt virus spread, provided that countries put in place strong measures to detect disease early, isolate and treat cases, trace contacts, and promote social distancing measures commensurate with the risk.
It is important to note that as the situation continues to evolve, so will the strategic goals and measures to prevent and reduce spread of the infection. The Committee agreed that the outbreak now meets the criteria for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and proposed the following advice to be issued as Temporary Recommendations.
The Committee emphasized that the declaration of a PHEIC should be seen in the spirit of support and appreciation for China, its people, and the actions China has taken on the frontlines of this outbreak, with transparency, and, it is to be hoped, with success.
In line with the need for global solidarity, the Committee felt that a global coordinated effort is needed to enhance preparedness in other regions of the world that may need additional support for that.
World Health Organization
The following day at 11pm on 31 January 2020 the UK was pre-occupied with celebrating Brexit with a sound and light show in Downing Street!
Ten years of pointless austerity . . . . . . followed by Brexit!
Q. Is this something to celebrate?
A. Theresa May thought so.
Martin Rowson's brilliant political swipe at Theresa May's vision of a Brexit Festival. If this festival comes to pass it will (or will NOT), be compared with the Festival of Britain of 1951.
In 1951, after six years of austerity to a purpose, that was decent housing, education, a national health service, the nationalisation of essential industries and infrastructure, and a welfare state, the Festival of Britain looked forward to the future of a modern Britain, a Britain for the many, not the few.
Churchill is reported to have commented on the Festival of Britain as being; “three-dimensional socialist propaganda.”
A woman repeatedly punches David Cameron in the head, or at least an effigy of him. In slow motion, its smiling features distort under her blows. Elsewhere, a homeless man is slowly sinking into the pavement outside a corporate office block. A disturbed janitor with a headful of rightwing propaganda brings a shotgun to his school. Volunteers dispense care and supplies at a foodbank in a coastal town. A Bolivian cleaner shouts to the oblivious office workers around her: “Am I invisible?”
These are probably not the images of modern Britain that Theresa May had in mind when she announced a celebratory Festival of Brexit back in late 2018, but as a state-of-the-nation snapshot, they speak volumes. They are all from The Uncertain Kingdom, an anthology of 20 short films made last year. The films vary widely in subject and tone, from surreal comedy to hand-sketched animation. But recurring themes emerge: xenophobia, loneliness, identity, class and poverty. The overall mood could not be described as festive – apprehensive, more like. Is this really who we are? Or should that be, who we were?
Steve Rose reports for the Guardian (Thu 21 May 2020) on how, following Theresa May calling for a Brexit festival, 20 film directors have responded. The results, featuring kickboxers and an armed janitor, add up to an extraordinary snapshot of Britain. Steve Rose writes:
The so-called Festival of Brexit (now scheduled for 2022), was the direct inspiration for The Uncertain Kingdom, explains its instigator, John Jencks: “I was in the bath listening to Radio 4. It was November 2018, and there was an announcement about a post-Brexit festival that would bring us all together again and make us feel so proud of being British. And I groaned .” Like many Britons, Jencks, a producer and director best known for his film adaptation of Stephen Fry’sThe Hippopotamus, was not convinced the time was yet ripe for “bringing us all together”. “Actually we needed to do quite a lot of shouting. And a lot of sighing,” he says. “But I thought the idea of a cultural response to this very febrile moment was utterly important.”
The Uncertain Kingdom might not use “Britishness” as a punch bag but it does literally use Cameron’s head as one. The punching occurs in Strong Is Better Than Angry, directed by Hope Dickson Leach (best known for 2016 rural drama The Levelling). It was a filmed at a women’s kickboxing class in Edinburgh, where a diverse group talk about their anger, its causes – and who they’d most like to punch. As well as Cameron, the list includes Donald Trump, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Brett Kavanaugh and Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam.
Millais travelled to Budleigh Salterton
to paint in the location because of connections to Raleigh's birthplace
and early life at Hayes Barton, East Budleigh, Devon. Millais' sons modelled for the boys. The sailor was a professional
model.
Millais' friend and biographer, the critic Marion Spielmann, suggested that the "old sailor" was intended to be Genoese. He also argues that the sailor is pointing south towards the "Spanish main".
This suggestion would begin to make remarkable sense if we see this painting as part and parcel of what was later termed the "Black Legend".
Black Legend was a term used for what we now call "Culture Wars".
Historian Philip Wayne Powell in Tree of Hate gives this definition of the Black Legend:
An
image of Spain circulated through late sixteenth-century Europe, borne
by means of political and religious propaganda that blackened the
characters of Spaniards and their ruler to such an extent that Spain
became the symbol of all forces of repression, brutality, religious and
political intolerance, and intellectual and artistic backwardness for
the next four centuries. Spaniards ... have termed this process and the
image that resulted from it as ‘The Black Legend,’ la leyenda Negra.
Powell also provides various examples of how it was still active in modern history:
Spaniards
who came to the New World seeking opportunities beyond the prospects of
their European environment are contemptuously called cruel and greedy
"goldseekers," or other opprobrious epithets virtually synonymous with
Devils; but Englishmen who sought New World opportunities are more
respectfully called "colonists," or "homebuilders," or "seekers after
liberty." (...) When Spaniards expelled or punished religious dissidents
that was called "bigotry," "intolerance," "fanaticism" ... When
Englishmen, Dutchmen, or Frenchmen did the same thing, it is known as
"unifying the nation,"...
Powell, Philip Wayne, 1971, Tree of Hate: Propaganda and Prejudices Affecting United States Relations with the Hispanic World. Basic Books, New York, 1971.
Historian Antonio Soler first used the expression "black legend" to describe the portrayal of some historical Castilian monarchs, though it was Emilia Pardo Bazán
at a conference in Paris on April 18, 1899, who used it for the first
time to refer to a generalized biased view of Spain as a whole. She
declared:
Abroad
our miseries are known and often exaggerated without balance: take as
an example the book by M. Yves Guyot, which we can consider as the
perfect model of a black legend, the opposite of a golden legend. The
Spanish black legend is a straw man for those who seek convenient
examples to support certain political theses (...) The black legend
replaces our contemporary history in favour of a novel, genre Ponson du
Terrail, with mines and countermines, that doesn't even deserve the
honor of analysis.
This
conference had a great impact inside and outside of Spain. In Spain,
the torch was passed to various historians making reference to the Spanish Black Legend, among them Julián JuderÃas.
He was the first historian to describe and denounce this phenomenon in
an organized way, providing the first definition of a black legend as
well as the first description of "The (Spanish) Black Legend". His book The Black Legend and the Historical Truth (Spanish: La Leyenda Negra y la Verdad Histórica),
a critique published in 1914, claimed that this type of biased
historiography had presented Spanish history in a deeply negative light,
purposely ignoring positive achievements or advances.
In his book, JuderÃas defines The (Spanish) Black Legend as;
the
environment created by the fantastic stories about our homeland that
have been published in all countries, the grotesque descriptions that
have always been made of the character of Spaniards as individuals and
collectively, the denial or at least the systematic ignorance of all
that is favorable and beautiful in the various manifestations of culture
and art, the accusations that in every era have been flung against
Spain.
JuderÃas, Julián, La Leyenda Negra (2003; first Edition of 1914)
Sverker Arnoldsson,
from the University of Gothenburg, supports JuderÃas hypothesis of the
existence of a Spanish Black Legend in European historiography, locates
the origins of the Black Legend in medieval Italy, unlike previous
authors who locate it in the 16th century. In his book The Black Legend.
A Study of its Origins, Arnoldsson cites studies by Benedetto Croce
and Arturo Farinelli to affirm that Italy in the 14th, 15th, and 16th
centuries was extremely hostile to Spain, and considers that the texts
produced and distributed there were later used as a base to build on by
Protestant nations in the "Culture Wars" of the Reformation.
The
unique characteristics of the colonial wars of the early contemporary
period and the need of new colonial powers to legitimize claims in now
independent Spanish colonies, as well as the unique and new
characteristics of the British Empire that succeeded it.
An example of the translation of this historiography into literature and film is Fire Over England, an English adventure novel written by A. E. W. Mason. The book is set in the late 16th century and covers the English Elizabethan response to the threat of the 1588 Spanish Armada. A beleaguered Elizabeth I of England prepares for invasion by a tyrannical Spain in the throes of the Inquisition.
This provided excellent propaganda material for a film version of the book, a
thinly veiled metaphor for then-neutral Britain's need to prepare for
the threat of Nazi invasion, and published while the Spanish Civil War
was raging, the book was made into a film by Alexander Korda
in 1937, England's leading film producer; Korda was helping Winston
Churchill in his struggle to alert the British people to the military
threat of the Third Reich. Whilst the novelist Mason is careful to
appear even handed in his treatment of the various personalities,
including Phillip of Spain and Santa Cruz.
This narrative tradition continues as a trope into the 21st century with entertaining historical
drama and the re-framing of an heroic England, standing alone in a
hostile world.
Amnesia
reigns, along with Cate Blanchett's Elizabeth, when it comes to
remembering British imperialism in a globalised cultural, political and
economic setting. This is a story integral with the foundation story of
the British Empire.
The Genoese seafairer in The Millais painting of the Boyhood of Raleigh would make sense then, either intentionally, or more probably unintentionally, in this context of European states in a capitalist "survival of the fittest" competition. Italian states such as Genoa and Venice also competed for dominance between themselves, but the emergence of Spain as a global power, muscling in on the trade with the Orient, in the "short cut" that became the "silver way", required "black propaganda" efforts.
The
long lasting, and remarkably robust continuation of the Black Legend
that was applied to the Spanish World Empire, an economic, military and
political power that stretched across both the western and eastern
hemispheres, and often refreshed for various propagandist purposes,
stands out as a particular historical phenomenon. As the Wikipedia
article has it:
Black Legends usually fade once the the next great power is established or once enough time has gone by.
Making America Great Again is going to be a challenge in this period of struggle for global political and economic hegemony between these sparring partners, China and the U.S.A.
Trump's pronunciation of the word 'China' emphasizes his infantile hostility toward an economic and political competitor, and now, with his incompetence exposed, China represents a potential scapegoat for his failure. Now This News (Mar 19, 2020) and the Guardian (May 11, 2020) present the video material evidence of this very constructed political petulance.
Today, this week (Sun 24 May 2020), and over the last two months or so, this scenario is being played out in a grotesque repeat, in the farcical rhetoric that Donald Trump is using against China, a stock response on his part, to deflect from his abject failure to meet the challenge of this crisis, or any crisis, for that matter.
The fact of this present exchange of rhetoric (although to use the word "rhetoric" is a misapplication of the term, as the exchanges are not far from blame game name calling), suggests that:
the next great power is NOT as yet established.
Simon Goodley and Dan Sabbagh report for the Guardian (Sun 24 May 2020) under the headline and subheading:
China raises US trade tensions with warning of ‘new cold war’
Foreign minister accuses Washington of damaging relationship with Beijing
The prospects of a trade war between China and the western economies ratcheted up on Sunday as Beijing accused the US of pushing relations towards a “new cold war”.
“China has no intention to change, still less replace the United States,” China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, said on Sunday in the latest escalation in tensions between the world’s two largest economies. “It’s time for the United States to give up its wishful thinking of changing China and stopping 1.4 billion people in their historic march toward modernisation.”
He said US political attacks on China over the coronavirus and global trade matters “are taking China-US relations hostage and pushing our two countries to the brink of a new cold war”.
Relations between the UK and the US have also soured as a string of Conservative politicians pressed on Sunday for tighter controls to protect struggling UK companies from Chinese takeovers, and the UK announced an emergency review of the deal to allow the Chinese telecoms firm Huawei to help run the forthcoming 5G mobile network.
Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre is expected to conclude that recently announced US sanctions against Huawei will make it impossible to use the Chinese company’s technology as planned.
A government spokesman said: “Following the US announcement of additional sanctions against Huawei, the NCSC is looking carefully at any impact they could have to the UK’s networks.”
Last week Boris Johnson was forced to give in to to Conservative backbench rebels opposed to the presence of Huawei in 5G networks. The prime minister said he was drawing up plans to reduce the Chinese company’s involvement to zero by 2023.
Over the weekend, a series of well-known Conservative MPs added their voices to the debate by either writing or tweeting newspaper articles about the UK distancing itself from China. The MPs included former leader Iain Duncan Smith, former defence secretary Liam Fox and Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee.
Writing in the Sun on Sunday, Fox said: “China is at a crossroads and needs to decide whether it truly wants to become a partner in the global community or take the path to becoming a pariah state.”
Tugendhat argued in the Financial Times that “time is running out” to accelerate new legislation designed to make it harder for state-owned companies from countries such as China to take over struggling UK firms.
“Britain needs to bring its laws on foreign ownership in line with partners,” he said. “The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States provides one model that gives the government discretion and dissuades many inappropriate buyers before a veto is required.”
The issue of Huawei’s involvement in the UK’s 5G network has long been controversial in the US as well as Britain.
Excluding Huawei from the UK’s 5G network would amount to a hasty reversal of a policy announced by ministers in January to limit Huawei to 35% of 5G network supply, and risks irritating China and adding hundreds of millions in costs for BT and other phone companies.
The debate in the UK came as Wang told a press conference on the sidelines of National People’s Congress meetings in Beijing: “Regretfully, in addition to the raging coronavirus, a political virus is also spreading in the United States. This political virus is using every opportunity to attack and smear China.”
The debate over trade has intensified as the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic becomes clearer.
According to a paper published by the World Economic Forum on Sunday, the value of Chinese exports fell by 17.2% year on year in the first two months of 2020, while imports slowed by 4%.
The research added: “Major industries have suffered at the hands of Covid-19, with nuclear reactors, electrical machinery and equipment, plastics and organic chemicals among the worst affected … Globalisation will work best through the adoption of a strong international cooperation network.”
The battles over world trade were further complicated by China’s proposed national security legislation for Hong Kong, which could prompt US sanctions and threaten the city’s status as a financial hub, the White House national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, said on Sunday.
“It looks like, with this national security law, they’re going to basically take over Hong Kong, and if they do … Secretary [of State Mike] Pompeo will likely be unable to certify that Hong Kong maintains a high degree of autonomy, and if that happens, there will be sanctions that will be imposed on Hong Kong and China,”O’Brien said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
This is the same Beijing (Peking) where, 160 years ago this year, and as referenced in the review of Jacob Rees Mogg's Eminent Victorians, the British High Commissioner to China, Lord Elgin, ordered the complete destruction of the Old Summer Palace, which was then carried out by British troops during the Second Opium War. The palace was so large – covering more than 800 acres – that it took 4,000 men 3 days of burning to destroy it. Many exquisite artworks – sculptures, porcelain, jade, silk robes, elaborate textiles, gold objects and more – were stolen and are now found in 47 museums around the world, according to UNESCO.
And, this is the same Hong Kong that was ceded to Queen Victoria in perpetuity by China as a result of the First Opium War, as part of the onerous terms imposed on China by the British in the Treaty of Nanking. This period of British Chinese conflict remains as a symbolic reminder to modern Chinese of the brutality of encounters with western powers. The Opium Wars are a prime example of Victorian hypocrisy. Britain was importing and selling large quantities of opium to China because it was very profitable and helped balance Britain's trade deficit resulting from its importation of Chinese goods, such as tea. Britain forced peasants in its colony, India, to grow opium poppies so it could sell the opium in China, although the importation and sale of opium were illegal under Chinese law. When a Chinese government official seized British opium cargo in 1841, Britain declared what became known as the first Opium War. Britain won the war and was in a position to impose on the vanquished Chinese a one-sided treaty with onerous treaty obligations. An update to the Re:LODE project in 2019 looked at how a monument to Queen Victoria has been interwoven with a movement to protect individual human rights and democracy in this ex-colonial British territory.
The vigil in Hong Kong, reported in this Guardian article, took place on 4th June 2019 in Victoria Park.
Queen Victoria's name is used for many places across the world-wide
territories that were once part of the British Empire, and Hong Kong is
no exception.
"More
than 100,000 people have gathered in Hong Kong for a candlelight vigil
to mark the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre."
The
event is the biggest and traditionally the only major commemoration of
the incident allowed in China. Taiwan also marked the massacre with a
vigil and exhibition on “Tank man” – the man photographed standing in
front of tanks on 5 June 1989.
On
the mainland, all talk of the Chinese army’s killing of thousands of
peaceful student protesters is forbidden. But Hong Kong has had a level
of independence under the “one country, two systems” rule enacted after
Britain relinquished control to China in 1997.
On
Tuesday evening, crowds filled the six football pitches of Victoria
Park, suggesting the number of attendees could break the 2012 record of
180,000.
The streets leading to the park were lined with pro-democracy stalls and demonstrators handing out posters and flyers.
Victoria Park, a public space in the shadow of Empire
Victoria
Park in Hong Kong was formerly a typhoon shelter known as Causeway Bay
Typhoon Shelter, part of Victoria Harbour, used as a refuge by fishing
boats and yachts during typhoon seasons. In the 1950s, the shelter was
reclaimed and the park was built there. The typhoon shelter was then
relocated to the north.
The park includes tennis courts, a
swimming pool, a bowling green and other sports facilities such as the
central lawn, basketball courts, football pitches and multiple
children's areas and playgrounds.
The
park has long been a gathering place for domestic workers on Sundays,
their usual day off. Since the early 2000s, helpers from Indonesia have
come to predominate, in and around the western end of the Park, as their
numbers in Hong Kong have increased relative to those from the
Philippines. The parallel tradition for Filipina domestic workers is to
congregate around Statue Square in Central Hong Kong.
Hong
Kong has one of the highest ratios of domestic workers in the world,
with more than 336,000 among the 7.2 million in the city, comprising 10%
of the total working population.
The study surveyed over 1,000 domestic workers, almost all either from the Philippines (51%) or Indonesia (46%).
“Migrant
domestic workers are uniquely vulnerable to forced labor because the
nature of their occupation can blur work-life boundaries and isolate
them behind closed doors,” the study states. “They are often overworked
and undervalued.”
According to government statistics, the city's
average working hours is 40 to 50 hours a week. Meanwhile, the study
shows that domestic workers work on average 71.4 hours a week (11.9
hours a day, six days a week), mostly due to the live-in rule, which
requires migrant domestic workers to live with their employers, blurring
work and rest boundaries.
Over a third of domestic workers still
work before or after they leave for their one rest day, not getting the
full 24 hours of rest mandated under Hong Kong employment law.
The statue of Queen Victoria, showing her seated, has been located at the main entrance of the park on Causeway Road. This statue was originally located in Statue Square.
Statue Square and the Victoria monument in 1905
This statue of Queen Victoria should have been made not in bronze but in marble, an error that was not discovered until the bronze statue was almost completed. It was officially unveiled at the centre of the square on 28 May 1896, the day officially appointed for the celebration of the 77th birthday of the Queen
The fact that this statue to Victoria was cast in bronze led to its removal from its location in Statue Square by the Japanese Empire during its occupation of Hong Kong, to be melted down, along with other statues from the square. After the war the statues were brought back to Hong Kong, and in 1952 Queen Victoria's statue was restored and placed in Victoria Park.
So, every Sunday, in the shadow of the statue Queen Victoria, and the history of British rule, Indonesian domestic workers gather together and create a shared social fabric on their day of rest.
In contemporary Hong Kong, along with many places worldwide, there is a freedom to gather together, and also to exploit vulnerable migrants, alongside the precious freedom to demonstrate and mark a moment in history.
“The whole of China is silenced, and we have a window, or a loudspeaker for that in Hong Kong, to tell the world what happened.”
Lee was a young labour organiser in 1989, sent to the student protests in Tiananmen Square with funds activists had raised in Hong Kong.
“I heard the gunshots and saw the tanks rolling in, the rickshaws taking injured people,” he said. “It went from high hope to despair for me.”
Lee was detained and forced to apologise before being allowed to return to Hong Kong, where he now runs the June 4th Museum. He says many visitors are mainlanders, and the museum has been targeted by harassment and vandalism.
“When I came back from Beijing 20 years ago, people told me to make sure you tell the world the truth,” he said.
As night fell in Hong Kong, thousands of candles flickered. People cried as the crowd joined in songs, before chanting slogans and the date of the incident. Footage of the massacre was broadcast on a giant screen and some turned away as the recorded sound of Chinese guns rang out. The crowd broke its silence to yell at an image of the then Chinese leader, Li Peng.
A proposed Hong Kong bill to allow the transfer of fugitives to mainland China, which many fear will be the end of Hong Kong as a safe haven, was a constant theme at the vigil.
There are widespread fears the new law could be used to target political dissidents and attending the vigil may soon become too dangerous.
Claudia Mo, a pro-democracy legislator, said: “It may sound exaggerated to outsiders, but if you look at China and how it practises its rule of law, if there is such a thing, it’s anything goes.”
Will this freedom to demonstrate in a public place, to fight for justice and liberty, to express a view, be taken away? This is a real possibility!
Does this includes the freedom to offend?
Q. Do all of Al Murray's audience realize the character of the Pub Landlord is a satire?
Paul Fleckney reviews Al Murray's show (Sun 19 May 2019). He writes:
“Having your cake and eating it” has become a pretty useful idiom when describing the infuriating paradox of Brexit. And it comes to mind when watching Al Murray perform his new show, Landlord of Hope and Glory. The comic, who we can probably assume voted remain but who plays the ultimate Brexiteer in Pub Landlord, has met himself in the middle, with a show that takes turns to rabidly attack leave and remain, progressive and conservative values. In other words, a sort of one-man Question Time.
Call it showbiz pragmatism, call it strategic ambiguity, but it feels a bit of a cop-out for Pub Landlord to have a generalised “they’re all as bad as each other” take, no matter how true it may be. Still, it does lead to some solidly funny sections, such as when he misses the old Europe that would start a war over a croissant, and when he extends the “Britain is up shit creek” metaphor to foul lengths.
The loose premise is that: “It’s up to you, the Great British people, to sort this out.”
A war over the right to market opium?
The colonial and capitalist mindset that could engage in a war to enable the opening up of a pernicious drug trade in opium, through the forced opening of the lucrative market in China, and financed by British Indian commercial interests, a corporate capitalism in cahoots with the British state, is an example of European imperialist exceptionalism.
The Re:LODE Methods & Purposes section of the Re:LODE site in 2017-18 on Eurocentrism references European exceptionalism as part of the syndrome of Eurocentrism.
European exceptionalism?
The Wikipedia page on Eurocentrism has a section following on from the origins of the Terminology with the heading European exceptionalism.
One of the features of European colonialism and the conquest,
domination and exploitation of the world, its peoples and its resources,
was, and is, the need for a set of narrative structures to help explain
why it was that Europe, exceptionally, had been given the special
destiny to run the rest of the planet. These narratives include a set of
assumptions concerning superiority, prejudice and racism, and yet are
evident in discourses across the globe.
During
the European colonial era, encyclopedias often sought to give a
rationale for the predominance of European rule during the colonial
period by referring to a special position taken by Europe compared to
the other continents. Thus, Johann Heinrich Zedler, in 1741, wrote that;
"even
though Europe is the smallest of the world's four continents, it has
for various reasons a position that places it before all others.... Its
inhabitants have excellent customs, they are courteous and erudite in
both sciences and crafts".
The
Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (Conversations-Lexicon) of 1847 still has an
ostensibly Eurocentric approach and claims about Europe that;
"its
geographical situation and its cultural and political significance is
clearly the most important of the five continents, over which it has
gained a most influential government both in material and even more so
in cultural aspects".
European
exceptionalism thus grew out of the so-called Great Divergence of the Early
Modern period, due to the combined effects of the Scientific Revolution,
the Commercial Revolution, and the rise of colonial empires, the
Industrial Revolution and a Second European colonization wave.
A great divergence? European
exceptionalism is widely reflected in popular genres of literature,
especially literature for young adults (for example, Rudyard Kipling's Kim)
and adventure literature in general. Portrayal of European colonialism
in such literature has been analysed in terms of Eurocentrism in
retrospect, such as presenting idealised and often exaggeratedly
masculine Western heroes, who conquered 'savage' peoples in the
remaining so-called 'dark spaces' of the globe.
Thinly
disguised racist narratives were part of the necessary ideological
structure to maintain the European colonialist and capitalistic system
of exploitation of the peoples of the whole world, but one short story,
one novella in particular, creates a sort of cultural collision between
truth and fiction, reality and denial. This is Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
Gravesend
In the 1902 novel Heart of Darkness,
Joseph Conrad has Marlow/Conrad the narrator talking with others on a
ship moored on the dark aired River Thames at Gravesend. This river, a
river at the heart of the British Empire is the setting from which
Marlow begins his reminiscences and then tells his tale.
Steve McQueen’s film Gravesend (2007)
is concerned with the mining of coltan, a dull black mineral used in
capacitors, which are vital components in mobile phones, laptops, and
other electronics. Juxtaposing an animated fly-by of the Congo River
with footage of workers sifting through dark earth and robots processing
the procured material in a pristine, brightly lit laboratory, the
film’s disjunctions allegorise the very real economic, social and
physical distance this material traverses as it moves from the third to
the first world. Its final sequence, a time-lapse shot of a sun setting
behind smokestacks, brings everything full circle, rendering visual a
scene described at the outset of Joseph Conrad’s celebrated novel, Heart of Darkness.
Heart of Darkness remains one of the most widely read novels in English.
The movie adaptation Apocalypse Now
has brought Conrad's story to still more. The very phrase has taken on a
life of its own. Conrad's book has become a touchstone for thinking
about Africa and Europe, civilization and savagery, imperialism,
genocide, insanity - about human nature itself. It's also about a flash point. In the 1970's, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe
declared Heart of Darkness"an offensive and totally deplorable book,"
rife with degrading stereotypes of Africa and Africans. Conrad, said
Achebe, was "a bloody racist."
Not
long afterward, a half-American, half-Kenyan college student named
Barack Obama was challenged by his friends to explain why he was reading
"this racist tract.""Because . . . ,"Obama stammered, "because the
book teaches me things . . . About white people, I mean. See, the book's
not really about Africa. Or black people. It's about the man who wrote
it. the European. The American. A particular way of looking at the
world." Page 4., The Dawn Watch by Maya Jasanoff
Leopold
II, King of the Belgians, was fascinated with obtaining a colony and
focused upon claiming the interior of Africa—the only unclaimed sizable
geographic area. Moving within the European political paradigm existing
in the early 1880s, Leopold gained international concessions and
recognition for his personal claim to the Congo Free State.
His
rule of the vast region was based on tyranny and terror. Under his
direction, Stanley again visited the area and extracted favorable
treaties from numerous local leaders. A road and, eventually, a rail
line were developed from the coast to Leopoldville (present-day
Kinshasa). A series of militarized outposts were established along the
length of the Congo River, and imported paddle wheelers commenced
regular river service. Native peoples were forced to gather ivory and
transport it for export. Beginning c. 1890, rubber—originally
manufactured from coagulated sap—became economically significant in
international trade. The Congo was rich in rubber-producing vines, and
Leopold transitioned his exploitative focus from dwindling ivory
supplies to the burgeoning rubber market. Slavery, exploitation and the
reign of terror continued and even increased.
Meanwhile, early missionaries and human rights advocates such as Roger Casement,
E. D. Morel, George Washington Williams, and William Henry Sheppard
began to circulate news of the widespread atrocities committed in the
Congo under the official blessing of Leopold's administration. Women and
children were imprisoned as hostages to force husbands and fathers to
work. Flogging, starvation and torture were routine. Murder was
common—tribes resisting enslavement were wiped out; administration
officials expected to receive back a severed human hand for every bullet
issued.
Rape and sexual slavery were rampant. Workers failing to secure
assigned quotas of rubber were routinely mutilated or tortured.
Administration officials so completely dehumanized local peoples that at
least one decorated his flower garden with a border of severed human
heads. News of these atrocities brought slow, but powerful,
international condemnation of Leopold's administration leading,
eventually, to his assignment of the country to Belgian
administration.
In the chapter called "Meeting Mr Kurtz"Hochschild says more about Conrad the man and the writer:
Heart of Darkness
is one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all
literature, but its author, curiously, thought himself an ardent
imperialist where England was concerned. Conrad fully recognized
Leoplod's rape of the Congo for what it was: "The horror! The horror!"
his character Kurtz says on his deathbed. And Conrad's stand-in, Marlow,
muses on how "the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking
it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter
noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too
much." yet in almost the same breath, Marlow talks about how the British
territories colored red on a world map were "good to see at any time
because one knows that some real work is done in there"; British
colonialists were "bearers of a spark from the sacred fire."
Marlow
was speaking for Conrad , whose love of his adoptive country knew no
bounds: Conrad felt that "liberty . . . can only be found under the
English flag all over the world." And at the very time he was denouncing
the European lust for African riches in his novel, he was an investor
in a gold mine near Johannesburg.
Conrad
was a man of his time and place in other ways as well. He was partly a
prisoner of what Mark Twain, in a different context, called "the white
man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages."Heart of Darkness
has come in for some justified pummeling in recent years because of its
portrayal of black characters, who say no more than a few words. In
fact, they don't speak at all: they grunt; they chant; they produce a
"drone of weird incantations" and "a wild passionate uproar", they spout
"strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language . .
. like the responses of some satanic litany." The true message of the
book, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe has argued is: "Keep away from
Africa, or else! Mr. Kurtz . . . should have heeded that warning and
the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to
its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible
allure of the jungle al lo! the darkness found him out." However
laden it is with Victorian racism, Heart of Darkness remains the
greatest portrait in fiction of Europeans in the Scramble for Africa.
When Marlow says goodbye to his aunt before heading to his new job, "she
talked about 'weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,'
till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint
that the Company was run for profit."Conrad's white men go about their
rape of the continent in the belief that they are uplifting the natives,
bringing civilization, serving "the noble cause." All
these illusions are embodied in the character of Kurtz. He is both a
murderous head collector and an intellectual, "an emissary of . . .
science and progress." He is a painter, the creator of "a small sketch
in oils" of a woman carrying a torch that Marlow finds at the Central
Station. And he is a poet and journalist, the author of, among other
works, a seventeen-page report - "vibrating with eloquence . . . a
beautiful piece of writing" - to the International Society for the
Suppression of savage Customs. At the end of this report, filled with
lofty sentiments, Kurtz scrawls in a shaky hand: "Exterminate all the
brutes!"
The old wounds have been re-opened by the publication of a book called King Leopold's Ghost, by the American author Adam Hochschild, which has brought howls of rage from Belgium's ageing colonials and some professional historians even as it has climbed the country's best-seller lists.
The debate over Belgium's colonial legacy could not be more timely. In the realm beyond the palace walls where Leopold's great grandson Albert II is now king, the openly racist extreme rightwing Vlaams Blok, which blames much of the country's ills on coloured immigrants from Africa, is bidding to become one of the biggest parties in next month's elections.
But Hochschild's book has hit a raw nerve for a new generation with its vividly drawn picture of a voracious king anxious to maximise his earnings from the proceeds of rubber and ivory.
It is clear that many of Leopold's officials in the depots up the Congo river terrorised the local inhabitants, forcing them to work under the threat of having their hands and feet - or those of their children - cut off. Women were raped, men were executed and villages were burned in pursuit of profit for the king.
But what has stuck in the gut of Belgian historians is Hochschild's claim that 10 million people may have died in a forgotten holocaust. In outrage, the now ageing Belgian officials who worked in the Congo in later years have taken to the internet with a 10-page message claiming that maybe only half a dozen people had their hands chopped off, and that even that was done by native troops.
They argue that American and British writers have highlighted the Congo to distract attention from the contemporary massacre of the North American Indians and the Boer War.
Under
the headline 'a scandalous book', members of the Royal Belgian Union
for Overseas Territories claim: 'There is nothing that could compare
with the horrors of Hitler and Stalin, or the deliberate massacres of
the Indian, Tasmanian and Aboriginal populations. A black legend has
been created by polemicists and British and American journalists feeding
off the imaginations of novelists and the re-writers of history.'
Professor Jean Stengers, a leading historian of the period, says:
'Terrible things happened, but Hochschild is exaggerating. It is absurd
to say so many millions died. I don't attach so much significance to his
book. In two or three years' time, it will be forgotten.' Leopold's
British biographer, Barbara Emerson, agrees: 'I think it is a very
shoddy piece of work. Leopold did not start genocide. He was greedy for
money and chose not to interest himself when things got out of control.
Part of Belgian society is still very defensive. People with Congo
connections say we were not so awful as that, we reformed the Congo and
had a decent administration there.'Stengers acknowledges that the
population of the Congo shrank dramatically in the 30 years after
Leopold took over, though exact figures are hard to establish since no
one knows how many inhabited the vast jungles in the 1880s.
Yet Leopold certainly emerges as an unattractive figure, described as a young man by his cousin Queen Victoria as an 'unfit, idle and unpromising an heir apparent as ever was known' and by Disraeli as having 'such a nose as a young prince has in a fairy tale, who has been banned by a malignant fairy.' As king, he did not bother to deny charges in a London court that he had sex with child prostitutes. When the bishop of Ostend told him that people were saying he had a mistress, he is reputed to have replied benignly: 'People tell me the same about you, your Grace. But of course I choose not to believe them.' His wiliness in convincing the world that he had only humanitarian motives in annexing the Congo, in persuading the Belgian government essentially to pay for his purchase and in buying up journalists, including the great explorer Henry Morton Stanley, to promote his cause show both cunning and skill.
Emerson claims Leopold was appalled to hear about the atrocities in his domain, but dug his heels in when he was attacked in the foreign press. He did indeed apparently write to his secretary of state: 'These horrors must end or I will retire from the Congo. I will not be splattered with blood and mud: it is essential that any abuses cease.' But the man who (as Queen Victoria said) had the habit of saying 'disagreeable things to people' was also reputed to have snorted: 'Cut off hands - that's idiotic. I'd cut off all the rest of them, but not hands. That's the one thing I need in the Congo.' Although few now defend him, strange things happen even today when the Congo record is challenged. Currently circulating on the internet is an anguished claim by a student in Brussels called Joseph Mbeka alleging he had his thesis marked a failure when he cited Hochschild's book: 'My director turned his back on me.'Daniel Vangroenweghe, a Belgian anthropologist who also published a critical book about the period 15 years ago, says: 'Senior people tried to get me sacked at the time. Questions were asked in parliament and my work was subjected to an official inspection.' At a large chateau outside Brussels in Tervuren is the Musee Royal de l'Afrique, which Leopold was eventually shamed into setting up to prove his philanthropic credentials. It contains the largest African ethnographic collection in the world, rooms full of stuffed animals and artefacts including shields, spears, deities, drums and masks, a 60ft-long war canoe, even Stanley's leather suitcase.
There is one small watercolour of a native being flogged, but a visitor would be hard-pressed to spot any other reference to the dark side of Leopold's regime. Dust hangs over the place. A curator has said changes are under consideration 'but absolutely not because of the recent disreputable book by an American'.
The real legacy of Leopold and of the Belgians who ran the country until they were bloodily booted out in 1960 has been the chaos in the region ever since and a rapacity among rulers such as Mobutu Sese Seko which outstripped even the king's. Leopold made £3m in 10 years between 1896 and 1906, Mobutu filched at least £3bn. When the Belgians left there were only three Africans in managerial positions in the Congo's administration and fewer than 30 graduates in the entire country.
Vangroenweghe says: 'Talk of whether Leopold killed 10 million people or five million is beside the point, it was still too many.' I asked Belgium's prime minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene, about the Congo legacy this week. 'The colonial past is completely past,' he said. 'There is really no strong emotional link any more. It does not move the people. It's part of the past. It's history.'
That was back then! Now many disagree!
Belgium's former 'human zoo' - Inside the world's 'last colonial museum'.
A century after millions died in Congo, attitudes (and street names) are changing, according to Daniel Boffey in Brussels, reporting for the Guardian (Sat 23 Nov 2019).
In the last years of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, King Leopold II of Belgium ruled the Congo Free State with a tyranny that was peculiarly brutal even by the cruel and deeply racist standards of European colonialism in Africa. He ran the country – now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo – as a personal fiefdom, looting ivory and rubber and murdering millions before the international community stepped in to demand he bequeath the country to the Belgian state.
Yet debate over his legacy has remained muted in Belgium, where hundreds of roads are named after the king along with memorials dedicated to his memory and glory.
Now, under pressure from a growing movement that believes Belgium needs to confront its past, attitudes in the corridors of power are starting to change. As part of a belated reckoning with its colonial history, museums are showcasing sins that were previously overlooked, the tone of history books in school is shifting and, in a development unthinkable until recently, cities have started to remove street signs commemorating Leopold II and openly denounce his legacy.
The council of Kortrijk, in west Flanders, has said it is renaming its Leopold II Laan [avenue] on the grounds the monarch was a “mass murderer”. Officials in Dendermonde, a Flemish city 20 miles north of Brussels, said they were changing a similarly named street to simply Leopold Laan to avoid further “shame” for residents. Elsewhere, a working group in Ghent is considering the city’s role in Belgium’s colonial past and whether it remains appropriate to have a Leopold II Laan. The mayor of Bruges, Dirk de Fauw, said he was assessing the situation. “If other cities start with it, it could trigger a chain reaction, but there are no plans yet,” he told the Het Nieuwsblad newspaper.
While some municipalities are holding out, the reappraisal offers further evidence of a sea change in how the colonial history is viewed.
Those resistant to change are likely to come under more pressure when a Hollywood film, based on a best-selling book 20 years ago that highlighted Leopold’s bloody rule of the Congo Free State, is released. Last week it was announced Ben Affleck would be producing and directing the film inspired by Adam Hochschild’sKing Leopold’s Ghost.
Earlier this year a UN working group concluded in its preliminary report that, nearly six decades after the newly named DRC gained independence from Belgium, many of the country’s institutions remained racist and the state needed to apologise for the sins of its past as a step towards reform. The then prime minister Charles Michel said the government would respond when the UN filed its final report, although he expressed some surprise at the findings. Activists say an important step towards acknowledging the past was made last year when Brussels named a square in honour of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the DRC, who was assassinated in 1961 with the connivance of the Belgian government. It had taken 10 years of campaigning by the Congolese diaspora and others for the city authority to give its approval. Panels giving information about Leopold II have also been attached to most of his statues in recent years.
Jeroen Robbe, of the anti-racism group the Labo vzw said too many municipal leaders were still failing to show moral leadership: “The fact they are taking this so lightly indicates a blind spot that we have in our own history.
“Not a priority? Nobody would dare say that about a Stalinstraat or a Hitlerstraat. The difference is not the size of the horror, but the skin colour of the victims. You have to change the street names and add an explanation to it, so that we don’t hide away the past.”
In Kortrijk, the council said it was also renaming a street marking the life of Cyriel Verschaeve, a Flemish nationalist priest, and collaborator during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. Alderman Axel Ronse said: “Leopold II was a mass murderer and Cyriel Verschaeve a collaborator. We will support companies and residents who may be affected by the new street names in the future.”
The difference is not the size of the horror, but the skin colour of the victims
A woman holds a placard that says STOP KILLIN' BLACK PEOPLE
'I can't breathe'
Jared Goyette in Minneapolis reports for the Guardian (Wed 27 May 2020):
Police and protesters clashed in Minneapolis on Tuesday evening, following a demonstration at the intersection where George Floyd was killed in an altercation with several police officers the day before.
Hundreds of protesters gathered in the city to demand justice after Floyd, who was African American, was killed when a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck as he lay on the ground during an arrest. Footage of the incident showed Floyd shouting “I cannot breathe” and “Don’t kill me!”
A large and diverse crowd had gathered at the start of the protest, with some carrying signs reading “I can’t breathe” and “Jail killer KKKops” and chanting “Prosecute the police.”
Activists had blocked traffic for several blocks in every direction, and the crowd spilled out into the streets. News helicopters hovered overhead.
The Twin Cities have seen several consecutive years of protests against police killings of black men, and in one case, an unarmed white Australian woman, but the gathering Tuesday was one of the largest the metro area has ever seen.
When asked why they had come, most people spoke about the need for police accountability, before inevitably turning to remembering Floyd’s unheeded final pleas. “It could have been my son. It could have been me. It shouldn’t be,” said a protester carrying a sign saying “Lock them up”.
A group of riders from the Vital Kings, a black motorcyclist club based in St Paul, accompanied the protesters, revving their engines over and over, the ear-splitting noise reverberating off the concrete. “We wanted to make some noise for the crowd. This is my voice,” one of the riders said.
From the intersection, protesters marched through the neighborhood to a city police precinct, where a small but angry and persistent crowd faced off for hours with officers guarding the building.
At the precinct, as the rain came down heavily, windows were damaged and squad cars sprayed with graffiti. Protesters threw water and milk bottles at the officers, shouting “pigs” and “how could you”. Police fired green teargas and stun grenades to disperse the crowd approaching the station. Dozens of protesters gathered in a Target parking lot.
Minneapolis police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Floyd died late on Monday, when officers responded to a call from a grocery store that claimed Floyd had used a forged check. Police said Floyd “physically resisted officers” while possibly under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
In the video footage, witnesses can be heard shouting at officers to get off Floyd’s neck. One yells: “Bro, he’s not even fucking moving!” Another asks if “you’re going to just sit there with your knee on his neck?”
Overall it's bad . . .
. . . but change is gonna come!
The local is going global. The tragic circumstances of George Floyd's death under the knee of a bad cop were captured on video and transmitted around the world's media, because people have mobile-phone-based globally connected technology. The evidence is made present.
Videos goes viral. We are living in an information based version of a viral pandemic, as well as living and dying through an actual viral pandemic. The actions of local and global actors are accountable in new ways. World events are becoming grounded for the 99%, through media-based tools and sharing, even though there are many dangers and vulnerabilities in these new and contentious spaces.
The Local Goes Global
Looking at local broadcast media we can see how some local stories go global as a result of citizens videos going viral. Over the last three days we see and hear voices of reason, and voices of fear, anger and loathing. First from Minneapolis, with coverage of local protests and a local business man reaching out to the family of George Floyd:
And secondly, from New York, where a bird watcher in Central Park requests a dog walker to tether her dog as the local bye law requests, and is met with racist hostility and a request from her to the NYPD for assistance. This is all captured on video with mobile phone technology. The woman apologises for her unacceptable behaviour but gets fired from her job.
From scientific research on climate change that looks bad, to hypocritical exceptionalism that looks bad and the denial of the evidence of wholesale racism that looks even worse, to a placard that reads:
Q. So, what's the point?
A. Three points actually! Number One: Stop killing black people! Number Two: We are all in it together! Number Three: Save the Planet! There is NO escape from the planet . . .
. . . even for the 1%!
While the rest of us face the pandemic, the wealthy are donning face masks, boarding private jets and heading for the hills
So, writes Edward Helmore for the Guardian (Fri 13 Mar 2020). He continues:
Coronavirus may have no respect for social, racial or professional boundaries, but even during a pandemic, as F Scott Fitzgerald observed, the very rich “are different from you and me”.
While most of us are panicking about having enough toilet paper or whether we can work from home those with the means are making other arrangements.
Private aviation
Given the choice of fight or flight, flight is the preferred option of the wealthy. Private jet travel is booming, with as much as a tenfold increase in bookings, allowing travelers to avoid large hubs identified as entry-points for coronavirus and avoid contact with strangers.
The need to solicit business has been overtaken by demand, according to Jerod Davis, owner of Southern Jet. “The request lines are just crazy right now,”Davis told Slate.
Location, location, location
It helps if you have somewhere safe to go. New Zealand is top of the list for Silicon Valley billionaires such as Facebook investor Peter Thiel, who owns 193 hectares (477 acres) of the country’s pristine South Island.
A well-stocked country home is also a good option. Escaping to your house in the country, to Idaho or Gloucestershire, is one of the most popular 1% ways of avoiding the contagion, says PR Mark Borkowsky, who attended a notably sparse memorial service for photographer Terry O’Neill in London on Tuesday.
“In this country, people are heading for the hills,”Borkowsky said. “At the memorial, not one person was handshaking and I’ve never seen so many Aesop hand-cleansers in one room. Lots of people were either heading out of London, or those that hadn’t were either talking about doing so or self-isolating.
“It feels like a phoney war: what do we do to avoid it [coronavirus] and how do we keep away from people,”Borkowsky said.
Who you know, not what you know
It also helps to have friends in high places.
The Trump administration, which initially downplayed the pandemic, has lost no time making testing available to political loyalists.
Two congressional Republicans, Matt Gaetz of Florida and North Carolina’s Mark Meadows, the incoming White House chief of staff, were both tested after exposure to a Covid-19 carrier at the annual conservative conference near Washington DC last month.
Both said they were exhibiting no symptoms of illness, rendering their testing in apparent defiance of the government’s own recommendations that healthcare providers prioritize tests for hospitalized patients who are exhibiting coronavirus symptoms, elderly and those with underlying health issues.
Face masks
If the jet is grounded, or you have to mix with hoi polloi, there’s always a face mask.
The US surgeon general, Jerome Adams, has urged the public to stop buying them. “Seriously people,” Adams wrote on Twitter, “STOP BUYING MASKS!”
That didn’t stop Naomi Campbell
from boarding a plane in Los Angeles decked out in a full white
protective suit and wearing a 3M N95 mask – the hospital-grade mask that
doctors and coronavirus experts say are in short supply.
Campbell’s less than chic new look followed a a selfie by Paris-bound Gwyneth Paltrow wearing a since sold-out “urban air mask” by a Swedish company, Airinum. Paltrow starred in the prescient 2011 drama Contagion about a deadly viral outbreak.
“Paranoid? Prudent? Panicked? Placid? Pandemic? Propaganda?” wrote
Paltrow, who now apparently refers to herself in the third person.
“Paltrow’s just going to go ahead and sleep with this thing on the
plane. I’ve already been in this movie. Stay safe. Don’t shake hands.
Wash hands frequently. 😷”
Money can’t buy you love
But, sadly, wherever the super-rich go, they take themselves with them.
Quarantine may prove too much for wealthy couples forced to stay home and deal with intimacy issues rarely encountered by the jet set.
Mitchell Moss, who teaches urban policy and planning at New York University, told Bloomberg News: “This is going to destroy the marriages of the rich … All these husbands and wives who travel will now have to spend time with the person they’re married to.”
For this 1%, as part of the 100% of people on the planet . . .
But for those not part of the wealthy and powerful 1%, then it is more likely that human rights will be abused by forced, or unforced exploitation, institutional racism, and socio-economic systems based on inequality of opportunity, and limited ability to maintain sustainable livelihoods. Climate change, if unchecked, will have catastrophic effects upon the poor and vulnerable in society. These effects will be amplified even more so in regions that are vulnerable to sea level rises, increased desertification, due to long term drought, or extreme weather events, bringing flood and wind damage in their wake.
Exceptionalism is part of the larger problem of avoidance and denial that keeps things as they are from changing for the good of the 100%.
Human rights are equal rights, and these equal rights are, according Amnesty International:
Right to life – We all have the right to life, and to live in freedom and safety. But climate change threatens the safety of billions of people on this planet. The most obvious example is through extreme weather-related events, such as storms, floods and wildfires. Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines claimed the lives of nearly 10,000 people in 2013. Heat stress is among the most deadly impacts. The summer heatwave in Europe in 2003 resulted in the deaths of 35,000 people. However, there are many other less visible ways that climate change threatens lives. The World Health Organization predicts that climate change will cause 250,000 deaths per year between 2030 and 2050, due to malaria, malnutrition, diarrhoea and heat stress.
Right to health – We all have the right to enjoy the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. According to the IPCC, the major health impacts of climate change will include greater risk of injury, disease and death due to more intense heatwaves and fires; increased risk of under-nutrition as a result of diminished food production in poor regions; and increased risks of food- and water-borne diseases, and vector-borne diseases. Children exposed to traumatic events such as natural disasters, exacerbated by climate change, can suffer from post-traumatic stress disorders. The health impacts of climate change demand an urgent response, with unmitigated warming threatening to undermine health systems and core global health objectives.
Right to housing – We all have a right to an adequate standard of living for ourselves and our families, including adequate housing. However, climate change threatens our right to housing in a variety of ways. Extreme weather events like floods and wildfires are already destroying people’s homes, leaving them displaced. Drought, erosion and flooding can also over time change the environment whilst sea-level rises threaten the homes of millions of people around the world in low-lying territories.
Rights to water and to sanitation – We all have the right to safe water for personal and domestic use and to sanitation that ensures we stay healthy. But a combination of factors such as melting snow and ice, reduced rainfall, higher temperatures and rising sea levels show that climate change is affecting and will continue to affect the quality and quantity of water resources. Already more than one billion people do not have access to clean water, and climate change will make this worse. Extreme weather events such as cyclones and floods affect water and sanitation infrastructure, leaving behind contaminated water and thus contributing to the spread of water-borne diseases. Sewage systems, especially in urban areas, will also be affected.
States
States have the obligation to mitigate the harmful effects of climate change by taking the most ambitious measures possible to prevent or reduce greenhouse emissions within the shortest possible time-frame. While wealthy states need to lead the way, both internally and through international cooperation, all countries must take all reasonable steps to reduce emissions to the full extent of their abilities.
States must also take all necessary steps to help everyone within their jurisdiction to adapt to the foreseeable and unavoidable effects of climate change, thus minimizing the impact of climate change on their human rights. This is true irrespective of whether the state is responsible for those effects, because states have an obligation to protect people from harms caused by third parties.
States must take steps to tackle climate change as fast and as humanely as possible. In their efforts to address climate change, they must not resort to measures that directly or indirectly violate human rights. For example, conservation areas or renewable energy projects must not be created on the lands of Indigenous peoples without consulting them and getting their consent.
In all measures, states should respect the right to information and participation for all affected people, as well as their right to access effective remedies for human rights abuses.
However, the current pledges made by governments to mitigate climate change are completely inadequate, as they would lead to a catastrophic 3°C increase in average global temperatures over pre-industrial levels by 2100. People in countries including France, the Netherlands and Switzerland are taking their governments to court for their failure to establish sufficient climate mitigation targets and measures.
Corporations Businesses also have a responsibility to respect human rights. To meet this responsibility, companies must assess the potential effects of their activities on human rights and put in place measures to prevent negative impacts. They must make such findings and any prevention measures public. Companies must also take measures to remedy human rights abuses they cause or to which they contribute, either by themselves or in cooperation with other actors. Such responsibilities extend to human rights harms resulting from climate change.
Corporations, and particularly fossil fuel companies, must also immediately put measures in place to minimize greenhouse emissions – including by shifting their portfolio towards renewable energy – and make relevant information about their emissions and mitigation efforts public. These efforts must extend to all the major subsidiaries, affiliates and entities in their supply chain.
Fossil fuel companies have been historically among the most responsible for climate change – and this continues today. Research shows that just 100 fossil fuel-producing companies are responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions since 1988.
There is growing evidence that major fossil fuel companies have known for decades about the harmful effects of burning fossil fuels and have attempted to suppress that information and block efforts to tackle climate change.
Q. Why do we need to stop climate change?
A. Because we all deserve equal protection.
We are all born with fundamental human rights, yet these rights are under grave threat from climate change. While climate change threatens all of our lives in some way or other, people who experience discrimination are among those likely to be the worst affected. We are all equally deserving of protection from this universal threat.
A. Because there is nothing to lose from acting, and everything to gain.
Fighting climate change gives us a chance to put the wellbeing of people first by ensuring a right to a healthy environment. This will give us an opportunity to enhance human rights, for example by enabling more people to access cleaner and cheaper energy resources and create job opportunities in new sectors.
A. Because we have the knowledge, power and ability to stop climate change.
Many people are already working on creative, inspiring and innovative solutions to address climate change. From citizens to companies to cities, there are people all over the world actively working on policies and campaigns and solutions that will protect people and the planet. Indigenous peoples and minority communities have for centuries developed sustainable ways of living with the environments that they call home. We can learn from them and, with their consent, benefit from their know-how to inform our own efforts to find a different way of interacting with our planet.
Fiona Harvey writing in an Opinion column for the Guardian (Fri 22 May 2020) says:
After the financial crisis, green investment paid dividends. Coronavirus presents an even greater opportunity
Everest is once again visible from Kathmandu, after decades shrouded in pollution. Greenhouse gas emissions have fallen to levels last seen in 2006. Nature has returned to our streets with a quack and a flurry, and people are waking to birdsong in inner cities as the roar of traffic recedes.
Clear skies bring little cheer at the food bank, however. Birdsong might lift the heart, but it won’t pay the rent.
The environmental renaissance that has come with lockdown shows both the necessity of cleaning up our filthy air and atmosphere, and the dangers of associating economic ruin with environmental gain. Daily greenhouse gas emissions fell by a quarter in many countries when the lockdown bit hardest, according to the first comprehensive study this week, and by early April were 17% down on last year. At the same time, the global economy plunged 6% and half the global workforce now face the loss of their livelihoods, says the International Labour Organisation.
Getting people back to work will mean rapidly rising carbon emissions, as it did after the financial crisis of 2008, unless strong action is taken by governments. Already, emissions are climbing: they will be only 4% down on the year if lockdowns are lifted next month.
For environmentalists, it may seem tedious to have to explain yet again why it makes economic sense to save the planet – there wouldn’t be an economy without the environment, so if we trash it “growth” will cease to have much meaning. But we teeter on the threshold of what could be the greatest depression for centuries. People who are losing their jobs and homes, with only politicians’ promises to put in their bank account, have every right to ask whether now is the time to prioritise the climate – or couldn’t it wait a year or two while we sort out this catastrophe first?
That question has a clear answer: a green recovery can produce higher returns on public spending and create more jobs in both the short term and the long term, compared to the alternative of pouring stimulus cash into the fossil fuel economy.
Those findings come from a study of the potential for a green recovery, based on a survey of finance ministries and central bankers, and a comparison with the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, conducted by the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank chief economist Lord Stern, and leading economists from Oxford University.
After the financial crisis in 2008, calls for a green recovery were partially successful. About 16% of the global stimulus spending was green, including subsidies for renewable energy, seed funding for research and development, and new technology such as electric vehicles.
That proportion may seem small, and the effects of the rest of the spending – much of which went on carbon-intensive projects such as concrete construction and coal – were soon apparent: carbon emissions, which had fallen 1.4%, rebounded by a record amount of nearly 6% in 2010.
Yet the green stimulus bore fruit. Renewable energy expanded, and the cost of wind and solar power fell far faster than predicted, to the point where both forms of power are now competitive with fossil fuel generation, without the need for subsidy.
If that was possible from just 16% of stimulus spending, what could be done if the proportions were reversed? We are much better prepared to create green jobs now, according to the Oxford study. Shovel-ready projects, from insulating homes to widening cycle lanes, abound. Electric vehicle charging points are needed around the world, and the slack in public transport can be used to upgrade rail networks.
Car companies, with government incentives, could hasten the move from petrol and diesel engines. The renewable energy industry has progressed in the last decade, making home solar installation cheap and offshore wind farms viable. All of these are labour intensive and would provide quick returns on taxpayer cash.
There are fledgling industries that could soar with a government boost. Fatih Birol, the widely respected executive director of the International Energy Agency, points to hydrogen and batteries as two major areas “now ready for the big time”. Hydrogen, in the form of ammonia, will be key to decarbonising shipping, but take-up has been slow due to lack of investment.
If governments get it right, the structural changes needed to bring emissions to net zero in the next 30 years will come with a gain in jobs and security. But more needs to be done to ensure that people see the positive, rather than associate falling emissions with falling prosperity. Much of the public discussion so far has focused on attaching “green strings” to bailouts for established industries such as airlines, fossil fuels and car manufacturing. Those are certainly needed – as the failure to attach conditions after the 2008 crisis clearly shows – but can seem like punishing industries already on their knees. Workers on airlines and in shale fields are workers too, with mortgages to pay and families to care for. Shrugging off the loss of their jobs as the casualties of a cleaner future is not good enough: there must be a clear path to high-quality alternatives.
After the financial crisis, capital did not reel for long – the initiative was soon recaptured by austerity advocates and increasingly by populists who persuaded voters in many countries that the rollback of the state was the price of fiscal stability. The same forces are still in place: Donald Trump’s White House has already seized the excuse to repeal dozens of regulations on clean air and water, threatening to reverse environmental protections to a pre-Nixon state. If things are to be different this time, people need reassurance on jobs above all, and hymns to nature must be sung to the backing hum of industry.
Millais travelled to Budleigh Salterton to paint in the location because of connections to Raleigh's birthplace and early life at Hayes Barton, East Budleigh, Devon. Millais' sons modelled for the boys. The sailor was a professional model.
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