History Wars, past, present and future in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"
Welcome to the culture/history wars!
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
This is the oft quoted first line of L.P. Hartley'sThe Go-Between, and the past is, indeed, something we can treat as a foreign country, especially those places we have never actually visited. The "past", as something we actually know about, like the places we have actually known, is quite different to the "past" as something to be used and exploited in the present culture wars. In this context we find bias, unconscious bias, and purposeful bias, are mixed together and "blown up" into toxic media kerfuffles in order to distract from what would otherwise be straightforwardly obvious. Hence the tactics of distraction usually have several phases that include ways in which we are distracted from distraction by distraction.
Caroline Davies reporting for the Guardian (Mon 6 Jul 2020) says:
"Couple say process will be uncomfortable but 'needs to be done because everyone benefits'"
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have said the Commonwealth “must acknowledge the past” even if it is “uncomfortable”, as the couple spoke of historical injustice, unconscious bias and racism in light of the Black Lives Matter movement.
They said the Commonwealth, which grew out of the British empire and is headed by Prince Harry’s grandmother the Queen, needed to follow the example of others, and they accepted it would not be easy.
Their comments came in a video-link discussion on justice and equal rights with young leaders from the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust (QCT), of which Harry and Meghan are president and vice-president respectively.
The QCT has said it has started a conversation about how the Commonwealth’s past – “of
colonialism, of the subjugation of peoples and the ongoing legacy of
such historic injustice – can and should shape the identity of the
organisation, how it develops its offer and how it works in the future”.
During a debate on historical injustices such as the slave trade, Harry, speaking from the couple’s Los Angeles home, said: “When you look across the Commonwealth, there is no way that we can move forward unless we acknowledge the past.
“So
many people have done such an incredible job of acknowledging the past
and trying to right those wrongs, but I think we all acknowledge there
is so much more still to do. It’s not going to be easy and in some cases
it’s not going to be comfortable but it needs to be done, because guess
what, everybody benefits.”
Meghan added: “We’re
going to have to be a little uncomfortable right now, because it’s only
in pushing through that discomfort that we get to the other side of
this and find the place where a high tide raises all ships. Equality
does not put anyone on the back foot, it puts us all on the same footing
– which is a fundamental human right.”
Harry said the young leaders inspired “optimism and hope … because there is no turning back now, everything is coming to a head. Solutions exist and change is happening far quicker than it ever has done before.”
Addressing unconscious bias and racism, he added: “We can’t deny or ignore the fact that all of us have been educated to see the world differently. However, once you start to realise that there is that bias there, then you need to acknowledge it, you need to do the work to become more aware … so that you can help stand up for something that is so wrong and should be acceptable in our society today.”
Meghan spoke of how unconscious bias could manifest in different and complicated ways. “It’s not just in the big moments, it’s in the quiet moments where racism and unconscious bias lies and thrives. It makes it confusing for a lot of people to understand the role that they play in that, both passively and actively.”
The couple have made several other comments around the Black Lives Matter movement. Last week Harry spoke of “endemic” institutionalised racism, saying he was sorry the world was not the place young people deserved it to be.
Last month Meghan, addressing graduates at her old high school, said of the police killing of George Floyd: “The only wrong thing is to say nothing.”
In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, QCT has been running a weekly discussion with young people looking at various forms of injustice.
For Re:LODE Radio the cause of inequality is bigger than the British empire - it is the history and past of capitalism, protected and promoted by actors in the present global "culture wars".
One of the UK actors in "making up" the "past" to promulgate the political and economic ends of neoliberalism, and its bankrupt ideology, but nevertheless backed by powerful capitalist interests, is Policy Exchange.
A recent Policy Exchange project, exposed as another distraction from distraction by distraction by Jonathan Portes, in an Opinion piece for the Guardian, is the History Matters Project. One of the things Re:LODE Radio takes from this exposé is that for actors in the present culture wars . . .
. . . history doesn't matter, it's who is in charge of economic policy that is the issue!
Another day, another skirmish in Britain’s culture war. Once again, universities have found themselves on the frontline. According to a report from the thinktank Policy Exchange, Academic Freedom in the UK, pro-Brexit and rightwing academics are being “forced to hide their views”.
The report cites a YouGov poll of 820 academics, which found that 32% of those who identify their political views as “right” or “fairly right” have “stopped openly airing opinions in teaching and research”. On the surface, these numbers sound legitimate – but simple statistical detective work tells us that this equates to no more than about 10 academics currently employed at UK universities. The survey has been padded out with a large proportion of retired academics, and the report itself is littered with basic statistical errors.
This group of 10 or so academics presumably includes the “Tory leaver” respondent who claimed to have been threatened by their university’s marketing department for not “explicitly condemning conservatism as immoral” in a journal article. The poor soul was also told that “remaining impartial” would entail disciplinary action. To be fair, it’s not just leavers who are persecuted; one “centrist remainer” was apparently removed from a programme after they failed to show sufficient deference towards a photograph of Jeremy Corbyn on a manager’s desk. That the authors were apparently gullible or lazy enough to print these responses, which seem to me like deliberate piss-takes, tells us all we need to know about the report’s credibility.
But while both the report and its recommendations are laughable, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take them seriously. One of the authors, Eric Kaufmann, from the politics department at Birkbeck, University of London, recently called on students and others to report academics for engaging in “politically motivated” attempts to “alter the curriculum”. Who will judge whether such alterations are acceptable? None other than Policy Exchange, under the auspices of its new History Matters project.
It all sounds a bit McCarthyite, doesn’t it? In principle, just about any new addition or minor change to the curriculum could be deemed “politically motivated” – from replacing Shakespeare on the curriculum with Stormzy, to my own attempts, when devising a course on the economics and politics of UK immigration, to inject more sources into the curriculum and develop perspectives from different countries.
Perhaps the thought police really are stalking the corridors of the ivory tower – but they aren’t the same people that the Policy Exchange report identifies. It turns out that academic freedom is only good when your views are defined as acceptable by a rightwing thinktank with close links to Downing Street.
Conflicts between politicians (especially, but by no means always, on the right) and academia are nothing new. And given who provides the funding, government and society have a legitimate interest in what academics do, and how we do it. What’s different here, however, is a concerted push by some academics and thinktanks to misrepresent how universities actually work, in order to impose from the outside their own conception of “diversity”, and their own definition, enforced by government diktat, of what is and what is not acceptable. Now that is genuinely “chilling”.
Leaving this hypocrisy aside, we can all agree that we don’t want legitimate research stifled. But what are we actually talking about here when we speak of “stifling research”? Helpfully, Policy Exchange are not afraid to elaborate. Suppose a colleague of mine at King’s announced that her new research project would investigate the hypothesis that Jews are genetically predisposed to care more about money than non-Jews. How should I respond?
The report argues that I must assume that she is acting in “good faith”. Since propagating racist beliefs is not a “wise career path”, it’s illogical of me to think that she’s interested in anything other than the noble pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. (It’s worth noting here that Kaufmann has proposed tweaking the new UK immigration system to give white people extra “points”, as well as asking us to consider which aspects of the “white genocide” theory are in fact correct. I can’t help observing that his career doesn’t seem to have suffered.)
To insulate this researcher from people like me, who might irrationally conclude that the university would be better off without her research, the report suggests creating a new position, a “director for academic freedom” at the Office for Students. They would be empowered to investigate alleged infringements of academic freedom – yet such breaches wouldn’t be confined to somebody suggesting that a certain research topic is not appropriate for a modern university. Suppose you’re just not very good at your job, in the eyes of your colleagues and peers. Could you be dismissed (or even denied promotion) for “low-grade scholarship”? No, according to Policy Exchange. Such a move would be the thin end of the wedge, as “other academics may be willing to let such a judgment be swayed by political disagreement”.
In other words, Policy Exchange demands that I should be allowed to spend all day ranting on Twitter about my persecution by the leftwing academic establishment (or indeed about the iniquities of Brexit or how VAR has ruined football), pausing only to churn out the occasional article for UnHerd about how terribly unfair it all is. And, when my colleagues gently suggest that I ought to do some serious research or be replaced by someone who will, the Office for Students will step in to defend me. Maybe I shouldn’t complain – but I can’t see how that can be good news for our universities.
Black Legends
Culture Wars are not a new phenomenon. Culture Wars have a significant history, and beginning well before the current phrase has come in to use. This history is significantly connected to the first beginnings of a globalised capitalism and the colonisation of both the west and east "Indies".
Pointing to the origins of this system Re:LODE Radio considers it would be reasonable to identify the Genoese banking system and the financing of the Spanish monarchy in its wars of theReconquista, and the application of this model of war and wealth creation to translating a newly discovered "New World" into an unimaginable wealth of resources, be they human, natural or mineral.
For the LODE project in 1992, and for Re:LODE in 2017, the ideology that sustains contemporary economic and political power has its origins in various forms of fabricated history. The LODE Line and accompanying LODE Zone line, leading the project across modern Colombia and Puerto Rico, necessarily addresses the particular history of propaganda, prejudice and psychological projection, in the so-called Black Legend. Not everything in the Black Legend is a downright lie, but everything has been shaped what we now call "spin". The figure in the painting below has been taken by some interpreters, those pursuing a particular imperial and colonial inspired narrative, for a Genoese sailor, or a Portuguese, pointing to the Spanish Main and the territories of the New Spain, including Colombia and Puerto Rico and along the LODE Zone Line.
The Boyhood of Raleigh, the painting by John Everett Millais that frames each section of the Re:LODE project article To every story there belongs another, came to epitomise the culture of heroic imperialism in late Victorian Britain and in British popular culture up to the mid-twentieth century.
The painting depicts the young, wide-eyedWalter Raleighand his brother sitting on the beach by the Devonshire coast. He is listening to a story of life on the seas, told by an experienced sailor who points out to the sea. If the sailor spinning his yarn about the Spanish main is taken to be either a Genoese or a Portuguese seafarer, then there is another foundation story at work here that alludes to what were claimed, by some ideologues, to be significant differences between the Catholic practice of Christianity, and the inheritors of a modern world shaped by the Protestant Reformation.
If the painting was, perhaps, influenced by an essay written by James Anthony Froude on England's Forgotten Worthies, which described the lives of Elizabethan seafarers, then it worth noting that Froude's historical writing was characterised by its dramatic rather than scientific treatment of history, an approach shaped by his intention to defend the English Reformation. The English Reformation was, he asserted;
"the hinge on which all modern history turned"
and the;
"salvation of England".
This argument was pitted against the interpretations of Catholic historians, as, in turn, he interpreted them. Froude focused on figures such as Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, although he became increasingly unfavorable to Elizabeth over the course of his research. Furthermore, he directly expressed his antipathy towards Rome and his belief that the Church should be subordinated to the state.
This historiographical argument has origins in Raleigh's own time:
As part of an Elizabethan campaign against Spain and the Catholic Church ...Literally hundreds of anti-Spanish publications appeared in English, Dutch, French, and German in the sixteenth century. New editions, and new works restating old accusations, would appear in the Thirty Years War and in other occasions when it seemed useful to excite anti-Spanish sentiment. Given the pervasiveness of such material, it is not surprising that the authors of scholarly histories absorbed anti-hispanism and transmitted it to later generations.
— William S. Maltby, The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire
Such is the continuity of this kind of historical bias it should, perhaps, be considered part of:
A black legend is a historiographical phenomenon in which a sustained trend in historical writing of biased reporting and introduction of fabricated, exaggerated and/or decontextualized facts is directed against particular persons, nations or institutions with the intention of creating a distorted and uniquely inhuman image of them while hiding their positive contributions to history.
The term was first used by French writer Arthur Lévy in his 1893 work Napoléon Intime, in contrast to the expression "Golden Legend" that had been in circulation around Europe since the publication of a book of that name during the Middle Ages.
This "Golden Legend" was a collection of the Lives of the Saints, and that had, before 1501, been printed in more editions than the Bible. It included a "black" legend concerning the origins of Islam. that describes "Magumeth (Mahomet, Muhammad)" as "a false prophet and sorcerer", detailing his early life and travels as a merchant through his marriage to the widow, Khadija and goes on to suggest his "visions" came as a result of epileptic seizures and the interventions of a renegade Nestorian monk named Sergius.
Historian Manuel Fernández Álvarez defined a black legend as:
"The careful distortion of the history of a nation, perpetrated by its enemies, in order to better fight it. And a distortion as monstrous as possible, with the goal of achieving a specific aim: the moral disqualification of the nation, whose supremacy must be fought in every way possible."
— as cited in Alfredo Alvar's book, La Leyenda Negra
Though black legends can be perpetrated against any nation or culture, the term "The Black Legend" has come to refer specifically to "The Spanish Black Legend" (Spanish: La leyenda negra) when not otherwise qualified, the theory that anti-Spanish political propaganda from the 16th century or earlier, whether about Spain, the Spanish Empire or Hispanic America, was sometimes "absorbed and converted into broadly held stereotypes" that assumed that Spain was "uniquely evil."
The absorption of political propaganda and outright fabrications into mainstream academic interpretations of Spanish history, along with their use to conceal or sanitize inconvenient facts about other nations, resulted in a systematic repetition of such anti-Spanish bias and distortions. Commonly cited examples of this include the Spanish Inquisition and the relationship between Spanish colonists in the New World and the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
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 Juderías. 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, Juderías 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.
Juderías, Julián, La Leyenda Negra (2003; first Edition of 1914)
A 1598 propaganda engraving by Theodor de Bry supposedly depicting a Spaniard feeding Indian children to his dogs. De Bry's works are characteristic of the anti-Spanish propaganda that originated as a result of the Eighty Years' War.
Later writers have supported and developed Juderías' critique. In 1958, Charles Gibson wrote that "Spain and the Spanish Empire were historically presented as cruel, bigoted, exploitative and self-righteous in excess of reality." 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.
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.
However, factors that would set the Spanish Black Legend apart from others might include:
its abnormal permeation and outreach across nations;
its racialized component;
and its abnormal persistence through time.
Protestant propaganda?
Sverker Arnoldsson, from the University of Gothenburg, supports Juderías 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.
Racializing the legend?
Arnoldsson offered a second alternative to the Italian origin in its polar opposite, the German Renaissance. German humanism was deeply nationalistic and longed to create a German identity in opposition to the Roman invaders. However, both Ulrich of Hutten and Martin Luther, the main authors of the movement, combine the "Roman" in a wider concept of the "Latino", or "Welsche." This Latin world includes Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy, and is perceived as;
"foreign, immoral, chaotic and fake, in opposition to the moral, ordered and German."
In addition to the identification of Spaniards with Jews, heretics, and "Africans" there was a clear increase in anti-Spanish propaganda among the detractors of Emperor Charles V. The propaganda against Charles V was deeply nationalistic and identified him with Spain and Rome, even though he was Flemish-born and -raised, with origins in a German dynasty, and spoke little Spanish and no Italian at the time, and was often at odds with the Papacy.
To further the appeal of their cause, rulers opposed to Charles focused on identifying Charles with the Pope, a view that Charles himself had started as a way to force the Spanish troops to accept involvement in his personal German wars, which they very much resisted as being none of their concern. The fact that the troops and supporters of Charles included German and Protestant princes and soldiers was an extra reason to focus attention on the rejection of the Spanish elements attached to them. It was necessary to create fear of Spanish rule, and to do so a certain image had to be created. At this point, the printing press would come into full action.
Among the points most often highlighted was the identification of Spaniards with Moors and Jews due to the high level of intermarriage and the number of "conversos" (Jews or Muslims who had adopted Christianity) in their society, and with the "natural cruelty of those two".
The actual level of intermarriage probably varied by region, being effected by length under Andalucian rule and Iberian Christian stigmas such as Limpieza de sangre. Additionally, the Reconquista which played a major role in creating Castile, benefited substantially from contributions both in soldiers and settlers from all over western Europe, including, but not limited to adventurers of German origin.
Some authors maintain that various incidents with the troops of Charles V in Germany during the war contributed to development of the Black Legend, while others point out that although the majority of Charles's troops were German, atrocities were attributed exclusively to Spaniards, suggesting that the Black Legend already existed prior to these events.
By the end of the 16th century, the Black Legend had acquired clear race-based elements under the influence of Flemish and French writers. By this time the power of Spain had also grown enough to threaten France´s security, and the Flemish nobles had given up all hope of extending their influence in the Castilian and Aragonese courts as they had initially tried to do. This created fear in France and discontent in the Flemish nobility, who saw their comparative power diminished and were repeatedly denied their desire to participate in the conquest of America.
There is also an anti-Islamic and anti-Semitic trope that was to emerge from the Protestant Reformation as part of a process of negative association tapping into deeply embedded European prejudices. This origin combines elements of the German origin with the proofs of the anti-Hispanic narrative existing prior to the 16th century, and with the large number of parallelisms between anti-Spanish and anti-Semitic narratives in modern Europe, and it is among the ones that are gathering most support.
Roca Barea, among others, argues that The Black Legend is founded on a spin-off, a reused version of the anti-Semitic narratives forged and circulated through England and most of Central Europe from the 13th century on.
According to this view, the Spanish Black Legend was created by transferring the already created "character" of the "cruel, gold lusty Jew" onto the Spanish nations.
Since the narrative was familiar, the stereotype accepted, and the identification of Spaniards and Jews was already mainstream in Europe due to the long history of coexistence between both in Iberia, at a time in which the Jews had been expelled from most of Europe, the Black Legend was promptly believed and assimilated in central Europe.
This case has three main sources of proof, the texts of German Renaissance Intellectuals, the existence of black legend narrative in Europe prior to the conquest of America, and the similarity of the stereotypes associated to Judaism by anti-semitic Europe and those that the Black Legend attributed to the Spaniards.
Texts identifying Spaniards with "heretics" and "Jews" can be found in Germany from the 14th century, and various pieces of 15th- and 16th-century anti-Spanish propaganda are almost line by line copies of prior anti-semitic works.
For example, the famous account of the mistreated Native Americans killing their oppressors by pouring melted gold on their heads is an exact copy of the same scene in the anti-semitic poem the Siege of Jerusalem. It also suggests that the deep anti-semitism in Luther´s works may have served a double function, nationalistic and anti Spanish as well as religious, if that identification between both was already in circulation.
This medieval woodcut shows Jews being burned alive in Cologne during 1349 after being blamed for the Black Death.
Luther creates a particularly explicit correlation between "the Jew", already detested in Germany at the time, and "the Spanish", which had a growing power in the area. He describes both as "thieves, false, proud and lusty". It is hard to believe that the words of such an influential thinker would go unnoticed.
This animosity of Luther towards Spain, even though it still was not the power it would later become, is explained by Arnoldsson as follows:
An identification of Italy and Spain with the papacy, even though the Papacy and Spain were bitter enemies at the time.
His own antisemitism and the long history coexistence-and intermarriage-of Christians and Jews in Iberia -the Spanish royal line was known to have Jewish blood in it. Luther characterized Spaniards as "sunt plerunque Marani, Mamalucken; Jews, sons of Jews".
Identification of Spain and Turkey, and fear to an invasion by both.
In 1566 Luther´s conversations are published. Among many other similar affirmations, he is quoted as writing:
[...] Spaniern [...], die essen gern weiss Brot vnd küssen gern weisse Meidlein, vnd sind sie stiffelbraun vnd Pechschwartz wie König Balthasar mit seinem Affen.
The Spanish eat white bread and kiss blonde women with all pleasure, but they are as brown and black as King Balthasar and his monkey.
— Johann Fischart,Geschichtklitterung (1575).
See On the Jews and Their Lies, an antisemitic treatise written in 1543 by the German Reformation leader Martin Luther. In the treatise, he argues that Jewish synagogues and schools be set on fire, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes burned, and property and money confiscated. They should be shown no mercy or kindness, afforded no legal protection, and "these poisonous envenomed worms" should be drafted into forced labor or expelled for all time. He also seems to advocate their murder, writing "[W]e are at fault in not slaying them"
Though not subject to the Inquisition, Jews who refused to convert or leave Spain were called heretics and could be burned to death on a stake
Meanwhile in Spain, the persecution of both Jews and Moriscos, had continued under the regime of the Spanish Inquisition following the Alhambra Decree, issued in January 1492. This decree gave Jews and Muslims the choice between expulsion and conversion. It was among the few expulsion orders that allowed conversion as an alternative and, so it is argued, that this expulsion was based on a religious intolerance, rather than a racial intolerance. Nevertheless,
References to Spanish as "bad Christians", "Jews", "Moors" or racialized references associating said ancestry with lack of moral or general inferiority can be found uninterruptedly in Black Legend sources and political propaganda since the Middle Ages until well into the contemporary period.
A "White Legend" and History Wars
The label "White Legend" is used to describe a historiographic approach which goes too far in trying to counter the Black Legend, and which consequently ends up painting an uncritical or idealized image of Spanish colonial practices. Such an approach has been described as characteristic of Nationalist Spanish historiography during the falangist regime of Francisco Franco, which associated itself with the imperial past couched in positive terms. This was, and is, a highly functional fake narrative that bolsters a nationalistic and nativist agenda.
A contemporary example of this misuse of history can be found in the "facts" that are used in the developing ideology of the populist political party in Spain VOX. Starting with a focus in economically liberal stances and recentralization proposals, the focus of their message shifted towards stances compatible with European right-wing populism, endorsing anti-Islam as well as criticism of multiculturalism and criticizing immigration from Muslim countries, but at the same time promoting immigration from countries of Latin America in order to repopulate Spain. Their view of European Union is that of a soft euroscepticism, arguing that Spain should make no sovereignty concessions to the EU, because they consider Spanish sovereignty to reside in the Spanish nation alone. They propose to eliminate Spain's autonomous communities. In addition, they seek the return of Gibraltar to full Spanish sovereignty.
Vox is considered antifeminist, and wants to repeal the gender violence law, which they see as "discriminant against one of the sexes" and replace it with a "family violence law that will afford the same protection to the elderly, men, women and children who suffer from abuse".
The party pleads for the closure of fundamentalist mosques as well as the arrest and expulsion of extremist imams. Vox has openly called for the deportation of tens of thousands of Muslims from Spain. In 2019, the party's leader demanded a Reconquista or reconquest of Spain, explicitly referencing a new expulsion of Muslim immigrants from the country.
According to Xavier Casals, the warlike ultranationalism in Vox, unifying part of its ideology up to this point, is identified by the party with a palingenetic and biological vision of the country, the so-called "España Viva", but also with a Catholic-inspired culture. The party discourse has also revived the myth of the Antiespaña ("Anti-Spain"), an umbrella term created in the 1930s by the domestic ultranationalist forces to designate the (inner) "Enemies of Spain".
According to Guillermo Fernández Vázquez, Vox's discourse (economically anti-statist & neoliberal as well as morally authoritarian) is similar to Jörg Haider'sFPÖ or Jean Marie Le Pen'sNational Front from the 1980s, thus likening the emergence of the party to an archaic stage of current radical right parties, more worried about the need to modernize their image than Vox; the later's approach to cultural issues would be in line with old school Spanish nationalist parties, restricting the scope of "culture" to "language and tradition".
Vox openly endorses the State of Israel. The party has however also appealed to conspiracy theories invoking the figure of Jewish philanthropist George Soros as mastermind behind Catalan separatism and the alleged "Islamization" of Europe, as well as it features a number of former nazis in party cadres and lists.
In this Observer special report (Sat 23 March 2019) Sam Jones considers:
In a recent interview, Iñaki Gabilondo, perhaps Spain’s best-known journalist, was asked how he would characterise Vox.
“To me, it’s Francoism,” he told eldiario.es. “I was 33 when Franco died. That means I’d lived for 33 years … with Franco in my head, my heart, my world and my soul.”
Vox’s“ultra-Spanish, ultra-centralised thinking, based on fatherland, God, Spain and old values”, he added, was Francoism pure and simple. “It’s something totally recognisable because I lived it,” he said. “It’s exactly what we wanted to get rid of.”
The satirical magazine El Jueves has drawn equally explicit parallels. A recent cover showed the Vox leader, Santiago Abascal, driving a tank towards panicked citizens while wearing the uniform of the Spanish Legion, which was once led by Franco. A speech bubble read: “At last you’ve managed to get Franco out of the Valley of the Fallen!”
History Wars, and the "black armband" versus "white blindfold" debate
When it comes to the British empire and the Commonwealth the LODE Zone Linethat girds the planet leads to Australia and then to Ireland amidst the so-called "History Wars".
An example of political conflict embedded in arguments between two revisionist historical "camps", anxious to capture a national narrative, and complicated by the ramifications of a history of British colonial policy in the formation of these different "histories", is to be found in Australia.
The history wars, as they are called in Australia, are an ongoing public debate over the interpretation of the history of the British colonisation of Australia and development of contemporary Australian society, particularly with regard to the impact on Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders.
However, despite the subject of the History wars being about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, none of the main protagonists in the debate have been Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders.
The so-called "white blindfold" is a term that has been used by the so-called "black armband" camp to represent the extent to which the history of European colonisation post-1788 and government administration since Federation in 1901 may be characterised as having been a relatively minor conflict between European colonists and Indigenous Australians, and generally lacking in events that might be termed 'invasion', 'warfare', 'guerrilla warfare', 'conquest' or 'genocide', and generally marked instead by humane intent by government authorities, with damage to indigenous people largely attributable to unintended factors (such as the spread of new diseases) rather than to malicious policies.
The "black armband" camp see a different history, an invasion marked by violent conflict at the frontier, guerrilla warfare (or other forms of warfare) between Europeans and Aboriginal people, involving frequent or significant massacres of Aboriginal peoples engaged in defending their traditional tribal lands; a situation which can be said to have developed either nationally, or in certain areas, into something like a war of 'extermination' or something which accords with the term genocide as a consequence of British imperialism and colonialism involving continued dispossession, exploitation, ill treatment and cultural genocide.
Politicians have been involved in shaping the debate because the versions of history being set out relate to broader themes concerning national identity, as well as methodological questions concerning the historian and the craft of researching and writing history, including issues such as;
the value and reliability of written records (of the authorities and settlers) and; the oral tradition (of the Indigenous Australians), along with the political or similar ideological biases of those who interpret them.
One theme is how British or multicultural Australian identity has been in history and today.
At the same time the history wars were in play, professional history seemed in decline, and popular writers began reclaiming the field. The field is now an ideological battleground, similar to the United states based Culture Wars, pitting those who seek to acknowledge a darker historical reality with those who prefer a more positive gloss on the nation's story, and blame "political correctness" as a negative influence.
In 2003 Australian historian Stuart Macintyre published The History Wars, written with Anna Clark. This was a study of the background of, and arguments surrounding, recent developments in Australian historiography, and concluded that the History Wars had done damage to the nature of objective Australian history. At the launch of his book, historian Stuart Macintyre emphasised the political dimension of these arguments and said the Australian debate took its cue from the Enola Gay controversy in the United States. The book was launched by former Prime Minister Paul Keating, who took the opportunity to criticise conservative views of Australian history, and those who hold them (such as the then Prime Minister John Howard), saying that they suffered from "a failure of imagination", and said that The History Wars "rolls out the canvas of this debate."
Macintyre's critics, such as Greg Melluish (History Lecturer at the University of Wollongong), responded to the book by declaring that Macintyre was a partisan history warrior himself, and that "its primary arguments are derived from the pro-Communist polemics of the Cold War."Keith Windschuttle said that Macintyre attempted to "caricature the history debate."
In a foreword to the book, former Chief Justice of Australia Sir Anthony Mason said that the book was "a fascinating study of the recent endeavours to rewrite or reinterpret the history of European settlement in Australia."
In 2001, writing in Quadrant, a conservative magazine, historian Keith Windschuttle argued that the then-new National Museum of Australia (NMA) was marred by "political correctness" and did not present a balanced view of the nation's history.
Central "garden" of the National Museum of Australia (Garden of Australian Dreams)
In 2003 the Howard Government commissioned a review of the NMA. A potentially controversial issue was in assessing how well the NMA met the criterion that displays should:
"Cover darker historical episodes, and with a gravity that opens the possibility of collective self-accounting. The role here is in helping the nation to examine fully its own past, and the dynamic of its history—with truthfulness, sobriety and balance. This extends into covering present-day controversial issues."
While the report concluded that there was no systemic bias, it recommended that there be more recognition in the exhibits of European achievements.
The report drew the ire of some historians in Australia, who claimed that it was a deliberate attempt on the part of the Government to politicise the museum and move it more towards a position which Geoffrey Blainey called the 'three cheers' view of Australian history, rather than the 'black armband' view.
In 2006 columnist Miranda Devine described some of the Braille messages encoded on the external structure of the NMA, including "sorry" and "forgive us our genocide" and how they had been covered over by aluminium discs in 2001, and stated that under the new Director;
"what he calls the 'black T-shirt' view of Australian culture" is being replaced by "systematically reworking the collections, with attention to 'scrupulous historical accuracy'".
Devine, Miranda (2 April 2006). "Opinion: Disclosed at last, the embedded messages that adorn museum". Sydney Morning Herald.
An example of the current approach at the NMA is the Bells Falls Gorge Interactive display, which presents Windschuttles's view of an alleged massacre alongside other views and contemporary documents and displays of weapons relating to colonial conflict around Bathurst in 1824 and invites visitors to make up their own minds.
PM Archive - Monday, 13 August , 2001 - Reporter: David Mark
MARK COLVIN: A debate over the controversial new National Museum of Australia goes to the very heart of how we interpret Australian history by questioning whether a massacre did or didn't happen. Historian Keith Windshuttle argues that a display featuring an Aboriginal massacre in the museum's gallery of Aboriginal Australia is a complete fabrication.
He says there is no evidence to support a story which claims that women and children jumped to their deaths at Bells Falls Gorge near Bathurst after white settlers opened fire on them. But the exhibit's curator says documentary evidence isn't everything. Respecting oral histories is equally important. David Mark reports.
DAVID MARK: The Museum's director, Dawn Casey has decided to hold a public debate after some of the Museum's board members raised concerns over perceptions of historical accuracy. At issue is one particular display which features an Aboriginal massacre. One of the Museum's curators, Brad Manera, created the frontier warfare exhibit which includes the massacre display. He says the exhibit contrasts the early encounters between Aborigines and Europeans. On the one hand cooperation and curiosity and on the other hand, conflict. One such conflict occurred around Bathurst in the earl 1820s following a rapid expansion of European settlement in the area.
BRAD MANERA: With the increasing European population there was a great deal of tension and conflict and competition for resources, until a number of stockmen were killed by Aboriginal people in reprisals for the killing of Aboriginal people.
And the British Military Garrison in Bathurst was increased and they began to send patrols out to the area to the north of Bathurst to try and drive off the Wiradjuri people that were living there and to open the area for European settlement and to make it safer for Europeans to live there.
DAVID MARK: There's a legend that the local Wiradjuri women, children and elderly took refuge in hilly country to the north of Bathurst.
BRAD MANERA: The legend has it that mounted settlers or the army found these people and killed them. And indeed, some suggest that the legend has it that these people were driven off the cliff and into the gorge.
DAVID MARK: What facts do we have of the massacre of the women and children jumping over the cliff and to what extent is it just relying on the oral history of the Wiradjuri people?
BRAD MANERA: Accounts by, from the European perspective are rather vague. There are stories from a missionary in the 1850s and also there are written accounts by a magistrate that was in command of a group of British soldiers. They talk about seeking the enemy and clearly he's talking about the Aboriginal population of the area.
DAVID MARK: The problem, according to Sydney historian and publisher Keith Windshuttle, is that there's no evidence of a massacre.
KEITH WINDSHUTTLE: Well I'm working on an article in Australian Historical Studies written by David Roberts in the Department of History at the University of Newcastle, who did a whole thesis on the issue.
He started out presuming that there was a massacre, but found that the story first surfaced in print in 1962, you know, 140 years after the event was supposed to have occurred. And somehow, without checking the original sources, the museum has picked up the story and put in a big display about it.
DAVID MARK: So is the display a documentary of fact or rather an interpretation of what may have been. Brad Manera.
BRAD MANERA: Well it's a good question. I think what the display wants to present is an indigenous voice. The stories that have been passed from one generation to the next about what happened on that site.
I've spoken very close - well you know, in detail - with some very highly respected law keepers, if you like, and they are quite convinced that something very tragic occurred on that place and that they are certain that members of their family, their language group died in that place in the 1820s.
DAVID MARK: But Keith Windshuttle says relying on oral history isn't good enough.
KEITH WINDSHUTTLE: Oral history of events that happened, you know 150/180 years ago can't possibly be accurate. Everybody knows from their own family history that there are rumours in family that go two generations back.
You know your grandmother or your great-grandparents told you. When you actually go and do a bit of genealogy and check up the records yourself you find that a great many of them are not true. And Aboriginal people are no different to white people in this regard.
DAVID MARK: The debate is as much about how we interpret history as the relationships between Aboriginal and European Australia. Both men see the need for debate, but for different reasons.
KEITH WINDSHUTTLE: It's obviously healthy to get the facts right because, you know, schoolchildren go through these things. People who don't know how historical evidence should be judged look at these things and presume they're true when in fact, the slightest bit of degree of investigation can show that they're false.
BRAD MANERA: He's entitled to his version of history and I think that it's a valid one, but I think that the Wiradjuri storytellers have their version of history which is equally as valid.
For some historians it seems that the 'pen' is mightier than a collective 'voice', an oral history communicated through generations. A written untruth is therefore deemed more believable than a spoken truth according to some who choose to live by the pen! Publication in 2016 of"Indigenous Terminology" guidelines ("Indigenous Terminology" University of New South Wales) for the teaching and writing of history by the University of New South Walescreated a brief media uproar.
Amongst the advised language changes, they recommended "settlement" be replaced by "invasion", "colonisation" or "occupation".
They also deemed that the generally accepted anthropological assumption that "Aboriginal people have lived in Australia for 40,000 years" should be dropped for "... since the beginning of the Dreaming/s" as it "reflects the beliefs of many Indigenous Australians that they have always been in Australia, from the beginning of time" and because "many Indigenous Australians see this sort of measurement and quantifying as inappropriate."
While some commentators considered the guidelines appropriate, others categorised them as political correctness, an anathema to learning and scholarship.
Q. Is the term "political correctness" necessarily an anathema to learning and scholarship?
A. To paraphrase Wittgenstein's "axiom" on meaning and language: "Don't ask the meaning. Ask the use."
In the history wars the term "political correctness" is used by conservatives and reactionaries who use the term in an effort to divert political discussion away from the substantive matters of resolving societal discrimination, such as racial, social class, gender, and legal inequality, and against people whom conservatives do not consider part of the social mainstream, and therefore not entitled to a voice.
"Political correctness" as a term was used by the New Left in the United States in the 70's as an in-joke on the left:
"radical students on American campuses acting out an ironic replay of the Bad Old Days BS (Before the Sixties) when every revolutionary groupuscule had a party line about everything. They would address some glaring examples of sexist or racist behaviour by their fellow students in imitation of the tone of voice of the Red Guards or Cultural Revolution Commissar:
Herbert Kohl, in 1992, commented that a number of neoconservatives who promoted the use of the term "politically correct" in the early 1990s were former Communist Party members, and, as a result, familiar with the Marxist use of the phrase. He argued that in doing so, they intended; "to insinuate that egalitarian democratic ideas are actually authoritarian, orthodox, and Communist-influenced, when they oppose the right of people to be racist, sexist, and homophobic."
During the 1990s, conservative and right-wing politicians, think-tanks, and speakers adopted the phrase as a pejorative descriptor of their ideological enemies – especially in the context of the Culture Wars.
The British journalist, Will Hutton, wrote in 2001:
Political correctness is one of the brilliant tools that the American Right developed in the mid–1980s, as part of its demolition of American liberalism.... What the sharpest thinkers on the American Right saw quickly was that by declaring war on the cultural manifestations of liberalism – by levelling the charge of "political correctness" against its exponents – they could discredit the whole political project.
Some of the most diametrically opposed contentions in these history wars have related to the inquiry established by the federal Attorney-General, Michael Lavarch, on 11 May 1995, in response to efforts made by key Indigenous agencies and communities concerned about the general public's ignorance of the history of forcible removal and separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. This Federal and State policy began around 1905, continuing until 1967, known more recently in Australia as the Stolen Generation(s).
The Community Guide summarised the report's conclusions that; "indigenous families and communities have endured gross violations of their human rights. These violations continue to affect indigenous people's daily lives. They were an act of genocide, aimed at wiping out indigenous families, communities, and cultures, vital to the precious and inalienable heritage of Australia"
Five years later, in 2002, the Australian drama film Rabbit-Proof Fence, directed by Phillip Noyce, renewed this controversy. Eric Abetz, a government official, announced the publishing of a leaflet criticising the film's portrayal of the treatment of indigenous Australians, and demanded an apology from the filmmakers. Director Phillip Noyce suggested instead that the government apologize to the indigenous people affected by the removal policy.
The film was based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara, loosely based on the true story concerning the author's mother Molly, as well as two other mixed-race Aboriginal girls, DaisyKadibil and Gracie, who ran away from the Moore River Native Settlement, north of Perth, Western Australia, to return to their Aboriginal families, after being placed there in 1931.
Mr. A. O. Neville, the Chief protector of Aborigines, is the legal guardian of every Aborigine in the State of Western Australia. He has the power . . .
The film follows the Aboriginal girls as they walk for nine weeks along 1,500 miles (2,400 km) of the Australian rabbit-proof fence to return to their community at Jigalong, while being pursued by white law enforcement authorities and an Aboriginal tracker.
Despite the lengthy and detailed findings set out in the 1997 Bringing Them Home report into the Stolen Generation, which documented the removal of Aboriginal children from their families by Australian State and Federal government agencies and church missions, the nature and extent of the removals have been disputed within Australia, with some commentators questioning the findings contained in the report and asserting that the Stolen Generation has been exaggerated.
Despite the fact that none of the more than 500 witnesses who appeared before the Inquiry were cross-examined, to ameliorate the risk of exposing witnesses to unnecessary psychological trauma, this has been the basis of criticism.
This criticism by the Coalition Government and by the anthropologist, and right wing columnist Ron Brunton, and set out in a booklet published by the Institute of Public Affairs (a conservative public policy think tank based in Melbourne, Victoria), was itself criticised in turn by the lawyer Hal Wootten, someone who has served in multiple capacities and offices, including as a Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, a Chairman of the Law Reform Commission of New South Wales, and a Deputy President of the Native Title Tribunal. Wootten has been involved in the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, and the Australian Conservation Foundation, as its President, among other causes.
Wootten also served as the Chairman of the Australian Press Council between 1984 and 1986, so the fact that much of the controversy regarding the history of the Stolen Generation has been stoked up by sections of the Australian press owned by News Corp, the American mass media and publishing company, formed as a spin-off of the original News Corporation founded by Rupert Murdoch in 1980, is relevant.
Following Rupert Murdoch's takeover of The Herald and Weekly Times and a decision from the 15-member council against calling on the Commonwealth Government for an independent tribunal to vet proposed media takeovers and in light of the Council's failure to object to Murdoch's control of 70% of Australia's print media and the sense that both of these events were wrong and unjust, Wootten resigned in protest, alongside John Lawrence, a former federal president of the Australian Journalists Association.
“Allowing Murdoch to assume control of Australian newspapers was unparalleled outside of totalitarian countries. The Federal Treasurer could stop the takeover if he wanted to … in this case it is a man who has renounced his citizenship to further his worldwide media power, and who makes no secret of the fact that he intends to make personal use of his control of newspapers.”
— Hal Wootten, Sydney Morning Herald (17 December 1986)
News Corp's newspaper the Herald Sun is the highest-circulating daily newspaper in Australia, with a weekday circulation of 350 thousand and claimed readership of 1.26 million.
An Australian Federal Government submission has questioned the conduct of the Commission which produced the report, arguing that the Commission failed to critically appraise or test the claims on which it based the report and failed to distinguish between those separated from their families "with and without consent, and with and without good reason". Not only has the number of children removed from their parents been questioned, but also the intent and effects of the government policy.
Some critics, such as Andrew Bolt, an Australian conservative social and political commentator working for the Herald Sun, have questioned the very existence of the Stolen Generation. Bolt stated that it is a "preposterous and obscene" myth and that there was actually no policy in any state or territory at any time for the systematic removal of "half-caste" Aboriginal children.
Robert Manne, Emeritus Professor of politics and Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, and a leading Australian public intellectual, responded that Bolt had not addressed the available documentary evidence demonstrating the existence of the Stolen Generations.
According to Manne this was a clear case of "historical denialism".
Bolt then challenged Manne to produce ten cases in which the evidence justified the claim that children were "stolen" as opposed to having been removed for reasons such as neglect, abuse, abandonment, etc. He argued that Manne did not respond and that this was an indication of unreliability of the claim that there was policy of systematic removal.
In reply, Manne stated that he supplied a documented list of 250 names. Bolt stated that prior to a debate, Manne provided him with a list of 12 names that he was able to show during the debate was "a list of people abandoned, saved from abuse or voluntarily given up by their parents"; and that during the actual debate, Manne produced a list of 250 names without any details or documentation as to their circumstances.
Bolt also stated that he was subsequently able to identify and ascertain the history of some of those on the list and was unable to find a case where there was evidence to justify the term ‘stolen’. He stated that one of the names on the list of allegedly stolen children was 13-year-old Dolly, taken into the care of the State after being "found seven months pregnant and penniless, working for nothing on a station".
One of the qualities of nationalist extremists is the anxious denial of their own group's historic crimes. As soon as the cultural warriors of the right embraced Keith Windschuttle, perhaps for the first time in our history an authentic version of Australian denialism began to emerge.
One branch of this denialism concerns the question of what Australians have come to call the "stolen generations", the policy and practice of removing mixed descent Aborigines from their mothers, families and cultures between 1900 and 1950 when the thinking was unambiguously racist, and between 1950 and 1970 when racist thinking and welfare considerations became intertwined.
The most extreme exponent of this branch of denialism is the Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt. Despite the fact that an Australian Bureau of Statistics survey reveals that between 1900 and 1970, 20,000 to 25,000 indigenous children were separated from their natural families; despite the fact that a mountain of documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony exists that reveal the cruelty and the racist motivations of the policy; despite the fact that even the Howard Government has funded a monument to the stolen generations - in column after column, Bolt has described the question of the stolen generations as a "preposterous and obscene" myth, a "pride murdering fantasy", a "libel on our past".
Bolt has written that there was no policy in any state or territory at any time for the systematic removal of "half-caste" children. This is blatantly wrong. One example must suffice. In 1934, the Secretary of the Department of the Interior in Canberra outlined government practice in the Northern Territory like this: "It is the policy to collect all half-castes from the native camps at an early age and transfer them to the Government Institutions at Darwin and Alice Springs." What does Bolt think this means?
Bolt has often written in a way that suggests that there is not one example of a child seized from a loving mother by force. Again, this is plainly wrong. In October 1919 the tough police inspector at Broome complained to the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, A. O. Neville: "This seizing and removing of children is obnoxious to the police. No neglect has been shown by the mothers. The children have the natural love for the mother." Neville responded thus: "If the duty of bringing in half-caste children is obnoxious to the Police, it is strange that the Department has not previously been advised of this, in view of the hundreds of cases that have had attention." What does Bolt think this exchange means?
Bolt also writes as if in the seizure of the children no racism was involved. If the thousands of children were taken for welfare reasons, to save them from neglect, why is there no example of the removal of a "full-blood" child? Was it not racist when a Protector in the Kimberleys spoke about Aborigines as if they were animals: "I would not hesitate to separate any half-caste from its Aboriginal mother. They soon forget their offspring." And was it not racist when the Commonwealth Government, in 1933, decided that half-castes should be removed so that their "colour" could be "bred out"?
Most denialists have at least an awareness of the relevant historical evidence. Their tactic is to distort and twist. This is not the case with Bolt. He is unacquainted with archival evidence, most stolen generations memoirs, the scholarly monographs, and the publicly available oral history interviews. But his indifference to evidence is even deeper than this. Bolt has dismissed the testimony of stolen children as "lurid anecdotes". In our recent debate at The Age MelbourneWriters' Festival he described documents as "bits of paper". It is from eyewitness testimony and from documents that all history is written. There is no other way. By discounting all such material, Bolt's form of denialism is more absurd, more resistant to reason, than that of Windschuttle. Even David Irving does not call documents "bits of paper".
For the past five years I have been trying to engage Andrew Bolt in debate. In 2001, he agreed and then pulled out. This year, after he argued that the "left" feared debate with the "right", I renewed the invitation.
Trying to get Andrew Bolt to agree to a debate was surreal. Before being willing to debate me Bolt demanded first either "ten" or "one hundred" or even "a few hundred" names of stolen children. I asked him for his definition of a stolen child. He refused to reply. I asked him who was to determine whether or not I had satisfied his pre-condition. Again he refused to reply. Eventually, I sent him some 250 names. After a silence, Bolt agreed to the debate.
Bolt has a Herald Sun blog-site. He appealed on it for help in discrediting my first 12 names. There was no mention of the other 230-plus. Bolt presented the results of his research assistants at last Sunday's debate. The omissions and distortions took my breath away.
One of my names, Margaret Tucker, was raised by a loving mother, who also had to work, and by a completely devoted uncle and aunt. In her wonderful autobiography she reveals that she was with her mother when she was seized. Her mother was so distraught that she was discovered by the uncle and aunt lying in the bush "moaning and crying" like "an animal in pain". Here is Bolt's version: Margaret's mother "had gone to Sydney and some auntie was looking after her-sort of".
Another name was John Moriarty, a much-loved Northern Territory child of mixed descent whose mother was so frightened that he would be stolen that she went to foreign country, Roper River, so he could go to school. One day when she came to pick him up, John was gone. He had been sent in a truck and in a state of high terror with other children to the notorious Alice Springs half-caste institution, the Bungalow. Consider Bolt's account. "He was sent south to go to a boarding school with, he says, aunties and uncles. Stolen? Or sent away?" Every word is invention. In each case he discussed on Sunday, Bolt's distortions were of a similar kind. He has never mentioned the other 230 names.
Historical denialism is a morally terrible matter. By refusing to acknowledge the suffering of the victims it becomes for them and their families a second sickening blow, a revival of the original offence.
Because I want citizens to discover what Bolt has done, before the debate I prepared a 46,000-word documentary collection on "half-caste" child removal. No one could read this collection without understanding how widespread, cruel and racist the policy and practice was. The collection is available on the website of The Monthly magazine. I handed Bolt a copy on Sunday. If Bolt, without taking this evidence into account, continues to claim that the stolen generations is a myth, the nature of his journalism will be plain.
The Bolt/Manne debate is a fair sample of the adversarial debating style in the area. There is focus on individual examples as evidence for or against the existence of a policy, and little or no analysis of other documentary evidence such as legislative databases showing how the legal basis for removal varied over time and between jurisdictions, or testimony from those who were called on to implement the policies, which was also recorded in the Bringing Them Home report. A recent review of legal cases claims it is difficult for Stolen Generation claimants to challenge what was written about their situation at the time of removal.
The report also identified instances of official misrepresentation and deception, such as when caring and able parents were incorrectly described by Aboriginal Protection Officers as not being able to properly provide for their children, or when parents were told by government officials that their children had died, even though this was not the case.
The new Australian Government elected in 2007 issued an Apology similar to those that State Governments had issued at or about the time of the Bringing Them Home report ten years earlier. On 13 February 2008, Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia moved a formal apology in the House of Representatives, which was moved concurrently by the Leader of the Government in the Senate. It passed unanimously in the House of Representatives on 13 March 2008.
In the Senate, the leader of the Australian Greens moved an amendment seeking to add compensation to the apology. This was heavily defeated in a vote of 65 to 4. Having avoided inclusion of this financial burden of responsibility the motion was passed unanimously.
“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.”
The Wikipedia article on the Stolen Generations has a photographic detail of a three dimensional diorama style portrayal entitled The Taking of the Children on the 1999 Great Australian Clock, Queen Victoria Building, Sydney, created by the artist Chris Cooke.
The Queen Victoria Building (QVB) is a heritage-listed late-nineteenth-century building designed by the architect George McRae located in the Sydney central business district, in the Australian state of New South Wales.
As the figure of the Aboriginal hunter circles the exterior of the clock, it activates many animations, and passes the illustrated scenes listed below:
- Aborigines before European settlement. - Captain Cook landing in 1770 - Second fleet landing 1790. - Crossing the Blue Mountains. - The taking of the children. - Corroboree. - Judgement of Myall Creek massacre - The black line, Tasmania, 1830. - Annual blessing Torres Strait islands - Eureka stockade. - Battlefields of 1861 - Lords at London - Opening of Parliament 1901 - Soldiers return to the outback 1945. - Unity 1999.
At a lower level, a small sailing ship is shown circling the exterior of the clock continuously.
The Famine Queen
This
monument to Queen Victoria stands outside the Queen Victoria Building
in Sydney Australia. This sculptural monument to Queen Victoria by the
Irish sculptor John Hughes was originally unveiled by King Edward VII in
1904 outside Leinster House in Dublin, the "second city" of the British
Empire.
The
monumental sculpture, and the portland stone column on which the statue
of Queen Victoria sits, was located in the enclosed courtyard of
Leinster House on 17 February 1908. At a ceremony with 1000 troops on
parade, the Lord Lieutenant declared "we are assembled here to
dedicate this noble work of art to the perpetual commemoration of a
great personality and a great life."
The
statue shows an effort to portray Victoria Regina as the 'Irish Queen'
rather than the 'British Sovereign'. She is seated in a low chair rather
than an elaborate throne, allowing the artist to contain the figure
within a sphere rather than as a towering pillar. And she wears a simple
coronet rather than the royal or imperial crown...Moreover, the statue
portrayed her as the Sovereign Head of the Most Illustrious Order of St
Patrick, Ireland's order of chivalry dating from 1783. The star on her
left breast, and the pendant badge, feature shamrocks, crowned harps,
and St Patrick's Cross.
The
St Patrick reference probably backfired. It confirmed Ireland's
colonial subordination. Round her neck the chain alternates the red and
white roses of England.
The statue sat atop a portland stone column, also designed by Hughes, with three sculptural groups to be placed below – "Fame", "Hibernia at Peace" and "Hibernia at War". This last group was also known as "Erin and the Dying Soldier" and referred to the loyalty demonstrated by Irish soldiers in the Boer War.
In 1922, 14 years after the statue's installation, Leinster House had become the seat of the Irish parliament, the Oireachtas, and nationalistic sentiment disapproved of having a British queen celebrated in such a location.
The statue had by now been given the nickname "The auld bitch" by Irish writer James Joyce.
In
August 1929 The Irish Times reported that discussions were under way to
remove the statue “on the basis that its continued presence there is
repugnant to national feeling, and that, from an artistic point of view,
it disfigures the architectural beauty of the parliamentary buildings.”
As
part of the Irish State's move towards declaring a republic, it was
removed in July 1948 and replaced with a carpark. It was transported to
the Royal Hospital Kilmainham and, along with the associated three
sculptural groups, was left in a courtyard. The hospital had been a
proposed site for the parliament, and so used as a storage location for
property belonging to the National Museum of Ireland. Attempts to send
the sculpture to London, Ontario did not succeed as neither the Canadian
nor Irish governments wished to pay the cost of transport.
In February
1980 the statue was transferred to a yard behind a disused children's
reformatory at Daingean, County Offaly.
In the mid-1980s, the iconic Queen Victoria Building
in central Sydney was undergoing major renovations after decades of
disuse, and appropriate public art was being sought for the entrance.
Neil Glasser, Director of Promotions for the company undertaking the
renovations (Singapore's Ipoh Gardens Ltd), travelled to several former
British colonies in the hope of finding a statue. After a "considerable
amount of sleuthing", the statue, sitting in long grass behind the
reformatory, was rediscovered and proposed to be moved to Australia.
In
order to obtain approval, Glasser contacted John Teahan, the Director
of the National Museum of Ireland, and Sydney's Lord Mayor contacted the
Irish Ambassador in Canberra. In August 1986 Fine Gael Taoiseach,
Garret FitzGerald, authorised that the statue be given to Australia "on
loan until recalled". Subsequently, declassified cabinet papers showed
that the plan was opposed by the then finance minister John Bruton
(later to be Taoiseach), as well as Teahan, on the basis that it
represented the work of an Irish artist and;
"...representative of one of the many traditions of Irish history".
Despite
heavy rain an unveiling ceremony took place on Sunday 20 December 1987
overseen by Eric Neal, Chief Commissioner of Sydney, and Dermot Brangan,
first secretary at the Irish embassy to Australia.
The irony of the British Queen being "transported" to Australia by ship was not lost on the Irish media.
To many Irish people Queen Victoria has been known as the "Famine Queen". as she was the reigning monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland during the second devastating Irish famine known as The Great Famine. The government of Queen Victoria's United Kingdom all but abandoned the rural poor of Ireland to their fate, be it starvation or migration. Meanwhile Irish landlords exported bumper crops of wheat to England.
No wonder, then, that in the days before the unveiling the embassy and the Daily Telegraph
newspaper received anonymous threats of violence and protest about "the
propriety of an Irish government giving a statue of Victoria as a gift."
Ireland’s Australian embassy got “threatening and abusive phone calls”
over the government’s gift of a statue of Queen Victoria to the city of
Sydney, Irish cabinet papers declassified after 30 years have revealed.
“In
the days preceding the unveiling, you should be aware that the embassy
received a number of threatening and abusive phone calls about the
propriety of an Irish government giving a statue of Victoria as a gift.
The callers demanded to know the name of who was going to represent the
Irish government at the ceremony and to warn him/her to stay away,”Brangan said.
Perhaps
the unveiling of this statue had a capacity to trigger deep, and long
standing, feelings of resentment regarding the British Crown. During the
years of the Great War many within the Irish diaspora in Australia
would resist attempts to introduce conscription by the aforementioned Billy Hughes. Hughes
was a strong supporter of Australia's participation in World War I and,
after the loss of 28,000 men as casualties (killed, wounded and
missing) in July and August 1916, Generals Birdwood and White of the
Australian Imperial Force (AIF) persuaded Hughes that conscription was
necessary if Australia was to sustain its contribution to the war
effort.
However, a two-thirds majority of his party, the Labor
Party, which included Roman Catholics and union representatives as well
as the Industrialists (Socialists) such as Frank Anstey, were
bitterly opposed to this, especially in the wake of what was regarded by
many Irish Australians (most of whom were Roman Catholics) as Britain's
excessive response to the Easter Rising of 1916.
The Tudor monarchy had begun the foundations of England's empire in Ireland, and Queen Elizabeth I, following in her fathers footsteps was ruthless in her colonisation policy of destroying feudal autonomies and strengthening her Royal and English rule.
Between 1579 and 1583, Raleigh had taken part in the suppression of the second of the so-called Desmond Rebellions, which took place initially between 1569–1573 and then subsequently between 1579–1583 in the Irish province of Munster.
Raleigh received 40,000 acres (16,000 ha) (approx. 0.2% of Ireland) upon the seizure and distribution of land following the attainders arising from the rebellion, including the coastal walled town of Youghal and, further up the Blackwater River, the village of Lismore.
This made him one of the principal landowners in Munster, but he had limited success inducing English tenants to settle on his estates. Raleigh made the town of Youghal his occasional home during his 17 years as an Irish landlord, frequently being domiciled at Killua Castle, Clonmellon, County Westmeath.
The Royal Clock
There is another, and older, clock in the QVB called the Royal Clock that activates on the hour and displays six scenes of English royalty accompanied by Jeremiah Clarke's trumpet voluntary.
The six scenes (in chronological order) depict:
King Cnut commanding the tide to halt. King Harold dying on the field at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. King John signing the Magna Carta in 1215. Also present in the scene is Stephen Cardinal Langton. Henry VIII and his six wives. Queen Elizabeth I
knighting Sir Francis Drake aboard the Golden Hind in 1588 (an
apocryphal scene as the ceremony was performed by the ambassador from
France—in the Queen's presence), and a republican ending withKing Charles I executed in 1649.
Brought
together in the Queen Victoria Building these clocks reflect the
changing state of parallel foundation narratives, an English myth, and a
more nuanced Australian, post-imperial and reflective adjustment to
recent historical understandings, but both are embedded in a shared
imperial past and stories rooted in the Victorian era.
One of the sequence of scenes displayed on the hour in The Royal Clock was Queen Elizabeth I
knighting Sir Francis Drake aboard the Golden Hind in 1588.
In 1580, having circumnavigated the world in his ship, originally known as Pelican but renamed mid-voyage as the Golden Hind, Queen Elizabeth awarded Drake a knighthood aboard the vessel in Deptford on 4 April 1581; the dubbing being performed by a French diplomat, Monsieur de Marchaumont, who was negotiating for Elizabeth to marry the King of France's brother, Francis, Duke of Anjou.
The Duke of Anjou was a short in stature, and who reminded the queen of a frog - so that is what she called him, her "frog".
By getting the French diplomat involved in the knighting, Elizabeth was gaining the implicit political support of the French for Drake's actions.
During the Victorian era, in a "spirit of nationalism", the story was promoted that Elizabeth I had done the knighting.
The Millais painting of The Boyhood of Raleighcarriesthis"spirit of nationalism", a spirit that validated the British imperial acquisition of territories and peoples across the world, and that shaped the narrative present in Millais' picture.
The Millais picture inspired a famous cartoon, drawn in 1928 by the New Zealand born David Low, showing the Earl of Birkenhead (Secretary of State for India), Stanley Baldwin (Prime Minister) and Winston Churchill (Chancellor of the Exchequer) listening to "Tales of the Dominions" from a diminutive sailor (Leo Amery, Colonial Secretary – who was a very short man).
A favorite scheme of Leo Amery was to develop one or more colonies into white-ruled dominions, with special attention to Southern Rhodesia, Kenya, and Palestine. The strong opposition by the overwhelming nonwhite populations in Africa, and by the Arabs in Palestine, destroyed his plans. In India, the strong resistance of the Congress movement defeated his hopes for greater integration into the Commonwealth.
The Earl of Birkenhead served as Secretary of State for India in Baldwin's second government from 1924 to 1928. Baldwin had allegedly declined to reappoint him to the woolsack on the grounds that it would be inappropriate for the Lord Chancellor to be seen drunk in the street. His views on pre-partition India's independence movement were gloomy. He thought India's Hindu-Muslim religious divide insurmountable and sought to block advances in native participation in provincial governments that had been granted by the 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms. His parliamentary private secretary recalled much time ostensibly on India Office business seemed to be spent playing golf. A 1924 entry in Evelyn Waugh's diary states that an English High Court judge, presiding in a sodomy case, sought advice on sentencing from Lord Birkenhead. "Could you tell me," he asked, "what do you think one ought to give a man who allows himself to be buggered?"Birkenhead replied without hesitation, "Oh, thirty shillings or two pounds; whatever you happen to have on you."
David Low's early reputation working as a cartoonist in Sydney, New South Wales for The Bulletin, was bolstered by a 1916 cartoon satirising Billy Hughes, then the Prime Minister of Australia, entitled The Imperial Conference.
The cartoon captures a moment during Hughes’ trip to England in 1916. At the time, Hughes was lauded for his strong support of the war effort. Behind the scenes, however, there were tensions between Hughes and the British Cabinet. Here you can see British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and Cabinet Minister David Lloyd George being harangued by Hughes. There are upturned chairs and fluttering papers. The caption has Asquith saying ‘Talk with him in Welsh, David, and pacify him!’—a reference to the shared Welsh ancestry of Lloyd George and Hughes. Low later said this cartoon was about Hughes’ propensity to grandstand: ‘It was persistently reported … that behind closed doors his habit of talking people down was an embarrassing experience to the Asquith Cabinet’.
Ronald Munro Ferguson, Australia’s Governor-General, was so amused by the cartoon that he asked Low for the original. Following that success, Low published many cartoons depicting Hughes' forceful and eccentric personality. Hughes was not impressed and apparently called Low a "bastard" to his face.
During this period of the early twentieth century, Irish Home Rule was a burning issue, following on from the political move to rule Ireland from the Westminster parliament, prompted by the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Consequently the Irish and the British parliaments enacted the Acts of Union. The merger created a new political entity called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland with effect from 1 January 1801.
Flying the flag? Job done!
Boris Johnson likes to get things done, really important things like spending tax payers money on painting a military aircraft to fly the flag of the United Kingdom.
Flying the Union Jack has an edge to it in 2020 as never before has the disintegration of the union seemed more likely. With plunging confidence in the UK PM over the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, growing levels of trust in the Scotland's First Minister, and a Brexit NO DEAL economic disaster looming on the horizon, demands for another referendum on Scottish Independence are on the political agenda. If the Scottish Nationalist Party wins convincingly in the upcoming Scottish parliamentary election with a manifesto that includes a referendum on independence, then it would be "undemocratic"for the UK government to block the necessary legislation. But then again;
how democratic is the elected government at Westminster?
It covers the history of England from the time of the Roman occupation until Queen Victoria's death, using a mixture of traditional history and mythology to explain the story of British history in a way accessible to younger readers.
Prime Minister David Cameron chose Our Island Story when asked to select his favourite childhood book in October 2010:
"When I was younger, I particularly enjoyed Our Island Story by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall [...] It is written in a way that really captured my imagination and which nurtured my interest in the history of our great nation."
The
book depicts the union of England and Scotland as a desirable and
inevitable event, and praises rebels and the collective will of the
common people in opposing tyrants, including kings like John and Charles
I.
The ideology/mythology of this influential text has a lot in common with the sequence of illuminated tableau scenes shown on The Royal Clock in the QVB shopping mall.
Henrietta ElizabethMarshall was born in Bo'ness, Scotland, and therefore it is not surprising that she also published the book Scotland's Story in 1906 in the United Kingdom and in 1910 in the United States. It is a text"replete with British imperial iconography".
Scotland's Story starts off with the legend of Prince Gathelus, and it ends with King George IV. It ended here because as Marshall says in the book "And here I think I must end, for Scotland has no more a story of her own – her story is Britain's story."
The book's depiction of William Wallace, which describes him as paving the way for the union of Scotland with England, has been described as a "romanticised illustration" not "based on any idea of historical reality".
The book went out of print in the 1960s, but in 2005, an alliance of the Civitas think-tank and various national newspapers reprinted it, with the aim of sending a free copy to each of the UK's primary schools. Readers of The Daily Telegraph contributed £25,000 to the cost of the reprint.
This building is home to several groups that either spread misinformation about climate science or lobby against government action to reduce emissions.
Those various national newspapers linked in to a rightwing think-tank based in Tufton Street - who would have thought it?
According to ConservativeHome, Civitas"started as the Health & Welfare Unit of the Institute of Economic Affairs, but divorced from it in order to grow and because libertarian elements within the IEA disapproved on the focus on non-narrowly economic issues."
Civitas is based at 55 Tufton Street, in the same premises as Business for Britain and where Vote Leave was originally registered.
Civitas set up the Centre for Social Cohesion 2007. Civitas research was drawn on heavily by Vote Leave in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum.
The think tank describes itself as "classical liberal" and "non-partisan". The Times and The Daily Telegraph have described it as a "right-of-centre think-tank". Its director David G. Green writes occasionally in The Daily Telegraph and its deputy director Anastasia de Waal frequently contributes to The Guardian's "Comment is free" section.
The Times has described Civitas as an ally of former Education Secretary Michael Gove.
It is opposed to green regulations, to legislation designed to reduce climate change, and to greater reliance on renewable energy.
Keen as Civitas and the readers of The Daily Telegraph were to revive the influence of Our Island Story it turns out, according the Guardian Books blog article (Fri 7 Feb 2014) by Tom Holland that Our Island Story is:
During the campaigns, for and against, Scottish independence in the lead up to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, there was much less debate concerning the historical realities, and more than enough political posturing based on received ideas and constructed mythologies.
The PM is broadcasting his love of Henrietta Marshall's book while campaigning against Scottish independence. It's an odd choice of propaganda
Politicians, cynics like to imagine, publicise their choice of reading as carefully and calculatingly as they do their records on Desert Island Discs. This morning, when David Cameron declared his love of the Edwardian childhood classic Our Island Story, the fact that he did so in the course of a speech on the Scottish referendum may well have caused some to raise their eyebrows. In fact, though, Cameron has form when it comes to eulogising Henrietta Marshall's gloriously sweeping history of Britain. Four years ago, in the same survey that saw Nick Clegg nominate The Gruffalo, he picked it as his all-time favourite children's book. Clearly, then, Our Island Story genuinely does appeal to something in our prime minister's heart.
It is not hard to guess, of course, in the context of the possible break-up of the United Kingdom, what the appeal of Marshall's narrative might be to a Conservative leader. Toryism has its romantic as well as its utilitarian side, and Our Island Story portrays the rise of British institutions as a stirring tale of heroism and triumph. As well as Parliament and freedom under the law, Marshall casts the union of England and Scotland as something almost pre-ordained, and celebrates it with a strain of romanticism that owes much to that most influential of Scottish Tories, Sir Walter Scott. Marshall herself, though, was no Tory. The vision of British history as a progression towards enlightenment and liberty articulated in her book was famously cast by the historian Sir Herbert Butterfield as Whiggish – yet she was no Whig either.
As Ted Vallance, the author of A Radical History of Britain, has pointed out, Marshall wrote her book in Australia, a country that by the early 20th century was way in advance of Britain in terms of its democratic fundamentals.
Those who have never read Our Island Story should not be deceived by Tory enthusiasm for it into imagining it jingoistic. To read it is to discover what Vallance has aptly described as "the surprising radicalism of this deceptively traditional text".
The keynote of Our Island Story is an enthusiasm for the rights and freedoms of the people at the expense of those cast by Marshall as their oppressors. Kings who fail to do right by their subjects are forthrightly condemned. William the Conqueror, John and Charles I all duly receive black marks. Alfred, by contrast, is hailed as "England's Darling", less for his achievement in defeating the Danes than because "he did away with the laws which he thought were bad, and made others".
Marshall is even keener on rebels. Boudicca is praised for teaching the Romans that "the women of Britain were as brave and as wise as the men, and quite as difficult to conquer", and Wat Tyler for starting a rebellion that was "the beginning of freedom for the lower classes in England". Feminist and progressive, Our Island Story is a book that would have little truck with any Bullingdon school of history. Cameron may or may not appreciate it as such – but as a text for Unionists to rally around, it is certainly not only for Tories.
The colony myth . . .
Renton is a main character played by Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting, a 1996 British black comedy crime film directed by Danny Boyle.
An essay, published
in The Scotsman (Wednesday 06 August 2014) by Colin Kidd, Professor of
History at the University of St Andrews, and Gregg McClymont, Labour MP
for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East, is headlined:
SCOTTISH
NATIONALISTS increasingly paint the Union between Scotland and England
as a colonial relationship. Independence for Scotland is equated –
somewhat insensitively, as we shall see – with the freedoms won by
former colonies of European empires.
In the past few decades,
nationalist intellectuals have also detected a Scottish inferiority
complex of cringing self-abasement within the Union, and have rather
pointedly aligned this with the cultural experiences of colonised
peoples. This is a new departure.
For, once upon a time, the
acknowledged reticence of Scots was attributed – by inter-war
nationalist intellectuals no less – to a dour patriarchal Calvinism
inculcated by harsh dominies all too quick to use the tawse on the
outspoken and self-confident, as well as on the indolent and the badly
behaved.
More recently, however, the Union has replaced
Puritanism as the prime cause of Scotland’s ills. Nor is the
identification of Scotland as a downtrodden colony any longer confined
to the margins of political debate. Rather, it seems to have become an
axiom of popular nationalism. Thus the repeated references of Yes
campaigners to the countries of the Commonwealth and outside who have
achieved “independence” from England their former colonial master.
The
phenomenon is sufficiently widespread to have attracted the notice of
outside observers. The distinguished historian Linda Colley –
English-born but based at Princeton University in the USA – recently
expressed her surprise at the number of Scots who believe Scotland’s
relationship with England to be a colonial one.
One might call
this the Renton interpretation of history – who can forget his diatribe
against English colonialism and Scottish self-abasement in
Trainspotting? But what in Irvine Welsh’s novel appeared as an amusing
and deliciously shocking slice of absurd theatre has now gone mainstream.
Even
the avowedly non-nationalist figure Kenneth Roy, founder of the
Scottish Review, writes in his recent history of modern Scotland that
the post-war nation “reverted to the place ascribed for it in the Union
as an unthreatening backwater distinguished by the poor education, poor
health and poor housing of its people”.
Roy adds for good measure
that Scots schoolchildren were deliberately denied by the education
system a grounding in Scottish history: “In denying children an adequate
knowledge of their own culture and identity, it asserted the relative
insignificance of Scotland.”
Scots, it is now too widely believed
for comfort, are a colonised nation, ruled over by a dominant caste of
English colonisers. Or “Westminster” in the language of Yes. This is not
only largely nonsensical as history, but offensive and insulting to
many non-white, non-European peoples who did, in fact, find themselves
oppressed or even dispossessed by the “British” Empire.
Scots
were complicit in empire, and it is insulting to the real victims of
empire to assume otherwise. What else are we to make of the golf course
built for Scots traders at their slave trading post on Bance Island at
the mouth of the Sierra Leone River in the 18th century? Who was doing
the exploitation here? Or the Scots planters in the West Indies – one,
alas, named Kidd – who dressed their slaves in tartan? Or, indeed, of
the fact that the Jamaican mother of Diane Abbott MP was a McClymont by
birth?
After all, one of the main causes of the Union of 1707
was, ironically, the failure of Scotland’s attempt to establish its own
colony at Darien in Panama in the late 1690s. The Darien disaster was a
massive drain on Scottish capital, and accusations that English trading
and foreign policy interests had conspired to thwart the venture stirred
up Anglophobia in Scotland. However, the point is that Scottish
criticism of English imperialism was focused on the larger power’s
unwillingness to let the junior kingdom achieve its own colonial
ambitions. As a result many early 18th-century Scots came to the
conclusion, however reluctantly, that the only route to a Scottish
colonial empire was within a formal Anglo-Scottish union.
Nevertheless,
by the 1750s and for two centuries thereafter enthusiastic
participation in the British Empire was a defining aspect of Scottish
identity.
The nationalist version of Scottish history is
cartoonish and drawn in primary colours. It leaves little room for
shading, nuance or the tangled complexities of the past as it really
was. The emotional resonance produced by history displaces a desire to
understand or explain.
It comes as a shock, therefore, when
nationalists discover that unionism – something they despise as a kind
of false consciousness supposedly imposed upon Scots by the English –
was framed long before the Union of Parliaments in 1707, moreover almost
a century before the Union of the Crowns in 1603. And that it was
devised by Scots as a means of ensuring Scotland’s interests were not
overwhelmed by its larger neighbour.
Unionism was first
formulated as a set of ideas by the Catholic philosopher John Mair, of Haddington, around 1520. It was Mair’s central idea that union was the
opposite not of independent Scottish nationhood, but of an English
empire over the territory of Great Britain. How was tiny Scotland to
control her much larger neighbour who inhabited the same island except
by means of an agreement, a union which would allow both English and
Scottish institutions, laws, cultures and identities to flourish within
the same island under a common monarchy?
The alternative was
cross-border warfare, and the fear of an inevitable victory – in the
end, and notwithstanding the occasional Bannockburn – for the larger
power. In other words, the casual antithesis we encounter of unionism
and nationalism is misconceived.
Traditionally, union was seen by
Mair and the early Scots unionist tradition as a means of taming
English imperial ambitions, of binding an overmighty neighbour within a
set of negotiated constraints. In this sense, Flodden not Bannockburn
was the decisive cross-border battle.
Unionists today are just as
concerned as nationalists to protect Scottish institutions, Scottish
identity and Scottish prosperity but the former believe Scottish
autonomy is best secured within the civilised and polite setting of a
Union state which we have built together over 300-plus years. The
alternative today is a return to a less intimate, less friendly
relationship: between an independent England and an independent
Scotland, a situation moreover that would have been willed – however
narrow the majority – by Scots themselves. Obviously this outcome would
not mark a return to the warfare of the Middle Ages; but after any
divorce – as we know – there’s a bit of unhappiness and anger followed
by paths diverging. Both sides increasingly pursue their own interests
without reference to those of their former partner.
If Alex
Salmond really does believe that post-referendum negotiations to break
up the UK would be seamless and friendly, and that Scots and English
would remain best friends and neighbours he is deluding himself.
As
Professor Anthony King – a Canadian academic based in England – has
recently noted, England is a democracy too; and the people of England
would feel rejected and hurt if Scotland chose to leave. Quite
understandably English voters would insist on placing English interests
first. Consequently, English politicians would have no choice but to
reflect this posture at the negotiating table.
John Mair and the
Scottish architects of the Union would be in no doubt about who would
have the better of these negotiations. After all, Union was designed by
Scots – and for Scotland – as the means by which our nation could
maximise its autonomy while sharing across this island with a much
larger neighbour.
Q. So, where is this Darien?
A. Along the LODE Zone Line in what was a part of Colombia until the USA had it wrenched away to build the Panama Canal.
The Darien scheme was an unsuccessful attempt by the Kingdom of Scotland to become a world trading state by establishing a colony called "Caledonia" on
the Isthmus of Panama on the Gulf of Darién in the late 1690s. The aim
was for the colony to have an overland route that connected the Pacific
and Atlantic oceans.
At
the time, and up to the present day, claims have been made that the
undertaking was beset by poor planning and provisioning, divided
leadership, a lack of demand for trade goods particularly caused by an
English trade blockade, devastating epidemics of disease, collusion
between the English East India Company and
the English government to frustrate it, as well as a failure to
anticipate the Spanish Empire's military response. It was finally
abandoned in March 1700 after a siege by Spanish forces, which included a
blockade of the harbour.
As
the Company of Scotland was backed by approximately 20% of all the
money circulating in Scotland, its failure left the entire Lowlands in
substantial financial ruin and was an important factor in weakening
their resistance to the Act of Union (completed in 1707). The land where
the Darien colony was built, in the modern province of Guna Yala, is virtually uninhabited today.
During
the seventeenth century, for those living in the British Isles in the
lands of Scotland, England and Ireland, these were "interesting times",
overshadowed by the Wars of the Three Kingdoms,
sometimes known as the British Civil Wars, formed an intertwined series
of conflicts that took place in the kingdoms of England, Ireland, and
Scotland between 1639 and 1651. These wars included the Bishops' Wars of 1639 and 1640 with conflict in Scotlandbetween Covenanters and Royalists and an English army; the Irish Rebellion of 1641; Confederate Ireland, 1642–1649; the Scottish Civil War of 1644–1645; and the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in 1649, collectively known as the Eleven Years War or Irish Confederate Wars; and the First, Second and Third English Civil Wars of
1642–1646, 1648–1649 and 1650–1651. This was followed in Scotland by a
period of unrest related to religious differences between 1670-1690. The
impact upon the Scottish population was profound, and diminished their
material resources significantly.
The 1690s marked the lowest point of the Little Ice Age,
of colder and wetter weather. This reduced the altitude at which crops
could be grown and shortened the growing season by up to two months in
extreme years, as it did in the 1690s. There is some conjecture that
massive eruptions of volcanoes at Hekla in Iceland (1693) and Serua
(1693) and Aboina (1694) in Indonesia may also have had some global
effects upon the atmosphere and filtered out significant amounts of
sunlight.
In Scotland, the so-called "seven ill years" of
the 1690s saw widespread crop failures and famine. This was a period of
national famine in Scotland in the 1690s. It resulted from an economic
slump created by French protectionism and changes in the Scottish cattle
trade, followed by four years of failed harvests (1695, 1696 and
1698–99). The result was severe famine and depopulation, particularly in
the north. The famines of the 1690s were seen as particularly severe,
partly because famine had become relatively rare in the second half of
the seventeenth century, with only one year of dearth (in 1674). The
shortages of the 1690s would be the last of their kind.
During
this period, starvation probably killed 5–15 per cent of the Scottish
population, but in areas like Aberdeenshire death rates reached 25 per
cent. The system of the Old Scottish Poor Law was overwhelmed by the
scale of the crisis, although provision in the urban centres of the
burghs was probably better than in the countryside. It led to migration
between parishes and emigration to England, Europe, the Americas and
particularly Ireland. While Scotland's deteriorating economic position
led to some calls for a political or customs union with England, the
stronger feeling among Scots was that the country should attempt to
become a great mercantile and colonial power like England. The crisis
resulted in the setting up of the Bank of Scotland and the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies.
In
the face of opposition by English commercial interests, the Company of
Scotland raised subscriptions in Amsterdam, Hamburg and London for the
scheme. For his part, King William II of Scotland and III of England had
given only lukewarm support to the whole Scottish colonial endeavour.
England was at war with France and hence did not want to offend Spain,
which claimed the territory as part of New Granada.
The New Kingdom of Granada
The
original concept of the Darien Scheme was to create a trading colony,
an entrepôt in the New World to facilitate trade between Europe and the
East Indies across the isthmus, that had been realised in the maritime
trading routes of the Spanish treasure fleet and the Manila Galleons from 1865 to 1815 but in the context of complete control of exchange by the Spanish and their "closed sea".
This
was in the first era of the globalisation of trade and currency, along
with the permanent embedding of nascent capitalism with colonial and
imperial exploitation of nature and peoples.
Opening
up this highly controlled and "closed system" with this kind of
intervention would risk opposition on many fronts.
In the twentieth
century the Darien Scheme concept was further realised and validated in
the United States appropriating the Panamanian land corridor for the
Panama Canal, but the need for an entrepôt for trading had long been superseded by the establishment of imperial and colonial trading centres.
The Re:LODE project has an article that looks at the broader historical and geographical context:
It was Scottish-born trader and financier William Paterson,
and one of the founders of the Bank of England, had long promoted the
plan for a colony on the Isthmus of Panama to be used as a gateway
between the Atlantic and Pacific.
Whilst
in London, Paterson had met a sailor called Lionel Wafer, who had told
him about a wonderful paradise on the Isthmus of Panama, with a
sheltered bay, friendly Indians and rich, fertile land - a place called
Darien.Lionel Wafer (1640–1705) was a Welsh explorer and privateer,and certainly had a buccaneering tale, or two, to tell. He wasa
ship's surgeon, and had made several voyages to the South Seas and
visited Maritime Southeast Asia in 1676. In 1679 he sailed again as a
surgeon, soon after settling in Jamaica to practise his profession.
It was Wafer'sPacific Adventure, under the changing leadership of variousCaptains, including John Coxon, Robert Allison, Cornelius Essex, and Thomas Magott, and
joined later by Captains Richard Sawkins, Edmund Cooke, and Peter
Harris. Towards the end of this adventure under the leadershipof Bartholomew Sharp,
a story was to emerge that was to spark Paterson's interest in the
Isthmus of Darien. In 1680, when Wafer was recruited by buccaneer Edmund Cooke to join a privateering venture under the leadership of Captain Bartholomew Sharp. It was at this time that he met William Dampier at
Cartagena on the Caribbean coast of New Granada. Dampier was an English
explorer, ex-pirate and navigator who became the first Englishman to
explore parts of what is today Australia, and the first person to
circumnavigate the world three times. He has also been described as
Australia's first natural historian, as well as one of the most
important British explorers of the period between Sir Walter Raleigh and
James Cook.
A New Voyage Round the World
After impressing the Admiralty with his book A New Voyage Round the World, Dampier
was given command of a Royal Navy ship and made important discoveries
in western Australia, before being court-martialled for cruelty. On a
later voyage he rescued Alexander Selkirk, a former crewmate who may have inspired Daniel Defoe'sRobinson Crusoe. Others influenced by Dampier include James Cook, Charles Darwin, and Alfred Russel Wallace.
An
eyewitness account of Sharp's adventures was published in The Dangerous
Voyage And Bold Assaults of Captain Bartholomew Sharp and Others, by
Basil Ringrose (London, 1684). William Dampier gave a brief account of his time with captain Sharp and the buccaneers in A New Voyage Round the World (1697).
John
Cox wrote an account of his time
with the Buccaneers, and Bartholomew Sharp wrote his own account, and a
detailed atlas intended for the Admiralty. The Pacific Adventure is
perhaps the best-documented voyage of high seas piracy in history.
By Dr Mike IbejiBBC 2011-02-17: Decades
of warfare had combined with seven years of famine to drive people from
their homesteads and choke the cities with homeless vagrants, starving
to death in the streets. The nation's trade had been crippled by
England's continual wars against continental Europe, and its home-grown
industries were withering on the vine. Something had to be done. Some
way had to be found to revive Scotland's economic fortunes before it got
swallowed up by its much richer neighbour south of the border.
The
man who came up with the answer was a financial adventurer called
William Paterson, a Scot who had made his name down south as one of the
founding directors of the Bank of England. Paterson returned to
Edinburgh with an audacious scheme to turn Scotland into the major
broker of trade across the Pacific Ocean.
Whilst
many of the geographic and trading facts were available in Wafer's
account, the fact of the challenging dimension of the local tropical
environmental conditions were passed over in another case of
documentation and information having an administrative standing over
experience. Nevertheless, the Darien Company hired Wafer as an adviser
when it was planning its settlement on the isthmus in 1698.
Paterson
had immediately seen the potential of Darien as the location of a
trading colony. Trade with the incredibly lucrative Pacific markets was a
hugely expensive business, since all merchant ships had to make the
hazardous trip round Cape Horn on the southern tip of South America.
This added months to the journey, and the ships involved had a high
chance of being lost at sea. If a colony could be established at Darien,
goods could be ferried from the Pacific across Panama and loaded onto
ships in the Atlantic from there, speeding up Pacific trade and making
it much more reliable. Moreover, the Scottish directors of the Darien
Venture could charge a nice fat commission for the privilege. Never mind
that the Spanish claimed control of that part of Panama: no-one ever
made a profit without stepping on some toes.
For the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies,
whilst the concept was valid, the degree of English opposition would be
significant, and the scheme itself was vulnerable to the new global
politics, where Spain, for the English interest, was to be treated as a
sleeping dog, and left to lie, in the ongoing tensions between England
and the France of Louis XIV.
One
reason for English opposition to the Scheme was the then prevalent
economic theory of Mercantilism, a concept as widespread and accepted
then as capitalism is today. Modern economics generally assumes a
constantly growing market but mercantilism viewed it as static; that
meant increasing your own market share required taking it from someone
else. This meant the Darien Scheme was not simply competition but an
active threat to English merchants.
England was also under pressure from the London-based East India Company,
who were keen to maintain their monopoly over English foreign trade. It
therefore forced the English and Dutch investors to withdraw. Next, the
East India Company threatened legal action on the grounds that the
Scots had no authority from the king to raise funds outside the English
realm, and obliged the promoters to refund subscriptions to the Hamburg
investors. This left no source of finance but Scotland itself.
Darien House, headquarters of the Company of Scotland in Edinburgh, now demolished
The
idea proved hugely popular, and there was a great rush to subscribe to
the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, founded in
June 1695; but it was not just the Spanish who felt threatened by it.
The English East India Company, fearing the loss of its monopoly on
British trade to the Indies, successfully lobbied the English
Parliament, which threatened the new company with impeachment, forcing
its English investors to withdraw.
Undaunted, Paterson and his
colleagues turned to the Scottish people for support. Thousands of
Scots, both rich and poor, flocked to subscribe, and within 6 months
£400,000 had been raised. The money was used to fit out five ships for
the expedition, the Unicorn, St Andrew, Caledonia, Endeavour and
Dolphin, despite efforts by the English authorities to block them. The
English ambassador to Holland even threatened to embargo any merchants
who traded with the new company.
However,
Lionel Wafer's stories of long-haired Indians living a life of luxury
in a land of milk and honey had given the company's founders an
unrealistic vision of what lay ahead. The cargo manifests of the first
expedition list thousands of combs and mirrors, which they expected to
sell to the Indians, along with boxes of wigs and other useless items
which the colonists expected to use in their new life. They were
completely unprepared for the ordeal which lay ahead.
The
ships set sail from Leith harbour on 4th July 1698, under the command
of Captain Robert Pennecuik. Of the 1,200 settlers in the first
expedition, only he and William Paterson knew of their destination,
which was outlined in sealed packages to be opened only once the ships
were on the open sea.
They made landfall at Darien on 2nd
November, having lost only 70 people during the voyage. Full of
optimism, they named the peninsula New Caledonia, and set to work
building a settlement. However, their first choice of site was, as
Paterson put it: 'A mere morass, neither fit to be fortified nor
planted, nor indeed for men to lie upon... We were clearing and making
huts upon this improper place near two months, in which time experience,
the schoolmaster of fools, convinced our masters that the place now
called Fort St Andrew was a more proper place for us'.
Within the
fort stockade, they began to erect the huts of New Edinburgh. However,
they soon found that the land was unsuited to agriculture and the
Indians were uninterested in the trinkets they had brought with them.
Spring 1699 brought torrential rain, and with it disease. By March 1699,
more than 200 colonists had died, and the death rate had risen to over
10 a day. To make matters worse, the ships sent out to trade for
supplies returned with news that all English ships and colonies were
forbidden to trade with the Scots by order of the King. One ship did not
return at all. The Dolphin was captured by the Spanish and its crew
imprisoned.
They
were the lucky ones. Roger Oswald, a young gentleman who had joined the
venture full of hope and optimism, wrote a harrowing account of what
life was like that Spring on the Darien Peninsula. They lived on less
than a pound of mouldy flour a week: 'When boiled with a little water,
without anything else, big maggots and worms must be skimmed off the
top... In short, a man might easily have destroyed his whole week's
ration in one day and have but one ordinary stomach neither... Yet for
all this short allowance, every man (let him never be so weak) daily
turned out to work by daylight, whether with the hatchet, or
wheelbarrow, pick-axe, shovel, fore-hammer or any other instrument the
case required; and so continued until 12 o'clock, and at 2 again and
stayed till night, sometimes working all day up to the headbands of the
breeches in water at the trenches. My shoulders have been so wore with
carrying burdens that the skin has come off them and grew full of boils.
If a man were sick and obliged to stay within, no victuals for him that
day. Our Councillors all the while lying at their ease, sometimes
divided into factions and, being swayed by particular interest, ruined
the public... Our bodies pined away and grew so macerated with such
allowance that we were like so many skeletons.'
William
Paterson's wife died on that peninsula, along with his dreams. The final
straw was news that the Spanish were planning an attack on the colony.
The settlers took to the sea in panic, abandoning the settlement. Of the
four ships that fled the colony, only the Caledonia made it back to
Scotland, with less than 300 souls on board.
A
second expedition left Scotland in August 1699, knowing nothing about
the fate of the first colony. Three ships, led by The Rising Sun,
carried a further 1,302 settlers, of which 160 died in the crossing.
Finding the colony abandoned, they set about rebuilding it; but the
second colony fared no better than the first. The Revd Archibald Stobo,
one of three Presbyterian ministers who accompanied the second
expedition, was scandalised by the barbarity of the colonists. 'Our land
hath spewed out its scum...' he wrote, 'We could not prevail to get
their wickedness restrained, nor the growth of it stopped...' He viewed
the sickness and contagion which plagued the colony as the just
judgement of God.
In fact, his judgement is harsh. The men and
women sent out to Darien were completely unprepared for the harshness of
the territory in which they found themselves, and the collapse of
discipline and rampant disease which afflicted them were the natural
consequence of their altered circumstances. On top of this, they faced
the constant threat of attack from the Spanish, with absolutely no
support from the English colonies which had been ordered not to aid
them.
Seeing
this, one newly-arrived young officer, Captain Alexander Campbell of
Fonab, persuaded the colonists to launch a pre-emptive strike against
the Spanish forces massing at Toubacanti on the mainland. The attack was
outrageously successful, but only served to sting the Spanish into
concerted action. Under the command of Governor-General Pimiento, a
massive fleet and army besieged Fort St Andrew, which finally
surrendered in March 1700. The surviving colonists were permitted to
vacate the fort on board their remaining ships. Only a handful ever made
it back to Scotland.
The
Darien Venture was a complete disaster for Scotland. The blow to
Scottish morale was incalculable. Those colonists who returned found
themselves cast as pariahs in their own land. Roger Oswald, disowned by
his father, wrote to a friend: 'Since it pleased God that I have
preserved [my life], and had not the good fortune (if I may term it so)
to lose it in that place, and so have been happy by wanting the sight of
so many miseries that have come upon myself... I never intended, nor do
intend, to trouble my father any more.'
William Paterson found
himself forced to defend his actions. He partially vindicated himself
with a no-holds-barred account of the colony. Some years later, he was
granted a pension of £18,000, but he died a deeply disillusioned man.
Only Campbell of Fonab came out of the affair with honour. He made it
back to Scotland, where he was awarded the 'Toubacanti Medal' for his
part in the débacle, but he never stopped blaming the Company for
failing to support its colonists.
The
failure of the colonisation project provoked tremendous discontent
throughout Lowland Scotland, where almost every family had been
affected. Some held the English responsible, while others believed that
they could and should assist in yet another effort at making the scheme
work. The Company petitioned the King to affirm their right to the
colony. However, the monarch declined, saying that although he was sorry
the company had incurred such huge losses, reclaiming Darien would mean
war with Spain. The continuing futile debate on the issue served to
further increase bitter feelings.
Hoping to recoup some of its
capital by a more conventional venture, the company sent two ships from
the Clyde, the Speedy Return and the Continent, to the Guinea coast
laden with trade goods. Sea captain Robert Drummond was the master of
the Speedy Return; his brother Thomas, who had played such a large part
in the second expedition, was supercargo on
the vessel. Instead of trying to sell for gold as the company's
directors intended, however, the Drummond brothers had exchanged the
goods for slaves, whom they sold in Madagascar. Carousing with the
buccaneers for whom the island was a refuge, the Drummonds fell in with
pirate John Bowen, who offered them loot if they would lend him their
ships for a raid on homeward bound Indiamen. Robert Drummond backed out
of the agreement, only to have Bowen appropriate the ships while
Drummond was ashore. Bowen burnt the Continent on the Malabar coast when
he decided she was of no use to him, and he later scuttled the Speedy
Return after transferring her crew to a merchant ship he had taken. The
Drummonds apparently decided against returning to Scotland, where they
would have had to explain the loss of the ships they had been entrusted
with, and no more was ever heard of them.
The company sent out
another ship, but she was lost at sea. Unable to afford the cost of
fitting out yet another vessel, the Annandale was hired in London to
trade in the Spice Islands. However, the East India Company had the ship
seized on the grounds that this was in contravention of their charter.
This provoked an uproar in Scotland, greatly aided by the inflammatory
rhetoric of the company's secretary, Roderick MacKenzie, a relentless
enemy of the English. Fury at the country's impotence led to the
scapegoating and hanging of three innocent English sailors.
The
Darien chest, which held the money and documents of the Company of
Scotland. Now in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.
The failure of the Darien colonisation project has been generally cited as one of the motivations for the 1707 Acts of Union.
According to this argument, the Scottish establishment (landed
aristocracy and mercantile elites) considered that their best chance of
being part of a major power would be to share the benefits of England's
international trade and the growth of the English overseas possessions,
so its future would have to lie in unity with England. Furthermore,
Scotland's nobles were almost bankrupted by the Darien fiasco. In
Scotland, some claimed that union would enable Scotland to recover from
the financial disaster wrought by the Darien scheme through English
assistance and the lifting of measures put in place through the Alien
Act to force the Scottish Parliament into compliance with the Act of
Settlement.Some
Scottish nobility petitioned Westminster to wipe out the Scottish
national debt and stabilise the currency. Although the first request was
not met, the second was and the Scottish shilling was given the fixed
value of an English penny. Personal Scottish financial interests were
also involved. Scottish commissioners had invested heavily in the Darien
project and they believed that they would receive compensation for
their losses.
The 1707 Acts of Union, Article 15, granted £398,085 10s
sterling to Scotland to offset future liability towards the English
national debt.
Personal
financial interests were also allegedly involved. Many Commissioners
had invested heavily in the Darien scheme and they believed that they
would receive compensation for their losses; Article 15 granted £398,085
10s sterling to Scotland, a sum known as The Equivalent, to offset
future liability towards the English national debt. In essence it was
also used as a means of compensation for investors in the Company of
Scotland's Darien scheme, as 58.6% was allocated to its shareholders and
creditors. Even
more direct bribery was a factor. £20,000 (£240,000 Scots) was
dispatched to Scotland for distribution by the Earl of Glasgow. James
Douglas, 2nd Duke of Queensberry, the Queen's Commissioner in
Parliament, received £12,325, more than 60% of the funding. Robert Burns
referred to this:
We're bought and sold for English Gold, Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation.
The
Treaty was hated in Scotland at the time. Riots occurred in Edinburgh,
as well as substantial riots in Glasgow. The people of Edinburgh
demonstrated against the treaty, and their apparent leader in opposition
to the Unionists was James Hamilton, 4th Duke of Hamilton. However,
Hamilton was actually on the side of the English Government.
Demonstrators in Edinburgh were opposed to the Union for many reasons:
they feared the Kirk would be Anglicised; that Anglicisation would
remove democracy from the only really elementally democratic part of the
Kingdom; and they feared that tax rises would come.
Sir George Lockhart of Carnwath, the only member of the Scottish negotiating team against union, noted that "The whole nation appears against the Union" and even Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, an ardent pro-unionist and Union negotiator, observed that the treaty was "contrary to the inclinations of at least three-fourths of the Kingdom". Public
opinion against the Treaty as it passed through the Scottish Parliament
was voiced through petitions from shires, burghs, presbyteries and
parishes. The Convention of Royal Burghs also petitioned against the
Union as proposed:
That
it is our indispensable duty to signify to your grace that, as we are
not against an honourable and safe union with England far less can we
expect to have the condition of the people of Scotland, with relation to
these great concerns, made better and improved without a Scots
Parliament.
Not
one petition in favour of an incorporating union was received by
Parliament. On the day the treaty was signed, the carilloner in St Giles
Cathedral, Edinburgh, rang the bells in the tune Why should I be so sad on my wedding day? Threats of widespread civil unrest resulted in Parliament imposing martial law.
Q. What is the lesson we can take from the facts of this particular history?
A. We're bought and sold for English Gold, Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation.
The Scottish establishment (landed
aristocracy and mercantile elites)are the Parcel of Rogues in the Scottish Nation referred to by Robert Burns. They were acting politically and constitutionally in their own narrow interests to maintain the status quo of power relations, regardless of issues of national sovereignty. Democracy for them was not an issue. Just as for Civitas Democracy is used as a cloak devised to hide other agendas.
Rogues in a Nation by Steeleye Span
Fareweel to a' our Scottish fame, Fareweel our ancient glory; Fareweel ev'n to the Scottish name, Sae fam'd in martial story. Now Sark rins over Solway sands, An' Tweed rins to the ocean, To mark where England's province stands- Such a parcel of rogues in a nation! What force or guile could not subdue, Thro' many warlike ages, Is wrought now by a coward few, For hireling traitor's wages. The English steel we could disdain, Secure in valour's station; But English gold has been our bane - Such a parcel of rogues in a nation! O would, ere I had seen the day That Treason thus could sell us, My auld grey head had lien in clay, Wi' Bruce and loyal Wallace! But pith and power, till my last hour, I'll mak this declaration; We're bought and sold for English gold- Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!
Robert Burns
The privatization of profit and . . . . . . the socialization of loss!
Nosheen Iqbal covers this story for the Observer (Sun 5 Jul 2020) on how a "statue war" was instigated by a Daily Telegraph journalist.
Nosheen Iqbal writes:
Sprawled on a throne, sword in hand, the statue of Constantine the Great is a familiar fixture outside York Minster. The city claims a connection to the first Roman emperor to establish the Christian faith across Europe. It was in York that Constantine is believed to have succeeded his father to rule the Roman Empire in 306AD. And it was here last week that reports that his life-size bronze could be torn down were considered a threat to civilisation itself. York Minster had received complaints that the emperor supported slavery, claimed the Daily Telegraph, and that Black Lives Matter protests had led to the statue being put under review. The story was followed up by the Daily Mail and the news was shared thousands of times online accompanied by ridicule and fury. “Stop capitulating to these ridiculous demands”, tweeted comedy writer Andrew Doyle. “Pathetic”, wrote Welsh assembly member Neil Hamilton. If a classical Roman statue, albeit one erected in 1998, could become an alleged target for destruction, what would come next? Except one awkward fact persisted: it turns out the story simply wasn’t true. There had been no such complaints to York Minster. The statue is not under review. The Black Lives Matter movement had no active part to play in a debate that appears to have been speculatively confected. “Contrary to what has been reported, we have not received a single complaint about Emperor Constantine’s statue,” said a York Minster spokesperson, adding: “We are not removing Emperor Constantine’s statue. Nothing is happening: there is no discussion, action, intention or even thoughts about it.” The imaginary statue scandal comes amid a heated culture war that goes from Donald Trump at Mount Rushmore railing against “cancel culture” on Friday to Ashfield’s Tory MP suggesting that a local statue of a miner was under threat. Statues have become a national obsession, dominating radio talkshows and generating many more hysterical column inches than is proportionate to any real-world risk to them. In an attempt to stop the false narrative spreading, Sunder Katwala, the director of thinktank British Future, repeatedly corrected those sharing the Constantine story online. “The sheer made-upness of it gave people pause,” he told the Observer. “The internet massively over-amplifies polarisation on these questions. And it creates a sense in newsrooms, in political offices, that there are these two tribes that are absolutely at loggerheads – but we’ve done lots of research and work on history and identity and what people think about, and there just isn’t an appetite for these issues.” He said that the rightwing press often complained, “but if [they] don’t want these culture wars, why are [they] inventing them?” Historian Tom Holland is also sceptical. “Iconoclasm polarises people; it expresses the worst fears of those who don’t want to see symbols of the past brought down and it becomes a summons to battle,” he said. To Holland, the false fight for Constantine was “a lockdown distraction” for those taking part. Following the toppling last month of Bristol’s statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, the Church of England has asked cathedrals and churches to review their monuments and statues for specific examples which symbolise and reflect prejudices experienced by people today. “The transatlantic slave trade is the most prominent example and has a contemporary manifestation,” said the York Minster spokesperson. “Constantine and the Romans do not fall into this category.” Polling by Hope Not Hate last week revealed that 67% of the British public felt attacks on statues and war memorials was “political correctness gone mad” but overall, there was strong public support for the aims of Black Lives Matter protests and 64% agreed that black and Asian people face discrimination in their everyday lives. To Katwala, the framing of Black Lives Matter online plays to “a strategic advantage from the right in inventing a culture war … This government can either deliver on people wanting a sense of pride in their town, the high street, jobs, spreading the economy – all the things Boris Johnson has been saying – or it can increase the profile of something [it doesn’t] agree with Keir Starmer and David Lammy on.” The net result is that nuance is lost, the broader issues are ignored and only the loudest, rather than the most representative, voices get heard. As for York, the emperor remains victorious. The Telegraph’s social and religious affairs editor, Gabriella Swerling, declined to comment on her story. A spokesperson for the paper said: “Our journalist spoke to both York Minster and the York Civic Trust and the story we believe accurately reflects these conversations.”
US president enflames national tensions with attack on ‘leftwing revolution’ and plan for national memorial of statues of ‘American heroes’
David Smith in Washington reporting for the Guardian (Sat 4 Jul 2020) writes:
Standing beneath Mount Rushmore on the eve of American independence day, Donald Trump staged a defiant celebration of what critics say is white identity politics and warned the nation’s history is under siege from “far-left fascism”.
The US president defended the symbolism of statues and monuments before a packed crowd at an event that revelled in political incorrectness calculated to enflame the country’s current divisions and enrage liberal critics. There were few face masks and even fewer people of colour on stage or in the stands.
“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children,”Trump said. “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”
In an effort to fight back, he announced a surprise executive order establishing “The National Garden of American Heroes”, a vast outdoor park featuring statues of “the greatest Americans to ever live” – a selection sure to provoke debate and controversy. Mount Rushmore in South Dakota depicts the images of US presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Washington and Jefferson owned slaves and have found their legacies increasingly questioned since the police killing of African American George Floyd in Minneapolis by a white police officer on 25 May triggered a wave of Black Lives Matter protests and the toppling of dozens of Confederate statues. The president has shown no sign of embracing the public mood, but has rather dug in with a “law and order” response, promising harsh penalties for anyone who vandalizes statues, resisting changes to military bases named after Confederate generals and retweeting (then deleting) a video in which a man shouted “White power!”. On Friday Trump become the first president since George HW Bush in 1991 to attend Mount Rushmore’s independence day celebration. He saluted and his wife, Melania, stood with hand on heart as the national anthem played, the stars and stripes unfurled on big screens and Blue Angels jets flew overhead. “This monument will never be desecrated,” Trump declared, eliciting cheers. “These heroes will never be defaced. Their legacy will never, ever be destroyed. Their achievements will never be forgotten. And Mount Rushmore will stand forever as an eternal tribute to our forefathers and to our freedom.” In remarks that offered little by way of reconciliation, he went on to rail against “cancel culture, driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and to our values. It has absolutely no place in the United States of America. “This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty, must be stopped, and it will be stopped very quickly.” He added darkly: “In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished.” Gesturing to the overwhelmingly white crowd, he said: “Not going to happen to us.” Trump added: “Make no mistake, this leftwing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American revolution.” When the president said he was deploying federal law enforcement to protect monuments and arrest and prosecute offenders, the crowd rose to their feet and applauded. When he proclaimed, “They want to silence us, but we will not be silenced,” there were chants of “USA! USA!” In a swipe at sports professionals and others who take a knee to protest racial injustice, Trump said: “We stand tall, we stand proud and we only kneel before almighty God.” He went on to announce the National Garden of American Heroes in an executive order that said it should include statues of figures like Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T Washington, George Washington and Orville and Wilbur Wright.
After the speech, Trump sat with Melania to watch a fireworks display above the monument, accompanied by patriotic music and historical readings, the first since 2009 due to environmental concerns and wildfire fears. South Dakota says the surrounding Black Hills National Forest has “gained strength” since then and that fireworks technology has advanced.
But the threat of damage was one more example of how, if president’s advisers had designed a stunt to goad his critics in the media and Congress, they could hardly have chosen a more incendiary time and place. Protesters blocked a road leading to the monument. Authorities worked to move the demonstrators, mostly Native Americans protesting that South Dakota’s Black Hills were taken from the Lakota people against treaty agreements and objecting to Trump celebrating American independence on their sacred ground. About 15 protesters were arrested after missing a police-imposed deadline to leave. The Democratic National Committee tweeted at one point that Trump had disrespected Native Americans and that his South Dakota trip was “glorifying white supremacy”. It subsequently deleted the tweet. As in Oklahoma and Arizona last month, Trump held an event with a big crowd despite health experts’ recommendations to avoid large gatherings amid a surge of coronavirus cases to a record of more than 50,000 per day. Covid-19 cases in Pennington county surrounding Mount Rushmore have more than doubled over the past month.
It was reported on Friday that Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of the president’s son Donald Trump Jr, has tested positive for the coronavirus. She had travelled to South Dakota but did not attend the event.
George Monbiot shares a lesson from history in his Opinion piece for the Guardian (Thu 2 Jul 2020) under the headline and subheading:
It may not be fascism, but in the US and UK rightwing nationalists are reviving classic myths and resentment
The anger that should be directed at billionaires is instead directed by them. Facing inequality and exclusion, poor wages and insecure jobs, people are persuaded by the newspapers billionaires own and the parties they fund to unleash their fury on immigrants, Muslims, the EU and other “alien” forces.
From the White House, his Manhattan tower and his Florida resort, Donald Trump tweets furiously against “elites”. Dominic Cummings hones the same message as he moves between his townhouse in Islington, with its library and tapestry room, and his family estate in Durham. Clearly, they don’t mean political or economic elites. They mean intellectuals: the students, teachers, professors and independent thinkers who oppose their policies. Anti-intellectualism is a resurgent force in politics.
Privileged grievance spills from the pages of the newspapers. Opinion and leader writers for the Telegraph and the Spectator insist they are oppressed by a woke mafia, by the rise of Black Lives Matter and other cultural shifts. From their national newspaper columns and slots on the BBC’s Today programme, they thunder that they have been silenced.
Myths of national greatness and decline abound. Make America Great Again and Take Back Control propose a glorious homecoming to an imagined golden age. Conservatives and Republicans invoke a rich mythology of family life and patriarchal values. Large numbers of people in the United Kingdom regret the loss of empire.
Politicians and political advisers behave with impunity. During the impeachment hearings, Trump’s lawyer argued, in effect, that the president is the nation, and his interests are inseparable from the national interest. Cummings gets away with blatant breaches of the lockdown. Robert Jenrick, the housing secretary, with his assistance for a developer who then donated to the Tories. With every unpunished outrage against integrity in public life, trust in the system corrodes. The ideal of democracy as a shared civic project gives way to a politics of dominance and submission.
Political structures still stand, but they are hollowed out, as power migrates into unaccountable, undemocratic spheres: conservative fundraising dinners, US political action committees, offshore trade tribunals, tax havens and secrecy regimes. The bodies supposed to hold power to account, such as the Electoral Commission and the BBC, are attacked, disciplined and cowed. Politicians and newspapers launch lurid attacks against parliament, the judiciary and the civil service.
Political lying becomes so rife that voters lose the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. Conspiracy theories proliferate, distracting attention from the real ways in which our rights and freedoms are eroded. Politicians create chaos, such as Trump’s government shutdowns and the no-deal Brexit Boris Johnson seems to be engineering, then position themselves as our saviours in troubled times.
Trump shamelessly endorses nativism and white supremacy. Powerful politicians, such as the Republican congressman Steve King, talk of defending “western civilisation” against “subjugation” by its “enemies”. Minorities are disenfranchised. Immigrants are herded into detention centres.
Do these circumstances sound familiar? Do they pluck a deep, resonant chord of apprehension? They should. All these phenomena were preconditions for – or facilitators of – the rise of European fascism during the first half of the 20th century. I find myself asking a question I thought we would never have to ask again. Is the resurgence of fascism a real prospect, on either side of the Atlantic?
Fascism is a slippery, protean thing. As an ideology, it’s almost impossible to pin down: it has always been opportunistic and confused. It is easier to define as a political method. While its stated aims may vary wildly, the means by which it has sought to grab and build power are broadly consistent. But I think it’s fair to say that though the new politics have some strong similarities to fascism, they are not the same thing. They will develop in different ways and go by different names.
Trump’s politics and Johnson’s have some characteristics that were peculiar to fascism, such as their constant excitation and mobilisation of their base through polarisation, their culture wars, their promiscuous lying, their fabrication of enemies and their rhetoric of betrayal. But there are crucial differences. Far from valorising and courting young people, they appeal mostly to older voters. Neither relies on paramilitary terror, though Trump now tweets support for armed activists occupying state buildings and threatening peaceful protesters. It is not hard to see some American militias mutating into paramilitary enforcers if he wins a second term, or, for that matter, if he loses. Fortunately, we can see no such thing developing in the UK. Neither government seems interested in using warfare as a political tool.
Trump and Johnson preach scarcely regulated individualism: almost the opposite of the fascist doctrine of total subordination to the state. (Though in reality, both have sought to curtail the freedoms of outgroups.) Last century’s fascism thrived on economic collapse and mass unemployment. We are nowhere near the conditions of the Great Depression, though both countries now face a major slump in which millions could lose their jobs and homes.
Not all the differences are reassuring. Micro-targeting on social media, peer-to-peer texting and now the possibility of deepfake videos allow today’s politicians to confuse and misdirect people, to bombard us with lies and conspiracy theories, to destroy trust and create alternative realities more quickly and effectively than any tools 20th-century dictators had at their disposal. In the EU referendum campaign, in the 2016 US election, and in the campaign that brought Jair Bolsonaro to power in Brazil, we see the roots of a new form of political indoctrination and authoritarianism, without clear precedents.
It is hard to predict how this might evolve. It’s unlikely to lead to thousands of helmeted stormtroopers assembling in public squares, not least because the new technologies render such crude methods unnecessary in gaining social control. As Trumpseeks re-election, and Johnson prepares us for a likely no deal, we can expect them to use these tools in ways that dictators could only have dreamed of. Their manipulations will expose longstanding failures in our political systems that successive governments have done nothing to address.
Though it has characteristics in common, this isn’t fascism. It is something else, something we have not yet named. But we should fear it and resist it as if it were.
Q. Is there a name for - Free market ideologues, climate change deniers, fighting for the kind of democracy and freedom that buys and sells the resources of the planet (inc. all people, and all of nature) for private profit?
A. Rogue-oligarchy?
"Far-left fascism" followed by "leftwing Conservatives"?
Larry Elliott in an Opinion piece for the Guardian Journal (Tue 7 Jul 2020) writes on how:
Back in December, a major plank of the Conservative party’s general election strategy was to portray Jeremy Corbyn as a Marxist throwback, committed to all sorts of dangerous 1970s lefty ideas such as state ownership and higher public spending.
Six months later, Boris Johnson felt the need, when announcing plans to bring forward £5bn of investment in Britain’s clapped-out public infrastructure, to reassure voters that he was “not a communist” and still believed in capitalism.
It’s easy to see why the prime minister felt the need to provide some reassurance to his party’s traditional supporters, who believed the Conservatives stood for a small state, free enterprise and sound public finances. Johnson has nationalised the railways, is paying the wages of about a third of the workforce and is on course to borrow more this year than any other prime minister in peacetime. If Corbyn had announced that he was prepared to take a stake in strategically important companies to stop them going bust, Johnson would have been the first to accuse the former Labour leader of “picking winners”. In a Covid-19 world, it is what the government does, if more out of necessity than conviction.
But as Larry Elliott points out later in this Opinion piece for the Guardian:
Thus far, there is nothing historically exceptional about what Johnson’s administration has been doing. Governments in the past have expanded the role of the state. They have used fiscal policy – tax, spending and borrowing – aggressively during recessions. They have bailed out troubled companies. They have argued that higher spending on infrastructure will pay for itself by shifting the economy into a higher gear.
The problem for the Conservatives is that parties of the left have traditionally been more comfortable pushing these policies than parties of the right. Johnson likes to talk about his brand of one nation Conservatism, but somehow or another he has ended up with an economic strategy rather like that of Harold Wilson’s 1964-70 Labour government, with its National Plan for growth, high levels of public spending and belief in the transformative power of science and technology. It is certainly not Thatcherism, which is why free-market thinktanks are uncomfortable with the government’s direction of travel.
For the time being, there is not much those who think Johnson’s dalliance with dangerous leftwing ideas will end in tears can do about it. They can point out that in some ways the lockdown has highlighted the strengths of the market, with many businesses finding all sorts of creative ways to keep themselves going. They also make the point that the way the government has handled the crisis – from its Soviet-style targets for testing to its chaotic air bridges – has not always been the best advertisement for an activist state.
Politics goes in cycles and there will eventually be a moment when that thinking resonates with the public, but not now. For the moment, if the opinion polls are to be believed, voters are far more receptive to more stimulus and a rolling back of welfare cuts. The Resolution Foundation thinktank’s proposal for a £200bn spending boost, complete with £500 of spending vouchers for every adult, is far more in tune with the public mood than a return to austerity.
This is not entirely surprising. As the shadow business secretary, Ed Miliband, said on Tuesday, a pandemic is the ultimate collective action problem: it is simply not feasible to tell workers and companies that they must survive on their own as best they can when the government itself has been responsible for shutting down the economy.
Nor is the mood likely to change all that quickly. The recession of the early 1990s was cured by Britain leaving the exchange rate mechanism on Black Wednesday. Pouring money into the banks was the turning point in the financial crisis of 2008. This time, only a vaccine for Covid-19 will do the trick, and that could be years away.
Re:LODE Radio considers this last paragraph quoted from Larry Elliott's Opinion piece more or less, and succinctly, covers the time period, thus far, of the LODE project, and the strategies applied during this time for turning a succession of national and global crises. However, the crisis that we face now certainly includes the ongoing impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, but people everywhere are facing the impact of climate change, and the time for action is passing.
Addressing and acting upon both these crises, and urgently, is the lesson we must take from the present.
"Who owns history?"; is a question that belongs everywhere to the question:
Who owns the land?
When it comes to the question of the rule of law; in this case . . .
A federal judge has sided with the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and ordered the Dakota Access pipeline to be shut down until a more extensive environmental review is carried out.
US district judge James Boasberg had previously said the pipeline, which has been in operation three years, remained “highly controversial” under federal environmental law, and a more extensive review was necessary after an environmental assessment by the US army corps of engineers.
In a 24-page order on Monday, Boasberg wrote that he was “mindful of the disruption such a shutdown will cause” but said he had concluded that the pipeline must be shut down for an environmental impact statement (EIS).
“Clear precedent favoring vacatur [an order setting aside a previous judgment] during such a remand coupled with the seriousness of the Corps’ deficiencies outweighs the negative effects of halting the oil flow for the 13 months that the Corps believes the creation of an EIS will take,”Boasberg wrote.
Boasberg had ordered both parties to submit briefs on whether the pipeline should continue operating during the new environmental review.
The $3.8bn (£3bn) pipeline was the subject of months of protests, sometimes violent, during its construction near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, which straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border.
The 1,172-mile (1,886km) underground pipeline carries oil from North Dakota across South Dakota and Iowa and to a terminal in Illinois. Just north of the Standing Rock reservation, it crosses beneath the Missouri River. The tribe draws its water from the river and fears pollution. The Texas-based Energy Transfer insists the pipeline is safe.
In December 2016, the Obama administration denied permits for the pipeline to cross the Missouri River and ordered a full environmental review to analyze alternative routes and the impact on the tribe’s treaty rights.
In his first week in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order to expedite construction. Construction was completed in June 2017.
The tribe challenged the permits – and won. As a result, the corps was ordered to redo its environmental analysis, which it did without taking into consideration tribal concerns or expert views.
The court ordered Energy Transfer to shut and empty the 570,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) line within 30 days, closing off the biggest artery transporting crude oil out of North Dakota’s Bakken shale basin to midwest and Gulf coast regions.
Energy Transfer said it was looking at legal and administrative measures to avoid a shutdown and was considering an appeal if those efforts failed.
In a filing seeking a temporary stay to the order, the company argued that time-consuming and expensive steps were required to shut the pipeline down safely and empty it of oil, which would take much more than 30 days.
If the motion for stay pending an appeal was denied by the district court, the company said, it intended to file one in the Washington DC circuit court.
Q. If acknowledging the colonial and capitalist "past" is to everyone's benefit, surely it is to everyone's benefit to acknowledge the "present" crisis of capitalism and the climate emergency?
As part of the Irish State's move towards declaring a republic, it was removed in July 1948 and replaced with a carpark. It was transported to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham and, along with the associated three sculptural groups, was left in a courtyard. The hospital had been a proposed site for the parliament, and so used as a storage location for property belonging to the National Museum of Ireland. Attempts to send the sculpture to London, Ontario did not succeed as neither the Canadian nor Irish governments wished to pay the cost of transport.
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