The Western Origins of Anti-Western Prejudice

Ian Buruma & Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism (London: Atlantic Books 2004).

Orientalism is the name historians and anti-racist scholars and activists have given to the complex of prejudicial attitudes and images towards the Arabs and Middle East underpinning western imperialism and colonialism. Its best known treatment is the book of the same name by the American-Palestinian historian Edward Said. In contrast to this is a similar system of prejudicial attitudes, occidentalism, by Muslims and Middle Easterners against the West. I first came across the term back in the 1980s when I was studying Islam, and understood it then to mean the complex of everyday prejudices against the West, Such as the belief among some Muslims, at least back then, that in the West women walk round naked. Well, not in my experience, and definitely not about this time of year when people of both sexes are better off wrapping up against the winter cold. This book isn’t about those prejudices, but against the larger, viciously anti-western ideologies held by the imperial Japanese, the founders of the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the Islamist terrorists responsible for 9/11 and 7/7.

Occidentalism views western society as corrupt and godless, an urban civilisation dominated by the City, rejecting warm, human, organic values for that of cold rationalism and the egotistical pursuit of private profit against the higher ideals of the community. And quite often the forces behind this Babylon and its selfish pursuit of money are the Jews. This ideology has emerged not just in the Middle East, but in imperial Japan just before the Second World War, where it motivated a group of academics, scholars and thinkers meeting in Kyoto to debate how they could fight the western values and way of life they felt were threatening 1920s Japan. Occidentalism also views western art and mass culture as trivial and shallow. Western society, it is held, prefers bourgeois comfort to danger and struggle. It is cowardly and unheroic. Against this, occidentalism promotes the death cult of suicidal warriors, such as the Japanese kamikaze. After the bombing of the American army base in Beirut in the 1980s, Osama Bin Laden declared that the forces of militant Islam would win, because they loved death while the Americans and the west loved Coca-Cola.

The European Origins of Occidentalist Ideology

These attitudes, according to Buruma and Margolit, against the city, the selfish pursuit of trade, rationalism, godlessness and sexual immorality go back millennia, right back to Genesis in the Bible and the stories about the Tower of Babel and later Babylon and the King of Tyre. But they were also further developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries by European writers and social campaigners such as Karl Marx against the new, urban, mercantile, industrial culture that emerged during the industrial revolution. And while the early commenters on the stock exchange in London were delighted to find Christians, Jews and Turks all working peacefully together in the common pursuit of profit, others were horrified by the spectacle. This anti-rationalist, anti-modern attitude was developed in 19th century Germany as a reaction to the Napoleonic occupation. Acutely aware of the superior intellectual sophistication of the French, German writers and thinkers such as the philosopher Schelling argued instead that French – and British – rationalism was shallow. It ignored the greater depths and truths of the human soul, depths that particularly existed among the Germans. Schelling became extremely popular amongst 19th century Russians, and his views on the profundities of the soul, instinct and the organic community as against the atomised society of the West was taken up by the Slavophiles, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. In his heart, even the most boorish, uneducated peasant knew greater profundities than the most educated western scholar. These ideas were taken further by proto-Nazi ideologues like Moeller van de Bruck, who coined the term ‘Third Reich’ and Carl Schmitt. They added the death cult, the celebration of a higher, noble death for a cause against bourgeois ‘komfortismus’. This complex of ideas was then taken over by Middle Eastern and Asian nations struggling against western imperialism and the encroachment into their societies of the western way of life.

Japanese Imperialism and the Kamikaze Death Cult

The Japanese response to the western threat had been to copy it. Western ideas, science, technology, art and culture had been imported so that by the time of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, Japan had become a modern industrial power. Its defeat of Russia to Tolstoy represented the victory of western industrial civilisation over that of Asia. Japanese imperial militarism, intended to combat the west and establish the Japanese as an imperial power – another form of western imitation, in the eyes of some Japanese – was based on garbled ideas of western, pre-Reformation society. Its architects believed that western society had originally been an organic unity in which society, culture, science and religion had formed a harmonious whole. This had been shattered, first by the Reformation and then by the Enlightenment. In order to strengthen Japanese society, they attempted to copy this by establishing an official Japanese religion, state Shinto. The emperor, hitherto a remote figure in his palace, became the country’s war leader, a living god and the centre of adulation and worship by the masses. And death for him became a sacred duty, as promoted through a poem dating from the 8th century. But this noble death originally was only for the emperor’s bodyguards.

The adherents of this death cult, who piloted the kamikaze aircraft and sailed as human torpedoes launched from subs, were highly educated young men. They were the brightest students from Japan’s universities, well-read in three languages, including philosophers such as Marx, Hegel and Nietzsche. Some were Christians, others Marxists but most looked forward to a new, more egalitarian Japan arises after the War. Their official correspondence was about their enthusiasm for destroying Japan’s enemies with their deaths, but private letters to their families reveal much more anguish.

The Rage of the Country Against the City

Most of the anti-urban, anti-modern, anti-western movement came from the urbanites, but this changed with the peasant armies of Mao and Pol Pot. These troops from the countryside – many of Pot’s troopers were stunted from starvation and malnutrition and illiterate – represented the revenge of the countryside on the city. In China, Mao unleashed ‘tiger-hunting’ squads to round up the capitalist bourgeoisie. The small fry received prison sentences. For the big industrialists there was no mercy. Shanghai, one of the most westernised, modern cities in China, was an especial target of the Communists’ hatred. In Cambodia, having glasses, being able to read or simply having soft hands marked you out as a member of the hated middle class and therefore deserving execution.

Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Islamism

These attitudes were then incorporated into Islamic radicalism with a further twist: that the Islamist ideologues regarded western materialism as shirk, idolatry. For Sayyid Qutb one of the founders of modern Islamism, the West was the source of a modern jahiliyya – the name Moslems gave to the age of ignorance that prevailed before the coming of Mohammed. Western scholars have also translated jahil as ‘barbarism’. The West are barbarians, corrupting the pure religion and civilisation of Islam. Although they hate the West, the prime focus of their rage is the Muslim leaders who have adopted and introduced western ways into their countries. Some of this is understandable, given the brutal way this was done by Kemal Attaturk in Turkey and the father of the last Shah of Iran. In Iran, for example, women were forbidden from wearing the veil and men the turban. Squads of soldiers were despatched to roam the streets forcing people to remove these items of clothing at gun point.

Qutb, an Egyptian, had been an English student, and had received a scholarship to study in America, and it was his experience of the American way of life in the 50s that turned him against America and the West. The carefully manicured lawns were to him symbols of American individualism. He hated the way American preachers attempted to inspire their congregations by introducing Jazz into the hymns and was horrified by the lust at a church dance in Greeley, Colorado – hardly a modern Babylon. In New York, he was struck by a painting of a fox in one of the city’s art galleries. This was, however, given hardly a glance by the other visitors hurrying past it, which seemed to him to indicate the superficial attitude to art in the West.

Alia Shariati and Iran

Ali Shariati, one of the ideologues behind the Iranian Islamic Revolution, was a bitter opponent of imperialism, Zionism, colonialism and multinational corporations. He also included in his anti-western critique Marxist elements, such as the fetishisation of the market and commodities, as well as the gharbzadegi – the mindless pursuit of western culture. He believed that the only way the Third World could combat the west would be through developing a religious identity, which meant, in the case of Iran, Islam. He was particularly concerned with social justice and protecting the poor against the rich. In the 1950s when he was a school teacher in the province of Khurassan he translated Abu Dharr: The God-Worshipping Socialist by the Egyptian writer Abul Hamid Jowdat al-Sahar. Abu Dharr was a follower of Mohammed, who championed the poor and attacked the rich for deserting God for money. Shariati saw him as the model for the new, revolutionary, anti-capitalist, anti-Western Iran he wanted to see created. Mohammed Taleqani was another major influence of the Iranian revolutionary movement. He was a member of the militant Fadai’ane-e Islam, and set out to establish revolutionary Islam as an alternative to the secular, Communist Tudeh party. It was Taleqani who, in his revolutionary reading of the Qur’an, identified western materialism with the pre-Islamic jahiliyya.

Maududi and the Caliphate

Another major intellectual force behind Muslim occidentalism was the Pakistani journalist and ideologue Abu-l-Ala Maududi, the founder of the Islamist party Jamaat-I Islam. It was Maududi who devised the idea of the modern jahiliyya. He was opposed to democracy, as it substituted man-made law for that of God, and saw it in India as a way of forcing Gandhian Hinduism on Muslims. He also rejected nationalism, and regarded Islamic nationalism as a contradiction in terms, like a ‘chaste prostitute’. His idea was a new caliphate governed by shariah law.

Puritans Vs Fundamentalists

The book draws a distinction between Muslim puritans and fundamentalists. The puritans want to purify Islam, but not to overturn society as a whole, unlike the fundamentalists. In contrast to the occidentalists is the more benign theology of Muhammad Iqbal. Iqbal was educated at Government College in Lahore, Trinity College, Cambridge, and Munich. Iqbal was particularly concerned with khudi, the self, and its relationship to the Almighty. Iqbal believed that the self could only be properly cultivated through a proper understanding of the tawhid, the unity of God. He also believed in an Islamic state under shariah law, but unlike the fundamentalists, who insisted that only the Islamic community, the umma, merited salvation, he believed that other groups also were destined for heaven. And he argued also that Islam had to be liberated ‘from the medieval fancies of theologians and legists’.

Herzl, Zionism and the Palestinians

The book also discusses the politics of the veil and the seclusion of women and the incorporation of occidentalism, as well as socialism and fascism, in the Arab nationalism of the Ba’ath party in Iraq and Syria. This party also attempted to unify the Arab peoples through the doctrine of asabiyya, (Arab) blood solidarity. It also discusses Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, and his 1904 novel Altneuland (Old-New Land). Zionism and the establishment of Israel with the consequent ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians has caused immense suffering to the indigenous Arab population. The two authors, one of whom is an Israeli philosopher, recognise Israel’s bullying of them as the cause of Palestinian resentment and the conflict between Jew and Arab. Tony Greenstein has devoted a series of posts about the racism, including the internalised anti-Semitism in Herzl’s ideas. Herzl believed that Jews would never be accepted by gentile westerners, and declared that he had learned to forgive this attitude. Instead of a malign villain, here he appears as colossally naive and arrogant with all the faults of other western colonialists. Herzl believed that Jewish colonisation would spur development through the introduction of superior western technology. Massive engineering projects would be initiated, including huge dams and hydroelectric projects. By 1920 the new Israel would be an advanced, technological nation, with Jews and Arabs working together in vast, cooperative enterprises. The colonisation would also benefit the Arabs, whose landowners would become rich selling their properties to the Jews. This optimistic vision hasn’t materialised. Israel is an advanced, westernised nation, but this has been at the expense of the Arabs.

The book’s conclusion discusses how this occidentalism may be combated, and urges that despite the challenge of occidentalism, the West should preserve and defend the institution of free speech. Because without it, we become occidentalists ourselves.

Occidentalism and Islamist Terror

The book appears to me to be an attempt to explain to the western public the bitter hatred of parts of the Islamic world and the reasons behind the terrorist outrages of 9/11, 7/7 and the oppressive, persecutory regimes of revolutionary Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan. It differs from some, right-wing treatments of Islamist and radical Muslim ideology, which located these in Islam itself. Instead, these ideas came from the West itself, and these hatreds and ideas were not confined to Islam, but also shared by other nations and cultures such as the Japanese. These ideas arose in the west as a reaction to secular, capitalist modernity and then were adopted by the extra-European nations as part of their own critique and defence against western imperialism and global dominance.

Fighting Occidentalism by Upholding Free Speech

As for the supposed hatred of democracy and western personal freedom and civil liberties, while they are loathed by ideologues like Qutb, a vicious anti-Semite who published an Arab version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, for most Muslims the reason for hating the America and the West is much more straightforward. Polls of the Muslim world cited by the late critic of American imperialism, William Blum, show instead that they distrust us for the simple reason that we invade their countries. Occidentalist ideology and hate needs to be dissected and fought, but the book is exactly right by stating that we cannot do so by shutting down free speech. This is particularly timely given the victory of the anti-Islam politician, Geert Wilders in the Dutch elections. Over a decade ago Wilders announced that he would like to ban the Qur’an, which undermines the Dutch and western tradition of religious tolerance and dangerously brings the state into the private realm of religious belief and conscience.

Oxbridge Professor Avi Shlaim States that Zionism Is Racism and Responsible for the Palestinian Nakba

This is another excellent video attacking the racism underpinning the state of Israel and its persecution of the Palestinians from Middle East Eye. Professor Avi Shlaim is, I believe, the chair of Middle Eastern politics at one of the Oxbridge universities. He appeared over a decade ago on a Channel 4 Despatches documentary on the Israel lobby, presented by former Torygraph journo Peter Oborne. In that programme, Shlaim commented on the falsity of the accusations of anti-Semitism directed at the BBC when it dared to report the massacres of Palestinians by the Christian Falange in two Lebanese refugee camps. The Phalange were allies of Israel, and so the various pro-Israel organisation accused the Beeb of anti-Jewish prejudice. An investigation later found that in all but one, minor detail, the Beeb’s reporting was fair and objective.

The blurb for the video runs: ‘During the UK premiere event of the film Tantura, hosted by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) in May, British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim answered a question by Dr Azzam Tamimi about whether he considers Zionism to be a racist ideology and responsible for the Nakba.’ I have a feeling Dr Tamimi is a member of Human Rights Watch, as Shlaim mentions the organisation and it has been closely monitoring the persecution of the Palestinians by the Israeli state.

Shlaim states that it most certainly is a racist ideology. Israel can be a Jewish state or a democratic state with freedom and equality for all its citizens. That is the option he would prefer. It is a racist state because the 2018 law on nationality states that the Jewish people have the exclusive right of self-determination in Israel. No-one else enjoys that right, and so even if the Arabs became the majority, they would still not be allowed to govern the country. He also states that Zionism has been responsible for its apartheid system and the persecution of the Palestinians over the past 75 years.

Crisis of Islam in Iran as 60 Per Cent of Mosques Closed

This report was posted five months ago on the Times Now channel on YouTube. It states that Mohammed Abolghassem Doulabi, the liaison between the government of president Ebrahim Raisi and the Islamic seminaries, claimed that 60 per cent, or 55, 0000 of the country’s 75,000 mosques, had shut because of non-attendance. This was amid the anti-hijab protests, which have drawn considerable foreign praise. The execution of two people for burning the Qu’ran and organising ‘anti-religious activities’ is also noted in the report. Doulabi said that people decide whether to join or leave a religion through looking at its outcome. One of the reasons people decided to leave was ‘humiliation in the name of religion’. He added that more Iranians were weary of the government using religion as the pretext for its brutal dictatorship. The piece concludes by stressing the importance of the fact that Iran is governed by extremely strict shariah law where even the slightest deviance can have severe consequences.

This is astonishing. A few years ago a Pew poll reported that the majority of Iranians were no longer Muslim, but I had no idea that they were walking away from Islam, or at least its worship, in such large numbers.

The Shah attempted to turn the country into a modern, prosperous, westernised nation. The social dislocation created by this and his own brutal personal despotism resulted in the Islamic Revolution of 1979. But I think some of this is due to the forces he set in motion. Iran is one of the most prosperous and developed countries in the Middle East. It’s also a young country – most of its population were born after 1979. I think the elite are very much aware of intellectual and cultural trends in the rest of the world. An Iranian friend told me that although satellite television is officially banned, if you give the local mullah the right bribe, you can install a dish and watch it.

The Iranian people, or at least the westernised segment of the population, are sick of the religious repression. Part of the problem is that the ayatollahs turned Islam into a political ideology, and so it’s suffering the fate of another totalitarian political ideology, Communism. In the final stages of Communist rule in eastern Europe, people weren’t joining the Communist parties. They turned their energies to other channels, so that the ruling parties were staffed by an ageing elite of politicians and officials. Years ago I read a travel book on East Germany, The Saddled Cow. This took its title from a comment by Stalin: ‘Socialism fits Germany like a saddle fits a cow’. The elderly state of the country’s politicians was shown by the common answer East Germans gave to the question, ‘What do you think of your leaders?’ ‘They’re marvellous for their age’. As with Communist rule, there’s widespread corruption as well as rigid repression. Although it has to be said, Iranians felt that they were far freer and enjoyed more freedom to criticise their leaders than the people of Communist Russia. Other autocratic regimes are also suffering the same problem. I think Communist China is also led by an increasingly ageing party and that the simple lack of interest of its citizens in joining the party and supporting the system will eventually lead to its collapse.

The report suggests that if Islam is to continue as the country’s official faith, then it has to liberalise. This seems to me to be a fair assessment, but whether this can be done given the institutional inflexibility of the governmental system remains to be seen.

A Devastating Critique of the Attack on Objective History from Literary Theory and Postmodernism

Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (Simon & Schuster: 1996)

Literary Theory and its Attack on Historical Objectivity

This is another book I’ve just finished reading, and it’s been fascinating. Windschuttle was a lecturer in history, social policy and media studies at the University of New South Wales, among other Ozzie institutions. Although it was published in the 1990s, many of the issues Windschuttle attacks are still present in our universities in Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand. When I was doing my MA in history at UWE in the first decade of this century, Postmodernism, one of the ideologies attacked in this book, was already passe. But the central ideas of Postmodernism and its cousins are still very much present. The notion that modern science is really only a western form on knowledge no better than other, non-Western forms, and is somehow oppressive to indigenous people, and does not present any objective knowledge about the world. The doctrine that indigenous peoples have their own, radically different form of rationality which we cannot understand nor criticise. And that traditional history can never present objective truth about the past, and so most be regarded as fiction, ‘although this does not mean it is fantasy’. And that far from being humane and progressive, modern society’s treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill is worse than it was in the Middle Ages.

The usual leading thinkers of French literary theory, postmodernism and now Critical Theory are here: de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, as well as the philosophers of science Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper and Lakatos. Windschuttle demonstrates in the book that not only are they wrong on the theoretical level, but that their theories and attitudes have resulted in an appallingly bad history and have caused immense harm to the historical profession as a whole. Universities across Australia and the rest of the English-speaking world are laying off historians and the number of students taking history has gone down radically. Some of this is due to other factors – I’d say that now one of them was the government’s insistence that schoolchildren study STEM subjects rather than the humanities – but much of this, in Winschuttle’s view, has been due to the impact of these radical ideologies and the push to incorporate them into history from literary criticism. This is radically altering the nature of history itself, and destroying the idea of historical objectivity.

The Roots of Radical Scepticism in Heidegger and Nietzsche

Structuralism and Poststructuralism are two of these ideologies that emerged from literary criticism and linguistic theory. In short, these theories consider that human experience is constructed by language and culture, and so do not represent objective reality about the external world. The Postmodernists were particularly influenced by Heidegger, a university philosopher who supported the Nazis and their coordination of the German universities, and who continued to support the ‘truth’ of the Nazi regime even after the fall of the Third Reich; and Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God and the absence of any objective values or knowledge of the real world. This was a chaos outside our comprehension and language was unable to give any kind of objective picture of it. The result of this is a radical scepticism towards any claims towards objective truth and those disciplines that make and rely on such claims, such as science and history. Indeed, he cites the radical British sociologist Anthony Giddens as stating that neither sociology nor history now represent objective knowledge about society and human affairs, but should be merged together in a new academic discipline. Heidegger’s continued support for the Nazi regime acutely embarrassed some of the Postmodernists and radical literary theorists, but despite this setback, they still carried on.

Cortes and the Conquest of the Aztec Empire

After discussing these ideologies, Windschuttle goes to show how these theories have led to some bad, and sometimes appallingly terrible, historical writing, beginning with the Aztecs. The argument made by the literary theorists is that the Aztec Empire fell because they were so locked into their culture and its view of the world, that they could not adapt to the new tactics and weaponry used against them by the Spanish conquistadors. Against this are the arguments of empirical historians: the Aztecs fell because Montezuma was vacillating and indecisive; Hernan Cortez and the Spanish possessed superior military technology against the Neolithic weaponry of the Aztecs; the subject peoples of the Empire were sick to their back teeth of Aztec oppression. The Aztecs could inspire fear, but not loyalty. And hence the other nations were willing to ally themselves with the conquistadors. Their hatred ran to genocidal levels, with Cortes told by his Amerindian allies that he should exterminate them all, right down to children and the elderly. When massacres of the Aztecs occurred, they were frequently carried out not by the conquistadors by their indigenous allies.

The book shows clearly that, although the Spanish employed tactics, such as siege warfare, that had been unknown in the New World, the Aztecs quickly recognised and adapted to them. They also knew very well that the new, White-skinned incomers and their horses were not gods. It also discusses the horrors of Aztec human sacrifice, which included cannibalism. Children, as well as warriors, were killed. In one four-day ceremony about 20,000 people were slaughtered, although the original Spanish estimate was 80,000. And the sacrifices had a Hannibal Lecter dimension of horror to them. After killing and beheading their victims were flayed and the priests wore their skins. In one of the ceremonies in November the sacrifice was a woman, whose skin was worn by a naked male priest. This is Ed Gein and The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill on an institutional level. The book also points out that relatively few people were actually killed by the Spanish themselves. What annihilated the Amerindian population was the smallpox which entered their country thanks to a sick emissary from the governor of Cuba, who wanted to know what Cortes was doing in Mexico. The indigenous peoples had no immunity to the disease, and so died in their millions. Windschuttle is scathing of attempts to normalise or present a sympathetic view of Aztec human sacrifice by comparing it to the Roman Catholic mass, in which the bread and wine of Holy Communion are mystically transformed into Christ’s flesh and blood. He also states that if these writers had any genuine sympathy for Mexico’s indigenous peoples, it should be not with the brutal Aztecs themselves, but with the subject peoples they oppressed.

The Death of Cook on Hawaii

There’s a similar controversy over the death of Captain Cook in Hawaii. When Cook first landed, he was welcomed and went through a ceremony in which he was robed in red cloth. It was therefore claimed that this marked his recognition by the Hawaiians as an incarnation of the god Lono, who represented sports, peace and fertility. When he was forced to return to escape a storm, the mood had changed. They were insolent and became aggressive when Cook tried to arrest their chief to hold hostage for the return of a boat that had been stolen. This led to a battle in which Cook and a number of marines were killed. Cook’s body was taken back to the Hawaiian temple, where it was dismembered and his bones subsequently used in religious ceremonies. This is supposed to have been done in accordance with the Hawaiian religion. Cook had supposedly arrived during the Mahakiki festival for the god Lono. When he returned, it was the season of Ku, the god of war, and Cook was duly sacrificed accordingly.

Against this is the theory of the Sri Lankan anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, that the Hawaiians knew very well Cook was no god. He didn’t speak their language and knew nothing of their culture or religion. And many of the events were the actual reverse of the conflict between Lono and the Hawaiian chief in their religion. Cook was most probably invested as a chief, not a god. The Hawaiians were still friendly to him after he returned, and the elderly chief went quietly with him as a hostage. What changed the mood was a skirmish elsewhere between the Hawaiians and the British, during which some warriors were killed. The chief’s wife was filled with fear and ran to help her husband. Rather than this being the re-enactment of a mythical conflict, Cook was killed because his wife and warriors were afraid that the old chief would be maltreated and killed by the British.

There is a similar discussion of Captain Wallis’ contact with the Tahitians nearly thirty years earlier. Wallis was met with a very hostile reception during which his ship and men were pelted with stones to the extent that they retaliated with guns and cannons. However, once again it is claimed that the indigenous peoples weren’t responding to what they regarded as an outside threat, but responding to Wallis as a god from their religion. This god would have demanded human sacrifice, and so the Tahitians would have been ‘well satisfied’ with his killing of their friends and relatives. This boggles belief, and commonsense says very clearly that the Tahitians were no different to anybody else, and so would definitely have not regarded Wallis as a god, nor been pleased to see their people killed. But the response to Obeyesekere from the proposers of these views is that, despite being Sri Lankan, he has been captured by western imperial and colonial ideology and does not understand how non-western peoples think. Which comes across the me as sheer hubris.

Paul Carter’s Spatial History, Convict Literature and Indigenous Australian History

The Aussie writer Paul Carter also gets it for a book he wrote about the country’s convicts and aboriginal people. Carter wanted to write a new kind of history, one that would be open-ended as the events were experienced by the people themselves, rather than as it is traditionally written where the ending is already known. It was hailed as a classic by novelists and literary critics, winning the Victoria President’s award for literature in any genre. It also made some glaring, howling mistakes. First of all, he claimed that the settlers only stopped and settled down as brief pause before moving on again. But this can hardly be true of people, who were the younger children of the British aristocracy, who built mansions more impressive than some of their relatives back home, and who spent years clearing the land to raise livestock and crops.

He also claims that the voices of the convicts are lost to us, and we can only reconstruct their story from the accounts of the officials and warders guarding them. But Windschuttle goes on to show that the opposite is very much the case. There was an acute skills shortage in Oz, which saw convicts performing very middle class jobs as bank clerks, lawyers and other professionals. They weren’t all illiterate bogans. Many of them were transported for political crimes, such as British trade unionists and Irish nationalists. These men were also literate. The cons wrote poetry, plays and novels. The first novel published in Australia in 1830 was written by a convict. One of them also wrote a critique of the prison system in which he had served. One historian collected an anthology of convict writing in the 1950s and it’s been in print since it was published in 1958. There’s also abundant evidence from the British and Australian trial and prison records, which recorded their testimony verbatim. So much so that historians can’t get through it all. And there are more Ph.Ds, lectureships and chairs awarded in convict studies than in any other subject Down Under. Literary types may have been impressed, but historians were devastating in their remarks. With all this information about Australians convicts around, why didn’t Carter just walk into his local library or branch of the Ozzie version of Waterstone’s?

He gets worse when it comes to indigenous Australians. They’re absolutely unknowable and so outside western ability to capture their historical presence. Indeed, he says that it could be possible to write a book about their history without mentioning them at all. But people have written excellent books about them. The first was C.D. Rowley’s ’70s book, which revealed the extent of the persistent genocide against them. This has been succeeded by other writers, who have included the voices and art of aboriginal people themselves. But Carter sneers at these works, because they have been written according to the conventions of western narrative history, and so are imperialist, colonialist etc. Again, you’re astonished at his hubris and sheer arrogance.

Michel Foucault, Power, Prisons and Lunatic Asylums

Then comes Michel Foucault and his books on prisons and mental institutions. Foucault was part of the radical prisoners’ movement in the 1970s, and wanted to show in his book that modern prisons and mental institutions in their way were more intolerant and brutal than those of the Middle Ages. Foucault has been highly influential, not least because he spoke directly to university students. They didn’t have to do anything really radical like joining a protest march or trade union. No, they could just talk about the injustice of it all at university. He also believed that oppression came not from the centre, as in Marxism, but from the periphery, from the people and officials actually involved in administering the system. As such he provided an alternative explanation for social injustice contrary to that of Marx, who was already being abandoned by many on the New Left. He also believed that knowledge wasn’t accumulated, but that there were various stages of history he called epistemes which were completely separate from each other, although he had to admit that some institutions, attitudes and doctrines, such as those of the church, continued across epistemes. This rightly comes in for criticism, as does his contention that the modern treatment of prisoners and the mad is no more humane than the barbarities perpetuated in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. Central to Foucault’s thinking is the idea that prisons and lunatic asylums were instruments of oppression built by regimes and their rulers to incarcerate the undesirables who challenged their rule and system. But as Windschuttle shows, Foucault alwo too makes glaring errors of fact. The treatment of prisoners and the insane in mental hospitals is definitely more humane than it ever was in previous centuries, and if the mad had greater freedom in the Middle Ages, it was the result of society being much more hierarchical. This allowed them to roam the country and enjoy personal freedom without incarceration, but only because they were at the bottom of the social pile. It does not mean they were more respected, as Foucault claims, or better treated. And the ships of fools that supposedly carried them up and down the Rhine in search of their lost reason may be entirely mythical.

Anti-Science Scepticism and the attack on Historical Objectivity

Kuhn, Popper and Lakatos are attacked for undermining scientific rationality and the efficacy of the scientific method in favour of a form of social constructivism. Scientific truth is supposedly defined by the attitudes of the scientific community, rather than whether they actually describe an objective reality. Kuhn’s ideas that scientific progress comes in a series of paradigm shifts, as theories are replaced by different theories, which may not initially provide much of a better explanation, as laid down in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is compared with Foucault’s notion of epistemes, though Foucault himself was moving away from this idea as his thinking progressed. These theories are duly criticised, not least because science clearly has advanced and for a theory to be accepted at all, it must correspond at some level to reality. This concentration on the philosophy of science is rather odd in a book about history. It’s a separate, but related issue. But Windschuttle tackles it because he believes that history straddles the humanities and the sciences, and proper empirical history, done in archives, has something of the scientific endeavour. It is also similar to some of the natural sciences like evolutionary biology and geology, as discussed by Philip Jay Gould, the late palaeontologist and rival of Richard Dawkins. Historians have their own views, are frequently mistaken and engaged in arguments with their colleagues, but their writings must correspond to fact, even if their interpretations of those facts differ. And facts are important: history isn’t just about interpretation, as some of the literary theory crowd claim. Historians also find that despite their initial ideas about where their research will lead, they find that quite often it takes them in a different direction and they are forced to modify and alter their opinions. History, like science, is about finding and revealing truth. It is certainly not about fiction.

Cultural Relativism and the Different Rationality of the Non-Western ‘Other’

The final chapter and afterward revisit some of these topics, such as the continuing arguments over the death of Cook. The postmodernist has had the last word, publishing a response to Obeyesekere to which the Sri Lankan anthropologist had not responded. This contains information about the radically different ways some indigenous peoples divide up the world as a demonstration of their different rationality. This includes a Papuan tribe that categorises things according to smell from ‘smelly’ to ‘decaying’. But some of these distinctions are those we also make in the West, such as the Chewa’s separation of wild and domestic ducks. We also distinguish between wild and domesticated animals at the practical level of farming, although we have another level of distinction in their scientific categorisation. And apart from this, these peoples still show the same kind of rationality found in peoples throughout the world, including the West.

It then goes on to attack the cultural relativism, including the demands from aboriginal Australians and the Maori that the evolutionary theories of the origin of humanity taught in schools demean them by ignoring their own origin stories of how they are native to the land. They wished this changed so that their stories are also taught in school as equally valid. This is dangerous. Science is a form of rationality that transcends the West. Although it first arose there, there were elements that could have led to it arising elsewhere in the world and it has been of immense practical benefit to humanity. And if we went back to the various cultural divisions demanded by the postmodernists and their relatives, it would mean a return to the attitudes of hunter-gatherer peoples, in which you can only be a member of the tribe by birth. With contemporary, modern states like Australia, you membership is open to anyone who wants it. There is an especial danger to aboriginal Australians and Maoris if the scientific explanation of their evolutionary descent were replaced by the teaching of their origin myths. It would mean that they didn’t share the common descent of all humans through emigration out of Africa tens of thousands of years ago. They would constitute separate species, and so could be the human rights extended to and enjoyed by the rest of humanity.

The Problems of History from Maori Point of View

The afterword discusses the devastating effects these doctrines have had on history, as well as the fightback from professional historians. As a response to these doctrines, the American Historical Association was founded. This includes historians of all views, from Marxists to Conservatives, all united by a desire to fight the pernicious influence of the literary theorists, postmodernists and the Critical Theory mob as they were emerging. Much of it is also a response to the book’s critics following the publication of the first edition. He also discusses the attempt to present an even-handed history of the discovery of New Zealand from the British and Maori viewpoints. This has maps showing how European states were also at war with each other, just as the various Maori tribes were with each other. It discusses the barbarous punishments and treatment visited upon criminals and others transgressors alongside the brutal practices of the Maori. But this book is also flawed. At the time the Maori had no idea of the radical changes these encounters would mean for them. They were of little apparent importance. The ships, or floating islands filled with goblins, as the Maori saw them, sporadically appeared. Sometimes Brits and Maori fought and killed each other. Sometimes the British landed and offered strange gifts. But then they went away again and life carried on the same. Except that the British knew very well what these encounters meant and the great, calamitous changes that would overcome indigenous New Zealanders. To leave this element of the story out because it wasn’t realised by the Maori omits the disastrous changes which occurred to them and deprives the Maori of the historical knowledge they need to fight back against past injustice.

The Continuation of These Doctrines Today in Critical Theory

Postmodernism may be passe now in history, but its doctrines and attitudes have been taken up and repackaged by the Critical Theory crowd, which is increasingly being taught in universities. The radical scepticism about scientific truth led to the ‘Science Must Fall’ movement c. 2004, which had Black African students in South African universities demanding that science should include their indigenous beliefs. It’s now part of the demands for decolonisation and the inclusion of non-western modes of knowledge in science teaching. The book notes that in 1994 history teaching in American schools was going to replace the standard narrative about the American Revolution and the founding of America, the Civil War and then the movement west with accounts of the oppression of women, ethnic minorities and the disabled and how they were able to challenge and overcome oppression. Only the intervention of a conservative administration prevented this from being enacted. This is history as social activism, which is still very much a demand of the social justice crowd, who reject the idea of history for its own sake as the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. This is something that they claim doesn’t exist, and if you are a traditional historian, you are, whatever your political views, somehow still a supporter of the system of oppression. These doctrines are spreading out from the humanities into science and mathematics as part of a campaign to turn them into vehicles for social activism. And the quality of education is being damaged as a result. James Lindsay, a former mathematician and member of a team of anti-Critical Social Justice academics with the philosopher Peter Bogossian and feminist historian Helen Pluckrose, has shown how much this doctrine is based on the Marxist pedagogy devised by the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freyre. And the standard response of the literary theory crowd is still present in Critical Race Theory’s doctrine of standpoint criticism. This holds that people’s views are determined by their social position. The literary theorists’ response to any attack on their facts and arguments is not to respond to them, but instead to attack the social status of those advancing them. If the argument comes from someone with a privileged social position, their arguments are ignored or rebutted as self-serving and no more time need be spent on them. Standpoint criticism in Critical Race Theory does exactly the same, although it is specifically directed at Whites, whose attitudes and views are also considered to be attempts to justify their privileged social position regardless of their content.

Intellectual Life – the Other Side of Ozzie Culture

This is a fascinating book. Although it was written nearly thirty years ago, it shows how old these literary theories are and the danger they represented to history, just as they are threatening the wider academy in the form of Critical Social Justice theories. It’s also eye-opening seeing these issues discussed from an Australian, antipodean perspective. For most Brits, at least those of a certain age, the dominant image of Australia is one of the Outback with rugged men and women on the cattle stations and sheep farms making their lives in the immensity of the continent. This includes the ocker redneck culture with hard-drinking men in hats decorated with dangling corks. The caricature Australian satirised by Private Eye in the strip and Bruce Beresford’s film Barry McKenzie. Or else it was the suburban philistinism against which Beresford, Clive James, Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries rebelled when they emerged in Britain in the 60s and 70s. This shows that Australia had a genuine intellectual culture at variance to the national stereotype. And what I found particularly fascinating was how much this culture had been built by the convicts transported there. I wondered if this helped contribute to the optimism that existed at one point in Australia. Skills and labour were desperately needed, and so wages were higher. It really was a land of opportunity, and so many people emigrated because, in Oz, the slogan ‘I bloody can!’ was a reality. At least before the economy developed so that immigration was not needed quite so much.

Conclusion: A Great Introduction to these Ideological Issues and the Debates They Affect

It is also amazing what the book says about the Aztec Empire itself. Its capital, Tenochtitlan, had a population of 200,000 people, nearly three times as much as the largest city in contemporary Spain, Seville, which had 70,000. Apart from its huge temples, it had a vast like divided into islands on which the Aztecs grew their crops, reached by a causeway and with an aquaduct bringing the city’s water supply. It is astonishing how a sophisticated civilisation like the Aztecs could commit the horrendous atrocities they did. I can also remember hearing that the Aztecs were conquered because they believed Cortes and his crew were gods, and that Cook was killed for the same reason. This presents the persuasive counterarguments.

In reading this book, you’ll not just get a grasp of the fundamental doctrines of French literary theory and its successors, and how they threaten genuine history, whether of left or right, but you will also learn something about the historical debates over topics like the Spanish conquest of Mexico, British contact with Hawaii, Tahiti and the Maori and the Australia’s literary heritage from the convicts. As well as the beginning of research into the institutional genocide of indigenous Australians.

While the War Goes On, Israel Steals Gaza’s Oil

Jacob Bronowski, the British scientist, Fabian socialist and presenter of the 1970s blockbusting science TV series The Ascent of Man, stated that ‘War is theft by other means.’ He was paraphrasing the Prussian theorist of war, Von Clausewitz, who famously stated that ‘War is politics by other means’. And it’s true. The Iraq invasion wasn’t about liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. It was about stealing their oil industry and state enterprises, as well as an experiment in creating the kind of low-tax, free trade utopia the Neocons wanted to introduce to America. It failed, creating more chaos, mass unemployment and bankruptcies and sectarian division and violence.

And the Israeli state is now stealing the oil that rightfully belongs to the people of Gaza. Jimmy Dore put up a video on his channel last week commenting on a clip from an English language TV station that revealed that way back in 2004/5-ish British Gas had discovered $453 billion’s worth of oil in Gaza. They then started signing contracts with the Gazan authorities to exploit it. Then, a few years later, came another war between Israel and Gaza, and the Israeli’s Operation Cast Lead. During the fighting, Israel took the part of north Gaza containing the oil reserves, but never returned them to Gaza after the end of the conflict.

Now the Israeli state is granting licenses to oil companies to develop and exploit the oil left, right and centre. They’ve given twelve licenses to various oil companies so far, and are hoping to start exporting it to Europe. The video on which Dore comments also remarks that with the oil from place like Iran under embargo, and the Syrian oil fields mostly occupied by American troops, this looks like it could be very profitable for Israel.

Douglas Murray has also been on YouTube this week repeating the lie that anyone opposed to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the Palestinian people must be an anti-Semite. Part of his argument is that Pakistan is deporting two million people to Afghanistan, and the Pakistanis marching against Israel aren’t complaining about that. But he also goes back to the old argument the British traveller Robert Byron made when he visited the Near East way back in the 1920s/30s: that the Jewish settlers would develop the country in contrast to its indigenous Arabs. Murray considered that if Palestine was given its freedom, it would just become another failed Arab state. Maybe, but it’s speculation. Much of the poverty of the Palestinian people is due to the oppressive Israeli apartheid system. But the Palestinians have also put a lot of effort into educating their people, especially at university level. They certainly have the intellectual expertise to develop their country, though possibly not the practical business skills to do so. But $453 billion of oil would certainly give them the capital to start developing their nation.

Nuking Israel to Build Their Counterpart to the Suez Canal

This comes from the same edition, and is absolutely unbelievable. In the 1950s there was a plan to build a second canal running along the border between Israel and Gaza as a rival to the Suez Canal. I think this would be about the time Nasser’s Egyptian government nationalised Suez, starting a confrontation with us. We wanted to invade, but the Americans refused to back us, and Eden’s Tory government collapsed. It also signalled the end of British imperial power and showed how dependent we were on the Americans. But how was the new, Ben Gurion canal, to be built?

Nukes. Lots of nukes.

Yes! According to the US official document that was declassified in the 1990s, these was to be done by bombing the area with 250 nuclear bombs. This would, of course, have turned it all into a nuclear wasteland like Judge Dredd’s Cursed Earth. Fortunately sanity prevailed, and the plan was never carried out. Apart from being of interest in itself, it shows how crazy official policy could be in the early days of the atomic age, when nuclear power represented the solution to all our energy problems and scientists and engineers were talking about ocean liners powered by fistfuls of uranium and so on. I think Israel and Palestine were lucky when that plan was dropped.

Composer and Performer Jerrel Dulay Plays and Explains the Aeol or Regent Zither

This is another video about an unusual American instrument I found on YouTube. It’s by Jerrel Dulay and is from his Mountain Home – Jerrel D channel on YouTube. It’s about an extremely rare form of Zither, the Aeol or Regen Zither, which dates from the 1890s. He bought it a year ago at auction and restored it. He hasn’t been able to find another one of YouTube, so, apart from being a real Wild West instrument, it’s also extremely rare and one he feels very fortunate to have. Dulay’s an aficionado of zithers, and has posted a number of other videos about them, including similar instruments like the autoharp. This zither was usually played flat on a table, but he prefers to hold it upright. The video begins with him playing the old American folk song, ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken’.

Kyle Wood: Boatman Dance and Building Gourd Banjos

More of that American banjo music from Kyle Wood. He starts off playing the ‘Boatman Dance’ before talking about how he made his unusual banjos, showing two he’s making for young relatives who want to play the instrument. They’re made from gourds with goatskin bellies tacked on. Due to the shape of the gourds, they have double bellies, one smaller and placed about the main body of the gourd. He found the goatskins on Ebay and the gourds on Etsy. The neck is fixed to the body of the instrument by a piece of dowling that goes right through the body of the instrument and out the other end, with the tailpiece is fixed to hold the strings. He talks about the other banjo instrumentalists and luthiers whose advice helped him build the instrument.

It’s interesting as I think this was how the African ancestors of the banjo were made and then taken to America by the slaves during the transatlantic slave trade. Before the introduction of the mechanical and metal elements to the instrument, the skin was just tacked on, and I think the body was traditionally a gourd as well. One of the British museums – I think it’s the V&A – has a banjo dating from the 1890s where the skin belly is tacked on, as it used to be before it was improved and mechanised.

The ‘Boatman Dance’ appears to be a song about the boatmen going up and down the Ohio River, and so is quite an interesting piece of folk music. It appeals to that part of me that’s fascinated with the way Samuel Longhorn Clemens took his nom de plume, ‘Mark Twain’, from the depth soundings of the boat navigators and pilots along the Mississippi.

More Banjo Music: Hallujah I’m a Bum

I thought this might amuse the people here. It’s another banjo piece, this time from Kyle Wood’s YouTube channel, ‘Hallujah I’m a Bum’, about the joys of just having been released from prison with no money and having to go from door to door. It has great lines like ‘I don’t agree with work and work don’t agree with me.’ It’s a humorous take on the grinding poverty many Americans went through at the time it was written. And I think it’s eminently suitable now, as an ironic statement on how mass poverty has returned thanks to failed Thatcherite policies and a right-wing government and media that demonises the poor as bums and scroungers. All while cutting welfare policies to give their extremely rich friends and donors more undeserved tax cuts.

Black British Banjo Player Performs Last of the Summer Wine Theme

It’s been another depressing week with the war in Gaza and the media and Israeli state lies dragging on, and the Tories in this country determined to punish the great British working class, the disabled and the unemployed even further before hopefully they’re given the heave-ho at the next general election. So before I start with the serious stuff, I thought I’d put up some fun music.

This is a video from Paul Lion Sinclair, the Black British Banjo Player’s YouTube channel, in which he plays the theme to the long-running British sitcom, Last of the Summer Wine. The show and its tune had a kind of folksy feel. It was really about the small town elderly behaving like mischievous schoolchildren. In one episode it’s made very clear when they knock on the Battys door and when Nora answers it, stammer out the question of whether Wally’s coming out. Sinclair’s arrangement of the tune for harmonica and banjo is different, but fits that folksiness.

Bristol Stop the War Coalition Online Zoom Meeting

‘Bristol Stop The War Coalition supporters are having an online planning meeting on Tuesday 21^st November to review all the work we have been doing in support of Palestine in recent weeks and to make plans for future activities. Please come along if you would like to be involved in this planning.

Date: Tuesday 21^st November
Time: 6.30pm to 8.00pm
Venue: Zoom

Click Here To Join!

For more information email bristolstopwar@hotmail.com

We hope to see you there,

Bristol Stop the War’