A few days ago the mighty CJ put up a piece on his website asking the question ‘What Are UFOs?’, in which he took aim at elements of the psycho-social interpretation of the phenomenon. CJ’s a long-term member of ASSAP, one of Britain’s leading paranormal research organisations. Unlike the Society for Psychical Research, which concentrates on laboratory research, ASSAP was set up to investigate paranormal phenomena in the field, whether they be ghosts, fairies, crop circles, time slips or flying saucers. CJ’s been investigating such phenomena since the 1980s, following very strict scientific protocols, and has a wealth of practical experience.
At the heart of his essay are two questions. One of these is on the nature of folklore itself. What is it? Does it include popular superstitions like not putting your shoes on the table or crossing on the stairs? Where does folklore begin and literary, composed culture end? For example, when football fans start singing Beatles’ songs on the terraces, does it become a piece of folklore? What are the authentic features of traditional fairy encounters, and, indeed, is there are a single class of being that comprises the fairies?
In fact, these are questions folklorists themselves have been discussing for a very long time. Books on folklore, such as Linda Degh’s Legends, often begin with that very question. And what counts as folklore is very wide. Folklore can be thought of as any popular custom. The folklorists of the 19th century viewed it in terms of an ancient, timeless popular culture arising from a particular ethnic group, preserved in the rural customs of agricultural communities. There was supposed to be a distinction between this timeless, popular culture, the authors of which were unknown, and literary culture produced by the educated upper classes.
This distinction between elite, educated culture and that of the masses has more or less collapsed. The more you examine folksong and folk literature, the less it seems to be the timeless remnant of ancient beliefs and practises. The Marshfield mumming play, in which the hero fights an enemy, is killed, but restored with a pill from a doctor, has been one of those folk customs whose origins have been claimed to lie back with the dying and rising gods of pagan antiquity. Research back in the 90s by contrast claimed that similar plays dated no earlier than the 18th century, and were commonly performed at local fairs. Similarly, songs and dances travelled across Europe, taken from one country to another by itinerant musicians from quite an early date. A 16th century writer, for example, remarked on English musicians going to fairs to hear the latest tunes and catches from other performers in Germany. Instead of autochthonic expressions of the essential soul or spirit of a particular ethnic group or locality, people were swapping tunes and songs across countries and continents. Musicologists have suggested, for example, that there are African elements in western sea shanties. As for their connection to particular areas, that was frequently just where folksong collectors like Cecil Sharpe happened to pick them up. While he marked them down as coming from Suffolk, Yorkshire, Somerset or wherever, this didn’t mean that the songs were exclusive to those areas.
Nor is folklore restricted to rural communities. The focus on them by the early researchers no doubt was part of the reaction of some parts of educated society to the rise of science and the machine age in the 19th century. This was felt by some intellectuals as a threat to traditional western culture and its metaphysical assumptions. And so scholars investigated the ancient traditions and stories of rural communities, collecting stories of witches, ghosts, giants and fairies as well as rustic tunes to preserve this popular, pre-industrial culture and its basis in the supernatural against the new, scientific materialism.
At the same time, other scholars questioned this focus on the countryside and asked whether towns didn’t have their folklore as well. Yes, they did, and there was a burgeoning interest in what became known as urban legend in the ‘90s, following the publication years earlier of Jan Harold Brunvand’s books on phantom hitch-hikers and so on. And the actual subject matter of folklore can be more or less anything that has entered popular culture. One book on folkloristics covers subjects as diverse as Navajo Indian pottery figures for tourists, American barn types, and jokes and humour in American gay culture. These latter have a deeper social purpose than just amusement. They were often told to subtly find out whether the person being talked to was gay or not. Some jokes would be only understood by other gays. If the person told the joke smiled and laughed, it could be assumed they were a fellow member of the community. And new forms of urban folklore were emerging all the time. One example of this was the photocopylore that turned up in offices and workplaces, in which someone had photocopied or faxed a particularly remarkable or humorous piece and pasted it up in the office. Several of these, I remember, were jokes at the expense of American football players on scholarships at universities, as well as the general drudgery of office life.
And this is where UFOs come in. The second question of CJ’s critique is whether fairies really can be identified with today’s UFOs and aliens. This is based on the books of Fortean writer John Keel and the American-French astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee. They noted in their books – UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse by Keel, Passport to Magonia by Vallee- that UFO encounters often followed the same motifs as fairy lore. UFOs and their occupants. They suggested that UFOs and their alien pilots are the 20th century successors to traditional fairy beliefs. But the imps and goblins of previous centuries have had to change with the times. In modern, technological society people no longer believe as they did in fairies. These have therefore been replaced by the imagery of Science Fiction and space travel.
Some of the motifs of traditional fairy lore do indeed seem to fit the UFO phenomenon. Evans-Wentz in his classic The Fairy Faith in Western Europe, quotes ‘an old Irish mystic’ as saying that the fairies are an older race, who come from the stars. Some of the UFO aliens reported from Scandinavia and also from Italy certainly resemble the short gnomes and goblins of western European fairy tales. And some of their activities also resemble those of past supernatural entities. The abduction phenomenon, in which people are forcibly taken aboard alien craft and raped to produce half-human hybrids, is very similar indeed to medieval tales of demons having sex with sleeping mortals, and even jinn in the Islamic world. One Arab story has three maidens made pregnant by a jinn, who enters their house through a gap into elsewhere opening in their bedroom wall. He is accompanied by a number of lights. And just like the aliens, who take their progeny away from those who bore them, so this jinn takes back into his world his children by the girls.
There are several problems with the identification of today’s aliens with fairies. One of these is with the collection and recording of such traditional narratives, that CJ identifies as a problem. He states in his article that European fairy lore is very much a literary phenomenon, influenced and shaped by writers like Shakespeare, and that we have difficulty knowing what ordinary people really believed about them. This is a fair point. Jeffrey Burton Russell in his history of witchcraft in the Middle Ages discusses fairies and their origins as it affects the later development of witch beliefs. Roman civilisation had a number of supernatural beings below the gods and their messengers, the daimones. These included tree spirits, the dryads, and lamias, part-women, part snakes. Belief in such beings persisted after the fall of the Empire into the 7th century in Spain until they were somehow replaced by the fairies. He identifies the latter’s origins in the Latin fatare, ‘to enchant’, and states that there seems to be little difference between supernatural fairies and witches when they first appear on the continent.
It is suggested that fairies are ultimately based on the three fates that are believed in Greek folklore to appear at a child’s birth to cast its destiny. Other historians have suggested that there was an international fairy cult stretching over Europe and the Middle East, whose remains have sometimes survived to the present as in Romania. In the west under pressure from the witch hunters the fairy cult’s central beliefs were distorted. In the original fairy belief, young women left their bodies to meet the Queen of the Fairies and enjoy a round of singing, dancing and the company of the young men they fancied. Under the pressure of the witch-hunters’ interrogation, however, this became the witches’ sabbat, in which they flew to meet the Devil and instead of a pleasant feast, ate foul food among other lurid horrors. In this manner, the elite concerns of the witch hunters served to transform traditional folk beliefs.
Western fairy lore has been the source and subject of literary romance since the Middle Ages. Medieval authors wrote and sang tales of the quests of heroic knights, assisted by benevolent fairies like Oberon, and these tales remained popular after the end of the Middle Ages. By the 17th century authors started writing their own fairy stories as conscious literary inventions, and this has carried on down the centuries with much-loved tales like Peter Pan and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter tales. These have shaped to a greater or lesser extent the popular image of fairies. It was Shakespeare, apparently, who added the gossamer wings. As for their size, Oberon is described as about the size of a child of three or older. He’s small, but not tiny. And sometimes glimpses of popular beliefs about the fairies can be seen. For example, church records from 12th century Exeter record the local bishop forbidding the local people from putting small objects, including bows and arrows, in their barns for the elves to play with.
CJ also talks about the differences between various kinds of fairy creature, such as barguests and other spectral entities. Are they of the same type as brownies, goblins and so on? These creatures may be very different from each other, and so it is reasonable to ask whether they refer to the same types of supernatural entity.
Keel and Vallee, however, did not argue that there was a simple equivalence between fold fashioned fairies and UFOs. To begin with, fairies were not the only supernatural creatures modern UFOnauts resembled. Vallee in one of his later books discusses the similarity between UFOs and their pilots and the pagan gods of the Ancient Near East. Keel also discusses medieval demonology. While demons are supernatural, they were also generally considered a separate set of beings than the fairies, although sometimes the two were identified with each other. Keel and Vallee also didn’t think that UFO aliens were literally fairies either. Rather, the phenomenon that took the form of fairies, demons, angels and other supernatural beings in the past now took the form of spacecraft and aliens in the UFO mythology. They saw them therefore as ‘Ultraterrestrials’ – beings from beyond our reality. Vallee considers that they come from parallel universes, a view that he has incorporated in his SF novels such as Fastwalker.
The investigation of the links between fairy beliefs and UFO lore does not end with the views of Keel and Vallee, however. Their books provided the foundations for the Psycho-Social Hypothesis, which goes further than this. It maintains that there is little or no objective reality to UFO encounters. They are primarily internal, psychological experiences that take their imagery from contemporary culture. In the past this was the myths about gods, demons and fairies. Today the content and imagery are taken from Science Fiction. These experiences may be sparked by a real phenomenon, such as a misidentified sighting of Venus or aircraft and the content generated by poorly understood psychological or neurological phenomena, such as sleep paralysis. Back in the ‘90s there was considerable interest in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy as the source of such illusory encounters, and it does seem that it can explain some. Those suffering from it may experience hallucinations that do draw on contemporary culture and folkore. One poor fellow who had it used to see a witch, complete with cauldron, in his kitchen during attacks. But this explanation seems to have fallen from favour in recent years, possibly because there is no single explanation for UFO encounters.
But although the imagery is that of aliens and space travel, behind them lies traditional fairy motifs. Thus, Joe Simonton’s encounter with small aliens while out prospecting in the Rockies also follows one convention of traditional fairy lore. In fairy tradition, precious fairy objects taken from their owners by the heroes become, in the light of day, perfectly ordinary and worthless. Fairy gold, for example, becomes a pile of leaves. Simonton found the aliens cooking pancakes. He was offered one, and took it back to be analysed. It was then found to contain nothing more exotic than flour and salt. Back in the 90s the lawyer and TV host Clive Anderson had a pair of ufologists on his late night show, Clive Anderson Talks Back. These two blokes described their encounters with aliens. As proof these were genuine, the aliens had given one of guys a rock, which he duly produced. Cue audience laughter. A rock could provide convincing proof of the reality of the phenomenon, if it was made of some exotic material from one of the planets, say regolith from the Moon or Montmarillonite from Mars. But this, however, was just an ordinary stone.
There is a wider point about the Psycho-Social Hypothesis. As it rejects a supernatural or paranormal basis for the experience, it does not matter whether the material generating the experience is based in authentic folklore or not. The fairy literature behind encounters with aliens resembling fairies may be literary, such as the small, winged aliens who asked a British housewife baking Christmas cakes back in the 70s if they could have one, but this does not affect the nature of the experience itself. Not all ufologists, whose views have been influenced by the PSH go so far as to deny that there is a paranormal element to the UFO experience. Jenny Randles stated in one edition of her small press UFO magazine, Northern UFO News, that there was a paranormal element to the experience which was using the motifs of traditional fairy lore and SF. Kevin McClure, another long term writer and researcher of the world of the strange and paranormal, came to a similar view. There was a genuine paranormal phenomenon behind the experiences, which was using traditional supernatural tales and SF to communicate with us. This was the basis for his extremely short-lived magazine, Alien Scripture, with its subtitle ‘Who is talking to us and why?’
CJ states that theGareth essay is just one of a projected series in which he will discuss what UFOs are. In part 2 he intends to examine other features of the phenomenon. This should be interesting. Although the Psycho-Social Hypothesis has established itself as a major alternative explanation to the Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis for UFO experiences, there are definitely questions to be asked about it. One is that sometimes paranormal encounters do not resemble established folklore or literary tropes. Gareth Medway argued this in article published by Magonia back in the ‘90s. I think Gareth’s a priest or leading member of one of the new pagan religions in Britain. He was also the author of The Lure of the Sinister, a book that cast a very sceptical eye on the various Satanism scares that have occurred over time and that were causing hysteria and distress then with rubbish stories of the terrible abuse of children in Satanic orgies. In his article, he discussed a paranormal vision a man experienced out riding one evening. This fellow reported seeing something like a fist rising up from the ground. He had no explanation for the vision and was genuinely confused by the experience. The next evening, just as he was out riding again, he experienced the same vision. Gareth argued from this that if such encounters were based on folklore and popular culture, then the vision should have conformed to the contemporary imagery of the time. But it didn’t. And I’ve no doubt that there may be other problems with the Psycho-Social Hypothesis and other explanations for the UFO phenomenon waiting to be investigated.
We’ve seen Israel-critical Jews smeared as anti-Semites by the official Jewish organisations in this country, like the Chief Rabbinate, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the United Synagogue and that rag the Jewish Chronicle. These foul lies have been picked up by Stalin Starmer and used to purge the Labour party of dissenting Jewish voices and the gentiles who supported them. Incredibly principled people like Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Jackie Walker, Tony Greenstein and so many, many others. About 3/5 or 4/5 of the people purged from Labour for anti-Semitism were Jews. In addition to this, there is the media blackout on the military aid Britain seems to be giving to Israel. Mike carried a report on his site last week about nine Israeli planes landing in Britain. Private Eye in its ‘Letter From…’ column a few fortnights ago reported that British airbases in Cyprus were being used by American planes en route to the Middle East. Mike asked whether ordinary Brits had been asked about Britain being involved in the Gaza genocide. Well, no, we weren’t, and anyone who does will be accused of anti-Semitism and, if Muslim, an Islamist and fanatical supporter of Hamas. Even if they’re just going by John Lennon’s words in another grotty war: ‘All we are saying is, ‘Give peace a chance’. It’d be great to see that translated into Hebrew and Arabic.
But this story from Middle East Eye shows that anti-Zionist Jews in Germany now seem to be suffering the thin end of the wedge of corporate/state persecution. And let’s be clear here – German Jews have every right to be critical of Israel. Before the Second World War Zionism was a minor movement in European Jewry. Most Jews wanted to stick to the homelands of their birth and fight to be accepted as fellow citizens, not to migrate to a country they’d never seen, to displace people who’d never harmed them, and who belonged to a religion many Jews believed had treated them better than Christianity. The Jewish groups the Nazis really feared were the German Jewish ex-servicemen’s association. These were courageous men who had fought for their country, and who patriotism was indisputable. They couldn’t convincingly claim that Jews had betrayed Germany in front of old soldiers with war wounds and the medals to match.
And the Zionists were quite prepared to sacrifice European Jewish lives if it served their purpose. David Ben Gurion said that he didn’t care if the Nazis exterminated half the Jews in Europe, if the other half went to Israel. And then there was Rudolf Kasztner, the head of the Hungarian Zionists, who made a deal to send Jewish Hungarians to the death camps if some could go instead to Israel. As for the trial of that abomination Erich Eichner, the nascent Israeli state also followed other western countries in recruiting Gestapo agents for their intelligence services during the Cold War. For more information, please go over to Tony’s blog and start reading. It all comes from respectable historical sources and is minutely documented.
Israel gets very strong support from Germany, no doubt motivated from guilt over the Holocaust. Germany was the no. 1 holiday destination for young Israelis because of how well they were treated. But this positive attitude shouldn’t exempt Israel from justified criticism nor permit the persecution of German Jews who do not share this attitude to Israel.
‘A state-owned bank in Germany has frozen the account of a Jewish anti-Zionist organisation and demanded the group disclose a list of all its members. Judische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost, or Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East, announced on Tuesday that its account with Berliner Sparkasse was frozen on 26 March with immediate effect. “In 2024, Jewish money is once again being confiscated by a German bank: Berliner Sparkasse freezes Jewish Voice account,” Jewish Voice said in a statement on its social media platforms. The group received a letter from the bank informing it that a full list of all members, including adresses, tax documentation, income statements and other internal documents, needed to be submitted to Berliner Sparkasse by 5 April to “update customer data”. “It’s a very creepy letter. You’d think they are working together with the state criminal police bureau,” Wieland Hoban, chairman of Jewish Voice, told MEE.’
Bruce Gilley, The Case for Colonialism (Nashville, Tennessee and London, New English Review Press 2023)
Introduction
This is a controversial book that arose from an extremely controversial academic article written by the author. It’s particularly timely as yesterday the Guardian reviewed an exhibition on Black slavery with the approving comment that it was a great rebuttal to those who are now arguing that British imperialism was benign and civilising. Gilley is indeed one of the latter. in 2018 he was moved to write an academic article defending European colonialism after researching Sir Alan Burns, the last British governor of the Gold Coast, now Ghana, and reading positive comments about British colonialism from the anti-colonialist activist and writer, Chinua Achebe. Achebe is regarded as a staunch enemy of British colonialism, and yet Gilley presents quotation after quotation showing that his attitude was more nuanced. Achebe stated that by and large, Nigeria under the British was well run and that they cared for their colonies. He noted that he owed his education to European missionaries who ran excellent schools, the state schools and finally the university founded by the British. He had no animus against the British themselves, and lived in London. He was also attacked for writing in English rather than his native Igbo, despite the fact that an Igbo language press did not exist.
Benefits of Colonialism
Gilley argues that colonialism benefited its subject peoples by modernising their countries with western technology, medicine and industry, as well as fundamental institutions of political liberty as property rights and democracy. It was not regarded as illegitimate by the colonised peoples themselves. The book begins with a letter from the peoples of the Lakes region of Nigeria, now Lagos, for the British to take over their lands to protect them from their tribal enemies and inviting them to stay as long as they liked. Their willing acceptance of colonial authority was shown in the way they moved closer to the centres of colonialism, not away from them, seeking the greater opportunities to be found there. The colonies’ indigenous peoples formed the majority of civil servants, police and soldiers so that the number of White administrators in some of these nations was minuscule compared to the vast populations over which they ruled. And some of the former colonies are coming to a positive reappraisal of the colonialists as the founders of their nations. This is happening in Nigeria with Lord Lugard and the former Belgian Congo with A Brazza. Moreover, the abysmal misgovernment and corruption in these nations is forcing many of them to look back on their former colonial overlords requesting them to return. After the explosion at the port of Beirut several years ago, a petition in Lebanon went up calling for the French to return and take over the colony. 60,000 people signed in the first hours it was up on the Net. Macron acceded to the request, so that the French state acted as a kind of supervisor in an international arrangement in which a western company took over the running of the port. A Belgian journalist, van Reynbrouck, was surprised when he visited the former Belgian Congo by the numbers of young Congolese who came up to him asking when the Belgians would return. In a similar case to Lebanon, the Indonesian authorities were extremely concerned about corruption among the customs officers in Jakarta. They sacked all 3,000 of them and brought in a Swiss company to rebuild it. But the projects to reintroduce elements of western colonialism to genuinely modernise and restore good government and business practice to these countries goes far beyond that. One economist has recommended setting up ‘charter cities’ in the former colonies, with the authorities’ consent. These would be leased to the former colonial powers under 99 years leases, like Hong Kong, and governed by the former imperial masters. At the same time, leases granting residential status would be given to a limited number of migrants seeking to live and work there. In this way modern, democratic government and business would return to the former colonies.
Resulting Controversy
Gilley submitted his article promoting colonialism to two academic journals. One turned it down because it was too controversial. He then offered it to another, the Third World Quarterly. They published it to a storm of outrage. Over a hundred academics, including those of his own university, demanded that he be sacked or subjected to something like a Maoist ‘struggle session where he would be forced to recant his sin. Eventually the article was withdrawn because of threats to lives of the magazine’s editors and staff from anti-colonial fanatics in India.
The book is partly a response to this controversy. The first few chapters describe the affair and respond to his critics. The next part of the book provide examples of the positive influence of colonialism around the world, including iconoclastic reappraisals of German rule in Africa and China and a complete demolition of the claim that King Leopold’s rule in the Congo was genocide resulting in the deaths of 8 million Black Africans. The chapter on German imperialism shows that, rather than proto-Nazis, the Germans had made explicit provision for the good government of their subject peoples leading to their eventual independence at the Congress of Berlin in 1880. They ruthless punished imperial administrators and troopers who abused and victimised the natives. In Qingdao their chief judge was keen to incorporate local, Chinese law into that of the colony and wrote three books on the subject. The genocide against the Herero in Southwest Africa was not planned and was largely the result of forces beyond the authorities’ control.
Refutation of Holocaust Allegations over King Leopold’s Rule in the Congo
In the Congo the real death toll from the exactions of the Force Publicque was largely confined to one section of this vast, sprawling country and consisted of 18,000 people. This was largely the result of tribal warfare, not deliberate policy by Leopold himself. The severed feet and other bodies shown in photographs of alleged colonial atrocities were the result of the traditional way the tribes in the area showed that they had killed their victims. Leopold had taken over the country with the specific intention of eradicating the slavery and cannibalism which plagued the area. The photographs of people with severed limbs were staged recreations of mutilations resulting from these atrocities, and not of horrific punishments visited by Leopold and his servants on those who failed to meet the rubber quotas. These photographs were then taken over by British missionaries and the anti-colonialist British press to show the supposed horror inflicted by Leopold over the people of his private empire. One notorious photo showed a man looking down forlornly at severed feet and an arm. This has been presented as limbs hacked off by the Force Publique on those rubber workers who had failed to meet their set targets. But the original photograph states that the man was looking down on the remains of his wife and daughter after they had been eaten by cannibals.
Black Anti-Slavery Activists Embrace of American Constitution
Another chapter presents the positive case for enslavement in America. He does not seek to present slavery itself as a positive institution benefiting its victims, although that was one of the arguments of its supporters. Instead he notes that in America slaves could, surprisingly, have the benefit of the law. In 1791 in Newport, Connecticutt, a slaver was tried for murder for throwing an enslaved woman with smallpox overboard as a threat to the health and lives of the rest of the ship. The trial lasted five years before the man was acquitted on the grounds that he had acted to protect the others on board against the contagion. Moreover, Black anti-slavery activists were well aware of the anti-slavery implications of the American constitution and its enshrinement of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. They sought to widen its application beyond White Americans to themselves, in alliance with Whites, writing hymns and other texts supporting this view.
British Attempts to Supply Food to Famine-Struck First Nations in Canada
The book also rehabilitates British rule on the Canadian prairies, stating that they were not indifferent or complicit in a 19th century famine of the indigenous peoples that has now been described as a Holocaust. The British had scant resources in this corner of Canada and did what they could to provide food. They were also seeking to provide the Indians with modern, industrial education in the now notorious residential schools at the Native Canadians own request. They were hampered by distance and the problems of farming in that section of Canada which stumped even season agriculturalists from Ontario and was only solved ten years after the famine. And the same problems afflicted White Canadians. One man, who moved west, suffered from the loss of vital equipment en route. When he arrived, local people, including the Indians, borrowed his equipment but did not return it. The environment itself proved to be too challenging and after sticking it out for three years he finally gave up and returned home.
Erasure of the History of White Farmers in America
White farmers in colonial era America are also being erased from official history through a movement that claims that the piles of stones they left in their fields are really Native American cairns. This started with a group of old, White men. The founders of the movement were interested in pseudo-history, like finding Atlantis. Farmers in 19th century New England, when clearing their fields of stones, used to pile them up in the centre of the field. They were given to children to play with or sold to workers building roads. When such piles have been excavated, they reveal underneath rusted farm equipment and White American domestic refuse. The indigenous peoples then adopted the idea, passionately claiming that the piles were indeed cairns left by their ancestors. They gained this knowledge after visiting the stones and a few minutes of sacred contact with their gods and spirits. From there it moved on to be adopted by state and county authorities, sometimes as a means of preventing building development of these areas. Yet the fake history presented by this movement damages real colonial history. The stones themselves are the physical remains of the agricultural settlement and abandonment of these areas as the farmers moved to fresh lands further west. Another chapter takes apart this misrepresentation of Malayan colonial rule during the Emergency, stating that most Malayans actually supported British rule against that of the Communist guerrillas.
Achebe and Naipaul on the Benefits of Colonialism
There are two chapters given to the positive appreciation of colonialism by Chinua Achebe and the British Asian writer, V.S. Naipaul. Naipaul believed very strongly that British colonialism had benefited its peoples around the world. For him, it was a universal civilisation that promoted benign values applicable to all humanity. He was sharply critical in his novels of the dictators that took over these countries, plunging them into corruption and horrific bloodshed, and their left-wing White European supporters who followed them around, turning a blind eye to the horrors in the belief that something great and genuinely African would arise. He is also scathing of the hypocrisy behind the critics of British colonialism, who all seek its benefits in London or the West. These include Fazlur Rahman, who led the campaign to the Islamise Pakistan in the 1960s. When this provoked opposition, he fled to a nice tenured academic position at an American university. Vijayamprada Gopal, a professor of Colonial and Post-Colonial Literature at Cambridge University and a favourite with Novara Media, also gets it for her snobbery. She stated that she would no longer teach working class students after the university porters called her by the university’s accustomed form of address of ‘madam’ for all women, rather than calling her ‘doctor’ as she wanted. This conforms to Naipaul’s comment that Oxbridge educated Indians were worse petty tyrants than the Indian landlords, who insisted that their tenants bow and touch their feet.
Criticism of Gandhi
Naipaul was also critical of Islam in Among the Believers, and had scant regard for Gandhi. Gandhi had the right idea when he started out, but then transformed himself into a Hindu holy man, after which he had nothing positive to contribute. It’s controversial, but there have been books and articles written arguing that Gandhi was not the benign figure he’s been presented as. Rabindranath Tagore, another great figure in Indian nationalism, dislike Gandhi because of his tactic of whipping up mobs until they were on the edge of rioting and violence and then pulling back. His sudden embrace of the Dalits in the 1920s was provoked, not by genuine concern for them, but because the British were planning to add an extra clause protecting their voting rights. Gandhi feared that this would lead to them supporting British rule, not Indian nationalism. He also knew absolutely nothing about the Second World War and the nature of Nazism. He wrote a letter to Churchill urging him to make peace with Hitler as ‘he is not a bad man’. On the invasion of Czechoslovakia, he recommended that the Czechs and Slovaks should meet the Nazis with passive resistance. When someone pointed out to him that this would simply result in the Nazis exterminating them, he acknowledged that this would happen, but ‘it would have been glorious’. India today is an emerging industrial and technological global superpower, quite contrary to what Gandhi himself would have wanted for his country. Gandhi hated modern technology with its trains and airplanes. He would have liked India to return to its traditional Vedic social and economic structure. And it is precisely by rejecting his vision that India has developed and become the global force it is today.
Gilley’s View of the Handing of Hong Kong to China
The last chapter is Gilley’s own personal observations of Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1991 under its last governor, Chris Patten and an article he wrote for the final edition of a magazine devoted Asian affairs when this magazine finally folded. Patten comes across as trying to do his level best for Hong Kong and its people despite almost insurmountable opposition from the Chinese. Beijing did not respect the original treaty and simply regarded it as an opportune time to take over the colony. They warned Patten not to introduce democracy just before independence, as the British had done elsewhere. Patten defied them and gave it to Hong Kong anyway. He was very keen to soothe local feelings about colonialism, and so appeared in a lounge suit rather than traditional gubernatorial garb. As for the magazine, based in Hong Kong, this was very much a product of the colonial age in taking a broad view of the politics and economic affairs of the region. But it lost readers with the retreat of colonialism. Instead of a broad, regional view, magazines now presented the specific views of the individual nations, such as India or China, and the broader view was now being lost.
Genocide and Butchery by Post-Independence Dictators
The book also describes the horrors and carnage perpetrated by the colonies’ various dictators, who seized power after independence. Guinea-Bissau’s dictator wanted to destroy the legacy and infrastructure left over by the Portuguese, and so tore his country apart, butchering its people in the process. The British in Zanzibar had set up a multi-party system which sought to balance the interests of African and Arab Zanzibaris. A year after Prince Philip had formally handed power to them, however, it was invaded by anti-colonial forces backed by the Soviet Union and East Germany. Only one in ten indigenous Zanzibaris supported the invasion. The invaders set up a regime of massacre and repression, driving out the Sultan and the Arab and South Asian Zanzibaris. In one massacre, they invaded and slaughtered the tribespeople in one of the islands, whose children were then required to sing suitably patriotic songs celebrating their parents’ deaths.
Frantz Fanon’s Glorification of the Shooting and Murder of Whites
He also attacks Frantz Fanon, the Caribbean psychiatrist whose text on Algerian war of independence, The Wretched of the Earth, is now a classic of the decolonisation movement. Rather than being some kind of benign text on the necessity of Black liberation, Fanon’s book is bloodthirsty, revelling in the genocidal massacre of French colonists and White Europeans, and endorsed with a foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre. Gilley is harshly critical of the western left-wing intellectuals, safely ensconced in their Paris cafes, supporting people who can only be described as monstrous tyrants. No positive view of French rule in Algeria is permitted in the mainstream French press, but there is a large, self-published literature by the Pieds-Noir, the former French colonists, arguing that the mainstream view is incorrect. He also criticised the modern anti-colonial crowd, who angrily denounce America as a colonial power while demanding the right of Africans and Muslims to immigrate there.
Independence Not Expected or Wanted by the Majority of Colonial Peoples
Against this, and attacks on western notions of democracy and human rights, Gilley argues that the independence came unexpectedly and was not wanted by the mass of the colonised. In the Belgian Congo, only 27 per cent of the population supported it, but they were given it anyway, like it or not, by the departing Belgians. The real forces behind decolonisation was European exhaustion following the Second World War. Europe no longer had the ability to afford to run the former colonies and there was pressure from both America and Russia to open them up and decolonise, plus the politics of the Cold War. The countries that did best following independence were those that retained the most of their colonial legacy and infrastructure. This is recognised by many of the former colonies themselves. While colonial rule is hated by the people of most of the former colonies, their rulers are seeking to reintroduce elements of the colonial legacy in order to improve their countries.
Colonialism Preferable to the Alternatives
This all runs counter to what has been taught for decades, at least since the 1970s, about European colonialism, which is still being blamed for the many failures and troubles of the former colonies today. It will certainly not be popular with the Guardian and the other left-wing papers and magazines that hold the view that colonialism was uniformly bad, oppressive and exploitative. But Gilley makes a very strong and clear case. As well as the known facts that contradict the received narrative, it also argues from counterfactuals. What would have happened in the absence of colonialism? There are three possibilities. One is a continuation of tribal warfare and indigenous slavery. The second is the penetration of these colonies by western mercenaries and companies seeking concessions. The third is colonisation by a rival power. None of these would necessarily benefit the indigenous peoples.
As for the brutality of the British and other Europeans, the indigenous rulers and imperial powers were just as ruthless, if not more so. Nader Shah, the Persian emperor, was preparing a common currency for Persia and India, suggesting he planned to invade and annexe the country. During his time in Delhi he massacred 30,000 people. On his return to Persia he gouged his son’s eyes out, castrated one of his generals and had six merchants buried alive for the crime of buying a rug belonging to the imperial court. The British and other colonial powers, on the other hand, erected laws against the exploitation and brutal treatment of natives, sending reports back to the home countries and investigating and prosecuting offenders. This provides the basis for the many works of history denouncing colonialism, which is rather hypocritical in the absence of similar concerns by the indigenous powers presented as being somehow innocent of these crimes.
Arguments for Forced Labour
Gilley also seeks to rehabilitate the system of forced labour the British and other Europeans imposed on their African colonies. Gilley argues that this was indeed to make the colonies pay for themselves in the absence of monetary taxation. He states that the arguments against it are economically illiterate. Perhaps, but in Malawi and no doubt other African countries it was resented as a new form of slavery. He also points out the contradictory arguments against colonialism. For some, it underdeveloped its colonies. For others, it interfered too much. And there is the attitude among many of colonialism’s critics that the British should have provided free education and healthcare to their colonial subjects. In fact, Britons themselves did not have free healthcare until the establishment of the NHS and welfare state by the Labour government in 1948. Education in Britain wasn’t compulsory until the 1870s, and even if it was supposed to be free, the poverty of many working class Brits meant that some were unable to afford items such as school uniforms, pens and pencils and other equipment. It’s a case of presentism, the imposition of modern attitudes on to the past, in this case the expectations of the modern welfare state at a time when it did not exist.
Two Phases of British Colonialism
It is noticeable that Gilley begins his treatment of colonialism when it had entered its paternalistic, liberal phase after 1824. In Britain’s case this followed the abolition of the slave trade in 1809 and the introduction of progressive legislation for the improvement of the slaves’ lives in preparation for their eventual emancipation. The previous phase of British imperialism, such as the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, James VI’s/I’s plantations and the horrors of the Cromwellian campaigns, in my view cannot be justified. Nor can the conquest of the Caribbean and the New World with the extirpation of the original Amerindian populations and the establishment of transatlantic slavery. Which is, no doubt, why he doesn’t and is silent on this phase of western colonialism. Some anti-imperial historians have written about European colonialism as if it was consciously proceeded according to a pre-set plan. But his was not the case. There was no uniform plan and European imperialism was the result of different economic, political, social and religious forces at different times. The lost of the American colonies and their slave holdings made it easier for the British to ban the slave trade and eventually slavery in theirs. Historians have long recognised that there were two phases of British imperialism, the first in America and the Caribbean, the second in the conquest of India, Africa and Asia. It may well be high time that anti-imperial historians and activists took on board the fact that the nature of colonialism itself changed in these two periods.
Imperialists as Colonies’ Real Nationalists
The book is part of a growing mass of literature seeking to present a positive case for colonialism, such as Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning. Gilley goes further than Biggar, who merely argues that there were certain aspects of British colonialism that were deeply amoral and oppressive, by presenting this phase of imperialism as benign and positive, and takes friendly issue with Biggar on this point. There are even a very few positive facts in favour of Apartheid. One of these is that under it, 100,000 Black Africans a year sought to immigrate to South Africa. But this probably says more about the horrific state of the other African countries than anything really positive about Apartheid. Despite the barrage of abuse and threats Gilley received for his article, the book also reproduces the positive and supportive comments he received from other academics and activists from Africa and Asia, some of whom said that they and their families had greatly benefited from the institutions, especially schools and universities, left by the British. He also claims at one point that the British and other colonialists were these countries’ true nationalists, in that they had a deep interest in the indigenous cultures and their arts and literature that were often being neglected by the indigenous peoples themselves. Naipaul quotes an Indonesian Muslim as saying that his countries’ historic mosques are now preserved by the West, as previously the Indonesians themselves wanted to pull them down.
Necessity of Proper Academic Debate
This is a powerful counterblast to the received narrative about the evils of colonialism. Whatever one feels about it – and looking at the current state of political corruption and creeping authoritarianism in Britain, I am extremely doubtful about the ability of my country to act as a new, benign imperial force – I strongly believe that it and similar books have a place in academic education and discussion. The attempt to silence Gilley, and indeed Biggar on this side of the Pond, with denunciations, personal abuse and death threats is deeply authoritarian and oppressive in its turn. Gilley at one point states that it may take national legislation in America to restore genuine free speech to campuses. And free speech and genuine academic debate are the cornerstones of genuine democracy. Without it, you just have authoritarianism and indoctrination.
Philip George Chadwick, with introduction by Brian Aldiss, The Death Guard (London: Penguin 1982).
I bought this a few weeks after reading about it online. It was first published in 1939, although according to Wikipedia Chadwick probably started writing it in 1919 after the First World War. Very little is known about Chadwick himself, though the brief author biography at the end of the novel states that he was born in 1893, the youngest son of a North Country family. He wrote a number of short stories for newspapers and magazines in the ’20s and ’30s, as well as poetry. He lived for a while in Brighton, where he raised a family and was known as a articulate and talented political speaker, first for the Fabians and then as an Independent MP. He died in 1955.
The description of the book as ‘underground’ suggests that it was somehow officially banned. This wasn’t the case. It appears to have had a limited print run, and all but one copy seems to have been destroyed during the Blitz. It was long believed to have been lost completely, and perhaps even mythical, despite being referred to several times by no less than H.G. Wells. It was then rediscovered and republished by Penguin when they were trying to launch the RoC imprint of SF and Fantasy novels.
What makes the book fascinating to me is that it appears to be one of the earliest future war novels in which the menace is from genetically engineered warriors, somewhat like the armies clones used by the Empire in Star Wars, or the replicants in Blade Runner. In Chadwick’s vision, however, they are a form of artificial life that develops from a chemical soup into things like worms, before transforming into something like tadpoles then becoming humanoid. The creatures, simply dubbed ‘the Flesh’, or ‘units’ are pure slabs of muscle, with every other biological aspect pared down to the bare minimum. Instead of eyes, they have sockets of photosensitive skin. They breathe through their mouths, which has a membrane at the back through which they absorb air and their food, a mess of biologically engineered nutrients of the same type from which they are spawned, called ketchup. They have no intelligence or individuality. They exist purely to march and kill. Their creators equip them with helmets, a pair of spikes on either side of their bodies to make them even more efficient killers, metal shoes that make their feet rather like pig’s trotters, and a type of spear with four blades, dubbed a quadrifane. They are almost unkillable, and even when apparently dead, their biological substance lives on. It sprouts vesicles containing immature versions of the flesh, neoblasts, which then erupt to attack and kill in their turn. And the ketchup itself, unless consumed or destroyed, will also spawn more of the monsters.
The Origins of the Guard
These creatures are the products of Goble, a recently demobbed World War I soldier waiting with other former troopers for transport back to the demob centres and civilian life. Goble is haunted by an incident during the War, when he accidentally kills a fellow British trooper while on sentry duty. The man was too terrified to utter the password, and mistaking his inarticulate mumbling for that of an enemy, Goble killed him. He states, bitterly, that he didn’t want to be a soldier and become a killing machine. He is a former scientist, who with his supervisor, Dax, was engaged on a project to create life. It was during the War that he formulates the idea of the Death Guard, sketching out their appearance and equipment. Biological machines to do the fighting that humans wouldn’t.
Goble is discovered by Edom Beldite, a semi-retired industrialist seeking new projects to occupy his time. driving past Goble as he waits for transport back home. Beldite is fascinated by him, picks him up in his car, and takes him back to his country house, where Goble becomes a friend of the family, which includes his grandson Gregory Beldite, and the junior Beldite’s aunt, Fertile. Goble describes his killing of the other British squaddie and reveals his and Dax’s work on creating artificial life. Edom Beldite is fascinated by this, taking it up as a new hobby and converting the house’s stables into laboratories. This is the household environment in which the young Beldite grows up. The novel is framed as Beldite’s history of the war with the continental powers resulting from Beldite’s and Goble’s creatures, in which his personal memoirs as a significant participant in the events and ensuing war are an important part.
The Book’s Description of the Britain of the Late 20th Century
Despite initial official disapproval – at one point the laboratories and their staff have to be hidden from an inspection by the authorities – the experiments become an important but carefully hidden part of Beldite industries. Europe is bound by a series of international disarmament regulations which restrict the manufacture of weapons and technologies that may be used for war. This alternative future – the book is set in the 1970s – has autogyros and aircraft, but they are gliders launched from giant catapults. Other devices include the televisor, a sort of television. Not only can people watch it at home, they also do so in halls like cinemas. The broadcasting equipment is two way, so that politicians and political speakers using it to address the British public are able to view their audience and take stock of how well their speeches are going. It has been said that much Science Fiction reflects the time it was written, not the future, and this is the case with The Flesh Guard. Brighton is an entertainment resort, and people go to dance halls, not discos or nightclubs, and the Prime Minister wears a frock coat. It is also a Britain of grinding working class poverty and mass disaffection. There are militant pacifist groups plotting revolution and political censorship. When the leading pacifist spokesman attempts to address the nation on the threat of the Flesh Guard through the televisor, the authorities turn the sound off before dragging him away.
Racism and Black Subordination
It also reflects the racism of the time. The actual work of manufacture is done by the Experts, low-class, semi-educated Whites with brutal tastes. These centre around women, gambling, and staging ‘red try-outs’ – gladiatorial combats between members of the Guard, as well as their killing of cattle. After the infant creatures have been produced – dubbed at this stage ‘pugs’ – they are given over to Black workers to wash the chemicals from which they were spawned off them. These workers are described as ‘nigs’ or ‘ni**ers’. They are portrayed as simple minded, but potentially rebellious and bloodthirsty. In order to prevent them turning on their White employers and then the wider White community when they are relocated to Britain, they are kept in line with a false religion. This extols the White man, in the form of Edom Beldite, Dax, and a third leader in the manufacture of the Guard, as the creator of the Black race as well. The Flesh Guard are believed by the Black workers to be their brothers, and have instilled in them the doctrine that the Guard was deliberately created to protect Black people. This indoctrination is hammered into them through the ‘Glory Service’, held every evening in which attendance is mandatory.
As the manufacture of the Flesh becomes a part of Beldite’s industrial concerns and no longer a hobby, it is moved to Africa and a part of the Congo, under the guise of a subsidiary specialising in a new form of producing rubber. At the same time, the Guard draws the attention of Vessant, the smooth and scheming minister for war. Vessant sees them as a new weapon, an invincible army that will prevent and fight off any attempt by the continent to invade Britain. He therefore arranges with Beldite to increase production. Secret factories and depots are established throughout Yorkshire and the north. The ketchup that feeds the bioengineered hordes is disguised as ‘artificial food’. Gregory Beldite grows up, and takes up boxing and gliding as his hobbies. His uncle moves to Brighton, and it is there that his aunt Fertile introduces him to Paddy Hassall, the book’s heroine. Moving back to Yorkshire, Gregory Beldite joins the workforce at one of the Flesh factories, though as a ‘mugger’, a labourer running around serving the Experts, rather than management. One of the office workers is a member of the pacifist underground, and later introduces Beldite junior to his comrades at a political meeting in town. This gives the novel a quasi-working class viewpoint, even though young Beldite is a scion of the propertied classes.
Massacres by the Flesh in Africa
The Experts are restless for their old bloodsports, and so arrange a red try-out, whose victim is to be a cow they’ve managed to purchase. Only the Experts and muggers like Beldite are to know about this, not the office staff. This becomes a scene of carnage when one of the office women bursts in on them, wondering what it’s all about. The Unit at the centre of bullfight turns and kills her, and carries on killing the other personnel who futilely attempt to save her life. Back in Africa similar events have occurred. The Flesh escape from the Beldite compound to massacre the local African village leaving no one, not even a White missionary, alive. The Belgian authorities are outraged, as is much of the continent. They demand an immediate investigate of the Beldite compound. The Beldite company refuses and won’t allow them entry unless they are allowed to leave taking all their research and instruments with them. The Belgians therefore send an armed force against them, which is repulsed by the Flesh Guard. They are totally massacred, and the unleashed Guard goes on to butcher the British radio journalist and his crew secretly covering the events, which are broadcast live on the national news.
War with the Continent
The continental powers, fearing invasion and subjugation by Britain, join together in an alliance to invade. Even though they have been bound by the same international treaties, weapons research and manufacture has gone on secretly on their side as well. Their weapons include types of gas. One of these completely surrounds its target with murky black, preventing them from seeing the enemy. Another type, described as electric, destroys the functioning of machines as well as killing humans. This type of gas doesn’t disperse, but remains as a largely unseen toxic presence to kill the unwary travelling through the battle zones. The continental forces also have dominance of the air. There are giant motherships, flying aircraft carriers, transporting the Bomb Pluggers, sleek, streamlined dive bombers operated electronically by their pilots and which follow pre-programmed routs. The British navy is completely destroyed and the air force ruthlessly decimated. The continentals invade, but the British unleash the Death Guard, who mercilessly beat them back.
This does not end the war. The continentals embark on a bombing campaign, first against the Flesh factories, and then against the transport network and the towns and civilians centres. Order begins to break down. The government arranges the evacuation of civilians from the towns, and then shipments by air of food. Large areas of the country become impassable due to the destruction of the roads, the lingering gas and the neoblasts erupting from the parental Flesh seeking victims. Revolution breaks out in several parts of the north, as starvation and abandonment by the authorities to the bombing takes its toll. Roaming the devastated towns and countryside are the Mercy Gangs, volunteers who provide emergency medical aid to the wounded who can be saved, and euthanasian to those that can’t. Effective control of the country contracts to London and Brighton, an important place for the politicians and military leaders to unwind. As the war goes on, everything above ground is levelled and London’s people left to the assaults of the continental bombers. The really important personnel and equipment is moved hundreds of feet underground, where factories have been set up to produce a Flesh invasion force that will be transferred to the continent on rocketgliders to wreak death and destruction there.
After attending secret pacifist meetings, Gregory Beldite is conscripted into a special force of Experts charged with exterminating escaped Flesh and the neoblasts, during which his convoy is attacked by bombers, leaving him as the only survivor. He escapes, and makes his way across country, going to his old family home of View to meet his ailing uncle and persuade him to do something to stop the War. Beldite senior, however, lives in a hotel suite in Brighton along with Aunt Fertile. He is old, and sick, and while he wishes to stop the war, he is utterly sidelined by Vessant and the government. Haggard, one of his fellow Experts, goes down there with a message from Gregory telling them that he is now determined to do everything he can to stop the bloodshed. Haggard believes he is dead, but Paddy Hassall resolves to find him and forces Haggard to take her up north. Doing so they struggle with impassable roads, starving crowds who riot and try to attack them when they see Haggard’s Experts’ uniform. Finally their car is wrecked and Haggard killed protecting Paddy from a mass of attacking neoblasts. She struggles on alone, escaping the attention of a farmer, who forces her to attend to his wife in childbirth, but who clearly has other plans for her. Gregory Beldite eventually finds the view, but is shot and wounded by two unknown gunmen. There is no food or water in the house, so he starves while sustaining himself drinking its wine store. A crashed bombplugger at the side of the house offers him the opportunity of escape, but before he can use it, it is totally wrecked and himself nearly killed by a Flesh Unit. He seeks to escape and join a passing pacifist march, but he is shot again by the unseen shooters and the march killed by a continental air attack. Lying awaiting death, he is discovered by a Mercy Gang, recognised and then sent back south to recuperate.
He and Paddy become guests of Vessant and his wife at his country house. Vessant knows this is scheduled by the continentals to be destroyed the following day, but is going to abandon it and move to the underground warrens in London, there to preside over the Flesh counterattack and invasion of the continent. He takes Gregory Beldite, who has inherited ownership of Beldite from his uncle, who has since died, as well as the other remaining company directors. Once there, Gregory Beldite sees how far advanced the preparations are, and wonders if it is too late to stop it. The rocketgliders are hidden in silos hidden underneath buildings on the surface. The are blown up to open the silos beneath. Two columns of the Flesh Guard are marched to their waiting craft, which are then catapulted across the Channel to begin their murderous work.
Beldite Seizes Power to End the War
This is interrupted by a revolt from the Black workers, The Experts rush to Vessant’s command centre in panic, during which one of Vessant’s goons shoots one of the loyal Blacks, who had dropped to his hands and knees to plea for peaceful treatment. Gregory is also shot, but is dragged out by the other Experts, who kill Vessant and everyone in the room with him with one of the gas guns they use on the Flesh. Beldite then takes control of the situations, and in a coup seizes power in the government and company. He arranges a truce between Britain and the head of the continental forces, who descends to meet him in his mothership. Beldite has promised the British public victory, which doesn’t go down too well with the French commander. Nothing but complete surrender will satisfy the continentals, not even if Beldite stops a further invasion of the continent. Beldite then plays his last hand. One of his fellow directors, whom Beldite despises for his mercenary money-grubbing attitude, has repeatedly urged Beldite to sell the secrets of Flesh production to the various individual continental countries. They are businessmen, after all, and not in the business of war. Beldite tells the commander that if peace is not agreed upon, he will sell the secret to the individual nations of the alliance. They will immediately become mutually suspicious, and turn on each other, just as the alliance has turned on Britain. The Flesh will rampage across Europe and then the world. But to show the commander his good faith about British disarmament, he asks the Frenchman to look out the window. There, the remaining Flesh are being marched down the streets to their incineration by fire amidst cheering crowds attacking them with anything they can. This persuades the commander and the leaders of the alliance. Peace is declared. Beldite and Paddy are married and the work of reconstruction begins.
A Reflection of Interwar Britain
Chadwick was clearly drawing on the events and political situation of his own time. It reflects the tensions in interwar Britain, with pacifist societies and working class unrest. The seizure of power by revolutionaries in a number of northern towns seems to me to be based on the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the collapse of central authorities and the seizure of power by local revolutionary councils in Germany and Austria after their defeat in World War I. The descriptions of combat, the disgust of troopers forced to watch it and the cynical attitude to the crowds cheering the Experts and other soldiers as heroes, strikes me very much as coming from a man who really did see combat and all its horrors. At one point, Beldite and Haggard are rescued from a destroyed observation post by a cheerful airman, charged with carrying food to the surviving population. Beldite looks down on him as inexperienced, someone who has only seen the war from the air.
The description of the grinding poverty of sections of the working class, and the conduct of their political meetings, also has the ring of authenticity.
Racism, Colonialism and a Black Fascist SF Writer
Contemporary readers, however, may be put off by the racism towards the Black workers. I think this reflects not just the attitude of the time, but also possibly more specifically that some colonials. The Experts may be based on some of the rough, low class Whites, given jobs above the Black workers in colonial society. And the distrust of Black Africans as potentially violent and murderous probably comes from racial tensions during the late 19th century phase of imperial expansion. As for the creation of a false religion to keep them in line, this plot device was used by a Fascist Black American writer in the 1930s. This individual published a novel in which a Black American superscientist takes over the leadership of Africa and its Black population to wage a genocidal war against White Europeans. In order to give Blacks the necessary moral and spiritual strength for their struggle, he creates a giant Black android to pose as their new god during religious services established to inculcate the superiority of the Black race and the urgency of the struggle against Whites.
Similarities to The Day of the Triffids and Stalker
The book is interesting for several reasons. It’s a cracking good story in itself, and the passages of Beldite’s, Haggard’s and Hassall’s travel through a devastated Britain reminded me Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids and its depiction of a ruined Britain threatened by another set of creatures, which may also have been biologically manufactured and which have also escaped human control. The hidden hazards of the devastated zones, such as the lingering gas, also reminded me of the Strugatsky’s Stalker, whose hero also navigates his way through a treacherous zone with hidden traps, though one that may have been created by material from an alien spaceship rather than a human war. It’s also interesting for its 1930s vision of a future Britain, which is pretty much like 1930s Britain but with advanced technology. Some of the predictions for this technology are very inaccurate, like the motherships, although there were experiments with them by some air forces. The planes are all propeller driven, so there are no jets, and mass air travel seems to be gliders launched from catapults. The televisor is shown in halls like a development of the cinema rather than rival to it.
Science and Artificial Life
The creation of the Flesh itself seems to come from contemporary scientific speculation, in particularly the vitalism of philosopher’s like Henri Bergson. Goble at one point explains that life is inherent in matter, and it is only a case in some ways of freeing it. This is before the discovery of DNA and the more recent findings of biochemistry, which have shown how intricate and complex the chemistry of biological life really is. Scientists are engaged in creating analogies of biological cells from non-organic matter. This has been discussed by the Russian science vlogger, Anton Petrov, but it will be something like a thousand years before humanity will be able to make anything like one of Blade Runner’s Replicants.
Conclusion: A Forgotten Masterpiece
But it does show the horrors of war, and the threat of uncontrolled scientific advances used for military purposes, a threat not just to Britain, but also to Europe and global civilisation. This is SF as the literature of warning. In one incident, the continent sends war robots into Britain to fight the Flesh, which defeats them. We are nearing such an international situation now, with the development of real war robots, unmanned drones and tanks. For all its faults, I think the vividness of its writing, its creative imagination of a future war and its machines and its realistic depiction of working class politics and militancy makes the book well worth reading and, indeed, an SF masterpiece.
Lilienthal was one of the pioneers of modern aviation. In the late 19th century he built and flew a series of hang-gliders, eventually dying from a broken back caused when one of them crashed. This film comes from Johannes Hogebrink’s channel on YouTube. It’s in German, but there are subtitles. There is no existing film from the time of any of Lilienthal’s flights, as at that time film was very much in its infancy. Hogebrink, however, realised that many of the photographs taken of the flights were shot from the same angle, and could therefore be pieced together to produce a moving image. He therefore set about doing so with the cooperation of the Otto Lilienthal museum in Germany, eventually using 145 photos to produce the short film here. It’s a bit patch, as you’d expect. Sometimes the photos of the flight flow together so that it seems like a normal, regular movie. At other times there’s clearly a gap between the movement of the figures. It is, however, still a fascinating reconstruction of one of the humanity’s great pioneers taking tentatively to the air.
I’m still reading James Meek’s book on how this country’s public utilities have been wrecked by Thatcherite privatisation. I’ve just finished the chapters on the mess it made of the railways and the water supply, and am roughly half-way through the chapter on electricity. I intend to put up posts on these particular subjects in due course, but it might be sometime before I finish the book. Because it gets me so angry with the way the utilities and the British public have been sold out that sometimes the only thing I can do is put the book down and go and do something else instead. Or else my head will literally explode, like Kryten’s when something gets Red Dwarf’s metal man too infuriated.
I’ve just got to the pages in the book which describe how Littlechild, the academic behind the privatisation of British electricity, contrived a formula to allow the electricity companies to make massive profits while supposedly keeping prices down. But instead it allowed the companies to manipulate the system by taking power stations strategically offline to create massive profits and grossly inflated prices. Ed Wallis, the head of Powergen, did it in Yorkshire and Warwickshire.
At the moment there have been stories in the right-wing press about the French coming into provide us with electricity that we couldn’t produce domestically. I have a feeling this is all being blamed on the Green agenda, such as it is. In fact it’s almost certainly due to the privatisation of the energy companies, many of which are owned by the French state company EDF. And what also comes across very strongly in that chapter is the bewilderment and anger the French trade unionists have over the privatisation of British electricity and the supine attitude, as they see it, of the British trade unions.
One member of the French union, the CGT, told his British counterpart, ‘There’s only one country stupid enough to privatise its electricity, and that’s Britain’.
So much for the admiration the foreigners were expected to have for Thatcherite , global Britain.
As for the term ‘privatisation’, it was coined in 1936 as reprivatisierung, to describe the Nazi economic policy of mass privatisation. Which I think counts against the Nazis being some kind of socialists.
As I posted a few days ago, I’ve started reading Paul Meek’s Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else, about the massive harm done to Britain’s public services and the genuinely great British public by the privatisation of the public utilities. The book attacks the privatisation of the electricity and water companies, the part privatisation of the NHS, the sale of council houses and what would happen if Nigel Farage got into power and was effectively allowed to privatise us all. And the first chapter is on the privatisation of the Royal MailChristi.
This is interesting as it seems to have been done following the precedents of the Dutch and German Post Offices. The Dutch, who Meek notes have tended to be seen by Brits and Americans as Hippy lefty-liberals, privatised their Post Office decades ago in the mid-to late ’70s. He talks to the last left-wing minister over a publicly-owned post office, a Christian Radical and member of the PRR party in the Netherlands, who is still angry about its privatisation. The rationale for the privatisation of the post office in Britain and the Netherlands seems to be the same: as a publicly owned company, it will continue to be inefficient and suck up taxpayers’ money unless privatised and exposed to competition. Except in the Netherlands and Germany the mail remained for a long time a state monopoly, and it was only later, after it had made money, that it was exposed to competition from private companies. In Britain, Labour pushed through liberalisation of the postal service, introducing private competition, before it was privatised. This was purely ideological. Richard Hooper, the civil servant who compiled two reports demanding its privatisation, stated that it was done in order to force the other European countries to set up private rivals to their form state postal monopolies. It was also partly demanded by European law. Which somewhat contracts all the huffing and nonsense from the Conservative right and Reform about the EU being an evil Communist superstate.
The effect on ordinary postal workers was devastating. There are three private postal services in the Netherlands: SandD, TNT as well as PostNL. The private postal companies run a system in which the postmen and -women are each given so many pieces of mail and then required to sort through it at home and then deliver it. Meek talks to one postwoman who simply hasn’t been able to keep up with the sheer volume of the mail she’s been required to deliver, and so her house is stuffed full of it. The Dutch describe this job as a ‘bybaan’, a part-time job for people who don’t need full time work because they’ve got another source of income or a rich husband. These postmen and -women are paid below the minimum wage and don’t have health insurance. And unless they work extremely hard, they don’t get holiday pay either.
In Britain, Meek visits a couple of Post Office sorting centres, and hears about their operation and the pressures on the Mail from the rise of email and the subsequent decline of snailmail and private competition from management, workers and the trade unions. At the time he was writing – the book was published ten years ago in 2014 – postal workers were still given a decent wage and long term workers had five weeks holiday entitlement. He also talks to the heads of their rivals, who think that the mail’s workers are overpaid. Their workers are staggeringly underpaid, especially outside London, and they are on zero hours contracts.
Despite the decline in ordinary mail, there’s been an expansion of corporate mail from companies sending out catalogues, and as internet shopping has taken off, the volume of parcel mail has risen. But the civil servants and private corporations were still demanding further cuts to the workforce. Many of the jobs shed by the former Royal Mail were through natural wastage and people taking early retirement. But one predatory company reckoned that if Royal Mail had laid of 3 per cent more people, and cut wages by another three percent, it would produce a nice little profit, no, a nice massive profit for shareholders.
There’s also a campaign against the USO – the public service order requiring that the mail delivers six days a week to everywhere in the British Isles at the same price. He talks to the people of the Scots island of Muck, who may only have deliveries on three days a week due to the weather preventing the ferries from coming, and talks about how Jersey also cut back its postal deliveries in order to save money. In other countries around the world from America to New Zealand, the postal services are cutting back deliveries to only a few days a week. Despite the problems getting the mail to remote places like Muck, the Royal Mail is obliged to do it. But the private companies are aiming to sabotage the Mail’s ability to do so by competing with them in the big urban centres like London and Manchester. This cuts into some of the market that’s effectively subsidising Royal Mail deliveries to places like Muck, which are in themselves loss-making. SandD opened up a branch in Manchester, and were praised for it by George Osborne, who boasted that it was creating jobs. The book says very clearly that this wasn’t the case. The total number of postmen in Manchester would be the same due to the volume of post remaining the same, only the SandD workers would be worse paid.
The chapter concludes with the report that after a campaign by the unions and members of the Dutch parliament, conditions for the Netherlands’ private postal workers had been improved with laws passed to give them better wages and full-term contracts. There was bitter rivalry between the Dutch and German postal services, as neither the Dutch nor the Germans wanted the other’s former state postal service to operate in their countries, but both were setting up private subsidiaries of their former state monopoly to undercut the others’. And both sides were accusing the other of using dirty tactics by doing this.
The book was written ten years ago. I have friends, who are postal workers and they’ve told me that the company is determined to cut wages and jobs. It hasn’t quite happened, but my fear is that Britain’s postal service will end up like the private companies in the Netherlands, staffed by genuinely exploited people to generate profits for senior management and shareholders.
Rakib Ehsan, Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong About Ethnic Minorities (London: Forum 2023).
I first came across this in an interview Ehsan himself gave about it on YouTube. I can’t remember now what channel it was on, but I think it may have been the SDP’s as Ehsan’s politics seem similar to theirs – left-wing economically but conservative socially. He also says at the outset that he tries to bridge the gap between Blue Labour and Red Tories. I have very strong issues with both of those groups, as they cloak their Thatcherite economics that disenfranchise and exploit working people in the language of the left. See Philip Blonde’s Red Tory. The book is directed very firmly at the Labour party. Ehsan sees the party as having abandoned class based activism in the wake of the BLM movement for divisive identity politics imported from America. This is a country that has a very different history and political culture from the UK, and this is going to cost them the votes of the very ethnic minorities they seek to court.
Contrary to identitarian propaganda, Britain and its people aren’t racist, although racism still exists and needs tackling where it does. The supposed privilege Whites enjoy over people of colour disappear when examined in detail. Some ethnic minorities are surpassing Whites in school grades, pay and employment. There are also differences in achievement between White demographic groups. Working class White English males are nearly at the bottom, with only Irish Travellers below them. Chinese and Indians outperform Whites. Black Africans are also outperforming Whites academically. There is no overarching ‘BAME’ community, as these are very different peoples who have different levels of achievement. Black Africans, for example, are much more successful than Afro-Caribbean peoples. The success and growing achievements of people of colour is being obscured by the grievance narrative that they are all being held back by systemic racism. As a man of mixed Bangladeshi-Uttar Pradeshi heritage, he felt particularly insulted when Jeremy Corbyn declared that only Labour could unlock the potential of Britain’s Black and Asian communities. This attitude, he warns, is going to cost the Labour party the votes of Britain’s non-White communities. Rather than being obsessed with racial grievances, these communities value the two parent family, religious faith and are patriotically British. It is these values, that are despised by the woke left, that produces their increasing academic, economic and social successes. This success should be celebrated, and the White population, which is trailing behind in many instances, could, he dares to suggest, take a leaf out of their book. At the last election, one million people of colour abandoned Labour for the Tories.
Brexit Not Fascist Project of Nostalgic White Supremacists
He is also a Brexiteer and is at pains to argue that Brexit wasn’t the project of Fascist, backward-looking Whites. Many of the Whites who voted for it did so because they came from communities who believed the country had been harmed by the EU, not because of immigration. And a large proportion of the non-White population also voted Leave. One in three Asians did so. They feared the immigration to this country of large numbers of people from parts of Europe which were much less tolerant of non-Whites. They also wanted Britain to establish greater contact with the Commonwealth.
Ethnic Disparities Based on Other Factors Apart from Racism
As for the disparities between ethnic groups in sport, jobs and education, some of this is down to class, and differences in culture and job expectations. For example, Bangladeshis largely do better than Whites at school, but come from a very traditional culture that sees women’s place as being in the home. There is thus a relative lack of Bangladeshi women in the workplace. He also discusses the question of the absence of British Asians in cricket played at the county and national level. This comes from the allegations of racism at Yorkshire CC. He states that this was clearly a case of racism, and that the club was racist hellhole. But he quotes several British Asian cricketers that there are particular attitudes in British Asian culture against playing cricket professionally. Asian parents want good, secure jobs for their children – jobs like doctor or dentist. Professional cricket is very insecure, and so their parents will try and steer their kids away from it. As for the police, in many instances it’s a matter of family tradition, with children following parents and relatives in the force. Thus, White people tend to predominate simply because of family tradition. And on the subject of the cops, he cites evidence that shows that most people of colour are satisfied with their local police forces. Indeed, more non-Whites trust the cops more than White British. This does not include the Metropolitan Police, who are distrusted because of their proven racism, misogyny and other forms of bigotry. He believes that this could be tackled by breaking it up into smaller, local forces, and letting local forces also run the parts of the Met that extend into surrounding counties like Kent.
Regarding Islam, he cites the statistic that three-quarters of Muslims believe that Britain is a good place to be one. This is much more than the general British population. More Muslims are also concerned about the threat of Islamism than Whites. He also criticises the Labour MP Naz Shah for claiming that the Prevent programme was resented by Muslims for demonising them when the stats showed that 53 per cent of Muslims weren’t aware of it.
Black and Asians Patriotic Brits
The Black and Asian communities were also generally more patriotic and had a greater trust in British democracy, although this was much less so in the younger generation. 78 per cent of older Asians had faith in British democracy, but only 58 per cent of the younger generation, just a bit lower than Whites at 62 per cent. He put this down to the older generation coming from countries which were unstable with very repressive regimes, tracing the history in particular of the British South Asian community. This began after the War with Sikhs from the Punjab, who had been displaced from Pakistan and given poor quality land in India. They were then followed by Gujuratis seeking employment in the NHS. And then came the ethnic cleansing of the Ugandan Asian community by Idi Amin and his policy of Africanisation. The South Asians in Africa were employed as middle ranking officials and businessmen between the White colonial officials at the top and indigenous Africans at the bottom. There were already immigration restrictions in place, but they were admitted by Ted Heath. I’ve heard again and again, including from Asian speakers at our local church, that the Ugandan Asian community is still grateful to Britain because of this.
He also has immense respect for the Queen and King Charles. The Queen had a strong sense of duty to the Commonwealth, while our current liege lord is strongly multicultural. He said in his coronation speech that Britain is a ‘community of communities’ and that he wanted to be known as ‘Defender of Faith’, meaning all Britain’s religious communities, not just the Anglican church. On the subject of which, he notes the strong contribution made by Black Africans to keeping it alive in the face of the massive secularisation of the White population. He states that you are far more likely to get a sense of the deep antiquity of Christianity in Britain in an African cafe eating Jellof rice in London than in many White communities. It is ridiculous to blame the Queen for the evils committed under imperialism and colonialism, and Britain’s non-Christian religions are certainly not resentful of Christianity. He takes issue with the secularists in the Labour party, who feel that religion is outmoded and dangerous. They are actively putting non-Whites off, because these cultures have a very strong religious identity. More Muslims see their religion as important to their identity than Whites. The Labour party has a strong tradition of Christian Socialism, and these non-Christian religious communities would like to see it revived.
Importance of Education to Indians and Chinese
He also puts the growing success of the Indian and Chinese communities in education and professionally to strong families and religion. He cites statistics showing that children from stable, two parent homes are less likely to join criminal gangs, are more emotionally stable, and do better at school and in the world of work. Far fewer Asian children live in single parent families than Whites. They, and the Chinese, are also very aspirational. They want their children to do well, make sure they work hard at school and in the case of the Chinese make sure they keep away from bad influences. They also have the support of the wider community, with elders actively taking an interest in the welfare and progress of the young. He does not decry single mothers, recognising the immense hard work so many do to raise their children, and that the relaxation of the divorce laws were brought in for the very good reason of allowing women in particular to escape abusive marriages. But it has had a devastating effect on marriage and the family in Britain. 63 per cent of Afro-Caribbean children live in one parent families, and 43 per cent of Black African. 25 per cent of Whites also are being raised in families largely without a father. This is holding these groups back, and he dares to suggest that Whites could take a leaf out of the Asian communities in starting to value marriage and the family more. I am in complete agreement, and don’t think this is at all controversial.
On the subject of religion, he states that he has mixed views on the subject, wondering if it really is outmoded and dangerous, especially after the terrorist attacks of 7/7 and the massacre of schoolgirls by a suicide bomber at the Ariana Grande concert. But the stats also show that people, who have a strong religious faith are generally more mentally stable, more optimistic and with a higher degree of life satisfaction than atheists. He also believes that respect for the cultures of ethnic minorities should not be used as a pretext for avoiding tackling crime and extremist attitudes in those communities, which could be excused by their perpetrators as part of their culture.
Britain Not Racist Country
He also cites the statistics showing that Britain is not a racist country. A large majority of Whites -well above 70 per cent – believe that Englishness is a matter of values rather than colour. The number of people linking Englishness to White ethnicity is low, and fell markedly in the last decade. Britain has robust laws against racism and discrimination, and the level of real racism, including abuse and violence, is lower in Britain than in many continental countries like France, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. This, he claims, shows the falsity of the Remain argument that views the continent as a paradigm of anti-racism in contrast with evil Britain. Anti-Black racism also isn’t confined to Whites. Eight per cent of Blacks in Britain have experienced discrimination at the hands of other Blacks. 84 per cent of Brits have no problem with a person of colour heading the government. Rishi Sunak, regardless of his wretched political policies, is an example of Asian success, who should be celebrated. His parents both worked in the medical sector – I think his father was a pharmacist. Sunak was privately educated, rising professionally and politically.
This is where the book is really controversial. He takes these stats showing that Britain isn’t a racist country from a variety of reports, including those of CRED and Sewell. The last was commissioned under the Tories, and came under widespread attack for supposedly erasing the reality of racism in Britain. This was despite it being written by mostly Black and Asian academics. Various Labour MPs accused it of being Fascist, with one even Tweeting an image of a Klan meeting underneath. The Black and Asian politicians, who do not accept that Britain is racist, like Kemi Badenoch, are subjected to horrendous racist abuse as Uncle Toms and worse language. He himself has been attacked in these terms. His favourite has been that he is a ‘Muslim Mosley’. Well, I’d say that the Muslim Mosleys were the Islamists convincing lost and alienated Muslims to join Daesh, or march around our cities demanding sharia law while waving the black flag of jihad. The British left, and primarily the Labour party, has taken over dangerous and divisive identity politics imported from America. What many of the people of colour demanding these policies want is not equality, but preferential treatment. He is also suspicious of many of those attacking Islamophobia, as he suspects that many of those are Islamists using it as a strategy to introduce aspects of sharia law. I think he’s right here, as the mass protests against the autistic schoolboy for Islamophobia when he scuffed a Qur’an, a horrendous blasphemy under Islam, certainly shows. He is against the European Court of Human Rights ruling that businesses are allowed to discriminate against women wearing the hijab if this threatens to be disruptive. He points out that the hijab simply covers the face. It is not like the niqub, which covers the whole body, including the face. The ruling threatens to prevent devout Muslim women from finding work outside the home and bring them into contact with mainstream society.
Attacks on Corbyn
Naturally for a man of the right he gives Jeremy Corbyn a good kicking. He claims that Labour lost the 2019 election due to his inability to tackle the anti-Semitism crisis and the promotion of identitarian politics. But this wasn’t the case. Corbyn had very wide support and paradoxically a greater share of the vote than Blair and New Labour, regardless of the fact that it was the poorest electoral performance for the party since the 1930s. What brought him down was a very manufactured campaign by the British right and the official Jews of the Board of Deputies, Chief Rabbinate and various pro-Israel groups. They were alarmed by his championing of the Palestinians against the oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Israeli state, and so did everything they could to smear him as an anti-Semite. Corbyn has a long career of standing up for Jewish Brits, but this counted for nothing to people who regard any opposition or criticism of Israel as an anti-Semitic. As for the real anti-Semites in the Labour party, the true nature of the crisis was kept hidden from him by right-wing intriguers and traitors within the party. People like Margaret Hodge, who admitted she did everything she could to stop Labour being elected.
Rejection of Labour’s Proposed New Equality Act
He respects the Labour party for the anti-racist legislation it passed in the 70s as well as the Equality Act passed by Blair, but is firmly against Labour’s promised new Equality Act demanding affirmative action. The majority of Black and Asian people do not want or need it. Indeed, he claims that there is a suspicion that Labour will hold people of colour back in order to stop their success invalidating the claim that their lagging behind Whites is all due to racism. He is also critical of organisations like the Runnymede Commission pushing this narrative. Twenty years ago the Commission praised Britain for its multicultural tolerance. Now it claims that Britain is marred by deep structural racism. But British society isn’t racist and hasn’t become worse. It is just that the Runnymede Commission, in order to keep itself relevant, has joined BLM and the other grievance mongers. Labour’s embrace of these groups and individuals, such Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, is putting voters, including those of colour, off. And they may well abandon the party because of it.
The Trans Issue
He also has controversial views on the trans issue. He states that trans people should enjoy the same protection from abuse, discrimination and violence as other protected groups. However, transwomen should not be allowed to enter women’s private spaces such as prisons, toilets and changing rooms. In many ways, this is common sense as trans identified biological male rapists have been put in women’s prisons in California and Scotland, and there has been an outcry against it. The SNP lost much of their support when they also placed these dangerous men in women’s prisons. It does conflict, however, with the view that ‘trans women are women’, even if they are not biologically, and so trans activists and supporters will naturally find it very offensive. And he is also not afraid to call divorce parties degenerate as part of the collapse of marriage and the nuclear family in the west.
Radical Attacks on Marriage and the Family
This is a controversial but necessary book. Controversial because it overturns the received wisdom about British ethnic minorities as the victims of systemic racism needing aid and allyship from mainstream White British society. The statistics about the beneficial effects of growing up in two-parent family are almost certainly correct. They’ve been reproduced several times before. This will jar with some on the radical left. There has been an attack on traditional European marriage since the time of the 18th century French philosophes. Free love instead of marriage was embraced by 19th century Romantics like Shelley and Byron. It has also been part of the Anarchist critique of capitalism as well as Marxism. Marx states in The Communist Manifesto that it degrades women and believed it was dying out among the working class in his own time. This was further expanded by Engels in his The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, which also drew on the Das Mutterrecht of the German antiquarian, Backhausen. Backhausen had believed that society had passed through several phases of development – a communal society without institutional marriage, followed by matriarchy and then finally patriarchy. Archaeologists and historians have since rejected this. Historical research has also shown that marriage very definitely wasn’t dying out among the 19th century working class. Nevertheless, marriage has been attacked by radical activists. I can remember the controversy about Pebble Mill, a BBC lunchtime magazine programme in the 70s, when they invited on a couple who very definitely believed that marriage was dying out, and that this was a very good thing indeed. Over the other side of the Channel, the Postmodernist Marxist Althusser attacked marriage and the family as part of the sociological infrastructure of capitalism and feudalism.
Benefits of Religious Faith
Similarly there is abundant evidence supporting the view that religion is beneficial to one’s wellbeing. A few years ago medical researchers claimed that having a faith in general added six months to one’s life. And back when the New Atheists were beginning their assault on religion neurologists found that people who had mystical experiences were generally in no worse mental health than the rest of the population. This obviously isn’t something secular and atheist activists want to hear. Nor do I think they really want to hear that in general, non-Christian minorities don’t have an issue with institutional, public Christianity. The claim that they do tends to come from secularist and atheist organisations like the Humanist Society as part of their project of removing Christianity and other forms of religion from the public sphere. The philosopher Bruce Trigger tackled this subject in his Religion in Public over decade. He claimed that many Jews did not want the bishops removed from the House of Lords because, so long as they were, it created a public space for religion in politics.
Ethnic Success Also Due to Differences in Culture and History
I also think that the stats showing that Britain is not an intrinsically racist country is likely to be true, even if the report that argued this was commissioned by the Tories. If it is untrue, then it has to be shown to be untrue through further sociological research and polling. The argument that it must be the case from ethnic disparities is false, because as Thomas Sowell has shown, different ethnic groups have different attitudes and economic and professional specialities due to their history and quite often geographical location. The Chinese and Gujuratis are, like the Jews, ‘middleman cultures’ strongly based on trade. They therefore tend to surpass other groups in business, as do the Lebanese in South America. Ehsan himself argues that the success of various ethnic groups depends on the cultural resources and the attitudes and material advantages they may have enjoyed when they left their country of origin. Ugandan Asians have prospered, despite having been robbed of nearly everything they owned by Amin and his thugs, because they were business and professional people. Afro-Caribbeans, however, generally speaking lack this entrepreneurial and professional background and so lag behind. And the idea that all White people are privileged is going to ring particularly hollow for White working class boys and the hollowed out coastal towns and post-industrial communities. The instant dismissal of the claim that Britain isn’t racist is based on prejudice rather than genuine scepticism.
Changes in Patterns of Racism Since the Experience of the First Afro-Caribbean Migrants
The attitude of the identitarian left that Britain must be intrinsically racist seems to come mostly from the experience of Afro-Caribbeans, who are generally more distrustful of the police and democracy than other groups. They have indeed, along with the first generation Asian immigrants, suffered real racism in the form of institutional discrimination – no dog, no blacks, no Irish – racist bullying and violence, particularly from real Fascists in the shape of the BNP, National Front and other lowlifes. It is Afro-Caribbeans in particular who lag behind Whites. This history has bred an attitude among many that Britain is racist and hostile, backed up with convoluted and contrived arguments from the Postcolonial set. This has become part of the general culture of the left, because of the long tradition of anti-racism and anti-imperialism. It looks plausible, because for over four decades now the received view has been that Britain is racist to a greater or lesser extent, even though the situation has changed and is now becoming much more complex. Diane Abbott didn’t want to discuss inter-ethnic minority conflict and racism, but this attitude is contradicted by rioting last year between Hindus and Muslims in Leicester. Ehsan points out that this shows that ethnic conflict isn’t just something confined to Whites. And there is now and industry of grievance mongers in academia and woke capitalism, whose careers are centred around portraying White Britain as innately oppressive, that Blacks and other people of colour are always victims and that Whites should feel guilty as racial oppressors tainted with the blood of the indigenous peoples they exterminated and enslaved.
Multiculturalism Pulling Ethnic Groups Apart, Not Together
Ehsan notes that while Britain may be more tolerant than other countries, there is still a problem in pulling the different ethnic groups together. He cites further statistics shown that a majority of Brits feels more needs to be done on this count, and argues that was is needed is a common set of shared values. But this is one of the problems of multiculturalism. Blair recruited as his community representatives people who very definitely not representative of their communities and determined to push their own sectarian or ethnic politics. And the attack on the welfare state has meant that different communities are competing against each other for government funding and aid. For all his faults, Corbyn did represent a return to class politics, which is another reason why there was such a concerted attempt to remove him. If the working class in general receives proper welfare support, there is less jealousy and resentment between ethnic groups, and so Whites in particular are less inclined to heed racists like the BNP.
Blue Labour and Attacks on the Welfare State
As for the position that government action is needed to strengthen the family, I agree. But this goes further than simply making it a matter of tax. And I am very suspicious of the right when they claim to strengthen the family. All too often it is based around the view that it’s declined due to the welfare state, and so the first thing they do is cut welfare support even further while loudly crying, like Thatcher, that it’s more self-help and will make people more self-reliant.
He is critical of the Tories as a corrupt group wrecking the economy for their own benefit and hope that Labour will put forward pro-working class policies. But this won’t come from Blue Labour any more than it will supposedly come from Red Tories. What comes from the Blairites and the other Thatcherite infiltrators is more privatisation, including that of the NHS, more cuts to the welfare state and more attempts to strangle the unions, all of which you can see in Stalin’s leadership of the Labour party.
This book is necessary as it argues against the current racial narrative from a man of colour, who clearly believes that such narratives are damaging the Labour party. Certainly racial attitudes have changed radically in my lifetime and it is time that the debate recognised this. But at the same time, as Ehsan is careful to state, racism still exists and needs tackling where it does.
Yesterday I put up a video which explored Bristol’s Stapleton Road, asking whether it was still Britain’s most dangerous road as it had been dubbed twenty years ago. This had been at time when there had been a very high level of gun crime linked to feuding drug gangs. It concluded that Stapleton Road wasn’t as bad as it had been, but was still dangerous. I got a comment to the video from Lesley Matthews, who lives there, stating that it’s actually a great place to live. When I asked him what made it so, he replied
‘Yes. It’s an excellent community where people look out for each other. A truly multicultural area similar to how Easton used to be before gentrification took over, house prices shot through the roof and white middle classes moved in. (Still bitter, we were priced out by landlord raising the rent so we would move and he could sell)
There are a few groups of lads hanging about but they are very polite to the elderly and are pretty well behaved. (Mostly Somalian so they’ve been well brought up).
The shops are fabulous with lots of food from all over the world.
There is a problem with rubbish but this is down to Bristol being constantly underfunded and the waste disposal teams cut to the bone.’
This is very interesting, as it presents a very different and contrasting picture to the image of this part of Bristol. I was very interested to read that it has a great community spirit and that the groups of mostly Somali youths are actually polite to the elderly and well-brought up. Again, this contradicts some of the perceived ideas about Black criminality, not just in Bristol but also in other British cities. As for the problems of gentrification and Bristol’s rubbish disposal services being cut to the bone, the latter unfortunately is true right across the board in Bristol following massive cuts made by the elected mayors Ferguson and Marvin Reese. And I’ve no doubt that Easton is also suffering from gentrification. It’s happening to many working class and diverse communities across Britain and America, as the affluent White middle classes move into areas of traditionally cheaper housing, raising rents and house prices beyond the ability of local people to afford them. It’s causing a lot of resentment.
I’m very happy to present this alternative, positive view of the area and hope that the community spirit Lesley describes goes on to make it a great place to live.
Trev, another commenter on this blog, also remarked that Stapleton Road looked like Manningham in Bradford, another community that has acquired a nasty reputation with outsiders, but was also a great community for the people who lived there.
‘Looks a bit like Manningham in Bradford, classed as “no go zone” by those who never go there but a thriving multicultural community that I was a part of for 18 years! I think Jawa motorbikes were eastern european, either Czek or German. Still make them today.’
Again, another comment I’m pleased to put up as it contradicts the received ideas about these communities, showing that local people consider them very differently to the negative views of outsiders.
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.
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