Black Myth

Ten years ago the BBC conducted a poll on the 100 greatest Britons.  Those who notice this sort of thing noticed that no black people made it on to the list, so a black list was produced.  Sorry; how else am I to describe it?!  If I tell you that it features the Labour MP Diane Abbot that might give you a measure of the quality of ‘greatness.’ 

The whole thing is really quite ridiculous, risibly so at points.  I have no problem at all with black people looking for positive role models, but who really needs this kind of silly condescension?  These is also a kind of desperation, it seems to me, in the search for the century.  Philipa of Hainault, queen consort of Edward III, is on the list.  Why?  Because she was the mother of Edward, the Black Prince of Wales!  You know, and I know and anyone with any wit knows this had nothing at all to do with the colour of his skin! 

Mary Seacole is also there.  In fact she tops the list, this supposed black heroine of the Crimean War.  She’s rather the flavour of the day, this woman, even replacing Florence Nightingale as the true Lady of the Lamp.  This is not just a result of black elevation, but white guilt, as Lynne McDonald suggests in a brilliant, eye-opening piece in the latest issue of History Today (Nursing’s Bitter Rivalry).  I almost passed over this because, quite frankly, the subject does not really interest me that much.  I’m so glad I didn’t.  The Seacole story, I know now, is a lot of black propaganda. (Sorry; I couldn’t resist that either!)  It’s only fair to add that it’s not of the lady’s devising. 

I give you Jamaican-born Mary Seacole, an hotelier and herbalist by profession.  So far as the quality of ‘blackness’ is concerned black people would be well-advised to stay well clear of the truth; the myth is much more comforting.  She was three-quarters white and, as she explains in her journals, proud of her ‘Scotch blood’.  Her writing, moreover, is full of the usual nineteenth century stereotypes.  She refers to black people as ‘negroes’ and ‘niggers.’  It’s never a self-reference.  No, she took considerable pains to distance herself from what she called the ‘lazy Creole’ image, evidenced in her “good for nothing black cooks.”

But the myth has wings.  I understand that a massive statue is to be erected to this ‘Pioneer Nurse’ at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, the place where Florence Nightingale was based for forty years.  The monument, McDonald says, will even be visible from the House of Commons, taller both than that of Florence Nightingale at Waterloo Place and Edith Cavell in St Martin’s Lane.

I suppose I have to congratulate the fundraisers on fighting such a brilliant campaign, brilliant enough for the hospital trustees to grant permission on a foundation of evidentiary quicksand.  The statue will show ‘Britain’s black heroine’, with medals won for bravery, walking on to a Crimean battlefield to treat the wounded.  There is only one problem: it’s a lie.    

Here are the inconvenient facts.  Unlike Nightingale, Seacole never nursed, never trained as a nurse and never worked in a hospital.  In the Crimea she ran a hotel, catering specifically for officers, a thing she remarks on with a snobbish sense of delight.  She never won any medals, and never claimed to have won any medals, though that did nor stop her from wearing medals. 

Even the Nursing Standard, a magazine owned by the Royal College of Nursing, which supports the Seacole statue campaign, has contributed to the mythology. Over the past ten years it has published more than seventy articles lauding her ‘achievements’, even though they give not a single concrete example of Seacole’s contribution to the profession. 

The media has taken up the angel Seacole and devil Nightingale campaign.  In Mary Seacole: a Hidden History, a Channel 4 documentary broadcast in 2005, it was claimed on no evidence at all that Seacole had “saved thousands of lives.”  The fakery, for fakery it is, has even made it into children’s literature.  In The Life of Mary Seacole by Emma Lynch she is described as nursing soldiers from 5am until midday before going on to the battlefield, presumably to look for more.

It never happened.  She was present at only two engagements, the Redan assault in June and Tchernya in August 1855.  In her journal she gives no details, other than to say that it was ‘pleasant enough’ and a source of ‘strange excitement’.’  Yes, I suppose it was.  Meanwhile it was back to the British Hotel, where lightly wounded officers (the serious cases were sent to Nightingale in Turkey) could feast on such delights as lobster, oysters, wild fowl and game, all items well beyond the means of ordinary soldiers. 

If you really want to know about Seacole it’s best to ignore the saccharine-sweet hagiography.  Go instead to The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, her own account originally published in 1857, a reasonably honest testament, unlike so much of the present dishonesty surrounding her memory.  We are all ill-served by this sort of nonsense, black people most of all, treated by a certain shade of white liberal opinion as though they were children to be indulged in a state of innocence.  It’s just a mirror image of the old racism. 

Laughing in the Face of Absurdity

Burn the Witch!

I hugely admire Nick Cohen, a journalist and author of fearless integrity.  He is one of those people almost impossible to classify politically.  On the face of it he belongs to the left, but that has not stopped him from voicing the most trenchant criticism of his fellow travellers.  His book What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way is a brilliant polemic, exposing the shallow opportunism, intellectual barrenness and moral vacuity of so much contemporary ‘progressive’ opinion.  He might be said to occupy the same position once held by George Orwell, for whom honesty came well before party loyalty.

A recent blog of his drew my attention to a scandalous episode of heresy hunting that might even have shocked the witch hunters of Salem.  It concerns the illiberalism of liberal academics in the States.  It concerns a hysterical onslaught against one Naomi Schafer Riley, an education correspondent for The Chronicle of Higher Education.  Rather she was a correspondent for this publication.  She was fired for daring to question an unquestionable orthodoxy. 

What was her offence?  She raised doubts over – horror of horrors – the academic rigour of black studies departments in US colleges.  She wrote a response to a laudatory piece previously published by the Chronicle.  Going to source, she examined a number of graduate dissertations, concluding that they were, to use her words, “purveyors of left-wing victimisation claptrap”.  Her punches were not spared:

Topping the list in terms of sheer political partisanship and liberal hackery is La TaSha B. Levy. According to the Chronicle, “Ms. Levy is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’” The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?’

All at once the thunder rolled – racist! racist!, racist!, burn the witch.  What price freedom of speech in the land of the free?  Very little, it would seem, when it challenges the shibboleths of the academic left.  They demanded a sacrifice.  The editor of the Chronicle tried to make it an issue of free debate.  But that was not enough.  Shamefully 6500 people, mostly academics, signed a petition demanding that Riley be sacked.  Shamefully the editor gave way to the pressure. 

Cohen’s observation is telling;

Now suppose that the US government said that universities should fire academics who excused the Iranian regime. Or right-wing Christians demanded that the Chronicle fire a writer who insulted teachers at theological colleges. Or universities had acted on Riley’s argument that black studies departments were a waste of space and closed them. Cries of ‘McCarthyism’ would rend the air. Earnest professors would remind us that academic tenure was an essential protection of free inquiry. 

But when the blood hounds start baying there is little room for reason.  The dog who barked loudest was one Stanley Fish, a law professor who writes for the New York Times.  His argument was, as Cohen says, both sinister and clownish.  He told American liberals that it was OK to abandon liberalism.  They must deny conservatives free speech and enforce censorship.  There is no shame here; no, for we are the righteous hypocrites; we demand free speech for ourselves while denying it to all those we disapprove of.    

In defending herself Riley pointed to the black American scholars who have been saying exactly the same thing about black studies department, namely that they reinforce stereotypes and encourage victimhood.  But that’s alright; they are black.  For her to make the same point is akin to a white person using the n word.  You see, by their double standards shall ye know them.

There are no limits to the sea of hypocrisy in which Fish swims.  Oh, but let me be fair: there is no dissimulation here; for he is an honest hypocrite, defending hypocrisy as hypocrisy.  In a recent Times piece he wrote that it was quite in order for liberals to condemn Rush Limburgh for making sexist remarks while excusing Bill Mahler for making equally sexist remarks.  The thing is, you see, the former is one of the good guys while the latter is “on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy”.

One has to wonder about the nature of American democracy, the partial nature that would favour freedom for some and silence for others.  Yes, one does indeed wonder when one reads this piece of idiocy:

I know the objections to what I have said here. It amounts to an apology for identity politics. It elevates tribal obligations over the universal obligations we owe to each other as citizens. It licenses differential and discriminatory treatment on the basis of contested points of view. It substitutes for the rule “don’t do it to them if you don’t want it done to you” the rule “be sure to do it to them first and more effectively.” It implies finally that might makes right. I can live with that.

Such is the degeneracy of liberalism.  People like Fish want to cast democracy in their own image.  This is a pond where the little fishes can be untroubled by countervailing thoughts; where, if they disapprove of what you say they will fight to the death to prevent you saying it.  How Voltaire would have laughed.  That’s all one can do in the face of absurdity – laugh. 

American Disease

When I take timeout I have to climb a mountain of emails on my return. It takes a while to catch up and to respond. But on this occasion there was one that quickly caught my attention and spurred my intellect.

Sent by a friend (thanks, Nobby!) who shares my general political outlook, it was a link to a YouTube video, a documentary about the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the evolution of political correctness, with particular regard to the United States.

In The World Crisis, his book about the causes and course of the First World War, Winston Churchill, in a particularly memorable simile, wrote that the Germans transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia. Well, cultural Marxism and political correctness, its most toxic cell, were similarly transported like a plague bacillus from Germany to the United States.

Interested? I bet you are! I’ll make things a little bit clearer further on but first a word or two about the context, the medium, if you like, carrying the message. The presenter is William S. Lind, the former Director of the Centre for Cultural Conservatism, which doubtless means that some will dismiss the thesis without further consideration. That’s a pity, really, for there is real meat here, a thread into the labyrinth of the present American malaise.

The argument itself is simple enough: that Marxism in its classic form was a failure because the working class did not perform the walk-on part allotted to it in a turgid drama that went by the name of Historical Materialism. But the play did not die. Instead it was rewritten as a cultural critique of Western society and civilization as a whole.

The Institute for Social Research was set up in Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany in 1924. Here a new hybrid was created as if on the island of Doctor Moreau, a melding of Marx and Freud. The basic theme here was that everyone was repressed by capitalism, politically and sexually, if only they knew it, if only they weren’t so beset by ‘false consciousness.’ With the ascent of the Nazis, a particularly virulent form of false consciousness, the School relocated in America, where its ideas were to have the greatest impact of all.

The documentary did not really tell me anything that I did not already know, either about cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt School or the corrosive effects of political correctness in general. In reviewing Anthony Browne’s The Retreat of Reason, which examines the creature in a British context, I wrote;

The author identifies what might be referred to as the pre-history of PC. Although Marxism failed in both political and economic terms it made significant advances in the cultural arena, through universities and opinion-forming bodies, to the point where ordinary debate was contaminated by a new orthodoxy, one which amplified the perceived injustices done to minorities, even so far as silencing debate over uncomfortable issues.

The documentary therefore did not come as a revelation but it helped put things into a slightly sharper perspective, particularly in an American setting, where PC is overwhelming FC – factual correctness -, where, supported by a repressive totalitarian mindset, it has advanced to the point where liberty and free speech, those core American values, are in real danger.

The Frankfurters were quick to make an impact in the States, especially after the publication of Theodor Adorno’s book The Authoritarian Personality. In this fascism was freed from a specific set of historical and political causes. Instead it found a new home in the human psyche, in the psyche of the American people at large, who, according to Adorno, possess many of the traits associated with fascism. In other words, the supporters of traditional American culture and values are psychologically unbalanced, prone to the worst forms of sexual repression and authoritarianism.

So here, in short, we have what was to become the ideology of the counter-culture. Here we have, paradoxically, a new orthodoxy taking shape, which allowed all those who took a contrary view to be dismissed as ‘fascists’, people in need of analysis or ‘sensitivity training.’ Herbert Marcuse, who was to be the most influential of all the Frankfurters, added to the mix in Eros and Civilization, which condemned all established sexual norms, calling instead for ‘polymorphic perversity.’

While the old-fashioned working class, too wedded to the material benefits of capitalism, had been abandoned, a new carrier of Utopia was alighted on in the 1960s - the Politically Correct Coalition, a variety of fashionable causes and movements, which stormed campuses across America, in the process creating a new narrative, a new hegemony, one which continues to dominate contemporary discussion.

Know it or not, the carriers of the counter-culture, are under the direct influence of the Frankfurters, particularly Marcuse, not just in embracing ‘polymorphic perversity’ but in cudgelling any view different from their own. Free American society, Marcuse argued, was actually a deception. Instead he argued for something he termed ‘liberating tolerance’, another paradox, for the tolerance only extends to the politically acceptable.

It was tolerance for all views coming from the left; intolerance for all views coming from the right. While political Marxism killed free speech in Russia, cultural Marxism is killing free speech in America, rather ironic, don’t you think? That’s the legacy of Frankfurt; that’s the effect of a plague bacillus that continues on its course.

Santa Wants a Ho

A few years ago an attempt was made in Australia to stop Santa Claus giving his jolly Ho, Ho, Ho greeting to children, substituting Ha, Ha, Ha in its place, anodyne and wholly (!) without any kind of character or provenance. Why? Because ho is slang in America for, well, a ho!

That’s just the sort of thing that would be bound to upset every Australian girl and boy, just as it annoyed every Australian parent, many of whom were discovering for the first time what a ho was and what the jolly old, red-nosed (possible alcohol problem?) fellow was calling for.

Generally speaking Santa is a disreputable old man, don’t you agree? All parents should be warned against this December interloper. After all, with school teachers being subject to levels of background scrutiny that was formerly reserved for candidates for senior office, with schools being turned into mini-prisons, we still give this unvetted stranger completely free range, to come, go and do as he will.

Every alarm bell should be ringing over the actions of this ho-monger. Every year he commits an act of mass breaking and entering unparalleled in the history of crime. More worrying still, he urges children to be ‘good for Santa’, to be good boys and girls, seduced by promises of gifts. What’s his motive here?

Here we have a stranger, coming silently in the night, creeping into the bedrooms of children with material inducements; just how much more of this are we prepared to take? Why are questions not being asked? Are social service departments not concerned? Do something, before it’s too late! Oops, sorry, it is too late; centuries too late.

Alas, we live in a humourless age. I’m tempted to write a journal message to the future, in the style of Winston Smith from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a greeting to a hoped for time, a time free from the absurdity of Big Nanny and Political Correctness. Will such a time ever come? I have a feeling that things will get worse before they get worse still.

The attack on Christmas and the traditions associated with Christmas is as predictable and relentless as the season itself. We’ve seen it all here in England, with one local authority substituting a ghastly ‘Winterval’, and another referring to Christmas lights as ‘Luminos’, all to avoid offending those capable of taking offence.

The disease is spreading by degrees. This year a school in Stockton, California is reported to have placed an interdict on classroom displays of Santas, Christmas Trees and even Poinsettia plants for fear of upsetting people of other faiths. Bah! Humbug!

I’m sure there lots of other tiresome examples, of initiatives thought up by tedious people, the thought police of the PC brigade who would treat us all as infants. I imagine these joyless, sour and literal-minded types were just bad girls and boys in the past, those who never, ever got presents from Santa. Christmas is in the winter of their discontent. They want the world to be like Narnia, a place where it is always winter and never Christmas.

Meanwhile the old fellow is going quietly mad, locked away in the North Pole, not much given to ho ho ho-ing or even ha ha ha-ing. Maybe he should have another look at his contract, to check if there really is a sanity clause.

Starkey and the Morlocks

I recently watched a movie called Adulthood. I can’t tell you an awful lot about it other than it was set in London among an unprepossessing set of violent thugs and drug dealers. The reason I can’t describe what it was about is because I barely understood one word in ten. They were all speaking a language that I take to be a form of English, the argot of an underclass, referring to each other as bloods or buds or bluhs, I really can’t be sure which, the sort of gobbledegook that I suppose gives these types ‘street cred.’ It just so happens that I saw this a few days before the London riots. There they were again, the same types, all the same types, all the bloods or buds or bluhs.

When I say ‘all’ I mean black and white; I mean that white teenagers of a certain class have adopted aspects of what I take to be a type of black culture, specifically a kind of coded language, because it’s considered to be ‘cool’ or because they have never known anything else, growing up in places like Hackney or Tottenham or wherever. There is nothing racist about this kind of observation; it’s nothing to do with skin colour and everything to do with cultural identity. Oh, but it is racist, at least according to some.

David Starkey is a historian who specialises in Tudor England, an expertise which he has carried so far as the nation’s television screens. But he’s also an all-round media person, offering his opinions on a variety of subjects. I find him highly entertaining, not just the way in which he presents his historical documentaries, but his direct and no-nonsense approach in discussion. He speaks to the point, not suffering fools gladly or at all. Altogether there is a refreshing honesty to his manner, quite free from cant and anodyne platitudes.

Last Friday he offered his opinion on Newsnight, a current affairs show, saying that the recent riots happened because too many young white people “had now become black.” It was all because a “violent, destructive and nihilistic gang culture” had been embraced by as many white people as by blacks, a culture that militated against education. As for their speech patterns;

Black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together. This language which is wholly false, which is Jamaican patois, that’s been intruded into England and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.

Shock, horror; crucify him!, crucify him!, the cry went out. To paraphrase Macaulay, I know of no spectacle more ridiculous than the liberal chattering-class in one of their periodic fits of moral outrage. One by one his fellow broadcasters fell over themselves in attempts to drive home the nail. Piers Morgan, another media person and a bit of a twerp, had a tweet – “RIP David Starkey’s TV career. And good riddance. Racist idiot.”

Now, if you don’t know Morgan let me just say that he is well qualified to refer to other people as idiots, being a first class idiot himself, a kind of jumped up chav, Burberry Man at his finest, easy to make fun of, as he has been made fun of during his embarrassing apperances on Have I Got News For You. He’s as stupid as Starkey is clever. He’s also a hypocrite. But he’s in so many ways typical of the oiks that dominates so much of contemporary life.

His word has been added to by Robert Preston, the BBC’s business editor, saying that “David Starkey’s nasty ignorance is best ignored not worthy of comment or debate.” Oh, really? Then why, I ask myself, did this clot feel compelled to comment? I don’t suppose it really matters now, as his intervention is doubtless evidence that Starkey’s TV career is indeed over, that his voice has forever been silenced by Auntie’s Marxist Men.

It really makes no difference that Starkey was talking about gang culture and not skin colour or ethnicity, a point he has made since, raising this issue at all has ensured him a passage to the gulag of all that is unacceptable, all of the issues that dare not speak their name.

Unlike Piers Morgan, aka Baron Phone Hacker of the Daily Mirror, I do not see any racism here. I see plenty of idiots, though, arbiters of what can and cannot be said. The evidence is overwhelming that the low life gangstas, bloods or buds or bluhs, the semi-literate rappers, black or white, are to blame for London’s madness, that they represent an alien culture and a wholly alien world that I despise, a threat to culture and every standard of civilized decency. They are a wretched sub-class, Morlocks and Calibans, who should be ushered off to some nether world where they can all speak their incomprehensible jargon in complete freedom. Either that or they could set up home besides Piers Morgan.

Neither a girl nor a boy be

Do you believe that there is a limit to stupidity? I do, at least I used to, coming across some absurdity or other, saying things can’t get any more ridiculous than that, surely they can’t? But they can. There are no absolute limits to human stupidity; it expands ever outwards like the universe!

My attention was drawn recently to a story that appeared in the Toronto Star. It concerns a Canadian couple – people I decline to name – parents of a baby who decided that it should grow up genderless. Oh, they know the baby’s sex alright, as do the child’s older siblings, but the rest of the world is to be kept in the dark, and the rest of the world includes the child’s own grandparents.

So, I ask myself, do the grandparents refer to it as it? It's too young at present to have a view but how will it feel in years to come? Will it feel that it would have been better to have been born to parents who were not such stupid morons, parents who have taken political faddishness to the ultimate level: blaming God - and grammar - for creating hes and shes!

When it was born the couple sent an email to friends and family, saying that they had decided not to share its sex for now. “…a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand for what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime.”

Yes, Storm is its name, rather appropriate considering what it is likely to face at the hands of people who believe that parents making choices for children is “obnoxious”. Really? I rather thought that guidance and making choices was what responsible parenting was all about. Ah, but think of the freedom it will have, to live if it wants on a diet of chocolate bars and cookies!

My parents never imposed any kind of gender identity on me, whatever that is meant to imply. I was simply Anastasia, their daughter, valued as a girl and a daughter, never limited in any way, never taught to believe that there were restrictions on what I could or could not do simply because I was female. To that extent I suppose I, too, must have been a ‘genderless’ baby, inasmuch as I was always free from preconceptions, no limitation at all being created by the proper use of language and the rules of language. Oh, perhaps we should abolish pronouns also, along with gender!

It might give you some idea who these people are, what their mode of thought is, if I tell you that, when not working or ‘unschooling’ their older children (apparently it’s a offshoot from home schooling), they wander from place to place, spending time with the Zapatistas in Mexico at one moment, spending time with families in Cuba, learning about the ‘revolution’, at the next. Oh, brave new world that has such left liberals in it, people who turn the world upside down, formless freedom for some, abject tyranny for others!

That’s just the thing, isn’t it; this child of the revolution is not an individual; it's not a girl or a boy or genderless or a unique human being; no, it’s an experiment, an experiment in the most deluded forms of political correctness and liberal faddishness. It will not grow into freedom; it is likely to grow into neurosis, especially when it becomes aware that there is a wider world beyond the cocoon spun by its loopy parents; especially as the wider world has been made aware of it.

What these people are doing is encouraging the worst forms of voyeuristic speculation and curiosity, which effectively turns their baby into a sex object, not an individual who happens to be a girl or a boy. It is not a person; it’s an either or set of genitalia; for that’s what these publicity hounds have created. Setting out to do one thing they have achieved not just the contrary but the contrary at its most refined.

Oh, well, some folks are wise and some are otherwise, as Roderick Random says.