Heil, Bertie!

Open any anthology on fascism and there is bound to be an introduction telling you that fascism is difficult if not impossible to define. At my own risk I’ll hazard a definition: fascists, generally speaking, are wholly devoid of a sense of humour.

Let me give you a practical example. Take the great humorist P. G. Wodehouse, the satirist of the English upper classes, the creator of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, possibly the greatest craftsman in words that our language and literature ever produced. Jeeves and Bertie are his best known creations, but there is also Roderick Spode.

Those who love Wodehouse will know all there is to know about Roderick Spode, the seventh earl of Sidcup, the founder of the Black Shorts, because when he got round to fascist politics there were no more shirts!

Now just imagine any Italian or German author writing about Mussolini or Hitler in the way that Wodehouse wrote about Spode, an obvious parody of Sir Oswald Mosley, the real-life leader of the British Union of Fascists. You know and I know what would have happened to such foolhardy souls. You know and I know what would have happened to anyone who could have written this;

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"

There are few writers more brilliant than Wodehouse and few less political. Caught up in the German invasion of France in 1940, he was subsequently interned as an enemy alien (“If this is Upper Silesia one wonders what Lower Silesia must be like.”) Released on the grounds of age, he went on to make a series of broadcasts in the summer of 1941 from Berlin at the behest of the Propaganda Ministry, light-hearted banter on life in Europe in typical Wodehouse style, intended for an American audience, for a people not yet at war.

Light-hearted or not, apolitical or not, they were enough for some in England to condemn him as a traitor. In hysterical over-reaction some libraries banned his books, clearly not conscious of the political irony here. He was even accused with total absurdity of being a Quisling, after the notorious Norwegian collaborator. As late as December 1944 in Parliament it was urged that he should be indicted on a charge of treason. Most absurd of all were those who combed through his books looking for ‘fascist tendencies’. What, fascist tendencies, in Bertie Wooster?! Oh, well, maybe in Jeeves.

Wodehouse was later to describe the decision to give these broadcasts as naïve, not treasonable or malicious. He was certainly not treacherous in the way that, say, Ezra Pound was treacherous, broadcasting in a distinctly political manner from Rome. But the criticism, hurtful and vicious on the part of some, caused him to move permanently to America after the war, where he became a citizen in 1955. It was an outcome anticipated by George Orwell in any essay published ten years earlier;

In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three or four years later -- and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery -- is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings…I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse -- just because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age -- became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to regard the incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is caught and shot by the American authorities, it will have the effect of establishing his reputation as a poet for hundreds of years; and even in the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves.

Sad to say the accusations have not entirely gone away, fresh fuel being added by a recently declassified Ministry of Intelligence (MI5) memo, part of a file on Werner Plack, an official of the German Foreign Office who acted as Wodehouse’s minder. Reported recently in the Times, it mentions an interview with H. W. Flannery, an American journalist, in which the author is alleged to have said that he was at liberty in Berlin but had to report occasionally to a “Mr. Slack or Black or something”, whom he claimed to have met while in the internment camp.

The memo says “This clearly referred to Werner Plack and was clearly intended to suggest that Wodehouse had so little acquaintance with the German foreign office official that he was uncertain as to his name.” But MI5 already knew that Wodehouse was acquainted with Plack, the two having met in Hollywood prior to the war, where the German was acting as a film extra and a spy. The memo concludes “This incident suggests that Wodehouse is not always quite as frank and ingenious [sic] as he pretends.”

Oh, my, what a heavy burden of guilt, a Plack by any other name would smell as sour! Poor old P. G; poor old Bertie, the one moment in his life when he really needed Jeeves the dashed fellow had taken a spot of French leave!

Although Wodehouse was later to admit that he had, in his own words, made a ‘ghastly mistake’ in broadcasting from Berlin, he categorically denied Flannery’s statement that he had been misleadingly vague about his contacts with Plack.

It would seem obvious that Flannery, a rabid anti-Nazi who believed – wrongly – that Wodehouse had done a deal with the Germans to get out of the internment camp, is far from being a reliable source. But no matter; if this is the weight of the evidence then it is ludicrously light.

I would excuse Wodehouse anything, a return for all the delight he gave me when I was at school, trying to suppress my laughter, reading undercover by torchlight after lights out. We, as a nation, treated him shabbily when he should have been treasured. Our loss was America’s gain.

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

Envying Dogs

It was in March 1999 that Dr Kim left the fatherland. She couldn’t take any more. She had already given up paediatric medicine because she could no longer bear to look into the eyes of the starving children. She switched to pure research, which at least allowed her to get away from the dying, from people she was completely unable to help. But the doctors were starving too; more time was spent in foraging for food than medical work.

Kim dropped in weight to eighty pounds; her breasts shrivelled and her periods stopped. Finally she gave up going to work altogether. What was the point? She did not have the energy. Besides, she had long stopped receiving any pay; all the doctors had. All that mattered was finding food. There was none; the countryside had been stripped as if plagues of locusts had passed. The only remaining hope was to go to look for some long lost relatives living in another land, names from a list that her father had given to her prior to his own death, a legacy of desperation.

With difficulty she travelled north to the border, unable to afford to hire a guide. Spring was coming but winter had still not lost its sting. Covered by darkness, she wadded waist-deep across the freezing river, thrusting aside the lumps of ice, hoping that the border guards would be sleeping. Numb and frozen, she made it to the other side, where, weak with hunger, she had no other course but to throw herself on the kindness of strangers.

At one farm she found the gate unlocked, pushing it open and peering into the courtyard. There, on the ground, was a bowl of pure white rice, a luxury she could not remember when she had last seen. More than that: the rice contained scraps of meat. Who could possibly leave such precious food on the ground like this? Then she heard a bark. A moment’s epiphany; it was for a dog. At once a lifetime of faith fell away. This was China; here the dogs ate better than doctors in North Korea.

That, for me, was the most striking story in a striking book – Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick. I don’t really think there is much more to be said about this brilliant work of reportage, which deservedly won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction last year, that hasn’t already been said. I’ve come lately, a point when the stock of superlatives has all but been exhausted. All I can do is add a few words of appreciation and admiration for a book that unfolds a tragedy in a wholly intimate and human fashion, through the eyes of those, like Dr Kim, who had experienced it first hand.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so is said. Let me refine that by saying that a million lights are worth a single darkness. Look below: there is North Korea by night, an island as black and as impenetrable as the seas, a contrast with the surrounding illumination. This should tell one all there is to know about an implosion, the death of a country, the death of its people and the death of a tawdry ideal.

Demick gathered the material for Nothing to Envy while she was based in Seoul, working as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. Although she travelled to North Korea her visits, like that of all foreigners to a state that has effectively quarantined itself and its people from the world, were highly supervised. The truth behind the façade of Pyongyang, the capital that serves as a kind of Potemkin village, would have to be sought elsewhere. It came in a series of interviews with defectors living in South Korea, six of whom are featured here, all coming from the closed city of Chongjin in the north-east.

It’s worth stressing that none of these people were political dissidents. Rather they were all believers, believers in the infinite benevolence of Kim il-Sung, the Great Leader, and Kim Jong-ill, the Dear Leader. After all, in the words of the children’s song, the words that Demick uses in the title, “We Have Nothing to Envy in the World.”

No, it wasn’t politics that forced them into exile: it was hunger, the famine which gripped this ideological museum in the 1990s and is thought to have been responsible for the deaths of as many as two million people, reduced in their final extremity to eating bark and weeds. It was only afterwards that they became aware that with little food came the big lie. There people were in the dark, both literally and figuratively.

Demick’s story is as good a piece of journalism as I have ever come across, written in a clear and undemonstrative style. She tells the story of people like Jun-Sang, a science student and Mi-Ran, the teacher with whom he had a chaste affair in the all-enveloping darkness of their homeland, neither of whom dared confide in the other that they were making plans to escape. There is the story of Mrs Song, another true believer, who watched her husband and son starve to death.

They were told nothing, the government told them nothing, other than issuing exhortations to eat less when there was nothing to eat at all. When people had taken to removing kernels of undigested corn from the excrement of animals the state news agency was reporting the case of a man whose stomach had allegedly burst open from eating too much rice.

The few who eventually made the passage to South Korea came almost as a different species, stunted by hunger and deprivation. Fifty years of separation, fifty years of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader, had created a kind of sub-group of humanity, people who took time to adjust to a new life, a people who realised just how much they had to envy, even so far as Chinese dogs.

Nothing to Envy is an extraordinary book by an author whose style of reporting recalled for me the narrative power of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. It’s difficult to remain dispassionate in reading books like this, no matter how much one tries.

The Witch Child

In one of my very early blogs here I wrote about the case of Brigitta Hörner, a seven-year-old girl who once lived in Rothenburg ob der Tauber in seventeenth century Germany (Remembering the Little Witch Girl). In 1639, for reasons unknown, Brigitta claimed to be a witch. I wrote;

In much the same fashion that was appear later that century during the Salem witch trials Brigitta began to identify the members of her 'coven', adults from both Rothenburg and Spielbach. This added to the social tensions in the area, with people asking her to identify those whom they suspected of witchcraft. It was concerns over public order that caused the city council of Rothenburg to have Brigitta arrested on 8 July. She was now widely known in the area as the 'Little Witch Girl.'

This was a dangerous time. The Great European Witch Craze had not yet come to an end. Hysteria, fuelled by no more than accusation, could have taken hold of the community in much the same way it was do elsewhere. But the authorities, who treated Brigitta with kindness, decided that her stories were simply not plausible, allowing the matter to settle down.

I called this back to mind on watching The Pendle Witch Child, a BBC documentary about another accusation of witchcraft, this time in the county of Lancashire in north-west England. It’s a case that also involved the testimony of a little girl, one with a wholly different outcome. In concerned nine-year-old Jennet Device, whose evidence was enough to send her whole family, her mother, her brother and her sister to the gallows, along with a number of others.

It’s England in 1612. The country is on the cusp of huge changes, poised between the Age of Superstition and the Age of Enlightenment. It’s a time of great religious and political uncertainty, a time of fear and suspicion; against perceived outsiders, against Catholics in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, against all those who are believed to be a threat to good order.

On the throne sits James I, the intended victim of one plot after another, not just the political terrorists of 1605 but those who allegedly tried to ensnare him by witchcraft when he was still king of Scotland. James, the wisest fool in Christendom, according to his fellow monarch Henri IV of France, was a bit of an expert when it came to the nefarious arts, bringing all sorts of Presbyterian prejudices from the north, all outlined and codified in Daemonologie, his witch-hunter’s manual.

To Lancashire now, a county in England’s wild north-west frontier, a place still considered to be beyond the pale by those living in the tamer regions of the south. This was an area where old religions and old beliefs did not die readily. Here a great many remained loyal to England’s Catholic heritage. Others remained loyal to an even more ancient set of beliefs, giving particular prominence to the wise women, the local healers in the absence of any other, the only healers the poor could afford.

It’s a dry and explosive mixture that really only required a spark, that and an ambitious guardian of public order, ready to fan the ensuing flames. The spark came in March, 1612, when one Alizon Device laid a curse on a peddler by the name of John Law. Alizon, the older sister of Jennet and part of a local family of beggars, was at once convinced that she had the power of a witch. Full of contrition for the doom that had befallen Law, who on the evidence seems to have suffered a stroke, she held to her story, bringing it so far as the guardian, Roger Nowell, a local magistrate.

Now a witch hunt was truly underway, a hunt that drew in not just suspected wise women but Catholic dissidents, as the circle moved wider and wider still. Enter Jennet, full of accusations against her own family and their neighbours.

There was something deeply tragic about this little girl, as tragic in her own way as Brigitta Hörner. The greater tragedy is that her accusations, unlike Brigitta’s, were taken seriously. She had a story to tell and she told it in open court, a key witness for the prosecution. Was it right to trust the word of a child when there was no other corroborating evidence? Yes, of course it was; had not the king said as much in Daemonologie?

Why did Jennet act as she did? We can’t be sure but according to Simon Armitage, who presented The Pendle Witch Child, she seems to have harboured a particular animus against her family, perhaps for neglect, perhaps for other perceived slights. After her mother, making hysterical appeals from the dock, was removed from the court at the little girl’s request, she proceeded to give her evidence with calm authority, even evading a trap laid out for her by the judge.

As the story unfolded it was brought vividly to life by some haunting hand-drawn images of Elizabeth, the mother, of Alizon, the sister, and of little Jennet, who looked particularly forlorn. Tragic and malicious, a pawn and a player, she was to have an impact far beyond Pendle, beyond Lancashire, even beyond England itself. It was her actions and this precedent that allowed child testimony to play such an important part in Salem in 1692.

Ironically Jennet herself became a victim and by the very process that she initiated. In 1634 she was accused of witchcraft along with a number of others on the fantastic evidence of a ten-year-old by the name of Edmund Robinson. But times had changed; a new mood of sceptical inquiry was coming into prominence. The political, social and religious tensions that sustained events earlier in Pendle - and later in Salem - were in abeyance. Robinson’s accusations were eventually dismissed as fantasy, though not until after he had initiated a mini reign of terror. It did not do Jennet much good. Though acquitted, the evidence suggests that she died in jail.

It’s easy to dismiss this sort off thing, part of the age of superstition, not the age of reason. But reason, as Armitage pointed out in his presentation, is always superficial. Fear, superstition, if you will, remains with us in some fashion or another, though the targets may have altered. Demonization, after all, is not limited to Daemonologie, and witches come in many guises.

Foul Rose

Ida Siekmann was 58 when she died, jumping from a third floor window in the summer of 1961. Chris Gueffroy was only 20, shot while trying to swim across a canal in the winter of 1989. What's the connection between the two? Simply that they were the first and the last victims of the Berlin Wall, killed trying to escape from a bleak communist tyranny. Gueffroy's death was particularly tragic, not just because of his age, but because a few months later the Wall came a-tumbling down, the greatest revolution of the twentieth century, a true springtime of the people and of liberty.

Siekmann and Gueffroy were the overture and finale of a long tragedy. We will never know exactly how many people were killed between their deaths, between August 1961 and February 1989. The official figure stands at 136, though it is thought to be higher. Overall up to seven hundred people are estimated to have been killed in attempts to escape from the old East Germany, the so-called German Democratic Republic, at various points along the border. It’s also worth noting that the guards who shot them earned a bonus for each and every kill, money and time off, something they can reflect on as they enter the twilight of life.

Earlier this month, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its construction, Berliners along with people from elsewhere in Germany gathered in the city's Bernauer Strasse, the scene of many escape attempts, where a memorial is now situated, visited by half a million people every year. "We bow our heads in remembrance of all who died at the Wall and of the hundreds who died on the inner German border", said Christian Wulff, Germany's president. "The dead and wounded", he continued, "the hundreds of thousands who were imprisoned and politically harassed aren't the only victims of this Wall. Millions were also forced to renounce the lives they wanted to live."

The construction of the Wall was an act of monumental bad-faith. Only two months before it went up, Walter Ulbricht, the hatchet face of a hatchet regime, announced that "no one has any intention of building a wall." The concrete and the barbed wire were already on order.

It was on the early hours of 13 August that 'Operation Rose' was launched. Like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, this is another day which will live in infamy, a Sunday, deliberately chosen to catch people off-guard as they enjoyed a summer day off. Up to this point Berlin was the only place in the world where people could move with relative ease from the communist East to the free West.

As I said here recently, the new structure was described officially by the government of the East as the “Anti-Fascist Protection Wall", when it should more accurately have been called "We Have to keep our Miserable Citizens in Wall.” Some 3000 had been leaving every month up until that point. Amazingly 2.5 million of a population of 19 million left in the brief thirteen years the German Democratic Republic had been in existence.

There is little left now either of the Wall or of the ideological perversions that conjured it into existence. The so-called wave of the future is now the ripple of the past. The sections that are left are quite rightly being preserved as a memorial, a way of ensuring that Ida Siekmann, Chris Gueffroy and all the other victims of Communism are never entirely forgotten.

We must be Free or Die…Really?

In a my review last month of Anthony Browne’s The Retreat of Reason - Political Correctness and the Corruption of Public Debate in Modern Britain I said that intolerance and sanctimonious moral superiority are among the defining features of the proponents of the politically correct, people whose chief response to criticism is ad hominem attacks.

I was reminded of this once again as the liberal sledgehammer went bang bang on the historian David Starkey’s silver head for daring to raise question about the wholly negative effects of a certain type of subculture.

If he had said all sorts of nasty things about the British National Party or the English Defence League he would have been applauded; because these are safe objects for the two minute hate, safe objects of liberal hysteria. Throw the Newspeak dictionary at the face of Nick Griffin of the BNP, who cares? But raise questions about gangsta rappers and their incomprehensible patois, raise questions about their responsibility for the recent riots – racist! racist!, screams the mob, urged on by that cretinous vulgarian Piers Morgan.

The rest is silence, or it would be if Starkey had not come out fighting at the weekend with an article in the Telegraph. Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party, and a man in the same league was Morgan, apparently gave a speech after the history don’s appearance on Newsnight (the horror! horror!), at the end of which a member of the audience invited him to ‘stamp out’ the kind of opinions expressed by Emmanuel Gold…sorry, David Starkey. Yes, yes, blah, blah; the comments were racist and “there should be condemnation from every politician, from every political party of those sorts of comments.”

Starkey reminds us of the comments to be stamped out: “A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic, gang culture has become the fashion…This sort of black male gang culture militates against education…It’s not skin colour, it’s cultural.” Rejecting this view, as Miliband does, presumably means embracing the corollary: gang culture is “personally wholesome and socially beneficial.”

Tony Parsons, a left-wing Labour MP, does not seem to think so, despite Red Ed’s admonition. Writing the Daily Mirror he goes even further than Starkey, saying that “without the gang culture of black London, none of the riots would have happened – including the riots in other cities like Manchester and Birmingham where most of the rioters were white.”

If we accept the Miliband-Morgan-Moron line then the views of Lindsay Johns should also be ‘stamped out.’ He is an Oxford-educated writer of mixed race who works with young people in the Peckham district of London. Like Starkey, he has drawn attention to the insulting and demeaning acceptance of a fake Jamaican – or ‘Jafaican’ – patois. “Language is power”, he wrote, “and to use ghetto grammar renders young people powerless.”

Powerless, that’s the key; moral relativism, the kind of moral relativism embraced by Miliband; the moral relativism bequeathed to this nation by thirteen years of the most awful government in our history, has created a powerless sub-class that shares nothing of a common identity, one that can only express itself in ignorance, violence and disorder.

There is another dimension to this. The attack on England, the attack on English identity, on the symbols of English identity, has contributed to a process of alienation and cultural fragmentation. Over several decades there has been a systematic devaluation of Englishness, of the symbols of Englishness, including the flag of Saint George – “The attack was astonishingly successful”, Starkey writes, “But it left a void where a sense of common identity should be. And for many the void has been filled by the values of ‘gangsta’ culture.”

Starkey reminds us of Somersett’s Case of 1772, one of the most famous legal rulings in English history, a judgement against slavery, in which it was resolved that “England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in.” But it’s not too pure for parts of the black community to be effectively re-enslaved, in the ghettos of language and in the ghettos of the mind. How many centuries will it take for some future politician to offer an apology for this betrayal?

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.-In every thing we are sprung
Of Earth’s first blood, have titles manifold.

No, we must not; we must have uncomfortable questions ‘stamped out’; we must condemn all those who attempt to raise these issues howled down as racists; we must deny them a platform least they corrupt the gullible public; we must avoid all attempts to understand the recent disorders in England least they prick the bubble of complacency. That’s the decent way; that’s the Miliband way; that’s the Morgan way.

The War of Northern Greed

It’s October, 1861. In American the Civil War has been underway for some months, really just the overture to what was to become a tragedy of epic proportions. That same month a German exile living in London summed up the situation as he saw it – “The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is, further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery and in fact turns on Northern lust for sovereignty,”

A few months later similar sentiments were to be found in the words of another writer, an Englishman of impeccable liberal credentials – “The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for economic control of the United States.” He goes on to say "...Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils... The quarrel between the North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel."

Who were these men? Karl Marx was the first and Charles Dickens the second, not people one would expect to have very much in common, the prophet of world revolution and the prophet of moral reform, the one a hard-nosed theorist and the other a bourgeois sentimentalist. But they were both, in their individual ways, absolutely right: the War Between the States had nothing to with slavery or any other great issue of principle.

But myths die hard if they die at all. I open the latest issue of the BBC History Magazine. There is an article by Paul Cartledge, professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge, on slavery in Classical Athens (Democrats and Slaves). He offers this view in his preamble – “One hundred and fifty years ago…the northern and southern States of the (dis)United States went to war in large part over these very issues.”

I think that’s the answer one would get from most people, even those who are only vaguely aware of the details - that it was all about human bondage, all about the virtuous North and the wicked South.

I watched, and enjoyed, Ken Burns' television documentary about the Civil War a while ago. I remember the episode, soon after the Battle of Antietam, when parts of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation were read, all very moving, cut with images of a black people as slaves and then black people as soldiers in the Union Army, all against a rousing chorus of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Yes, it was great television…and wholly misleading history.

It was good to see a corrective to the mythology in History Today, where Tim Stanley writes on the North-South Divide in the Contrarian section of the magazine. It’s a return to first principles, a return to the Victorian view of Marx and Dickens. This was not a war about morality; it was a war about naked self-interest. Slavery was certainly an issue between the States but it was far from being the most significant; no, that rested on the altogether more mundane issue of revenues and taxes, which had been poisoning relations for years.

We are dealing with two economies – the rural economy of the South and the nascent industrial economy of the North. But it’s more than that. Northern industrialisation was effectively built on Southern backs; built, it also has to be said, on the backs of Southern slaves. To protect domestic industry from foreign competition, Congress imposed crippling import taxes, which hit the South particular hard because it had to buy the machinery it needed from abroad.

In the 1850s, in the wake of an economic downturn, Congress increased duties from fifteen to thirty-seven percent. In a mood of outrage Southerners began to consider the virtues of secession. An alarmist editorial then appeared in the Chicago Daily Times. If the South left the Union;

…in one single blow, our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than half of what it is now. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all its immense profits.

Not a word about the morality of trading with the Slave Empire, not a word about the morality of slavery. Secession meant war, but war less for the preservation of the Union as a great political principle, more for the preservation of the economic dominance of the North.

For the South the election of Lincoln in 1860 was the final confirmation of all of its fears, not because the Great Liberator was a threat to their ‘peculiar institution’ – he wasn’t – but because the ‘black’ Republicans represented a coalition of interests inimical to the whole Southern way of life. That year the outcome of the presidential election, as Stanley puts it, was interpreted in the South as a Northern coup d'état.

For almost two years the North fought to reimpose its hegemony without giving any thought to the question of slavery. The Republican Party was opposed to slavery but it was not abolitionist; and, yes, there is a very big difference. When Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the mawkish Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as “the little lady who started this big war” it was nothing but the worst kind of political hyperbole and cant.

The Emancipation Proclamation, for all its high-minded rhetoric, was even more hyperbole and cant. It only freed slaves in areas beyond Union control. It did not free them in the Border States or those areas under Northern occupation. Even William H. Steward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, remarked on the obvious hypocrisy – “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”

Slavery is a great moral evil but let’s not be confused about the issues here: the Civil War was about Northern greed more than Southern iniquity.

Tyranny Remains

The more things change in China the more they stay the same. In social and economic terms no greater contrast could be imagined between the country at the time of the death of Mao in 1976 and the high-tech nation of today. But the political technique, the technique of oppression, the techniques favoured by Mao Zedong both before and after the creation of the People’s Republic in 1949, are still very much in place.

There always have to be enemies, always outsiders, counter-revolutionaries then, disruptive elements now. China, in a sense, is in a state of permanent revolution. The enemies may have changed, the definition of what constitutes an enemy certainly has, but the fallback position remains the same – they have to be eliminated in one manner or another. It’s the technique inherited from Mao, the default position as Jonathan Minsky argued recently in an article in the political journal Standpoint.

Here it’s as well to remember that that it was Deng Xiaoping, the man normally associated in the West with modernisation and reform, who oversaw the so-called ‘anti-Rightist’ campaign of 1957, which saw the purge of thousands, and who also presided over the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 as well as the ensuing reign of terror.

Now, in the midst of prosperity, when even the word ‘jasmine’ is banned, as if it carried a kind of plague bacillus, it has been estimated that the number of extra-judicial executions range between 5000 and 10000 per annum, more than the rest of the world combined.

Thousands of people, often the poorest and least powerful, are being held in secret ‘black jails’, free enterprise institutions run by thugs to contain ‘troublemakers’, often no more than petitioners anxious to redress some abuse – a right granted to them by precedent and by law -, people who are an embarrassment to the authorities. There they can be held indefinitely without charge, beaten, starved and abused, out of official sight and out of official mind.

Corruption, mismanagement, official neglect and sheer incompetence get worst by the day. Officially the casualty toll from the recent high-speed rail crash near the city of Wenzhou stands at 40 dead and 191 injured, though according to the buzz among the country’s micro-bloggers the true figures are much higher. What is certain is that the government cleaned up the site with indecent haste, burying one of the carriages and restoring rail services even before rescue operations had been completed.

True or not, the rumours are based on past perceptions, on other scandals that have created a mood of widespread cynicism and scorn, a reluctance to believe anything the authorities say. Here the case of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, when so many children died as a result of shoddy school construction, comes to mind. It was the determination to establish the true facts over this scandal that lead to the first serious clash between the complacent and negligent authorities and Ai Weiwei, the brilliantly unconventional artist, recently convicted on a charge of ‘tax evasion.’

In Mao’s Invisible Hand, a collection of papers edited by Sebastian Hellman and Elizabeth J. Perry, published earlier this year by Harvard University Press, the point is made that the policy style that emerged from Maoism was “fundamentally dictatorial, opportunistic and merciless. Unchecked by institutions of accountability, guerrilla leaders pursue their objectives with little concern for the interests of those who stand in their way.” Rightist opportunists, class enemies, counter-revolutionaries, seditionists, disruptive people, inharmonious elements - the terminology may change, the tyranny remains the same.