Ana the Imp
Time 2021-10-26 09:07:15Web Name: Ana the Imp
WebSite: http://anatheimp.blogspot.com
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keywords: description: Ana the ImpThis is a tale of a succubus
Monday, 25 March 2013 I am such stuff as dreams are made onNothing is forever. I know that, you know that, weall know that. Life is all about change and transformation, metamorphosisin its many forms! I was once Clio the Muse on Wikipedia. I awokealmost four years ago here as Ana the Imp. But now I am breaking free ofthat chrysalis. Its time for me to dry my wings and fly away.There are great changes coming in my life. Most important of all Imexpecting a little imp! At one time this is not something I thought Iwould welcome. But now I do, a new challenge, my own offering to thefuture. I have so much to think about and so much to do, new foundationsto put down. I just want to thank everyone who has contributed here,friends old and new. Goodbye and good fortune to you all.
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
I was recently asked to identify the various historicalelements that led to the creation of Victorian Britain, the high-water mark ofour national story, a time of innovation, of self-reliance and self-assurance,things that now seem a distant memory in our present state of senesce. Itcomes really at an opportune time, right in the middle of my Trollope period, anovelist who did much to identity some of the significant political andintellectual trends in nineteenth century English life. I also have a particularlyclose acquaintance with the work of Charles Dickens, another great chroniclerof the day.The transformation thatcharacterised the times, particularly in the Industrial Revolution, is thestuff of a thousand school essays! The obvious things can be marched outwith ease the improvements in agriculture, in communication, in transport,in technology; innovations of all sorts. Much of the mechanicalimprovement was directly related to the ever increasing demand for coal, apower source significant as far back as the Middle Ages. But the mines goeven deeper here, deep into our history.On the eve of the Victorianperiod feudalism was a distant memory, effectively killed off as early as thefourteenth century. In contrast it was a living reality on theContinent, in France, in Prussia and in Russia. In the case of thelatter it was to be a living reality as late as the early 1860s, with shadowslong thereafter. It is England not France that is the true home ofliberty. In France Liberty came late, trailing clouds of terror and bringingstreams of blood.In England freedom was far morethan a word. From the myth of Robin Hood to the reality of Magna Carta,the first great break on royal power, it was a living reality. Ifindit difficult to define this properly but I know a poet who can;It is not to be thought of that the Flood
Of British freedom, which to the open Sea
Of the world's praise from dark antiquity
Hath flowed, "with pomp of waters, unwithstood,"
Road by which all might come and go that would,
And bear out freights of worth to foreign lands;
That this most famous Stream in Bogs and Sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever. In our Halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible Knights of old:
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.We recentlydug up the remains of Richard III, a reminder of the great fifteenth centurydynastic struggle known as the Wars of the Roses. But that event was farmore significant than a simple game of thrones. It decimated thehereditary nobility that had effectively ruled the country since the NormanConquest. In its place came a new nobility, made up quite often of themiddling sort. Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, the two most powerfulpolitical figures during the reign of Henry VIII, were respectively the son ofa butcher and the son of a blacksmith. I can think of no other country atthe time that where such a rapid ascent would have been possible.Then there isParliament, a uniquely assertive body in English history, present from thethirteenth century onwards. It was to be an effective scrutiniser overtime of national finances, granting fresh supply only after various grievanceshad been addressed. It may have started on a Continental model of anassembly of estates but it became so much more, the best firm of accountants that the nation has ever had.So, if the Warsof the Roses saw the beginning of the end of aristocratic power, the politicalstruggles of the seventeenth century saw the absolute end of royalabsolutism. It is not to be thought that the Restoration of the monarchin 1660, after a republican interlude, marked the victory of Crown overParliament. Charles II was to have almost as much trouble from his loyalassembles as his father did from his rebellious ones. The GloriousRevolution of 1688, which saw the overthrow of James II, sent all pretence ofdivine right monarchy to the grave.The longReformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an importantprecursor here, freeing people from more traditional forms of thought andreligious practice. The process was also fairly uniform throughoutmainland Britain, uniting people in a common Protestant ideology. Wherethere is religious liberty and freedom of thought political libertyfollows. In France such religious liberty was the gift of the state,ended in a stroke of royal absolutism. As England wakened to freedom Francesunk deeper into the sleep of absolutism.If any one mansupplied the ideological impetus for the Glorious Revolution, and thesubsequent Bill of Rights, then it surely has to be John Locke. For meLocke serves as an avatar of the English intellect, far more precise andempirical than the cloudy abstraction of so much Continental thought.English itself is a precise language which, if used properly, is concerned withmeanings and ends. It is a language that does not readily lenditself to obscurity. When it does it simply looks ridiculous. Afree language given to free expression, that is of crucial importance inunderstanding who we are, in understating our values and our dow-to-earthsense of what is right and what is wrong. We must indeed be free or die, who speak the tonguethat Shakespeare spake. The corruption of our spoken and written languageis among our greatest contemporary dangers.Our politicalstruggles did not end with the Glorious Revolution, merely took on a differentform. The early Victorian period saw a new and bloodless civil war,fought between the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832, which expandedmiddle-class representation in Parliament, and the repeal of the Corn Laws in1846, which saw the final victory of the industrial over the landedinterest. Through this period, though passions were often heightened,problems were solved by pragmatic compromise rather than violence, another characteristicof the English.Take thecareer of Benjamin Disraeli, for example, another kind of avatar. Hefirst made his mark in Parliament by a ruthless assault on Sir Robert Peel, hisown party leader and the Prime Minister responsible for the repeal of the CornLaws. At the time Disraeli spoke for the landed interest. But whenhe became Prime Minister himself later in the century there was no return tothe past. For him laissez-faire capitalism and free trade, defined byAdam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, was the wealth of the nation.Britain wasfortunate in being the first industrial nation among a world of primaryproducers. But while free trade opened the agricultural sector to foreigncompetition in did not entail terminal decline. Instead the nationsfarms and farmers became more proficient, as proficient as their manufacturing counterpartsin adopting new methods and techniques. Farms became pure commercialenterprises with little of the inefficient and underproductive peasantagriculture that continues to be a defining feature of the French system.The countrywas also fortunate in not having a standing army on the Continental model, adrain on national resources. Instead there was the navy, based on theneed to defend ever lengthening trade routes. Naval officers weregenerally of a far higher level of ability than those in the army, many of whombought their commissions. An idiot could command a regiment; an idiotcould not sail a ship. The defeat of France in the Seven Years Warestablished Britain as the leading sea power in the world, something that wasto continue right into the twentieth century. Secure trade meant growingwealth; growing wealth meant an ever greater flow of capital; more capitalmeant more investment, and onwards and upwards.The Englishdont do revolution by doing it so well! The changes are outwardlysubtle, so subtle than they can scarcely be seen to have happened.Consider the difference between the England of Richard III and that of QueenVictoria. In institutional terms little has changed. They are allin place, the monarchy, the aristocracy and Parliament, both Lords andCommons. But the balance between them has changed dramatically andcontinued to change. The monarchy is now the decorative part of theconstitution, something that would have caused Richard a new winter ofdiscontent!If I take Disraelias one avatar of the Victorian age the other has to be Charles Dickens, at oncethe least and most political writer we have ever had. His work is in somany respects another human comedy along the lines of Dante, but he never lostsight of the various social, politic and institutional abuses of histime. He is really the great giant of mid-Victorian liberalism, bestcaught in Charles Dickens, George Orwells brilliant pen portrait, whichconcludes thus;When onereads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression ofseeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual faceof the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding,Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what thesepeople looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that thewriter ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is notquite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the faceof a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing,with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is theface of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in theopen and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry inother words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hatedwith equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contendingfor our souls.I dont thinkthere is any better description of the free English intellect. Its aninsightful portrait of Dickens just as its an insightful portrait of Orwellhimself.The English have never been hung on a cross of theory. The Victorian age providesplenty of examples of this, of people reaching for practical solutions topractical problems. Karl Marx would have crucified us. Though he spentmany years in exile in London, he never understood the people among whom helived. Alwaysexpecting great things from the English proletariat, the most advanced inEurope, by the lights of his theory, he came to see that England was the onecountry in Europe with a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois working class aswell as a bourgeois bourgeois! His last recorded words were To the Devil withthe British.To be cast tothe Devil by Karl, is there any better compliment, I wonder?
12 comments: Labels:british history,england Thursday, 21 March 2013 Paper Tiger
Its by pure chance that I cameto David Cannadines recently published The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond OurDifferences in succession to Catalin Avaramescus An Intellectual History ofCannibalism, though they harmonise quite well. Both are concerned withcategories and perceptions, both with the divisions created betweencivilization and barbarism, both with notions of Us and notions ofThem.Cannadine, a professionalhistorian who professes history at Princeton, comes to us rather in the mannerof a prosecutor, bearing a heavy indictment against the profession ofhistory! Actually his beginning is the profession of politics, or thesort of simple-minded politics embraced by the likes of George W. Bush and TonyBlair in the aftermath of 9/11, a new form of Manichaeism, with clear anduncomplicated division between the forces of light and the forces ofdark. Historians are to blame here,Cannadine feels, in creating to a general mood of division and derision.They have spent too much time, he argues, on conflict and very little oncollaboration, on disharmony rather than harmony. Above all, they havefailed to celebrate a common humanity.The Undivided Past, if you like,is a critique of artificial identity politics. Professor Cannadineunveils his six paper tigers. These are religion, nation, class, gender,race and civilization. In cementing differences and creating antagonisms,historians made their particular choices. The overall result is a kind ofinterpretive straightjacket.The simple truth is that we havemultiple and shifting identities, a truth so simple it scarcely deservesrepeating. But the authors blood is up and his challenge offered. Hebears down on the conventional wisdom of single-identity politics, the allegeduniformity of antagonistic groups, the widespread liking for polarized modes ofthought, and the scholarly preoccupations with difference. My, how thosepaper tigers fall, driven down by this mighty verbal onslaught!Broadly speaking its possible toaccept elements of Cannadines argument. All history, to take oneexample, is not the history of class struggle! But Marx and Marxism issuch an easy target, for the simple reason that class is the weakest of allthe tigers. Old dinosaurs like Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, are nowthemselves consigned to the past with a good part of their tendentiousscholarship, though they and their kind still have an abiding influence onsections of the liberal media.Yes, what a chimera classpolitics proved to be. The whole sandcastle was swept into the sea in1914, when the German Social Democrats, the largest Marxist party in the world,voted for war credits, thus in a single move destroying the SecondInternational. Here nation trumped class, but even so Cannadines methodwould not allow us comprehend why class-based politics became so important inthe Second Reich in the first place. Why on earth did Bismarck and Bebelnot simply celebrate togetherness? Altogether there is a conceit andpolemical blindness here that I find difficult to accept, for all of theauthors weighty scholarship.Actually Im not quite sure whothe author is arguing against, beyond the ghosts of the past, those who rest inthe shade of Karl Marx or Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee. I know of noreputable scholar today who is in thrall to any single one of the sixcategories. We all know surely we do? just how complex the past is,just how hopeless the search for any imperial model of explanation. Thesupposed big division between Christianity and Islam sublimates a great manyinternal divisions within these faiths. Historians have long been alertto the truth that wars of religion, for example, are never exclusively aboutreligion. The Thirty Years War is very fertile ground here.Cannadine is certainly no Marxistbut paradoxically he seems to have lifted notions of false consciousness fromthe ideological wreckage. His fellow historians, you see, have helped tocreate artificial and misleading perceptions of reality. Alas, he woulddo well to remember that the task of historians is to interpret the past, notchange it. It there are conflicts the conflicts are real; if there are debatesthe debates are real, if there is oppression the oppression is real. Wecannot conjure away the things we do not like or approve of by fatuous appealsto a common humanity. This book, for all its weightiness, is repletewith too many unsupported generalisations and too much, well, piousintellectual conceit. There is the professor at the endof the lists, his tigers all knocked down. The contest was just too easy,the false solidarities all dead. The only solidarity acceptable from thispoint forward is human solidarity; its really as simple as that. Come,now, ye academic historians, see the truth and abandon the artificial divisionsand celebrate those things that still bind us together today. Yes, Iimagine Haitian slum dwellers and Russian billionaires will be delighted to seea celebration of a common humanity as the profession of history sinks into asleep of quietism!All history may not be thehistory of class struggle, but it is the history of struggle, as ArthurSchopenhauer rightly contended. Yes, we are all human but any attempt tocreate a common identity or a common history is a task that has failed,destroyed by its own absurd contradictions. There is nothing new in thisobservation. As long ago as the 1960s J. H. Plumb described UNESCOsHistory of Humanity as an encyclopaedia gone berserk, or resorted by adeficient computer. Speaking of berserkers, there is the EuropeanUnions House of European History, which begins the story in 1946, because thevarious national governments cant agree on what went before! Ill go withCannadines six categories, liberally mixed, any day over absurdities likethis, or over his hippy-like, Kumbaya approach to the past.At the end I found that TheUndivided Past was the biggest paper tiger of all. Its entertaining,certainly, at least now and again, though far too prolix and dense in style. It's also wide-ranging, but that does not compensate for its deficiencies. Mymost serious criticism is over the stunning banality of the centralmessage. Simply put, its almost impossible to provide an acceptabledefinition of a common humanity when one proceeds beyond the basics we areborn, we breath, we eat, we grow, we decline, we die. Thats it, acommon humanity we share with every other species on earth.Historians have to grapple withthe past and interpret it for the present and perhaps even the future, with asmuch honesty and integrity as they can, not be seduced by cosy common roomcant. We are in the presence here of a new Francis Fukuyama.
6 comments: Labels:Book Reviews Wednesday, 20 March 2013 Faddishness and Minorities
Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad, so theancient proverb goes. Im quietly rejoicing over the great Cyprus bankbungle, the latest symptom of European insanity and a clear sign that the godsare on my side! I have my eye also on the craziness of our presentcoalition government in England, the craziness in particular of David Cameronand George Osborne, the Dumb and Dumber of our political life.Im in the mood for quotations; Im in a particular mood forDisraeli. England does not love coalitions, he rightly said. Iwould update this slightly by saying that Englandhatescoalitions;this Englishwoman certainly does. The grand old Tory also said that aConservative government is an organised hypocrisy. My, oh my, I do wonderwhat he would have made of our present government and the present leadership ofthe Conservative Party a disorganised idiocy, perhaps?Lynton Crosby, Camerons campaign chief, has a cunning plan for a Toryvictory in the scheduled 2015 general election, or so I read recently in theTelegraph. In the wake of the drubbing the Party got in the recentEastleigh by-election there are to be no more stupid ideas. Really?Then I take it we can see gay marriage and windmills dropping from theagenda? I have a plan also for a Tory victory, though its not reallythat cunning get rid of Cameron and Osborne.Take the Prime Ministerplease. Mediocre leaders are the rulerather than the exception in the Tory Party. Margaret Thatcher? Nothanks; lets have John Major instead. But, my goodness, on the scale ofmediocrity Cameron has no contenders. He even manages to make StanleyBaldwin look good. When it comes to breath-taking incompetence there arefew better than Call Me Dave. His latest wheeze was the introduction ofminimum alcohol pricing. Eh, excuse me, Prime Minister, does this notmean that the price of booze will increase when voters have had more thanenough of price increases in general? Oops goodbye to all that.Simple truths are simply stated the Conservative Party led by Cameronis heading for sure defeat. I was tempted to write that there are lies,damned lies and David Cameron but, on reflection, I think thats unfair.Its better said that he is a little man lost in his own confusion.Having no identity of his own he took on that of Tony Blair and themetro-cosmopolitans. The Tory Party went mad when it elected him leader,much as Labour did when it elected Michael Foot. The Cameron Manifesto isanother of historys long suicide notes.The credibility of all politicians is pretty low these days, particularly those in the Conservative Party. It gives me no pleasure to writethis because I have only ever voted Tory a long family tradition and I havea great many Conservative friends. But the Party has forfeited allcredibility and all trust; people simply do not believe a word it says.In fact the more Cameron and Osborne say the greater the disbelief. Thesemen arehopelesslyout of touch. The one great platformthe government stood on was reduction of the public debt. Whatshappened? Its now more bloated than ever. Some of the reductionswe have had are beyond crazy. Favoured socialist causes have beenring-fenced while defence spending is being slashed. We spend millions onforeign aid while depriving tank regiments of, er, tanks. This really isthe political theatre of the absurd.Can things get any worse? Yes, indeed they can.If people distrust the Conservative Party the Conservative Partydistrusts itself. Call Me Daves gay marriage scheme has introduced ahuge fissure into the Party ranks, one I suspect will never be fullyhealed. Nobody wanted this; nobody needed this except a loud-mouthedminority. And when it came to standing up to Europe and the EuropeanCourt of Human Rights the Cameron government is nothing but piss andwind.Oh, yes, on the subject of wind we have what the Chancellor calls arenewable levy, a rip-off tax by any other name, one which will penaliseconsumers and cripple industry. And for what? Merely to placateanother loud-mouthed minority, the green fanatics who are set on covering thisgreen and pleasant land with ugly and unpleasant windmills.Ido not care what Osborne says in todays budget (I wrote this piece before Iknew the details) because it will make little practical difference. Thegame is up. There are simply not enough gay couples, greens and lovers offoreign aid to secure a future Conservative government. Under Cameron theTory Party has become a movement of faddishness and minorities. In futureit is likely to become the biggest minority of all.16 comments: Labels:british politics,conservative party,david cameron Tuesday, 19 March 2013 Venezuela's Sawdust Caesar
Hugo Chavez, the late presidentof Venezuela, may have been poisoned by dark forces that wanted him out of theway, at least according to Nicolas Maduro, his less than charismatic standin. I think the dark force may very well have been Chavez himself,anxious to preserve something of his inflated reputation before his countryimplodes under his poisonous legacy.What an illusion the so-calledBolivarian Revolution was, based on little more than a sharp rise in worldcommodity prices that enabled Chavez to float on a lot of oil revenue,squandered away in one cack-handed scheme after another. The corruptionand mismanagement was extreme, even by South American standards. Imreminded here of one of the jokes that was popular in the old Eastern Bloc.What would happen if the communists took control of the desert?Nothing for a while and then there would be a shortage of sand.Venezuela, a country rich in natural energy, has suffered periodic power cutsfor years.Ive long understood that Chavezwas a complete fraud. My goodness, I asked myself, who could not seethrough the posturing of this manipulative and self-regarding demagogue?Politically he was an interesting phenomenon. Supposedly of the left, hisinspiration was shallow and eclectic, a ragbag of ideological detritus. Iread recently that Carlos Fuentes, a left-wing Mexican writer, described him asa tropical Mussolini, which comes extraordinarily close to the truth.The political technique is just the same, the bread and circuses approach tolife. Now the circus is over and the bread, as Venezuelans may soondiscover, is likely to be in ever shorter supply.The signs are already inplace. Inflation is out of control, a fact that is unlikely to be changedby Maduros recent devaluation of the bolivar, the national currency.Venezuela, after years with Chavez at the helm, is a ship floating at thebottom of every league table of good governance and economic competitiveness,an inconvenient truth pointed out by a recent report in the Economist.Inflation is bad, poverty is worse, crime is unmanageable. This, Isuppose, must be the true definition of the Bolivarian Revolution. TheRevolution in health care, for instance, seems to have involved rotting hospitalsand declining investment. The fact that Chavez had to seek medicaltreatment in Cuba is a perfect indictment of a lamentable state ofaffairs.So, yes, he exited, stage-left,at just at the right time, no longer around to face the reckoning afterfourteen years of corrupt, oil-fuelled autocracy. His legacy, I suspect,will survive as a kind of grand illusion, a little like that of Juan Peron inArgentina, or a little like that of Mussolini.
4 comments: Labels:hugo chavez,venezuela Monday, 18 March 2013 Death by Diversity
Observers of the last generalelection will surely remember the encounter between Gordon Brown and a woman bythe name of Gillian Duffy, a voter from some Lancashire constituency or other,a person of no importance at all; just an ordinary individual. Still, shehad her fifteen minutes of fame. She spoke some unwelcome truths to thethen Prime Minister. She raised concerns over mass immigration, for whichshe was later dismissed as an awful woman and a bigot by Brown when hethought only his toadies were listening.Gillian Duffy became for a brieftime everywoman, or everyperson, a representative of thousands and thousands of ordinary voters who have effectively been disenfranchised, vote ornot, by the political machine, by the social democratic oligarchy that dominatesdebate and dismisses each and every concern over immigration as bigotry andracism. The real issue is nothing of the kind; the real issue isnumbers. But its become a truth that dare not speak its name, or if itdoes speak its name bang! bang!, you are dead.Douglas Murray is one of the fewjournalists for whom I have a particularly high regard. He says what hethinks, a dangerous pastime in our liberally illiberal culture. He saidwhat he thinks about mass immigration in the latest issue of Standpoint (Acensus that revealed our troubling future). His focus is the 2011census, which does indeed show that we have a troubling future. Thecensus, and the comment that has followed its publication, shows something elseI think: it shows that England, as a nation, is being systematically eroded,worn away, deliberately so, by the politicians, bureaucrats and pundits whogovern our lives and dominate our media.I often use the term England wrongly, Im occasionally reminded to refer to the United Kingdom as awhole. But here I really do mean England. Wales, which I do notknow that well, and Scotland, which I know very well indeed, have magnifiedtheir own distinct identities, just as Englands vanishes by degrees. Thearrogance of the liberal intelligentsia, you know, the Islington set, is quitestunning, the contempt for our past and our traditions palpable. Murraymentions two of the usual suspects, liberal rent-a-mouths wheeled out ontelevision discussion shows Bonnie Greer and Will Self, the former whoappeared on Newsnight, the latter on Question Time.So, Greer speaks There isalways this failsafe, spoken or unspoken, that there is a Britishidentity. Thats always interesting to me. I think it one of thegeniuses of the British of being British is that there isnt this sort ofrock-solid definition of identity that an American has.She obviously is referring to theEnglish, as I think few will dispute that the Scots, Welsh and Irish have afairly rock-solid definition of identity. The argument that the Englishallegedly do not is a justification for mass immigration, the more the merrier,all in the name of multiculturalism and diversity. One of the mostalarming facts from the census is that native English people are now in aminority in London, the nations capital. Boris Johnson, the mayor, saysthat we need to stop moaning about the dam burst. Yes, thats right;lets just drown. In 23 out of the 33 London Boroughs white Britons arenow in a minority. A spokesman for the National Statistics Officeapparently hailed this as a victory for diversity. As Murray rightlyasks, what exactly are the limits of diversity? When there are no whiteLondoners at all?Then there is that self-satisfiedprig Will Self, the grand ayatollah of soft soap leftism, mouthing awayshop-soiled clichés on Newsnight. The audience was packed with the usualdebating fodder (does the BBC keep these people in permanent reserve?), thatcross section of the English public who clap at every right on remark, sorry,left on remark. In the wake of the census he said Up to the Suezcrisis...most peoples conception of what being British involved was basicallygoing overseas and subjugating black and brown people and taking their stuffand the fruits of their labours. That was the core part of Britishidentity, was the British empire. [sic].Now the various members of thepolitical class have tried to revive the idea quite recently without muchsuccess?Do you have any idea what he ison about because, quite frankly, I dont? Anyway, his view is in completecontrast to that of George Orwell, who had far more direct experience of Empirethan Self will ever have. Most English people ignored the Empire, Orwellwrote more than once; it wasnt something that impacted directly on theirlives. The Self argument is essentially that England must be punished forits past crimes. The Empire, you see, strikes back in massimmigration. The Newsnight audience went in to orgasmic hysteria over hisplatitudes The people who line up on the opposition to the immigration lineof the argument are usually racists...with an antipathy to people, particularlywith black and brown skins.Back we go to Gillian Duffy andher kind, the people who simply dont matter, the people who are notrepresentative enough ever to be included in a Newsnight audience, the peoplewho can be scorned and ignored as their nation is literally swept from underthem by the dam burst. These are the people that Self and the othermetropolitan literati can disregard; these are the people who can be damned asracist with the usual self-satisfied smugness of those who know that they arealways right.I value the tolerance of theEnglish people, one of the defining characteristics of an identity that we arenot supposed to have. But tolerance can be too tolerant. Is thereany other nation in the world that would allow itself to be treated like this,to be told that mass immigration is a necessary corrective for pastwrongs? The implication is that the end of England should be celebratedin the name of diversity.We are not and never have been anation of migrants, another lie perpetrated by the likes of Greer andSelf. Until fairly recently in history our identity as a people was solidand unremarkable. The mass migration of the French Huguenots in the lateseventeenth century, for example, was a fraction of a fraction compared withtodays figures. Orwell could write about the English in a whollyuncontroversial way. He couldnt now; few could. Perhaps we shouldcall, before it is too late, for our country to wake up.Either that or face death bydiversity. 36 comments: Labels:england,immigration Sunday, 17 March 2013 Monsters of Imagination
Those who have readRobinson Crusoewill recall the point when the herodiscovers that he is not alone on his island when he rather ludicrously finds asingle footprint! A duffelpud, perhaps? Defoe is really setting the mood, oneof horror and one of fascination. And its with horror and fascination that thecannibals made their way into the western imagination, from Robinsons Islandto the feasts of Hannibal Lector.
I had so much fun if thats the word! - in picking my waythroughAn Intellectual History of CannibalismbyCatalin Avaramescu, translated by Alastair Blyth and published by the PrincetonPress. It really helped me to put the practice in a the wider context ofhistory, civilization and imagination
I love Hannibal Lector as much as the next girl but - oh my -when it comes to the real thing some of the details of the cannibal life aretruly hard to take in. I remember when I was in my teens reading about the caseof one Armin Meiwes, who lived in the German town of Rotenburg an der Fulda.This man went into a website called Cannibal Café and there advertised for awell-built eighteen to thirty-year-old to be slaughtered and then consumed.
Who on earth is going to volunteer for that? Well, someonedid, someone by the name of Bernd Brandes. The actual details of what followed aretruly repellent. Let me just say that dinner began while Brandes was stillalive, the hors d'oeuvre being a certain part of the anatomy that most men finddear. Found to be too rubbery, it was sautéed and fed to the dog!
To a certain extent, as Avaramescu explores, cannibalismbegan really as an invented concept, a dividing line between civilization andsavagery. It was another form of here be dragons, filling out the space onempty maps, those barbarous places ...of the Cannibals that each other eat.Cannibals, in other words, entered the western imagination alongside suchfabulous creatures as the dog-headed men and monopods.
For Thomas Hobbes the cannibal was a useful concept, awarning of the depths that the war of all against all could descend to in theabsence the social contract and the state. But it became something more in thereal world; for the discovery of supposed cannibal savages became an excusefor far greater savagery, as the Spanish fully demonstrated in the Americas.The hypocrisy, not just in this, but in much of the practice of civilization,was touched on by Montaigne;
Iconceive there is more barbarity in eating a man alive, than when he is dead;in tearing a body limb from limb by racks and torments, that is yet in perfectsense; in roasting by degrees; in causing it to be bitten and worried by dogsand swine (as we have not only read but lately seen, not among the inveterateand mortal enemies, but among neighbours and fellow citizens, and which isworse, under the colours of piety and religion), than to roast and eat himafter he is dead.
I suppose the modern cannibal, cannibals in the form of thefictional Lector or the factual Meiwes, are really the creation of civilizationrather than savagery, a notion supported by arguments advanced by the Marquisde Sade, who saw the absorption of the other as a perfect expression of onesfreedom. Alas, there are some forms of freedom one would rather not have.
Avaramescu has performed commendably in exploring the darkerside of human imagination; for this is a journey less into the practice thanthe perception. It touches on assumptions about barbarism that allowedsupposedly civilized societies to behave towards others in a wholly barbarousway. As much as anythingAn Intellectual History of Cannibalismis anexploration of evil, of ideas and practices that go well beyond the consumptionof human flesh.
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I am a right moderate social libertarian
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