Category: Society

Yesterday, a British Member of Parliament was stabbed and shot. Her name was Jo Cox. I am numbed by the news. This column by Alex Massie in the Spectator puts into words my feelings at the moment, please go and read it. A sample:

When you shout BREAKING POINT over and over again, you don’t get to be surprised when someone breaks. When you present politics as a matter of life and death, as a question of national survival, don’t be surprised if someone takes you at your word. You didn’t make them do it, no, but you didn’t do much to stop it either.

Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realise any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen.

All the demonisation of the “other”, whether they be immigrants, Muslims, or the EU by the likes of Nigel Farage and his ilk does have consequences. We have an even nastier example here in the Netherlands in the form of Geert Wilders.

My father was a politician, and was a member of the Manx parliament. Like Jo Cox, he always fought for the underdog. It would have broken his heart had he lived to have seen the events of yesterday.

I’m dreading the EU Referendum – I can’t help feeling that my fellow Brits will choose to leave the EU…

https://embed.theguardian.com/embed/video/global/video/2016/may/31/eu-referendum-brexit-for-non-brits-video-explainer

And then, to top it all, the Americans will probably plump for President Trump.

Stop the world, I want to get off.

Nicholas Whyte, who lives and works in Brussels, gives his reaction to the terrorist attacks in Brussels yesterday. Go and read it – it’s worth it. A sample:

As with any awful event, there’s a temptation to grasp for easy explanations. I will give in to that temptation. It seems to my jaundiced eye that, dreadful as they were, yesterday’s attacks were botched. Maelbeek is actually the wrong metro station to attack – both Schuman, the stop before, and Arts-Loi, the stop after, would surely be much more attractive targets, being much busier intersections on the network (and also both recently renovated as prestige architectural projects). Only two of three planned explosions in the airport happened, the third attacker apparently losing his nerve and running away. To adopt a Trump-ism, these guys were losers.

This happened because they are losing. Less than a week ago, a major figure in the terror movement was arrested in Brussels; perhaps yesterday was revenge for his arrest, perhaps it was rushed into because they were afraid he would start talking (or knew that he already had). On the ground, their allies and sponsors are losing territory and resources in Syria and Iraq. I wrote a week ago about violence as story-telling, in the Irish context. This is an attempt to write a story about the weakness of our interconnected world, attacking places where people travel and meet, where many nationalities and cultures join together and build together.

It is a narrative that must not and will not win.

Amen to that.

Here we go again, more deluded fools with guns and explosives murdering innocents, followed by a statement from IS that is “written in the standard, sententious style of Isis and other militant pronouncements and is framed by a worldview that has become wearily familiar over recent years”.

The late Iain M. Banks summed it up well in his novel Against A Dark Background:

Sorrow be damned and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming.

Amen.

Back in 2010, I wrote about my misgivings about the fact that the Netherlands was considering banning the burqa. Fast forward to now, and the government has indeed now proposed a ban on wearing the burqa in certain places, including in courts, schools, townhalls, and on public transport.

I remain unconvinced that this ban is going to help our samenleving (literally: living together, but usually translated as society). Kenan Malik’s words at the time about the ban remain as true today as they were back then:

The burqa is a symbol of the oppression of women, not its cause. If legislators really want to help Muslim women, they could begin not by banning the burqa, but by challenging the policies and processes that marginalize migrant communities: on the one hand, the racism, social discrimination and police harassment that all too often disfigure migrant lives, and, on the other, the multicultural policies that treat minorities as members of ethnic groups rather than as citizens. Both help sideline migrant communities, aid the standing of conservative ‘community leaders’ and make life more difficult for women and other disadvantaged groups within those communities.

As I wrote at the time:

While I have qualms about why women should choose to wear the burqa, the answer is not to ban it. The answer is to make it as ludicrous as a codpiece, and that must emerge from the women themselves.

From the reporting of the Guardian on today’s barbaric act in Paris, the words of the former Charlie Hebdo publisher Phillipe Val, whose friends were assassinated today:

“We cannot let silence set in, we need help. We all need to band together against this horror. Terror must not prevent joy, must not prevent our ability to live, freedom, expression – I’m going to use stupid words – democracy, after all this is what is at stake. It is this kind of fraternity that allows us to live. We cannot allow this, this is an act of war. It might be good if tomorrow, all newspapers were called Charlie Hebdo. If we titled them all Charlie Hebdo. If all of France was Charlie Hebdo. It would show that we are not okay with this. That we will never let stop laughing. We will never let liberty be extinguished.”

(translated from French by @rayajalabi)

Read the full interview in French here.

Addendum: During a restless night, while trying to sleep, I got to thinking about why I had blogged about this event, and not about other examples of violent religious extremism, for example the kidnapping of 276 female students from the Government Secondary School in the town of Chibok in Borno State, Nigeria by by Boko Haram, or the murder of 140 people, mostly schoolchildren, in a Taliban attack on a school in Pakistan. I suppose that a banal reason is simply that the Paris attack seems closer to home. It doesn’t seem a particularly strong or good reason, but there it is. The schoolchildren and their teachers have grieving families also.

Salman Rushdie, as usual, has a few wise words on the situation:

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. ‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

Addendum 2: Juan Cole gives a very good analysis here in Sharpening Contradictions. A sample:

Most of France will also remain committed to French values of the Rights of Man, which they invented. But an insular and hateful minority will take advantage of this deliberately polarizing atrocity to push their own agenda. Europe’s future depends on whether the Marine LePens are allowed to become mainstream. Extremism thrives on other people’s extremism, and is inexorably defeated by tolerance.

Addendum 3: And, as only to be expected, Geert Wilders is stoking the fire to thrive on the situation:

This is not the end of the trouble, but the beginning,’ he said. Accusing political leaders of cowardice, Wilders said very tough measures had to be introduced. The borders must be closed and ‘the army has to be brought in to protect our stations, our streets and our shopping centres’

Idiot.

The bogeyman of English politics of the late 1960s was Enoch Powell, and Hanif Kureishi has written a masterful article on the effect of Powell: Knock, knock, it’s Enoch. It’s well worth reading.

Like Kureishi, I was a teenager in 1968 when Powell gave his Rivers of Blood speech. Like Kureishi, I was born in Britain, although unlike Kureishi, I was white. So even though I was appalled at what Powell unleashed, I was never the target of white racism. Ironically, I am a child with immigrant blood – my mother’s side of the family has maternal roots in 19th Century India. As I’ve written before, my great-aunts and great-uncle were clearly Indian (as can be seen in the photograph below), and my mother remembered the casual racism directed at her father when she was a young girl.

Perhaps because of what my mother remembered, I was brought up without being conscious of the fact that racism existed. I also grew up on the Isle of Man, and I only recall ever seeing one black person in real life as a child; he worked at one of the hotels during one summer season. I was more struck by the fact that his bicycle had a real radio on it, than by the fact that he was black. Nonetheless, racist attitudes existed in the wider society, and I must have subconsciously been aware of them. I recall one incident that happened when I must have been 11 or 12, and visiting my aunt and uncle who lived in Tottenham. I was walking along a London street and saw a very expensive car – it was either a Rolls or a Bentley – and being rather impressed by its beauty. Then, the owner and his family appeared and got into the car. They were black, and from seemingly nowhere, the thought popped into my head: “how have the likes of them got a car like that?” I stopped in shock, absolutely appalled at what I had just thought, and horrified that I could think such a thing. Despite my parents care and attention, racism had snuck in and lodged itself in my brain.

It’s an insidious thing. Look again at that photo of my great-uncle George above. The uncle that I was visiting in Tottenham looked just like a whiter version of George. By his, and my mother’s, generation, their Indian origins had faded enough so that they could pass for white. He lived in the same terrace house where he had grown up. Tottenham became a multicultural melting pot, and during the 1960s contained a large population of African-Caribbean people. I became very aware during that time that my uncle and aunt had racist attitudes towards their neighbours. I would often bite my tongue in their presence. Lovely people, but with that side to them that I found very difficult to deal with.

As Kureishi writes:

Appealing to the worst in people – their hate – is a guaranteed way to get attention, but it is also fatal. Powell talked in whole sentences and was forever translating Herodotus, so was known for his cleverness. But he wasn’t smart enough to resist the temptation of instant populism for which he traded in his reputation. Racism is the fool’s gold, or, rather, the crack cocaine of politics.

Forty-five years on, and it’s still happening. We have Nigel Farage and UKIP in the UK, and Geert Wilders and the PVV here in the Netherlands.

Kureishi again:

Britain survived Powell and became something he couldn’t possibly have envisioned. He was a pessimist and lacked faith in the ability of people to cooperate with one another, to collaborate and make alliances. The cultural collisions he was afraid of are the affirmative side of globalisation. People do not love one another because they are “the same”, and they don’t always kill one another because they are different. Where, indeed, does difference begin? Why would it begin with race or colour?

Racism is the lowest form of snobbery. Its language mutates: not long ago the word “immigrant” became an insult, a stand-in for “paki” or “nigger”. We remain an obstruction to “unity”, and people like Powell, men of ressentiment, with their omens and desire to humiliate, will return repeatedly to divide and create difference. The neoliberal experiment that began in the 80s uses racism as a vicious entertainment, as a sideshow, while the wealthy continue to accumulate. But we are all migrants from somewhere, and if we remember that, we could all go somewhere – together.

I hope we can survive Farage and Wilders as well.