The endless catalogue of British imperial atrocities
Tim Harris’s mention of Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland has prompted me to summon the book from the library and to read the Guardian review by Fara Dabhoiwala.
In the endless catalogue of British imperial atrocities, the unprovoked invasion of Tibet in 1903 was a minor but fairly typical episode. Tibetans, explained the expedition’s cultural expert, were savages, “more like hideous gnomes than human beings”. Thousands of them were massacred defending their homeland, “knocked over like skittles” by the invaders’ state-of-the-art machine guns. “I got so sick of the slaughter that I ceased fire,” wrote a British lieutenant, “though the General’s order was to make as big a bag as possible.” As big a bag as possible – killing inferior people was a kind of blood sport.
And blood sport is a Thing to [a certain class of] the British. I did a post once, not very long ago, about a fact I hadn’t known: the toffs like to shoot birds out of the sky and then just walk away. They don’t shoot them for food, they just shoot them. Same with “trophy” hunting – elephants, lions, whatever they think will look nice on the wall.
And now we learn that they saw a set of people the same way. A “bag,” a “trophy,” a blood sport.
And then the looting started. More than 400 mule-loads of precious manuscripts, jewels, religious treasures and artworks were plundered from Tibetan monasteries to enrich the British Museum and the Bodleian Library.
Ok stop right there.
Notice an incongruity?
On the one hand the people are so much garbage, as cheerfully slaughtered as mosquitoes. On the other hand, creators of precious manuscripts and artworks well worth looting and taking home to show off.
Well which is it?
Sitting at home watching the BBC antiques show Flog It one quiet afternoon in the early 21st century, Sathnam Sanghera saw the delighted descendant of one of those soldiers make another killing – £140,000 for selling off the artefacts his grandfather had “come across” in the Himalayas.
As one does.
It’s a characteristically instructive vignette in Empireland, Sanghera’s impassioned and deeply personal journey through Britain’s imperial past and present. The empire, he argues, still shapes British society – its delusions of exceptionalism, its immense private and public wealth, the fabric of its cities, the dominance of the City of London, even the entitled and drunken behaviour of British expats and holidaymakers abroad. Yet the British choose not to see this: wilful amnesia about the darker sides of imperialism may be its most pernicious legacy.
I look forward to reading it. Thanks, Tim.
I recently saw mention of that invasion of Tibet, which I had not been aware of.
The context was noting that Europeans use their military superiority to at least invade almost everywhere, but where they made it stick was where they had germs on their side. Ie: the Americas, Australia and a few other places.
Tradtional Tibetan culture was all but eradicated in its homeland following the Chinese invasion of 1950. Almost all Tibet’s 6,000 monasteries were destroyed. I suspect the stuff looted in the Younghusband invasion forms a large proportion of the surviving material culture of old Tibet. I’m not suggesting for a moment that this retrospectively justifies the Younghusband invasion in any way – it was undoubtedly a horrible crime – but it did enable the survival of a lot of artefacts that would otherwise have been lost.
I too find the shooting of birds incomprehensible and revolting on every level. But it is hardly unique to the British ruling class. It is very prevalent around the Mediterranean, for example: https://birdlifecyprus.org/the-darker-side-of-cyprus/
This book is in my current stack – very well written.
The Pitt-Rivers museum in Oxford is full of all sorts of random things invaders scooped up on their travels. But something I noted there is that not only is it full of objects made by ‘savages’ in other countries, it also has artefacts collected from the ‘savages’ in other parts of Britain – to these collectors Wales and Cornwall were just as weird and wild and populated by bizarre subhumans as ‘darkest Africa’.
@2 A museum that used to be in Bristol, the Museum of Commonwealth and Empire, had a section informing us that the only information we now have on some indigenous cultures comes from what European invaders took/preserved, and European scholars now know more about these cultures than the actual descendants of these people. Scholars working in universities in Asian and African countries are at a disadvantage, as the collections of materials – original artefacts and the notes of missionaries and soldiers – are housed in European libraries that aren’t accessible to them.
It’s a knotty problem, isn’t it? A bit of regime change and world heritage (and possible indigenous heritage depending on migration patterns and the passage of time) is destroyed forever. Doesn’t make the looters in any way virtuous unless they were specifically aiming to do that (generally wasn’t the case). But now that time is passed, what do you do? Which claims should be answered and how? I’d like to think at this point that China wouldn’t go back to trying to erase its rich history again but ol’ Winnie the Pooh thinks the reason things went down hill is because the Chinese people didn’t Mao hard enough, so who knows what the future holds for them?
Not at all, Ophelia! It is a very good, and, as I have said, fair-minded book – which is to say, it contains responsible description and analysis, respects the complexity of the subject, and does not depend on making those brutal binary distinctions (‘Science good, Everything else bad!’) that seem to derive from ‘Animal Farm’, and that many people appear to suppose is what constitutes serious thought.
Another very good book for those who, as guest appears to be, are interested in Wales:
The History of Wales in Twelve Poems, by M. Wynn Thomas (University of Wales Press).
I found this in Lhasa and its mysteries, with a record of the expedition of 1903-1904 (1905) by Lieutenant-Colonel L. A, Waddell. There are several copies on the Internet Archive. The quotation is on p. 101. It looks like an interesting book.
Thank you, Blood Knight: it is, as you say, a knotty problem, and I, too, don’t see any ready & easy ways of solving it.
As for Mao, the ideology that inspired him and his followers derived from the work of a late Enlightenment thinker, Karl Marx, whose analyses of aspects of capitalism and the plight of the poor I admire, but whose messianic ideas, deriving from the Hegelian conception of the grand march of history towards a better future that in fact was largely shared with 19th-century proponents of capitalism and colonialism, have been wholly destructive.
guest #3
“…informing us that the only information we now have on some indigenous cultures comes from what European invaders took/preserved, and European scholars now know more about these cultures than the actual descendants of these people…”
I have actually had conversations with people who believe that.
It is always surreal.
Re: “European scholars now know more about these cultures than the actual descendants of these people”
I don’t think ancestry necessarily confers knowledge. Ancestry is a motivation for maintaining knowledge, but not a guarantee that it has been preserved, or preserved accurately. I would be more inclined to believe scholars than descendants. There is a lot of crap that gets passed down as “the story of our people” that is less than credible and unsupported by evidence.
I don’t think I’d put such a claim in a museum exhibit, though. Especially in reference to invaders.
Jim Baerg#1 In addition to the ravages of smallpox in Australia, there were also a great many massacres committed that have only fairly recently come to be properly discussed. Before, there was what the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner called in 1968 ‘The Great Australian Silence’ – a silence that, it seems, a great many white Australians would prefer to maintain. The Australian Museum describes this silence as one in which ‘Australians do not just fail to acknowledge the atrocities of the past, but choose to not think about them at all, to the point of forgetting that these events ever happened.’
That, of course, is very far from being a solely Australian failing.
Sackbut #10: “There is a lot of crap that gets passed down as “the story of our people” that is less than credible and unsupported by evidence.”
Yes, there is! Read the histories of almost ‘Western’ nation written in the 19th & early 20th centuries, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s ‘The Victorians’ (“staggeringly silly”, “absolutely abysmal”, “morally repellent” are among the kinder judgements passed on it by reviewers), or look at the curricula that are being provided, at the behest of Republican state governments, to unfortunate public schools in the USA by Prager ‘University’ or Hillsdale College.
Read the histories of almost EVERY ‘Western’ nation…
Sackbut #10
” I would be more inclined to believe scholars than descendants.”
Why?
Tim, certainly. No society is immune from that. There is nothing special about indigenous populations or non-Western societies that makes their stories unimpeachable. We don’t trust eye witnesses unquestionably, either.
Americans on a large scale are a perfectly good example of why the descendants of a group are less reliable than people who actually study the evidence. Not all scholars are honest and unbiased, but I’ll take the scholars over the descendants in general.
Chigau, I think I explained pretty well in #10 and #14. Was something unclear?
Er, #15, I meant.
Sackbut
It is abundantly clear.
I don’t think anyone is claiming that there is something ‘special about indigenous populations or non-Western societies that makes their stories unimpeachable’. I have certainly not claimed that, or even come near to claiming that, and so far as I can remember no commenter on this particular issue has done, either. I think you have – forgive me for saying this – a rather naive idea of what the writing of history has consisted in, and does consist in. The writing of history has itself a history (I do not think that any serious and responsible historian now would, like Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1963, dismiss the idea of African history on the grounds that it would consist only in chronicling ‘the unrewarding gyrations of barbarian tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe’).
Another matter is that history (in the sense of studying & writing it) is always contested – it is not a mere chronicling of events in the manner of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – useful and revealing though that is (though chronicling, like history, involves a particular perspective) – or a mere amassing of ‘facts’. And there are never any simple answers, or absolute truths that go beyond banalities. All historians have a particular point of view and they interpret what has happened in terms of their points of view, drawing on evidence of course but also making judgements about what evidence is important and what is not in the light of their points of view – a dialectical process, one might say, since the evidence may lead one to modify one’s point of view. They may draw on Marxism, as did those great British historians Eric Hobsbawn, Christopher Hill, and E.P. Thompson, whereas that fascinating and profound German historian, Reinhart Kosseleck, drew on the thought of that highly intelligent and thoroughly unpleasant Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt (who is well worth reading). Or there are the Annales school of France, with historians like Marc Bloch (shot by the Gestapo), Fernand Braudel, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. All very different, and all great historians.
There is an excellent book by Sir Richard Evans (who was an expert witness for the defence in the libel case brought by the British ‘historian’ David Irving against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt) entitled ‘In Defence of History’. It provokes thought and makes one realise that history itself is no simple thing, and neither is the writing of it. And, as I suggested above, history – in the writing of it – will always be a contested area.
I should add that I think it is a bloody good thing that the lofty condescension displayed by Hugh Trevor-Roper towards indigenous populations and non-Western societies is far less easy nowadays outside the right-wing noise machine.
#9 chigau
Do you doubt the possibility?
And I should add that if you, as a ‘Westerner’, are writing a history, or conducting an anthropological or sociological study, of another civilisation or culture that is not Western, you need to have an extremely good understanding of that culture, its people, and its language, and – this is very important – you need also to be aware of your position as an outsider, and not assume that because you are a ‘Western scholar’ your perspective and the rules of your discipline, as they have been taught to you, necessarily deliver ‘truth’ – for they may well function as an impediment. That is to say, you need to respect those whom you are studying and learn to learn from them. I say this as someone who has lived for fifty years in Japan, am married to a Japanese, and have worked exclusively in Japanese institutions with Japanese colleagues. I can assure you that it is not easy to remove the Western spectacles which you were given at birth and with which you have grown up and become accustomed to.
Lots of virtue signalling here, in the sense of signalling ones virtue by deploring the attitudes of past times (and, to be fair, many of the attitudes in past times were indeed deplorable by modern standards, though that is hardly news).
But one major misconception:
This is the gross misconception that economics is a zero-sum game, and that becoming wealthy is a matter of plundering others. The truth is that Britain did not become wealthy owing to having an empire and plundering the world; rather, Britain had an empire and plundered the world because it became wealthy. After all, launching armies half-way across the world is actually expensive. And that could only be done because Britain then had the world’s biggest economy, and that was based on technological know-how.
In the same way, America today is not the world’s biggest economy because it has military bases strewn across the world; rather, American has military bases strewn across the world because it is the world’s largest economy, an economy based on technological know-how.
After all, fighting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, is hugely expensive (the Iraq war is reckoned to have cost the US 2 trillion dollars). The US is not rich because of military adventurism (Vietnam, Libya, Bosnia, etc, in addition to Iraq, Afghanistan), rather, the US can do those things because it is rich.
There’s also a lot of broad-brush demonisation going on in this thread (the reality is that people in the past had a wide range of attitudes, and while many people were deplorable, many others were laudable), for example:
@guest:
Have a prize for the least-charitable take possible!
Augustus Pitt Rivers was actually genuinely interested in the history and cultural development of his own country as well as of other countries.
From wikipedia: “The estates Pitt Rivers inherited in 1880 contained a wealth of archaeological material from the Roman and Saxon periods. He excavated these over seventeen seasons, from the mid-1880s until his death. His approach was highly methodical by the standards of the time, and he is widely regarded as the first scientific archaeologist to work in Britain. His most important methodological innovation was his insistence that all artefacts, not just beautiful or unique ones, be collected and catalogued. This focus on everyday objects as the key to understanding the past broke decisively with earlier archaeological practice, which verged on treasure hunting. It is Pitt Rivers’ most important, and most lasting, scientific legacy.”
And: “Following the passage of the Ancient Monuments Protection Act 1882, Pitt Rivers became the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments […] Charged with cataloguing archaeological sites and protecting them from destruction, he worked with his customary methodical zeal …”
Also: “He is often called the “father of British archaeology”, who stressed the need for total excavation of sites, through stratigraphic observation and recording, and prompt and complete publication. Like Sir Flinders Petrie, Pitt-Rivers adopted a sociological approach to the study of excavated objects and emphasized the instructional value of common artifacts.”
He is quoted as saying: “Tedious as it may appear to some to dwell on the discovery of odds and ends that have, no doubt, been thrown away by the owner as rubbish … yet it is by the study of such trivial details that Archaeology is mainly dependent for determining the date of earthworks. … Next to coins, fragments of pottery afford the most reliable of all evidence …”
I really don’t think that Augustus Pitt Rivers deserves your take on him.
Maybe it’s not fucking “virtue signaling.” Maybe you’re just contempt signaling.
Tim @ 19
I thought I was making a fairly non-controversial statement that I value expertise over “lived experience”. I understand there are cases where experts are terrible and “lived experience” is the best information, but in general expertise and scholarship is better, and I didn’t think it was strange to state this. I think it applies in history and anthropology as well as it does in medicine and psychology and biology.
If a rejection of expertise was not the point of the statement to which I initially responded, then I apologize for being mistaken.
As to Britain (or another country) becoming wealthy by plundering the world, or plundering the world because wealthy, maybe it’s both, a feedback loop.
Being married to a historian has cleared my eyes somewhat on the subject of history. I have a lot of respect for historians, but I now temper that with a dose of skepticism. One example, to add to the others. It isn’t just non-Western nations that are treated with contempt. It is, in general, often any other nations than your own. My husband is a Napoleon scholar, and he has told me that most Americans (and British) get a lot wrong because they rely too much on Edmund Burke. Seems plausible to me, but I’m not a Napoleon scholar, so I have to trust him on that, which is like trusting any other expert. Account for biases.
Karen the Chemist, that sounds very likely to me. feedback loops are not one thing or the other, but things feeding each other.
@Karen the chemist:
I’m not convinced. If we consider the goods that Britain obtained owing to its colonial adverturism in India, China, Afghanistan etc (again, necessitating armies and navies that cost a heck of a lot) they were things like spices, silk, tea, sugar, opium, indigo dye. These were all “luxury” consumer goods that sufficiently-wealthy people would spend money on, and which get used up.
But, in the long run, economic development is driven by technological innovation and know-how. This is why all the “Western” countries today have a fairly similar standard of living, including countries that both did and didn’t have empires, even though they have had very different histories — because technology and good ideas get adopted widely and all these countries now have a similar way of doing things.
So you’re just going to ignore my response to you @ 24?
I don’t want you commenting here if you’re going to lead with snotty accusations of virtue-signaling.
@Ophelia:
What sort of a response should I give? It seemed more like rhetorical question than one expecting a reply.
It is, of course, your blog, so if you don’t want me commenting here then that’s up to you.
A withdrawal and/or apology. Of course it wasn’t rhetorical – you opened with an insulting accusation of lying for the sake of an appearance of virtue. Was that “rhetorical”?
All very interesting.
My wife and I have locks on the doors of our house, not to keep out the people and neighbours we know, but those we don’t: ‘Strangers.’
I contend that there is a simple rule running right back through human history, down into the Kingdom Animalia to which we all belong, and arguably including the rest of the Biosphere as well. It is this: If you can’t defend it, you don’t own it. There is no book up there in the sky in which it is written that the Chinese own China, the Americans own America, the Tibetans own Tibet, and so on. Just to state the issue that way IMHO is to invite a variety of critical responses, like ‘which Americans are you talking about: Latinos? Indians? Which tribe of Indians?’ Etc.
I am also fond of cactus plants, and have potted members of a few species in the garden outside. Each of those plants is defending its own little bit of territory and soil with a truly ruthless set of spines, all so sharp as to defy even the slightest touch. Only small insects can get down through them to dine on the succulent tissues below.
There is another thread running through history; at least, the history of human consciousness. I saw it well illustrated in some movie years ago, in which a petty crook is trying to educate his own son, saying: “How many times have I got to tell you that stealin’ what’s stole ain’t stealin?” Some of my own Scots-Irish ancestors possibly drove others of them off their lands in Britain, resulting in their emigration and my birth here in Australia. That birth of mine took place on land in Sydney from which the original Aborigines had been ‘cleared off’ by incoming European settlers and convicts, and often massacred in the process. But those original (Murrayan) Aborigines had themselves cleared off the even more original Tasmanian Aborigines, whose own ancestors had once had this entire continent to themselves. They finished up driven off and isolated in what is now Tasmania by the rising waters of the Bass Strait after the last glaciation of the Pleistocene series. And so on it goes.
As that great old Arab proverb puts it: ‘The dogs bark, and the caravan moves on.’
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https://overland.org.au/2023/03/standing-in-the-dawns-new-light-truth-telling-for-settlers/
“Contempt signaling”. I may have to steal that.
Are we supposed to approve the deplorable attitudes of the past, many of which are directly responsible for the multiple, existential threats we are currently facing? If we’re supposed to learn from our mistakes, how do we do that without mentioning them? In many instances the past is not dead and gone, buried and forgotten, but alive and well and in the driver’s seat, steering us (and many other species) to oblivion. Or is your issue with our alleged “virtue signaling” the choice of values being deplored? Exactly which attitudes are we supposed to (in your opinion) let slide and ignore? Perhaps you could furnish us with an Approved List of Irreproachable Attitudes to which we can refer, so we can stop wasting our time fighting against and “deploring.” Thanks.
While you’re at it, can you give us a date in history before which we should not concern ourselves? Think of it as a kind of cultural statute of limitations, or an historical half-life of relevancy, so that we’re not looking farther into the past than we need to. This might be tougher than it looks, but I’m sure you’ve got some ideas. Maybe the US Civil War? That date seems to keep coming up here, so maybe that could be our benchmark, right?
However much we might like to forget about it, the past is always with us. Forgetting about it is easier and more convenient for some of us than others. In some cases “forgive and forget” isn’t really an option. The United States and Canada have never fully come to grips with the fact that much of their current wealth and prosperity is the direct result of a) the displacement, disposession, and genocide of the peoples already living here at the time of European contact; b) the mass importation over centuries of enslaved Africans along with generations of what amounted to “captive breeding”; and c) the destruction and degradation of the continent’s biodiversity (which continues to this day). That the dominant culture has ignored or papered over this past for centuries does not make it go away, or render it nothing more than spilled milk under the bridge. Should First Nations peoples simply abandon their attempts to hold governments accountable for Treaty obligations? Should they walk away from pursuing land claims where their territories were appropriated without any treaty process having opened them to White settlement or development? Should they surrender what little sovereignty they have been granted pyrand yield to destructive, dangerous “development” (pipelines, logging. mining, etc.) on their lands? These issues are rooted in history, but by no means relegated to the “past.” First Nations peoples are not “relitigating the past” but trying to secure and protect their future. These battles are very much the result of actions in the past that were the fruits of deplorable values of the times. That these attitudes were once common does not excuse them, or put them beyond the bounds of legitimate critical examination or current remediation.
My faith and trust in the know-how and technological development driving “economic development” is somewhat less than Panglossian. Technological development and know-how are not neutral, benign givens. They are the result of choices and power struggles within societies; they are not blind forces of nature over which we have no control, and to which we must inevitably submit, however much we may be told that they are, and that we should; “That’s progress!” As just one element of historical development, they are as prone to accident, unintended consequences, and the distortion and inertia of vested interests as any other human endeavour. Not all changes are improvements.
Just because an idea is “widely adopted” doesn’t mean it’s good. It’s quite possible that better options and choices might have been undermined or short-circuited along the way, for reasons that have little to do with their value or benefit to society as a whole. Think of BETA vs VHS. Or less facetiously, investment in public transit vs. highways and private automobiles. If a country’s cabinet is made up of people dependent upon donations from car manufacturers and Big Oil, you can see how their recommendations and decisions regarding economic development and government spending might be coloured by their own personal interests, rather than the broader common good. Regulatory capture is a thing. Some choices foreclose others, with the path taken making backtracking to an earlier fork in the road much more difficult. For vested interests driving decision-making for their own narrow benefit, this is a feature, not a bug. “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” There’s no guarantee that the final result of such decisions is good or optimal, and at the same time, no requirement that less-than-optimal results must be accepted as foreordained, inevitable, or irreversible. The results of the “Invisible Hand” do not incline me to believe in the wisdom of the Market any more than the results of a Ouija board lead me to believe in the existence of a spirit world. To paraphrase Sagan, the invisible bears a striking resemblance to the non-existent.
Just because an idea makes someone a shit-ton of money doesn’t mean it’s a good one. The above examples of a) indigenous dispossesion/displacement/genocide, b) slavery, and c) environmental destruction made some people very wealthy. This says nothing about the moral worth of those ideas, only their remunerative utility for some favoured few. There are plenty of current attitudes that are deplorable. Do we get to oppose them without being accused of virtue signaling? There’s always someone outside the picture of wealth and prosperity that’s paying the price. But these very real costs, borne by others are dismissed as “externalities.” The profits are privatized but the mess is socialized, with everyone else left to pay the tab.
Earth is a zero sum game. It is small and finite. Its material and bioenergetic limits render it incapable of supporting eight billion people in a “Western” standard of living; to exhort “underdeveloped” countries to follow our fine example is a recipe for disaster. Yet to deny those same countries the opportunity and right to do so is grotesquely unjust. Those of us at the top of the pyramid scheme have burned through so much of the fossil fuel wealth to leverage our “development.” Those who have had the misfortune to fall outside the magic circle of the West’s techno utopia will just have to suck it up. Here’s an idea; what if we figured out some sort of massive transfer of wealth to poorer countries to lift them out of their grinding poverty? We managed a massive transfer of wealth away from those countries to fuel our own development. “But they haven’t “earned” I hear. Well, as far as I’m concerned neither did we. There’s a phrase I’ve heard: “Live simply, that others may simply live.” Naive and simplistic? Perhaps, but it’s something we can do now, and it doesn’t depend on any pie-in-the-sky miracle technology. Under our current way of doing things, any such technology would likely be designed to keep the current model of business as usual going, rather than to support a radical rethinking of human development within biospheric limits that is not driven by profits for the few at the expense of everyone and everything else.
Thank you, Ophelia & Your Name’s not Bruce.
I shall copy here the a slightly modified passage from a previous comment of mine on the tactics employed by a number of vociferous pundits on the extreme right :
In his book ‘There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech… And It’s a Good Thing, Too’ (published back in 1994), Stanley Fish describes the tactics adopted by right-wing propagandists:
‘…the basic move is to abstract persons and issues from the flow of history… so that real-world issues can be reduced to problems in a moral algebra: any policy that takes race into consideration is equivalent to any other policy that takes race into consideration, Nazis equivalent to Israeli hardliners, Ku Klux Klanners equivalent to those who favor minority set-asides. In the making of such equivalences, differences in power, motive, and morality just don’t count….’
We have seen this tactic here, on display among the comments. Actual people, who were born into particular familial and social circumstances, have grown up in particular ways, have been educated in particular ways, have undergone particular experiences, are reduced to abstract ‘individuals’ (counters, more like) who may be distinguished only, it seems, by their genetic inheritance, particularly where IQ is concerned, or their money (or lack of it).
And we have seen another favoured tactic practised here by the same commenter – one that Fish also remarks on: that of disingenuously quoting the following words of Martin Luther King: ‘I have a dream that one day my four little children will…not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’ While, of course, wholly ignoring the rest of the speech and the context within which it was made. As Fish remarks, it is an ‘oh-so-convenient’ sentence for the dissembling racist, as he or she strives to create a ‘thin veneer’ that is designed to cover ‘attitudes that will not bear examination’ – but that are nevertheless obvious.
There is nothing original in these tactics in 2023 – they have been the dishonest stock-in-trade of the rightists, or, as Fish bluntly calls them, racists, for many decades. It is well to be aware of them, and the stench of the bad faith with which they are employed.
I shall also add that the confident assertion made by the same commenter that the Millsian idea of ‘free speech’ is generally accepted is untrue and ignorant. There has been a great deal of very intelligent debate about the flaws of the idea. You may find a well-argued account of the various objections to it in essays in the book by Fish mentioned above, and a fuller and more focussed account in another book of his: ‘The First: How to think about hate speech, campus speech, religious speech, fake news, post-truth, and Donald Trump’.
Not to distract too much from your worthier points Tim, but you still haven’t explained in what universe the tools of suppressing free speech won’t be handed to someone like Donald Trump.
The Millsian idea of free speech isn’t good or wonderful by any means, but as a guiding principle humans have yet to demonstrate that there’s a better one. It’s like the apocryphal Churchill bit about democracy and it being the worst system except everything else.
Thank you, Blood Knight. I shall make the simple point that the ‘tools’ of free speech are in the hands of Donald Trump, and, like the MAGA Republicans and Fox News (at least formerly, for it has improved itself slightly), he is abusing them in every way he can.
I am not talking about suppressing people’s speech, what I am saying is that the Ideal of free speech is no simple and obvious thing and does not exist in some Platonic and uncontested space, as is shown by, for example, Ophelia’s latest post about the firing by The University of Alberta of its Sexual Assault Centre director for ‘signing an open letter questioning sexual assault and rape claims against Hamas during the Oct. 7 attack in Israel’.
Should this director not have been fired? Does the university have no right to fire this person because to do so infringes on her right to ‘free speech’? Does no employer have the right to fire employees who, say, direct racial slurs or other insults towards other employees?
Speech in real life is an act, taken in particular circumstances, and it is impossible in the real world to draw any clear distinction between speech and action. The First Amendment is primarily a statement of an ideal relationship between the state and its citizens (which is why it does not apply in the example of the University of Alberta), but in fact the state necessarily imposes restrictions on free speech – for example, you cannot shout ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre, you cannot lie under oath, you cannot discuss military secrets with a representative of a foreign power. Do these examples infringe on the right of free speech? When judges in the state of Colorado are doxed by Trump, and then receive death threats directed at themselves and their families, are Trump’s actions and the subsequent harassment & threats protected by the First Amendment? Does Tucker Carlson. or anyone else, have the right to churn out damaging lies on what purports to be a news channel? Things are not simple.
I don’t propose to go on. Please read the books by Stanley Fish I have mentioned above. They are well-argued books which analyse the complexity of issues that are raised by the ideal of free speech. And, by the way, Fish does not deny the importance of the First Amendment; but he argues cogently that no speech is, or can be, free in any absolute sense, since speech is always constrained by circumstance and is always contested, and we need to recognise that.
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Funny. We had a post about the evils of group-ism a few days ago, and now this.
So you are calling Coel a liar and a racist. No doubt anybody who thinks he has a point is also a liar and a racist. Couldn’t be a matter of holding a different point of view, could it? Of believing that Enlightenment liberalism, for all its shortcomings, is the best way to address justice and policy? Apparently such charity is only for the in-group.
Blood Knight, thank you. We’ve all seen what happens when “progressives” (so-called) have the power to suppress speech. It’s no prettier than when conservatives do it.
Incidentally, not only are the victims of Trump’s rhetoric forced to endure harassment & threats, but they have to receive protection from the state – that is to say, American taxpayers are having to pay very large amounts of money for the protection of those whom Trump sics his dogs on. I frankly do not see why taxpayers, as well of course as the victims of the threats, should be put in this position because of Trump.
There was a video on the MeidasTouch network (which I’m afraid I can’t track down at the moment) in which Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a prosecutor who once worked with Jack Smith, discusses, from personal experience, how terrifying it is to receive such death-threats and harassment, and points out how the ubiquity of such behaviour is likely to discourage good and competent people from becoming prosecutors or judges – or election workers, for that matter, like Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.
Thank you, Lady Mondegreen. I have made it abundantly clear that I value democratic institutions and do not wish to see them destroyed, either by the right or the left..
A silly oversight on my part:
‘The First Amendment is primarily a statement of an ideal relationship between the state and its citizens (which is why it does not apply in the example of the University of Alberta)…’
Alberta being in Canada, the First Amendment does not apply there anyway. I should have said it does not apply in the case of a university firing a member of staff for engaging in speech that the university does not wish to be associated with.
@Ophelia:
The comment I was most thinking of when I made by “virtue signalling” remark was not by you, it was the one I did then reply to:
“The Pitt-Rivers museum in Oxford is full of all sorts of random things invaders scooped up on their travels. […] to these collectors Wales and Cornwall were just as weird and wild and populated by bizarre subhumans as ‘darkest Africa’.”
I don’t think there’s any evidence that Pitt Rivers regarded anyone (let alone those in his own country) as “bizarre subhumans”. While no-one of that time would measure up to modern standards, be seems to have been a decent and laudable man, more enlightened than many, and with a genuine interest in other cultures. We’re better off for him having lived. The same can be said of many scientists of that era. It’s wrong to broad-brush demonise them all.
This tendency to exaggerate the faults of others does seem to me to have an element of tribal signalling. For comparison, if someone accuses JKR of something vastly worse than than she’s said, they are likely playing to their Twitter bubble
By the way, re the original post, English people of that time and education tended to use sporting metaphors. That’s just how they spoke. The fact that one used a sporting metaphor does not mean that he literally regarded killing men as the same as killing birds.
@Your Name’s not Bruce?:
No, but nor are you supposed to exaggerate them for effect.
I’m fine with honest and appropriate accounts of history. Indeed, it’s because I find history interesting that I want it discussed accurately.
Nope, it’s the exaggeration.
We should concern ourselves with all of history. But we should seek to understand it, not just broad-brush demonise it.
Of those, (a) is true, in the sense that the Europeans took all the land, yes. (b) is not true (I’ve argued this on other threads, so won’t in this comment; but note that there was vastly less slavery in Canada, yet the standard of living there is not now vastly lower than in the US, so your own remark argues against it). Your bald assertion here about the effects of history, as though they were clear and unarguable, is part of why I argue for an accurate account of history and its effects. Please note that arguing that your (b) is just not true is not the same as saying that history is irrelevant and should be ignored. As for (c), that’s contentious and arguable, though I won’t argue it here since it’s way off topic and this comment is already getting long.
And just because an idea is a bad one does not mean that it necessarily makes a shit-ton of money.
That, again, is arguable, Better technology (sustainable energy, better agriculture) could make it possible.
You’re misunderstanding the causes of wealth. Having the poor countries sit around subsisting on welfare is not a recipe for the future. We do actually know the recipe for wealth; non-Western countries that have adopted it (Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, etc) are doing fine.
Again, no we didn’t, and, again, I think you’re misunderstanding what generates wealth.
@not Bruce:
OK, I said I wouldn’t argue (c) but just a few quick remarks:
I don’t agree with the cause/effect claim here. That is, the current prosperity is not a “direct result” of the degredation of the environment.
Note that the US/Canada (like many Western countries) have the highest environmental standards of nations across the world or across history. Note that alternative ways of doing things, such as communist China and the Soviet Union, were vastly worse for environmental destruction, and still didn’t generate much prosperity.
By far the biggest factor in terms of reduced bidiversity is modern agriculture. But that is pretty much a function of population size. That is, if you has the same number of people doing dirt-poor subsistence farming, then that would cause just as much — or likely much more — degredation of the environment and reduction in biodiversity. We know this because there are plenty of places across the world where that is the case.
So I’d concur with a statement like: “sustaining a high population … is a direct result of … farming that greatly reduces biodiversity” (noting that the current population of the US/Canada is about 100 times that prior to the arrival or Europeans) but I don’t concur with your claim as made.
That’s neither an apology nor a withdrawal.
Just don’t bounce in with a bald assertion that we’re lying for head pats. Don’t lead with a sneer. It’s not all that complicated.
Coel @23,
If you were already wealthy, why would you need to plunder the world?
Probably because you’re greedy!
@Krishna:
They didn’t “need” to. They did it to empire-build, they did it because that’s what rich/powerful people (ok, “men”) tended to do.
Why did the Romans conquer Britain? Because it hadn’t yet been conquered. Because that was the Roman ethos. Because a Roman Emperor needed a victory parade back in Rome, in which conquered kings were dragged in chains as slaves. (It was not “in order to get rich”; they couldn’t have done it unless they were already rich.)
What was the “plunder” the British obtained? Well, to some extent it was luxury goods that they couldn’t obtain at home (spices, tea, silk). But it was also “status” plunder. To quote from above: “400 mule-loads of precious manuscripts, jewels, religious treasures and artworks” to enrich museums at home.
The equivalent nowadays is a billionaire amassing a modern-art collection or donating to the opera in order to be the guest of honour on opening night.
Again, this behaviour is because they were rich (and couldn’t have been done absent that), not in order to get rich. Ditto the US invasion of Iraq.
@Ophelia:
I had no intention of suggesting that anyone was lying or being insincere. Those “virtue signalling” do indeed consider that the virtues that they are signalling are virtues; that is why they are signalling them.
It’s just a term for an expression that amounts to “Those people are/were deplorable! Aren’t we morally superior to those people?”. Isn’t that a fair enough remark about some comments on this thread, say, #3?
If anyone is interested in reading some serious history, as opposed to Coel’s puerile and self-serving simplifications and the accompanying protestations about his passionate interest in history, I recommend reading the following paper:
Sweet Business: quantifying the value added in the British colonial sugar trade in the 18th century.
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/288501190.pdf
It is far from being a matter of those poor, deluded Britons impoverishing themselves for a dream of empire.
To turn to another matter, the statement that:
‘By the way, re the original post, English people of that time and education tended to use sporting metaphors. That’s just how they spoke. The fact that one used a sporting metaphor does not mean that he literally regarded killing men as the same as killing birds.’
Yes, Coel, we all know what metaphors are, and are very well aware that the speaker in question did not ‘literally regard killing men as killing birds’.
Metaphors, however, are not the simple thing you appear to suppose them to be. The reduction of ‘enemies’ to non-human creatures is all too common. The Jews were called ‘rats’ by the Nazis, the Tutsi tribe called ‘cockroaches’ by the Hutus in Rwandan genocide, and President Trump is calling immigrants and those he regards as enemies ‘vermin’. In this case the ‘hideous gnomes’, as the Tibetans were described by the chief looter on the Younghusband ‘expedition’, are being reduced to ‘game’ so that they may be slaughtered without any moral qualms, like pheasants or grouse. What splendid sport!
How readily you leap to excuse certain things! You behave very similarly to those snowflakes on the left you affect to despise.
On another note, I largely agree with Coel’s defence of Pitt-Rivers, but will add that the Pitt-Rivers Museum has for some time now been returning ‘human remains’ from its collection to various corners of the world
@Tim:
Sugar is a consummable, it gets consumed. The argument is not about how things like that contributed to prosperity then, it’s about whether/how they contribute to prosperity today.
The whole claim of “modern prosperity is built on slavery/colonialism” misunderstands how wealth works. It presumes that each generation labours to produce “stuff” and a small surplus of stuff is left over, and that surplus builds up generation by generation, and so today we have more “stuff”.
[And you can just about make that argument for some sorts of infrastructure, such as railway networks and sewerage systems.]
But, in general, this is just wrong. Stuff like sugar gets consumed. What gets passed on and so builds up generation by generation is good ideas and technological know-how. That is why we’re more prosperous today.
Coel @ 49
No.
Your obstinate smug refusal to apologize for being smug and rude is smug and rude.
I’m tired of this.
Don’t lead with an insult. Consider that A Rule, if you like, although it should be just basic manners. Nobody has anointed you The Great Corrector, so bouncing in with an insult is just that: bouncing in with an insult.