A pause for extra sass
Gareth Roberts takes a blowtorch to the “thinking” of Owen Jones:
‘Oh, and by the way’, said Owen Jones in his ‘sassy’ mode the other day on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, ‘it wasn’t actually Hamas who introduced the law banning homosexuality in Gaza. Guess who it was?’ He then gave an extra pause for extra sass. ‘The British Empire.’ (Dramatic chord!)
There’s an ordinance! A British Mandate Ordinance! Can’t argue with that, now can you.
Jones, who has been a vocal supporter of Palestine during the current conflict in Gaza, clearly thought he had got one over on those critics who have tried to remind him of Hamas’s less than savoury attitudes to gay people. Never mind that the British Mandate for Palestine ended in 1948, when Dorothy Squires was Britain’s top hitmaker and Mrs Dale’s Diary was the hot new soap. The obvious thought that the Gazans have had 74 years to repeal this anti-gay ordinance doesn’t seem to have occurred to Jones. In fact, they have made the ‘offence’ and its punishment more severe in recent years. Meanwhile, the other jurisdictions that also were formerly under the mandate had no such issue – Jordan scrapped the law in 1951, Israel in 1988 (though it stopped bothering to prosecute homosexuality much earlier).
…
This bizarre romanticism of non-Western cultures as prelapsarian paradises is, ironically, a very Western thing. In fact, there is a bulging smorgasbord of ironies here.
The first and most obvious is that this view is deeply racist. It treats the non-Western peoples of the world as children, with no agency or identity of their own. They can only copy us, and once something Western goes into their laws, bish bosh, it’s in for good. Even after decolonisation, it never occurs to them to change it…
We are also often asked to swallow an absurdity of presentism – that before the coming of the dread British Empire, it had never occurred to these populations to do anything that is disapproved of by Westerners on the internet in the year 2023.
In other words he implies that before the British Mandate Palestine was a utopia of idenniny recognition and celebration.
But in truth, Western Enlightenment ideas didn’t enable slavery, colonialism or the punishment of sexual difference. They stopped them. Jones and his ilk are posing against the very institutions and economic system that support and enable their charmed lives. The default of civilisation isn’t egalitarian Eden, it’s earth-grubbing poverty, backbreaking toil and perpetual war conducted by any means, with a ‘99.99 per cent for me, and a tiddler for you’ distribution of the spoils.
And no time or energy to have luxury idenninies.
The norm of history – peasants ruled by brigands.
I’m happy to live in a country somewhat better than that.
“Where and when did homosexual people live openly and freely, before our time in the West? The answer, I’m afraid, is never and nowhere.”
I’m afraid don’t understand Roberts here. Homosexual relationships between men were regarded as a normal part of Ancient Greek society, especially places such as Thebes. There were parts of Ancient Greece where a gay person could live relatively openly.
I also believe (though I’m not sure) that places like Tang Dynasty China had homosexual couples living openly too.
Mostly Cloudy @2 Maybe he meant the Christian West.
I think that bit about the brutishness of human existence is critical—not Critical. This metaphysics of history and humanity in Critical Theory-flavored views, which they inherit from Marx, is that if not for [insert favored villain], life would be utopian. At the core of existence is pure gold, and it will be revealed by removing all the base substances through the hermetic alchemy of Critique and Dialectic. Humanity is already perfected, and all we have to do is deal with the colonialists, racists, sexists, cisheteronormativists, capitalists. Once we do, the Perfect will be revealed, and Social Man will be finally recognize himself as his own creator and realize the End of History.
In really real reality, however, we see no reason to presume this sort of antediluvian perfection. There’s no Fall, no expulsion from Eden as punishment for crimes committed by Europeans. Humans are but mammals, products of evolution and therefore intrinsically imperfect. Our core isn’t a flawless gem to be found be casting off the impurities that sully us. Our core is stupid and selfish, to be accounted for and mitigated by the systems and technologies that we’ve developed over painful, bloody millennia.
[…] a comment by Nullius in Verba on A pause for extra […]
So is there any current example of the decolonization process not having gone to shit? I guess South Africa is a bit more just than it was prior but Hong Kong was reconquered rather than decolonized and liberal democracy is disintegrating in India and Israel.
And possibly the United States.
Well in parts of it anyways… one thing we’ve got going for us is our extremely diverse demographics (in all respects); we’re really bad at the kind of identity politics that make Hungary/India/Israel/Poland “work” the way they tend to do. Balkanization seems somewhat inevitable as a result.