One of the pleasures of Roger Scruton’s England: An Elegy is his seeming indifference to the deranged hatred his works must inevitably provoke among woolly-minded liberals. He makes an interesting case for the British Empire, arguing that a standard classical education equipped our officers to spread enlightenment among the pagans. This may seem a bit of a stretch but anyone thoroughly versed in Vergil and Homer would, as Scruton says, have some knowledge of pagan cultures. Just the effort required to learn Latin and Ancient Greek, and to read a tricky a poet as Vergil, would encourage some responsiveness to other cultures and languages. Again, this is a stretch, and may seem a way of excusing a rapacious & arrogant imperial enterprise, but i think there’s some truth in it.
Today i read, in James Ashcroft’s Making a Killing (a memoir by a former British infantry captain turned mercenary in Iraq), an interesting account of a typical scene of American domestic policing; it chimes with Tim Collins’ own record of the routinely disastrous American mishandling of, well, just about everything in Iraq. So here we have Ashcroft guarding a Japanese journalist crew:
Next day, the press lined up outside another Dutch base on the main street to film a JMC unit driving into and out of the gates. Thrilling stuff. Twenty minutes later while this was still going on, two donkey carts crashed in painful slow motion, blocking the traffic. The motorists got out of their cars waving fists and yelling while the two maddened donkeys continued braying and kicking. At that moment, like the approach of a tsunami, marchers from a peaceful demonstration demanding free elections began to arrive; by peaceful I mean a howling mob, but no guns. CNN later reported that there were about 10,000 demonstrators and that seemed about right to me at ground level. The passion was remarkable, even stirring, wave after wave of young men wailing, waving banners and battering their own heads on large portraits of ayatollahs.
This made good footage, although the braying donkeys and screaming hordes were all drowned out when, by unhappy coincidence, a convoy of thirty oil tankers and a platoon of escorting American military police appeared at the end of the street. They stopped, scanned the scene with binoculars, then stepped down from the vehicles and charged the crowd screaming what the fuck and waving weapons in a bizarre attempt to restore calm and clear the road for their tankers.
The crowd thought that the Americans were there to deny them the right of free elections and the American MPs had the impression that the crowd was there to block the convoy. Two MPs started diplomatically beating the crowd’s spokesman and the officer in charge fired shots into the air. The mob reacted with predictable fury and things got so rowdy I almost missed seeing the Dutch riot platoon deploying out from the gates behind me.
It was complete pandemonium. The Japanese press kept filming, while the South Africans and I stood to one side enjoying the chaos until Tanaka-san grabbed his cameraman, dumped his jacket and ran into the middle of the crowed to do a ‘live-from-the-riot’ broadcast. We piled into the horde, stamping on feet and shoving with elbows and knees. I had never realised how useful a public school education could be.
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The riot in Samawah was the perfect example of what was going wrong with the occupation of Iraq by Coalition Forces. The American MPs that day had thought they were dealing with a disturbance that required a forceful solution and had treated the people with condescension and incomprehension. The convoy escort officer had terrified the crowd by firing shots in the air and had probably left Samawah believing that he had effected a rapid and successful outcome to a minor outbreak of disorder. Mission accomplished. End of story.
The soldiers had completely ignored the spiritual element so important to people with little in their lives other than a fierce pride and a sense of devotion to their religion. The demonstrators were carrying pictures of their leaders, they were unarmed and they were demanding elections, the very aim of the Coalition. The lack of respect, the violence and the lack of effort or interest in listening to the crowd were a lethal insult. If this had been a town garrisoned by US troops, the Iraqis would have been out that same night shooting up their patrols. In a tribal area they would not have waited five minutes.
Throughout Ashcroft’s book the fairly level-headed actions of the British ex-Army mercenaries (of a company called Spartan) are contrasted with the uncomprehending, unprofessional, wildly aggressive approach of the American army. Partly it’s just that the British Army is notably professional, and any merc who’d spent years therein would inevitably – in his 30s or 40s – be cooler and less prone to random violence than some terrified 18-year old kid from Ohio.
But this old theme – of Americans’ fundamental lack of interest in other cultures – is so widespread, in reliable accounts (and i remember in Venice a clump of Americans looking contemptuously around and one bellowing, “this place is a fucking mess”), that i suppose there must be something basically xenophobic about American ‘culture’. Why a country entirely comprised of immigrants and the children of immigrants should have no interest in other cultures is beyond me. Perhaps it is simply that in order to have any real interest in another culture, one must first belong to a culture; and even educated Americans seem incapable of apprehending the ‘enchantment’ (to use Scruton’s word) of a deep-rooted, evolving yet stable culture; so why should they have any respect for anyone or anything? An educated American may, for example, advocate the destruction of Englishness through uncontrolled immigration: is that any different to the behaviour of the Americans in the world, casually & uncomprehendingly destroying indigenous cultures wherever they go?
In Ireland, the British Empire made at various times the Irish language illegal, Catholicism illegal, Catholics unable to take positions of authority in governmental positions, robbed all the land imposing forceful impoverishment to the rural masses, carried out essentially a process of intentional genocide with a combination of their actions and inactions during the Famine in the mid- 19th century where by the early 20th century as a direct , the Irish were generally portrayed as ignorant, scumbag neanderthals in British papers like Punch…all this right next door to the Britain of the British Empire with a population of, like themselves, white people. How I wonder were the much much farther afield lesser racial types of the blacks, the Asians, the Arabs etc treated by the civilising British?
And also it had been in the monasteries of Ireland that much of the ancient learning survived through the Dark Ages.
The Catholics point being of course that all the Irish were Catholics.
Feck it, I meant to write
essentially a process of intentional genocide with a combination of their actions and inactions during the Famine in the mid- 19th century where by the early 20th century as a direct result the Irish population had been reduced from about 9 millions to less than 4, when it seems populations in much of Europe were increasing very strongly.
Into the 20th century, the British sent in an army called the Black & Tans comprised to a large extent of released prisoners to teach the Irish to behave.
It’s quite a mild quote but still revealing by “Greatest Briton of the last century”, Winston Churchill
We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.
The “lesser racial types” being of course the attitude of the relevant Empire builders of the time, which still prevails in the positive racism of people like Scruton who maintain wholly ignorant faith in obviously sick regimes like the current US & British axis of evil based presumably on the fact that they come from the West.
i don’t think Scruton has any genetic hang-ups, so not a racist. A ‘culture-ist’ may describe Scruton & myself more accurately.
and yes it’s hard to stomach the notion of the British Empire – or Empier at all – if you know about Irish history. It is no doubt more complicated than just ‘the British are evil’ but still…
Time constraints but yes, it’s much more complicated than just ‘the British are evil’, as it’s the ruling elites who generally fool people with notions of nationalism…the factories of the Industrial Revolution lovely bastions of slave labour of British by other British.
I should be off but Scruton’s claims to the benevolent breadth of the West & its culture included as proof mention of Kipling’s Kim, not, for example, mentioning the darker hue of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, about more genocide, this time in the Belgian Congo, though which appears to have been far from a unique example of the Western attitude. Read a book recently “King Leopold’s Ghost” which was excellent about that.
‘Heart of Darkness’ is a great example of a book that is horrifying even now. It’s very restrained, no gorey particulars, but horrific.
i like Scruton but disagree with him about a great deal. Empire for me is just an extended form of a big man bullying a small man. But then most human societies are just highly organised forms of bullying in the end. i gather the British Empire wasn’t as grossly monstrous as the Belgian but at the end of the day it’s hard to differentiate between a great monstrosity and a very great monstrosity.
at the end of the day it’s hard to differentiate between a great monstrosity and a very great monstrosity.
And it certainly shouldn’t lead to intellectuals spending their time justifying the actions of their evolutionarily retrogade political leaders.
I’ll assassinate Scruton with a bit more gusto & death later…
Freudian thingummy….”gusto & depth”
actually, thinking about it, i think Scruton’s point about the Empire (in England: An Elegy) is that once it came about – which was i gather just as a series of trading ventures by English merchants – the British comported themselves with at least some merit, that at least a significant minority of Brits had notions of fairness (a very English concept) that weren’t impeded by the idea that Indians were ‘inferior’ – indeed, a true gentleman would be fair to all, even those who seem not to deserve it, because he is finally accountable to his own sense of honour, not to some utilitarian concept.
However i’m sure things were much murkier on the ground.
But if that’s the sum of the point, it hardly amounts to being worth making: not everyone in the service of the Empire was an evil prick.
There’s a line by Huxley, “Idealism is the noble toga political gentlemen drape over their will to power.” As shown pretty clearly in terms of Britain’s next door neighbours, Ireland, claims as to its civilising benevolence are little more than a joke in terms of the real reason for the Empire. And when people go attacking foreign countries, they don’t tend to say, “We’re off to satisfy our lust for power & to eceonimically rape this place for all we can get.” Instead, they are embarking on noble crusades of spreading democracy, liberating the people from oppression, educating the savages, etc.
My feeings for Scruton are he is obviously of a certain intelligence, but there is little more tedious than reading generalisations from a man who has not the vision or understanding to do justice to his ambition. If such a person keeps to the limits of his capacities then all’s well but their limitations becoming magnified the larger their attempted philosophical reach. Thus the comically inept John Carey.
I find Scruton’s prose dull, and his pieces long-winded, devoid of any spark of illumination. Even the things like cultural values he wisely wishes to protect, he makes seem to me feel arduous and worthy factors required of the educated person, rather than anything like their essence.
He also reads to me like someone who takes a kind of secondary school(teenage school here) education version of history, current events as his starting point & then he philosophises from there.
To take one example, in his Culture essay….not quite sure its full title he mentions “the humourless bigotry of Islam”, and that’s it; no qualification. The humourless bigotry of this summation.
Stuff like his is little more than apology for the superior culture of the West fucking over thesed countries dismissed in a few words that one can be sure cost Scruton no unease.
Any chance a Scruton or Appleyard’s great Nick Cohen might mention with disgust the thousands of tonnes of depleted uranium in missiles & bombs used in Iraq radioactively poisoning the land & people, ensuring massive cancer explosion, deformed babies, etc. The answer to that would be fuck all chance, as either they don’t know, or don’t want to know.
Though I’m not saying Scruton isn’t fully without worth!
In one of his recent books Scruton offered Barbara Streisand as an example of a great modern musician. Elberry, you flirt with depravity reading this man’s work.
I’m temted to agree wirh simon d