DECODING DENIALISM

Nadeem F. Paracha in The Dawn

Illustration by Abro


On November 12, 2009, the New York Times (NYT) ran a video report on its website. In it, the NYT reporter Adam B. Ellick interviewed some Pakistani pop stars to gauge how lifestyle liberals were being affected by the spectre of so-called ‘Talibanisation’ in Pakistan. To his surprise, almost every single pop artiste that he managed to engage, refused to believe that there were men willing to blow themselves up in public in the name of faith.

It wasn’t an outright denial, as such, but the interviewed pop acts went to great lengths to ‘prove’ that the attacks were being carried out at the behest of the US, and that those who were being called ‘terrorists’ were simply fighting for their rights. Ellick’s surprise was understandable. Between 2007 and 2009, hundreds of people had already been killed in Pakistan by suicide bombers.

But it wasn’t just these ‘confused’ lifestyle liberals who chose to look elsewhere for answers when the answer was right in front of them. Unregulated talk shows on TV news channels were constantly providing space to men who would spin the most ludicrous narratives that presented the terrorists as ‘misunderstood brothers.’

From 2007 till 2014, terrorist attacks and assassinations were a daily occurrence. Security personnel, politicians, men, women and children were slaughtered. Within hours, the cacophony of inarticulate noises on the electronic media would drown out these tragedies. The bottom-line of almost every such ‘debate’ was always, ‘ye hum mein se nahin’ [these (terrorists) are not from among us]. In fact, there was also a song released with this as its title and ‘message.’

The perpetrators of the attacks were turned into intangible, invisible entities, like characters of urban myths that belong to a different realm. The fact was that they were very much among us, for all to see, even though most Pakistanis chose not to. 

Just before the 2013 elections, the website of an English daily ran a poll on the foremost problems facing Pakistan. The poll mentioned unemployment, corruption, inflation and street crimes, but there was no mention of terrorism even though, by 2013, thousands had been killed in terrorist attacks.

So how does one explain this curious refusal to acknowledge a terrifying reality that was operating in plain sight? In an August 3, 2018 essay for The Guardian, Keith Kahn-Harris writes that individual self-deception becomes a problem when it turns into ‘public dogma.’ It then becomes what is called ‘denialism.’

The American science journalist and author Michael Specter, in his book Denialism, explains it to mean an entire segment of society, when struggling with trauma, turning away from reality in favour of a more comfortable lie. Psychologists have often explained denial as a coping mechanism that humans use in times of stress. But they also warn that if denial establishes itself as a constant disposition in an individual or society, it starts to inhibit the ability to resolve the source of the stress.

Denialism, as a social condition, is understood by sociologists as an undeclared ‘ism’, adhered to by certain segments of a society whose rhetoric and actions in this context can impact a country’s political, social and even economic fortunes.

In the January 2009 issue of European Journal of Public Health, Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee write that the denialism process employs five main characteristics. Even though Diethelm and McKee were more focused on the emergence of denialism in the face of evidence in scientific fields of research, I will paraphrase four out of the five stated characteristics to explore denialism in the context of extremist violence in Pakistan from 2007 till 2017.

The deniers have their own interpretation of the same evidence. In early 2013, when a study showed that 1,652 people had been killed in 2012 alone in Pakistan because of terrorism, an ‘analyst’ on a news channel falsely claimed that these figures included those killed during street crimes and ‘revenge murders.’ Another gentleman insisted that the figures were concocted by foreign-funded NGOs ‘to give Pakistan and Islam a bad name.’

This brings us to denialism’s second characteristic: The use of fake experts. These are individuals who purport to be experts in a particular area but whose views are entirely inconsistent with established knowledge. During the peak years of terrorist activity in the country, self-appointed ‘political experts’ and ‘religious scholars’ were a common sight on TV channels. Their ‘expert opinions’ were heavily tilted towards presenting the terrorists as either ‘misunderstood brothers’ or people fighting to impose a truly Islamic system in Pakistan. Many such experts suddenly vanished from TV screens after the intensification of the military operation against militants in 2015. Some were even booked for hate speech.

The third characteristic is about selectivity, drawing on isolated opinions or highlighting flaws in the weakest opinions to discredit entire facts. In October 2012, when extremists attempted to assassinate a teenaged school girl, Malala Yousafzai, a sympathiser of the extremists on TV justified the assassination attempt by mentioning ‘similar incidents’ that he discovered in some obscure books of religious traditions. Within months Malala became the villain, even among some of the most ‘educated’ Pakistanis. When the nuclear physicist and intellectual Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy exhibited his disgust over this, he was not only accused of being ‘anti-Islam’, but his credibility as a scientist too was questioned.

The fourth characteristic is about misrepresenting the opposing argument to make it easier to refute. For example, when terrorists were wreaking havoc in Pakistan, the arguments of those seeking to investigate the issue beyond conspiracy theories and unabashed apologias, were deliberately misconstrued as being criticisms of religious faith.

Today we are seeing all this returning. But this time, ‘experts’ are appearing on TV pointing out conspiracies and twisting facts about the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccines. They are also offering their expert opinions on events such as the Aurat March and, in the process, whipping up a dangerous moral panic.

It seems, not much was learned by society’s collective disposition during the peak years of terrorism and how it delayed a timely response that might have saved hundreds of innocent lives.

Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth

Keith Kahn-Harris in The Guardian

We are all in denial, some of the time at least. Part of being human, and living in a society with other humans, is finding clever ways to express – and conceal – our feelings. From the most sophisticated diplomatic language to the baldest lie, humans find ways to deceive. Deceptions are not necessarily malign; at some level they are vital if humans are to live together with civility. As Richard Sennett has argued: “In practising social civility, you keep silent about things you know clearly but which you should not and do not say.” 

Just as we can suppress some aspects of ourselves in our self-presentation to others, so we can do the same to ourselves in acknowledging or not acknowledging what we desire. Most of the time, we spare ourselves from the torture of recognising our baser yearnings. But when does this necessary private self-deception become harmful? When it becomes public dogma. In other words: when it becomes denialism.

Denialism is an expansion, an intensification, of denial. At root, denial and denialism are simply a subset of the many ways humans have developed to use language to deceive others and themselves. Denial can be as simple as refusing to accept that someone else is speaking truthfully. Denial can be as unfathomable as the multiple ways we avoid acknowledging our weaknesses and secret desires.

Denialism is more than just another manifestation of the humdrum intricacies of our deceptions and self-deceptions. It represents the transformation of the everyday practice of denial into a whole new way of seeing the world and – most important – a collective accomplishment. Denial is furtive and routine; denialism is combative and extraordinary. Denial hides from the truth, denialism builds a new and better truth.

In recent years, the term has been used to describe a number of fields of “scholarship”, whose scholars engage in audacious projects to hold back, against seemingly insurmountable odds, the findings of an avalanche of research. They argue that the Holocaust (and other genocides) never happened, that anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change is a myth, that Aids either does not exist or is unrelated to HIV, that evolution is a scientific impossibility, and that all manner of other scientific and historical orthodoxies must be rejected.

In some ways, denialism is a terrible term. No one calls themselves a “denialist”, and no one signs up to all forms of denialism. In fact, denialism is founded on the assertion that it is not denialism. In the wake of Freud (or at least the vulgarisation of Freud), no one wants to be accused of being “in denial”, and labelling people denialists seems to compound the insult by implying that they have taken the private sickness of denial and turned it into public dogma.

But denial and denialism are closely linked; what humans do on a large scale is rooted in what we do on a small scale. While everyday denial can be harmful, it is also just a mundane way for humans to respond to the incredibly difficult challenge of living in a social world in which people lie, make mistakes and have desires that cannot be openly acknowledged. Denialism is rooted in human tendencies that are neither freakish nor pathological.

All that said, there is no doubt that denialism is dangerous. In some cases, we can point to concrete examples of denialism causing actual harm. In South Africa, President Thabo Mbeki, in office between 1999 and 2008, was influenced by Aids denialists such as Peter Duesberg, who deny the link between HIV and Aids (or even HIV’s existence) and cast doubt on the effectiveness of anti-retroviral drugs. Mbeki’s reluctance to implement national treatment programmes using anti-retrovirals has been estimated to have cost the lives of 330,000 people. On a smaller scale, in early 2017 the Somali-American community in Minnesota was struck by a childhood measles outbreak, as a direct result of proponents of the discredited theory that the MMR vaccine causes autism, persuading parents not to vaccinate their children.

More commonly though, denialism’s effects are less direct but more insidious. Climate change denialists have not managed to overturn the general scientific consensus that it is occurring and caused by human activity. What they have managed to do is provide subtle and not-so-subtle support for those opposed to taking radical action to address this urgent problem. Achieving a global agreement that could underpin a transition to a post-carbon economy, and that would be capable of slowing the temperature increase, was always going to be an enormous challenge. Climate changedenialism has helped to make the challenge even harder.

Denialism can also create an environment of hate and suspicion. Forms of genocide denialism are not just attempts to overthrow irrefutable historical facts; they are an assault on those who survive genocide, and their descendants. The implacable denialism that has led the Turkish state to refuse to admit that the 1917 Armenian genocide occurred is also an attack on today’s Armenians, and on any other minority that would dare to raise troubling questions about the status of minorities in Turkey. Similarly, those who deny the Holocaust are not trying to disinterestedly “correct” the historical record; they are, with varying degrees of subtlety, trying to show that Jews are pathological liars and fundamentally dangerous, as well as to rehabilitate the reputation of the Nazis.

The dangers that other forms of denialism pose may be less concrete, but they are no less serious. Denial of evolution, for example, does not have an immediately hateful payoff; rather it works to foster a distrust in science and research that feeds into other denialisms and undermines evidence-based policymaking. Even lunatic-fringe denialisms, such as flat Earth theories, while hard to take seriously, help to create an environment in which real scholarship and political attempts to engage with reality, break down in favour of an all-encompassing suspicion that nothing is what it seems.

Denialism has moved from the fringes to the centre of public discourse, helped in part by new technology. As information becomes freer to access online, as “research” has been opened to anyone with a web browser, as previously marginal voices climb on to the online soapbox, so the opportunities for countering accepted truths multiply. No one can be entirely ostracised, marginalised and dismissed as a crank anymore.

The sheer profusion of voices, the plurality of opinions, the cacophony of the controversy, are enough to make anyone doubt what they should believe.

So how do you fight denialism? Denialism offers a dystopian vision of a world unmoored, in which nothing can be taken for granted and no one can be trusted. If you believe that you are being constantly lied to, paradoxically you may be in danger of accepting the untruths of others. Denialism is a mix of corrosive doubt and corrosive credulity.

It’s perfectly understandable that denialism sparks anger and outrage, particularly in those who are directly challenged by it. If you are a Holocaust survivor, a historian, a climate scientist, a resident of a flood-plain, a geologist, an Aids researcher or someone whose child caught a preventable disease from an unvaccinated child, denialism can feel like an assault on your life’s work, your core beliefs or even your life itself. Such people do fight back. This can include, in some countries, supporting laws against denialism, as in France’s prohibition of Holocaust denial. Attempts to teach “creation science” alongside evolution in US schools are fought with tenacity. Denialists are routinely excluded from scholarly journals and academic conferences.

The most common response to denialism, though, is debunking. Just as denialists produce a large and ever-growing body of books, articles, websites, lectures and videos, so their detractors respond with a literature of their own. Denialist claims are refuted point by point, in a spiralling contest in which no argument – however ludicrous – is ever left unchallenged. Some debunkings are endlessly patient and civil, treating denialists and their claims seriously and even respectfully; others are angry and contemptuous.

Yet none of these strategies work, at least not completely. Take the libel case that the Holocaust denier David Irving brought against Deborah Lipstadt in 1996. Irving’s claim that accusing him of being a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of history was libellous were forensically demolished by Richard Evans and other eminent historians. The judgment was devastating to Irving’s reputation and unambiguous in its rejection of his claim to be a legitimate historian. The judgment bankrupted him, he was repudiated by the few remaining mainstream historians who had supported him, and in 2006 he was imprisoned in Austria for Holocaust denial.

 

David Irving in Austria after being imprisoned for Holocaust denial in 2006. Photograph: Herbert Neubauer/Reuters

But Irving today? He is still writing and lecturing, albeit in a more covert fashion. He still makes similar claims and his defenders see him as a heroic figure who survived the attempts of the Jewish-led establishment to silence him. Nothing really changed. Holocaust denial is still around, and its proponents find new followers. In legal and scholarly terms, Lipstadt won an absolute victory, but she didn’t beat Holocaust denial or even Irving in the long term.

There is a salutary lesson here: in democratic societies at least, denialism cannot be beaten legally, or through debunking, or through attempts to discredit its proponents. That’s because, for denialists, the existence of denialism is itself a triumph. Central to denialism is an argument that “the truth” has been suppressed by its enemies. To continue to exist is a heroic act, a victory for the forces of truth.

Of course, denialists might yearn for a more complete victory – when theories of anthropogenic climate change will be marginalised in academia and politics, when the story of how the Jews hoaxed the world will be in every history book – but, for now, every day that denialism persists is a good day. In fact, denialism can achieve more modest triumphs even without total victory. For the denialist, every day barrels of oil continue to be extracted and burned is a good day, every day a parent doesn’t vaccinate their child is a good day, every day a teenager Googling the Holocaust finds out that some people think it never happened is a good day.

Conversely, denialism’s opponents rarely have time on their side. As climate change rushes towards the point of no return, as Holocaust survivors die and can no longer give testimony, as once-vanquished diseases threaten pandemics, as the notion that there is “doubt” on settled scholarship becomes unremarkable, so the task facing the debunkers becomes both more urgent and more difficult. It’s understandable that panic can set in and that anger overwhelms some of those who battle against denialism.

A better approach to denialism is one of self-criticism. The starting point is a frank question: why did we fail? Why have those of us who abhor denialism not succeeded in halting its onward march? And why have we as a species managed to turn our everyday capacity to deny into an organised attempt to undermine our collective ability to understand the world and change it for the better?

These questions are beginning to be asked in some circles. They are often the result of a kind of despair. Campaigners against anthropogenic global warming often lament that, as the task becomes ever more urgent, so denialism continues to run rampant (along with apathy and “softer” forms of denial). It appears that nothing works in the campaign to make humanity aware of the threat it faces.

The obstinacy with which people can stick to disproved notions is attested to in the social sciences and in neuroscientific research. Humans are not only reasoning beings who disinterestedly weigh evidence and arguments. But there is a difference between the pre-conscious search for confirmation of existing views – we all engage in that to some extent – and the deliberate attempt to dress this search up as a quest for truth, as denialists do. Denialism adds extra layers of reinforcement and defence around widely shared psychological practices with the (never articulated) aim of preventing their exposure. This certainly makes changing the minds of denialists even more difficult than changing the minds of the rest of stubborn humanity.

There are multiple kinds of denialists: from those who are sceptical of all established knowledge, to those who challenge one type of knowledge; from those who actively contribute to the creation of denialist scholarship, to those who quietly consume it; from those who burn with certainty, to those who are privately sceptical about their scepticism. What they all have in common, I would argue, is a particular type of desire. This desire – for something not to be true – is the driver of denialism.

Empathy with denialists is not easy, but it is essential. Denialism is not stupidity, or ignorance, or mendacity, or psychological pathology. Nor is it the same as lying. Of course, denialists can be stupid, ignorant liars, but so can any of us. But denialists are people in a desperate predicament.

It is a very modern predicament. Denialism is a post‑enlightenment phenomenon, a reaction to the “inconvenience” of many of the findings of modern scholarship. The discovery of evolution, for example, is inconvenient to those committed to a literalist biblical account of creation. Denialism is also a reaction to the inconvenience of the moral consensus that emerged in the post-enlightenment world. In the ancient world, you could erect a monument proudly proclaiming the genocide you committed to the world. In the modern world, mass killing, mass starvation, mass environmental catastrophe can no longer be publicly legitimated.

Yet many humans still want to do the same things humans always did. We are still desiring beings. We want to murder, to steal, to destroy and to despoil. We want to preserve our ignorance and unquestioned faith. So when our desires are rendered unspeakable in the modern world, we are forced to pretend that we do not yearn for things we desire.

Denial is not enough here. As an attempt to draw awareness and attention away from something unpalatable, it is always vulnerable to challenge. Denial is a kind of high-wire act that can be unbalanced by forceful attempts to draw attention to what is being denied.

Denialism is, in part, a response to the vulnerability of denial. To be in denial is to know at some level. To be a denialist is to never have to know at all. Denialism is a systematic attempt to prevent challenge and acknowledgment; to suggest that there is nothing to acknowledge. Whereas denial is at least subject to the possibility of confrontation with reality, denialism can rarely be undermined by appeals to face the truth.

The tragedy for denialists is that they concede the argument in advance. Holocaust deniers’ attempts to deny that the Holocaust took place imply that it would not have been a good thing if it had. Climate change denialism is predicated on a similarly hidden acknowledgment that, if anthropogenic climate change were actually occurring, we would have to do something about it.

Denialism is therefore not just hard work – finding ways to discredit mountains of evidence is a tremendous labour – but also involves suppressing the expression of one’s desires. Denialists are “trapped” into byzantine modes of argument because they have few other options in pursuing their goals.

Denialism, and related phenomena, are often portrayed as a “war on science”. This is an understandable but profound misunderstanding. Certainly, denialism and other forms of pseudo-scholarship do not follow mainstream scientific methodologies. Denialism does indeed represent a perversion of the scholarly method, and the science it produces rests on profoundly erroneous assumptions, but denialism does all this in the name ofscience and scholarship. Denialism aims to replace one kind of science with another – it does not aim to replace science itself. In fact, denialism constitutes a tribute to the prestige of science and scholarship in the modern world. Denialists are desperate for the public validation that science affords.

While denialism has sometimes been seen as part of a post-modern assault on truth, the denialist is just as invested in notions of scientific objectivity as the most unreconstructed positivist. Even those who are genuinely committed to alternatives to western rationality and science can wield denialist rhetoric that apes precisely the kind of scientism they despise. Anti-vaxxers, for example, sometimes seem to want to have their cake and eat it: to have their critique of western medicine validated by western medicine.

The rhetoric of denialism and its critics can resemble each other in a kind of war to the death over who gets to wear the mantle of science. The term “junk science” has been applied to climate change denialism, as well as in defence of it. Mainstream science can also be dogmatic and blind to its own limitations. If the accusation that global warming is an example of politicised ideology masked as science is met with indignant assertions of the absolute objectivity of “real” science, there is a risk of blinding oneself to uncomfortable questions regarding the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which the idea of pure truth, untrammelled by human interests, is elusive. Human interests can rarely if ever be separated from the ways we observe the world. Indeed, sociologists of science have shown how modern ideas of disinterested scientific knowledge have disguised the inextricable links between knowledge and human interests.

I do not believe that, if only one could find the key to “make them understand”, denialists would think just like me. A global warming denialist is not an environmentalist who cannot accept that he or she is really an environmentalist; a Holocaust denier is not someone who cannot face the inescapable obligation to commemorate the Holocaust; an Aids denialist is not an Aids activist who won’t acknowledge the necessity for western medicine in combating the disease; and so on. If denialists were to stop denying, we cannot assume that we would then have a shared moral foundation on which we could make progress as a species.

Denialism is not a barrier to acknowledging a common moral foundation; it is a barrier to acknowledging moral differences. An end to denialism is therefore a disturbing prospect, as it would involve these moral differences revealing themselves directly. But we need to start preparing for that eventuality, because denialism is starting to break down – and not in a good way.

On 6 November 2012, when he was already preparing the ground for his presidential run, Donald Trump sent a tweet about climate change. It said: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

At the time, this seemed to be just another example of the mainstreaming of climate change denialism on the American right. After all, the second Bush administration had done as little as possible to combat climate change, and many leading Republicans are prominent crusaders against mainstream climate science. Yet something else was happening here, too; the tweet was a harbinger of a new kind of post-denialist discourse.

Trump’s claim is not one that is regularly made by “mainstream” global warming denialists. It may have been a garbled version of the common argument on the US right that global climate treaties will unfairly weaken the US economy to the benefit of China. Like much of Trump’s discourse, the tweet was simply thrown into the world without much thought. This is not how denialism usually works. Denialists usually labour for decades to produce, often against overwhelming odds, carefully crafted simulacra of scholarship that, to non-experts at least, are indistinguishable from the real thing. They have refined alternative scholarly techniques that can cast doubt on even the most solid of truths.

 

Donald Trump announcing his decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Trump and the post-truthers’ “lazy” denialism rests on the security that comes from knowing that generations of denialists have created enough doubt already; all people like Trump need to do is to signal vaguely in a denialist direction. Whereas denialism explains – at great length – post-denialism asserts. Whereas denialism is painstakingly thought-through, post-denialism is instinctive. Whereas denialism is disciplined, post-denialism is anarchic.

The internet has been an important factor in this weakening of denialist self-discipline. The intemperance of the online world is pushing denialism so far that it is beginning to fall apart. The new generation of denialists aren’t creating new, alternative orthodoxies so much as obliterating the very idea of orthodoxy itself. The collective, institutional work of building a substantial bulwark against scholarly consensus gives way to a kind of free-for-all.

One example of this is the 9/11 truth movement. Because the attacks occurred in an already wired world, the denialism it spawned has never managed to institutionalise and develop an orthodoxy in the way that pre-internet denialisms did. Those who believe that the “official story” of the September 11 attacks was a lie can believe that elements in the US government had foreknowledge of the attacks but let them happen, or that the attacks were deliberately planned and carried out by the government, or that Jews/Israel/Mossad were behind it, or that shadowy forces in the “New World Order” were behind it – or some cocktail of all of these. They can believe that the towers were brought down by controlled demolition, or that no planes hit the towers, or that there were no floors in the towers, or that there were no passengers in the planes.

Post-denialism represents a freeing of the repressed desires that drive denialism. While it still based on the denial of an established truth, its methods liberate a deeper kind of desire: to remake truth itself, to remake the world, to unleash the power to reorder reality itself and stamp one’s mark on the planet. What matters in post-denialism is not the establishment of an alternative scholarly credibility, so much as giving yourself blanket permission to see the world however you like.

While post-denialism has not yet supplanted its predecessor, old-style denialism is beginning to be questioned by some of its practitioners as they take tentative steps towards a new age. This is particularly evident on the racist far right, where the dominance of Holocaust denial is beginning to erode.

Mark Weber, director of the (denialist) Institute for Historical Review, glumly concluded in an article in 2009 that Holocaust denial had become irrelevant in a world that continues to memorialise the genocide. Some Holocaust deniers have even recanted, expressing their frustration with the movement and acknowledging that many of its claims are simply untenable, as Eric Hunt, previously a producer of widely circulated online videos denying the Holocaust, did in 2016. Yet such admissions of defeat are certainly not accompanied by a retreat from antisemitism. Weber treats the failures of Holocaust denial as a consequence of the nefarious power of the Jews: “Suppose The New York Times were to report tomorrow that Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust centre and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum had announced that no more than 1 million Jews died during the second world war, and that no Jews were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz. The impact on Jewish-Zionist power would surely be minimal.”

Those who were previously “forced” into Holocaust denial are starting to sense that it may be possible to publicly celebrate genocide once again, to revel in antisemitism’s finest hour. The heightened scrutiny of far-right movements in the last couple of years has unearthed statements that might once have remained unspoken, or only spoken behind closed doors. In August 2017, for example, one KKK leader told a journalist: “We killed 6 million Jews the last time. Eleven million [immigrants] is nothing.” A piece published by the Daily Stormer in advance of the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville that same month ended: “Next stop: Charlottesville, VA. Final stop: Auschwitz.”

Indeed, the Daily Stormer, one of the most prominent online publications of the resurgent far-right, demonstrates an exuberant agility in balancing denialism, post-denialism and open hatred simultaneously, using humour as a method of floating between them all. But there is no doubt what the ultimate destination is. As Andrew Anglin, who runs the site, put it in a style guide for contributors that was later leaked to the press: “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not. There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self-deprecating humour – I am a racist making fun of stereotypes of racists, because I don’t take myself super-seriously. This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.”

Not all denialists are taking these steps towards open acknowledgment of their desires. In some fields, the commitment to repressing desire remains strong. We are not yet at a stage when a climate change denier can come out and say, proudly, “Bangladesh will be submerged, millions will suffer as a result of anthropogenic climate change, but we must still preserve our carbon-based way of life, no matter what the cost.” Nor are anti-vaxxers ready to argue that, even though vaccines do not cause autism, the death of children from preventable diseases is a regrettable necessity if we are to be released from the clutches of Big Pharma.

Still, over time it is likely that traditional denialists will be increasingly influenced by the emerging post-denialist milieu. After all, what oil industry-funded wonk labouring to put together a policy paper suggesting that polar bear populations aren’t declining hasn’t fantasised of resorting to gleeful, Trumpian assertions?

The possibility of an epochal shift away from denialism means that there is now no avoiding a reckoning with some discomfiting issues: how do we respond to people who have radically different desires and morals from our own? How do we respond to people who delight in or are indifferent to genocide, to the suffering of millions, to venality and greed?

Denialism, and the multitude of other ways that modern humans have obfuscated their desires, prevent a true reckoning with the unsettling fact that some of us might desire things that most of us regard as morally reprehensible. I say “might” because while denialism is an attempt to covertly legitimise an unspeakable desire, the nature of the denialist’s understanding of the consequences of enacting that desire is usually unknowable.

It is hard to tell whether global warming denialists are secretly longing for the chaos and pain that global warming will bring, are simply indifferent to it, or would desperately like it not to be the case but are overwhelmed with the desire to keep things as they are. It is hard to tell whether Holocaust deniers are preparing the ground for another genocide, or want to keep a pristine image of the goodness of the Nazis and the evil of the Jews. It is hard to tell whether an Aids denialist who works to prevent Africans from having access to anti-retrovirals is getting a kick out of their power over life and death, or is on a mission to save them from the evils of the west.

If the new realm of unrestrained online discourse, and the example set by Trump, tempts more and more denialists to transition towards post-denialism and beyond, we will finally know where we stand. Instead of chasing shadows, we will be able to contemplate the stark moral choices we humans face.

Maybe we have been putting this test off for too long. The liberation of desire we are beginning to witness is forcing us all to confront some very difficult questions: who are we as a species? Do we all (the odd sociopath aside) share a common moral foundation? How do we relate to people whose desires are starkly different from our own?

Perhaps, if we can face up to the challenge presented by these new revelations, it might pave the way for a politics shorn of illusion and moral masquerade, where different visions of what it is to be human can openly contend. This might be a firmer foundation on which to rekindle some hope for human progress – based not on illusions of what we would like to be, but on an accounting of what we are.

Oxbridge bashing is an empty ritual if we ignore wider social inequities

Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian

The numbers are clearly unacceptable. Several colleges in both Oxford and Cambridge frequently admit cohorts with no black students in them at all. Roughly 1.5% of total offers are made to black British applicants and more than 80% of offers are made to the children of the top two social classes. With offers made overwhelmingly to those in London and a handful of the home counties, both universities are consistently excluding entire ethnic and regional demographics. They also continue to admit a grotesquely disproportionate number of privately schooled students. In effect, the two ancients are running a generous quota scheme for white students, independent schools and the offspring of affluent south-eastern English parents. 

There is undoubtedly a great deal that both institutions can and must do to remedy this. Our admissions processes at Cambridge are not sufficiently responsive to the gravity of the situation. Despite periodic panics in response to such media “revelations” or staged political scolding, and notwithstanding the good intentions of many involved in admissions, questions of diversity and inclusion are not taken seriously enough in their own right.

The focus on educational achievement, itself defined in purely numerical terms and worsened by internal league tables, means there is little sense of meaningful diversity as an educational and community good in its own right. Despite having contextual indicators that would allow us to diversify our admissions, we balk at non-traditional attainment profiles for fear that the student will not be able to cope once here.

For any Oxbridge college to not have a single black student at any given point in time, where they would rightly not tolerate having low numbers of women, is not just about looking institutionally racist but also impoverishes the educational and social environment we provide. The same holds true for regional and class exclusions.

When I first came to Cambridge in 2001, having taught at different institutions in the US, I was struck by the relative whiteness and sheer cultural homogeneity of this university. Even the minimal improvements I’ve seen since then in some years – more students from ethnic minority backgrounds, more young women from northern comprehensives – have made a huge difference both to me as a teacher and, more importantly, to what students are able to learn from each other.

Not all of them will get first-class marks, but they both gain a lot from and have a great deal to give to the educational environment here, not least by expanding the definition of what counts as achievement. We need more of them. (At Cambridge, in recent years, a quantum of vocal BME students as well as students from northern comprehensives has demanded change, often to good effect. There is some cause for hope.)

There is also undoubtedly a culture of denial when it comes to matters of race and racism, which students speak of both in class and privately and which I have experienced when I’ve tried to draw attention to them. And more than one student from northern comprehensives has told me about being discouraged by teachers from applying and feeling amazed to have received an offer only to feel alienated by the stultifying class conformity of the affluent south-east once they get here.

It is simply not good enough for Oxford and Cambridge to say that they are welcoming of diversity and in effect blame certain demographics for not applying despite their outreach programmes. It is Oxbridge that must change more substantially to provide a better environment for a diverse student body. The two ancients must be held to account; homogeneity must fall.

But should they be the only ones held to account? In having a necessary conversation about elitism and exclusion, are we forgetting – or being encouraged – to not have a larger one about wider deprivation and systemic inequality? It is striking that some quarters only too happy to periodically attack Oxbridge for its failings, from rightwing tabloids to Tory ministers, are rarely interested in the roots of inequality and lack of opportunity of which Oxbridge exclusion is a symptom but is hardly the origin.

We should be careful that a headline-friendly focus on these two institutions alone does not become an easy way to avoid even more painful and challenging questions. It seems somewhat selective and inadequate to focus on what David Lammy rightly calls “social apartheid” at Oxbridge without discussing the widespread and worsening economic apartheid in this country.

We know that access to university education in general is sharply determined by school achievement that, in turn, is shaped by parental income and education levels. In an economically stratified society, it is inevitable that most young people from economically deprived backgrounds have a substantially lower chance of achieving the kind of marks that enable access to higher education.

Hence it is incoherent to have a discussion about access to higher education without having one simultaneously about economic disadvantage, which, in some cases, including British Caribbean and Bangladeshi communities, has an added ethnic minority dimension to it. In a context of worsening economic fault lines, there’s a whiff of something convenient about only attacking the admissions failings of top universities.

The other obvious missing dimension to this discussion is the existence and encouragement for independent schools. It’s somewhat contradictory to encourage a market culture where money can buy a deluxe education and then feel shocked when the well-off get their money’s worth by easily meeting the requirements for offers from high-status institutions. It’s worth saying that as long as independent schools, hardly bastions of ethnic diversity, exist, there will remain a fundamental apartheid between two kinds of students.

Oxbridge, or even the Russell Group of universities more broadly, can only do so much to mitigate this state of affairs, which lifting the tuition fee cap will only worsen. Lammy notes that more offers are made to Eton than to students on free school meals.

But why not also question the very existence of Eton and the lamentable state of an economic order that necessitates free school meals for many? Add to this the parlous condition of state education with its chronic underfunding, inflated classroom sizes, an undermining testing and target culture and difficulties in recruiting and retaining good teachers.

The same politicians who rightly point to Oxbridge’s demographic narrowness are rarely willing to grasp the nettle of a two-tier educational structure in which some are destined to do much better than others. Who, for instance, would be willing to call for the abolition of private schooling, subject as such a suggestion would be to shrill denunciations about how individual choice, personal aspiration and the workings of the market are being interfered with?

There are other tough discussions that could be had if the aim truly is to address and undo inequalities in university demographics. Would politicians and institutions be willing, for instance, to impose representational quotas for both ethnic minorities and state-educated students that reflect the national pie-chart?

Currently, the Office for Fair Access (Offa) makes some toothless demands around “widening participation”, a rather feeble phrase, which are not accompanied by penalties for failure. Lammy, whose suggestion that admissions be centralised has some merit to it, not least towards undoing the unhelpful internal collegiate caste system at Oxbridge, has made also a comparison between Oxbridge’s abysmal intake of black students and Harvard’s healthy numbers.

Would the political and intellectual classes be willing to have a discussion about something like “affirmative action” in the US, a process of “positive discrimination” by which underrepresented ethnic minorities and disadvantaged groups are given special consideration? We must hope so. For failing a wide-ranging discussion aimed at radical measures, all the huffing and puffing about Oxbridge is destined to remain a yearly ritual, each controversial headline simply making way for the same unsurprising headlines every year.

The Pope can see what many atheist greens will not

George Monbiot in The Guardian



Who wants to see the living world destroyed? Who wants an end to birdsong, bees and coral reefs, the falcon’s stoop, the salmon’s leap? Who wants to see the soil stripped from the land, the sea rimed with rubbish?

No one. And yet it happens. Seven billion of us allow fossil fuel companies to push shut the narrow atmospheric door through which humanity stepped. We permit industrial farming to tear away the soil, banish trees from the hills, engineer another silent spring. We let the owners of grouse moors, 1% of the 1%, shoot and poison hen harriers, peregrines and eagles. We watch mutely as a small fleet of monster fishing ships trashes the oceans.

Why are the defenders of the living world so ineffective? It is partly, of course, that everyone is complicit; we have all been swept off our feet by the tide of hyperconsumption, our natural greed excited, corporate propaganda chiming with a will to believe that there is no cost. But perhaps environmentalism is also afflicted by a deeper failure: arising possibly from embarrassment or fear, a failure of emotional honesty






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FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘We have all been swept off our feet by the tide of hyperconsumption, our natural greed excited, corporate propaganda chiming with a will to believe that there is no cost’.

I have asked meetings of green-minded people to raise their hands if they became defenders of nature because they were worried about the state of their bank accounts. Never has one hand appeared. Yet I see the same people base their appeal to others on the argument that they will lose money if we don’t protect the natural world.

Such claims are factual, but they are also dishonest: we pretend that this is what animates us, when in most cases it does not. The reality is that we care because we love. Nature appealed to our hearts, when we were children, long before it appealed to our heads, let alone our pockets. Yet we seem to believe we can persuade people to change their lives through the cold, mechanical power of reason, supported by statistics.

I see the encyclical by Pope Francis, which will be published on Thursday, as a potential turning point. He will argue that not only the physical survival of the poor, but also our spiritual welfare depends on the protection of the natural world; and in both respects he is right.

I don’t mean that a belief in God is the answer to our environmental crisis. Among Pope Francis’s opponents is the evangelical US-based Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, which has written to him arguing that we have a holy duty to keep burning fossil fuel, as “the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork”. It also insists that exercising the dominion granted to humankind in Genesis means tilling “the whole Earth”, transforming it “from wilderness to garden and ultimately to garden city”.

There are similar tendencies within the Vatican. Cardinal George Pell, its head of finance, currently immersed in a scandal involving paedophile priests in Australia, is a prominent climate change denier. His lecture to the Global Warming Policy Foundation was the usual catalogue of zombie myths (discredited claims that keep resurfacing), nonsequiturs and outright garbage championing, for example, the groundless claim that undersea volcanoes could be responsible for global warming. There are plenty of senior Catholics seeking to undermine the pope’s defence of the living world, which could explain why a draft of his encyclical was leaked. What I mean is that Pope Francis, a man with whom I disagree profoundly on matters such as equal marriage and contraception, reminds us that the living world provides not only material goods and tangible services, but is also essential to other aspects of our wellbeing. And you don’t have to believe in God to endorse that view.

In his beautiful book The Moth Snowstorm, Michael McCarthy suggests that a capacity to love the natural world, rather than merely to exist within it, might be a uniquely human trait. When we are close to nature, we sometimes find ourselves, as Christians put it, surprised by joy: “A happiness with an overtone of something more, which we might term an elevated or, indeed, a spiritual quality.”

He believes we are wired to develop a rich emotional relationship with nature. A large body of research suggests that contact with the living world is essential to our psychological and physiological wellbeing. (A paper published this week, for example, claims that green spaces around city schools improve children’s mental performance.)

This does not mean that all people love nature; what it means, McCarthy proposes, is that there is a universal propensity to love it, which may be drowned out by the noise that assails our minds. As I’ve found while volunteering with the outdoor education charity Wide Horizons, this love can be provoked almost immediately, even among children who have never visited the countryside before. Nature, McCarthy argues, remains our home, “the true haven for our psyches”, and retains an astonishing capacity to bring peace to troubled minds.

Acknowledging our love for the living world does something that a library full of papers on sustainable development and ecosystem services cannot: it engages the imagination as well as the intellect. It inspires belief; and this is essential to the lasting success of any movement.

Is this a version of the religious conviction from which Pope Francis speaks? Or could his religion be a version of a much deeper and older love? Could a belief in God be a way of explaining and channelling the joy, the burst of love that nature sometimes inspires in us? Conversely, could the hyperconsumption that both religious and secular environmentalists lament be a response to ecological boredom: the void that a loss of contact with the natural world leaves in our psyches?

Of course, this doesn’t answer the whole problem. If the acknowledgement of love becomes the means by which we inspire environmentalism in others, how do we translate it into political change? But I believe it’s a better grounding for action than pretending that what really matters to us is the state of the economy. By being honest about our motivation we can inspire in others the passions that inspire us.

From Roy Hodgson to Carol Thatcher, this fixation on celebrity gaffes tells us nothing about racism

Britain is a nation in denial. While celebrity stories grab the headlines, true discrimination is thriving and largely ignored

• 
• • Joseph Harker
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 22 October 2013

‘It was great that we celebrated Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah at London 2012, but the common conclusion, that this proved our nation was at ease with diversity, was pure delusion.' Photograph: David Davies/PA

In the past seven days two stories have shown how little we know about race in modern Britain. First, the one that dominated the headlines: what Roy Hodgson said to the England team at half-time in their World Cup qualifier, and what he meant by using the word "monkey" to refer to a black player. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion. Comment columnists and sports writers weighed in. Radio stations ran phone-ins. Arguments raged.

There's no doubt that, given the history of monkey chants at football grounds during the 70s and 80s, Hodgson was at the very least stupid and incredibly insensitive to use such a word in reference to one of his own team. It's right that he apologised. But what concerns me about this story is not whether Hodgson's a racist but the way it skews our understanding of how racism impacts on modern society. Media reporting is now all about what TV and sports personalities say, rather than what ordinary people do out there in the real world. And the discussions are always centred on whether the alleged target was justified in being "offended".

So the stories we hear are: should Carol Thatcher have called a black tennis player a "golliwog"; should England football captain John Terry have called an opponent a "fucking black cunt"; should Ron Atkinson have called a footballer a "fucking lazy thick nigger"? How should they be punished? Should they be sacked? And in too many cases the abusers quickly become martyrs, the new victims of a nation gripped by political correctness – you just can't say anything nowadays, can you?

And liberal commentators have caught on too. When talking about such issues as sexism, or gay rights, or disability, or antisemitism, their regular refrain is: "Imagine if they'd been talking about black people, just think of the fuss that would have been made."

And added to this, controversial comments by black personalities are seized upon as proof that there's an equal and opposite racism coming from the other side: Rio Ferdinand agreeing that Ashley Cole was a "choc-ice" – outrageous; Diane Abbott tweeting that "White people love playing 'divide & rule'" – the woman who campaigns against racism turns out to be just as racist herself.

In the endless coverage of all this, let's not pretend we're actually talking of racism; these are celebrity gaffe stories for the search-engine age. Though the issues are, for black people, irritating and possibly offensive, they are as relevant to racism as a cough is to tuberculosis. The fact you were once upset by a tweet doesn't mean you understand what racism's about.

The second race story last week addressed the real issues. An undercover BBC London investigation into lettings agents showed the massive extent to which black people are being denied homes – without them even knowing it. One reporter posed as a landlord and asked the agents not to show his rental property to African-Caribbean people. The agents – even the Asian ones – readily agreed. To test the agents' willingness, two other reporters, one black, one white, posed as prospective tenants. As the agents had promised, the black hopeful was told the property had gone; the white prospect was invited for a viewing.

Ten agents were found to be discriminating in this way; even more shocking, one of them said on (hidden) camera: "Ninety-nine per cent of my landlords don't want Afro-Caribbeans or any troublesome people." If true, and there's no reason to doubt his claim, it throws open all sorts of questions about how widespread discrimination is in modern Britain. This investigation, after all, took place in a city often held up as being at ease with difference. If it's happening in London, it can happen, and probably does, anywhere in Britain. And to cap it all, the black "rejects" would have no idea they were being discriminated against; they wouldn't have suspected a thing, unless this happened over and over again – in which case they'd risk being labelled paranoid for blaming it on their skin colour.

This is the true story of racism in the UK: how it is still so casual, and how it excludes and disenfranchises thousands. It's a story, though, which attracted minimal media attention. A news article in the Guardian and the Telegraph, but no interest from any other newspaper, and no battalions of columnists giving their opinions.

No celebrities involved; only black people affected. No story. As they say, if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If blatant racism occurs, and no one reports it, does it exist?

How things have changed. In 1988 a similar investigation took place by undercover BBC reporters in the city of Bristol. The documentary Black and White, broadcast over five successive weekdays, exposed discrimination in jobs, housing and the leisure industry and shocked the nation. Stunned viewers asked themselves how this could be happening in a country they believed to be so tolerant, and where discrimination was supposed to be illegal.

The documentary had a massive impact, opening people's minds to the fact that racism wasn't simply about National Front marches, skinhead thugs, abuse and violence. Geoff Small, the black undercover reporter, recalls: "For weeks afterwards, white people would approach me in the street and offer their sympathy and sincere apologies for what I'd gone through." Now, however, we look back on the 70s and 80s with a sneer. We believe we're so much more sophisticated now. Alf Garnett and the Black and White Minstrel show have gone; we've heard all about police racism through Stephen Lawrence; we see black faces presenting TV shows; many minorities have been successful in business; and we've even had black faces in the cabinet. For Christ's sake, even the President of the United States is black!

These steps, important though they are, are mainly about individual achievement; and the problem is that now, in this allegedly postracial era, the rose-tinted glasses of our diversity training are in fact blinding us to the reality for most black people – which has changed little in the intervening years. In case we need reminding, jobless rates are twice as high for black people as for whites, unemployment is a staggering 56% for young black men; black pupils are less likely than their white peers to get five good GCSEs and are routinely marked down by their teachers; they are three times more likely to be permanently excluded than the overall school population; stop and search rates are over five times higher for black people; and black people are five times more likely to be jailed.

But the story Britain likes to tell itself is that discrimination has gone away – that now we're used to black and brown people living among us, the barriers have come down. It was great that we celebrated Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah at London 2012, but the common conclusion, that this proved our nation was at ease with diversity, was pure delusion. As is the dominant view that the rise in interracial relationships and "beautiful" mixed-race babies shows that racism is on the way out.

The fact it persists undiminished is, it seems, too much for our society to take. And to keep the fantasy in place, we look for excuses: if there are more black jobless it's because of their poor attitude to work; if they perform badly at school it's their laziness and culture; if they're overrepresented in the criminal justice system then they're just naturally more aggressive. If black people could only sort out these self-inflicted problems themselves, everything would be OK. After all, doesn't every business say it welcomes job applicants from all backgrounds? The doors are open, why aren't you coming in?

Needless to say, this proves problematic for genuine anti-racists. It's the problem doctors used to have in "proving" that smoking causes cancer. You can't show it in individual cases, but when you track the increase in smoking and compare it to the increase in cancer rates, it becomes obvious. As for inequality, the general statistics show the racial disparities but individual cases are almost impossible to prove, allowing the deniers to claim that no barriers exist.

We certainly need the facts and figures, but what history shows is that most of us only react to this kind of thing when we see it with our own eyes. Would the abuse allegations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq ever have been believed were it not for the photographic proof? Statistics, unfortunately, can be manipulated and argued over endlessly. But seeing individuals act in a certain way is far more damning. What if, for instance, the BBC team had gone undercover with recruitment agents, or in the teachers' common room, or the judges' golf club? And what about the police? Ten years ago another undercover BBC investigation caused a storm after exposing the raw racism among trainee officers, most of whom used terms of racial abuse on a daily basis.

To investigate all these would, of course, be a significant undertaking; but we need to change the terms of the debate. If we are to achieve genuine equality, which most people say they want, then we need to show how racism can operate, indeed thrive, without a sign telling the world it exists. Without visible proof, we look set for years more discrimination, and years more denial.

Britain is far more corrupt than we think

Mary Dejevsky in The Independent

Within Britain, there is a widespread view – seriously dented neither by the MPs’ expenses saga nor by the newspaper phone-hacking scandal – that this is not a corrupt country. It might not be quite as squeaky clean as Scandinavia, but it is nothing like – let’s see, who shall we offend? – Italy or Spain. As for Russia or China, well, we can strut the moral high ground – can’t we? – certain of our superiority.

Incorruptibility is part of our national self-image. But we flatter and deceive ourselves. Over the past few weeks, The Independent has exposed private investigators who routinely break the law, digging for dirt on behalf of commercial clients. The techniques – phone hacking and “blagging” – are the same as those for which journalists have been hauled before the courts and pilloried by public opinion.

If there seems to be a slight edge to our reports, how could there not be? On present evidence, law enforcers would appear to take a dimmer view of journalists applying these illegal methods, or buying them in, than it does of business people and lawyers who do the same. That, at least, was the message from the Serious Organised Crime Agency, which initially instructed MPs not to name the companies commissioning such services on the grounds that it could “undermine their financial viability” by “tainting them with… criminality”.  Yesterday, however, there was a change of heart and Soca supplied the Home Affairs Select Committee with a list of a list of 101 names of people and organisations who have hired private investigators. The committee’s chairman, Keith Vaz, is now deciding whether to publish them.

Strictly speaking, blagging – obtaining information by deceit – can succeed without a partner. The offence is all on one side: no money or favour changes hands. But this is not the only way in which information is obtained. As with journalists and the police or others who hold  sensitive information, it is now known that money or favours have changed hands. And in these cases, those who sell are as culpable as those who buy. There has to be a market for the transaction to work.

The sellers might not see themselves as corrupt, merely as individuals exploiting an opportunity, or enjoying a perk of the job. That such practices may not always have been recognised as corrupt does not make them less so. It just means we are more adept than some of our neighbours at not calling things by their proper names. A gift for euphemism is something else that defines our national character.

If journalists and private investigators were the only ones under investigation, and the only commodity changing hands was information, we might just be able to file it away and argue that Britain has a very limited and very specific corruption problem. But this is not true, either.  In banking, we have had the rigging of Libor, the key lending rate, by individual bank employees for personal gain. As corruption goes, this comes close to the top of any list because  greed compromised a major pillar of the financial system – in a global financial centre which was built largely on its word being its bond.

A few steps further down we have claims of corrupt behaviour by British companies abroad. Only last week accusations were made against employees of a British company in China, GlaxoSmithKline. According to the Chinese, other pharmaceutical firms are also in the frame – for allegedly bribing doctors to prescribe their products. It is not, of course, that paying backhanders, or “doing as the natives do”, was unheard of in the operations of UK companies outside Britain. But the Bribery Act of 2010 made it expressly illegal, and it comes to something when it is the Chinese authorities doing the exposing and British companies that find themselves in the dock. The reputational damage flows only one way.

Again, it might be just possible to winkle out a “British” exception and claim that this sort of corruption reflects the malign influence of “foreigners” rather than any home-grown proclivity. But such complacency is challenged by the latest “global corruption barometer” compiled by Transparency International. Published earlier this month, its findings show not only that the perception of corruption in Britain has increased markedly over the past two years – not surprising, giving the prominence of the phone-hacking scandal – but that in the same period one person in 20 claims to have paid a bribe to a public official for services as diverse as health, justice and education.

A first instinct is, naturally, to question these conclusions. A second would be to surmise that those who admitted paying a bribe were at the margins – newcomers, perhaps or illegal migrants. But that would be too easy an escape. As with journalists and police, corruption is a transaction. There must be takers as well as givers. But I find it credible, too, because of a mini-brush of my own. When posted abroad more than 10 years ago, I checked that my husband, if he became non-resident, would have to pay privately for his (expensive) Parkinson’s medicine. The doctor, a locum, said yes, that was so. Then he paused, and – as I read it – implied, no more, that a deal could be struck. I left, but a possibility was there. 

And this is where corruption begins. Not with GSK in China, but with crimes left unpunished, names left unnamed and the prosaic minutiae of daily needs debased. If the Serious Organised Crime Agency is telling MPs – our representatives – what we the public may and may not know for national commercial reasons, the UK is on a slipperly slope indeed.

Another Country

Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them

GEORGE MONBIOT

Those whom the gods love die young: are they trying to tell me something? Due to an inexplicable discontinuity in space-time, on Sunday I turned 50. I have petitioned the relevant authorities, but there’s nothing they can do.

So I will use the occasion to try to explain the alien world from which I came. To understand how and why we are now governed as we are, you need to know something of that strange place.

I was born into the third tier of the dominant class: those without land or capital, but with salaries high enough to send their children to private schools. My preparatory school, which I attended from the age of eight, was a hard place, still Victorian in tone. We boarded, and saw our parents every few weeks. We were addressed only by our surnames and caned for misdemeanours. Discipline was rigid, pastoral care almost non-existent. But it was also strangely lost.

A few decades earlier, the role of such schools was clear: they broke boys’ attachment to their families and re-attached them to the instititions – the colonial service, the government, the armed forces – through which the British ruling class projected its power. Every year they released into the world a cadre of kamikazes, young men fanatically devoted to their caste and culture.

By the time I was eight those institutions had either collapsed (in the case of colonial service), fallen into other hands (government), or were no longer a primary means by which British power was asserted (the armed forces). Such schools remained good at breaking attachments, less good at creating them.

But the old forms and the old thinking persisted. The school chaplain used to recite a prayer which began “let us now praise famous men”. Most of those he named were heroes of colonial conquest or territorial wars. Some, such as Douglas Haig and Herbert Kitchener, were by then widely regarded as war criminals. Our dormitories were named after the same people. The history we were taught revolved around topics such as Gordon of Khartoum, Stanley and Livingstone and the Black Hole of Calcutta. In geography, the maps still showed much of the globe coloured red.

My second boarding school was a kinder, more liberal place. But we remained as detached from the rest of society as Carthusian monks. The world, when we were released into it, was unrecognisable. It bore no relationship to our learning or experience. The result was cognitive dissonance: a highly uncomfortable state from which human beings will do almost anything to escape. There were two principal means. One – the more painful – was to question everything you held to be true. This process took me years: in fact it has not ended. It was, at first, highly disruptive to my peace of mind and sense of self.

The other, as US Republicans did during the Bush presidency, is to create your own reality. If the world does not fit your worldview, you either shore up your worldview with selectivity and denial, or (if you have power) you try to bend the world to fit the shape it takes in your mind. Much of the effort of conservative columnists and editors and of certain politicians and historians appears to be devoted to these tasks.

In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explains that the nobles of pre-revolutionary France “did not regard themselves as representative of the nation, but as a separate ruling caste which might have much more in common with a foreign people of the same society and condition than with its compatriots.”(1) Last year the former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren wrote something very similar about the dominant classes of the US: “the rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens … the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it.”(2)

Secession from the concerns and norms of the rest of society characterises any well-established elite. Our own ruling caste, schooled separately, brought up to believe in justifying fairytales, lives in a world of its own, from which it can project power without understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact it appears to be associated with a powerful sense of entitlement.

So if you have wondered how the current government can blithely engage in the wholesale transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, how its front bench can rock with laughter as it truncates the livelihoods of the poorest people of this country, why it commits troops to ever more pointless post-colonial wars, here, I think, is part of the answer. Many of those who govern us do not in their hearts belong here. They belong to a different culture, a different world, which knows as little of its own acts as it knows of those who suffer them.

Deny the British empire's crimes? No, we ignore them

New evidence of British colonial atrocities has not changed our national ability to disregard it

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 April 2012 20.30 BST

Members of the Devon Regiment round up local people in a search for Mau Mau fighters in Kenya in 1954. Photograph: Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

 

There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain's colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied.

The story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping, is a myth that has been carefully propagated by the rightwing press. But it draws its power from a remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard our past.

Last week's revelations, that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing mistreatment of its colonial subjects, and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser revelations, is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press. I was unable to find any mention of the secret archive on the Telegraph's website. The Mail's only coverage, as far as I can determine, was an opinion piece by a historian called Lawrence James, who used the occasion to insist that any deficiencies in the management of the colonies were the work of "a sprinkling of misfits, incompetents and bullies", while everyone else was "dedicated, loyal and disciplined".

The British government's suppression of evidence was scarcely necessary. Even when the documentation of great crimes is abundant, it is not denied but simply ignored. In an article for the Daily Mail in 2010, for example, the historian Dominic Sandbrook announced that "Britain's empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law … Nor did Britain countenance anything like the dreadful tortures committed in French Algeria." Could he really have been unaware of the history he is disavowing?

Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly 10 years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain's Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. She started her research with the belief that the British account of the suppression of the Kikuyu's Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s was largely accurate. Then she discovered that most of the documentation had been destroyed. She worked through the remaining archives, and conducted 600 hours of interviews with Kikuyu survivors – rebels and loyalists – and British guards, settlers and officials. Her book is fully and thoroughly documented. It won the Pulitzer prize. But as far as Sandbrook, James and other imperial apologists are concerned, it might as well never have been written.

Elkins reveals that the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintain, but almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died.

The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as "Labour and freedom" and "He who helps himself will also be helped". Loudspeakers broadcast the national anthem and patriotic exhortations. People deemed to have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled. Unless you have a strong stomach I advise you to skip the next paragraph.

Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women's breasts. They cut off inmates' ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound.

Elkins provides a wealth of evidence to show that the horrors of the camps were endorsed at the highest levels. The governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, regularly intervened to prevent the perpetrators from being brought to justice. The colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, repeatedly lied to the House of Commons. This is a vast, systematic crime for which there has been no reckoning.
No matter. Even those who acknowledge that something happened write as if Elkins and her work did not exist. In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan maintains that just eleven people were beaten to death. Apart from that, "1,090 terrorists were hanged and as many as 71,000 detained without due process".
The British did not do body counts, and most victims were buried in unmarked graves. But it is clear that tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Kikuyu died in the camps and during the round-ups. Hannan's is one of the most blatant examples of revisionism I have ever encountered.

Without explaining what this means, Lawrence James concedes that "harsh measures" were sometimes used, but he maintains that "while the Mau Mau were terrorising the Kikuyu, veterinary surgeons in the Colonial Service were teaching tribesmen how to deal with cattle plagues." The theft of the Kikuyu's land and livestock, the starvation and killings, the widespread support among the Kikuyu for the Mau Mau's attempt to reclaim their land and freedom: all vanish into thin air. Both men maintain that the British government acted to stop any abuses as soon as they were revealed.
What I find remarkable is not that they write such things, but that these distortions go almost unchallenged. The myths of empire are so well-established that we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told. As evidence from the manufactured Indian famines of the 1870s and from the treatment of other colonies accumulates, British imperialism emerges as no better and in some cases even worse than the imperialism practised by other nations. Yet the myth of the civilising mission remains untroubled by the evidence.