Tag: China

Posted on

Do Europeans Fear the African Columbus?

I’ve been researching the ‘discovery’ of the Americas recently, particularly the history of Columbus, Vespucci, and Magellan, as well as the conquering of the Aztecs by Hernan Cortes.

What strikes me, reading the letters of Vespucci or the affidavits of Columbus, is their braggadocio of adventure. It’s all couched of course in careful obsequence to lordly funders and rulers, and pious devotion to the mother church, who one suspects had at best tenuous command in small, rickety ships traversing unknown oceans. But it’s easy to discern their sense of excitement, of being the first to see and claim terra incognita, to place the first footsteps on a new world.

They were, in short, adventurers who had little concern about the indigenes they encountered other than a kind of sociological curiosity to describe them as they might describe sea routes or the local flora and fauna, all filtered through their world view of manifest destiny and medieval Catholicism, and their barely-suppressed exhilaration.

But it was, as we now recognise, a somewhat dark and bloody history, replete with dehumanisation and erasure of the peoples who already lived in those locations, and interspersed with crimes of violence, atrocity and domination.

The Capture of Tenochtitlan by the forces of Hernan Cortes, signifying the end of the Aztec Empire

Much of the evidence of those times now exists as absence. In searching for the Taino indigenes of the Caribbean, one finds only their diluted bloodlines. Their civilisation, culture, language and polities are long since effectively vanished. Similarly, some 97% or so of Argentina today is of at least partial if not total European descent. In Uruguay, it’s just under 90%. In neither country is there a significant indigenous population remaining.

Somewhere, buried perhaps in the genetics of modern Turks, still echoes the bloodline of the Hittite empire too. But the Hittites were builders and the Taino were not. The Hittites left correspondence and monuments by which we can remember them. The Taino did not. In some ways, the Hittites are more current three millennia after their demise than the Taino are, who died out in only the past few hundred years.

Downstream over five centuries from those heady days, we might believe we are now in a position to consider them sanguinely, if you will forgive a pun in bad taste. We are now almost a century into the process, or thinking, of postcoloniality, of decolonisation. The spokes now speak to the hubs. The empires strike back.

Today, the flows of people which cause the most contention are those into Europe and the European-founded states in North America and Australasia. It’s unsurprising that this would be so. Firstly, those nations habitually top tables for metrics like income, quality of living and education, happiness, security and so on. Who wouldn’t like to live in countries with those qualities?

And of course those coming to them are by definition coming from countries which lack those qualities. They suffer poverty, war, poor educational standards, insecurity in general. They aren’t happy, or they wouldn’t be moving.

But also, they are adventurers like Columbus, Vespucci, and Magellan. They are primarily desperate young men with little to lose and much potentially to gain. They travel embedded within their own cultures, religions and languages. The increasingly loud and paranoid concerns from European nationalists is that they may also come as conquerors like Cortes.

As a scholar of uchronia, or history which never happened, I am always intrigued by the what ifs. What if Ming China had not turned its back on the world in 1433, but had instead beaten the Europeans to colonise the Americas by over half a century? Would Admiral Zheng He now enjoy the oscillation between celebration and opprobrium currently offered to the memory of Columbus?

Or what if it had been Africans or Amerindians who had first embarked on transcontinental sea travel and had arrived in small boats at the shores of a frightened and uncomprehending European populace not unlike the fleets of dinghies which now traverse the English channel daily? Would the cities of Benin, Lagos, Accra now boast the wealth of imperial buildings and infrastructure we instead find in London, Amsterdam, Paris and Lisbon?

We would be in a very different world perhaps. Or more likely, we would not. The processes of colonialism would most likely have remained intact. The resulting erasures, atrocities and domination would likely still have occurred, only with the positions of the colonised and colonisers reversed.

What evidence for this is there, outside of my fevered imagination of the multiverse? Well, firstly one might consider the Bantu Expansions of the 11th to 17th centuries. On encountering the sparse populations of existing pastoralist and nomadic peoples of central and southern Africa, they largely either wiped them out or absorbed them, resulting in an African variant of what we might call the Argentina model.

And we don’t even need to look to history for examples of Chinese colonialism. It continues today, as Tibetans, Uyghurs and those in various South and East China Sea islands can testify.

In short, history teaches us that cultures do clash, and that all too often, if not indeed most of the time, one of those cultures is going to come off worse, often to the point of eradication. The process of cultural evolution, which exists both in isolation and in free associations via trade, commerce and technological development, continues ever faster in the globalised and techno-enabled world in which we find ourselves. Cultures do not atrophy by themselves. History indicates that when they die, it is not by suicide but more commonly at the hands of conquerors and colonisers.

The bafflement of the political class in Europe at the inexorable rise of ethnocentric, hypernationalist and insular right-wing parties is itself therefore baffling. History suggests that this is a manifestation of resistance to perceived colonial attack. The rhetoric on all sides illustrates this very clearly, whether it is assertions of Europe as being inherently white and Christian, and Islam an existential threat, or the counter-rhetoric of inflammatory Islamic preachers demanding Sharia law in Europe, and the misplaced triumphalism with which Indians proclaim ownership of London.

Is it a sense of folk guilt which fuels the suspicion of Europeans encountering the African Columbus or subcontinental Vespucci today? Postcolonial theory suggests as much. But perhaps it is also something more deeply felt – an existential fear that they are instead meeting columns of modern-day Cortes.

Diversity by definition is divisive. It is not inherently a strength, otherwise the late Roman Empire would have been stronger than its earlier iteration. But diversity could become a strength if we could somehow harness a collective expansion of in-group sensibilities, a magnification from the gigatribes of nations to the teratribe of humanity.

For that to occur, however, a sea change in perspective is required by everyone. Those intent on building fortresses around their cultures need to understand that no walls can stand against the march of human adventure and ingenuity. And those who set sail for new worlds must leave their small-minded cultural and religious preconceptions at home in the past.

Only then can we truly move beyond zero-sum colonial mindsets.

Posted on

I’ll culturally appropriate whatever seems appropriate

I guess I’ve been quiet for quite some time on this blog. It seemed to me wise to adhere to a particular wisdom that takes various forms in various cultures.

“Whatever you say, say nothing.”

“It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.”

Or this one, from the Hávamál:

I’ve been reading the Hávamál for the first time recently. I’m somewhat of a Norse wannabe. I like the mythology. I can relate to the sense of bone-chilling cold, the strict code of honour and morality. These are familiar things to me. But I am, somewhat unusually for people from the Atlantic Archipelago, entirely lacking in Norse genetics. I’m a wannabe.

My kids on the other hand are of Viking descent (and no doubt other things too). Both have clear blue eyes. One is blond. The other is descended from a town literally founded by Vikings and named for its fjord. I however, am pure Celt. This is less of a boast than a lament on my part. How astonishing it would be to have a diverse lineage. How interesting it would be.

Nevertheless, when Professor Bryan Sykes of Oxford University tested me some years ago, I proved to be almost entirely of North-Eastern Irish origin. The slight question mark was in relation to the possibility that I might have had some Icelandic heritage. However, that’s because the settlers of Iceland came from Norway and, en route, realised they’d forgotten a crucial component for settling a new land – women. So they – erm – collected a few in Antrim en route across the Atlantic.

Thus was a nation born. However, the likelihood that a stray Viking of Antrim descent returned to form part of my lineage is tiny. I accept the fact that my ancestors most likely never traveled further than the Hebrides in thousands of years (and most likely not even that far.)

As an Irishman – a very Irish man genetically in fact – I have a patrimony worth valuing. One of the oldest mythologies in the world is mine to claim. I can also lay claim to other aspects of Irishness, however constituted or conceived. The invention of whiskey and the pneumatic tyre alone justifies the existence of my people I would suggest.

Nevertheless, I choose not to be so parochial. Indeed, I was not raised to be parochial. The education I received valued the cultures of Judeo-Christianity, of Greece and Rome, of the (mostly Italian) Renaissance, and the (mostly Anglo-German) Enlightenment.

By the time I reached university education, postcolonialism was assuming its position in the canon. (I was later to teach this at Trinity College Dublin.) I was exposed to the (English language) literature of Africa, India, the Caribbean.

Later again, I began to find certain other cultures of interest. I was intrigued by China and Tibet, and visited both. I’ve since spent a lot of time exploring Buddhist thought. I likewise found the ancient Mesoamerican cultures fascinating and visited Mexico to witness their ruins and remains, where I encountered their nation’s founding mestizo mythology – the value in a blended culture.

More recently, I have found the palimpsestic cultures of both Turkey and Israel to be absolutely intriguing. Anatolia, arguably the omphalos of the world, has given home to the Hittites, the Hellenes, the Byzantines, and later a series of Turkic arrivals, culminating in the Ottoman Empire, which arguably led the world for centuries.

Likewise, the history of the land variously historically known as Judea, Palestine (and various other monikers) has had an outsized influence on the culture of the entire world. The Abrahamic monotheisms all stem from this slender sliver of land. Some of the cultures there are of extremely ancient origin. Jericho, for example, is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on the planet.

And the persistence – against enormous odds – of the Jewish people, and in a less attenuated timeframe the Palestinian people, remains astonishing in light of the many, many cultures which have come and went in the meantime. I was educated among Jewish people, and work alongside them. They are an industrious, imaginative and above all, hopeful people. I likewise have Palestinian friends. They too have sustained their culture through enormous trials.

ALL of these have influenced me. They have influenced my thinking. They have influenced who I am. It would be foolish of me to argue otherwise. Likewise, many other cultures, ancient and modern, distant from my birthplace and blood or closely proximate, have also. (It would be beyond foolish, for example, to deny the influence of the English on me. I was educated in their system, watched their TV, imbibed their culture and ultimately lived there teaching English culture to English kids in England.) I don’t believe I am alone in this. Arguably, only the isolate cultures of the Andaman Islands or the inner Amazon could truly argue for their cultural purity.

It is for this reason that, even as I taught postcolonial theory and literature, I innately rejected the concept of cultural appropriation. All of these cultures, ideas, practices are within me. No one loses if I choose to eat Jamaican jerk chicken, or strike a Hindu yoga pose, or chant a Tibetan mantra, or listen to urban American rap, or read 19th century Russian literature. No one. If anything, the people embedded in or descended from those cultures potentially gain a friend, an ally.

So I’ll culturally appropriate whatever seems appropriate, if you don’t mind (and even if you do.) Tonight I will read the Hávamál. I’m not a Viking and never will be. I may be related to some of their descendants, and have visited the lands they inhabited, but that’s not important. What’s important is that I value these cultures, in my own way.

Don’t let anyone police what you find interesting.

Posted on

Dear Media, Look in the Mirror

There’s a lot of REALLY great points raised in this article here, by a Georgian journalist and media scholar, but unfortunately I disagree with most of the author’s conclusions. She claims that noise (ie everything from clickbait to fake news – all the bullshit online, basically) is the new censorship, because it’s drowning out the signal, ie all that is truthful.

Let me clarify. Noise is a major problem, but it’s still not the new censorship. The old censorship is very much still censorship (just ask Chinese people, or North Koreans, or indeed any citizen of a nation propping up the Global Press Freedom Index, or indeed a few near the top too.)

And new forms of censorship are the new censorship – ‘cancelling’ people for holding different opinions, ‘deplatforming’, boycotting, and so on.

This article blames Big Tech for the logarithmic rise in noise online. But to my mind, journalism has only itself to blame for the endless acceleration of the noise-to-signal ratio. In the democratised field of modern tech-enabled communication, journalism could and should have thrived as the pure signal offering. Instead, it allowed itself to become (even more) partisan, skewed, and untrustworthy than it already was.

The general public are not as stupid as journalists (who aren’t as smart as they think) think they are. They have learned how to ‘read between the lines’ of stories which often make little coherent sense, and glean what the missing data points are.

This has eroded trust in their former gatekeeping role.We’re now in a ‘boy who cried wolf’ scenario. The public remember every instance when the media got it wrong, or deliberately misrepresented factuality, or presented partisan viewpoint as objective reportage. So when the media, as it does, presents legitimate and reliable work for public consumption, many people simply no longer trust it.

And so they turn to the charlatans’ parade of liars, cynics, clickbait peddlars, conspiracy theorists and ideologues online instead, thereby amplifying those noises and drowning out what little truth there is.

It’s a shitshow, no bones about it. But it’s disingenuous to put the entire blame at the door of Big Tech, much as I loathe them. Journalism needs to take a long look in the mirror to find the cause of its own woes. And I don’t mean the British redtop.

Posted on

Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet

Nice image from ‘Our World in Data’ here:

The last two thousand years or so (CE) make up only c. 1% of human history, but around half of all people ever have lived during that period, and one in 12 or 13 of all people ever are currently alive today.

For the record, just before humans began to farm and settle in urban environments, around 9,000 years ago, there were only around 20 million people on the entire planet. That’s the population of Cairo today.

At the time of Christ, 2,000 years ago, there was between 90 and 200 million humans on Earth. In other words, between the population of today’s Congo and today’s Nigeria.

China’s population today is around 1.48 billion. That was the population of the entire planet around 1875 CE.

When I was born, there were fewer than half the number of people alive today. Welcome to infinite growth on a finite planet. We’re getting to the point where the consequences are becoming inescapable.

Posted on

We are all Ukraine, and that’s not a good thing to be

When I was a journalist, I used to embody the maxim from James Joyce’s Ulysses that ‘sufficient unto the day is the newspaper thereof’. Or, to use an almost equally antiquated saying, today’s news wraps tomorrow’s chips.

In other words, it’s kind of a foolish enterprise to pontificate (as I am about to do) on matters which are kinetic. Tomorrow, next month, in one hour, the situation will change, radically. One’s assumptions, presumptions and conclusions are at best provisional and likely to become hostages to fortune very quickly.

An additional relevant point is that I’m not any expert on Ukraine. I’ve never been there. I’m not Ukrainian. Of course those attributes haven’t stopped others from spouting their tupennyworth of verbiage, so why should I be shy? At least my lack of knowledge doesn’t feed into the principals in this scenario. I’m not advising world leaders or directing the opinion of nations.

Ordinarily, I’d be silent, on the basis that when one is silent people may only presume you are an idiot, without you providing the incontrovertible proof thereof. But the current crisis in the Ukraine shows a risk of spreading, virus-like, to affect the rest of the planet, and I live here too, so on this occasion I’m prepared to take the risk. I will attempt to be brief, hence the bullet point format.

Crisi Ucraina, donne e bambini in fuga dal Donbass e i leader avvertono: “Mobilitazione generale” - Il Riformista
  1. The Ukraine is seen by Russia at their sphere of influence. Specifically the Eastern provinces are highly culturally Russian. The Kiev government has not been keen to accommodate this and has banned teaching in Russian in schools, and all discussion about reconsidering Ukraine’s borders. One presumes this Russophobia is a reaction to the occupation/annexation/secessation of the Crimea. Nevertheless, it means that Ukraine, in its current form, is unlikely to be preserved.
  2. NATO did promise, under Bush, not to expand to Russia’s borders, then did exactly that, repeatedly in the Baltic states. Russia is not pleased about this and has attempted to address it in a number of ways. Both Yeltsin and Putin actually applied to join NATO, and were turned down, because of course NATO’s creation and existence is in opposition to Russia. This means that Russia is aggrieved. It doesn’t make them the victims of the current situation, far from it, but that situation derives from the former.
  3. Beyond both the debatable legitimacy of the USA (or indeed NATO or the EU) involving themselves in the Ukraine arena, and the clear unpopularity among the American people for another foreign war, especially one with Russia, there’s the fact that Washington got completely blindsided by Putin this time. They clearly didn’t foresee that he would endorse the kind of colour revolution which the US has been tacitly and overtly supporting in a range of locations. He’s played them at their own game, and they weren’t prepared for that.
  4. This situation is DANGEROUS and fundamentally destabilising to global geopolitics. Already the Baltic states are nervous. But they’re always nervous. More concerning for Moscow is the issue of the US locating missile launch sites in Poland, ostensibly aimed at Tehran but tacitly able to reach Moscow in minutes. One might argue this in turn is a reaction to Russian nukes in Kaliningrad, pointing towards Europe. But what we need is a DE-ESCALATION not an escalation of threat.
  5. What happens in the Ukraine will have knock-on effects across the planet. Not just the possibility that Europe, which receives over 40% of its heating gas from Russia, will freeze, but also massive touchpaper issues like Taiwan. Washington and NATO have positioned themselves such that they must implement serious reaction, as they’ve repeatedly threatened, if they deem that Putin has indeed invaded Ukraine. Putin has already been driven into restoring the old alliance with China, and China will be watching avidly to see how Washington responds to Donbass. There are contradictory precedents all around, and we will no doubt hear of them all. But if NATO/US do NOT react to Putin’s colour revolution in Donbass, China will definitely be emboldened in relation to Taiwan. But if they DO react, these are nuclear powers we’re talking about. The world itself becomes at risk.
  6. As is ALWAYS the case when war-war looms large, what we need is more jaw-jaw. It’s time to talk, with everything on the table. Maybe we need to commission a conference to redraw some borders in Eastern Europe. Maybe we need to stop backing Russia into a corner and into the arms of Xi and China.
  7. Maybe we need to consider what a ‘world beyond five’ might look like seriously. Maybe it’s time to discuss taking nukes off the table for good, from EVERYONE, including other hotheads like India and Pakistan, and, yes, Israel too. Everyone. Maybe it’s time for cool heads to prevail. Am I confident this will happen? Not really, no. But this is another Cuban Missile Crisis, taking place this time when we are ALREADY at a mere 100 seconds to midnight on the doomsday clock, and when global co-operation is needed as it has never been needed before, to address existential risks to us all, like the climate crisis.
  8. Ukraine is under threat tonight (maybe not tomorrow hopefully, but tonight, yes). And we are ALL Ukraine. We are all at risk. It’s time to sideline the sabre-rattling media, the warmongering neocons in Washington, the bored Russian generals, and the neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine and get the grown-ups talking. To do otherwise is potentially suicidal.

Post-Script: It’s always beneficial to recall Field Marshall Montgomery’s rules of military strategy, iterated here in the NYT during the Vietnam War: “The United States has broken the second rule of war. That is: don’t go fighting with your land army on the mainland in Asia. Rule One is, don’t march on Moscow. I developed those two rules myself.” (New York Times, July 3, 1968.)

Posted on

Headspace, or, Adam Curtis redux

It’s always nice to see something new from Adam Curtis. He’s a genuine original, not just in terms of his vision but also in terms of his cultural position. There is literally no one else who holds his kind of position, salaried at the BBC to rummage in the entirety of their archives for his own purposes. Therefore, we have to value him, especially as he now is reaching pensionable age.

Can’t Get You Out Of My Head is a kind of capstone to the work Curtis has been doing for the past two decades or more. It has the thematic obsessions of Hypernormalisation or Bitter Lake, presented in the longer, episodic form he used for earlier work like Century of the Self.

Image result for can't get you curtis

It’s subtitled as an ’emotional history’, which could mean that Curtis has eschewed his habitual monotone voiceover or attempts to emulate the communicative modes of reportage, but in fact means that he intends this to be understood as a history of human emotions, specifically how people have emotionally responded to key events and societal developments in recent times.

People familiar with his work, so iconic at this point that a number of biting satires exist, will know what to expect: grand macro-theories about global geopolitical developments undercut by psychological speculation deriving from key practitioners, and illustrated by the succinct telling of lifestories belonging to people from the slipstream. Not Malcolm X but Michael X, not Mao but his fourth wife Jiang Qing, not Lee Harvey Oswald but his buddy from the Marines Kerry Thornley, and so on.

This is, of course, all extremely interesting, and provocative, especially when little known or long forgotten facts, such as Michael X selling John Lennon’s hair to raise money, are illustrated with archival footage. And the sheer welter of information, and imagery, alongside Curtis’s calm and lugubrious voiceover script, and the soft lulling of an expertly curated soundtrack of ambient music, all adds to the effect of being almost hypnotised.

Curtis loves to tell us how we have collectively and individually succumbed to dreamscapes, be they the futility of revolution, the seduction of online existence, the pseudo-authority of the banks, the fabricated myths of lost nationhood. Ironically, the narratives which emerge from his own work, acute though they are at times in skewering key engagements of the West with the non-Western world, are no less delusional.

Image result for can't get you curtis

It would be churlish and indeed ungrateful to pick holes in a work delivered to the world for free by a man who dedicated two years of his life to constructing it, a work of nearly 8 hours in length, that is carefully constructed, and perpetually intriguing and informative. So I’m not going to do that.

His theorising, in the academic sense of the word, which means argumentation that varies in quality from actual philosophising to bar room speculation to fervent ideological signalling, is exempted from the usual somewhat limited standards of academic review, largely because of the format in which he presents his arguments. The archival collage effect is so impressive, the editing so neat, the soundtrack so excellent, that one realises the inappropriateness of desiring an evidence base, or references, or footnotes.

And because he doesn’t have to provide footnotes and references, he can wildly connect this to that, across time and space, operating with the facade of reportage so it seems to be without the constrictions of ideological argument. But of course there is an ideology in there, albeit submerged and tentative, and there is a rashness to the wild connecting which suggests causality where in fact there is at best correlation, or at most ideological desire, or perhaps nothing except the sort of false pattern recognition he simultaneously propagates and excoriates.

If there’s a meta-theory beneath all of Adam Curtis’s endless, and often spurious big-picture postulating, it’s Dasein. Curtis’s sense of optimism is rooted in Heidegger’s understanding that we must really be in the world we occupy. Which is perhaps an understandable but ironic desire coming from someone who spends decades at a time in dark rooms watching ancient film footage.

The collage aspect, along with his culminating call for us all to wake up and be in the world, as well as his predeliction for slipstream figures and their tangential relationships to his grand narratives, may be why his huge lacunae often pass unnoticed. It seems perhaps that precisely because we have spoken so much about Trump and Brexit that Curtis need not refer to them except in brief passing.

Or we have worried ourselves so much about Putin’s Russia that the story of fringe element Limonov seems refreshing and interesting. Or we have agonised over both the causes of BLM and the civil unrest unleashed by it so much that it is preferable to look to previous eras and discussions of race relations, like Tupac or his mother. Or our lives have been so upended by Covid that we prefer to consider China’s business relationship with the west rather than the origins of the virus.

In the end, though, these are not slipstream events. They are the key elements of our age, and will define the chaos we have before us, indeed are already experiencing. Curtis’s slipstream narratives do not address these matters, because they don’t fit his narrative, his theorising. Curtis would have us to keep dreaming of new futures, which is desirable, but not at the expense of sleeping through the present.

Can’t Get You Out Of My Head is highly recommended, the keywork of a master at the top of his game. But it’s just another dream. One wonders if Curtis has it in him to document what happens if, how, when, we dead awaken. I hope so, because I doubt who else could.