{"id":176260,"date":"2020-07-27T19:21:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-28T00:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/07\/27\/have-i-mentioned-that-i-love-the-war-nerd\/"},"modified":"2020-07-27T19:21:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-28T00:21:00","slug":"have-i-mentioned-that-i-love-the-war-nerd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/07\/27\/have-i-mentioned-that-i-love-the-war-nerd\/","title":{"rendered":"Have I Mentioned that I Love the War Nerd?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Gary Brecher notes that with all this talk of cancel culture, it should be put in perspective.<\/div>\n

The specific perspective that he discusses is the universal silence of the British intelligentsia during the 1800s on the genocidal policies of their empire<\/a>. (As an aside, the British have done a marvelous job of covering up the brutality of their empire, at the cost of well over 100 million dead though both violence and indifference.*<\/sup><\/p>\n

What, you thought you were safe? You\u2019d get through the big \u201cCancel Culture\u201d war without me popping off?<\/p>\n

No such luck.<\/p>\n

Public morality should be pretty simple. When an oppressed group gets enough power to make its oppressors behave, they will do so \u2014 and they should.<\/p>\n

The real problem, the kind of thing that would make De Niro in Casino groan, \u201cAmateur night!\u201d, starts when people imagine that they can stop immoral behavior by policing immoral characters, phrases, or scenes in literature.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re looking for the wrong thing. They\u2019re sniffing for depictions of immorality, when they should be scanning the silences, the evasions.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a very na\u00efve theory of language at work here, roughly: \u201cif people speak nicely, they\u2019ll act nicely\u201d \u2014 with the fatuous corollary, \u201cIf people mention bad things, they must like bad things.\u201d<\/p>\n

The simplest refutation of that is two words: Victorian Britain.<\/p>\n

Victorian Britain carried out several of the biggest genocides in human history. It was also a high point of virtuous literature.<\/p>\n

Because they were smart about language. They didn\u2019t rant about the evil of their victims or gloat about massacring them, at least not in their public writings. They wrote virtuous novels, virtuous poems. And left a body count which may well end up the biggest in world history.<\/p>\n

Open genocidal ranting is small-time stuff compared to the rhetorical nuke perfected by Victoria\u2019s genocidaires: silence. The Victorian Empire was the high point of this technology, which is why it still gets a pass most of the time. Even when someone takes it on and scores a direct hit, as Mike Davis did in his book Late Victorian Holocausts, the cone of Anglosphere silence contains and muffles the explosion. Which is why Late Victorian Holocausts<\/a> is Davis\u2019s only book that didn\u2019t become a best-seller.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

But that didn\u2019t happen. There was no wave of conscience among historians of the British Empire in the 1920s (or 30s or 40s or, to end the suspense, ever.)<\/p>\n

Davis puts it bluntly: \u201c[T]he famine children of 1876 and 1899 have disappeared.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

They\u2019re very grim lessons, as it happens. While grad students comb texts for improper remarks, they miss the real point: the vast silence, and the paint-job of virtue that helps distract us.<\/p>\n

Ideology doesn\u2019t seem to do any good at clearing away the bigotry of Imperial history. Charles Kingsley, prominent novelist of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, was honored as promoter of socialist causes \u2014 while he wrote in letters to his wife about his loathing for the \u201cwhite chimpanzees\u201d whose corpses were littering the roadside when he visited Sligo [Ireland]<\/span> during the Famine in the 1840s.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Visiting County Sligo<\/a>, Ireland, he wrote a letter to his wife from Markree Castle<\/a> in 1860: \u201cI am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country [Ireland] \u2026 to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black one would not see it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

There are no excuses for this. There are reasons, but as the song says, \u201cIt doesn\u2019t make it all right.\u201d Still, once the rage passes and you stop clenching your jaw \u2019til it aches, there are reasons. Most of all, there\u2019s a deep Imperial skill in the trope of silence. The stupid Nazis ranted and raved and lasted 13 years, then got completely destroyed. The Empire kept its rants for private letters, passed on to a guild of coopted historians, pundits, and publishers\u2014and has never been called to account.<\/p>\n

Maybe it never will be. That poor optimist radical Davis mentions thought the expos\u00e9 would be big news by 1925. Well, it\u2019s 2020, and the Empire is still remembered fondly. Victoria herself is a beloved figure<\/a> all over again.<\/p>\n

Silence is the only really effective PR for a genocide, and the nature of artificial famines, as opposed to mass executions, makes silence particularly effective. Famines, most people still believe, are acts of God, or matters of chance, or perhaps (under their breath) the result of the sheer fecklessness of the victims, for being Papists as in Ireland, or Hindus as in India, or Muslims as in contemporary Somalia. After all, the Empire wasn\u2019t standing people up against a wall and shooting them (except sometimes, as in Kenya, and the Empire handled that<\/a> by putting the records on ships and dropping them into the Indian Ocean.)<\/p>\n

Silence, not Nazi-style boasting. That\u2019s the key. We should be looking for omissions, not gaffes. Gaffes are for hicks like Hitler. Silence is the grown-up way to hide vast genocides.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

That, folks, is how you cover up a genocide. It\u2019s leaked a little in the 170 years since it was successfully carried out. But it lasted longer than any other cursed tomb in history. Nowhere \u2014 not in Dublin, not in London \u2014 was there any commemoration of the Famine on its 50th anniversary in 1897, or its hundredth in 1947. In 1998 Blair gave a very carefully-worded quasi-apology, and I still remember Jeremy Clarkson\u2019s response: \u201cI see Blair has apologized to the Irish for poisoning their potatoes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In short, this method works. We are its products; we live in the delusion it created, and like it or not, Hobsbawm and a host of other Igors have that blood on their hands along with the outright vampires. Sometimes you end up angrier at the Igors than the Nosferatus.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Central Government [of British India] under the leadership of Queen Victoria\u2019s leading poet, Lord Lytton, vehemently opposed efforts\u2026to stockpile grain or otherwise interfere with market forces. All through the Autumn of 1876, while the kharif crop<\/a> was withering in the fields\u2026 Lytton had been absorbed in organizing the immense Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India (Kaiser-e-Hind). As The Times [of London]\u2019s special correspondent described it, \u2018The Viceroy seemed to have made the tales of Arabian fiction come true\u2026nothing was too rich, nothing too costly.\u2019 [This feast] \u2018achieved the two criteria [set for Lytton], of being \u2018gaudy enough to impress the orientals\u2019 and\u2026a pageant which hid the nakedness of the sword on which we really rely.\u2019 An English journalist later estimated that 100,000 of the Queen-Empress\u2019s subjects starved to death\u2026in the course of Lytton\u2019s spectacular durbar.\u201d<\/span>
<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

You won\u2019t find gloating, you won\u2019t see death\u2019s heads on every officer\u2019s cap. That stuff was for the Nazis, who were hicks themselves. The pro\u2019s, like Lord Lytton, wrote virtuous, vapory blather like this. Reams of it. Best smoke-screen a genocidaire could want.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/span>If I could distill this article into one sentence, and you should read the whole thing, it is, “Words can hurt, but silence kills.”

<\/em>Read this.<\/p>\n

*<\/sup>Just ask the Irish, or the Bengalis, or the Kenyans, or the Boers, the Cypriots, the Yemenis, the Kashmiris, the Indians generally, the Chinese [opium does not sell itself], the Malayans, the Tibetans, etc.)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gary Brecher notes that with all this talk of cancel culture, it should be put in perspective. The specific perspective that he discusses is the universal silence of the British intelligentsia during the 1800s on the genocidal policies of their empire. (As an aside, the British have done a marvelous job of covering up the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[370,669,592,389,570],"class_list":["post-176260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-empire","tag-genocide","tag-history","tag-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176260"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}