David Mitchell, Hitler, and laughing at foreigners

In this Sunday’s Observer the wonderful David Mitchell wrote about how one of the things that makes him most proud to be British is our national propensity to laugh at Adolf Hitler. The article was occasioned by a complaint by some Israeli tourists about some young British people taking photos of each other next to a wax statue of history’s most horrendous man in Madame Tussaud’s inexplicable celebrity stroke evil-people and oversized-candlestick stroke shit-simulacrum emporium while making Nazi salutes with one hand and simulating a small, square, strange, and silly moustache with the other.  Unfortunately, the upset Israelis thought these young people were being gigantically anti-Semitic.  As the excellent Mitchell pointed out, however, the moustache simulation was the really big clue that these people were just larking about, as opposed to signalling any sort of support of Nazism and the Holocaust.  And, as the National Treasure* also said, laughing at Hitler makes us recall that Hitler was small, stupid, and pathetic, which he was, while in no way diminishing our sense of the despicableness of what he did or in any way disrespecting his victims.  And, furthermore, laughing at him helped people survive the bombs he dropped on the cities, on the people, of this country, and thus helped the Britons of those times to live to fight another day and indeed, with a little bit of help from our friends, defeat Hitler and destroy his hideous regime.  Anyway, why am I trying to represent David Mitchell when you can read his article for yourself?  To try to justify my writing what follows, that’s why.  But if you want to read the full Mitchell piece, and you do, here’s the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/28/hitler-madame-tussauds-david-mitchell 

* Hmm. Is David Mitchell, a mere boy of 35, too young and new to be a National Treasure?  On the one hand, I don’t think so.  He seems perfectly suited to the role to me whatever his age—clearly clever and very funny, yet nicely self-effacing in a perfectly under-statedly British way.  The thing that worries me is that such a status might put too much pressure on him, as he seems the sort of nice person who takes his responsibilities to others tremendously seriously, and so, while that’s part of what makes him deserve the status of National Treasure, it also ought to make us have the mercy to spare him the role.  A dilemma.  But I digress.   

David Mitchell’s article put me in mind of German and Austrian friends who get understandably tired of what they see as a British obsession with World War II and Nazism, or disturbed that we associate their countries with those things and none of the good things they do, like sausages and yodelling.  (Or is that the Swiss?  Don’t get me started on the Swiss, mind!)  There may be some considerable validity in at least the first of those two concerns.  After all, 1945 was pretty much the last time the British were any good at anything significant.  But there is also more to it and, correspondingly, less to it than that.  Part of it is just harmless laughing at foreigners.  Now, yes, I can almost hear some people spluttering, saying, what? it’s okay to laugh at foreigners?  Well, of course it is, as long as it’s based on friendship and fondness, and not on hatred and xenophobia, and as long as you know where to draw the line at offending others’ sensibilities too much.  Or at least are prepared to apologise if you make the mistake of doing so.  It can be done.  I’ve had plenty of practice over the years.  Of course, one can easily offend others, certainly Germans, Austrians, Israelis, and perhaps all Jewish people, when it comes to Hitler.  It is easy to go over the line, and I’ve no doubt that it happens too often and that it hurts.  But it is also, I think, easy to see that there is an inside of the line, however tricky it may be to see exactly where the line is located.  It is easy, I think, to see that not all laughing at the Germans is bad, even in relation to Hitler.  Take perhaps the most famous instance of Brits laughing at the Germans (but not actually laughing at the Germans at all, as argued below): the “Don’t Mention The War” episode of Fawlty Towers.  Clearly, Basil Fawlty is a stereotyped Englishman who is not to be admired.  As if to emphasise that, in that particular episode he has a pratfall and has to go to hospital with a head injury.  Against medical advice, he discharges himself and returns to his hotel, with bandages still conspicuously wrapped around his head, and it is that condition that he does all the goose-stepping, moustache simulating, and mentioning of the war.  The Germans, meanwhile, are portrayed sympathetically as nice and reasonable people.  One of them even cries at Fawlty's antics because, as a German, she or her family suffered in the war.  I can’t remember the details, but they made the point that not all Germans were Nazis.  In other words, “DMTW” did not reduce all Germans and their history to Nazism.  It satirised a certain type of British person who remains ridiculously obsessed about World War II. 

If done with self-awareness, whether doing it yourself or watching John Cleese perform it, there is something inherently hilarious about reducing people of another nationality, in all their diversity and complexity, to a single silly aspect of their culture or their history.  To laugh at others in this way, is really to laugh at yourself and your own human propensity to be absurdly reductive and unfair.  It may even therefore serve a salutary purpose, reminding us that such thought and behaviour is ridiculous and should never be taken seriously, and should definitely not form the ideological basis of any country's foreign policy.  Whatever the case, laughing at foreigners is simply one of the funniest of all funny things, and being laughed at by foreigners is even better because the latter, while merely equally funny to the former, has the added bonus of teaching us something about ourselves, at least sometimes, or at least about what others think of us, which is interesting.  One time when it did both of these things for me, for example, was when American stand-up comedian Reginald D. Hunter observed that “Britain is the only country in the world where a friend will introduce you to a friend of his by saying: this is my mate Barry.  He’s a bit of a twat, but he’s alright.”  This made me *Proud to be British*.  I didn’t realise before how unique our British habit of casually insulting each other in this way is, and it puts in another perspective our propensity to laugh at Hitler and at foreigners generally.  

Sometimes, though, admittedly, laughing at foreigners and being laughed at by foreigners is just plain funny for nothing but the heck of it.  At university in the US I played in a multinational football team in Baltimore (Americans being genetically unable to play football—not “soccer”, football).  During one match I was running up the left wing with the ball and saw our Iranian centre forward, handsome chap, calling my attention for a cross with arm raised and shouting (Dick van Dyke-style), “Ma’e... ma’e... ma’e...”.  It’s hard to cross a ball with the left foot while running and laughing at the same time and I sliced it hopelessly wide of the post.  Our captain and manager was not well pleased.  He, by the way, was a French Johnnie, decent cove nonetheless (in fact, I now remember regularly introducing him to others by saying “This is Philippe: he’s French, but he’s okay”), which led to never-tiresome recitations of such phrases as “Ah em lucking furgh a bowl”.  One training session ended in an early bath for me when le capitaine forgot the English word for a certain body part and had to ask the team “What is the word for this, le coude”, pointing at his elbow.  Our Greek right-winger replied, “It is your dick.”  Yes, that was you, if you happen to be reading this, my old friend, paediatric pulmonologist Dr Harry Opsimos [insert kebab joke here].   

"Ah em lucking furgh a bowl".

David Starkey's "authority" as a historian

Update:  Here's another re-heated blog post from some time ago, now that yet another historian (see the last one about Niall Ferguson) has yet again decided to blow out a bumful of noxious prejudice under the cover of his "authority" as a historian.  In this instance, Dr Starkey informs us that "it is 'ludicrous' to suggest that historical novelists have authority".  Well, I'm not really sure why he thinks historians and historical novelists do the same thing. Hilary Mantel, for example, makes no claim to be a historian, and I expect that nearly all if not actually all her readers agree that there's a difference between what historians do and what historical novelists do.  But let's focus on Starkey and his claims to be an "authority".  I wrote the post below in response to Dr Starkey's claim, during the London riots of 2011, that the cause of those riots was a "particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture" that was, he said, "black" in origin, citing Jamaican roots, though he's clear that part of the problem, in his view, is that whites have adopted this Malady Of Black Origin. (I'd like to be clear--I'm not accusing him of racism.)  I repost the post now because of what it reveals about Dr Starkey's lack of authority as a historian.  He is no doubt a very great authority on the history of the Tudor court and the history of monarchy in general, and there is nothing wrong with that.  However, in contrast to most historians of monarchy, Starkey seems entirely ignorant of other aspects of history, as if the last 50 years of the discipline's development are entirely alien to him.  For example, *if* it's true that the riots were attributable to black-in-origin nihilism, then where does that nihilism come from?  As the post says, Starkey mentions Jamaica, but fails to connect Jamaica to its past in the violence of the slave trade and slavery.  At best, Starkey is a very insular historian, at worst a deeply ignorant one, and in either case not an "authority". *It isn't.

Here's the latest from Starkeyland: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10049866/David-Starkey-it-is-ludicrous-to-suggest-that-historical-novelists-have-authority.html

Here's the old post.
  
On Newsnight the other night, David Starkey, one of Britain’s most eminent historians and certainly Britain’s most stentorian historian, made what, frankly, can only be described as a complete arse out of himself.  Asked about the recent riots, he said he’d been re-reading Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech.  What Powell got right, said Starkey, was that immigration would lead to violence.  What he got wrong, apparently, was that the violence would not be racial in the sense of black versus white, but that black culture has pervaded white culture and made white culture violent as well.  In Starkey’s words: “the whites have become black.”  Now, to be fair, as this suggests, if Starkey is a racist, he is not any kind of biological essentialist.  As he also said, “It’s not skin colour, it’s culture.”  On that basis, he says that a “particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion.  Black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is a Jamaican patois that’s been intruded on England.”  There are links below to excerpts from Powell’s speech (you can find the whole 20-minute enchilada on Youtube, if you can stand it) and to the full Newsnight debate (just over 10 minutes long). 

Powell: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23MEL7424aQ

Starkey: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517

Okay, then.  As a historian myself, I feel I must say something about this.  Several things, actually....  To begin with, David Starkey first made himself famous as a historian of Henry VIII, who, as Starkey is very much aware, was a double-divorcee, who had two other wives executed, killed most of his chief ministers, trashed the monasteries, and who generally behaved like a tyrannical psychopath.  So, while there is no evidence that Henry was black, there is nonetheless no doubt that he had issues.  Furthermore, having done a whole TV series on the history of the English/British monarchy since the days when kings had such fabulous names as Athelstan, Ethelwulf, Offa, and Cnut (the Danish Connection), Dr Starkey also no doubt knows about how the modern monarchy was founded in 1066 by a man called William the Bastard, and how his son William Rufus was possibly assassinated in the New Forest, a forest claimed by the crown to the exclusion of peasants who would be executed for trespassing on to feed themselves.  Then there was the unfortunate misunderstandings over Thomas a Beckett, and the lurid business of how Edward II was killed by a roasting spit being inserted into his bum, and the princes in the Tower, and so on, and so, and so on, and so on. And indeed we could continue all the way through to recent times when Edward VIII was a Nazi sympathiser, and indeed the present, as Princess Michael of Kent is also reputedly somewhat right wing, and the Duke of Edinburgh isn't exactly famous for the kindess of his remarks about the foreign and the brown.  No doubt Starkey will be able to recount how there are numerous complex historical explanations why violent, destructive, nihilistic culture of royalty culture is entirely different from violent, destructive, nihilistic culture of gangsters.  And let’s take him at his word and on his own terms.  For the sake of argument, at least for the time being, let’s assume that a millennium and more of often murderous monarchical mayhem is somehow more respectable or at least explicable than the apparently more appalling and, for Dr Starkey, black, TV-thieving antics of a small minority of modern Britain’s multicultural yoof.  It’s difficult, I know, but if we try really hard we can do it.  And there is a point to doing this, as you’ll see later on, if you’re patient enough....    

And let’s look as well a little further down at the lower end of social scale—and although Starkey is no social historian, he is undoubtedly a practiced expert on looking down on those on the lower end of the social scale—and let’s see if we can find any evidence of violent, destructive, nihilistic [insert politically-charged epithet here] culture there.  Some may see clearly political movements as the Peasants’ Revolt, Chartism, trades’ unionism etc as entirely different from the rioting and looting etc that we’ve recently seen.  Many would say, as Starkey said himself, that the former had clearly articulated political grievances and aims and the latter did not.  Nevertheless, I find it hard to separate entirely the sense of entitlement and the antics of the rioters from those of the bankers who wreaked havoc on our national and on the global economy, and from the politicians who stole not tens or hundreds but thousands from the taxpayers for their duck houses, moats, and phantom second homes.  What’s good for the goose and so forth....  Of course what’s really different are the scales of damage and the scales of punishment in operation here.  The particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic culture of the economic and political elite is immeasurably more destructive than that of the looters, and yet is far, far less subject to any kind of punishment.  And if that’s not a political issue, then I sure as hell don’t know what is. 

Anyhow, I said let’s take Starkey on his own terms, and then I failed to do so in the above paragraph, so, to get back on track....  Let’s say that the whites have become black and therefore now exhibit a particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture.  That would require us to pretend that this kind of behaviour on the part of whites is new.  That is, to propose that there’s never been any such thing as, for example, a violent, destructive, nihilistic culture of football hooliganism.  A proposition that will come as a surprise to many people.  Or else that football hooliganism is completely different from the recent rioting, or else perhaps football hooliganism was a black thing too.  And let’s pretend that Britain's city streets at night are entirely free of aggressive drunks, unless they’re black, or whites who have become black.  And let’s pretend that all white Englishmen overseas behave themselves with impeccable manners, and never resort to shouting, fighting, vomiting, and urinating in public in the cities of continental Europe.  Indeed, let’s pretend that Britain before the Windrush was and white Britain since still is a place of calm communality entirely populated by well-behaved ladies and gentleman.  And let’s say that all the violent, destructive nihilism of today owes its existence to a language which is wholly false, which is a Jamaican patois that’s been intruded on England.  Let’s pretend all these things.  Now, as a historian, Dr Starkey ought to be curious about where this new language (and behaviour, presumably) came from, what its historical origins are.  And I think we can trace it all back, as Starkey's own words about Jamaica almost admit, to the British Empire.  I’ll try to be brief—the point is made easily enough. 

That empire had its origins in the privateering (i.e. legalised piracy) of Francis Drake (“el Diablo”, as the Spanish called him) and other “sea dogs” who looted Spanish towns and treasure ships which were carrying booty that was itself looted by the Spanish from the New World and its native peoples.  When that ended after Elizabeth I died and King James made peace with Spain, English adventurers took to colonising the so-called "New World," whihc of course was hardly new to the people who lived there already and who were subjected to expropriation and genocide by European colonizers. Anyway, the richest colonies were the islands of the West Indies, including, of course, Jamaica, which was invaded by the English and taken from the Spanish in 1655 as part of Oliver Cromwell’s “Western Design”.  The reason Jamaica and the other islands were so rich was because their new inhabitants grew sugar.  But sugar was highly labour intensive, and so British merchants got themselves very lucratively involved in the business of capturing and kidnapping Africans and selling them to West Indian planters who would then use them and their descendants as slaves.  Those slaves soon outnumbered resident whites in the West Indies by as much as ten-to-one, and the small white minority had to use literally spectacular violence in a not-entirely-successful attempt to oppress as well as exploit the people they enslaved.  The Barbadian slave code, the model for other islands and to a lesser extent the North American mainland colonies, described blacks, without irony, as “an heathenish, brutish, and an uncertain dangerous kind of people,” and they were treated by law and beyond the law accordingly.  If you want details, check out Trevor Burnard’s Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World: full of sex and violence and a stonking good read.  But the point is, and I think it’s pretty clear by now: whites never needed to become black to become violent, destructive, and nihilistic.  And if black culture is violent, destructive, and nihilistic, who did they learn that from?  I’m tempted to say that the blacks have become white.  But I won’t, because that would be a noxious bumquack of reductive nonsense also. 

The riots: I blame the parents.

So it goes like this. 

1: If you’re a banker who takes reckless risks and ruins entire economies, wrecking or at least threatening the livelihoods and welfare of millions of people, then you will be criticised in the papers and by politicians for a few weeks, and then you will collect your bonuses and nothing else will happen to you.

2: If you’re a politician who thieves thousands from the taxpayer for “expenses”, or if you are a member of the media elite with political connections who hacks the phones of the families of dead soldiers and child-murder victims, then you will be politely asked to appear at the nearest police station to discuss the matter, at your own convenience, maybe one nice lunchtime, and then, eventually, probably nothing else will happen to you (we’ll see, eventually).

3: If you’re a young so-called chav who steals a pair of trainers or a TV, then the police will arrive at your home without warning and in force and will smash your door down and take you away.  And that is just the beginning of your punishment.

I’m not condoning looting, much less arson, mugging, murder, and all the rest of it. I’m just saying 1 plus 2 makes 3. And, just to be clear, I’m not blaming the police who follow laws and orders and put themselves at risk to try to limit the damage and clean up the wreckage carried out by the so-called chavs, but actually caused in a much more fundamental way by their bastard parents: i.e. the reckless bankers and the like; the corrupt or complacent politicians who allow the bankers to be so unruly; and the venal media who attack anyone who has the nerve to threaten this dysfunctional family with the social services.

So, like David Cameron, I blame the parents.  But in a different way. 

Danny Alexander and the drivelling rhetoric of The Collaboration: “I want to be able to say I did the things I thought were right”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jul/31/danny-alexander-cuts-are-right

“I want to be able to say I did the things I thought were right”.  These are the words of Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, in an interview with Stephen Moss in the Guardian’s G2 published on Monday 1 August 2011 (link to the on-line version above, if you can stand to).  Now, for some reason, either Moss or some editor or some sub-something or other, decided that this would be a suitable headline for the whole interview/story*.  And indeed someone, or maybe someone else, decided it was fitting for the front page of Monday’s G2 supplement.  I don’t know, of course, if whoever it was who chose the quote for this headlining role did so because A) they wanted to reveal the vacuity of Danny Alexander, B) they wanted to highlight the pointlessness of political interviews in which subjects reveal themselves (i.e. cover themselves up), C) they wanted to show something unintentionally revealing about the subject, or D) they thought these words were wise and interesting and therefore were well worthy of such prominence.  What abides of my faith in humanity tells me it’s A, B, or C.  Unfortunately, however, my diminishing faith in humanity tells me it might well be D.  The article itself was largely very soft and sympathetic, which suggests, sadly, a D.  Below, however, I’m arguing for why it should have been a C.  My initial instinct was A or possibly B, but I now think it’s a C.  

*By the way, I don’t know if this is new or not, as I’m not a media expert, and would love to be informed and enlightened by any media studies chaps or chapettes who happen to read this post, but these days it seems that newspaper interviews are not just produced through a journalist talking to an interviewee in a room and then writing up the stuff they say with a bit of analysis thrown in.  These days it seems that there has to be a story, some sort of action-based narrative alongside the interview that supposedly reveals something else about the subject.  In this case, Moss followed Alexander around his native Scotland, mostly talking to fellow ginger people in his constituency of Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey.  Come to think of it, the whole thing was actually almost certainly arranged by Alexander’s people, to show him all nicey-nicey and helpy-helpy, improving people’s lives, and very much away from Westminster where he is in fact all nasty-nasty and cutty-cutty, fucking up people’s lives.  Accordingly, the trip and the whole interview turned out to be as insightful and as revealing as Danny Boy’s sound bite: "I want to be able to say I did the things I thought were right".    

Actually, though, the words are insightful and revealing, I think, but not, presumably, in the way Danny Alexander thinks.  My first reaction to the apparently staggering banality of the phrase was to think, “What a refreshing change from all those politicians who want to be able to say they did the things they thought were wrong.  Thank goodness the Chief Secretary to the Treasury is such a clear-headed and intelligent man.”  And that’s what I wrote on Facebook.  I tried to write it on Twitter too, but had to break it into bits because of the 140-character Nazism.  Well, to be fair, I suppose I understand why Twitter has a character limit, but why is it so pompous about it?  If you write anything of excessive length—i.e. 141 characters—it not only tells you this information but adds as well that “You’ll have to be more clever”.  Which is, frankly, a bit arsey, perhaps especially so, delivered as it is by an automaton rather than an actual sentient being.  And, in an interesting turn of unintended irony, I notice now by the green squiggle appearing in the draft of this increasingly undisciplined aside, that “more clever” is deemed incorrect by my word-processor’s grammar checker, another non-sentient smart-arse.  So, clever-clever Twitter should in fact be telling us to be cleverer.  I’m beginning to envision a future post on the subject of Twitter snobbery.  Especially how the biggest Tweeters think they’re oh-so-much-better than Facebookers.  But, anyway, I digress.

So, as I was saying, my first reaction was “What a refreshing change” and dah dee dah dee dah.  And then I got to wondering, well, how exactly does Mr Alexander foresee this happening, his saying “I did the things I thought were right”?  In what exact circumstance would he “want to be able to say” these words?  I think perhaps the first clue here is the more-than-a-hint-of-defensiveness in the whole phrase.  He may or may not be convinced enough himself that he’s doing the things he thinks are right, I think on the surface, yes, deeper down maybe not, but he must know very well that others think he’s doing the things that are wrong.  The defensive tone lies most obviously in the implied scenario: if you want to say that you did the things you thought were right, you must be imagining and imagining answering all those people who think the things you’re doing are wrong.  Less obviously but perhaps most revealingly, the defensiveness is visible in the precise and slightly tortured construction of the phrase.  If he was really confident, deep-down, that he’s doing the things he thinks are right, he would surely be more likely to say something such as “I want to be able to say I did the right things”.  Rather than “I did the things I thought were right”, as if he knows somewhere deep in his traitorous Tory-hugging heart that the things he’s doing are NOT-RIGHT-AT-ALL.  In these respects, Alexander’s phrase has a bit of a stench of Blair about it, Blair indeed at his most weasily, as when the pretty straight kind of guy defended his actions on Iraq by saying he genuinely believed he was doing the right thing.  As if, if he believed it, genuinely, then it was okay.  As if we would somehow forget all the dead people and embrace Tony once more because of his sincerity and his genuinely good intentions.        

But Alexander must know, because he will have been told by fellow Liberal Democrats who cannot believe what they’ve got themselves into, that he is not doing the things that are right, whatever he might think he’d like to be able to say.  It is not right, at least for a Lib Dem, to participate in the dismantling of so much of Britain’s civic infrastructure and the consequent dismembering of our civil society.  It’s alright for the Tories to do it.  They are Tories.  That is what they do.  It is what they are for.  That and vomiting all over restaurants they’ve just trashed.  They can dress up cuts with Big Society bullshit, but we all know that the Tories are about the cuts and we can vote for them, or not, accordingly.  But the Lib Dems, at least those participating in the Coalition, or the Collaboration as I prefer to call it, are not only betraying our civic infrastructure etc, but they are betraying their own purported political philosophy and, as a consequence of that, they are also betraying nothing less than our democratic process itself.  Like many people, I voted Lib Dem partly out of frustration with New Labour and because of the sheer heinousness of Tony Blair, not just in the most recent election but the two before that, and partly for the very positive reason that the Lib Dems were promising to raise taxes from those who can afford them (me included, and rightly so) and to spend the money on good things that help people who are not so well off.  That’s what the Lib Dems are supposed to be about, that’s what they said they’d do, and that’s why most of the people who voted for them voted for them.  That was therefore the deal, and not just any old deal, but a solemn democratic contract kind of deal.  It is a give-me-your-precious-vote-that-you-possess-as-a-result-of-centuries-of-struggle-and-sacrifice-and-I-solemnly-promise-you-x kind of deal.  There is hardly any more important kind of deal than that.  Doing the exact opposite of what you promised in an election is therefore not and can never be a thing that is right.  It is very, very, very wrong.  And pathetic pleading and Blair-like bleating about how “I want to be able to say I did the things I thought were right” only adds insult to injury.  And I reckon deep down Danny Alexander knows it.