Some time ago a Kenyan Cabinet Minister and Chair of the Parliamentary Committee on Defence was so incensed by the movie the Da Vinci Code that he threatened the President of the republic with dire consequences if the movie was shown.
Some time earlier angry mobs had attacked some churches of the Presbyterian Church, defacing them and claiming that they bore the marks of the devil. A while earlier, across the continent troops of baboons posing as Anglican Bishops threatened to walk out of the Anglican Communion if the Church of England went on to ordain gay clergy.
cross the Atlantic Ocean in the USA, Pat Robertson, a clergyman, former Presidential candidate, Presidential Adviser on Religion, Chapel Prefect of the Republican Party and purveyor of the Gospels on the CBS network called for the assassination of the Catholic President of Venezuela. Also in the United States, several clinic offering health services to women have been targeted for spiritual incendiary with bombs and targeted assassinations of abortion doctors and nurses.
The United States has its fair dose of weird cults, the most famous of which is David Koresh's. There are numerous more colourful ones, many violent and most with codes that are distinctly anti-enlightenment values. More mainstream are millennialist religious organisations that back Israel with the view that the entrenchment of the Jews in Palestine, and their subsequent conversion or annihilation will herald the rapture. So the murder of Arabs is kosher as it ushers the Second Coming. Returning home, we encounter the gory Ten Commandments movement and Joseph Kony.
What do all these groups and people share? A literalist translation of their holy book, the Bible, and an aversion for common decency that is called fundamentalism in journalistic cant. They also happen to be Christians, and so these stories do not regularly make it to the front pages. They are certainly not seen as symptomatic of a deep malaise in Christianity.
However, the murder of a 65 year old nun in war-torn, largely lawless Somalia is evidence of Islam's unique innately murderous nature. The kidnaps in the Gaza strip and the West Bank show that Muslims like their Prophet are evil, but when Nigerians capture for ransom Western oil-workers their religion is not mentioned. You heard of the Christian Phalangists in Lebanon, of Sabra and Shatilla? Not likely. Ariel Sharon is an elder statesman and uniquely was allowed to become Prime Minister in spite of the fact that Israeli institutions found him guilty of war crimes with regard to the Sabra and Shatilla massacres.
We are persuaded of the veracity of the Pope's quotes by historians who then fail to explain how the people of America were converted, or indeed the Africans and the Australasians.
The BBC and SkyNews have been broadcasting for the last 4 days endless continuous footage of the Pope's speech, misinterpreting it and asking the Muslim congregation, what are you going to do about it. They have paraded every clown available to showcase his most bigoted racist views on TV, so we can all sit back and ponder just how right the Pope was, just how right Emperor Manuel was. We live in a world where merely doubting any facet of the Holocaust narrative can land one in jail, but where it is open season on Islam.
The reactions to offence, much like non-state terrorism or the kidnaps cited above are corollaries of deeply held feelings of injustice and powerlessness. They are emblematic of societies that have despaired of fair judgement in the courts of the world's opinion, dehumanised, weak and without leadership, they resort to barbarism to express their anguish, whether on the streets of Washington DC or Paris or Warsaw or Islamabad.
In the end, unless Western society feels its spirit can take on another Holocaust, she will have to stop making a fetish of Islam and its violence and seek in homage to the last Pope to make a lasting peace with Islam, a just compromise that is respectful of an old and sometime great civilisation.
P.S Minutes after I finished typing this out a German friend pointed out to me that the Pope's words were rather different than the English translation offered up by the Anglo-Saxon Press. Schlecht or bad, mutated into boese or evil, which obviously has greater capacity to cause injury. Moreover the Pontiff went on to describe as 'brusque' or churlish, or boorish' the statement attributed to Emperor Manuel.
Thursday, 4 January 2007
Sorry seems to be the hardest word
2007 marks the bicentenary of the passing of the British Act of Parliament that outlawed the Slave Trade in the Empire. Glad for the rare chance to simulate a beating heart, and in true Third Way Clinton-ian style, Tony Blair this week saw it fit to address the matter of Britain’s involvement in the slave trade.
I have never much liked the tag "African", when used in dealing with issues between states; not just because it is a very general term, and therefore leads to events like Clinton’s Ugandan slavery ‘regret’ speech, but also because it is laden with profoundly racist undertones. Predictably, such entreaties as Clinton’s when served to the wrong audience elicit cold responses, like Museveni’s riposte that the regrets were not in order as Africans had sold themselves into slavery. Eastern Africa had very little experience of slavery, nothing much more for example than that experienced by the British at the hands of the Moroccans for example.
Back to Tony Blair: Deflated, limping and lame, with the blood of thousands of Iraqis and Lebanese staining his hands, he looks for all the scents of Africa to expiate himself. So he gives an interview, in a UK black magazine-New Nation; and in the words of the papers, expresses deep sorrow for the UK’s involvement in slavery. He - however they report - falls short of expressing an out and out apology, like he did in the case of The Irish Potato Famine. Sadly, this deft act of subterfuge on the part of the papers went largely unnoticed. Here are his actual words,
'I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was - how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition - but also to express our deep sorrow that it could ever have happened and rejoice at the better times we live in today.'
Remove the Bliarite© blather in the subordinate clauses, and all you are left with is a crocodilishly soggy, ’I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance to express our deep sorrow.’ No regrets, no apologies, the chance was there, but it has not been taken. Again, nothing is said about slavery itself, which for all those who survived the boat ride across the Black Atlantic, not to mention the auctions and the branding was another level of hell altogether. So it is the end of the trade that we are looking to celebrate with Blair, even though black people continued to live in his value laden world under oppression for more than half a century after that.
So 450 years of hard and unpaid work by black people, and the bloody proceeds of the triangular trade underwrote not just the Industrial Revolution, but also the foundations of much of the Western world. The cruelty and dehumanisation of those dark days may have passed, and doubtlessly we are all indebted to those who bravely fought for abolition of the trade. Men like Wilberforce, Pitt, Fox, and Burke‘s examples could hardly be more exigent than they are in our fear-filled days.
Many argue that an apology would do more harm than good, as it would be seen as an admission of guilt and therefore open the floodgates to inordinate, unchaste calls for reparations. But, that is not what this is about; in the best words of Derrida the meaning of forgiveness must be predicable ‘on the ground of salvation, atonement, reconciliation and redemption.’
That the descendants of the slaves and the nations they left behind, perhaps vicariously even all black people, are still suffering the effects of the devastation wrought by this great cruelty, is not in question. To reach out and lend a brotherly hand, seeking forgiveness, would set Britain and these peoples along the way to a better relationship, and could set the tone for a new disposition on trade and international politics.
The Church of England, which also grew wealthy from slavery has for its part apologised, as have the Japanese to the Koreans for the atrocities of World War II. Germany every day bears the burden of the Shoah and beats itself up about it. The Catholic Church has apologised for the Church’s errors during the days of fascism and for its ugliness towards Galileo.
Will the extreme atrocity of slavery never be addressed? Are Africans less worthy of the empathy of their fellow men?
The two finger salute has different meanings, depending on how it is displayed. This week Tony Blair had an opportunity to make peace, and extend a healing hand of friendship to the descendants of those who suffered the cruelty of slavery. Instead he chose to stick-it-up to them.
I have never much liked the tag "African", when used in dealing with issues between states; not just because it is a very general term, and therefore leads to events like Clinton’s Ugandan slavery ‘regret’ speech, but also because it is laden with profoundly racist undertones. Predictably, such entreaties as Clinton’s when served to the wrong audience elicit cold responses, like Museveni’s riposte that the regrets were not in order as Africans had sold themselves into slavery. Eastern Africa had very little experience of slavery, nothing much more for example than that experienced by the British at the hands of the Moroccans for example.
Back to Tony Blair: Deflated, limping and lame, with the blood of thousands of Iraqis and Lebanese staining his hands, he looks for all the scents of Africa to expiate himself. So he gives an interview, in a UK black magazine-New Nation; and in the words of the papers, expresses deep sorrow for the UK’s involvement in slavery. He - however they report - falls short of expressing an out and out apology, like he did in the case of The Irish Potato Famine. Sadly, this deft act of subterfuge on the part of the papers went largely unnoticed. Here are his actual words,
'I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was - how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition - but also to express our deep sorrow that it could ever have happened and rejoice at the better times we live in today.'
Remove the Bliarite© blather in the subordinate clauses, and all you are left with is a crocodilishly soggy, ’I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance to express our deep sorrow.’ No regrets, no apologies, the chance was there, but it has not been taken. Again, nothing is said about slavery itself, which for all those who survived the boat ride across the Black Atlantic, not to mention the auctions and the branding was another level of hell altogether. So it is the end of the trade that we are looking to celebrate with Blair, even though black people continued to live in his value laden world under oppression for more than half a century after that.
So 450 years of hard and unpaid work by black people, and the bloody proceeds of the triangular trade underwrote not just the Industrial Revolution, but also the foundations of much of the Western world. The cruelty and dehumanisation of those dark days may have passed, and doubtlessly we are all indebted to those who bravely fought for abolition of the trade. Men like Wilberforce, Pitt, Fox, and Burke‘s examples could hardly be more exigent than they are in our fear-filled days.
Many argue that an apology would do more harm than good, as it would be seen as an admission of guilt and therefore open the floodgates to inordinate, unchaste calls for reparations. But, that is not what this is about; in the best words of Derrida the meaning of forgiveness must be predicable ‘on the ground of salvation, atonement, reconciliation and redemption.’
That the descendants of the slaves and the nations they left behind, perhaps vicariously even all black people, are still suffering the effects of the devastation wrought by this great cruelty, is not in question. To reach out and lend a brotherly hand, seeking forgiveness, would set Britain and these peoples along the way to a better relationship, and could set the tone for a new disposition on trade and international politics.
The Church of England, which also grew wealthy from slavery has for its part apologised, as have the Japanese to the Koreans for the atrocities of World War II. Germany every day bears the burden of the Shoah and beats itself up about it. The Catholic Church has apologised for the Church’s errors during the days of fascism and for its ugliness towards Galileo.
Will the extreme atrocity of slavery never be addressed? Are Africans less worthy of the empathy of their fellow men?
The two finger salute has different meanings, depending on how it is displayed. This week Tony Blair had an opportunity to make peace, and extend a healing hand of friendship to the descendants of those who suffered the cruelty of slavery. Instead he chose to stick-it-up to them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)