Lumumba, Barka, Guevara, Allende
This morning's conspiracist theme was in part the product of a Sunday mood, but also maybe a reflection on St Peter's tendency to adopt a doctrine of denial occasioned by the readings at mass, and a kind priest's sermon on human fallibility at Thomas a Becket in Wandsworth. In any event, the mood made me feel like a film and I was lucky enough to come across I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed at the Library, which I recommend to you.
The film deals with the 1965 disappearance of Mehdi Ben Barka, an exiled left wing leader of Morocco whilst visiting Paris in 1965. It's director, Serge Le Peron, attempted to base the film on what could be gleaned from the contemporary record and recently released material from the French government. Barka was the chairman of the Tricontinental Conference, an organisation of third world liberation movements, and very close to the Cuban government.
It was, of course, a Marxist front, but whether it was a Soviet one or not is one of those revealing questions. Was the USSR the centre of a global conspiracy, and a sponsor of socialism ideologically, or just an example amongst others of a twentieth century pathology of socialised tyranny being made attractive to the poor because of its scientific, modernising ambitions?
The film made me think of three things. Firstly, it's a cliche to note that France was a traumatised country for most of its modern existence. The detonation of the revolution underneath it was the cause of a peculiar set of symptoms that persisted through time and that were rooted in bloodshed.
This is an important point; French history was pathological. The experience of terror, coup, restoration and collapse, the third empire, the commune and the Dreyfus affair are all symptoms of a deranged political order, not causes. Had France been an individual in the nineteenth century, one would have marvelled and been appalled at the insane instability of her modernisation, and its grossly distorted nature.
Yet the twentieth century was even worse; the Great War, the Fall and Algeria would have destroyed any other polity. France seems to have survived as a political unit by developing a political class who were capable of anything, and who all acted in an atmosphere akin to that of the more desperate sort of gangsterism.
Mitterand's assassination attempts on himself, and his gang of hired lawbreakers, in this context, were the apotheosis of the system, not an aberration. That and the way that the various legal systems work, with explanation and interpretation of the law coming after its administration, explain a lot about France's attitude to the modern European project, or at least that of the older French politicians.
The second thing that I thought of was the tendency of people in the English speaking countries to think that America or Israel do things first or in isolation and should be brought to book for them. This attitude is put into stark relief by the way other states behaved during and after the cold war.
I always wondered why, for example, Belgians were allowed to celebrate King Leopold's Palais de Justice whilst leaving the Congo memorial to be covered in muck and hidden away behind a mosque. How is that building less of a symbol of darkness to some who call themselves rational than the ruins of Hitler's Chancellery, or their Pentagon bete noire?
People recall, say, the post-1972 Munich operation, and forget the Rainbow Warrior, or Aldo Mori, or Gladio, or what the Italians and French seem to have got up to in the Algerian gas and pipeline affairs. Do those in what was the third world fall for the line that the British, Americans and Israelis did all the bad of Europe, and does what those countries have done compare to what the main body of continental powers did and do?
Need we believe the gangster leaders of some of these countries, and those who wish to appease them here, who talk as though the activities of English speaking powers were uniquely bad? I write as someone who feels himself Irish as well as British, so I need no lectures on how bad the British Empire was before Churchill sacrificed it, to his eternal credit, to destroy the Nazis.
Thirdly, I noted how references to the 'North' and the 'South' were national-revolutionary ones in the sixties, but migrated to creatures like the Brandt and Brundtland Commissions by the eighties, and to the status of factual cliches suitable for A-level and IB syllabi by the nineties. We also forget things like the Tricontinental commission and the Bandung Conference and the relationships they established.
Perhaps I am writing as a parochial English speaker. We--the community of such people--are, given India's sovereign individual rise as a global power, in the business of forgetting the non-aligned League. Others are not. Isn't it wrong that most people know nothing of the biggest collection of states outside of the United Nations?
Why is it, though, that the only time I know that we will hear it mentioned is if McCain wins and people are looking for a precedent for a non-UN but coexisting League so that the neoconservative movement can supplant the United Nations with an association of their own?
Historical certainties that are internalised emerge from forgetting and from groupthinking. For instance, an internationalised, global, legalistic, and essentially liberal cosmopolitanism has forgotten, perhaps deliberately, that there were once other sorts of itself.
Perhaps its followers need to. That which you cannot forget, ignore or finesse and which defies your nostrums--like global Christianity, and especially global Catholicism, for instance--I suppose you have to hate. After you ridicule, and before, of course, you bargain, then give in to it. Or perhaps you just get with quietly building things like the Global Sea Bed Authority, or ECOWAS and the European Union, or our new Super-NATO, and hope that everyone ignores what you are up to.
The West has long, long form on forgetting. The leadership of the Roman Empire by Constantinople was more or less deliberately forgotten after 476 by our historians, who of course happened to be monks then nationalists. It wasn't completely airbrushed away though, just renamed.
The Roman Empire was assigned to 'Byzantium', which was merged in the western mind with Ctesiphon and places further east. The West forgot that Greek was once not a language or art, or philosophy or for that matter just for Greeks, but well, (pardon the pun) a Lingua Franca. We just drew our Dark Ages over it and then covered it in assertions in our curricular texts that only elites read, just as we periodically forget inconvenient church councils.
Similarly, that another sort of global world was possible, and that a sort of 'third way' socialist nationalism (of which I do not approve, but which I note) could have taken root in the nineteen sixties and seventies is today being forgotten. The crimes and lunacy of neoliberalism in Africa and South America are also being set aside, or drowned beneath the righteousness of indignation at the human cost of how Asia modernised.
The leaders of this alternate world all ended up in violent death; perhaps it would have too. It could have come to pass though, and the memory of how easily that could have happened is one that would make those who decide wise if they would just remember it.
That modernity itself is part of the cause of human suffering is a highly unpalatable thought for many of our fellow human beings, and I have to say, it is distasteful to me too. I won't ignore it though.
Mark Mazower drew attention to something else we've all forgotten a few years ago; how viable, and real fascism was as a third option, between communism and liberalism, for the imposition or development of modernity within European nations. We need to remember that just because things worked out, doesn't mean that bad things went away or that history is on some inevitable path.
The absurd picture of one socialist bloc and one western bloc run absolutely by Washington and Moscow--to the point where Poland can be portrayed as a 'former Soviet' nation is being built. Poland was only Soviet when the Nazis and Soviets tried to wipe out its 20-year modern existence by occupying it in 1939 and reincorporating it into their Empires.
The whole Empire game is slipping away from sight, or being reassigned generally to any entity rather than remembered specifically. It's good to be reminded of what actually happened in small, concrete ways, and that there were stories which illuminate that are not spoken in English. It's good for those touched by the West, now near its end, to remember the blood Empires need to swim in.
I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed is infinitely superior as a film to Costa-Gavras's Z, and miles beyond Oliver Stone's attempt to rewrite them for Americans. I'd urge you to watch it. Quite apart from anything else, it's gripping. It also makes you think.
This morning's conspiracist theme was in part the product of a Sunday mood, but also maybe a reflection on St Peter's tendency to adopt a doctrine of denial occasioned by the readings at mass, and a kind priest's sermon on human fallibility at Thomas a Becket in Wandsworth. In any event, the mood made me feel like a film and I was lucky enough to come across I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed at the Library, which I recommend to you.
The film deals with the 1965 disappearance of Mehdi Ben Barka, an exiled left wing leader of Morocco whilst visiting Paris in 1965. It's director, Serge Le Peron, attempted to base the film on what could be gleaned from the contemporary record and recently released material from the French government. Barka was the chairman of the Tricontinental Conference, an organisation of third world liberation movements, and very close to the Cuban government.
It was, of course, a Marxist front, but whether it was a Soviet one or not is one of those revealing questions. Was the USSR the centre of a global conspiracy, and a sponsor of socialism ideologically, or just an example amongst others of a twentieth century pathology of socialised tyranny being made attractive to the poor because of its scientific, modernising ambitions?
The film made me think of three things. Firstly, it's a cliche to note that France was a traumatised country for most of its modern existence. The detonation of the revolution underneath it was the cause of a peculiar set of symptoms that persisted through time and that were rooted in bloodshed.
This is an important point; French history was pathological. The experience of terror, coup, restoration and collapse, the third empire, the commune and the Dreyfus affair are all symptoms of a deranged political order, not causes. Had France been an individual in the nineteenth century, one would have marvelled and been appalled at the insane instability of her modernisation, and its grossly distorted nature.
Yet the twentieth century was even worse; the Great War, the Fall and Algeria would have destroyed any other polity. France seems to have survived as a political unit by developing a political class who were capable of anything, and who all acted in an atmosphere akin to that of the more desperate sort of gangsterism.
Mitterand's assassination attempts on himself, and his gang of hired lawbreakers, in this context, were the apotheosis of the system, not an aberration. That and the way that the various legal systems work, with explanation and interpretation of the law coming after its administration, explain a lot about France's attitude to the modern European project, or at least that of the older French politicians.
The second thing that I thought of was the tendency of people in the English speaking countries to think that America or Israel do things first or in isolation and should be brought to book for them. This attitude is put into stark relief by the way other states behaved during and after the cold war.
I always wondered why, for example, Belgians were allowed to celebrate King Leopold's Palais de Justice whilst leaving the Congo memorial to be covered in muck and hidden away behind a mosque. How is that building less of a symbol of darkness to some who call themselves rational than the ruins of Hitler's Chancellery, or their Pentagon bete noire?
People recall, say, the post-1972 Munich operation, and forget the Rainbow Warrior, or Aldo Mori, or Gladio, or what the Italians and French seem to have got up to in the Algerian gas and pipeline affairs. Do those in what was the third world fall for the line that the British, Americans and Israelis did all the bad of Europe, and does what those countries have done compare to what the main body of continental powers did and do?
Need we believe the gangster leaders of some of these countries, and those who wish to appease them here, who talk as though the activities of English speaking powers were uniquely bad? I write as someone who feels himself Irish as well as British, so I need no lectures on how bad the British Empire was before Churchill sacrificed it, to his eternal credit, to destroy the Nazis.
Thirdly, I noted how references to the 'North' and the 'South' were national-revolutionary ones in the sixties, but migrated to creatures like the Brandt and Brundtland Commissions by the eighties, and to the status of factual cliches suitable for A-level and IB syllabi by the nineties. We also forget things like the Tricontinental commission and the Bandung Conference and the relationships they established.
Perhaps I am writing as a parochial English speaker. We--the community of such people--are, given India's sovereign individual rise as a global power, in the business of forgetting the non-aligned League. Others are not. Isn't it wrong that most people know nothing of the biggest collection of states outside of the United Nations?
Why is it, though, that the only time I know that we will hear it mentioned is if McCain wins and people are looking for a precedent for a non-UN but coexisting League so that the neoconservative movement can supplant the United Nations with an association of their own?
Historical certainties that are internalised emerge from forgetting and from groupthinking. For instance, an internationalised, global, legalistic, and essentially liberal cosmopolitanism has forgotten, perhaps deliberately, that there were once other sorts of itself.
Perhaps its followers need to. That which you cannot forget, ignore or finesse and which defies your nostrums--like global Christianity, and especially global Catholicism, for instance--I suppose you have to hate. After you ridicule, and before, of course, you bargain, then give in to it. Or perhaps you just get with quietly building things like the Global Sea Bed Authority, or ECOWAS and the European Union, or our new Super-NATO, and hope that everyone ignores what you are up to.
The West has long, long form on forgetting. The leadership of the Roman Empire by Constantinople was more or less deliberately forgotten after 476 by our historians, who of course happened to be monks then nationalists. It wasn't completely airbrushed away though, just renamed.
The Roman Empire was assigned to 'Byzantium', which was merged in the western mind with Ctesiphon and places further east. The West forgot that Greek was once not a language or art, or philosophy or for that matter just for Greeks, but well, (pardon the pun) a Lingua Franca. We just drew our Dark Ages over it and then covered it in assertions in our curricular texts that only elites read, just as we periodically forget inconvenient church councils.
Similarly, that another sort of global world was possible, and that a sort of 'third way' socialist nationalism (of which I do not approve, but which I note) could have taken root in the nineteen sixties and seventies is today being forgotten. The crimes and lunacy of neoliberalism in Africa and South America are also being set aside, or drowned beneath the righteousness of indignation at the human cost of how Asia modernised.
The leaders of this alternate world all ended up in violent death; perhaps it would have too. It could have come to pass though, and the memory of how easily that could have happened is one that would make those who decide wise if they would just remember it.
That modernity itself is part of the cause of human suffering is a highly unpalatable thought for many of our fellow human beings, and I have to say, it is distasteful to me too. I won't ignore it though.
Mark Mazower drew attention to something else we've all forgotten a few years ago; how viable, and real fascism was as a third option, between communism and liberalism, for the imposition or development of modernity within European nations. We need to remember that just because things worked out, doesn't mean that bad things went away or that history is on some inevitable path.
The absurd picture of one socialist bloc and one western bloc run absolutely by Washington and Moscow--to the point where Poland can be portrayed as a 'former Soviet' nation is being built. Poland was only Soviet when the Nazis and Soviets tried to wipe out its 20-year modern existence by occupying it in 1939 and reincorporating it into their Empires.
The whole Empire game is slipping away from sight, or being reassigned generally to any entity rather than remembered specifically. It's good to be reminded of what actually happened in small, concrete ways, and that there were stories which illuminate that are not spoken in English. It's good for those touched by the West, now near its end, to remember the blood Empires need to swim in.
I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed is infinitely superior as a film to Costa-Gavras's Z, and miles beyond Oliver Stone's attempt to rewrite them for Americans. I'd urge you to watch it. Quite apart from anything else, it's gripping. It also makes you think.
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