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Ungrateful , untrustworthy Africa
'Cynical armchair know-it-all pigs, with hands clenched at the bottom of their mean pockets, shouting at the telly that they know better.' That was my favourite quote from news commentary last week. It was uttered by comedian Marcus Brigstocke, on Radio 4's The Now Show. He was talking about comments from members of the public on last week's allegations that part of the money raised for famine relief through Live Aid had been diverted to buy arms for Ethiopian militias.
You yourself may have experienced some of the public reaction. 'You see?' many people seemed to be saying, 'I knew it was all a scam! Africa does it to itself once again. We [meaning the wealthy, non-African First World] should stop helping.' And, in a sense we should. We should have done so a long time ago. We should have stopped 'helping' before we went in and 'civilized' Africa, the way King Leopold of Belgium 'civilized' Congo by killing over ten million people or the practice we helpfully gave them of using amputated human hands as proof of military work done (and the thousands of amputees that left behind).
We should have stopped helping before introducing the 'chicotte', a whip used to 'punish' Africans who did not go along with slave-life. This whip, made of dried hippo hide, was turned to a sharp-edged corkscrew at the end and applied to bare buttocks, where 20 strokes resulted in unconsciousness and 100 strokes would likely kill the ungrateful African being civilized.
We should have stopped before 1904, when Germany put down a rebellion in Namibia by issuing an order to troops that every man of the Herero tribe, armed or unarmed, be shot. We (the generous colonial benefactors) could also have stopped before poisoning their wells and leaving entire communities to die slowly of thirst in the desert (or be bayonetted and clubbed to death with rifle-butts).
We should have stopped before supporting the madder-than-a-bag-of-cut-snakes-on-PCP dictator, Mobutu, after helping him seize power from a democratic but anti-us-helpful-benefactors government in Zaire. We should have stopped before using his image, the one we created, as an excuse for imposing our own capitalist dictatorship in many African states in the 80s. The one in which 'structural adjustment' meant those nations were forced to stop funding public education and our own companies were allowed to devastate their agriculture sector, buy up vast tracts of land for a pittance and privatize water to the point where they actually owned the rain.
Oh I know what the apologists for colonialism will say: we brought roads. We brought order, and anyway, they did far worse things to each other before we came along. All true. But why, then, do you take such a hard line on the 'order' brought to bear in Zimbabwe, Burma and Iran? If you want to make a civilization omelette, after all, you need to kill and torture tens of thousands of brown people, right? The fact is, because we like to forget what has been done in the name of all this 'help' we have given Africa, we genuinely think it was, on the whole, positive. It was not. And it did not stop there.
Today, forest populations are forced off land they have held for centuries so that French, British, Portuguese and Belgian companies can cut down thousand-year-old forests and transport the wood to Europe. A vicious war in Eastern Congo continues, largely because it makes it cheap and easy to export the minerals we need for mobile phones and games consoles. And wealthy countries' security forces continue to run violent and illegal 'anti-terror' operations on African soil. Yes, we really should stop helping.
Good governance and transparency are important. Mistakes will be and have been made. But if we use that to justify an attitude that suggests we stop sharing even the pathetically small amount of our obscene wealth that we currently do with those starving or suffering in Africa, then God is not with us. And I myself agree with Marcus Brigstocke when he calls us 'pitiless b******s'.
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Jonathan Langley, 11/03/2010 |
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I love the BBC
'Innuendo and exaggeration'. That's what News International accused the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of last week. The quote was in reaction to a report, also released last week, in which the Committee was rather critical of News International (the main UK subsidiary of the ridiculously huge News Corp) and one of its papers called News of the World. That's right. The people who own News of the World, Fox News and The Sun are accusing a bunch of people whose idea of a snappy title is 'Press standards, privacy and libel' of innuendo and exaggeration. Laugh? I nearly punched a hole through a little statue of Rupert Murdoch.
The Baptist Times [in which this column first appeared in early March] is a small paper and I am in no way a rich man, so I will not risk being sued by saying everything I truly feel about the Murdoch-owned media behemoth currently intent on ruining journalism (and the world). I will just say look at the front page of News of the World the next time you're at a news stand. Read the words put into the mouths of the pretties on page three of The Sun. Enjoy the measured, subtle, grown-up style and balanced, intellectual content of their coverage of the latest celebrity sex scandal. If you're interested in what their brothers and sisters on US TV are like, watch Fox News presenters and pundits suggest that vaguely socialised healthcare is all about the government killing the elderly, and then maybe you'll get an idea of what I think. I couldn't possibly comment, obviously.
In related news last week we heard that the BBC is tabling plans to lay off large numbers of its workforce and to close many of its operations. Much of this comes in the wake of the Tories promising that they will cut back on spending on the BBC, which in turn comes after Rupert Murdoch's son, James, called the expansion of the Beeb 'chilling' and 'a threat to independent journalism.' His campaign to get the BBC cut down to a smaller, more manageable size has some supporters in Labour, not just the Tories, and some commentators last week saw the proposed cuts across the BBC as a kind of 'pre-emptive strike', defensive pruning in the hope that bigger cuts will then not be justifiable. So while we should all join campaigns to save the variously beloved bits of Aunty Beeb we want to see survive, let's not blame the BBC brass themselves. Let's blame a handful of private-enterprise media moguls who want to see the BBC destroyed. Why? Because it is competition. Brilliant, wonderful competition that does not need to pander to the lowest common denominator to get funding from myopic advertisers.
That is not to say that the BBC does not pander to idiots. Just think of Chris Moyles on Radio1 or such gems as 'Snog, Marry, Avoid?' and 'Hotter Than My Daughter' on BBC TV. But what it does is attempt to provide as broad a range of programming as possible. Radio4 does not need to dumb down, make prank calls or focus on Paris Hilton's sex life, because its function and funding are not at the mercy of the profit motive. And the country is better for it. Niche music and even Pop are served by Radio 1 without being completely dominated by the American artists big record companies already push, and the country's music industry is better for it. Inasmuch as our news-gathering community is held up to better standards than those of fast-food sound-bite tabloidism, it is because the BBC is there, with no political agenda and no need to keep advertisers happy, and the country, if not the world, is better for it.
The BBC is one of a handful of things that make Britain truly great. And when phone-hacking, right-wing, mammon-worshipping, journalism-destroyers try to kill or even wound it, every person of good conscience should fight them, every step of the way.
This column first appeared in The Baptist Times on 5 March.
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Jonathan Langley, 07/03/2010 |
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Brainwashing is sexy
You could almost hear the hallelujahs and quiche-scented whoops of approval, as Christians applauded the carefully crafted statement that was created to achieve just such a reception. Last week the Conservative Party announced that it would be tackling companies who sexualised children in their advertising – and a good thing, too. If you're expecting a cartoon liberal 'I think every nine-year-old needs to learn pole-dancing' response from me, I'm sorry. But I would say this: why stop there? Why limit it to girls? Why not clamp down on all advertising that simultaneously tells women (not just girls) that the most important thing in the world is being sexually attractive and then tells them that they are failing, always falling short in this regard? Why not tackle advertising that tells you, sometimes subtly, sometimes not subtly, that you are a bad mother if you do not wash your family's clothes properly (and by 'properly', I of course mean 'using a specific machine/detergent/softner) or buy certain foods or clean with specific germ-killers? Why not target the adverts that tell a woman that unless she can do the impossible in reversing the effects of something as indifferent and inexorable as the passing of time and the natural biological process of growing older, she will be alone, unhappy, unfulfilled?
Do you want to know why? Because the 'family values' cynically trotted out in statements like this (and, to be fair, in mechanically 'family-oriented' press releases from Labour, too) have everything to do with capturing a section of the vote and little to do with genuine concern for the moral fabric of society. The politicians espousing the proposals may even believe them. But they have not thought very long or hard about them. If they had, they would be honest and say that an advert telling a man that if he does not drive a certain car he is not really a man or that his worth as a human being depends on the clothes he wears and the shoes he owns is far more damaging to our nation's moral fabric than violent computer games or sexy-pre-teen cartoons.
Because the majority of the world's most creative minds are working night and day on advertising that, while it may not sexualise children, tells us that if such products cannot be afforded, we have failed. To be attractive, to be respected, to be happy, to feel comfortable, to be popular and to feel alive, we're told to buy and buy more needless and environmentally unsustainable 'goods'. And politicians focus on the adverts that start ten years too early with their campaign to colonise young women's minds, and they ask us for applause? No. Not until they do the difficult thing, the thing that will offend and horrify their party contributors, whose livelihoods are based on enslaving people to a cycle of debt and overconsumption. Not until they bite the hand that feeds them and attack the majority of advertising as little more than manipulation and brainwashing.
But let's not feel too smug. After all, why do 'family values' get trotted out in Britain and America around election times? Why do politicians kiss babies in a traditional display that, while not actually sexualising children is still frankly creepy? They do it to appeal to us.
Christians have developed a reputation for small-mindedness and stupidity. We supposedly only care about a social ill if it is linked to sexual immorality (don't believe me? How many people-trafficking campaigns have you heard of in your church or Christian media that talk about the numerically huge problem of non-sexual slavery?) or, weirdly, a religious group even more conservative than us. The perception, to be fair, is not entirely just. But it has some basis in fact. And as long as that is the case, we will continue to be played like the dupes we are by politicians and marketers, and our plans for actually making a difference to the society we live in will come to nothing. There is little wrong with addressing sexual immorality. But there are other things to care about, if we care enough to look.
This column appeared in The Baptist Times on 26 February 2010
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Jonathan Langley, 26/02/2010 |
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Robertson's Siloam
Haiti has 'brought decades of torment on itself by making a pact with the devil.' That's what American evangelical Christian and all-round right-wing violence-advocator, Pat Robertson reportedly said about the earthquake that devastated Haiti last week, according to The Guardian.
That's no surprise, really. Pat Robertson's stupidity and shocking lack of theological integration have been legendary since he called on the US to assassinate Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez. Honestly, it would have been more newsworthy if he hadn't said something appalling. Disappointingly, many Christians from 'the chatroom classes' agreed with him, posting much about Vodoun (voodoo to them) bringing curses and God's judgement.
There will be enough theologians explaining disaster this week. Me, I have no answers. I think bad things just happen. Just like lots of good things (and lack of bad things) do. Hopefully you'll hear Luke 13:4-5 enough this week for me not to have to quote it. But God's vengeance for not being good evangelicals seems an unsatisfactory earthquake-precipitator, what with every country from Israel to the Vatican (and all those in between) presumably falling short of collective righteousness.
Robertson (who seems already to have forgotten the disaster of 9-11) was widely condemned for his comments, though other, more subtle fools last week prescribed 'intrusive paternalism' and a hard line from the US government to 'sort things out'. Their brand of prejudice is more widely shared, I suspect, by those who think we 'civilized' countries spend too much time bailing out 'uncivilized' ones that refuse to prepare for disaster. After all, Haiti was a basket case before the earthquake, right? Yes. But only with European and American help.
Haiti was the only slave colony ever to overthrow its French masters, in 1804. It was rewarded with a trade embargo from the US and Europe and was later forced to 'buy' the hard-won freedom for 150 million francs – a debt that crippled the Haitian economy for the next 200 years. In 1915, to protect its interests during the First World War, the US military occupied Haiti. They stayed until 1934 and killed 2,250 Haitians while there. From 1957 to 1986, vicious American-backed dictators, 'Papa Doc' and his son 'Baby Doc' Duvalier oversaw the death and exile of tens of thousands of Haitians, a dynastic regime synonymous with oppression and cruelty. But it was also anti-communist and received tens of millions of dollars in US aid and military support while the Ton Tonton Macoutes (Duvalier's notorious secret police) tortured and terrorised the nation. Under 'Baby Doc', in the '70s and '80s, so-called 'aid' came with the usual price-tags of opening markets to US companies, decimating Haiti's agricultural sector, but enriching both American farmers and investors in the new 'assembly industry' (read: 'sweatshops').
In 1991 the US aided a coup against democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former priest, who, while no Castro, did double the minimum wage, refuse some attempts at American privatization and demanded that France repay the 'reparations' for daring to overthrow their colonial slavery and tyranny. In 2004 he was forced out of Haiti at gunpoint in another coup, this time involving American, French and Canadian troops.
A legacy of abuse, destabilisation and exploitation did not cause the earthquake. But they have left Haiti unable to defend itself. If you're looking for a neat devil-oriented explanation for the suffering there today, why not examine the satanic pact western nations have made with Mammon?
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Jonathan Langley, 22/01/2010 |
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