I spent some great time this afternoon in a pub with an American doctoral student I've met. We talked for a bit about the political crisis in the UK now, with Prime Minister Gordon Brown hanging on by a thread. I said to N. that while my Tory sympathies are obvious, it has been kind of breathtaking to see how vicious the British media have been and are to Brown. It's like a feeding frenzy. While I don't have enough information to judge Brown's governing skills, he doesn't seem to me to have been such a calamitous failure as to justify the daily savaging he's taking in the papers.
N. told me that Brown really isn't a skillful politician, so he's brought some of this onto himself. But more broadly, the British media culture really does thrive on ripping public figures to shreds. N. said that having spent a few years here, he's come to see the aggression in the media as indicative of a broad and deep anger resident in the UK population. He said class has something to do with it, of course, but he also believes that the dramatic withdrawal (or exile) of religion from the nation's life also does.
"You weren't here yesterday for the Strawberry Festival, so you didn't see how bad it was," he said.
"When I hear 'Cambridge Strawberry Festival,' I think of gentlemen in straw boaters, clotted cream, that sort of thing," I said.
N. smiled. "If you had walked down the street with me yesterday, you would have seen a post-apocalyptic scenario. There was drunkenness everywhere. I saw one woman so drunk she was peeing on top of a car, in front of everybody. Fights breaking out all over. You'd find it hard to grasp how quick people are to get into fights on the street here. This is a normal thing in Britain today."
This wasn't a complete surprise to me, because I read Theodore Dalrymple, the British physician who often laments and decries the decline of Britain into hooliganism and drunkenness. From the Wiki entry on Dalrymple (pen name of Dr. Anthony Daniels):
Daniels' writing has some recurring themes:+ The cause of much contemporary misery in Western countries - criminality, domestic violence, drug addiction, aggressive youths, hooliganism, broken families - is the nihilistic, decadent and/or self-destructive behaviour of people who do not know how to live. Both the smoothing over of this behaviour, and the medicalization of the problems that emerge as a corollary of this behaviour, are forms of indifference. Someone has to tell those people, patiently and with understanding for the particulars of the case, that they have to live differently.
+ Poverty does not explain aggressive, criminal and self-destructive behaviour. In an African slum you will find among the very poor, living in dreadful circumstances, dignity and decency in abundance, which are painfully lacking in an average English suburb, although its inhabitants are much wealthier.
+ An attitude characterized by 'gratefulness' and 'obligations towards others' has been replaced, with awful consequences, by an awareness of rights, a sense of entitlement. The result is resentment as, naturally, those rights are violated by parents, authorities, bureaucracies and others in general.
My friend N. hadn't heard of Dalrymple, but he indicated in our discussion that whatever restraining role religion played in keeping people from giving in to their base impulses, and whatever instructive role religion played in teaching people how to live humanely, is now played by ... nothing.
"The sexual relations between men and women here are mercantile," he said. I asked him what he meant. He said, "They have a word for having anonymous sex in pub bathrooms. It's 'poling.' I mean, just the idea that there's a word for that tells you something."
We had talked in our political conversation about how powerfully the expenses scandal, in which members of Parliament have been revealed as taking advantage of their position to put private goods on the public tab, has been taken intensely personally here. N. told me the outrage felt personally by individual Brits is hard for Americans to grasp -- even though few Americans would approve of this kind of featherbedding in our own politicians.
"It has to do with the feeling widely shared here that politicians are expected to behave like gentlemen," N. said. "All the parties expect their leaders to have gone to Oxbridge, and to behave decently. What's weird is that there seems to be two standards of behavior here. The elites are expected to behave according to traditional standards, more or less, and that gives everybody else license to do whatever they want."
N. said that Cambridge itself -- the part we were in, the old city -- was absolutely beautiful, and that there are so many admirable things about England, and the English. "But you need to keep in mind that the England you're experiencing here is only a part of this country, and a small part," he said.
It is interesting to think about why the British have a recurring and serious problem of soccer hooliganism, one that doesn't seem to exist in the same way in other European cultures. Does it have something to do with that residual anger? Do British readers of this blog agree with N.'s analysis? What does he get right? What is he not seeing?
As we were leaving the pub this evening, the C.S. Lewis Society was gathering in one of the rooms. I thought later about how so many of us Americans, especially a certain sort of Christian, always wants to come here to find the Britain of Lewis, Tolkien and the Inklings. We also want to find our better selves here, projecting onto the England that is an England that we wish were here, and in turn an America we would like to be. A place more civilized, restrained, cultured.
It's only a mile or so from high table at Trinity College, Cambridge, over to the district where the drunken revelry of the Strawberry Festival was going down. Was it always like that here, and we've just sanitized it out of our memory? Hmm.
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Stephen
Funny, when I walked the dog there a few weeks ago it clearly marks out which army groupings on which side stood where.
No kidding. We know what units were there. They just don't include the battle in their regimental history. Pay attention.
Could I have evidence of the mass executions please (as opposed to the ring leaders who tried to topple the state)?
Although the French regulars were granted quarter, the Rebels were not so fortunate. According to 'Hangman' Hawley, when Cumberland arrived at Iverness, he discovered that Major-General Humphrey Bland's troopers had "taken about a hundred of the Irish officers and men prisoners, but not one Scotchman".
The British Army's culpability for 'war crimes' at Culloden has generated considerable debate. Although the scale of the butchery was later exaggerated by Jacobite propagandists, enough atrocities were perpetrate against the helpless to lend substance to their claims."
http://books.google.com/books?id=92CBkB0estkC&pg=PA54&lpg=PA54&dq=culloden+war+crimes&source=bl&ots=6VjemiJXHc&sig=BZXzh48Pq1VLoeSV9hyFg-Qniys&hl=en&ei=BVktSvTeMYKltgePjYW1CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10#PPA54,M1
Review of Culloden Moor 1746: The death of the Jacobite cause
The only complaint with Reid's narrative applies equally to his other works on Culloden: a tendency to downplay British atrocities. Nowhere in these pages do we find mention of "Butcher Cumberland," the notorious accolade for the British commander who presided over one of the grimmer chapters in British military history. Reid's bias is the standard device for those who wish to avoid dealing with black pages in their country's history: deny, minimize, ignore. According to Reid, John Prebble, author of the classic Culloden in 1961, was too inclined to accept atrocity allegations at face value. Reid denies the most vicious atrocity stories about Culloden - such as the alleged burning of Jacobite wounded in a farmhouse and bayoneting of wounded - but concedes that "isolated incidents" by the "vestry men" (British short-term conscripts) probably occurred. Minimize: it wasn't the British army that did these atrocities, but if any occurred it must have been the draftees not the regulars. Furthermore, the "everybody was doing approach" is employed by suggesting that other countries dealt just as harshly with rebels (this is really the "lowest common denominator" approach in suggesting that one's army merely need not act worse than any other army - say, the Turks - rather than setting any kind of higher standard). Then, Reid has the audacity to state that, "the bitter legacy of those punitive expeditions [that followed the Battle of Culloden], justified as they were..." Murder and rape are justified? Readers should consult Prebble's account to get a better understanding of the year-long killing, raping and looting spree that the British army undertook along the Great Glenn in reprisal for the Jacobite Uprising. In particular, Prebble - unlike Reid - notes that the British were so indiscriminate in their reprisals that they often brutalized loyalist Scots who had supported the crown against the rebels. Even if Prebble's account is too biased against the British as Reid claims, there is no doubt that the British punitive measures were very harsh indeed. Furthermore, American readers should consider the brutal repressive measures that this same British army would use to combat American rebels thirty years later; British regulars bayoneted many unarmed American soldiers in the Gowanus Swamps outside New York in 1776 and Banastre Tarleton's atrocities in the south were infamous. Reid's efforts to whitewash this sorry chapter in British military history are just as offensive as German historians attempting to minimize the activities of the SS or Japanese historians the Bataan Death March.
http://www.amazon.com/Culloden-Moor-1746-Jacobite-Campaign/dp/1841764124
Here is Brittania.com
Much has been written about the killing field of Culloden that took place in April 1745. Any advantages the Highlanders enjoyed in earlier battles had been won by a fast attack upon a line unable to use its firepower. Culloden was different. It was firepower alone that decided that outcome, well-disciplined firepower against a clearly visible target. The enormous casualties suffered by the Highlanders in their futile charges against the entrenched infantry and the slaughter of their wounded was followed by a brutal aftermath.
The Scottish clans were regarded as nothing more than barbarians. Their property was plundered by Cumberland's men with the Duke's approval. Punitive expeditions were undertaken to kill as many Jacobites as possible "if not all," and destroy their property. Systematic killings, rapes and devastation became the norm. Sad to say, many of those who delighted most in the rape of the Highlands were themselves Scots; the Royal Scots Fusiliers had been in the front line of Cumberland's troops on Culloden Moor.
The no-longer Bonnie Prince died in January 1788, long after his sacred Jacobitism had been exhausted. The butcher who went by the name Duke of Cumberland was greatly honored for his victory, but also reviled for his treatment of what after all were British subjects. He was later disgraced for his failure to defeat the French armies in the final years of the War of the Austrian Succession and died in 1765.
Enjoy reading about the non-rapes and non-warcrimes.
Some more on rapes in post Culloden Scotland here in "Women, Violence and War"
http://books.google.com/books?id=_RSi4WL0RP8C&pg=PA91&lpg=PA91&dq=culloden+rape+civilians&source=bl&ots=ranBmB8Ec9&sig=HS03ctxk3So7Ot1ZQ7j3P4KG1nw&hl=en&ei=3l0tSuG8A4uMtgfT9MzLCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9
Rape in War: Lessons of the Balkan Conflicts in the 1990s
violation of women in war concerns the raping of Scottish highland women, during and after the Battle of Culloden in 1746." Information ...
www.informaworld.com/index/783168104.pdf
*****************************************************
And some more...
Presentation by Melissa Raphael
Research on genocide and sexual violence
STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL FORUM
1 The classification of sexual violence as the means of committing genocide was subsequently confirmed in the ICTR judgement in the Prosecutor v. Musema,
ICTR-96-13 I judgement, 27 January 2000 (see http://www.shanland.org.HR/Publication/LtoR/sexual_violence_as--_a_constituent.htm).
2 Examples of the use of sexual violence in acts of partial genocide include the Israelite practice of abduction and rape of women from other tribes during warfare
(condoned in Numbers 31:17-18, 32-35), the mass rape of indigenous women in the early modern European colonial conquest and expansion in the
Americas, and the systematic rape of the Highland clanswomen in the eighteenth century by English troops after the battle of Culloden.
Article from the Cleveland State Law Review on atrocities and rape in Scotland and their impact on The Bill of Rights...
Lotsa great stuff on people being burned, disembowled etc
http://www.clevelandstatelawreview.org/54/issue4/Morris-FINAL_PROOFS.pdf
Funny how everybody else seems to know about this...
Re: Don't pretend that Scotland has no grievance.
There is not one living person in Scotland with a 250 year old grievance. By that idiotic sort of thinking I should hate all Southerners since some Rebel sharpshooter drilled a bullet between the eyes of my great-great-grandfather, Pvt. Irwin of the 7th Michigan Calvary, in 1864 (which is a bit more recent than Bonnie Prince Charlie's exploits, or certainly than the adventures of Robert the Bruce.) As Our Lord said, "Leave the dead to bury themselves.
,em>There is not one living person in Scotland with a 250 year old grievance. By that idiotic sort of thinking I should hate all Southerners since some Rebel sharpshooter drilled a bullet between the eyes of my great-great-grandfather, Pvt. Irwin of the 7th Michigan Calvary, in 1864 (which is a bit more recent than Bonnie Prince Charlie's exploits, or certainly than the adventures of Robert the Bruce.)
Let's expand that just a bit. Suppose that not only did your great great grandfather get killed, but your great great grandmother and her two eldest daughters were gang raped, and the eldest son was used for bayonet practice. You can't really be entirely sure of the parentage of the next child born at this point, since it does look a little...iffy. Afterwards, your surviving family lost all possessions and land as the house was burned, and they sent into indentured servitude in a foreign country and never were never able to return. The country that did this to your kin has never apologized or even acknowledged the harm that was done...not only to your own family but thousands of families.
Maybe you might just see why an awful lot of Scottish Americans are a wee bit resentful.
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