It is some years since I heard, with disbelief, an Irish father whose daughter had been killed in the unspeakable atrocity of the Enniskillen Cenotaph bombing, say that he forgave her killers. He is dead now, poor soul, and I have no wish to offend, but I have to say that I don’t think he was fit to be a father. A man who can forgive his child’s murderers may be a Christian, but he is something less than human, and he sets a dreadful example by, in effect, absolving them. I hate to think that my own father would have been so lost to his parental duty as to forgive anyone who had murdered me—but then I know it would never have crossed his mind. Vengeance, legal or otherwise, would have been his one thought, and if you think that un-Christian, just be thankful that it was a creed to which previous generations held. Because if they hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here.
“Grieving” and “forgiving” are both heads of the same Hydra of political correctness, and there are many, many more, although few quite as fatuous, dishonest, and maliciously provocative as the great cult of apology. This is part of the guilt industry so carefully nurtured by the liberal Left, which sees no evil save in the past of the white race (as already noted in the slavery question), and is strident in demanding that it should grovel for “crimes” committed in the past.
Thus we have Mr Blair apologising for the Irish famine (as though he personally was responsible for it, and there was the least cause for Britain to feel guilt about it), while the Pope regrets the Roman Catholic Church’s failure to denounce the Nazis, and a member of the British royal family says sorry for the destruction of Dresden. Then there is the bawling of the “Native Americans” for atonement (and compensation, naturally) by white America, the disgraceful demand from Indian sources that the Queen should apologise for “atrocities” allegedly committed by the Raj, and the even more contemptible cry from Afrikaners (a people whose record of beastliness is matched only by Germany, Belgium, and various banana republics) that she should apologise for the Boer War.
Words fail me, but it is necessary in the face of all this impertinent and dishonourable whining that one should approach the matter calmly, as I do.
To begin with, it should be obvious that only the person who has done a wrong can apologise for it. For anyone else to take it on himself is not only wrong but impudent, since it may well be that the original perpetrator would not himself feel obliged to apologise if he were still here. But it is also wicked, for it is racism of the most repulsive kind, since to apologise for an act committed by one’s ancestors, or kinsmen, or co-religionists, is to accept the concept of racial guilt—and that is the kind of thinking which results in American-Italian children pursuing small Jews with cries of “You killed Christ!”
It is doubtful if this occurred to Mr Blair, intent on parading his p.c. virtue, and no doubt, in his pursuit of the chimera of a “peace process”, it seemed wise to placate Irish nationalism. His Holiness probably bowed to similar political pressure, although in his case he may have felt himself the embodiment of Catholicism, and so responsible for its crimes and misdemeanours. They were both misguided, to say the least; apologies, if they were ever due, would be the concern of Pius XI and Pius XII, not of John Paul; and of Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell, not Mr Blair, who is obviously unaware that, far from feeling guilt over the Great Hunger, Britain can feel pride at the huge efforts which its people made to alleviate it.
Similarly, apology for Dresden is an insult to Bomber Command; if apology were due (which it patently is not) it would have to come from them, no one else. And the suggestion that the Queen should apologise for acts committed in previous centuries is as foolish as it is insolent. Nor is the Archbishop of Canterbury in a position to apologise for “wars, racism, and other sins committed in the name of Christianity” during the last millennium. Nor is the Pope, who seems to have an obsession with apology, to make one to Africa for the slave trade.
To put it bluntly, it is none of their business, and they do wrong to take it upon themselves to speak for the dead. George Carey slaughtered no prisoners at the Siege of Acre, and John Paul did not work his ticket on the Middle Passage. And it is doubtful if the Crusaders or the slave-runners felt any reason to apologise. So condemn them by all means, if it makes you feel better, but don’t have the effrontery to apologise for them.
All this is crashingly obvious—unless you believe in racial guilt and inherited guilt, and it is hard to think of a more wicked, dangerous doctrine. It makes for enmity, hatred, and mistrust—between black and white, Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Muslim, German and practically everybody. The list is endless, and while such mutual antipathies are inevitable, that is no reason for going through the bogus and thoroughly hypocritical farce of apology. It serves only to keep the hatreds alive.
Which is why, while I cannot help feeling a dislike for the Japanese en masse, I cannot for a moment subscribe to the suggestion that modern Japan should apologise for atrocities committed by their fathers and grandparents. Those were the guilty ones, not their descendants.
The sickest joke about the apology racket is its complete one-sidedness. Some modern Indians demand apology from Britain for the Amritsar massacre—but does it occur to them that, if such apologies are due, they must cut both ways? Is modern India prepared to apologise for the appalling atrocities of Cawnpore, Meerut, and Jhansi? Do the “Native Americans”, beating their breasts about Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, feel like owning up to the massacre of helpless white prisoners at Fort William Henry and Fort Venango, or atoning for the abominations practised by the Apaches on the Rio Grande settlements, or the shattered wagon trains and butchered immigrants? Are the Irish republicans, keening over Drogheda and Cromwell, ready to apologise for the burned-out Protestants and the foul crimes of the IRA? Do we hear sincere apology, for their part in the slave trade, from the descendants of those Africans who made such a good thing out of it?
Don’t be naive. Political correctness demands that blame should lie on one side only, usually the British and American, and that no non-whites can ever be taxed with past crimes, the rationale being that if they committed them, they were justified, and it was all the whites’ fault anyway. Incidentally, I doubt if many “Native Americans” have even heard of Fort William Henry, and you can be sure that no p.c. historian is going to enlighten them.
So much for the apology industry, one of the most truly rotten manifestations of p.c. And yet great and good people are stupid enough, and pressured enough, to subscribe to it; they feel they ought to, and not having considered the dreadful implications of the concept of racial guilt, they accept meekly the vilification from ethnic minority agitators and liberal bigots. The black humour of it all is that they believe they are living in the most enlightened age this country has ever seen, when the truth is that we have to look back to the days of supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church and the excesses of the Puritans to find spiritual tyrannies to compare with political correctness. Common to all is the abominable doctrine: “Thou shalt not speak, nor even think for thyself, but only as thou art told.”
(Oh, shame on me. I have used the phrase “black humour”, and must apologise for the deep offence this must have given to all non-whites. It was entirely unintentional—which of course is no excuse. Sick humour, then. I’ll just have to risk offending everyone in hospital.)
* But only temporarily. There were nineteen complaints (none from Germans) and London Underground had the advertisements removed from trains, but the Advertising Standards Authority rejected the complaints saying the posters were unlikely to cause offence. The German Embassy said it was a misconception that Germans had no sense of humour.
* Which, incredibly, can result in pay-outs of hundreds of thousands of pounds (rather more than a war widow’s pension or the pittance paid to disabled war veterans).
* The application of this clumsy expression solely to those who used to be called Red Indians is quite wrong: anyone born in the United States is obviously a native American. In fact the phrase ap
pears to have been coined in the nineteenth century by Theodore Roosevelt, referring to Americans of British and Dutch descent.
* Not the least of the inconsistencies in Christian teaching lies in the contrast between the Good Shepherd who blessed the meek and preached brotherly love, and the furious roughneck who beat up the moneychangers in the temple. Whether his violence was justified is by the way; the significance is that Jesus, far from being the rather delicate figure of religious art, must have been an unusually tough, powerfully built, and aggressive bruiser: I have seen the kind of muscle employed by Middle Eastern moneychangers, and if the Saviour could tackle that lot single-handed and come out on his feet, he had nothing to learn about unarmed combat. This evidence of his strength and vigour, with other indications in the Gospels, leads me to believe that he probably survived the Crucifixion and that the Resurrection was simply a reappearance.
INTERLUDE
To Scotland, with Love
“THERE’S LITTLE GOOD in an English Whig; in a Scotch Whig there’s none,” says John Law of Laurieston in Sabatini’s The Gamester. For Whig read politician, and consider, in support of this, that the most Scottish government ever to sit at Westminster is manifestly the worst. Whether the new Scottish Parliament will prove to be a burdensome and expensive disaster it is still too early to say, but the eagerness with which its members have voted for a colossally expensive and entirely unnecessary new parliament building which will be an architectural atrocity as well as a monument to its occupiers’ self-importance, does not bode well.
I was, and remain, a firm anti-Scottish Nationalist, but whereas my enmity thirty-five years ago was unqualified, and expressed through the columns of The Glasgow Herald at every opportunity, it has been modified of late. I can no longer blame any inhabitant of Scotland for wanting to get rid of Westminster rule, although whether King Stork will be any better than King Log (assuming full independence does come) is doubtful. He’ll be a dam’ sight more expensive, with the loss of the Westminster subsidy and inevitable increased taxation—and this, I confess, was what I found most baffling about the vote (minority one though it was) to set up the Edinburgh Parliament in the first place. If my countrymen had a virtue, I always thought, it was thrift, and yet they voted for something which would inevitably lighten their pockets—and to no good purpose that I can see.
Of course, the cry will be that self-government, whether by the present half-parliament or a fully independent one, is to be preferred to government from London, and there’s something in it, if not much. Certain matters can probably be better settled by Scots in Scotland than by Westminster. But the real reason for Scottish satisfaction in devolution is that it feeds the national amour propre, and may be seen as raising two fingers to England—or, as the more virulent Sassenach-baiters like to say, “the English”.
Well, it will certainly be an expensive gesture, and to me it seems to be a symptom not of Scottish pride, but rather of a lack of it. There is something wrong, I feel, with a country whose nationalism seems to be based, to some extent if not entirely, on dislike of another country. I never hear that God-awful dirge, “Flower of Scotland”, which must be the most pathetic whine ever set to music, without reflecting on the inferiority complex which it reflects. You don’t, if you have any national pride, have as your anthem a prolonged greet against an enemy whom you last defeated on a large scale seven centuries ago. “Sent them homeward to think again,” indeed; well, they did think again, and beat the hell out of us on more than one subsequent occasion, and we only held on by dint of a ferocious refusal to be subdued which I’m not sure still exists in Scotland today. If Scotland proves to be pro-European, I can be sure it doesn’t.
The damnable thing about this poor-mouthed resentment of England, which so often finds an unworthy echo in the shawl-over-the-head complaint that Scotland has been oppressed and held down, is that it’s so much rubbish. Until recently, no self-respecting Scot felt anything but superiority towards his southern neighbour. After all, Flodden and Falkirk and Solway Moss notwithstanding, we had stood toe to toe with the most formidable foe on earth and seen them off as no other nation ever had (and if this seems at odds with my sneer at “Flower of Scotland”, it isn’t, because it’s said with pride and not with whimpering self-pity). We weren’t just good, we were the best, the little, poverty-stricken corner of Europe that gave the world a lion’s share of great inventions and discoveries, rivalled only by Greece among the small nations of genius, whose scholars and adventurers and fighting men and explorers and scientists were household words, and nowhere more respected, be it noted, than in England; was it not Barrie who, in addition to observing that there was nothing more impressive than a Scotsman on the make, also remarked that there was nothing a Scot could not achieve, especially if he went among the English—and he should have known. He was echoing that closet Scot Nat, Lord Macaulay, who had pointed out that the sergeants and the foremen were invariably Scots—and yet today there are Scots who will rail against the England which was so necessary to them, and which they came, if not to dominate, at least to influence out of all proportion to Scotland’s size and numbers.
So, that’s that. Here’s tae us, wha’s like us? (Dam’ few, and they’re a’ deid.) Having got that off my chest, not only to show my pride in my race and country, but also because (like “Celtic 1, Partick Thistle 4”) it’s something that cannot be said too often, I have to add that my feeling towards England and the English is almost, though not quite, equally strong. Perhaps if you’re born in England, as I was, if you grow up there, and marry an Englishwoman of the English, and soldier with Englishmen, and have children who are half-English, half-Scottish, then England becomes part of you, and you of England. No doubt it’s a sentimental thing, based on misty ideas of Robin Hood and the bowmen of Agincourt, of Runy-mede and the Armada, of Gray’s Elegy and Shakespeare’s prose, of Squire Western and G. K. Chesterton and Falstaff and the Pilgrims and the Londoners unbroken by the Blitz and my fellow-Cumbrians walking into the Japanese shellfire—hopelessly romantic, you will agree, but very real too.
Unlike the Scottish internationalist who said he was impartial, he didn’t care who beat England, I am for England against anyone —except Scotland. I know that I am an unusual Scot in this respect. I didn’t use to be; I can remember Scottish supporters carrying Stanley Matthews shoulder-high, but that was many years ago, and the world was different then.
The sudden increase in anti-English feeling, ranging from mild resentment to naked hatred, has saddened and sometimes shamed me. It is stronger now than it has been in my lifetime or, I suspect, since the Darien fiasco.* Why, is not difficult to understand: the partnership with England, the greatest and most beneficent of its kind in human history, lost its reason for existence with the passing of empire. The high road to England which Dr Johnson rightly described as the noblest prospect a Scot ever sees, no longer led on to the ends of the earth; the huge opportunities of imperialism, from which Scotland profited so greatly in wealth and achievement, had gone; that partnership essential to Scotland’s development was essential no more. So dissolution was inevitable, and to inward-looking people the old animosities come all the more easily when accompanied by a general decline in power and status. It’s the end of an old song, indeed; the best song the world ever heard, I think—but then, I remember it in all its glory.
It will be seen that my feeling is a nostalgic one, for a time when Scotland was the junior but never the lesser partner in a Britain that mattered in the world. Well, that time’s gone, and it may be that Scotland will be well-advised to go it alone hereafter; I just don’t know, and I confess my opposition to devolution, and to possible future independence, is not based on sound foundations of polity or economy or social philosophy; like most Scottish feelings it is based on prejudice and passion.
For example, my principal objection to a Scottish Parliament goes back to the opening sentence of this piece: I know my fellow-countryman, and the ghastly change tha
t can come over him when he is elevated to political office, his delight in his own voice, his tendency to swell visibly like a cock on a midden, his evident conviction that he is worthy and wise beyond his fellows—you know him well, from Burns and Scott and (if you’re old enough) Willie McCulloch’s record of the “worthy baillie”. The thought of him being given a Parliament of his own, to strut and bore and feel important in, was enough to make me regret that I no longer had a newspaper’s leader column at my command.
As to those who have full independence in their sights, I suspect that they cherish private dreams not only of rolling in limousines and refreshing themselves at the troughs of office, but even of aspiring to the role (dare we say it?) of Scottish Ambassador to Washington or Paris or even the Court of St James. In this they resemble the leaders of almost every independence movement since time began—full of fine slogans and lofty ideals for the voters, but not without occasional thought to their own advantage. Garibaldis have always been thin on the ground.