By George Monbiot, published on www.monbiot.com, 10th January 2013.

Dear Travellers’ Solidarity Network,

You have made some grave allegations about me on the grounds of a radical misinterpretation of an article I wrote. It is hard to understand how you could have misread it so badly, but I’m prepared to believe it’s an honest mistake.

You accuse me, among other faults, of “racism”; of “imply[ing] that all Travellers are stupid and bestial”; of believing that it’s impossible to be “open-minded about Travellers”; of constructing “a generalisation of Travellers”; of “serv[ing] to criminalise an entire group of people”; of “encourag[ing] the perception that all Travellers are thieves”; of “delegitimis[ing] reports by Travellers of police violence; of turning the victim into the accused”; of seeking revenge and of acting maliciously.

These are extremely serious charges, and I would have hoped that, for the sake of your own credibility if nothing else, you would have ensured that they were well-supported before making them. I challenge you to show where I have said or implied any of these things. Your account of the story I wrote is pure fiction.

My views of the situation concerning travellers are contained in the following articles, and they have not changed since I wrote them:

http://www.monbiot.com/1995/05/15/britains-cultural-cleansing/

http://www.monbiot.com/1999/11/04/criminally-different/

http://www.monbiot.com/2003/11/04/acceptable-hatred/

I have long argued against the kind of racism, generalisation and persecution of which you are accusing me. However, I do not accept that this defence must extend to pretending that all travellers are at all times virtuous. Nor do I believe it trumps the duty to tell a story truthfully and well.

What I described was exactly what happened. I made no generalisations, no implications, no comments on travellers at all – except one: “Travellers … were often – and for good reason – wary of telling people much about their lives.” My article sought to make no points, draw no lessons, extract no morals. It was an account of a remarkable coincidence – nothing more, nothing less. What you read into it simply was not there.

I see the man I met as part of life’s rich tapestry, and have no malice or feelings of revenge towards him. After I lost my coat, I bought a new one of the same kind; it wasn’t expensive. Every community contains a wide range of characters, and it seems to me that travellers are no different in this respect from anyone else. I made no claim to the contrary.

When I first read your response, it struck me as so crazy that it was not worth answering. But it has been picked up by other people and circulated online, and has become the basis of a new tranche of hatemail. You have made some very serious false accusations and attacked someone who has a long history of support for your cause on an entirely groundless basis. I am writing to ask you to put the record straight. At the very least I’d ask you to publish this letter on your website.

Yours Sincerely,

George Monbiot

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 11th January 2010

Avatar, James Cameron’s blockbusting 3-D film, is both profoundly silly and profound. It’s profound because, like most films about aliens, it is a metaphor for contact between different human cultures. But in this case the metaphor is conscious and precise: this is the story of European engagement with the native peoples of the Americas. It’s profoundly silly because engineering a happy ending demands a plot so stupid and predictable that it rips the heart out of the film. The fate of the native Americans is much closer to the story told in another new film, The Road, in which a remnant population flees in terror as it is hunted to extinction.

But this is a story no one wants to hear, because of the challenge it presents to the way we choose to see ourselves. Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas; the American nations were founded on them. This is a history we cannot accept.

In his book American Holocaust, the US scholar David Stannard documents the greatest acts of genocide the world has ever experienced(1). In 1492, some 100m native peoples lived in the Americas. By the end of the 19th Century almost all of them had been exterminated. Many died as a result of disease. But the mass extinction was also engineered.

When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, they described a world which could scarcely have been more different from their own. Europe was ravaged by war, oppression, slavery, fanaticism, disease and starvation. The populations they encountered were healthy, well-nourished and mostly (with exceptions like the Aztecs and Incas) peacable, democratic and egalitarian. Throughout the Americas the earliest explorers, including Columbus, remarked on the natives’ extraordinary hospitality. The conquistadores marvelled at the amazing roads, canals, buildings and art they found, which in some cases outstripped anything they had seen at home. None of this stopped them from destroying everything and everyone they encountered.

The butchery began with Columbus. He slaughtered the native people of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) by unimaginably brutal means. His soldiers tore babies from their mothers and dashed their heads against rocks. They fed their dogs on living children. On one occasion they hung 13 Indians in honour of Christ and the 12 disciples, on a gibbet just low enough for their toes to touch the ground, then disembowelled them and burnt them alive. Columbus ordered all the native people to deliver a certain amount of gold every three months; anyone who failed had his hands cut off. By 1535 the native population of Hispaniola had fallen from 8m to zero: partly as a result of disease, partly as a result of murder, overwork and starvation.

The conquistadores spread this civilising mission across central and south America. When they failed to reveal where their mythical treasures were hidden, the indigenous people were flogged, hanged, drowned, dismembered, ripped apart by dogs, buried alive or burnt. The soldiers cut off women’s breasts, sent people back to their villages with their severed hands and noses hung round their necks and hunted Indians with their dogs for sport. But most were killed by enslavement and disease. The Spanish discovered that it was cheaper to work Indians to death and replace them than to keep them alive: the life expectancy in their mines and plantations was three to four months. Within a century of their arrival, around 95% of the population of South and Central America had been destroyed.

In California during the 18th Century the Spanish systematised this extermination. A Franciscan missionary called Junipero Serra set up a series of “missions”: in reality concentration camps using slave labour. The native people were herded in under force of arms and made to work in the fields on one fifth of the calories fed to African-American slaves in the 19th century. They died from overwork, starvation and disease at astonishing rates, and were continually replaced, wiping out the indigenous populations. Junipero Serra, the Eichmann of California, was beatified by the Vatican in 1988. He now requires one more miracle to be pronounced a saint(2).

While the Spanish were mostly driven by the lust for gold, the British who colonised North America wanted land. In New England they surrounded the villages of the native Americans and murdered them as they slept. As genocide spread westwards, it was endorsed at the highest levels. George Washington ordered the total destruction of the homes and land of the Iroquois. Thomas Jefferson declared that his nation’s wars with the Indians should be pursued until each tribe “is exterminated or is driven beyond the Mississippi”. During the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, troops in Colorado slaughtered unarmed people gathered under a flag of peace, killing children and babies, mutilating all the corpses and keeping their victims’ genitals to use as tobacco pouches or to wear on their hats. Theodore Roosevelt called this event “as rightful and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier.”

The butchery hasn’t yet ended: last month the Guardian reported that Brazilian ranchers in the western Amazon, having slaughtered all the rest, tried to kill the last surviving member of a forest tribe(3). Yet the greatest acts of genocide in history scarcely ruffle our collective conscience. Perhaps this is what would have happened had the Nazis won the second world war: the Holocaust would have been denied, excused or minimised in the same way, even as it continued. The people of the nations responsible – Spain, Britain, the US and others – will tolerate no comparisons, but the final solutions pursued in the Americas were far more successful. Those who commissioned or endorsed them remain national or religious heroes. Those who seek to prompt our memories are ignored or condemned.

This is why the right hates Avatar. In the neocon Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz complains that the film resembles a “revisionist western” in which “the Indians became the good guys and the Americans the bad guys.”(4) He says it asks the audience “to root for the defeat of American soldiers at the hands of an insurgency.” Insurgency is an interesting word for an attempt to resist invasion: insurgent, like savage, is what you call someone who has something you want. L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, condemned the film as “just … an anti-imperialistic, anti-militaristic parable”(5).

But at least the right knows what it is attacking. In the New York Times the liberal critic Adam Cohen praises Avatar for championing the need to see clearly(6). It reveals, he says, “a well-known principle of totalitarianism and genocide – that it is easiest to oppress those we cannot see”. But in a marvellous unconscious irony, he bypasses the crashingly obvious metaphor and talks instead about the light it casts on Nazi and Soviet atrocities. We have all become skilled in the art of not seeing.

I agree with its rightwing critics that Avatar is crass, mawkish and cliched. But it speaks of a truth more important – and more dangerous – than those contained in a thousand arthouse movies.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. David E Stannard, 1992. American Holocaust. Oxford University Press. Unless stated otherwise, all the historical events mentioned in this column are sourced to the same book.

2. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-miracle28-2009aug28,0,2804203.story

3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/09/amazon-man-in-hole-attacked

4. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/350fozta.asp

5. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2802155/Vatican-hits-out-at-3D-Avatar.html

6. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/opinion/26sat4.html

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 9th August 2005

Out of the bombings a national consensus has emerged: what we need in Britain is a renewed sense of patriotism. The rightwing papers have been making their usual noises about old maids and warm beer, but in the past 10 days they’ve been joined by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian, Tristram Hunt in the New Statesman, the New Statesman itself and just about everyone who has opened his mouth on the subject of terrorism and national identity. Emboldened by this consensus, the Sun now insists that anyone who isn’t loyal to this country should leave it.(1) The way things are going, it can’t be long before I’m deported.

The argument runs as follows: patriotic people don’t turn on each other. If there are codes of citizenship and a general belief in Britain’s virtues, acts of domestic terrorism are unlikely to happen. As Jonathan Freedland points out, the United States, in which “loyalty is instilled constantly” has never “had a brush with home-grown Islamist terrorism”.(2)

This may be true (though there have been plenty of attacks by non-Muslim terrorists in the US). But while patriotism might make citizens less inclined to attack each other, it makes the state more inclined to attack other countries, for it knows it is likely to command the support of its people. If patriotism were not such a powerful force in the US, could Bush have invaded Iraq?

To argue that national allegiance reduces human suffering, you must assert that acts of domestic terrorism cause more grievous harm than all the territorial and colonial wars, ethnic cleansing and holocausts pursued in the name of national interest. To believe this, you need be not just a patriot, but a chauvinist.

Freedland and Hunt and the leader writers of the New Statesman, of course, are nothing of the kind. Hunt argues that Britishness should be about “values rather than institutions”: Britain has “a superb record of political liberalism and intellectual inquiry, giving us a public sphere open to ideas, religions and philosophy from across the world”.(3) This is true, but these values are not peculiar to Britain, and it is hard to see why we have to become patriots in order to invoke them. Britain also has an appalling record of imperialism and pig-headed jingoism, and when you wave the flag, no one can be sure which record you are celebrating. If you want to defend liberalism, then defend it, but why conflate your love for certain values with love for a certain country?

And what, exactly, would a liberal patriotism look like? When confronted with a conflict between the interests of your country and those of another, patriotism, by definition, demands that you should choose those of your own. Internationalism, by contrast, means choosing the option which delivers most good or least harm to people, regardless of where they live. It tells us that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington, and that a policy which favours the interests of 100 British people at the expense of 101 Congolese is one we should not pursue. Patriotism, if it means anything, tells us we should favour the interests of the 100 British people. How do you reconcile this choice with liberalism? How, for that matter, do you distinguish it from racism?

This is the point at which every right-thinking person in Britain scrambles for his Orwell. Did not the sage assert that “patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism”,(4) and complain that “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality”?(5) He did. But he wrote this during the Second World War. There was no question that we had a duty to fight Hitler and, in so doing, to take sides. And the sides were organised along national lines. If you failed to support Britain, you were assisting the enemy. But today the people trying to kill us are British citizens. They are divided from most of those who live here by ideology, not nationality. To the extent that it was the invasion of Iraq that motivated the terrorists, and to the extent that it was patriotism that made Britain’s participation in the invasion possible, it was patriotism that got us into this mess.

The allegiance which most enthusiasts ask us to demonstrate is a selective one. The rightwing press, owned by the grandson of a Nazi sympathiser, a pair of tax exiles and an Australian with American citizenship, is fiercely nationalistic when defending our institutions from Europe, but seeks to surrender the lot of us to the US. It loves the Cotswolds and hates Wales. It loves gaunt, aristocratic women and second homes, and hates oiks, gypsies, council estates and caravan parks.

Two weeks ago, the Telegraph published a list of “ten core values of the British identity” whose adoption, it argued, would help to prevent another terrorist attack.(6) These were not values we might choose to embrace, but “non-negotiable components of our identity”. Among them were “the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament” (“the Lords, the Commons and the monarch constitute the supreme authority in the land”), “private property”, “the family”, “history” (“British children inherit … a stupendous series of national achievements”) and “the English-speaking world” (“the atrocities of September 11, 2001, were not simply an attack on a foreign nation; they were an attack on the anglosphere”). These non-negotiable demands are not so different to those of the terrorists. Instead of an eternal caliphate, an eternal monarchy. Instead of an Islamic vision of history, a Etonian one. Instead of the Ummah, the anglosphere.

If there is one thing that could make me hate this country, it is the Telegraph and its “non-negotiable components”. If there is one thing that could make me hate America, it was the sight of the crowds at the Republican convention standing up and shouting “USA, USA “, while Zell Miller informed them that “nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators.”(7) As usual, we are being asked to do the job of the terrorists, by making this country ugly on their behalf.

I don’t hate Britain, and I am not ashamed of my nationality, but I have no idea why I should love this country more than any other. There are some things I like about it and some things I don’t, and the same goes for everywhere else I’ve visited. To become a patriot is to lie to yourself, to tell yourself that whatever good you might perceive abroad, your own country is, on balance, better than the others. It is impossible to reconcile this with either the evidence of your own eyes or a belief in the equality of humankind. Patriotism of the kind Orwell demanded in 1940 is necessary only to confront the patriotism of other people: the Second World War, which demanded that the British close ranks, could not have happened if Hitler hadn’t exploited the national allegiance of the Germans. The world will be a happier and safer place when we stop putting our own countries first.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Eg Richard Littlejohn, 26th July 2005. Patriotism. The Sun.

2. Jonathan Freedland, 3rd August 2005. The Identity Vacuum. The Guardian.

3. Tristram Hunt, 1st August 2005. Why Britain is Great. The New Statesman.

4. He uses this phrase in both My Country Left or Right (1940) and The Lion and the Unicorn (1940). Both published in George Orwell, 1968. Essays. Penguin, London.

5. George Orwell, 1940. The Lion and the Unicorn. ibid.

6. Leader, 27th July 2005. Ten core values of the British identity. The Telegraph.

7. You can read the transcript of Miller’s speech at http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/09/01/gop.miller.transcript/

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 31st August 2004

Here’s how one estate agency, promoting homes in Mark Thatcher’s Capetown suburb, Constantia, describes the benefits of living in South Africa. “A weak rand gives you tremendous buying power if you’re paying with dollars or sterling,” EscapeArtist.com reveals.(1) “Around R8,000 (US$1,128) a month will do for a married couple. What kind of lifestyle will this buy you? A villa with a pool, a car, and a daily maid. … South Africa is one of the few places in the world where you’ll find First World comforts and infrastructure, and Third World prices on everything from food, to diamonds, to real estate. … South Africa has problems, but that’s what makes for opportunity.”(2)

Africa, to the British upper classes, remains an adventure playground, a deer park and a treasury. And Constantia is one of those many enclaves of apartheid – to be found everywhere from Table Mountain to Mt Kenya – prospering in a post-apartheid continent.

What happier roost could there be for Mark and his mother? Margaret Thatcher found that permitting British companies to break the sanctions against the apartheid regime turned South Africa’s problems into our opportunities. When Mark was asked what he thought of his mother’s position, he replied “my sympathy is with the struggling white community”.(3)

In 2001, Lady Thatcher announced that she would spend part of every year in Constantia with her son.(4) Here they could live, not far from Earl Spencer and Ian Smith, as the members of their adopted class lived in Britain before the Second World War. For some of their neighbours, that era has never passed. The language in the begging letter sent from prison by Thatcher’s friend Simon Mann (Eton, Sandhurst, Scots Guards), comes straight from PG Wodehouse. “Smelly and Scratcher”, he moaned, weren’t helping their old chum. “It may be that getting us out comes down to a large splodge of wonga!”(5)

Mann and Thatcher (Harrow, too thick for anywhere else) belong to a class which still believes it has a God-given right to oversee the lives of the Africans. Among Margaret Thatcher’s friends with homes on the slopes of Table Mountain was John Aspinall (Rugby, Oxford, Royal Marines), the gambling millionaire, zoo-keeper and remnant of that species of upper-class British fascist that used to keep the Duke of Windsor company. Aspinall believed that most of the human population should be culled by means of “beneficial genocide”.(6) He argued that “Medical research should be funded into abortion, infanticide, euthanasia and birth control”(7) and described his third wife as “a perfect example of the primate female, ready to serve the dominant male and make his life agreeable.”(8) Aspinall worked with Mangosuthu Buthelezi to undermine the African National Congress. He argued that South Africa should be split into 30 bantustans.(9)

“Aspers” was the hub of a circle of rightwing extremists who sought to meddle in the affairs of Europe’s former colonies. Robin Birley, the son of one of his closest friends, was mauled by one of Aspinall’s tigers when he was 12, but this did their relationship no harm. Birley’s mother left her husband for Aspinall’s chum Sir James Goldsmith, and both Aspers and Birley (who inherited Annabel’s – London’s poshest nightclub – from his father) stood as candidates for Goldsmith’s Referendum Party. Some years ago I had a furious row with Robin Birley, after he told me that he believed he had not just a right but a duty to give help to Renamo, the South African-backed force which terrorised the people of Mozambique.

Another of Aspinall’s friends was the Spectator columnist Taki Theodoracopoulos. With Carla Powell, the wife of Mrs Thatcher’s former private secretary, he led the campaign in the British rightwing press to canonise Buthulezi. Taki once wrote of Kenya that “democracy is as likely to come to bongo-bongo land as I am to send a Concorde ticket to my children.”(10) He has complained that “Britain is being mugged by black hoodlums … West Indians were allowed to immigrate after the war [and] multiply like flies”.(11) In 1999, Taki and Robin Birley funded the campaign to free Augusto Pinochet. Their PR man was Margaret Thatcher’s old spin doctor Lord Bell, who worked for the South African National Party in the 1994 elections, and is now representing Mark.

Ever since Cecil Rhodes seized Matabeleland, the British right’s struggle for ideological control in Africa has been linked to its efforts to seize the continent’s resources. Simon Mann’s network of nobs had its fingers in mines and oilfields all over Africa. The mercenaries who provided muscle in return for mining concessions appear to have been respectabilised by their class. Mann founded his company Executive Outcomes with the British businessman Tony Buckingham. Buckingham counted among his friends the privy counsellor and former leader of the Liberal Party, Lord Steel. Until 1997, Steel was a director of one of Buckingham’s other African interests, a company called Heritage Oil and Gas.

All this is a long introduction to what is supposed to be a column about Darfur. My purpose is to show that Africans have every reason to be suspicious of British involvement in their affairs. There is no question that the British are, and always have been, “concerned” about Africa, but their concern remains a proprietorial one. When the Sudanese government claims that Britain is after its oil and gold, it is half right: even if the British government isn’t, some of its prominent citizens are. Last week Mann’s alleged accomplice, Nick du Toit, testified in court in Equatorial Guinea that Thatcher was among them. He said that Thatcher wanted to buy helicopters from him for “a mining operation going in Sudan”.(12) Thatcher denies such allegations.

The Sudanese government appears to be attempting to commit genocide by natural causes in Darfur. The Fur, Massaleet and Zagawa peoples are being driven from their homes just as the rains are making survival in the bush almost impossible. Its claim that 1200 people have been killed is risible. The UN says 50,000 have died; a more comprehensive analysis by the Sudan specialist Eric Reeves suggests 200,000.(13) It’s a catastrophe, and it’s likely, partly as a result of the UN’s disastrous procrastination, to become far worse.

For once, the US and the UK governments appear to be on the right side, pressing Sudan more forcefully than the other members of the Security Council to disarm the janjaweed militias and accept a large African Union peacekeeping force. We should support them. But they are hobbled by three massive credibility deficits. The first is that, after the farce in Iraq and the sell-out in Israel, no Arab government will ever again trust them to intervene dispassionately. The second is that the institutions they control – in particular the cannibalistic International Monetary Fund – are responsible for more deaths every year in Africa than the janjaweed. The third is that the United Kingdom’s colonial history is not yet over.

The British are still hated in Africa, and with good reason. Blair might huff and puff about the continent being a scar on the conscience of the world, but while our own citizens still regard it as their personal fiefdom, it’s hard to see why anyone who lives there should take him seriously.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Cheryl Taylor, viewed 27th August 2004. A tumbling South African rand… “makes luxurious living in Cape Town affordable”. http://www.escapeartist.com/international/0700_south_africa.html

2. ibid.

3. Jonathan Brown, 27th August 2004. Mark Thatcher – arrogance in the shadow of power. The Independent.

4. Dan Bridgett, 28th January 2001. Lady T Back at No 10. The Mail on Sunday.

5. Jamie Wilson, David Pallister and Paul Lashmar, 26th August 2004. Thatcher and a very African coup. The Guardian.

6. Kim Sengupta, 30th June 2000. Death of a Maverick. The Independent.

7. Megan Tresidder, 17th June 1995. The Interview: John Aspinall. The Guardian.

8. No author, 20th November 1994. Profile: Booty and the Beasts – John Aspinall. The Observer.

9. Anthony Sampson, 6th July 1996. The Word from South Africa is Love Me, Love My Party. The Guardian.

10. Cited by Sholto Byrnes, 1st February 2003. A racist rant too far? Police investigate Taki the playboy pundit. The Independent.

11. Taki Theodoracopoulos, 11th January 2003. Thoughts on thuggery. The Spectator.

12. CNN news online, 25th August 2004 ‘Coup leader:’ I met Mark Thatcher. http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/africa/08/25/equatorial.mercenaries.reut/

13. Eric Reeves, 28th August 2004. Darfur Mortality Update IV. The Sudan Tribune. http://www.sudantribune.com/article.php3?id_article=5049

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 4th November 2003

Imagine an English village building an effigy of a car, with caricatures of black people in the windows and the numberplate “N1GGER”, and burning it in a public ceremony. Then imagine one of Britain’s most socially-conscious MPs appearing to suggest that black people were partly to blame for the way they had been portrayed.

It is, or so we should hope, unimaginable. But something very much like it happened last week. The good burghers of Firle, in Sussex, built a mock caravan, painted a Gypsy family in the windows, added the numberplate “P1KEY” (a derogatory name for Gypsies which derives from the turnpike roads they travelled) and the words “Do As You Likey Driveways Ltd – guaranteed to rip you off”, then metaphorically purged themselves of this community by incinerating it. Their MP, the Liberal Democrat Norman Baker, later told BBC South East that “there is an issue about the rights of travellers which has to be respected, but also the duty’s on travellers to ensure that they treat the areas in which they are living with respect. … That did not happen in Firle earlier this year which is why the Bonfire Society has taken the act that they have.” 1

Racism towards Gypsies is acceptable in public life in Britain. Last month the Now Show on Radio 4 satirised “pikeys” running fairgrounds “with no safety documents”.2 It would surely never crack jokes about “pakis” or “yids”, or suggest that members of another ethnic group typically engage in dodgy business practices. When Jack Straw was Home Secretary he characterised Gypsies as people who “think that it’s perfectly OK for them to cause mayhem in an area, to go burgling, thieving, breaking into vehicles, causing all kinds of other trouble including defecating in the doorways of firms and so on”. 3

Now all these people would doubtless claim that they are attacking not a race but a lifestyle. Jack Straw, for example, explained that he was not talking about “real Romany Gypsies … who seem to mind their own business and don’t cause trouble” but about “people who masquerade as travellers or Gypsies”.4 It is, of course, true that not all traditional travellers are ethnic Roma, and not all Roma are travellers. But the same could be said of Judaism, which embraces both an ethnicity and a religious culture. We recognise that there is no moral distinction between attacks on Jews by people who object to their way of life and attacks on Jews by people who object to their race. We also recognise that racism is a matter of characterising a community by the behaviour of some its members.

The persecution of Gypsies has often been accompanied by questions, like Straw’s, about their authenticity. In 1554, a British law explained that people calling themselves Aegyptians were in fact “false vagabonds”, and condemned them to death.5 The report on the “Gypsy question” presented to Heinrich Himmler, which recommended their confinement to labour camps, asserted that “most gypsies are not gypsies at all” but “the products of matings with the German criminal asocial proletariat”. 6

One might have hoped for a particular sensitivity about the rights of traditional travellers. Between a quarter and half a million Gypsies were killed during the Holocaust: in many parts of Europe, the Nazis almost succeeded in eliminating them. Throughout eastern Europe, the Roma are still denied employment, herded into ghettoes and beaten to death by skinheads. In Britain, some 67 per cent of traditional travellers’ sites were closed between 1986 and 1993.7 In 1994, the government released local authorities from the duty to provide sites for travellers and introduced new laws penalising people who stopped without permission.8 In one act of parliament, it effectively destroyed their way of life.

So why, despite so much evidence of persecution, are expressions of hatred towards Gypsies still acceptable in public discourse? Part of the reason is surely that they are trapped in a vicious circle: excluded from public life by racism, they are poorly placed to defend themselves against it. But it seems to me that there might be something else at work as well, the residue of a deeper and much older destestation.

The conflict between settled and travelling peoples goes back at least to the time of Cain and Abel. Cain was a farmer, a settled person; Abel was a herder: a nomad. Cain killed Abel because Abel was the beloved of God. The people who wrote the Old Testament were nomads who had recently settled, and who looked back with longing to the lives of their ancestors. The prophets’ constant theme was the corruption of the cities and the purity of life in the wilderness, to which they kept returning. All the great monotheisms were founded by nomads: unlike settled peoples they had no fixed places in which to invest parochial spirits.

Yet the city, despite the execration of the prophets, won. Civilisation, from the Latin civis, a townsperson, means the culture of those whose homes do not move. The horde, from the Turkish ordu, a camp and its people, is its antithesis. It both defines civilization and threatens it. We fear people whose mobility makes them hard for our settled systems of government to control. But, like Cain, we also appear to hate them for something we perceive them to possess: the freedom, perhaps, which the prophets craved.

Of course, today the settled people are often more mobile than the traditional travellers. Across eastern Europe, Gypsies have been sedentarised by decree; in Britain they have been settled by the enclosure of their stopping places. Many of the Gypsies who travel across Europe today do so because they have been driven from their homes: Queen Mary’s “pretended Aegyptians” have been transformed into “bogus asylum seekers”.

Yet, as our continued romanticisation of the Gypsy, or bohemian, life suggests, we appear to suffer still from a residual envy. We are a migratory people (our ancestors, in the savannahs of East Africa, were forced to move from place to place as the rain moved on) with the brains, the legs, the senses of creatures who were designed never to stay still. The lives of those we associate with perpetual movement often appear (whatever the reality may be) to be more desirable than our own. When the starving traveller in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Crossing arrives in town, the people there “beheld what they envied most and what they most reviled. If their hearts went out to him it was yet true that for very small cause they might also have killed him”.9

Envy is intimately connected with racism. Racists associate Jews with money and black people with sexual power, but our hatred of Gypsies may arise from a still deeper grievance, the envy of a people whose instinct for continual movement is frustrated by the constraints of the humdrum settled life. We wish, like Cain, to rise up and slay our brother, as the horde, not the civilized, are the beloved of the god of our creation. Could it be that it remains acceptable to hate Gypsies because it remains acceptable to romanticise them?

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Norman Baker, 28th October 2003. BBC South East News.

2. Marcus Brigstocke, 10th October 2003. The Now Show, BBC Radio 4.

3. Jack Straw, 22 July 1999. Interview with Annie Oathen, Radio West Midlands

4. ibid.

5. A Law for the Avoidance of All Doubts and Ambiguities, 1554. Cited by Dr Angus Murdoch, Community Law Partnership, 22nd August 1999, in a letter to the Guardian.

6. Final Report on the Gypsy Question, cited by Dr Angus Murdoch, ibid.

7. Tony Thomson, 1994. A study of site use since 1987. Community Architecture Group. 67% is the median figure from his survey across several English counties.

8. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994

9. Cormac McCarthy, 1995. The Crossing. Picador, London.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 30th April 2002

The polling stations had scarcely closed before Le Pen’s success was being blamed on the greens and the new left. The leader of France’s Front National, commentators on both sides of the Channel agree, had done so well because the radicals first established the political territory he exploited, then split the left-wing vote.

Both charges are ridiculous. The space seized by Le Pen was not created or fragmented by the critics of inequality, corporate power and environmental destruction, but by the inequality, the power and the destruction themselves, and the abject failure of Lionel Jospin to address them.

But there is no question that the far right, just as it has always sought to ride on the back of the labour movement, is now seeking to climb aboard the unleaded bandwagon driven by the new progressives. There is also no question that we have been far too slow to push the racists off.

The far right has scarcely hidden its attempt to ride our truck. An article on the British National Party’s website explains that “there is a huge gap in the political market here”. While its members might have expected the BNP to side with its traditional allies, the landlords, against the greens, “the Country Landowners’ Association … has 50,000 members”, while “the National Trust and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds … have 4,000,000 members. Which interest group would you rather have on our side come polling day?”

So the BNP now thunders about the loss of small farms, the overuse of pesticides, genetic engineering, the destruction of landscape features and (neatly fusing its new politics with its old) soil erosion. This is just one of the means by which it hopes to “harness the ‘green’ idealism of middle class youth, and to give a new vision to many of their working class contemporaries in the cities”. Citing Noam Chomsky and, to my horror, my own work, it has also begun campaigning against corporate power, the World Bank, the private finance initiative, the disposal of council houses and the dominance of the superstores.

The BNP is not the only force on the far right which now describes itself as “the true green party”. Similar claims have been made by members of Le Pen’s Front National, by the Vlaams Blok in Belgium and, in Britain, by a tiny offshoot of the National Front which calls itself Third Way. This is the group which most clearly articulates the way in which the politics of the hard right are shifting.

Third Way, which was founded in 1990 by the Front’s former chairman and vice-chairman, claims to reject “racism and the politics of hate.” But it believes that cultures should, for their own good, be kept apart, and defended from “mass immigration”. Globalisation, the splinter group claims, “reduces us to a rootless, transient population disconnected from its history”, precipitating ecological crisis and encouraging migration. The party’s leader, Patrick Harrington, has made contact with the black separatist Nation of Islam and orthodox Jews pursuing “separate development”. Third Way, like many far right groups, has abandoned overt racist aggression in favour of cultural isolation.

Much of the intellectual work underpinning Third Way’s policies has been conducted by a Dr Aidan Rankin. The position statement he wrote for the group blames indigenous people’s loss of land and sovereignty partly on corporations and brutal governments, but also on “left-wing cultural prejudice”, feminism, human rights and the politics of “tolerance” and “inclusion”. Oddly conflating it with assimilation, Rankin sees multi-culturalism as a globalising force which forbids tribal people to lead their own, culturally-pristine lives. He then goes on to suggest that “we are all indigenous peoples now”, our “voices … silenced, our language castrated” by “political correctness” and gender equality. Nick Griffin of the BNP takes this analysis a small step further when he claims to be defending the “endangered white tribes of the First World”. It should be a cause of grave concern to everyone in the green movement that Dr Aidan Rankin was, until very recently, the comment editor of Britain’s leading environmental magazine, the Ecologist.

This is not the first occasion on which the Ecologist (which despite Rankin’s bizarre appointment remains, by and large, a progressive paper) has found itself in trouble of this kind. The previous editorial team split with its founder Teddy Goldsmith after he addressed a meeting of the hard right Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Europeene. Goldsmith, whose politics are a curious mixture of radical and reactionary, has advocated the enforced separation of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda and Protestants and Catholics in Ulster, on the grounds that they constitute “distinct ethnic groups” and are thus culturally incapable of co-habitation.

Goldsmith, as the former editors later pointed out in their paper “Blood and Culture”, assumes that culture is a rigid, immutable thing: that different communities can live only within the boxes nature has assigned to them. Confusing, for example, Protestantism and unionism, he fails to understand the political forces which cause splits within communities and associations between them. He fails too to see the external manipulation which first defines ethnicity inflexibly, then drives the newly separated peoples to fight.

The far right claims to be contesting an imperialist homogenisation, but at the same time it is developing one of its own: telling people which culture they belong to and what its characteristics should be. It has simply reinvented the ghetto.

By seeking to pre-empt the far right with “tough” policies on crime and immigration, Jospin and Tony Blair have moved the game onto its home turf. A far more intelligent strategy would have been to re-secure the new territory the racists are exploiting, by getting tough on inequality, environmental damage, corporate power and new imperialism. This is the left’s own ground, on which the right will always be scrambling to catch up.

But those of us whose clothes are being stolen also have a responsibility: not to leave them lying around in the first place. We must define our intent more carefully. “Globalisation” means whatever you want it to, so people who call themselves “anti-globalisation” campaigners are leaving their laundry outside the BNP’s door. A tighter fit, such as the “social justice” or “internationalist” movement would at least ensure that our unattended keks were harder for other people to climb into. Pluralism and anti-racism must be not supplementary aims, but core values, around which all the others are built.

Anti-racism is not just about defending the victims of abuse. It is also about defending ourselves from becoming the unwitting accomplices of those who seek a segregated world.

Update, April 2007: Aidan Rankin has asked me to note that he has now severed all his connections with right-wing politics, partly as a result of the arguments presented here.  

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 5th March 2002

Those of us who opposed the bombing of Afghanistan warned that the war between nations would not stop there. Now, as Tony Blair prepares the British people for an attack on Iraq, the conflict seems to be proliferating faster than most of us predicted. But there is another danger, which we have tended to neglect: that of escalating hostilities WITHIN the nations waging this war. The racial profiling which has become the unacknowledged focus of America’s new security policy is in danger of provoking the very clash of cultures its authors appear to perceive.

Yesterday’s Guardian told the story of Adeel Akhtar, a British Asian man who flew to the United States for an acting audition. When his plane arrived at JFK airport in New York, he and his female friend were handcuffed. He was taken to a room and questioned for several hours. The officials asked him whether he had friends in the Middle East, or knew anyone who approved of the attacks on September 11. His story will be familiar to hundreds of people of Asian or Middle Eastern origin.

I have just obtained a copy of a letter sent last week by a 50 year-old British Asian woman (who doesn’t want to be named) to the US Immigration Service. At the end of January, she flew to JFK to visit her sister, who is suffering from cancer. At the airport, immigration officials found that on a previous visit she had overstayed her visa. She explained that she had been helping her sister, who was very ill, and had applied for an extension. When the officers told her she would have to return to Britain, she accepted their decision but asked to speak to the British consul.

They refused her request, but told her she could ring the Pakistani consulate if she wished. She explained that she was British, not Pakistani, as her passport showed. The guards then started to interrogate her. How many languages did she speak? How long had she lived in Britain? They smashed the locks on her suitcases and took her fingerprints. Then she was handcuffed and chained and marched through the departure lounge. “I felt like the guards were parading me in front of the passengers like their prize-catch. Why was I put in handcuffs? I am a fifty-year old housewife from the suburbs of London. What threat did I pose to the safety of the other passengers?”

Last week, a correspondent for the Times found 30 men and one woman camped in a squalid hotel in Mogadishu, in Somalia. They were all African Americans of Somali origin, who had arrived in the United States as babies or children. Most were professionals with secure jobs and stable lives. In January, just after the release of Black Hawk Down (the film about the failed US military mission in Somalia), they were rounded up. They were beaten, threatened with injections and refused phone calls and access to lawyers. Then, a fortnight ago, with no charges made or reasons given, they were summarily deported to Somalia. Now, without passports, papers or money, in an alien and frightening country, they are wondering whether they will ever see their homes again.

All these people are victims of a new kind of racial profiling which the United States government applies but denies. The US attorney-general has called for some 5000 men of Arab origin to be questioned by federal investigators. Since September 11, over 1000 people who were born in the Middle East have been detained indefinitely for “immigration infractions”. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has recorded hundreds of recent instances of alleged official discrimination in the US. Muslim women have been strip-searched at airports, men have been dragged out of bed at gunpoint in the middle of the night. It reports that evidence which remains shielded from the suspect, of the kind permitted by the recent US Patriot Act, “has been used almost exclusively against Muslims and Arabs in America”. Brown-skinned people in the US are now terrorist suspects. Some officials appear to regard them as guilty until proven otherwise.

Similar policies appear to govern the judicial treatment of detainees. During his press conference on 28 December, President Bush initially misunderestimated a question, and provided a revealing answer. “Have you decided,” he was asked, “that anybody should be subjected to a military tribunal?” Bush replied, “I excluded any Americans.” The questioner pointed out that he meant to ask whether Bush had made any decisions about the captives in Guantanamo Bay. But what the president had revealed was that the differential treatment of those foreign fighters and John Walker Lindh, the “American Talib” currently being tried in a federal court in Virginia, is not an accident of process, but policy. He couldn’t treat a white American like the captives in Camp X-ray and expect to get away with it.

These attitudes pre-date the attack on New York. “Patterns of Global Terrorism”, a document published by the US counterterrorism coordinator in April, appears to define international terror as violence directed at US citizens, US commercial interests or white citizens of other nations. Black and brown-skinned people are the perpetrators of terror, but not its victims. In Angola, for example, the “most significant incident” in the year 2000 was the kidnapping of three Portuguese construction workers by rebels. The murder of hundreds of Angolan civilians is unrecorded. In Sierra Leone terrorism, the report suggests, has afflicted only foreign journalists, aid workers and peacekeepers. In Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army’s appears to have done nothing but kidnap and murder Italian missionaires. The Democratic Republic of Congo, where terror sponsored by six African states has led to the deaths of some three million people, isn’t mentioned. Yet domestic terrorism in the United Kingdom and Spain is covered at length.

There is, of course, vicious racism on other sides as well. Bin Laden threatened a holy war against Jews. The men who kidnapped the journalist Daniel Pearl forced him to announce that he was a Jew before cutting his throat. I have lost count of the number of emails I’ve received from opponents of the Afghan war in Pakistan and the Middle East, claiming that 4000 Jews were evacuated from the World Trade Centre before the attacks.

This makes security policies based on racial discrimination even more dangerous. By treating brown-skinned people as if they are the natural enemies of the United States, the government could generate conflict where there was none before. At the same time this policy establishes splendid opportunities for terrorists with white skins, as they become, to the eyes of officials, all but invisible.

This is the morass into which Tony Blair is now stepping. “These are not people like us,” he said of the Iraqi leadership on Sunday. “They are not people who abide by the normal rules of human behaviour.” Some would argue that this quality establishes their kinship with British ministers. But to persuade us that we should go to war with Iraq, Blair must first make its leaders appear as remote from ourselves as possible.

The attack on Iraq, when it comes, could be the beginning of a third world war. It may, as hints dropped by the US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld suggest, turn out to be the first phase of a war involving many nations. It may also become a war against the third world, and its diaspora in the nations of the first.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 20th April 2000

The British establishment is poorly qualified to lecture Robert Mugabe about racism. The government’s condemnation of the murders of two white Zimbabwean farmers contrasts oddly with the blandishments with which it greeted Vladimir Putin, the killer of thousands of Chechens. Just as it revealed that Zimbabwe’s white refugees are welcome, for “reasons of ancestry”, to settle here permanently, it announced that it would expel 3,000 Kosovan Albanians. While the newspapers devoted hundreds of column inches to the horrible killings of the two white farmers, they scarcely mentioned the equally horrible killing of the black foreman who worked for one of them. The dispute between London and Harare is a dispute between racists.

Like Jack Straw and William Hague, Mugabe is using racism as a cheap – and not very effective – means of winning votes. But while he has made life miserable for Zimbabwe’s white population, he has also compromised the survival of millions of blacks. For he is destroying the very cause he claims to espouse: Robert Mugabe has become the enemy of land reform.

The recent land seizures mirror the thefts which first enabled the whites to control so much of Zimbabwe’s economy. In the 1890s, Cecil Rhodes and the settlers he led first cheated and then forcibly dispossessed the Shona and the Ndebele. The whites stole their land, their cattle and, through taxation, their labour. When they rebelled against these impositions, the blacks were cruelly suppressed and their leaders were hanged. From 1930 onwards, blacks were forbidden to own land outside the barren and crowded “reserves”. Even the cities were secured by the settlers: native people were confined to rented property in peripheral townships.

Today, though the laws have changed, the distribution of land has scarcely altered. Zimbabwe’s 4,500 white farmers occupy 70 per cent of the best land, while some seven million blacks still inhabit the old reserves. Some of the white farmers claim that if this dispensation were to change, Zimbabwe would starve, but any visit to a British supermarket shows that this is nonsense. Much of Zimbabwe’s most fertile land is used to grow not necessities for the hungry, but luxuries for the sated: mange tout, radicchio, french beans and tobacco. Redistribution would enable the poor both to support themselves and to produce staple crops for the landless: all over the Third World it is smallholders who keep their own countries fed.

Land reform in Zimbabwe, in other words, is an urgent necessity. But by manipulating the distribution programme to secure his own survival, Mugabe is keeping his people hungry. He is, however, not solely to blame for its failures.

The 1979 Lancaster House Agreement, which oversaw the transition to majority rule in Zimbabwe, ensured that the Zimbabwean government could use local currency only to buy land from farmers who were willing to sell. If it were to expropriate their property, it would have to compensate them with scarce and precious foreign exchange. The agreement bound the country to a programme of land reform, in other words, whose comprehensive implementation would have cost billions. Having hinted that we would pay for it, our government handed over only a fraction of the money required – £44 million – to make it happen.

Had a sterner settlement been struck, in other words, or had Britain been more generous, there might not have been a land distribution problem in Zimbabwe today. Our meanness, compounded perhaps by an unwillingness to undermine the white economic hegemony, perpetuated Zimbabwe’s racial segregation. Mugabe, unable to oversee a full and fair redistribution, acquired an excuse to turn land into a gift, to be deployed as political imperatives demanded. When the Lancaster House Agreement expired, he changed the constitution to allow the government to make compulsory purchases in Zimbabwe dollars, but he used the new power to reward his friends and purchase his enemies.

So Robert Mugabe is right about one thing: Britain does have a moral obligation to pay for a comprehensive land reform programme in Zimbabwe, to absolve not only the theft of land and labour by British-born farmers, but also to correct the inequitable settlement of 1979. And the foreign office minister, Peter Hain, is right to suggest that any money we hand over should bypass Mugabe’s regime. But he is wrong to imagine that he can implement “a programme of genuine land reform” with “some millions of pounds.” Our debt to the people of Zimbabwe runs into billions.

If we fail to recognise that Britain sits at the heart of this problem, then we condemn Zimbabwe’s poor to decades of manipulation, segregation and starvation. If our politics are to be distinguished from Mr Mugabe’s, then we must extend to Zimbabwe’s blacks the munificence we have offered the whites.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 4th November 1999.

Four months ago, when Jack Straw claimed that there has been “too much tolerance of travellers”, he declared open season on some of Britain’s most vulnerable people. Soon after his remarks were publicised, caravans in which children were sleeping had their windows stoved in with bricks. A truck in which travellers had made their home was set alight. Police have attempted summary evictions without regard for the law.

There is nothing new about vigilante attacks on travellers. I have a thick file of incidents from the past few years: of shotguns being fired into caravans at night, of petrol bombings, of travellers’ dogs being blinded with sharp sticks and of the police taking advantage of public indifference to beat the living daylights out of innocent people. It was not hard to predict that Mr Straw’s comments were likely to validate and encourage such assaults. But the Home Secretary has discovered that Middle England loves him for hating travellers.

On Monday the Home Office minister Paul Boateng told parliament that “the Home Secretary’s remarks did strike a chord throughout the country”. Encouraged by the response, he was considering measures to “strengthen the hand of both local authorities and police.”

The government will be hard put to make life for travellers in Britain much worse. Since 1994, local authorities have enjoyed new powers to remove them from places in which they have camped without the owner’s permission. Unless the campers comply with the eviction orders “as soon as practicable” they will be committing a criminal offence.

While councils were armed with a legal duty to evict travellers, they were relieved of the legal duty to accommodate them. The 1968 Caravans Act, which obliged local authorities to find sites for migratory people, was repealed, and new regulatory barriers were raised to discourage voluntary attempts by councils to make room for them.

Officially, the Labour government is committed to a policy of respect for travellers. “A nomadic way of life is legitimate,” Home Office guidelines insist. “Gypsies and Travellers should be accommodated and ‘tolerated’ wherever practicable”. But the guidelines have no legal force. Mr Boateng’s latest announcement appears to presage the revocation even of this feeble protection.

Migratory people have been living in Britain since the Palaeolithic. They have been persecuted for centuries. A law passed in 1554, establishing that anyone found to be either an “Aegyptian” or “pretended Aegyptian” could be executed, stayed on the statute books until 1789. Travellers, remarkably, survived, and they also survived the persecution and enclosure that followed the repeal of that act. It was not until Margaret Thatcher came to power that their complete extermination became possible.

A study by the Community Architecture Group shows that, in the counties it surveyed, 67 per cent of traditional travellers’ sites disappeared between 1986 and 1993. Some of them had provided shelter for thousands of years: this was perhaps the longest continuous land-use of any kind in Britain. While the old stopping places were sealed off, there was no means of establishing new ones. When it repealed the Caravan Sites Act, the Home Office told travellers that they should set up their own sites. They had been trying to do just this for years but, as the government knew perfectly well, the great majority had been refused planning permission. In the few cases in which local authorities allowed them to stay, central government overturned their decisions.

What this means in practice is that travellers are, once more, constitutionally criminal. Their very existence is illegal. Without lawful places to stop, they can be hounded from county to county and evicted wherever they pull up. Even the generous landlords who allow them to stay on their property have been threatened with prosecution.

The Labour government, like the Tories, is pursuing a straightforward policy of assimilation. People who do not conform to social norms, who are, in other words, not like us, are forced to lose their alternative identity and live like everyone else. If they refuse, they become criminally different. The policy is justified by repeated allegations of criminality, though the Home Office is unable to point to any research showing that travellers as a group are worse than the rest of us.

The government’s policy appeals to the worst instincts of Middle England: its complacency and vindictiveness, its closing of ranks against the outsider, its intolerance of understanding and compassion. But, as Jack Straw knows only too well, kicking the poor and weak has always played well with the prosperous.