Article by John Derbyshire |
||||
|
|
|||
| "Our
Lost Land"
Let the whole world know that we shall never accept
that the tragedy of Andalusia would be repeated in Palestine. We cannot accept that Palestine will become Jewish. —
Osama bin Laden, October 7th Andalusia
is the southernmost bit of Spain, which remained Moslem until Ferdinand of
Aragon reduced it in 1492. Our
bearded adversary is whining about something that happened 509 years ago!
This is tough for Americans to grasp, I know.
With the exception of a small number of southerners still fretting
over Abraham Lincoln’s “War of Northern Aggression,” and of course
the race-resentment cliques banging tiresomely on about slavery
reparations and the Battle of Wounded Knee, Americans are a
forward-looking people not much inclined to froth and fume over injustices
done to their ancestors, preferring instead to use their energies in
building a secure and prosperous life for their descendants. Elsewhere, as bin Laden’s little rant reminds us, things
are different. Bin
Laden’s comment about Andalusia brought to mind an incident that
happened to me twenty years ago. I
was working on contract in Tallaght, a suburb of Dublin.
A few months previously there had been a meeting at Dublin Castle
between Margaret Thatcher, then of course the Prime Minister of the U.K.,
and Charles Haughey, her opposite number in the Republic of Ireland.
This meeting had enraged the fiercer kind of Irish Republicans.
Well, there I was, sitting in a pub in Tallaght with some Irish
friends, in the summer of 1981. A
song came on the juke box, and I gathered, listening to the words, that it
was a protest ballad against the Dublin Castle meeting.
The protest was aimed at Haughey, who was referred to in every
chorus as: “Our Dermot MacMurrough of Eighty-One.”
(Which has a pleasant dactylic lilt to it.
You can depend on the Irish for a good tune.) I
knew very little about Irish history at that point, and inquired
innocently of my Irish friends: “Who is this Dermot MacMurrough he's
singing about?” Ah, they
instructed me, he was the fellow who first opened the door to let the
English into Ireland. And
that would be when? I asked.
Back came the answer: A.D.
1167 — over eight hundred years ago.
An awful long time to be nursing a grievance, I thought quietly to
myself. The
next time I encountered this phenomenon was a year later, when I was
living in China. Naturally
curious to know what image Chinese people had of my own country, I was
surprised to find that the only thing universally known about Britain was
that we had burned the emperor’s summer palace in 1860.
Chinese people, I found, were generally too polite to mention this
to one’s face, but in their government’s propaganda materials — a
category of literature that, in China, includes things like school
textbooks and TV documentaries — it loomed large, forming almost the
sole image of British character and policy that most Chinese people were
acquainted with. Magna Carta?
The Glorious Revolution? Ending
of the slave trade? The
Factory Acts? Churchill standing alone against fascism?
Fuhgeddaboutem — you burned our Summer Palace! This
harping on ancient grievances is, I think, characteristic of people who
feel the sting of some national or collective humiliation — people who
feel, I mean, that their culture, their way of life, has been elbowed off
the sidewalk by one that is bigger, richer, stronger, more potent.
Irish people felt that way in 1981, though with the rise of the
“Celtic Tiger” and the immigration of unskilled English laborers to
work on Irish construction sites, the feeling has much diminished
recently. Chinese people, who
cannot understand why the glories of their ancient civilization have
cratered into the ugliness, cruelty and squalor of a “People’s
Republic” in which the actual people have no voice, also feel that way.
And of course, thoughtful Moslems surveying the complete failure of
the House of Islam to come to terms with the modern world, are likewise
humiliated, and salve their hurt pride by picking at 500-year-old wounds. Nations
that have modernized successfully do not feel like this.
The Moslems were kicked out of Spain?
Poor things! For heaven’s sake: we
British have been kicked out of far better places than that in our
history, but you don’t hear us whining about it.
Matter of fact, at the time of
“the tragedy of Andalusia,” England was still holding on to the
city of Calais, the last remnant of the Plantagenet empire in continental
Europe. (Those of you who
thought the Victorian empire was a one-time fluke, go to the back of the
class. There have actually
been three British empires. At
the moment we are taking a rest from empire-building.)
Calais was not lost until sixty-six years later when, on January
7th 1558, the French seized it after launching a sneak attack.
Our monarch at the time was Mary Tudor, who died a few months later
wailing that: “When I am dead and opened, you will find ‘Calais’
lying in my heart.” Very
few English people nowadays would understand a reference to “the tragedy
of Calais,” and even fewer — none at all, in fact, I am willing to
guarantee — would take it as a call to action to restore our national
greatness. Angry
talk about “lost territories” that must be “recovered” is, in
fact, a sure symptom of a major national or cultural inferiority complex.
Who has not felt, talking to an Arab, a Chinese person, or an
ardent Irish Republican, that the rage they nurse about Israel, Taiwan and
Ulster respectively is wildly out of proportion to the actual issues
involved in sovereignty over those tiny territories?
“How would Americans feel if Hawaii broke away from the U.S.A.
and declared independence?” my Chinese friends ask triumphantly, as if
this were a decisive argument for the subjugation of Taiwan.
Well, how would you feel? I think
that if Americans were convinced that the secession was genuinely the
desire of most Hawaiians, they would accept it in a spirit of democratic
self-determination. (That the
Union did not take this view towards the Confederate States was an
entirely different matter, in a very different time.)
Most
to the point, the issue is anyway moot, since Hawaii is going to do no
such thing. The advantages of
being part of the United States — a constitutional republic, with
liberty and justice for all under fair laws, and abundant prosperity for
all those willing to exert a minimum of effort — are simply too great.
There is the rub. Those
“lost territories” don’t want
to be part of the “motherland” because the “motherland” is not a
fit place for human beings to live. This
is true of the entire Arab world, with its rickety gangster-regimes run by
corrupt thugs; it is true of China, where peasants starve and workers go
unpaid while the self-elected leaders of the People’s Democratic
Dictatorship shovel the national wealth into their Swiss bank accounts;
it was true until recently of the Irish Republic, for the first few
decades of its existence a stagnant rustic theocracy with little appeal to
anyone whose aspirations rose to anything higher than sitting around a
peat fire discussing the Council of Trent in Gaelic.
Zero immigration, or actual net emigration, is one of the
distinguishing marks of an aggrieved “motherland” fuming about some
“lost territory.” Nobody
wants to live there. It used
to be a regular feature of opinion polls in Northern Ireland — I have
not see one recently — to turn up a solid proportion of Northern Catholics
who had no desire to be ruled from Dublin (the Protestant majority is, of
course, 100 per cent against the idea).
One wonders how many Israeli Arabs would actually prefer to be
brought under the tender mercies of Yasser Arafat’s “Palestinian
Authority.” Certainly very
few inhabitants of Taiwan relish the thought of becoming citizens of the
People’s Republic. Instead
of taking these “lost territories” claims seriously, we should
understand them for what they are: irrational
and undemocratic responses to a sense of cultural humiliation, coming
under the scope not of political science but of psychopathology. --------------------------------------------------- |
||||