My, what a variety bucket from Andrew Roberts on Question Time. Notice how he regards the State as neutral on the institution of marriage: we all know the third side of the triangle otherwise formed by neoliberal economics and neoconservative foreign policy, and need look no further than the record of his beloved Margaret Thatcher to see it; accordingly, he not long ago used Any Questions to express his support for assisted suicide.
But the real story was the insistence of this Henry Jackson Society stalwart that Blair had been sincerely mistaken over the 45-minute claim, now utterly bizarrely being sold as only ever peripheral to the case for war anyway. Well, no one is going fall for that one, of course. Hardly anyone fell for the claim itself at the time. And some years ago, even though I myself have always believed the whole case for this war to the be the, I remember imploring Hilary Armstrong that the Government should say exactly that: "We were sincerely mistaken about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq". "In that case", she shrieked (there is no other word to describe the noise that she made), "the whole Government would have to resign". Go on, then. And take the "Opposition" with you.
Plus, of course, "it was never really about WMD, it was about removing a tyrant". Of course it was, all you old friends of the Soviet Union. Of course it was, all you old friends of Pinochet's Chile and of apartheid South Africa. And of course it was, Andrew Roberts, campaigner for the restoration of apartheid South Africa through your involvement with the Springbok Club, "White South Africa's Government-in-Exile", which always displays the old regime's flag at its meetings, including those addressed by you, Andrew Roberts. Finger lickin' good.
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I don't get it. Maybe Mr Lindsay can explain this to me, because I certainly don't understand it on the basis of anything written elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteIf Andrew Roberts was supportive of Afrikaner rule via his association with the Springbok Club, then why did he go out of his way to traduce Afrikaners by maintaining (History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, p. 31) that it was absolutely kosher to round up Afrikaner women and children in camps where, according to the most cautious estimates, more than 20,000 of them died? Here's what Roberts says there:
"The 'war crime' for which the British have been most commonly held responsible during the Boer War was the supposed [sic] ill treatment of Afrikaans women and children in camps there. In fact, these 'concentration' camps – the term had no pejorative implication until the Nazi era – were set up for the Boers' protection off the veldt, and were run as efficiently and humanely as possible . . . A civilian surgeon Dr Alec Kay, writing in 1901, gave a further reason why the death rates were so high: 'The Boers in the camps often depend on home remedies, with deplorable results'."
Unless Roberts is even more historically illiterate than one gathers he is (not least on the strength of Mr Lindsay's website), he must know that these concentration camps (and Roberts should abandon the sneer-quotation-marks, because the phrase was in currency from the Spanish-American War onwards) were denounced by leading British politicians themselves at the time. Such as future PM Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who asked: "When was a war not a war? When it was carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa." And another future PM, South Africa's own Louis Botha, hailed C-B after his death: "My greatest regret is that one noble figure is missing - Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman ... Three words made peace and union in South Africa: 'methods of barbarism'." (These quotes are from Chapter 29 of Robert Massie's Dreadnought.)
When Roberts has finished his tributes to anarcho-libertarian marriage (must be really comforting to Mrs Roberts, huh?), would he mind explaining to us what his actual South African policy is? Are Afrikaners to be treated like dirt, or are they to be championed? They can hardly be both. Inquiring minds want to know.
Ah, the strange case of the English-speaking white South Africans and apartheid. What they really couldn't forgive were the republic and leaving the Commonwealth, moves strongly opposed by Mandela and the ANC, whatever their failings elsewhere. But those developments did not move the English-speaking whites to leave.
ReplyDeleteAnd they were warmly welcomed by the Radical Right in Britain, which hated (and hates) the Commonwealth, and not least, though not exclusively, by extension hated (and hates) the monarchy.
Look at the Radical Right's support for Rhodesia, which not only purportedly deposed the Queen, but even removed the Union Flag from its own, something that not even the Boer revanchists to the south ever did.
The English-speaking white community produced valiant battlers against apartheid. So did the Afrikaners. And the old saying was that if a black iterant labourer on the veldt called at an Afrikaner farm house for a glass of water, then the farmer's wife would shout at him, swear at him, spit at him, and then give him a glass of water. But if he called at an English-speaking farm house, then she would slam the door in his face.