Monday was a bad mood day for compatriots who feel themselves to be the beleaguered indigenous peoples of the United Kingdom, the English most of all. Lee Anderson, a pedestrian Tory MP, posturing in a superhero cape, is boycotting the English Football team for unanimously agreeing to take the knee in the European championships. Opposing racism is a ‘political movement whose core principles aim to undermine our very way of life ’, quoth he, who through his own logic, must believe the British ‘way of life’, is to be loudly, brutishly racist and anti-anti-racist.
Other grouches, Lordy lord, so many of them, will be similarly vexed with the Bafta winners on Sunday night, the majority of them black or Asian. Diversity, the troupe which performed a Black Lives Matter themed dance on Britain’s Got Talent won the Must-See-Moment prize. (30,000 viewers complained to Ofcom about a dance, a dance) The usual suspects will dispense and monetise hackneyed protestations. 1. This is equality/PC/wokeness/ gone rabid. 2. What about white working class folk? 3.The arts and entertainment industries are treacherous and Marxist. Etc, etc
Proponents of ‘patriotic’- meaning doctored- history- will be going through their own paroxysms. The black British historian David Olusoga, an old friend, has updated his seminal book Black and British: A Forgotten History with additional chapters on the Windrush scandal and BLM. The new edition will re-enflame traditionalists, nationalists, conservative academics and the chillingly powerful populists- white, black and Asian- in the current government. Olusoga’s got his metaphorical hard hat on as he awaits the decriers, including some who are highly educated . As he told Aamna Mohdin of the Guardian: ‘It has now got to the point where some of the statements being made are so easily refutable, so verifiably and unquestionably false, that you have to presume that the people writing them know that. And that must lead you to another assumption, which is that they know this is not true, but they have decided that national myths are so important to them and their political projects that …they really don’t care about the historical truths behind them’
Satnam Sanghera, the British Asian journalist and author has also been trashed and bullied by volatile, anti-woke jingoists. All because he penned Empireland, a thoughtful and truthful book. Shashi Tharoor an Indian politician and writer was also battered after he wrote Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India. These oppressive, frantic, aggrieved white nationalists want information, opinion and expression to be scrutinised, monitored and subject to approval by the state or the majority. Just like censorious Muslim regulators and Hindu nationalists. Or Russian revisionists and Israeli state propagandists.
Fervid and livid, they all want to own or temper with national narratives. Saudi Arabian rulers have, for years, been bulldozing all the historical sites in that kingdom, including buildings associated with Prophet Mohammed. The ignoramuses believe Islam should be ahistorical, beyond place and time. In Modi’s India, the centuries of Mughal rule are being erased. In 2018, Hindu scholars were asked by the Prime Minister to ‘prove’ that Hindus are the original inhabitants of that land, that India, like Britain, made by migrations and invasions, belongs to them. Some crazy militants are even calling for the demolition of the Taj Mahal. I am banned from Zanzibar because I once, long ago, told the story of the Arab slave trade in print and on radio. Here I am revied as a traitor who should go back home.
Culture control is even more pernicious. A few years ago I made a radio programme about the top male stars in Bollywood, all of them of Muslim heritage. I still get horrible, irate missives about how the programme proved I was prejudiced against Hindus. Muslim hardliners, all over the world, including here, are forever denouncing this or that. Their current pet hate is the new, brilliantly iconoclastic Channel 4 show, We are the Lady Parts about a feisty female Muslim pop group, some hijabis, some not, some looking for husbands, others sexually liberated. Such depiction sof female longings and life are, apparently, ‘un-Islamic’. We Wrote in Symbols, an enthralling, revolutionary new book of erotic writings by Arabic women should be shredded says one deeply conservative Arab scholar I know, ‘It is dirty, western pollution of the pure Muslim woman’s mind’. He hasn’t read it.
Dogmatists, bigots and censors and their manic disciples jeopardize creativity, honesty, diversity, equality and empathy. They are a universal blight. They disfigure societies. And they are getting louder and more brazen.
I Newspaper, 9th June 2021