Vergangenheitsbewältigung.
Pithy. You can always rely upon the Germans to come up with le mot that is juste.
Coming to terms with the past.
It is three score years ago, as the great man might have put it, since Dr Martin Luther King Jr gave his celebrated “I have a dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and before a great throng, in Washington on August 28th, 1963. When I first heard the speech, I was captivated by the charisma of the orator, a combination of presence, delivery, but most of all, content. I was intrigued in particular by a sentence that began:
“I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification…”
What, I wondered were the words of interposition and nullification? I don’t know, but I would hazard a guess that they were the governor’s way of putting a brake on the aspirations of the civil rights movement. It sounds to me like the editing of a text. You interpose a word here, you nullify a word there, and lo, and behold, with minimal intervention, an entire document has been attenuated, much after the fashion of an infective organism that has been modified to remove its virulence – I nearly wrote virility (Freudian slip) – in the creation of a safe vaccine. The organism’s virulence, its potency, is annulled, its virility emasculated.
And note that the governor did not merely speak the words of interposition and nullification; his lips were dripping with them. That language comes across to me as very biblical; the governor sounds like Anass, or Caiaphas, or Pontius Pilate. Dr King was a Baptist minister so his adoption of biblical language is not surprising. The speech and its delivery are utterly spellbinding. I don’t suppose we have heard oratory to match this, on this side of the pond, since Winston’s great set pieces of the Second World War. In them we have the same historical awareness, the same adoption of magnificent, slightly archaic language (“Not one jot or tittle of our just demands do we recede!”), the rolling cadences, and always, a close attention to exactitude of meaning. Who, nowadays, can even begin to speak thus?
But in order to be an orator, to have an orator’s power to communicate and to move, you must first be sincere. What you have to say must come from the heart, your own heart. But what have we now? Politicians have speech writers. (Can you imagine Winston employing s speech writer?) Speeches are cobbled together by think tanks, focus groups, and special advisors. They must conform to a doctrine, a manifesto, and an ideology. They must not stray off piste. (Dr King’s remarkable I have a dream speech came out of a decision to drop the prepared text and speak, impromptu, from the heart.) Nowadays, any political statement must not make the politician, the party or the government a hostage to fortune by undue reliance on candour. Doubtless you could program some ghastly Artificial Intelligence contraption to concoct the speech for you. It would surprise me if this has not already happened. Perhaps AI could act as an editor. You submit the speech, and the AI modifies it with the words of interposition and nullification. Result: “I am busy delivering for hard-working British families who deserve a better future…”
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
And now here is a strange irony. It is three score years since Dr King’s speech, and it is three score years and ten since the publication of Ian Fleming’s first James Bond book, Casino Royale. The entire Bond canon is being republished to celebrate this anniversary. Browsing in Waterstones the other day, I picked up a copy of Live and Let Die and confirmed something I already knew to be the case. There has been an edit. The publishers have adopted the words of interposition and nullification. The words of interposition are in the frontispiece, a repudiation of the attitudes of the time (1953); and the words, rather absence of words, hence nullification, are in an early chapter renamed “Seventh Avenue”, in which an entire rather lengthy conversation had been removed. It no longer exists. Ergo, apparently, it has never existed. Syme, that wretched character in 1984, has sent it down the memory hole. The Pharisees, not content with controlling the way we live now, persuade us that their way of looking at the world is the norm, because it was ever thus. They are obliterating history.
It’s not a new phenomenon. When the Hanovers made up their mind to subdue the Jacobites, once and for all, not only did they lay waste and depopulate a vast landscape; they destroyed a culture by proscribing a societal structure, modes of dress, music, and, most of all, language. They obliterated, or tried to obliterate, history. That modus operandi is also biblical. By the waters of Babylon, I sat down and wept.
The salutary lesson is that such techniques of oppression are effective. The idea that the Jacobite landscape is an unspoilt wilderness is a myth. The trendy “North Coast 500” route for tourists that runs round the top of Scotland circumvents Ben Armine Forest, Loch Choire Forest, Borrobol Forest, Benmore Forest, Glendhu Forest, and so on. But why do none of these forests contain any trees? The landscape is denuded. The visitors in their campervans awkwardly negotiating the passing places on the single-track roads are unaware that they are passing obliterated ancient settlements that have been turned into archaeological sites.
The tall statue to George Leveson-Gower, first Duke of Sutherland (“the Mannie”), a pivotal figure in the highland clearances, still stands, upon Ben Bhraggie, above Golspie, in Sutherland. Some would have it removed. Occasionally it is vandalised, much as, following the Maori Wars in New Zealand, Hone Heke, a Maori chief and signatory to the Treaty of Waitangi, would repeatedly cut down the flagstaff bearing the Union Jack on Maiki Hill above the town of Russell, in Northland’s beautiful Bay of Islands; much as the statue of Lord Dundas in Edinburgh is occasionally besmirched with graffiti. Dundas delayed the abolition of the slave trade, utilising a temporising technique similar to the one Dr King described as “the tranquillising drug of gradualism”. Justice delayed is justice denied. Some would erect a plinth beside the Mannie, providing “context”, bearing the words of interposition and nullification. I would rather leave it alone. If it is an affront, let it be an affront. We must bear our scars, not hide them.
jamescalumcampbell 