Welcome to the Daily Hate

Good morning everybody. Or it will be until you finish reading this. 

I don't normally draw your attention to the Daily Mail mostly because we all know what it's like: racist, bigoted, impervious to evidence yada yada yada. But sometimes it's good to be reminded what 4 million people think is a reasonable newspaper. I read these pieces so you don't have to. 

Two articles came to my attention this week. One was on the Leveson Report, which is released on Thursday. The Mail doesn't like it because the Mail and the Mail on Sunday were the biggest customers of Steve Whittamore, the go-to guy for illegal activities, and because the Mail's stock in trade is pictures of pubescent girls in bikinis with paedophilic straplines like 'all grown up'. 

This particular report was notable for its retro qualities. Yes, it's back to the Mail's 1930s heyday:

Mr Boles, who came under fire in the press earlier this year after he claimed expenses for lessons to learn his male partner’s native Hebrew. 

Brian Leveson PC [Privy Council] QC is a Liverpool-born, Oxford-educated Orthodox Jewish lawyer and judge

Poor Nick Boles. Yes, he's corrupt Tory scum, but the Mail's editor must have orgasmed at the chance to combine homophobia and anti-semitism. And of course Mr Leveson's religious identity is completely relevant to his report. 'Not one of us, don't you know'.

The second piece was today's effort by Roger Lewis, 'Tyranny of the Welsh Taliban… the Nutty Welsh Language Society'. Agreed, Wales is a hilly country and one that's been frequently invaded by the English, but most of us would think that there the similarity ends. Unlike Afghanistan under the Taliban, the Welsh women I know are rarely genitally mutilated and often enjoy a foaming pint of Brains (they're not zombies, overseas readers: it's a local beer). British helicopters are rarely shot down over the Brecon Beacons and Heddlu Cymraeg (the Welsh Police) tend not to shoot their English colleagues in 'blue-on-blue' attacks. 

No, Mr Lewis is upset that some Welsh people still speak Welsh, and that they finally have a limited legal right to access some services in Welsh. 

He's not big on consistency or logic, is Mr Lewis:

In South Wales, where I am from, there was never any tradition of Welsh speaking. And at the turn of the last century, though my great-grandparents spoke Welsh to each other.

So nobody spoke Welsh there ever. Except for his great-grandparents. 

English was seen as the language of the future, Welsh as the sign of regional backwardness. In some respects, I rather fancy knowing more Welsh. It would appeal to my hankering after lost things, like steam trains or gas chandeliers.

Ah yes. The Matthew Arnold Manoeuvre. He said this in 1867 in 'On the Study of Celtic Literature'. It should be a nice hobby, he said, but for the Welsh to get on in the world, they needed to speak English, like the rest of the world was being made to. At the point of a bayonet. It's a utilitarian position, and one enunciated usually by a dominant hegemony and its converts. It existed on the left too: socialists in Wales saw the language as dividing them from the global proletariat. Notions of cultural value and autonomy were not then - and in the Mail now - considered worthy of attention. 

Back to Mr Lewis:

Welsh has become a political and divisive weapon in the principality

He doesn't find time to mention the 400 years in which Welsh was banned in education, public service and the law. If any language was a 'political weapon', it was of course English. 

Now, we learn that at one school in  Ceredigion - which used to be quite happily  Cardiganshire when I was a lad - the children are not allowed to use  the toilet unless they ask the teacher in Welsh.

Obviously there's no link or evidence offered here, but my guess is that it's either a Welsh-language school, or a Welsh-language class. But at least these evil Welsh fascists aren't using the 'Welsh Not': the board hung round the neck of anyone caught using Welsh. The last one to wear it by the end of the day got an entirely utilitarian beating.

Some children are, it seems, too frightened to speak English, even at home. This sort of thing would have done the Warsaw Pact proud. It is despicable.

At least he's dropped the Afghanistan reference. Evidence? None. Warsaw Pact? Eh? Polish seems to be thriving. So are Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian. In fact the Soviet Union seems to have more regard for its minority languages than the UK.

But what can be done about a place that now states, on job applications, 'Welsh speaker preferred'? Unless you are willing to go to classes and learn Welsh, what such xenophobia means in practice is that third-rate local people get the posts - as doctors, teachers, psychologists, architects, and so forth.

That's right. Anyone who speaks another language is third class in Mail world. Especially if it's Welsh. Because obviously speaking two languages (all Welsh-speakers can speak English as a second language) is a sign of mental imbecility. Even if you've managed to qualify as a doctor… in your second language because there are currently no Welsh-language medical degrees available: you're a loser. And obviously the same applies to all the other professions: being taught in Welsh makes them intrinsically inferior. 

But Roger's got academia on his side!

I asked a former colleague of mine at Oxford, whose speciality was changing speech habits in the United Kingdom from 1800 to 1914. He explained that an analysis of the late 19th-century census data revealed that Welsh-speaking was in steep decline and that, left to its own devices, the language would have 'died of inanition because Welsh people themselves were casting it off as a mark of backwardness'.  

Actually, he doesn't. Lewis doesn't exactly claim his friend is an Oxford University academic. He was 'at Oxford' with Roger and his 'speciality' may well have been an undergraduate one. He's wrong, anyway. Current scholarship says that industrialism saved the Welsh language. With plenty of jobs in the mines and steelworks, Welsh people could stay in Wales rather than emigrate to Anglophone places. The proportion of Welsh-speakers dropped until recent decades, but the number of Welsh-speakers has risen consistently since the mid-19th century. 

Welsh isn't dying of 'inanition'. It's struggled in the face of official censure, but in the streets it's thriving, especially in the North. A language survives when it's used to work and play: my last visit to Bangor certainly demonstrated that it's in – literally – rude health. Hordes of lads and ladettes were drinking, fighting and shagging in slangy Welsh. If you can do that, you've nothing to worry about. Where Welsh is struggling is those areas in which English second-home owners drive up property prices and drive out working-class Welsh-speakers. 'Twas always thus. 

But never mind that. We get to the heart of the matter: Roger Lewis's self-hating racism.

This is what those teachers in  Ceredigion - and those who support them - can't accept: what my friend at Oxford called 'the evident cultural superiority of English', i.e. that  English has, for example, a richer  literature, going right across  the world, from Irish writers such  as Shaw or Wilde to everyone  in America.

Firstly, English doesn't have a 'richer literature'. It has a bigger literature - as you'd expect from a larger English and English-speaking diaspora, one which colonised empty places and displaced or subjugated the populations of un-empty ones. Why did Wilde and Shaw speak English? Because the Irish language was banned and burned too. But Roger is desperate not to mention the link between culture and military or economic power. No, it's all about essential qualities. I wonder who else he thinks is 'inferior'? The French? Jews? Black people?

He makes the astonishing assertion. 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but as of yet there isn't a Welsh Shakespeare.

This of course misunderstands Shakespeare as much as it displays his ignorance of Welsh culture. Shakespeare was largely unperformed for 200 years after his death, and the Victorians liked to tack happy endings onto the tragedies. Furthermore, while there are world-class Welsh authors, the literary culture was different: many of the greatest texts are accumulations of the work of anonymous writers because authorship is a function of a capitalist and individualist culture which didn't reach Wales until later. Drama wasn't a feature of Welsh literature until recently for religious reasons, and because Welsh economic and social development didn't provide space for the form. Poetry was the thing, and what magnificent poetry there was. 

I'd point him in the direction of the Mabinogion, Dafydd ap Gwilym, Kate Roberts, Williams Pantycelyn, Ann Griffiths, Ceiriog, Wiliam Owen Roberts (amazing, postmodern) amongst a host of others. 

So how did Welsh survive, according to Roger?

the Liberal Government in 1907 created a  Welsh Department of the Board of Education, which 'captured state resources' i.e. taxpayers' loot, and allowed Welsh to be taught in the schools and artificially revived.

Right. Because Welsh-speakers aren't taxpayers, are they (and never mind that Welsh? And what damage they did!

Tenby was always Tenby, for example, until a few years ago when it suddenly became  Dynbych-y-Pysgod - a bit of nonsense about 'bay of the little fishes'.

OK… so you'd rather have a misheard translation of a name with a specific meaning than the actual name? Let's all call London 'Londres', shall we Roger?

Most depressingly, Roger seems to place no value on any kind of cultural diversity. Let's get rid of Welsh, he says. Flemish next? Then Dutch? Perhaps we might then dispose of German and the Scandinavian languages. Who needs them? We can then get rid of Spanish and Russian, and before long, we're left with the Queen's English, proud medium of the Daily Mail and all who sail in her. 

Enlightenment at last

We can close down our biology department. Why? Because the Islamic Society here have invited Oktar Babuna and Cihat Gundogdu to give a lecture on 'Evolution: Fact or Fiction?' at the university - in a teaching room, with the university's logo plastered over the flyer.

Their answer, you'll be unsurprised to learn, is that evolution is a fiction.

Taner Edis has said "there is nothing new in the Yahya material: scientifically negligible arguments and outright distortions often copied from Christian anti-evolution literature, presented with a conservative Muslim emphasis" concluding it "has no scholarly standing whatsoever". According to Richard Dawkins, Oktar "doesn't know anything about zoology, doesn't know anything about biology. He knows nothing about what he is attempting to refute".

The Council of Europe's Committee on Culture, Science and Education wrote in its report on this book that "None of the arguments in this work are based on any scientific evidence, and the book appears more like a primitive theological treatise than the scientific refutation of the theory of evolution." 

Who are these characters? They're disciples of Adnan Oktar - a leading Turkish Holocaust denier, antisemite and anti-science quack. Babuna and Gundogdu employ a range of sciencish to make a large number of false claims which ultimately boil down to insistence on the literal truth of their chosen sacred texts. Pretty quickly, their examination of evolution leads into an exposition of the End Times (Christians don't have a monopoly on Rapture nonsense). Oktar also got Richard Dawkins' site banned in Turkey.

They assert that evolution denies the existence of God, abolishes moral values, and promotes materialism and communism. Oktar argues that Darwinism, by stressing the "survival of the fittest", has inspired racism, Nazism, communism and terrorism. A claim not unexpected in Turkey when during the political turmoil before a 1980 military coup, communist bookshops touted Darwin's works as a complement to Karl Marx.

BAV spearheaded an effort to confront Turkish academics who taught evolutionary biology. A number of faculty members were harassed, threatened and slandered in fliers, leading to legal action against BAV. 

This really bothers me: universities shouldn't be hosting non-scientific charlatans. If students want to explore evolution, they should take a biology course in which they can experiment to their hearts' content, rather than attend pseudo-scientific events hosted by religious groups. Freedom of speech demands that all loons have their chance: but they shouldn't be given the credibility of a university as cover for divisive and dangerous nonsense.

In intend to go to this lecture - I may well blog it. I hope some of my biologist colleagues attend too. Come along: MC418, 1-3

Post-prandial pedagogy

Two fascinating political papers today: Richard on liberal Jewish lawyer Samuel Untermyer's Non-Sectarian anti-fascist boycott movement in the US 1930s, and one by Malcolm on the Earl of Manchester, a key (reluctant, conservative) Parliamentarian figure in the so-called English Civil War. Manchester wasn't a particularly good general, leading to the formation of the New Model Army, and to rifts between moderates, radical conservatives like Cromwell who tried to hold everything together by repressing more revolutionary impulses, and the revolutionaries such as the Diggers, Levellers, Fifth Monarchists and so on, led by heroes of mine such as Lilburne and Winstanley.

Read Winstanley's The Law of Freedom in a Platform; OR, True Magistracy Restored, Winstanley's statement of ideals.

True freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth. For as man is compounded of the four materials of the creation, fire, water, earth and air; so is he preserved by the compounded bodies of these four, which are the fruits of the earth; and he cannot live without them. For take away the free use of these and the body languishes, the spirit is brought into bondage and at length departs, and ceaseth his motional action in the body.

All that a man labours for, saith Solomon, is this, That he may enjoy the free use of the earth, with the fruits thereof. Eccles. 2.24.

Do not the ministers preach for maintenance in the earth? the lawyers plead causes to get the possessions of the earth? Doth not the soldier fight for the earth? And doth not the landlord require rent, that he may live in the fulness of the earth by the labour of his tenants?

And so, from the thief upon the highway to the king who sits upon the throne, do not everyone strive, either by force of arms or secret cheats, to get the possessions of the earth one from another, because they see their freedom lies in plenty, and their bondage lies in poverty?

Surely then, oppressing lords of manors, exacting landlords and tithe-takers, may as well say their brethren shall not breathe in the air, nor enjoy warmth in their bodies, nor have the moist waters to fall upon them in showers, unless they will pay them rent for it: as to say their brethren shall not work upon earth, nor eat the fruits thereof, unless they will hire that liberty of them. For he that takes upon him to restrain his brother from the liberty of the one, may upon the same ground restrain him from the liberty of all four, viz. fire, water, earth and air,

A man had better to have had no body than to have no food for it; therefore this restraining of the earth from brethren by brethren is oppression and bondage; but the free enjoyment thereof is true freedom.

Now if the earth could be enjoyed in such a manner as every one might have provision, as it may by this platform I have offered, then will the peace of the commonwealth be preserved, and men need not act so hypocritically as the clergy do, and others likewise, to get a living. But when some shall enjoy great possessions, and others who have done as much or more for to purchase freedom shall have none at all, and be made slaves to their brethren, this begets offences.

An especially good touch is Malcolm's (ironic?) reintroduction of the Overhead Projector as a presentation tool. I haven't seen one in action since my student days!

As I'm deeply interested in both 1930s American leftist politics (particularly that wonderful monster Huey Long) and in the Civil War, this session's tailor-made for me.

If you're interested in the extent of Nazism and anti-semitism in the US, have a look at Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent newspaper and The International Jew ("The World's Foremost Problem"), a work of such bigotry that the Nazis in Germany translated it for their supporters. He didn't just make cars, you know.

Untermyer's boycott campaign failed partly because, as Richard points out, American Jews at the time were uninterested in European affairs - America was in an isolationist moment, and established American Jews were fairly contemptuous of recent immigrant European Jews. Additionally, Untermyer hated leftists - New York Jews were largely leftwing - and found it difficult to get on even with his own supporters.