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Song of the racists
RULE, BRITANNIA, the height of English operatic can belto, inspired the usual mass rapture on the last night of the Proms last weekend. I felt it myself, watching on television, warmed up by Land of Hope and Glory and the customary, suppressed hysteria. This emotional high is one of the few truly shared moments of popular culture in this country, one that cuts through class and generation; only the very cerebral really look down on the joyous last night of the Proms.
At the very least it is one of the greatest gigs ever. But also it plays on the heart-strings that throb at the sound of a brass band, at old war movies, at cricket on the village green and the cadences of the language of this sceptred isle. It plays on the longing for something that is grand and great and British - harmless sentiments, I have always thought, and ones I share.
But this year I began to wonder. The Union Jacks and silly hats and noises off may be all part of the fun, but all those young nerds gawkily doing nationalistic knee-jerks, up and down to the rhythm, with their risible, root-tooting jingoism suddenly seemed to me worse than ridiculous. What could these hymns of Empire possibly mean to anyone under 40? They were being carried away by something completely meaningless to them, for the pleasure of the emotion; this was not sentiment but sentimentality.
Sentimentality is unearned emotion, as James Joyce said - emotion without content or direction. It is very dangerous - easily aroused and easily misused as groups like the British National Party understand. It is a chilling thought that just as the Proms ended, a young Asian boy was beaten to within an inch of his life by young white racists. And what white ultra-nationalists like to sing, apparently, on their Paki-bashing forays, the song that gets them going, is Rule, Britannia.
Perhaps with the success of the BNP in Tower Hamlets, in east London, it is time to reconsider the Proms. Perhaps Rule, Britannia should be put away, as a middle-aged matron keeps her wedding-dress in tissue paper and nostalgia, as a memory of a glamorous and exotic past, but something that no longer becomes her and no longer even fits her.
THE worst thing about the story of the babies who are being deliberately starved to death in China because they are not boys is that everyone is so astonished. None of this is new. I cannot imagine why it is that Westerners so consistently and for so long have resisted the truth about what goes on in China. There is a well-worn path of blinkered liberals going to vile totalitarian regimes and coming back to prate about the joys of socialism, from Sidney and Beatrice Webb to Jane Fonda, but you might expect better of the general public.
When I moved to Hong Kong 20 years ago, and first learnt and wrote about China, I tried to tell my bien pensant friends from university back in Blighty about the Chinese concentration camps. They do not exist, my friends firmly told me, from their flats in Islington and Pimlico. Mao is the best thing that ever happened to China, they said. The East is Red. So it was, with blood. Mao holds the Guinness Book of Records top score for genocide - of his own people. My English friends simply ignored me when I told them that hundreds of Chinese were fleeing China to Hong Kong through shark-infested waters on lilos, although they could not swim, and were regularly washed up on Hong Kong beaches, mutilated or dead.
Junking of 'useless mouths' - a Chinese expression that includes the old - is not new in China. Girl babies have been culled in China, not just since the notorious one-child ruling but time out of mind. The daughter of the heroic Professor Wu Ningkun, whose account of life in Maoist China came out this year, described what happened in the early Seventies to her peasant playmate. Married off young, this girl gave birth in rapid succession to four female babies, who were considered 'debt collectors' and thrown into the river. Other baby girls in the same village were drowned at birth in a urine bucket by their fathers.
The fact is that the Chinese still do, and the Japanese in their time have done, terrible things. Yet we prefer to ignore them. We accept their refusal to feel guilty, although at the same time we require Germans to do unending penance for their crimes against humanity. This can only be racism - the same racism that condemned the evils of white South Africa while remaining silent about the horrors of black Africa. We do not expect much of the little yellow people, after all; they have a different attitude to death, don't they? So why not have the Olympics in China anyway? Peking would be so much more amusing than Manchester.
BUS passes seem to have been sent to drive us mad. One reader has written to tell me the story of a friend who is on income support. In order to receive this, she has to walk over nine miles every two weeks, since she cannot afford the bus fares, to collect it in person. Other people have their benefit paid without having to collect it personally, but she was told she lived too close (sic) to the office to be entitled to this treatment and if she wanted cheaper fares, should get a bus pass. To get a bus pass she would have to get to a bus station 12 miles away, with two photographs. As she uses the bus only once a fortnight, the bus pass would be prohibitively expensive. Perhaps she too will be driven to vote for the British National Party.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, September 19, 1993
