Opinion by Marque A. Rome
“Even the madness of fanaticism,” Lord Macaulay is recorded saying in Parliament, “is but for a day. The time is coming when our conflicts will be to others what the conflicts of our forefathers are to us…. Then will be told, in language very different from that which now calls forth applause…the true story of these troubled years.”
It was 29th January of 1840, and a censure motion had been moved by one of the Tory members, John Yarde Buller, against Lord Melbourne’s government, in which Macaulay served as Secretary at War. The issue in dispute was whether Roman Catholics might be appointed members of young Queen Victoria’s Privy Council, a post largely ceremonial: “It is notorious,” Macaulay observed, “that no privy councillor goes to council unless specially summoned. He is called ‘right honourable’, and walks out of a room before squires and knights.”
That was the extent of a privy councillor’s power and authority.
Why should appointment of Catholics to merely honorary positions on the Queen’s council be cause for censure in a democracy? Indeed, why should it convulse the English nation? For, as Macaulay pointed out, the nation was divided, one group thinking it “monstrous that this honorary distinction should be given to three Roman Catholics” while the other just as vehemently insisted on shoving the appointments in their opponents’ teeth.
Why? Because, in England then, ‘Catholic’ meant ‘Irish’, and Ireland was a conquered land, its restive people ground beneath English heels for 700 years. At first prey to organized robber bands, then victims of racial and cultural bigotry, the Irish suffered most appallingly owing to violent antipathies aroused by the Reformation. England and Scotland turned Protestant, Ireland remained Catholic; the result: whole communities were razed to the ground during the English civil war, their inhabitants burned alive by Oliver Cromwell’s victorious Roundheads.
The English generally saw the Irish as enemies, barbarians, heretics, snakes-in-the-grass awaiting opportunity to strike. They deprived Irish Catholics of rights as property owners and citizens, outlawed their religion, and cordially hoped they might all starve.
By 1840, however, the Irish were feeling their strength in numbers, and were no longer disposed to meekly accept the savage treatment meted out by English and Protestant overlords. The movement to free Ireland had been growing for over half a century, and the English were finally giving ground. In 1829 the Catholic Emancipation Act passed despite agitation in the streets and opposition from the king and the Church of England.
The Tories, whose party toadied to church and crown, had split on the question of Catholic Emancipation. some siding with the political pragmatists, led by the Tory prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, the bulk in opposition. Out of office, they patched up their differences, and on that day in January, 1840, were again united in violently opposing privileges for the Irish generally and appointment of Roman Catholics to the Privy Council specifically. Likewise were the Protestant churches — led by the Church of England — dead against appeasing “Irish Papists.”
The Whigs (a word originally Scots Gaelic and applied to cattle and horse thieves), historically the party of rakes and libertines, whose power derived from opposing church and crown, refused to back down. They formed the government, under Lord Melbourne, and were in the driver’s seat, wholly willing to force the issue. Macaulay, as Secretary at War, noted that mild Whig rule in Ireland had resulted in reduced tension among the populace allowing him to withdraw “battalion after battalion, squadron after squadron…from districts which, as had then been thought, could be governed by sword alone.”
Macaulay was perhaps dissembling with that self-serving statement, for he did not say where the troops thus freed up were withdrawn to. War loomed in China and Afghanistan; Russia evidently planned to assault India: in such circumstances, no Secretary at War could have contemplated save with alarm the prospect of rebellion in Ireland, for he needed the troops elsewhere.
In the event, Britain beat the Chinese and took Hong Kong; they lost their army in Afghanistan, but Russia nonetheless backed down — perhaps because no rebellion erupted in Ireland, for the Whigs survived the censure vote on 29th January, 308 to 287.
Macaulay thought “Justice will be done at last,” but in that he was perhaps wrong: Ireland has yet to take among European nations “that high place to which her natural resources and the intelligence of her children entitle her to aspire.” He was quite right, however, in predicting that the whole brouhaha then in full spate would be by future generations forgot. Hardly anyone today knows or cares about that obscure controversy over the appointment of Catholic Privy Councillors, perhaps only the few antiquarian book lovers who cherish Macaulay’s speeches for their matchless prose.
That leads us to his point adducing the evanescence of controversy. That the stories told to future generations concerning, say, the last ten days’ controversies — Barack Obama’s birth certificate and the killing of Osama bin Laden — will differ from those told us appears inevitable.
The so-called long-form Hawaiian birth certificate released by the White House on 28th April is, on the face of it, a most peculiar document. Certainly it must have been rare in 1961 to list as ‘mother’ a married woman by using her maiden name (as is Obama’s mother on the document): most mothers then would have considered it an insult, a tacit way of calling the baby illegitimate. In the circumstances, I should think some might have sued the hospital.
Still more peculiar is officials’ listing of his father’s race as ‘African’: my 1963 printing of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (published by former Connecticut Senator William Benton and “edited in consultation with the faculties of the University of Chicago”) knows of no such race. In the entry entitled ‘Races of Mankind’, the author notes that differentiating races can be tricky, observing that, “Two entirely different forms of classification have been employed, one based on the study of the skull, the second, and more generally used method, on superficial characters, such as skin and hair, which may be observed….”
“On the basis of hair,” it is explained, “mankind may be divided into straight-haired (leiotrichous), woolly-haired (ulotrichous), and an intermediate group of wavy or curly-haired (cymotrichous).” Among the woolly-haired races are listed the “True Negroes”; and indeed ‘negro’ was the word invariably used in formal writing then to describe members of the black race, the reason for which being, undoubtedly, the existence of many — and dissimilar — races in Africa, including but not limited to Hamites, Bushmen, Pygmies, Hottentots, Bedouin Arabs and the Copts (i.e., the modern descendants of ancient Egyptians); if Madagascar is included, we must add the Mongoloid Malays. These groups are not, moreover, insignificant either in population numbers or area of dispersal: Cymotrichous groups, “though frequently mixed with negroes”, dominate “the Horn of Africa and the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea.”
Thus, there was then no African race per se, only African races.
At the time of Obama’s birth, official documents typically divided mankind into Mongoloid, Caucasian and Negro races. Blacks in America were not transformed into ‘African-Americans’ until much later, and then for purely political reasons. Similarly, married women did not use their maiden names — indeed were often prevented legally from so doing — until much later, and then again only as a result of political and social dissensions. Obama’s birth documents’ wording — both the short Certificate of Live Birth, and the longer Birth Certificate — seems thus strangely anachronistic (which is not to say impossibly anachronistic).
In a word, his documents look fishy, lending credence to the wilder asseverations of opponents who flinch at nothing in trying to drive him from office. But let us put aside all that: I am not qualified to pass judgment on the documents’ authenticity, which Hawaiian state officials absolutely stand behind. Moreover, the campaign to discredit his birth certificates is part of a larger one aimed at impugning his right to stand for office, as not being American — an assertion I frankly find absurd.
For me the deeper, more interesting question is, “What’s he hiding?” How could a bright fellow like Obama, of good family, who went to the best schools, performed at the top of his class, whose career has been simply magic — how could such a man perform so stupidly in this squalid controversy?
For, make no mistake about it, he has dropped the ball every time it came to him. Instead of revealing his birth certificate when first challenged — the logical move for a man even his current secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, called Barack HUSSEIN Obama during the primary campaigns — he refused. When voters sued, he fought them over and again in the Supreme Court, claiming they hadn’t sufficient legal standing to force the documents’ disclosure.
This may have been sharp legal practice — the Supreme Court agreed with Obama — but it was terrible public relations. Americans could only look askance at such an argument — and more and more heard of it. Release of the birth certificate, after six years of controversy and court suits, amounted to capitulation. Obama was hemorrhaging credibility: on the day of the certificate’s release, it was reported 50 per cent of Republican voters, and 25 per cent of all Americans, believed their president was not in fact American; and among British and Europeans, it is quite amazing the number of normal people who look one in the eye and assert unequivocally that Obama is from Kenya.
That’s the only reason he came clean (or faked coming clean, depending on one’s view).
I have always thought filled with good sense a statement by one of Nixon’s aides during the Watergate scandal: “If it looks like a duck, and smells like a duck, and walks like a duck — then it’s probably a duck!” Obama’s actions in this controversy have the smack — constantly — of one trying to hide something. Even in releasing the birth certificate he was sly, waiting till coverage of the wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton was at its height, evidently hoping his bombshell would pass without scrutiny while the populace was caught up in royal pageantry.
So he is evidently hiding something.
What he is hiding is entirely suppositious, though there are legions — many quite clearly out of their minds — who openly dare to suppose, thereby making the truth ever harder to get at.
The killing of Osama is another case in point: U.S. government officials have adduced him chief terrorist and ringleader of al-Qaida, yet produced no clear evidence of personal culpability — and no statute still on the books makes merely inspiring rebellion (what used to be called ‘sedition’) illegal. It is notorious that a preponderance of Americans no longer believe what many dismiss as “the official conspiracy theory” of events on 11th September, 2001. Having found Osama, living not as a warlord surrounded by his army but as a private citizen surrounded by his family, the government had a golden opportunity to arrest and try him in open court before the nation and the world. With his testimony supporting them, perhaps they could justify the multi-trillion-dollar wars undertaken during the last decade, suppression of the Bill of Rights at home, and the millions killed, maimed, displaced or ruined in the War on Terror — whose chief suspect was Osama bin Laden.
So what did they do?
Send in a team of commandos ordered to prevent him instantly from ever giving testimony, then dispose of his remains in such manner that no autopsy or analysis could ever be performed. Let us cast aside here other issues — such as whether it is legal without due process to execute foreign nationals in other countries (the Geneva Conventions, to which the United States is signatory, appear to make it illegal), or whether the administration’s claim that the president is empowered to kill anyone, anywhere, at any time, and without redress, if he feels it in the national interest, is supported by the the Constitution (I can’t see that it is; the claim is derived, curiously, from the president’s Oath of Office). These are issues I am sure lawyers will argue far into the future.
Let us rather concentrate on what we know. Nearly everything the government at first said about the operation has been withdrawn or amended, but one fact is certain: instead of gathering evidence, they destroyed it; and that, you will agree, is not what honest people do. The government’s dithering and deceit are much more characteristic of thosse who fear being found out in their lies.
So, presumably they are lying. What are they lying about?
Future generations, if they care, may get to the bottom of it — though what they find will likely, as Macaulay said, differ from the story that excites so much applause today. For myself, I might — but I won’t — advance any theories; I’ll leave that to the semi-literate producers of such wonders as the widely disseminated ‘documentary’, “Zeitgeist”.
Yet, as fanaticism is only for a day, probably no one 50 or 100 years hence will care — anymore than we care about the appointment of Roman Catholics to the Queen’s Privy Council in 1840.
