The TRUTH about Queen Victoria!!

It's Victoria Day weekend, and I am proud to be able to help renew public knowledge of the great woman this holiday commemorates by providing the following list of little known facts about her.

1. If the Prince Regent hadn't detested Victoria's father, the Duke of Kent, she would have ruled under a different name. The Prince Regent livened up her christening by refusing to allow her to receive any of the traditional names of the British royal family. So her intended name of Victoire (sic) Georgina Alexandrina Charlotte Augusta became Alexandrina Victoria.
2. She had an older half-brother and half-sister, Prince Charles and Princess Feodora of Leiningen. Feodora and Victoria were each other's closest friends throughout their lives, as a result of the curious circumstances of their childhood.
3. These curious circumstances were called the Kensington System by their instigator, Capt. John Conroy. He had been the Duke of Kent's equerry, and after the Duke's death the Duchess fell under his influence. He wanted Victoria to be dependent on her mother so that when Victoria acceded to the throne he could control her through her mother. To make Victoria dependent, Conroy kept her and Feodora isolated from any outside influence. After Feodora was married off at the earliest opportunity, Victoria was on her own.
4. Victoria nevertheless refused to fall under Conroy's influence. Before acceding to the throne she refused his request that she make him her personal secretary, on the day of her accession she ignored him and her mother, and after her accession she refused to receive him at court.
   
5. She loved beer.
6. Contrary to popular belief, Victoria's first language was English, not German.
7. When she became queen one of the first things she did was pay
   her father's considerable debts.
8. Like the rest of the royal family she was a staunch Whig. In 1839 she precipitated a political crisis which resulted in the Whigs preventing the Tories from taking over the government. The idea that the Crown should be above politics was introduced later by Prince Albert.
9. Because she outranked Prince Albert, she proposed to him.
10. In 1840 one Edward Oxford tried to shoot Victoria from close range while she was going to her mother's house in her carriage. She proceeded to her mother's house, then shortly after went out for another drive to assure the public that she had not beenhurt. The public was much impressed.
11. In 1858 she wrote to her pregnant daughter: "What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that; I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our very nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic."
12. Victoria's noble wish to promote the cause of civilization by demolishing the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, was thwarted by Brighton Town Council, which purchased and refurnished the building. The monstrosity survives to this day.

Happy Victoria Day.

(This article was cribbed from Cecil Woodham-Smith's
Queen Victoria: Her Life and Times, 1819-1861.)

The Truth about Queen Victoria © John FitzGerald, 2001

Cargo politics

A cargo cult mistakes an effect for a cause. The original Melanesian cargo cultists watched cargo arrive after their colonial occupiers had built airports, and concluded that the cargo had arrived because the airports had been built. This reasoning seems naive to us, since we already know that the correct chain of reasoning is the reverse: the wharves and airstrips were built because ships and airplanes were going to be arriving. However, as we have seen in the earlier articles in this series, we frequently fall into this type of error ourselves.

Anthropologists might object that I have oversimplified cargo cults, by the way. For example, the Melanesian cargo cultists often believed that their gods had already prepared cargo for them, and they just needed to supply places for the gods to deliver it. Whether my definition oversimplifies cargo cults or not, the cargo cultists still had the chain of reasoning backwards. Whether or not you thought cargo already exists, building an airport doesn’t cause cargo to be delivered. Even if you build a real airport rather than an imitation of one, building an airport still doesn’t cause cargo to be delivered. The Soviet Union had many airports, but it didn’t receive much cargo.

These days we have a lot of politicians, but they're not delivering much politics. Even in the broadest sense of the word, in which politics means simply the exercise of authority, contemporary politicians seem remarkably apolitical. Consider their agonizing and posturing about climate change, and then consider the few, trivial decisions in which that agonizing has resulted. The government of Canada ratified the Kyoto Protocols, and then promptly started ignoring them. Politics is no longer the art of the possible, but rather the art of avoiding the possible.

Political philosophy has followed the slide rule, restaurant counter service, and the dodo into oblivion. There was a time when conservative principles were based on the interests of the landed classes, liberal principles on the interests of the business class, and socialist principles on the interests of the workers. In Canada these days the national party with the closest thing to a political philosophy is the Conservatives, and judging by that philosophy they seem to represent the interest of pension funds. Everything is evaluated by the colour of the ink on the bottom line in the account books.

The New Democrats are now above all the party of proportional representation; the issue over-rides all others for them, and they drag it into the discussion of the most inappropriate issues (parliamentary ethics, for example). With a history of getting 20% of the vote and 10% of the seats, they're fierce about getting a system under which their 20% of the vote will get them 12% of the seats. They are losing the support of organized labour, but prefer to concern themselves with tinkering with the way votes are counted.

Both the Conservatives and the NDP have adopted the view that politics is a form of management. The Conservatives follow the managerial philosophy that all operations should turn a profit, while the New Democrats follow the managerial philosophy that all stakeholders should be persuaded to believe that they have a fair say in decision-making. As for the Liberals, they follow an approach known in the managerial literature as hill-climbing. That is, they believe in dealing with issues as they crop up, rather than in ways that are consistent with a political philosophy. They long ago abandoned their representation of business (as a class), and as for liberalism in the sense of promotion of individual liberty, they're the ones who, with the notwithstanding clause, decided the Charter of Rights should be perforated for easy removal.

Then there is the Bloc Québécois. It actually has the appearance of a political party. Its fundamental principle of sovereignty for Quebec is not well defined, if it is defined at all, but its decisions on parliamentary issues unrelated to sovereignty seem to be guided by consistent political principles. The Bloc also has a clear idea of the people whose interests they represent. There is a simple reason that the Bloc is more like an old-fashioned political party than the national parties are.

National sovereignty has been declining as international organizations and international agreements limit it, and as transnational corporations grow to ever more enormous sizes. Canada signed away much of its sovereignty, for example, to get free trade with the United States. In a world of declining national sovereignty, political principles and serious decision-making can get politicians in trouble with the people who really run the world. The Bloc can operate like an old-style party because for the moment the real decision-makers don't care what it does. Let Quebec become sovereign, though, and then someone new is going to be calling the tune.

The tune the rest of us are already dancing to, that is.

Cargo Politics © John FitzGerald, 2008

God works in mysterious ways

Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see,
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency.

–Emily Dickinson

Did George W. Bush lie about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction? Did he lie about Iraq's supposed plans to obtain uranium? Did he lie about Saddam Hussein's supposed support for al-Qaeda?

Probably not. He probably didn't tell the truth, but the reason he didn't is far more interesting than the idea that he simply lied.

One fact which people consider important about the contemporary Republican Party is its strong support among evangelical Protestants. Chief among these evangelical Protestants is Pat Robertson, head of the Christian Broadcasting Network, which grew out of his evangelical television show The 700 Club. Despite the recognition of the importance of the evangelicals to the Republican Party, though, no one seems to have realized the connection between evangelical theology and the Bush administration's dubious assertions.

Now, no one questions Christians' abilities to come up with wacky ideas. After all, the largest Christian denomination continues to organize its worship around what it considers to be an act of cannibalism in which believers consume the body and blood of their god. Nevertheless the evangelicals have come up with a few lulus lately.

Pat Robertson is known as an exponent of Kingdom Now teachings. In themselves Kingdom Now teachings are not all that wacky, but he combines them with another type of evangelical teaching which is, to use the technical term, looney.

Kingdom Now teachings hold that it is the duty of Christians to establish dominion over the earth by taking control of government and social institutions (I said they weren't all that wacky, not that they weren't wacky). Is it all that surprising that sending missionaries to Iraq turned out to be one of the chief American concerns after Iraq fell? Anyway, Kingdom Now devotees believe the Second Coming will be postponed until this dominion is established.

Kingdom Now adherents have many close relationships with another Protestant school of thought, the Word-Faith movement, also known as Positive Confession (we have now reached the really wacky bit). Word-Faith holds that if a person has faith, any word that he utters as a consequence of that faith must be true. Often the proponents of this view – the most prominent these days being Kenneth Copeland, Paul and Jan Crouch, and Benny Hinn – encourage people to believe that faith can make them rich.

Wealth, in fact, is seen as the right of the believer. Word-Faith has a highly deistic view of God, and believes that if what you say is based on faith in God, God is required to make your utterances true. So if you say "God will make me wealthy" (a statement of the type known as a positive confession), God must make you wealthy. Really. They believe that.

On the other hand, Word-Faith preachers tend to be loaded, so maybe they're onto something. Have a look at Rod Parsley's television show sometime. Besides being one of the most entertaining people on television, Pastor Parsley simply reeks of moolah. His suits are magnificent, and his headquarters in Columbus, Ohio is starting to make the Taj Mahal look like a shack. Benny Hinn doesn't look as if he has to go down to the food bank too often, either, although you'd think if positive confession was all that effective he could do something about his hair.

Anyway, one Kingdom Now adherent who has close ties to Word-Faith is...Pat Robertson! The 700 Club has Word-Faith preachers like Rod Parsley as guests, and the show has long featured Word-Faith shticks like praying over stacks of viewers' letters containing prayer wishes.

Now, George W. Bush, as every Republican tells us, is a spiritual man. No doubt he has been heavily influenced by Pastor Robertson. When faced with doubt about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, what would a Word-Faith believer do? He would believe that if he said Iraq had WMDs, then Iraq must have them.

That does seem to be the most persuasive explanation of what happened. It is simply more plausible than thinking that a bunch of intelligent people like Mr. Bush's advisers could think they could lie about issues like that and get away with it. It's more likely that they thought that if they believed it then it must be true.

Of course, many people think like that without the encouragement of evangelical preachers, and this type of thinking is rampant among the wildly popular American success experts. Even Dr. Phil, who at least has had the decency not to start his own cult, tells people that they come into this world with every ability they need to get whatever they want. However, among the exponents of this doctrine it is Pat Robertson who is the power within the Republican Party and the source of much of its funding. President Bush is more likely to have been influenced by him than by Dr. Phil or Anthony ("if I can go from being an overweight slob living in a rundown apartment to being an immensely wealthy exemplar of fitness who is accused of stealing other men's wives then so can you") Robbins.

The Administration's response to the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction confirms my analysis. Instead of simply planting some evidence, they continue to tell us that they are sure they will find some WMDs. They believe they will, so it must be true.

When you think about it, isn't it much better to have your country run by a bunch of those lying bastard politicians that everyone is always complaining about than by a bunch of religious wackos who are immune to reason and evidence? A lying bastard would have known better than to lie about things you could be caught out on.

But what about Tony Blair? He's probably not a Word-Faith devotee, and he's not a lying bastard (because a lying bastard would have known better). So I guess that makes him a stupid bastard.

Originally published in 2003

God Works in Mysterious Ways © 2003, John FitzGerald

Iggy's excellent empire

The Conservative Party of Canada has decided to enliven our lives in recent days by running announcements on TV about how un-Canadian Michael Ignatieff is. Once we got over our shock at the Conservatives attacking someone for being pro-American, we decided this was the perfect time to dust off this review, first published in 2006.

Reviewed in this article:

Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff(Vintage, 2003; 127 pages plus index; the Penguin edition, also published in 2003, is reviewed here)

He’s got that thing. Michael Ignatieff has been charming the Canadian journalistic classes for months now. The Globe and Mail published a fawning seven-page interview with him. Over and over we’re told how intellectual he is, how powerful his mind is, how he’s internationally respected as a scholar.

Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I decided to read some of this great thinking. The first thing I discovered while I was looking him up at the Toronto Public Library is that the Canadian people, or at least the Toronto branch, have not been inspired by reports of Mr. Ignatieff’s intellectual power (since Mr. Ignatieff is not teaching at the moment, I will use Mr. as his title rather than Dr.). No one’s been reserving any of his books, many of which are still on the shelves. In Toronto, at least, Iggymania seems to be confined to the employees of giant media corporations.

Anyway, I took out Empire Lite, which had the advantage of being fairly recent (2003) and topical (it deals in part with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; Mr. Ignatieff, in a departure from the policy of the party he aspires to lead, supports the latter invasion). It’s also short (127 pages of text in the Penguin edition), which I hoped would mean it hadn’t been artificially fattened the way so many books have been these days.

Mr. Ignatieff plunges into his topic immediately. His argument is that the old form of imperialism, which justified itself as necessary to spread civilization, has been replaced by a new stripped-down version which justifies itself as necessary to promote national self-determination – “hegemony without colonies,” as he puts it, “a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration and the risks of daily policing” (p. 2). He calls this empire lite, and says “the key question is whether empire lite is heavy enough to get the job done” (p. 3).

What job is that? Well, Mr. Ignatieff is confusing about that question. He asserts in his summary that the “essential purpose" of empire lite is “to restore order to border zones essential to the security of great powers” (p. 109), which at least is plausible. However, from the end of the introduction on he assumes that the most important goal of empire lite is actually to promote self-determination.

He writes in his introduction, for example, that “critics of imperial power need to understand that self-government in these places [Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo] is unattainable without some exercise of imperial power….Imperialism has become a precondition for democracy” (pp. 23-24). However, 85 pages later we find him writing that one of the imperial characteristics of empire lite is that “real power [in the countries which have supposedly become self-determining] will continue to be exercised from London, Washington, and Paris” (p. 109).

Besides that, Mr. Ignatieff repeatedly writes, persuasively, that the failure of empire lite to provide true self-determination is one of its serious flaws. One could as well argue that although con men never deliver the Brooklyn Bridge to any of the suckers who’ve given them money, nevertheless if you want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge you’re going to have to give money to a con man.

Mr. Ignatieff has been characterized by some as a groupie of the powerful, and his attribution of democracy-creating magical powers to imperialism – against his better judgment – seems to be an example of this. Nowhere does he make an argument to support his claim that imperialism is a precondition for democracy. He does not attempt to show how this assertion could be deduced from the defining characteristics of empire lite. In the three chapters between his introduction and his summary he marshals no objective empirical evidence which would support his claim or disprove a counterclaim that democracy can be established in a country without its becoming an object of imperialism. As we have seen, he characterizes imperialism (including empire lite) as inherently restricting national self-determination. His conclusion is that if empire lite doesn’t start living up to its supposed principles soon we’re going to be in serious trouble. But since imperialists say that their goal is to promote democracy, then ipso facto, Mr. Ignatieff seems to be arguing, that’s what their goal is.

I realize that what I’m claiming may not seem credible. However, if you’re a Canadian your public library probably has at least one copy of this book. All you have to do is read it. You will probably be as shocked by what you find as I was.

You’re probably wondering what goes on in those middle three chapters if Mr. Ignatieff is not marshalling evidence. What’s going on is some pedestrian journalism. In particular, the second of these three chapters is devoted to obvious character assassination of Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Médecins sans Frontières and of Médecins du Monde. Well, Mr. Kouchner may be as evil as Mr. Ignatieff depicts him, but his argument is unsupported by evidence. “What Bernard Kouchner represents is the whole tortuous history of modern humanitarianism and its marriage of convenience with state power and military force,” Mr. Ignatieff writes (p. 59). Represents to whom? Who exactly considers him to be a symbol of these things, other than Mr. Ignatieff? And saaay – isn’t hitching the self-determination wagon to the locomotive of state power and military force what Mr. Ignatieff is arguing for?

Clearly the imperialism of today does not promote national self-determination. Bosnia is effectively run by the European Union. In Iraq the coalition of the all too willing is ostensibly promoting the self-determination of a democratic nation called Iraq, when many of this ostensible nation’s citizens think their true nation is something else – Kurdistan, or an Islamic Caliphate based in the Sunni regions, or an islamic Republic of Iraq. But Mr. Ignatieff is still pitching the supposed virtues of the invasion of Iraq.

Much has been made of Mr. Ignatieff’s supposedly suspect Canadianness. Well, this book will allay your fears on that score. He actually mentions Canada as if it were important, so he must be Canadian. However, his book is obviously intended not for Canadians but for citizens of a country (the United States, say) which is having grave doubts about the justifiability of its imperial adventures and looking for someone who can give it soothing reassurances that blowing up thousands of Iraqis and Afghans is just what the remaining unexploded Iraqis and Afghans needed. As an analysis of what's happening in the world, though, it is unsubstantiated, self-contradictory, and quite possibly disingenuous.

Iggie's Excellent Empire © John FitzGerald, 2006

It's all about us

First published in 2008:

The Canadian political leaders spent the recent election campaign telling us what wonderful people they were. What they should have been doing is telling us what wonderful people we are.

There is a strong narcissistic streak in the public. The appeal of politicians like Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan was that they told the voters that they (the voters) were wonderful people and that consequently they (Mr. Mulroney and Mr. Reagan) were going to do wonderful things for them.

At the moment one of the candidates for the presidency of the United States talks about how the American people together can accomplish great things, while the other talks about how only some of them – the “real” Americans – can accomplish great things. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but you can get pretty close to flattering all of them, and at the moment the one who is flattering all of them is leading in the opinion polls.

It is flattery, too. Most of us are just great lumps. Most Americans couldn’t find the United States on a map, and they’re supposed to accomplish great things? But it makes sense to them, so you can’t hurt yourself playing up to it.

In Canada, this is the secret of the Quebec nationalists. They continually tell Quebeckers how vibrant and dynamic their culture is. Not vibrant enough, apparently, to withstand a reduction in arts grants, but let’s not confuse the voters, eh?

So, if Stephen Harper wants a majority, he’d better start sucking up. We don’t want to hear about what a swell fellow he is, we want to hear about what a great bunch of guys and gals we are. Unfortunately, most Conservative politicians seem to believe that we’re really a substandard lot, the standard being Americans. It may take them a while to convert to the new approach.

And Jack Layton can stop talking about “everyday families,” eh? We don’t want to be told we’re good enough for everyday, we want to be told we can accomplish great things. You’d think a socialist could come up with something about the collective greatness of the Canadian people.

As for the Liberals, they blew their chance royally. Instead of calling their platform the Green Shift, all they had to do was call it the Just Society.

Democracy: it's all about us.

It's All About Us © John FitzGerald, 2008