A Portrait in History

  It is one of those ironies of fate that Blair’s appearance before the Chilcot enquiry would fall 361 years (give or take a day or so), after the trial and execution of Charles the First. These are the January days: The strange desperate days, when in a mixture of bravado, fear, and mistrust, Cromwell, a handful of Generals, a clutch of Republicans and a number of religious Zealots executed the King. The magnitude of this is hard these days to fathom. It was the first trial of a monarch in public; the first attempt to hold an ‘executive’ to account in two ways, and faced all the problems of this modern attempt. That is, the real reason for the trials was/is a deep feeling of mistrust and loathing for leaders who were/are thought or felt to be personally responsible for wars. In Charles’ case he had, the summer before, restarted the Civil War, using the Scots (an action that had led to the Battle of Preston). And yet here was a problem. The feeling of resentment was very deep, and yet it was not enough to condemn the monarchs. Monarchs have the right to follow their judgement, even if that judgement leads toward war. It is their God Given right.

  This last point creates a deep problem with the very issue of putting a monarch on trial. It is not at all clear what one is trying them for: There is no capital offence of being a bad monarch, which is really what one wants to condemn, or perhaps one might say that ruling the nation ill is what one wants to condemn. Or perhaps one might say that the very task of ruling, is ’unlawful’. One is coercing after all, a population into action. One is robbing them of their possessions (eg. tax) and forcing them to act at one’s command. Actions that are only legal because there is a bond of trust between people and rulers in some form or other. That is, there is a belief on the behalf of the people that their ruler is somehow working in their interest. They might fight and die, but the ruler is the one who is insuring that that life and death are not in vain. There is then a trust that their leader is thinking about them – a belief in the ruler’s beliefs.

  And it is of course this point that broke down so badly both then and now. Both Charles and Blair were caught in a paradox. They were rulers who felt their higher loyalty to be not to their people but to God (or to history understood as subsequent generations). They felt then that they did not need to account for their actions in the here and now, and to the people that they were actually governing. The result of course was a massive dysfunction. On the one hand the rulers were simply doing ‘ruler-ly’ things, in the normal way; and yet they were not doing it in a way that their people felt comfortable with. The trust in the account given to the people was missing, supplanted by a faith in God and posterity. It is surely this faith that animates Blair’s irritating (and demonically carnivorous) smile – as much as it animated Charles’ very obvious distain for the court.

  The faith of rulers then matters. This is not merely a religious faith, but rather a faith in the future. It is clear that Blair’s only real defence was that posterity or an alternative universe would justify him. He was acting according to the principles of the state, and history would know that. He therefore defended himself with a massive counter factual of - Where would we be now if Hussein had had nuclear weapons and was preparing to use them ’here and now’? This is of course a very fantasy defence. We would presumably have had seven years to stop his happening (and Hussein and fundamentalism were always enemies and we could no doubt have ensured that they still were). And yet there is a real substance to that fantasy. Blair is clearly imagining the gratitude owed to him, set across posterity (which will realize he is right), given in the face of civilians who know not that they are wrong. His counterfactuals are where he is getting his appreciation. Just as Charles the First knew that subsequent generations would be on his side, and accept him at his word, as the good monarch.

  More than this counterfactual, Blair himself has clearly bought a very strong line, one that we in the West pedal so often. This line sees our little nation states with their flags, and their daffy uniforms as the very goal, the end of history (and possibly human evolution) as the Acme of development. All one has to do then, to liberate a world is to smash whatever tyranny was governing a block of territory, and proclaim that from now on, one will have a free republic, a democracy in its place. That ought to be enough, the logic goes, for general happiness to break out. Or even if it does not (as of course it did not in Iraq) that is merely a hiccup in the great plan. Nation building is difficult, we say, people need to be taught that our system is best - but it will all be aright in the end.

  We are then prepared (or Blair would have us be prepared) to inflict God knows what suffering upon a people, as we impose our system of government upon them. This imposition, this suffering will, the logic runs, be alright from the long perspective. It is merely the birth pangs of history. The creation of nations. The roots of this bravado lie of course in the ‘fall' twenty years ago of the Iron Curtain. We took this to be, and cried out our vindication; We were right all along. - A feeling of euphoria that outlasted the bloodbath in the Balkans, and the chaos in the Caucacus, and even the subsequent resurgence of Russia as a resource superpower (and its odd version of our democracy). These were mere hiccups, mere points along the way, as infantile peoples learnt how to be at the end of history.

  This faith then in our model, was very strong, and still is. We still tie our aid to democracy, that is, to the imposition of our values, our political systems. And yet there is something so odd here. The collapse of the old Soviet bloc and the resurgence of the nations of central Europe made some kind of historical sense. These were nations that had had a brief flowering between the wars, and beforehand had been the careful construct of the great nationalists of the nineteenth century, who had welded disparate peoples together, through folk custom and 'cod' history (often of historic disasters). They had then a history of being aspiring nations (if never the actual reality). In a very real sense this aspiration to nationhood was actually the roots of nationalism itself (which was always bigger in the Eastern bloc than in the West, which was replete with nations). Nations were then the object of centuries of aspiration (a fact that weighed heavily against communism).

  The difference then between this situation, these never never nations aspiring to nationalism, and what we did in Africa and the Middle East is shocking. We created in the nineteen fifties, nations in the sand, we drew arbitrary boundaries, and created kingdoms or republics where we chose, without rhyme or reason. Even more ironically the two nations with something akin to Western concepts of nations were not allowed; Palestine and Kurdistan remained mere dreams. The nations which we created were utterly arbitrary. Even worse that this, they ran in the face of people’s history. That is to say, a nation is not a flag, or a stupid song, or even a daft hat and an ill fitting uniform, but rather a marriage of popular and often cod history, a landscape, and political system. This marriage concocted in Europe might be applicable in places where history (that is, a written knowledge of the past) is light or not existent (Australia or parts of Africa): But this is clearly not the case in the Middle East. The land smokes history and the very cradle of civilization (the same is true in China). The problem is that this is not Western history -  it has not led a people to the only system which we allow for - functioning national democracy.

  On the contrary the weight of the history in the Middle East, was always to create large quite distant political bodies, not rooted in the land or one people (the Ottoman or Mamuluke empires are obvious examples here; in both cases the Soldier castes were not indigenous, or even in the Ottoman’s case Moslem). This political system could then rule vast tracts of land, and rule them well, without needing to make claims about nationhood. Within these landmasses, there would be many different voices, many different possible nations, all mixed up together.

  All of which is fine: It is just history, a history which we ignore. We come along, and offer a massive bribe to become like us, democracies founded in nations. We choose in making this offer to ignore something about our own history. Our nations were groups founded in Blood, which united (pretty much) a language, a history, and a political organization; whilst in contrast the nations we are looking to build, have no such homogeneity. There is then no simple path for their creation. They look then upon us and our homogeneity and how it makes our life easier, how it sorts out our history, and naturally assume that this is the key. The result is of course anarchy. We hover over this anarchy with Picaresque smiles, muttering please stop (or getting involved with bloody consequences), and yet fail to understand really how we created it, by grafting one history (ours) on another (theirs). Worse than this, Blair and his ilk, see this process, this war of histories, only in terms of a greater history. The history that will eventually see ‘the triumph of the West’, and its freedoms (on the grounds that if communism collapsed, then every other system must go the same way).

  The anarchy is not then seen for what it is. The anarchy created by their greed and our bodged attempts to graft our history onto theirs. It is rather a process that will allow ‘divine righters’ such as Blair to feel smug, and refuse to apologize. - In the face of suffering, history takes blood, his smile seems to say (but just thank God, he no doubt adds, it is not my blood). This posterity, where Blair is clearly imagining his gratitude to be, his regard, is the posterity of the triumph of the West. Every other option, is,  in his model, a mere counterfactual, a horror that one cannot countenance. There must be the victory of Western ‘freedom’ and Western history, or else the world will have 'gone wrong’. And he is of course the very apostle of this history. No matter that in making it we lost the trustees of our first civilizations, and bombed their ruins, for what is their destruction in the face of this higher history? This greater destiny?

  Charles the First did not boast this much divine inspiration. Or rather, he lay closer to its beginning, and so embodied it less perfectly. He might have been chosen by God, to govern Britain and its growing colonies and so export our system elsewhere, but that choice was curtailed as it existed alongside other systems (the French, the Spanish and the Holy Roman Empire) also. It could then cope with diversity elsewhere, in a way that Blair simply cannot. His system alone is allowed to triumph; everywhere must be Britain’s (or America’s) now, as we stand shoulder to soldier against that world, and in the name of a destiny.

  Hence perhaps the images of Blair and Charles differs in this: Charles’ portrait in his trial is a portrait of dreadful loneliness and isolation. A dignified and perhaps kind man, caught in events beyond his control but still unyielding and prepared to accept martyrdom if that was what it took. Blair by contrast appeared, to my mind at least Mad. He revelled in the martyrdom (where Charles merely accepted it). It was after all confirmation, that like Charles he is a product of higher history – a man of vision, a commitment politician, committed to waging the war of the West against the rest. A destiny which is worth this political martyrdom. He might then be as isolated (politically) as Charles, and as hated, and yet he cares not (or will not appear to care). Both portraits are united in that inflexibility – neither will apologize for the suffering caused in their name, or by their beliefs.

  Worse than that of course, is that this war, the War of Western values and security, is by definition an endless war. If we care not for other’s history or anarchy or lives lost in the struggle, then there is every reason that we ought to carry this war on to Iran and beyond. - Anywhere and everywhere where there are Western weapons, and non-Western values becomes a potential target: Well it does if our fears or paranoia link this place with ‘terrorists’. What is more, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Wage a war in the name of a cod history, and anarchy will follow, an anarchy that breeds more wars. The Blair logic is then the logic of endless war; a logic where wars in the future, and the coming need for a war with Iran, justifies wars in the past. The trouble here of course is not merely that this view is abhorrent, but rather that it has a logic, a logic of Western states faced with their own impotence in the face of a fundamentalism which rejects their complacency, and take on history. Once this rejection has become militant and linked to war, all the world other than myself is indeed the foe. The game must of course always be not to get to this point, this partial self boxing into a position that knows only the West and its nationalisms. A task which Blair who clearly thinks in terms of Western values and nation states alone, clearly cannot accomplish. Our trouble of course is not whether he can or cannot do this (for he is history – good or bad), our problem is - can we do it? And on this question an entire history will hang.

  It is this faith in a higher destiny that then naturally, both then and now, catches in the throats of those not privileged to this divine right. We see some other history – a bodged campaign, and bloody peace that followed it; an unrepentant warmonger, happy to wage war again and again in the name of destiny. Men, perhaps initially kind, who are now closed to the personal histories of death and suffering they caused. Men who can only see ‘the bigger picture’, and have lost sight of the pain, and the death. Men whose belief and faith in their own role in history has meant that they cannot be trusted.

  But of course the problem remains - it is actually impossible to try a king for merely having faith. They will simply argue that their faith is what matters - it is why they are King, after all. (Who’s Queen? or King? is a valid argument). We might not like it, but that is then our problem. In the seventeenth century, the Army had an answer to this. It howled justice, and smuggled the King off to execution and actual martyrdom. An act of injustice in itself, to compensate for a lack of power (and one that proved ineffective). And us? We of course have no recourse, no way right or wrong to stop Blair toddling off to yet another high paid job. There is no let up from our cries of injustice against a man who doesn’t care about our opinions, anyway (and who welcomes any little martyrdom we offer him). We are left then with only impotent fury against the system that allowed this to be. A fury that is always volatile, and dangerous, perhaps all the more so in an election year.