Are Wrongheaded U.S. Policies Ceding the Future to China?

HMS Hood steaming to meet Bismark - a  heroic but sad symbol of
a failure to recognize the forces of technological and economic change

A piece in the New York Times has a piece that suggests that Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, may be about to ignite a trade war with China.  The move stems from apparent growing concerns in the United States over a Chinese government-led effort to make the country a global leader in microchips, electric cars and other crucial technologies of the future. Unlike the orthodoxy of the GOP which wants to crush government regulations - including worker and public safety regulations - in China the ideology is to have government work with industry and foster the best possible economic future if for no other reason than the fact that economic success helps the Chinese leadership stay in power.  Thomas Friedman argues that Trump and his isolationist regime where ignorance is embraced and inconvenient facts are ignored or labeled "fake" are taking the wrong course and that the main beneficiary will be China going forward.  In many ways, as explained below, America finds itself where Great Britain was at the end of WWI.  Will American leadership make the same mistakes? Here are column highlights: 

I have a simple view of governing today: We are in the middle of not one but three climate changes at once to which government must help citizens respond — and Donald Trump doesn’t have a clue and China does. 

In the past you could fix any climate/environmental problem later or now. But today later is officially over. Later will be too late. At some point, the deforestation of the Amazon is not reversible.

We are the middle of a change in the “climate” of globalization. We are going from an interconnected world to an interdependent one, and in such a world your friends can hurt you faster than your enemies: Think what happens if Mexico’s economy fails. And your rivals’ falling becomes more dangerous than your rivals’ rising: We will be hurt a lot more by China’s economy tanking than its putting tanks on islands in the South China Sea.

And lastly we’re in the middle of a change in the “climate” of technology. We’re moving into a world where machines and software can analyze (see patterns that were always hidden before); optimize (tell a plane which altitude to fly each mile to get the best fuel efficiency); prophesize (tell you when your elevator will break and fix it before it does); customize (tailor any product or service for you alone) and digitize and automate just about any job. This is transforming every industry.

Governing today is all about how you prepare your society to get the most out of these three climate changes and cushion the worst. Sadly, that’s not our society’s priority right now. In the age of Trump we are treating governing as entertainment. Some conservatives argue that’s fine. The less D.C. does, the better. Let the market rule. I disagree. What actually made America great was a government that prepared the right soil in education, regulation, immigration, research and infrastructure, and a dynamic private sector that grew all kinds of flowers in that soil.

Which brings me to China. China takes governing seriously — in a cruel way and in an impressive way. Its leaders wake up every morning and ask themselves two questions. First, how do we stay in power?

China’s leaders are just as focused on asking a second question: What world are we living in? Which leads to: What are the biggest forces shaping this world? And what kind of national strategy do we need so our people can get the most out of these forces and cushion the worst?

They know we’re in the midst of these three climate changes and have formulated a strategy — “Made in China 2025” — to thrive within it. It’s a plan for building the infrastructure, investments, education and regulations that will enable Chinese companies to lead in supercomputing, new materials, computer-controlled machine tools, industrial robotics, space and aviation equipment — including drones — clean cars, clean energy, biomedicine and next-gen medical devices.

By contrast, Trump hasn’t even named a science adviser. He pulled out of the Paris climate accord without any input from scientists, and he proposed a budget for fiscal 2018 that eliminated the Department of Energy’s innovation lab (the “Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy”) and slashed funding for all of our key national science and medical labs, which provide the basic research for the very next-gen technologies in which China is now massively investing. He’s spending the money instead on a wall against Mexico. Is there anything more stupid?

And then you watch the health care debate. And then you realize that in addition to the executive branch, one of our two parties has gone nuts. For seven years the G.O.P. made replacing Obamacare, which needs improving, its top goal . . . . it was clear that it had done no homework on a better plan or built any intraparty consensus for it. It was all a fraud.

And then you look at all the knife fights between rival Trump aides and you realize that none of these fights were over how to thrive in a world challenged by these three climate changes. They were all about who could get closest to and flatter our Dear Leader most. But our Dear Leader — as we saw in the health care debate — has done no homework on the future, either. He’s been too busy promising to restore the past.

This is so dangerous. When the pace of change accelerates in climate, technology and globalization all at once, small errors in leadership navigation can have huge consequences. It’s like a 747 pilot who enters the wrong navigational coordinates. You can find yourself so far off course that the pain of getting back will be staggering.

We have such a pilot. It is time for the adult Republicans and Democrats in Congress to come together and take the helm.

Back to Great Britain.  On the eve of WWI, Britain was the most powerful nation on earth with a military, especially its navy, second to none.  It had lead the way in industrialization in the 19th century and had reaped huge economic benefit.  But things were changing.  Germany was rapidly gaining on Britain industrially and economically and science and the technology of the day was changing rapidly.  By the end of WWI, Britain's industrial base had become antiquated and leading industrial strength was moving towards the United States and even Japan.  Britain's leadership turned inward, failed to see the crucial need to modernize with the government leading the way.  By the eve of WWII, while still powerful, Britain had been eclipsed by America, Germany and Japan, the latter two of which had governments that pushed and controlled the modernization of their industrial bases, albeit for militaristic and imperial purposes. Will Trump and the GOP take America on a course akin to Britain's mistaken path?  Right now, I fear the answer is yes.  If this happens, Americans need to get used to the idea of America no longer being the world's leading power and economy.   

How the Arab World Came Apart

As noted several times on this blog, the roots of the disaster now engulfing the Middle East truly began after World War I when western powers divided up what had been the Ottoman Empire.  In parceling out territories to themselves, France and Great Britain created artificial nations that combined disparate tribes and religious groups with no thought of creating future stable nations.  The result has been that without a strong monarch or dictator, the countries were destined to blow apart, starting with Iraq.  The trigger for much of the death and mayhem that has followed was the American invasion of Iraq - an invasion sold to the American people based on deliberate lies and untruths.   The New York Times Magazine has a lengthy, five part piece that looks at the disaster which while not totally avoidable,could have played out so very differently but for the insane megalomania of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their henchmen.  Here are excerpts from the forward of the piece:

Why did it turn out this way? Why did a movement begun with such high promise go so terribly awry?

The scattershot nature of the Arab Spring makes it hard to provide a single answer. Some nations were radically transformed, even as others right next door were barely touched. Some of the nations in crisis were relatively wealthy (Libya), others crushingly poor (Yemen). Some countries with comparatively benign dictatorships (Tunisia) blew up along with some of the region’s most brutal (Syria). The same range of political and economic disparity is seen in the nations that remained stable.

Yet one pattern does emerge, and it is striking. While most of the 22 nations that make up the Arab world have been buffeted to some degree by the Arab Spring, the six most profoundly affected — Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen — are all republics, rather than monarchies. And of these six, the three that have disintegrated so completely as to raise doubt that they will ever again exist as functioning states — Iraq, Syria and Libya — are all members of that small list of Arab countries created by Western imperial powers in the early 20th century. In each, little thought was given to national coherence, and even less to tribal or sectarian divisions. Certainly, these same internal divisions exist in many of the region’s other republics, as well as in its monarchies, but it would seem undeniable that those two factors operating in concert — the lack of an intrinsic sense of national identity joined to a form of government that supplanted the traditional organizing principle of society — left Iraq, Syria and Libya especially vulnerable when the storms of change descended.

In fact, all but one of the six people profiled ahead are from these “artificial states,” and their individual stories are rooted in the larger story of how those nations came to be. The process began at the end of World War I, when two of the victorious allies, Britain and France, carved up the lands of the defeated Ottoman Empire between themselves as spoils of war. In Mesopotamia, the British joined together three largely autonomous Ottoman provinces and named it Iraq. The southernmost of these provinces was dominated by Shiite Arabs, the central by Sunni Arabs and the northernmost by non-Arab Kurds. To the west of Iraq, the European powers took the opposite approach, carving the vast lands of “greater Syria” into smaller, more manageable parcels. Falling under French rule was the smaller rump state of Syria — essentially the nation that exists today — and the coastal enclave of Lebanon, while the British took Palestine and Transjordan, a swath of southern Syria that would eventually become Israel and Jordan. Coming a bit later to the game, in 1934, Italy joined the three ancient North African regions that it had wrested from the Ottomans in 1912 to form the colony of Libya.

To maintain dominion over these fractious territories, the European powers adopted the same divide-and-conquer approach that served them so well in the colonization of sub-Saharan Africa. This consisted of empowering a local ethnic or religious minority to serve as their local administrators, confident that this minority would never rebel against their foreign overseers lest they be engulfed by the disenfranchised majority.

This was only the most overt level of the Europeans’ divide-and-conquer strategy, however, for just beneath the sectarian and regional divisions in these “nations” there lay extraordinarily complex tapestries of tribes and subtribes and clans, ancient social orders that remained the populations’ principal source of identification and allegiance. Much as the United States Army and white settlers did with Indian tribes in the conquest of the American West, so the British and French and Italians proved adept at pitting these groups against one another, bestowing favors — weapons or food or sinecures — to one faction in return for fighting another. The great difference, of course, is that in the American West, the settlers stayed and the tribal system was essentially destroyed. In the Arab world, the Europeans eventually left, but the sectarian and tribal schisms they fueled remained.

At least one man saw this quite clearly. For much of 2002, the Bush administration had laid the groundwork for the Iraq invasion by accusing Saddam Hussein of pursuing a weapons-of-mass-destruction program and obliquely linking him to the Sept. 11 attacks. In October 2002, six months before Firdos Square, I had a long interview with Muammar el-Qaddafi, and I asked him who would benefit if the Iraq invasion actually occurred. The Libyan dictator had a habit of theatrically pondering before answering my questions, but his reply to that one was instantaneous. “Bin Laden,” he said. “There is no doubt about that. And Iraq could end up becoming the staging ground for Al Qaeda, because if the Saddam government collapses, it will be anarchy in Iraq. If that happens, actions against Americans will be considered jihad.”

Part 1 focuses on three historical factors that are crucial to understanding the current crisis: the inherent instability of the Middle East’s artificial states; the precarious position in which U.S.-allied Arab governments have found themselves when compelled to pursue policies bitterly opposed by their own people; and American involvement in the de facto partitioning of Iraq 25 years ago, an event little remarked upon at the time — and barely more so since — that helped call into question the very legitimacy of the modern Arab nation-state. Part 2 is primarily devoted to the American invasion of Iraq, and to how it laid the groundwork for the Arab Spring revolts. In Part 3, the narrative quickens, as we follow the explosive outcome of those revolts as they occurred in Egypt, Libya and Syria. By Part 4, which chronicles the rise of ISIS, and Part 5, which tracks the resulting exodus from the region, we are squarely in the present, at the heart of the world’s gravest concern.

But what follows, ultimately, is a dark warning. Today the tragedy and violence of the Middle East have spilled from its banks, with nearly a million Syrians and Iraqis flooding into Europe to escape the wars in their homelands, and terrorist attacks in Dhaka, Paris and beyond. With the ISIS cause being invoked by mass murderers in San Bernardino and Orlando, the issues of immigration and terrorism have now become conjoined in many Americans’ minds, forming a key political flash point in the coming presidential election. In some sense, it is fitting that the crisis of the Arab world has its roots in the First World War, for like that war, it is a regional crisis that has come quickly and widely — with little seeming reason or logic — to influence events at every corner of the globe. 

Britain Post Brexit - A Cautionary Tale for America

With many pundits and talking heads swooning and saying that the Breixt vote in the United Kingdom might be a clue for a Donald Trump victory in November, one would think that the pro-Trump forces and the forces of bigotry and xenophobia might want to spend a few moments considering what leaving the European Union could likely mean for Great Britain.  Besides the huge negative economic impact, the nation now faces renewed signs of splintering as Scotland plans to hold a new vote on exiting.  Even Northern Ireland is no longer a safe bet at remaining and there is a  stampede of Britons who are seeking Irish passports since it would allow them the benefits of remaining in the EU.  The right wing may be "taking back their country," but that country is likely to be much diminished and the poor even worse off than under the EU.  A Pyrrhic victory at best.  A piece in The Economist looks at more of the possible self-inflicted harm that awaits the UK - or what will be left of it.  Here are highlights:

Britons have benefited from a global version of the QWERTY syndrome; our ancestors defeated the French in the battle for European control of North America. Not only did this establish English as the global language, but the natural alliance with America helped Britain win two world wars. The use of English and the country’s geographical position has made Britain a natural base for international business and finance. By being on the “right side” of those wars, English people grow up with a fairly benign view of their role in history and are shocked to find that the Irish (let alone the Scots) and citizens of the countries we invaded have a much more jaundiced impression. In a sense, then, modern Britons were “born on third base and think they hit a triple.”

It was not always thus. Just 40 years ago, Britain was a mess. As a teenager I recall doing homework by candlelight in the power cuts of 1972, the three-day week, endless strikes and a widespread sense that Britain was ungovernable. It was a shabby, dirty country; when my mum hung out the washing in Peterborough, the soot from the brick chimneys made it dirty again. There was widespread racism; “Paki-bashing” was a favourite sport of teenage boys. In the late 1970s, more people were leaving Britain than immigrating;London’s population fell by a quarter between 1939 and the early 1990s. Slowly but surely, Britain changed. Was it the EU? Was it Margaret Thatcher’s reforms? Was it North Sea oil (another lucky break)? Whatever the reason, Britain became more confident, more vibrant, more multicultural. . . . The British economy was no longer the “sick man of Europe”, especially in the run-up to 2008. Yes, there was too much debt and too big a bet on financial services; but these were not the only areas where Britain was doing well. The car industry has been revived under foreign ownership; aerospace remains important, as does pharmaceuticals; and Hollywood calls on Britain’s creative and technical expertise. The sense of national decline had gone; people flocked to live and work in London as one of the world’s great cities.

Not everybody, of course, welcomed these changes. And I understand that it is easier for a middle-class Briton to feel more secure about it than for someone on the minimum wage. Workers in the developed world felt that the benefits of globalisation were passing them by. Still, Britain has had rather more success, post-2008, in driving down its unemployment rate than France, Spain or Italy.

Now in the space of a week, there is a sense that all that has changed. The referendum campaign seems to have awakened some “rough beast” within the British public; never mind a halt to immigration, some people think existing immigrants are about to be forced out. There are widespread reports of racist incidents and attacks.

Yes, of course, the 17m people who voted Leave did so for a wide variety of reasons, from sovereignty through to the hope that more money would be spent on the NHS. The Leave campaign was always an odd coalition between slightly eccentric back-bench Tories (who were also climate-change sceptics) and UKIP’s nativist instincts. Part of the reason for the post-referendum chaos is that there was no coherent plan for what a post-Brexit Britain would look like.  

[T]the country looks more like the Britain I remember from the 1970s and less the kind of country that I can feel proud about. And that matters because my children may soon lose the right to live and work in the rest of the EU, an insurance policy against nastiness at home. And if I feel that way, how many more talented, more mobile people, who came to Britain because it seemed like an open tolerant place, might decide to leave?  To illustrate the point, here is a tweet from an Italian living in London

Many international professionals already thinking of leaving London and move elsewhere. Not bc of legal status, bc they no longer feel home

And as they go, the people in this video will feel like they have won.

Do Americans want to suffer a similar economic free fall just so racists can feel good about themselves? 

Evangelical Christians and Brexit

In my view, evangelical Christians are a toxic and dangerous element in America's civil society and political realm.  Almost by definition, evangelical Christians in America are at war against modernity and a diverse, knowledge based society.  Anything or anyone that threatens their childish, myth based belief system must be destroyed.  And if they resemble anyone in the New Testament, it is the Pharisees - those that Christ purportedly roundly condemned.  In short, they are a nasty group and a threat to decent and knowledge based society.  Indeed, they celebrate ignorance and idiocy.   In the wake of the disastrous Brexit vote in Britain, it should come as no surprise that evangelical Christians strongly supported leaving the European Union.  A piece in The Economist looks at  and this foul element and it support for a revolt against diversity and modernity.  Here are excerpts:

IN NORTHERN IRELAND, where a majority of citizens voted to remain in the European Union, there is a small but still significant share of the electorate who will be rejoicing over the result on religious grounds. Among some devoutly evangelical Protestants, the referendum has been viewed as a playing out of religious prophecy. The most widely quoted chapter is Revelations 18, in which an angel cries triumphantly that the evil empire of Babylon has fallen after "all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication." The verse on which preachers have focused is Revelations 18:4.

And I heard another voice from heaven, saying: "Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues."

In April, as campaigning for the referendum got underway, a conspicuous slogan urging people to vote for Brexit in the name of that verse appeared on a gable in Tigers Bay, a loyalist area on the north side of Belfast. In a small market town in the west of Northern Ireland, an evangelical group took over a premises on the main street and covered the front in posters urging people to vote "leave" or risk their souls by opting for a political institution which plainly stood for the Antichrist, an impostor whose appearance is a harbinger of the final battle before all earthly things come to end.

Using the eschatological parts of the Bible to denounce pan-European institutions is a long-standing trope in Ulster Protestant rhetoric. It was a recurring theme in the sermons of Ian Paisley, the preacher-politician who dominated Ulster Protestant politics for decades before striking a peace deal with his declared adversaries. He often alluded to Revelations chapter 17, which describes a depraved woman, the whore of Babylon, sitting upon a horrific, multi-headed, multi-horned scarlet-coloured beast. In Paisley's imagery, the Catholic church was the whore, and the European Union was the beast.

Such language is heard in ultra-Protestant circles elsewhere in the world, but Northern Ireland is probably the only place where it has come anywhere close to the political mainstream. 

BRITAIN: Half Of 18-24 Year-Olds Say They’re Not 100% Heterosexual

Click image to enlarge

A new survey in Great Britain has yielded results that will no doubt have the Christofascists foaming at the mouth and hysterically claiming that the "gay agenda" is turning youth gay.  The study found that 49% among 18-24 year olds classified them selves as not 100% heterosexual.  Interestingly, only 72% of the adults surveyed said they were 100% heterosexuals.  Tony Perkins, Victoria Cobb, Albert Mohler and Maggie Gallagher will be having the vapors!  Here are some of the findings from the YouGov survey:

Invented by Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s, the Kinsey scale plots individuals on a range of sexual dispositions from exclusively heterosexual at 0 through to exclusively homosexual at 6. Where the original study had a large number of methods for placing people, YouGov simply asked people to place themselves on the sexuality scale.

Taken as a whole, 72% of the British public place themselves at the completely heterosexual end of the scale, while 4% put themselves at the completely homosexual end and 19% say they are somewhere in between . . .

With each generation, people see their sexuality as less fixed in stone. The results for 18-24 year-olds are particularly striking, as 43% place themselves in the non-binary area between 1 and 5 and 52% place themselves at one end or the other. Of these, only 46% say they are completely heterosexual and 6% as completely homosexual.

More than anything, it indicates an increasingly open minded approach to sexuality. In a further set of questions asking if respondents could conceivably be attracted to, have sex with or have a relationship with someone of the same sex (if the right person came along at the right time), level 1s were at least 35% more likely to say they could than level 0s.

Given the Millennials seeming growing indifference toward religion and more open acceptance of gays, one has to wonder if similar findings would occur in America. 

Did Senior Thatcher Era Politicans Rape and Murder Boys?

Photo Illustration by Emil Lendof/The Daily Beast

With stories that sound like something out of the Vatican and Catholic priest circles, a victim and others are claiming that a pedophile abuse ring ran rampant during the Thatcher years and that powerful British politicians worked to keep the abuse and possible some murders covered up.  As most readers know, the Thatcher regime was anything but friendly to gays, yet if the stories are true, gay sex and the abuse of boys was a fixture with some in Thatcher's government.  Why is it that the loudest homophobes are always the ones desiring or engaging in abusive gay sex?  The Daily Beast looks at the sensational allegations.   Here are highlights:

Scotland Yard detectives believe that an organized pedophile ring at the heart of the British establishment was responsible for the murder of three young boys and the violent sexual abuse of dozens more.

A survivor, known as Nick, described regular “abuse parties” that were held at a luxury apartment block near Westminster during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. He said he watched a Conservative Member of Parliament strangle one boy to death, and witnessed another young boy brutally murdered in front of a Cabinet minister.

Detective Superintendent Kenny McDonald, who is leading an investigation of the alleged “VIP” abuse network said today: “I believe what Nick is saying to be credible and true.”

Nick says children between the ages of seven and 16 were taken to the events, including regular Christmas parties, which were often held at Dolphin Square, an exclusive building on the River Thames that was popular with MPs who needed second homes in London close to the Houses of Parliament. He has described the partygoers as a cross-section of some of the most powerful men in Britain including Sir Peter Hayman, a long-time MI6 chief.

A Scotland Yard inquiry has been established to investigate whether the Metropolitan Police was guilty of overlooking the crimes of powerful figures, or whether some kind of cover-up operation was in place.

Over the years, several MPs have alleged cover-ups or suggested that investigations were shut down by senior security officials. In 1981, Sir Peter Hayman, a former diplomat and intelligence operative, was outed by Conservative MP Geoffrey Dickens, who used Parliamentary privilege to name him as a pedophile in the House of Commons. Dickens continued to investigate the pedophile ring, which he claimed included “big, big names,” and he passed a 40-page dossier of evidence to the Home Secretary in 1983.

Dickens claimed his name subsequently appeared on a hit-list and his house was broken into by burglars who scoured his office but never stole any possessions. “The noose around my neck grew tighter after I named a former high-flying British diplomat on the Floor of the House. Honorable Members will understand that where big money is involved and as important names came into my possession so the threats began,” he told the House of Commons in 1985.
Current Labour MP John Mann has suffered no personal threats but says his investigation into allegations of a VIP pedophile network were also shut down by the authorities. As a local politician in Lambeth, South London, he said he became aware of allegations that young boys in care homes were being recruited as rent boys and taken to Dolphin Square.  “We were told this by several sources. It was very specific: there were sex parties there, and they involved Tory MPs,” he told the Daily Mail last month.

He passed the information to the police who came back to him after three months to apologize and say they had been instructed to stop looking into the abuse parties. “They'd been forced to drop it,” Mann said. “Pressure had come from on high in the police service.”

A former senior detective at the Metropolitan Police, Clive Driscoll, said earlier this year that he had been hastily removed from an investigation that had begun in Lambeth into child abuse when his superiors saw a list of suspects, which included several MPs, that he wanted to investigate.

The investigation into an alleged cover-up is just one of 18 strands of inquiry currently ongoing as part of Operation Fairbank, which was first set up in 2012 into allegations of a VIP pedophile ring. 

In total, officers said 600 emails or tip-offs had been received by more than 40 officers working on Operation Fairbank. Thus far, just five people have been arrested.

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

As noted in one or more previous posts, much of the disaster which is today's Middle East stems from the aftermath of World War I when the victorious French and British carved up what had been the Ottoman Empire and drew boundaries to nations such as what became Iraq with no regard to the ethnic and religious divisions of the region - much to the dismay of T.E. Lawrence, a/k/a Lawrence of Arabia.  Even the ongoing violence in Gaza traces in part back to the bad decisions made in 1919-1920.  A book, "Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East," looks at this reality and also the troubled life of the real Lawrence of Arabia who may have suffered from what we now know as post traumatic stress disorder.  Here are excerpts from an introduction to the book:

On the morning of October 30, 1918, Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence received a summons to Buckingham Palace.  The  king had requested his presence.

The collective mood in London that day was euphoric. For the past four years and three months, Great Britain and much of the rest of the world had been consumed by the bloodiest conflict in recorded history, one that had claimed the lives of some sixteen million people across three continents. Now, with a speed that scarcely could have been imagined mere weeks earlier, it was all coming to an end. On that same day, one of Great Britain’s three principal foes, the Ottoman Empire, was accepting peace terms, and the remaining two, Germany and Austria-Hungary, would shortly follow suit. Colonel Lawrence’s contribution  to that war effort had been in its Middle  Eastern theater,  and he too was caught quite off guard by its rapid close. At the beginning of that month, he had still been in the field assisting in the capture of Damascus, an event that heralded the collapse of the Ottoman army. Back in England for less than a week, he was already consulting with those senior British statesmen and generals tasked with mapping out the postwar borders of the Middle East, a once-fanciful endeavor that had now become quite urgent. Lawrence was apparently under the impression that his audience with King George V that morning was to discuss those ongoing deliberations.

He was mistaken. Once at the palace, the thirty-year-old  colonel was ushered into a ballroom where, flanked by a half dozen dignitaries and a coterie of costumed courtiers, the king and queen soon entered. A low cushioned stool had been placed just before the king’s raised dais, while to the monarch’s immediate right, the lord chamberlain held a velvet pillow on which an array of medals rested. After introductions were made, George V fixed his guest with a smile: “I have some presents for you.” 


Except Lawrence didn’t kneel. Instead, just as the ceremony got under way, he quietly informed the king that he was refusing the honor.  There followed a moment of confusion. Over the nine-hundred-year history of the monarchy, the refusal of knighthood was such an extraordinary event that there was no protocol for how to handle it. Eventually, King George returned to the lord chamberlain’s pillow the medal he had been awkwardly holding, and under the baleful gaze of a furious Queen Mary, Colonel Lawrence turned and walked away.

TODAY,  MORE  THAN  seven  decades  after  his death,  and  nearly  a century since the exploits that made him famous, Thomas Edward Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia,” as he is better known—remains one of the most enigmatic and controversial figures of the twentieth century. Despite scores of biographies, countless scholarly studies, and at least three  movies, including one considered a masterpiece, historians have never quite decided what to make of the young, bashful Oxford scholar who rode into battle at the head of an Arab army and changed history.

One reason for the contentiousness over his memory has to do with the terrain he traversed. Lawrence was both eyewitness to and participant in some of the most pivotal events leading to the creation of the modern Middle East, and this is a corner of the earth where even the simplest assertion is dissected and parsed and argued over. In the unending debates over the roots of that region’s myriad fault lines, Lawrence has been alternately extolled and pilloried, sanctified, demonized, even diminished to a footnote, as political goals require.

[T]he cardinal sin of these debates is that they obscure the most beguiling riddle of Lawrence’s story: How did he do it? How did a painfully shy Oxford archaeologist without a single day of military training become the battlefield commander of a foreign revolutionary army, the political master strategist who foretold so many of the Middle Eastern calamities to come?

The short answer might seem somewhat anticlimactic: Lawrence was able to become “Lawrence of Arabia” because no one was paying much attention.  Amid the vast slaughter occurring across the breadth of Europe in World War I, the Middle Eastern theater  of that war was of markedly secondary importance. Within that theater, the Arab Revolt to which Lawrence became affiliated was, to use his own words, “a sideshow of a sideshow.” . . . .  in the view of British war planners, if a young army officer left largely to his own devices could sufficiently organize the fractious Arab tribes to harass their Turkish enemy, all to the good. Of course, it wouldn’t be very long before both the Arab Revolt and the Middle East became vastly more important to the rest of the world, but this was a possibility barely considered indeed, it could hardly have been imagined—at the time.

But this isn’t the whole story either. That’s because the low regard with which British war strategists viewed events in the Middle East found reflection in the other great warring powers. As a result, these powers, too, relegated their military efforts in the region to whatever could be spared from the more important  battlefields elsewhere, consigning the task of intelligence gathering and fomenting rebellion and forging alliances to men with résumés just as modest and unlikely as Lawrence’s.

[T]here remain at least two compelling reasons why T. E. Lawrence and his story should reside firmly at its center. The  modern Middle East was largely created by the British. It was they who carried the Allied war effort in the region during World War I and who, at its close, principally fashioned its peace. It was a peace presaged by the nickname given the region by covetous Allied leaders in war- time: “the Great Loot.” As one of Britain’s most important and influential agents in that arena, Lawrence was intimately connected to all, good and bad, that was to come.

Second, and as the episode at Buckingham Palace attests, this was an experience that left him utterly  changed, unrecognizable in certain respects even to himself. Victory carries a moral burden the vanquished never know, and as an architect of momentous events, Lawrence would be uniquely haunted by what he saw and did during the Great Loot.

Though not mentioned in the introduction, relevantt to me at least is the fact that Lawrence is considered to have been gay - he once wrote that the love of his life had been an Arab youth who died during the war and left Lawrence emotionally devastated.  Despite the Christofascist and Catholic Church efforts to denigrate gays, we have played critical roles through out history and on many occasions, perhaps the world's future would have been better if others had listened to our insights.

Modernity is Sweeping Away Conservative Christianity

Via Civil Commotion I came across a post by far right Southern Baptist Convention leader Albert Mohler that works a larger commentary on the story line of Masterpiece Theater's Downton Abbey.  While Mohler grasps that the larger story line is the transformation modernity worked on Great Britain and how the old world was swept away, the irony is that he refuses to recognize that the public acceptance of his religious fantasy world is similarly being swept away.  His science rejecting, creationist religious belief system is as much an anachronism today as the great houses of the British countryside became in the wake of World War I.  And like the British landed gentry, Mohler tries to deny this reality.  Mohler doesn't "get it" or see that he and religious extremists/reactionaries like him are actually hastening the demise of conservative Christianity as they drive the younger generations (and many of older generations) away.  Here are highlights from Mohler's post that he ought to be applying to himself and the Southern Baptist Convention:

[M]ost viewers are likely unaware of what they are actually seeing. They are not merely watching an historical drama, they are witnessing the passing of a world. And that larger story, inadequately portrayed within Downton Abbey, is a story that should not be missed. That story is part of our own story as well. It is the story of the modern age arriving with revolutionary force, and with effects that continue to shape our own world.

Though by season four King George V is on the throne, the era is still classically Edwardian. And the era associated with King Edward VII is the era of the great turn in British society. The early decades of the twentieth century witnessed a great transformation in England and within the British Empire. The stable hierarchies of Downton Abbey grew increasingly unstable. Britain, which had been overwhelmingly a rural nation until the last decade of the nineteenth century, became increasingly urban. A transformation in morals changed the very character of the nation, and underlying it all was a great surge of secularization that set the stage for the emergence of the radically secular nation that Britain has become.

The signs of the Empire’s disappearance were there for all to see, even if most among the elites did their best to deny the evidence. The great landed estates were draining their lordly title holders of precious capital, and the economic arrangements that allowed the nobility to live off of their estates would never return. That is why so many English lords looked for rich American women to marry.

That larger story records a great shift in worldview, not merely a social transformation. The consequences of that larger story far exceed the story of a great English house and its inhabitants. In that sense, Downton Abbey is a parable of sorts—a parable that can teach us a great deal.

Those who subscribe to Mohler's world view are literally dying off.  Within a few more generations, if America is lucky, Mohler's world view will be largely extinct.  Mohler and the Christofascist can strive to deny reality and modernity, but ultimately reality will prevail.