Oirientalism. posted by Richard Seymour

Just a quick comment or two on Martin Kettle's column for The Guardian. I ordinarily avoid Kettle's priapic foreign policy diatribes like the plague, which happens to form the bulk of his output. He also writes The Guardian's leaders, of course, but I don't suppose I am alone in regarding those as wasted space. (The Voice of the Master, which is what the anonymous 'leader' column is supposed to signify, is long lost to the British newspaper.) Kettle is the descendant of communists, and he himself was once a left-wing activist with a Balliol pedigree. He then wrote for The Sunday Times before moving to The Guardian, appropriately enough, in 1984. That's over 20 years of unmitigated Manchester Liberalism. It takes a toll on a person, I imagine. Like most of that generation of Stalinophilic leftist, he moved to the right sharply during the 1980s, writing for the post-Marxist Marxism Today in its later years. He has always been slobberingly pro-Blair, whom he counts as among his friends - although frankly, I couldn't stand anyone who buried his tongue that far up my backside. Some of Kettle's torsions on behalf of Blair are adequately summed up here - let's just say that Kettle adapts himself with alacrity to every nuance of New Labour's ideological choreography and leave that to that.

So, here he is today, advising Ireland to "forget its violent past" and not "romanticise" it. Irish premiere Bertie Ahern is about to reinstate the Easter Parade in memory of the 1916 Uprising. It is a move which Kettle understands as partially animated by the necessity to thwart the recrudescent Sinn Fein and its predatory designs on the cynosures of Republican struggle, but which he nevertheless finds himself horrified by because it involves "fetishising" "the romance of the deed, whose origins are steeped in the pseudoreligious cult of the transformative blood sacrifice and purging authenticity of the acts of a committed minority that al-Qaida or Hamas could recognise". Like any good Empire loyalist, Kettle drafts a few taigs into his cause: Eoin MacNeill, who in fact did countermand the order for the uprising, purely on the pragmatic grounds that it might not succeed; Sean O'Casey, who had the sense to write an anti-war play called The Ploughman and the Stars, misperceived as an anti-nationalist tract at the time; and Conor Cruise O'Brien, (whose other monikers have included Conor Cruise O'Zion for his anti-Palestinian views and Afrikaaner Cruise A'Ryan, for his pro-apartheid views, and his warnings that the ANC's "sanction, symbol and signature" was "the burning alive of people in the street"), a former Irish Republican from Trinity College who turned against Irish Republicanism in the 1970s. By 1996, O'Brien had joined the UK Unionist Party, which, thrillingly enough, is even more extreme than Ian Paisley's ruling DUP. Not only must there be blissful Union across the sea: Ulster is to be ingested whole and considered a part of England. I still can't work out who would come off the worse from such a transaction. For Kettle, these three figures form an "an unbroken line" of resistance to "the example of an unelected armed elite trying to impose their will by force of arms": to be sure, a line unbroken except by circumstance, principle and sanity.


Fetish document.

The idea that anti-imperialists ought to articulate their cause solely through any political platform that might be afforded to them by their occupiers would be curious indeed. Yet isn't this what is implied in the sneering allusion to "an unelected armed elite trying to impose their will" - which, amazingly enough, does not advert to the activities of the British Army? That isn't the only sign of myopia, of course. "Ireland's violent past" is not to be "romanticised" - after all, "few of the rest of us feel this need" to be identified by an increasingly distant past. Strange to relate, I cannot imagine the former Washington Correspondent remarking in the same vein on 1492, Thanksgiving and Independence Day (in which an unelected armed elite...). Perhaps a word or two might be said about 1789 while we're at it. The key to this curious purblindness, I suspect, is in the references to Hamas and Al Qaeda, blood-sacrifices, romanticism, authenticity and the rest. Our oblocutor charges the Irish revolutionaries with irrationalism, anti-Englightenment obscurantism, fanaticism, pseudo-religious zest etc etc. He impugns them, in short, with the usual array of desultory insults that the Irish are faced with (ommitting only fecklessness and drunkenness). The Empire, as it goes, was packed with such histrios, whose alterity and resistance was interpreted by Orientalists as an indication of the retarded intellect of those under imperial tutelage. The family resemblances between the ideological representations of the Irish and those of colonial subjects is not unfamiliar today of course. “Bitter hatreds”, “barbaric enmity”, “divided communities” ... these demeaning and unctuous discursive practises are still applied in Northern Ireland as much as they once were to Yugoslavia, and even to Rwanda. And what Kettle's ponderous condescension confirms is a correlation noted elsewhere: that those who claim that the new imperialism is different and better often turn out to have a soft spot for the older variety.