2012 Memento Mori

As the drip drip drip of gooey but insincere hagiography and self-congratulation bursts into the deluge of Olympic Jubilee year 2012, who will hear the whisper of the slave?

For one thing, this year is celebrated the bicentenary of Charles Dickens, a national character who is sufficiently symbolic to have been portrayed on the £10 bank note. Yet look a little more closely into the man and the symbol starts to look all too reflective of what is a truly nasty, concealed reality.

The Amazon blurb for Claire Tomalin's new biography cheerfully admits that "the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family in his writings, he took up passionately with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children."

But those are just minor blemishes. Looming behind these infidelities and hypocrisies is a far more hideous aspect to the great Victorian era:

"Despite his vivid evocations of cruelty and harshness in Victorian London, Charles Dickens was a defender of the infamous Jamaican Governor Eyre who had violently suppressed a revolt by freed slaves in Morant Bay. In 1865 a group of farmers from Morant Bay, Jamaica rebelled against the harsh colonial conditions on the island. Governor Eyre responded with a campaign of ruthless violence that lasted 30 days. Troops killed over 400 people, including children and pregnant women, at least 600 people were flogged [often with piano wire] and over 1000 homes were burned. The event divided British politics and marked a pivotal moment in the violent racism that continued in the post-abolition period. John Stuart Mill led the Jamaica Committee that, supported by Charles Darwin among others, demanded Eyre's trial for murder. Dickens, along with Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin, supported the Eyre Defence Committee that aimed to raise £10,000 for the Governor's legal expenses. They were successful and Eyre was acquitted, because, it was said, his crime involved 'only negro blood'." National Portrait Gallery website.

These beliefs lurk under Dickens' world like Smeagol's cave. Take Mrs Jellaby, for example. You may well agree that her "telescopic philanthropy"; caring more for those far away while neglecting her own family is wrong, yet to uncover the original motivation behind Dickens' portrayal of Mrs Jellaby is deeply disturbing in that it puts a whole different perspective on it.

In his book 'How the Dismal Science Got Its Name: Classical Economics and the Ur-Text of Racial Politics',  David M Levy investigates the British Imperial race supremacist discourse in great depth, and amongst other details, tells us that "Carlyle found some surprising allies in his attack on those who invoked brotherhood to attack slavery. These included Charles Dickens. In a chapter of Bleak House titled "Telescopic Philanthropy" Dickens ridicules a Mrs. Jellaby who neglects her family for the good of Africans in "Borrio-boola-Gha." On the cover of the serial version of Bleak House, we see Mrs. Jellaby holding two black children. And beside her is a sign reading 'Exeter Hall' ... moral centre of the British anti-slave movement ..."

Whatever celebrations may come and go, let us humbly remind ourselves that civilisations are born and grow, yet however mighty they become, and by whatever means, they gradually senesce and eventually die.

But as for authors, however noble a man John Stuart Mill may have been, yet to my mind never so engaging a creator as his adversary.

Dirty Secrets Hidden on Craggy Island

In the Irish Catholic State

' Mary Norris ended up in a Magdalene laundry for disobeying an order. A teenage servant in Kerry, she took a forbidden night off, and was taken away to a convent where the nuns had her examined to see was she still a virgin (which she was). From there she was dispatched to the Magdalene laundry in Cork. Immediately on arrival, the nuns changed her name – standard practice in all the Magdalene laundries. "When I went in there," recalls Mary, "my dignity, who I was, my name, everything was taken. I was a nonentity, nothing, nobody." '

Imprisoned, dehumanised and forced to work as a slave. Pour encourager les autres. Place in authority a corps of uniformed functionaries who are cut off from normal social interaction and deny their fundamental human nature as sexual beings and you have disaster in the making.

Agribusiness: Environmental Destruction and Slavery

"It is no accident that globalisation has seen the reemergence of slavery …" writes Felicity Lawrence:

"In Brazil, investigating the explosion in soya production  in the Amazon region for my book 'Eat Your Heart Out', I heard of the slaves found on farms being cleared in the rainforest. A Dominican priest, Xavier Plassat, who campaigns to free them told me how he had just returned with government swat squads from a farm 60km off the road where 200 workers were being kept in slavery, labouring without pay, deprived of freedom of movement and controlled by debt bondage. They had no clean water and little food and were living 30 to a room. Plassat believed slavery and agribusiness were inextricably linked. Monoculture for export, the large-scale intensive farming dominated by transnational corporations (TNC), and favoured by trade rules and international financial institutions, had created the conditions for slavery by eliminating the traditional small scale farming that provided food for 60% of the Brazilian population. He is not alone. Kevin Bales, the great expert on modern slavery, has shown how driving peasant farmers off the land has created a new supply of dispossessed workers who can be pressed into this condition."

And although people were already being driven off the land before, NGOs like GRAIN are now showing that this process has been even further intensified since the Banker-induced Crisis. The ramifications of the appropriation of poor peoples' land by rich nations are huge. In Madagascar a plan by South Korea to buy up around a third of the country's arable land caused the fall of President Ravalomanana. Thankfully that deal was cancelled, but many other people's land is still under the hammer. Even the World Bank has been reluctantly forced to admit there is a problem, despite shamefully being implicated in it themselves:

"[T]here is an enormous farmland grab going on around the world ever since the 2008 food and financial crises and it shows no signs of abating. The Bank says that the 463 projects it tallied from Farmlandgrab.org between October 2008 and June 2009 cover at least 46.6 million hectares of land …"

"… investors are taking advantage of "weak governance" and the "absence of legal protection" for local communities to push people off their lands. Additionally, it finds that the investments are giving almost zero back to affected communities in terms of jobs or compensation, to say nothing of food security. The message we get is that virtually nowhere, among the countries and cases the Bank examined, is there much to celebrate."

"Many investments (...) failed to live up to expectations and, instead of generating sustainable benefits, contributed to asset loss and left local people worse off than they would have been without the investment."

The reality of modern industrialised agriculture is plain, and again succinctly expressed by Felicity Lawrence:

"Expansionist agriculture and empires have always depended on slave labour, as Latin authors of the Roman empire complained centuries ago. Today, we live in an era when the dominant powers don't officially "do" empire, so economic control takes a new privatised form in the TNC. Modern slavery has evolved to match. The straightforward ownership of chattel slavery is gone, replaced instead by an outsourced, subcontracted kind of control over people, which can be terminated when they have served their purpose. The transnationals universally abhor any idea of slavery or forced labour and yet it is found in their supply chains. Slaves and exploited migrants, often driven into migration by the squeeze on family agriculture, are what make the economics of today's agribusiness work."

There is currently a Sustainable Livestock Bill (PDF) going through Parliament, which should go a little way to addressing some of the iniquities of globalised agriculture, by ensuring that subsidies are re-oriented towards more local and small-scale farming, for example. It is due to receive its second reading on Friday 12th November. Has your MP signed the EDM? It is important to get as many MPs to be in the House and vote for the Bill as possible. More information here and here (dumbed down version).

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