John reviews Boris Johnson’s presentation of
the TV series ‘After Rome’ quite favourably. He even finds hope for redemption
for Boris, as long as he gives up Tory politics. ‘Crikey’, as Boris would no
doubt say. Well, this is the season of goodwill. What do you think?
With his comedy hair style and affable manner, Boris
Johnson, Mayor of London, graced our TVs this December with a two-part
documentary on the relationship between Christianity and Islam (After Rome:
Holy War and Conquest. BBC 2, December 2008)
Boris is an old-fashioned Tory: a public-school boy who was
never allowed to grow-up and drifted from one institution of power to the next
without really knowing what he was doing. He is one of the traditional elite
who bluff and bluster with such undue self-confidence they somehow manage to
inspire confidence in others, well, at least enough people to creep into
office. Boris even managed to become Mayor of London just by not being the
terminally uninspiring Ken Livingstone (with the help of that pernicious
rumour-mongering rag The Evening Standard)
At heart Boris is a liberal. Overall, his treatment of
history was thoughtful and interesting, although you couldn’t help thinking
there was something missing.
Only when he was interviewing three Muslim students did the
other shade of Boris show itself. One of them said “I don’t know if that’s what
you mean by democracy… I would love to see the Arab world becoming a very
democratic world, but it’s very problematic when the west tries to impose it…
Maybe it’s because of our previous experience with the west; because of the
crusades… the trust is just not there… if it’s an idea coming from the west we
go against it.”
Poor old bungling Boris couldn’t get his head around this.
The programme interpreted it to mean that even Muslim democrats don’t accept
democracy if it is given to them by the west, as if possessed of some childish
obstinacy. After all why should intelligent Arab people be unhappy about being
bombed and bullied into democracy and western values?
The students were, I think, grasping for a quite different
idea, which is this: there is a kind a ‘democracy’ in the west. It consists of
holding elections every four or five years, informed by a biased and corrupt
media, to a tightly-controlled legislature, which is part of a bureaucratic
state that invariably serves the interests of a minority. That minority are the
owners of private capital whose profits always come first, even before human
life. This is hardly going to inspire democracy-loving people to action.
It is obvious to people in the east that western foreign
policy towards them is determined by these vested interests and this poisons
the very idea of democracy. Democracy can, as the student said, mean different
things. It can mean the deep democracy that Marxists call ‘worker’s democracy’:
with right of recall of representatives, mass participation, real economic
power and where big business is not running the show. That would be worth
fighting for.
The simple points Boris made quite well were these:
- Christianity
and Islam are alike. Apart from being theologically similar, they both
have a moderate majority, a fundamentalist fringe and a history of
hypocrisy. - Just
as Christianity is economically and politically dominant today, Islam was
in the past. There are other reasons, that have nothing to do with
religion, why the Christian world is dominant at this particular moment in
history. - Capitalism
and the development of science have marginalised the influence of Christianity
in the west. The Islamist extremists are fighting because they fear that
it will do the same to Islam in the east.
The capitalist mode of production got its first foothold in
Northern Europe and spread rapidly across North America (areas that for other
reasons happen to be Christian). It has since spread, by a combination of the
gun and the cheap commodity, to the whole world. It has turned most of humanity
into wage labourers and had a profound affect on human consciousness. Everywhere
the old false certainties are draining away.
Now that capitalism can barely manage the laborious, uneven,
convulsive progress of the past, what is going to happen now?
The sewer of history is blocked and it’s just beginning to
back up. A new age of religious hypocrisy worse than anything the Crusaders and
Jihadists of the past could dream of awaits us. Unless, that is, the forces of
reason take up the fight and we finally overcome this iniquitous and
crisis-ridden system.
That was what was missing! After nearly two hours of
documentary Boris nearly got there. Minutes from the end he said “When you look
around this city we are in, Cairo, a place of 20 million people, some of them
living in unimaginable poverty, you realise its not just religion, it’s the
economy, stupid! These people can see with their satellite dishes all the
prosperity from which they feel excluded, and that sense of exclusion and
resentment can be channelled into religious resentment as well”
My advice to Boris: give up politics and become a
documentary maker. If only he’d made one more programme, then his transition
from liberalism to Marxism, which every healthy mind should make, would be
complete.
