There are two books out that make a lot of sense of the world as it is; the first is the very recently released ‘Fake History’ (Wellbeck Publishing), by political journalist Otto English (the pen name of Andrew Scott), one of the heroes in the Brexit debacle not so much as a trenchant Remainer, but more an extremely convincing arbiter of truth in an age of misinformation. The second book is ‘War for Eternity’ (Penguin) by American political scholar Benjamin Teitelbaum.
Fake History by Otto English
In case you’re wondering, there are no specific chapters on the epic perfidy and mendacity of Brexit and the current Blukip Conservative government, although these are frequently referred to. The point of the book is not about ‘fake news’ in the here and now but how the ‘fake history’ that fuels contemporary fake news and bullish, blusterful nationalist narratives, have been cultivated over the years and have come, wittingly and no, to distort people’s views of themselves and others. Outcomes from that can range from believing silly stories about the origins of curry, to believing in an innate superiority suffice to commit genocide of other peoples they’ve never met, basing their own national character traits on fellow countrymen achieving feats they’d absolutely nothing to do with.
Winston Churchill
The first chapter furnishes this point with the question of Winston Churchill being the UK’s greatest prime minister. Churchill was, like all people, a complex, flawed character, as capable of getting it as completely wrong as he did right, and about-turning on his own principles (oscillating back and forth from Liberal to Conservative). Above all though he was an excellent writer, very good at redeeming his errors, and self-aggrandizement, unbeatable at self-promotion. The parallel is drawn with Churchill’s most recent notable biographer, Boris Johnson, who English notes lazily serves up the same old myths (like making a tea lady a Dame) and witticisms long debunked as music-hall barbs that preceded Churchill by decades (like many a meme now, grab a quote and stick a famous face on it for validity).
Churchill however had spilt his own blood in battle, if not as much as he claimed; he wrote his own works, though supported by researchers; and he was very much the right man in Downing St in World War Two, if not before, and certainly not after. None of that applies to Johnson, no matter how high he hopes writing about Churchill will reflect his light on himsebut no; even for his most recent address to the Ukrainian Parliament, which his toadies hailed as his ‘Churchill moment’ he simply lifted Churchill’s words verbatim to describe the actual heroes, led by Zelensky. There’s piggy backing, and absolutely taking the mick.
Threads and themes in Fake History
Each chapter can be read as a standalone, but it’s not a Buzzfeed list. Threads and themes are developed and built on throughout the book. English scotches the idea that Columbus bravely disabused the world that it was flat; by the 1490s it’d been well known for centuries the Earth was round, hence Columbus sailed West to find India, only his abominable navigational skills drastically underestimated the journey and luckily hit the Americas en route – lucky for him, but mass slaughter for the locals.
But it’s all “evil white Europeans slaying hapless indigenous peoples”. English explores how the Conquistadors, who came after Columbus, are also blamed for wiping out the Aztecs. Yes, they certainly brought bloody conflict, but it was the smallpox they’d haplessly imported that wiped out the Aztecs, themselves not an advanced, mystical empire, but a fledgling alliance of states bound by their own extremely bloody beliefs and rituals. Many innocents would die, but inadvertently ending the Aztecs wasn’t wholly a bad thing.
Debate
But debate lurks elsewhere. He notes how western leaders have come to apologise for past atrocities, but full unequivocal apologies are only applied to long distant events for which there’s little political – and definitely no pecuniary – blowback. He chides Clinton for not apologising for the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in which ‘250,000 innocent people died’. But they weren’t all innocent, and the truly evil Japanese empire wasn’t going to surrender without mass carnage. Elsewhere English refutes the main myth of the Battle of Britain that the RAF were heavily outnumbered, arguing that the RAF and Luftwaffe had approximately 1,000 fighter each. Yes, but, Otto, while those fighters engaged one-on-one, another 1,500 swastikered bombers would sail past and rain Nazi high explosives down on British children’s heads.
It’s very enjoyable. The idea that “the Royal family is German”, well they are, a bit, and also pretty much the sum of an incredibly complex web of dynasties and peoples from across Europe – as is every individual in Europe – who English points out are all related to the same monarch … and including Angle-land, or England, where English itself is the ultimate hybrid tongue of words marking the ebbs and flows of peoples and cultures over centuries. Same for good old fashioned British fish and chips, notwithstanding battered cod is of Jewish origin and fried chips (obviously originally from South America) were a Flemish invention. All that’s British is the boldness of the claim, but agai it’s not about isolating and assaulting the usual right-wing suspects.
Myths around Bonnie Prince Charlie
The SNP’s own contemporary success has been stoked on myths relating to the righteousness and piety of the cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie and all the good the suppressed Scots believe he embodied, but who English paints as an utterly self-serving chancer heavily subsidized by other European monarchs with their own agendas. But the myth of Charlie has taken afoot much since the 1970s when deindustrialization hammered Scotland’s cities – prior to that Scotland’s union in the UK had been a predominantly happy one.
The myth of war and empire
It’s also a very personable and personal book. It opens with the myth of war and empire that English was taught as a child, that Britain won through victorious in WWI and WWII due to our innate moral superiority, skills, any other attributes, and combat was all about hardy Brits engaging in ferocious hand-to-hand combat and punching Nazis bombers out the sky, the kind of tales told and retold and warped by comics like Commando and Warlord – yet why was his granddad, a machine gunner in WWI, and feted as a hero by his family, in reality this apathetic old man, prone to violent rage, and in tears whenever Otto asked to hear his adventures in the trenches?
Like Johnson is corrupted by his own corrupted mythology, myths warp the narratives families tell of themselves even to the despair of its ‘heroes’, as much as entire peoples and countries buy into rubbish cooked up and burned into their psyche over centuries. There is nothing disbarring anyone anywhere falling prey to that – understandably when people seek order in chaos, and simplified narratives enable them to do so and becalmed for it. But such narratives can in the wrong hands be weaponised – people believing absurdities can commit atrocities.
So an early chapter describes the work of crank historians commissioned by the Nazis researching and ultimately reinventing a mythology of Teutonic knights of old in Germany, their origins reaching far back and wide, to the Aryan master race with its origins traced even in part to Tibet. The Ahnernerbe was the official outfit overseeing these efforts to prove Nazi Germany was the rightful, legitimate remanifestation of this reawakened genealogical force of spirit and blood, with SS chief Heinrich Himmler establishing a concentration camp solely to build a castle for him he called ‘Camelot’ – eh? Isn’t that Arthurian legend, the quintessence of what it is to be English?
War for Eternity by Benjamin Teitelbaum
The confusing hodgepodge of murderous Holy Grail hokum is very redolent of the kind of quest for spiritual knowledge that American political scholar Benjamin Teitelbaum tells of Steve Bannon in the book, ‘War for Eternity’ (Penguin). Where English’s book is about how we’re misinformed, much these days by the ‘fake news’ that Bannon’s own Breitbart has propagated, Teitelbaum’s book is more how we’re under informed amid the current rise of populism and it’s traditionalist origins.
Modern day events
The book was published in the UK in 2021 and mostly refers to events up to 2018, and we know of the American hedgefunder’s involvement in Brexit via Cambridge Analytica, that Farage saluted for victory, and in advising Trump. He’s since been somewhat sidelined,sacked by trump and at time of writing arraigned for co tempt of Congress.
But within a couple of pages the hideous relevance is stark, as Teitelbaum tells of Bannon’s spiritual brother in Russian form, Alexandr Gudin, an ultra Russo-nationalist and quasi-spiritual mentor to Putin and whose first name drop in the book is his longtime advocation for genocide in Ukraine. And suddenly the war is less about needing to stop the slaughter in Donbas, nor finishing the job from 2014 of taking Crimea and Sevastopol, or gas, or even obviating Ukraine’s NATO application like with Georgia in 2008. No. To Gudin, Ukrainians are the turncoat younger brothers of Russia, run away with their own contrived, anti-Russian, and wholly inferior culture. Gudin believes they must be wiped out, and he has the ear of Putin. Hence, the invaders are not professional soldiers surgically taking strategic points, but engage in committing war crime after war crime, mass murders, mass rapes – even for professional soldiering this is dark, dark stuff.
Both men are believers in ‘traditionalism’. Bannon’s own spiritual enlightenment came as a US Navy officer who spent shore leave in Hong Kong not in the brothels but looking up obscure tomes on Hinduism and mysticism in a shop of hanging chimes and incense, ‘scratch a fascist and find a hippy’, that led him to see his own country’s position as a bastion of democracy, liberalism, multiculturalism, globalism, as the worst manifestation of the ‘Dark Ages’ part of a cycle that must be overturned in order for the ‘golden age’ of society led by priests – like himself – with all the vestiges of corrupting material decadence scorned in a world reverted to nation-states. It’s ironic to learn the man behind Brexit, for whom its critics were forever browbeaten, ‘respect democracy’, hates it with violence. Scratch that hippy and there’s one Hell of a fascist.
He wants an America reverted to the Puritanism that preceded the 1776 Revolution and its Enlightenment-origins (the onset of Reason was the onset of the Dark Ages, to Bannon, hence hating the WHO makes sense), to something more akin to A Handmaid’s Tale (where there were only two genders – hence the Culture War on transgenderism) and men ruled (hence the war on feminism, abortion and reproductive rights). Where Gudin seeks a strong, resurgent Russia on the world stage, Bannon agrees, seeking a multipolar geopolitical set-up but in which the US is much diminished, and its lackey the EU is non-existent. Strange, as Bannon is a hedgefunder, an apex globalist who wants to destroy globalism and restore nation-states, but not his own as we know it.
As well as traditionalism, Gudin and Bannon – who have met, although the latter knows broader knowledge of that could be calamitous for his standing in the US – are virulent anti-Communists. It’s very like Adam Curtis’ The Power of Nightmares and the philosophical, chronological charting of the rise of the American neo-cons and Al Qaida, how they’re essentially mirror images of one another but happened to take power or gain influence at the same time.
And to achieve revolution, the virulent anti-Communist Bannon happily deploys Leninist methods of misinformation, diktat and terror, a revolution of real violence that one sees the allure for the Christian Right who can see the Rapture in the flames. Confusing? Certainly. Bannon himself in interviews with Teitelbaum seems to reach out for any sense in observations and ideas floated past him by the author. Bannon is a mass of paradoxes. He seems to have embraced tenets of Hinduism and also Sufi Islam, though he seeks to bring down Islam and restore a Judeo-Christian order to the West, but not a democratic one. Among the myths are those raising forth the ideas of an Aryan super-race, originating from the Himalayas, the same ideas the Ahnernebe were sent worldwide for, as Teitelbaum notes as did English.
For Bannon, Trump was a great ‘man of action’ – whose cabinet and agency appointees were the absolute apotheoses to the institutes they’d govern, in education, in the environment, to destroy them by design or by wreaking havoc. Trump actively undermined NATO, cheered on the carbombing of the EU that was Brexit, decried and ignored the WHO’s efforts with Covid – science is also part of the rationalism Bannon and Co hate. Doctors are in on the plot, teachers are woke, journalists are purveyors of ‘fake news’, and politicians we’re told ‘always lie’ – our communal faith in these professions and others, the professions necessary to keep society rolling on, is eroded and destroyed. All institutes and treatises and systems from the post-WWII order, when democracy and Communism defeated fascism, then 1991 when democratic liberalism defeated Communism, these embody the pinnacle of the decadent elite hegemony, embedding class, wealth, rationalism, encourage decadent materialism, and prevent the traditionalist spiritualism that Bannon wants restored.
So we see the same with their British counterparts; Farage in the EU, or Johnson in No. 10 (he and his party with very murky links to Russia, and abetted into power very much by Dominic Cummings whose own time in Russia has never been properly scrutinised), going on to assault the NHS, and our own Parliament, the police, universities, the BBC, Channel 4, RNLI, anything and everything people may look to for hope and inspiration, as they’re all Elite Establishment hotbeds of woke lefties (although isn’t the Establishment normally the preserve of the right-wing? For the UK’s embedded Brexiters look at Lord Lilley, Lord Lawson, Lord Moylan, Lord Rhys-Jones, Rees-Mogg, et al) and employing complete idiots as ministers to undertake their wrecking – and the more mindless they are, they better they’ll wreck. This appeals to the sociopaths who now see all opponents as Establishment Woke Lefties; and the latter may come to think, ‘fine, let’s have it, if we have to destroy you, too.’ This all pales of course in comparison with the destruction sought and wrought by Gudin, who is a more aloof and distant figure in this book but all the more terrifying for it. And from the chaos – e.g. la energy price spikes, or food price hyper inflation from blocked Ukrainian grain exports – even the most democratic minded will seek ‘strong men’ to lead them to stability. I saw the same in Russia in 1996, as the chaos of the Yeltsin years set in my students were still passionately democratic; but only a decade or so later, the Russians I met loved Putin as the ‘strong man’ who’d restored their standing in the world. We could see Putin in 1991 when the USSR collapsed as Hitler in the military hospital in November 1918, crying into his pillow when he heard Germany had capitulated. Something fractured, something burned, pride couldn’t handle, there would be wrath. And no amount of fake history, or fake news, will disguise that.
