The Spectator was always regarded as a pretty decent, high-brow, right-of-centre magazine, but I see the modern-day British affliction of self-loathing wokery has now infected even that once august publication.
A new biography of Rhodes – The Colonialist: the Vision of Cecil Rhodes, by William Storey – has just been released, and I was recently made of aware of a review of it in The Spectator. Written by some idiot called A.N. Wilson, the review was given the balanced title of ‘The Crimes of Rhodes were every bit as sinister as those of the Nazis’ – immediately prompting one to realise that the magazine has sunk to new depths. In truth, the worst anyone could really say about Rhodes was that he held similar views on race to most British people of his time, and that he was a ruthless businessman and hard-nosed politician who believed in the British Empire. The notion that these ‘crimes’ put him on a par with the Third Reich is simply too laughable to take seriously.
Wilson’s politics of envy are blatant, as his main issue with Rhodes seems to be that he did rather well in business. He evidently has a problem with how successful Rhodes was at such a young age, sniffily declaring that ‘aged 20, he had an annual income of £23,000 – the equivalent of about £1.5 million today’. So, not even massively rich by today’s standards, and hardly a ‘crime’ – unless Wilson also thinks that every Premiership soccer player’s wealth makes him ‘every bit as sinister’ as a Nazi.
Desperate to add the crime of racism to that of being wealthy, Wilson grudgingly admits that the Rhodes Scholarships specified that ‘no student shall be disqualified for election on account of his race or religion’… but then hastily adds that… err… Rhodes ‘probably’ (Wilson uses this word a lot) meant something else by this clear and unambiguous statement. Yup: that’s the best Wilson can come up with. In fact, Rhodes’ premier biographer, Robert Rotberg (who is generally unsympathetic to his subject), wrote ‘as a young man he had related directly and well to unlettered Zulu. Throughout his life he remained sympathetic and responsive to the needs of individual persons of colour’. I wonder why that was left out? And Wilson also doesn’t trouble himself to mention that, in stark contrast to the way things were done in the Boer republics of the age, Rhodes stated that the vote should be extended to Africans under the principle of ‘equal rights to every civilised man south of the Zambesi’. When asked to clarify what he meant by ‘civilised man’, he said, ‘a man, white or black … who has sufficient education to write his name, has some property, or works. In fact, is not a loafer’ – that inconvenient truth was simply overlooked because it didn’t fit Wilson’s determination to spew out self-loathing nonsense.
Wilson then attempts to add the ‘crime’ of homosexuality to the charge sheet (I really thought such narrow-minded prejudice had died out in the 1990s, but seemingly not). Again, and utterly desperate to pretend Rhodes was the Victorian-era’s version of Hitler, the best Wilson can pull out of his arse is to claim that Rhodes and Dr Jameson (ie. that noted ladies’ man) ‘probably had some kind of relationship, but because Storey can find no evidence for Rhodes’s homosexuality, he does not reflect on it’. Yes – because there is absolutely no evidence of this, the author of the biography didn’t make some up. Damning stuff – that’s proper Third Reich right there!
Wilson then clutches at his pearls, pretending to be shocked that – wait for it – people died in the mines owned by Rhodes and his ‘prodigiously rich pals’ (there’s that envy again). So the best Wilson can come up with is that some of those Rhodes paid to work in his mines died doing this dangerous work. Wilson has evidently never done anything more dangerous than typing on a keyboard, and is clearly unaware that, to this day, people tend to die in high risk industries like mining, oil exploration, construction, and deep sea fishing – only a full-on Marxist buffoon would claim that the owners of such companies are thus ‘every bit as sinister’ as the Nazis. Wilson also squeals with faux horror that the mine workers lived in compounds and were subject to (pretty unpleasant and invasive) checks to ensure they were not stealing diamonds… embarrassing, perhaps, but hardly unique to Rhodes’ mines, the workers were there by choice, and there are still pretty draconian levels of security in diamond mines even today. Besides, it takes a special sort of stupid to equate checking someone’s backside for a stolen diamond, to invading most of Europe and indulging in industrial-scale mass murder.
Surprise, surprise, Wilson then claims that Rhodes ‘egged on Jameson’ to launch the Raid that would bear the latter’s name… when, in truth, the exact opposite is the case. Indeed, when Rhodes learned that Jameson had gone in against express orders, he was distraught, and claimed that the Doctor had ‘upset my apple cart’. Clearly not a man with any knowledge of South African history, Wilson doesn’t take a moment to explain why the Raiders were poised on the border, or bother to explain why those to whom Kruger’s ghastly regime denied the franchise were keen to rise up and fight for their democratic rights. Rhodes’ support for them is a strange thing to overlook, and was clearly only done to maintain Wilson’s preferred fiction of Rhodes being ‘responsible for the Boer War’… yes, the war that Kruger had planned for since 1887, and which he started by invading British territory with the stated aim of winning an Empire ‘from the Zambesi to Simon’s Town’; Yup – that one.
And in yet another confirmation of his abject ignorance, Wilson then unthinkingly repeats the Apartheid-regime lies of Britain having ‘invented the concentration camp’. Indeed, the only surprise is he doesn’t claim that Rhodes himself operated a gas chamber in one.
So after this tissue of lies, half-truths, convenient omissions, and irrelevancies, Wilson is arrogant enough to believe he has made a cast-iron case against Rhodes. Clearly an epically confident incompetent, Wilson is unable to see absolutely no nuance in the matter, sagely pronouncing ‘those who scream with rage against Rhodes and his legacy are simply right, and those who try to defend him and what he did are simply wrong’. Well, there we go, children – teacher has spoken, and anyone who disagrees is a Nazi.
And in a final flourish of utter stupidity, Wilson then declares ‘Much of Oriel’s wealth and the very existence of Rhodes House derive from crimes every bit as sinister as those perpetrated by the Third Reich’. This is beyond parody; even after resorting to lies and omissions on an epic scale, the best Wilson’s pathetic article could come up with is that Rhodes was a successful businessman, was ‘probably’ gay, that some people died in the mines he owned, and that he wasn’t perhaps quite as woke as people are today. And Wilson genuinely seeks to equate these ‘crimes’ to starting a World War, and the industrial genocide of millions of Jews, homosexuals, disabled people, and gypsies.
This, dear reader, is the pathetic desperation of the self-loathing British Left.
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