Distrust the man who talks of freedom

It always seems wise to distrust anyone who claims to be striving to set you free.

“Setting me free? You’re really interested in my freedom, are you?” strikes me as the good question to ask.

For example, the US likes to celebrate the Mayflower pilgrims, the refugees from religious persecution in England who created the first successful European settlement in Massachusetts. Their admirers tell us the pilgrims struck a blow for freedom of worship. Which in a sense they did – a blow for their own freedom of worship. But they were members of a particularly harsh Protestant sect, and they weren’t interested in establishing freedom of worship for Muslims, Jews or – still worse – self-styled fellow Christians such as Anglicans or, even more abominable, Catholics.

Indeed, these fine apostles of liberty were far from above doing a bit of energetic persecuting of their own. They regarded it as a duty to God, even. Extirpating heresy and all that. Within a lifetime of their arrival, some of the descendants of the Pilgrims were conducting witch trials in Salem and other local towns, that led to the hanging of nineteen people for the perfectly fictional offence of witchcraft. In some instances, the cases turned on ‘spectral’ evidence, testimony provided by spirits in apparitions to some of the witnesses.

Contemporary denunciation of the use of
‘spectral’ evidence in the Salem trials

Or take the example of Hungary. 

It was part of the Austrian Empire into the nineteenth century. A movement for equality with the German speakers led to revolution in 1848. For a brief spell, power fell to Lajos Kossuth, outspoken and internationally celebrated liberation leader. Counter-revolution eventual crushed the uprising. He had to flee his country and spent the rest of his life in exile, where he was lionised and feted in many nations. Why, he even has a bust in the US capitol building.

Bust of Kossuth in the US Capitol building

And yet. While in power he showed little sympathy for the national aspirations of non-Hungarians, including the minorities inside Hungary. He did nothing for the Slovaks, for instance, though his own father was one. Indeed, Kossuth lost some support in the US when he showed himself unable to back either Catholics or the anti-slavery movement.

His keenness to liberate downtrodden communities clearly didn’t extend to all such minorities. Just to his own.

This all came to mind for me when I saw a piece of graffiti in Valencia. “Valencia is not Catalonia,” it pointed out, in English, “Valencian language is not Catalan”.

Will Catalonia work for freedom for Valencians too?

It’s certainly true that the Valencian language, although similar to Catalan, is a different language. More generally, there is little appetite in Valencia, either the city or the region, for independence from Spain. Let alone for absorption into Catalonia.

A few months ago, I heard the story of a public servant in the Balearic island of Menorca. As well as what most of us call Spanish – Castlilian – he’s a native speaker of the local language, Menorquí, which like Valencian is closely related to Catalan, but different from it. So imagine his annoyance when, in pursuit of promotion, he had to sit an examination that was written in Catalan and required answers in the same language.

The leaders of the fight for the independence of Catalonia are outspoken in their advocacy of Catalan rights. They have less to say about the rights of other, smaller minorities. Indeed, they’re happy to treat those minorities with exactly the same insensitivity, or even arrogance, that they claim they suffer at the hands of the national Spanish authorities.

Just like the Massachusetts Puritans, or the Hungarian nationalists, they’re long on their own freedom, much less concerned about anyone else’s.

Which is why I tend to distrust anyone who proclaims his commitment to liberty from oppression. I think a few follow-up questions are always in order. Like, “yes, but would you stand up for my rights against oppression by you?”

Or, to put in other words, “are we talking about freedom for me, or should I be more concerned about freedom from you?”

A quick lesson in Christianity to its eager protectors

With 3.8 million people displaced from Syria by war, terror and despair, Slovakia has generously decided to accept 200 refugees. But, it specifies, only Christians.

It’s an interesting notion. You make a gesture of purely symbolic charity but, in the same breath, demand adherence to Christianity. I’m no Christian, but I’m friends with a great many, and I believe they would none of them recognise the principles of their faith in that behaviour.

Behind the restriction to Christians lies something else, which is the desire to repel Muslims, seen as invading hordes. That was made more explicit by the estimable and hard right Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán. Incidentally, this is a man worth watching if ever you wonder what a government led by Britain’s own far-right Nigel Farage would be like, since Orbán’s party is the Hungarian equivalent of UKIP. He has, for instance, enlightened us on the nature of tolerance for minority communities, in this case homosexuals:

Tolerance ... does not mean that we would apply the same rules for people whose life style is different from our own.

He has now announced that Hungary, in trying to block refugees from entering in the first place, and rounding up and interning those already there, is protecting “Christian Europe” from Muslims.

Don’t see migrants. Or even refugees. Just people

Hungary spent a couple of centuries, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth, within the Turkish Ottoman Empire. I was amazed on visits to Hungary to find how little trace remains of the Turkish presence: in a church that had once been a mosque, I was pointed to a niche which might once have been a Mihrab, the structure that tells Muslims the direction of Mecca; in the provincial town of Eger I saw (and indeed climbed) a minaret, which is all that remains of the mosque there.

No, Hungary has turned its back on its Muslim past, unlike Spain where it is treasured and indeed claimed, on sometimes dubious grounds, by large numbers of people (but woe betide any Muslim who tries to worship inside the great mosque of Cordoba, now a Christian place of worship: the security guards will pounce and escort the believer out). 

Clearly, Slovakia and Hungary regard Islamophobia as legitimate, laudable even.

Further West, we try to hide our own anti-Islamic feelings, but they’re certainly running strong, however partially hidden they may be. But what is even more striking is the extent to which our leaders seem to share the Christian notions of their counterparts in Central Europe. So our reaction to migrants trying to reach Britain from Calais is not to identify the genuine refugees and let them in, but to put razor wire to keep everyone out. David Cameron has so far allowed 216 Syrians into Britain under a scheme to take refugees from that country; he now intends to increase the number to several thousand (where I suspect “several” is a relatively small number).

In other words, faced with fellow human beings in trouble, Orbán’s “Christian” Europe, or large parts of it at least, react with rejection and meanness.

David Cameron claims that Britain is a basically Christian country. So let me remind him of the parable of the Good Samaritan. The background to the story is that someone has correctly told Jesus that the key law is to love your neighbour as yourself. When he goes on to ask who his neighbour is, Christ answers (in the words of the New International version of the Bible, less poetic but more comprehensible than the King James version):

A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

Who was the neighbour? “The one who had mercy on him.”

The Samaritan was not of the same Community as the injured man, but he helped anyway. As though, say, we looked at Syrian refugees and saw people, not Muslims, not Syrians, not migrants. And because they were people, we helped them. Even if they were gay.

That would be behaving as Christians. That kind of Christianity would be worth protecting. But don’t count on the Orbáns or the Camerons to step forward to do it.

Persecution - pass it on

It’s fascinating to examine the way human tolerance, or perhaps I should say intolerance, pans out. For instance, I used naively to think that people who’d been victims of intolerance would be more sympathetic to other victims and would not behave intolerantly themselves. What an illusion. The reverse is the case. It’s as though someone who’s been regularly kicked around likes nothing more than to find someone else they can kick in turn.

An example. Back in 1848, the Hungarians got very fed up with being pushed around by their overlords, the Austrians. They rose in revolt and were fairly ferociously put down for their pains. The Austrians, however, got the message. In 1867, the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was set up and the Hungarians were made more or less equal partners in the Empire. Celebrations all round? Not quite. The Slovaks, the Croats, the Galicians, the Rumanians – they had nothing to be cheerful about. In fact, the Hungarians were pretty much as nasty to them as the Austrians had been to the Hungarians.

Then came the First World War and the Empires were broken up into the so-called Successor States. At last an opportunity to satisfy national aspirations. But again there were lots of dissatisfied people: the Slovaks, again, weren’t happy about being absorbed into Czechoslovakia, the Croats, again, weren’t happy about being a part of Jugoslavia. The Jews were recognised as a minority more or less everywhere but got their own state nowhere.

Then the Nazis came to power. When they invaded Czechoslovakia, that was pretty bad news for that new little nation. Or at least for the Czech part. The German-speaking Sudeten people were only too pleased to be absorbed into Germany. And the Slovaks, believing that the ‘independent’ state they were going to be given would actually be independent, were pretty pleased too.

Czechoslovakia was one of the nations reconstituted after the end of the War, so the Slovaks lost their illusory independence again. But then in the nineties, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, they got it back and for real this time, when the Czech Republic had its reasonably peaceful divorce from Slovakia. At last there was cause for celebration, or so you might think. I met a young Hungarian-speaking citizen of Slovakia at the time, very worried about being part of a minority in the new country – previously his people had enjoyed some protection against the Slovak majority, from the government of the unified nation in Prague.

So it seems it doesn’t matter how bad a time you’ve had as part of a minority yourself. When you finally get to be the majority, you’re likely to be just as ghastly to other minorities. Perhaps it’s just like most child abusers being people who were abused as children themselves: the victims become the perpetrators.

So when I see Israeli soldiers firing on schools where civilians are sheltering, I have to learn to stop saying ‘how can they, of all people, behave that way?’ Instead, I have to learn to ask ‘how is it that we all, humanity, persist in behaving that badly?’