
The Anglosphere miracle - wycx
http://www.newcriterion.com/articleprint.cfm/The-Anglosphere-miracle-7709
======
objclxt
> _To British eyes, the whole process seemed bizarre. Rules had been drawn up
> in the clearest language that lawyers could devise. Yet, the moment they
> became inconvenient, they were ignored._

I find it very difficult to take this seriously coming from a Conservative MEP
(I note the article makes no mention of his party affiliation), mainly because
his party is proposing to do the exact same thing with the EU Convention on
Human Rights.

To wit, the Conservative Party has upon numerous occasions frequently chosen
to ignore their legal obligations, such as trying to deport people who have
been charged with no crime on the basis of evidence gained under torture,
denying some prisoners the right to vote, and retaining DNA of those arrested
but not charged with a crime indefinitely. All of which are, according to the
EU courts, illegal.

So when faced with these 'inconvenient' laws, the tories are proposing to
ignore them, tear them up, and replace them with a 'British' bill of rights
that largely duplicates what's already enshrined in EU law (a pointless
exercise).

I also think it's rather disingenuous of the article to gloss over the fact
that Daniel Hannan is not without his critics, and that his positions on
issues such as immigration are not, in my view, particularly enlightened. I
leave it to other commenters here to determine whether it's really 'racist
garbage' (as someone else suggested), but whatever he's pining for something
that simply doesn't and cannot exist anymore.

~~~
pg
Can you give an example of a specific sentence or passage in the essay that
you believe is false?

~~~
objclxt
I quoted one. He suggests the British found it bizarre that Germany would
ignore its treaty obligations to preserve Eurozone fiscal stability.

I don't think that's true, especially since _his own party_ is doing the exact
same thing (ignoring EU treaty obligations), just with human rights instead of
fiscal responsibility. If he found it so bizarre why would he do it himself?

He is attempting to project his own Euroscepticism onto the UK as a whole by
making blanket statements about what it means to be 'British'. I think these
assumptions are false. Whilst there are vocal Eurosceptics in Britain they are
not representative of the whole (if they were, his own party would have a
majority, but they don't - they're in coalition).

~~~
jond3k
Something that is true of a group he is a part of isn't necessarily true of
him. However, if he did want to change parties over this he'd have to drop out
of mainstream politics entirely.

------
mtts
Typical self-congratulatory anglo-conservative clap trap. No one outside of a
very small group of wealthy Britons and Americans (and, alright, some wealthy
educated descendants from the former colonies) could possibly share such an
immensely bowdlerized narrative of anglo history.

The freedom he praises is the freedom of the very rich and well-connected to
impose their success on the less fortunate, be they poor sheep farmers in
Scotland who saw their commons taken away by enclosures, indentured servants
who were shipped off to the colonies in America or the inhabitants of India
who had their livelihood taken away from them when textile manufacturers from
Manchester forced the destruction of their local economy. (Notice, by the way,
how this essay makes no mention of Indians other than the 2.4 million Indians
who were pressed into service in the trenches in World War I and who, for the
most part, suffered terribly to defend a country that had pretty much ruined
their own.)

For this rich mercantile elite, yes, the anglo system is superior, which is
why its ideals have now spread across the entire world (even in China there is
now an elite that dresses in suits and engages in trade unencumbered by rules
and regulations that protect the millions that are pressed into working in
their factories under appalling conditions).

For the vast majority of people, however, the system is a disaster. It has
ruined communal forms of organisation that protected the unfortunate and the
weak. It has destroyed perfectly viable local economies and it has reduced
millions of people to little more than debt bondage.

It takes a special kind of myopia to gloss over all of that and proclaim, like
this article does, that the anglo system is superior because it promotes free
trade and rule of law for the rich.

~~~
alexeisadeski3
Actually, the Latin political systems are quite obviously better for the
powerful, as the weak tradition of rule of law and equality under the law
allows them to more easily exploit the political process for their own gain.

~~~
javert
Better to be a middle class American than a Latin despot.

(Back when America had a middle class. Now, we have our own despots.)

~~~
alexeisadeski3
Pretty sure the despot gets laid more.

------
abhiv
The standard, disingenuous "we stand for civilization" line that apologists of
colonialism like to make. Not a single mention of the fact that England with
all its stated commitment to freedom ruled India and dozens of countries
around the world against their will for two hundred years, systematically
stripping them of their wealth for the benefit of the mother country.

Notice how casually the number of Indian soldiers in WW2 -- 2.4 million, more
than the other countries combined -- is slipped in, well after NZ and
Australia. And of course they all volunteered out of their love for the Queen
-- unrelated to the fact that a coercive foreign power was ruling their
country at the time.

Honestly, the world should be too evolved to be accepting thinly veiled racist
garbage like this any more.

~~~
pg
Is there a specific sentence or passage in the essay that you feel is false
and would like to refute? That would be more convincing than mere accusations
of isms you feel the author is guilty of.

~~~
primelens
> _Look at the size of the war memorials outside Europe. Consider the sheer
> number of volunteers. During the Second World War, 215,000 men served from
> New Zealand, 410,000 from South Africa, 995,000 from Australia, 1,060,000
> from Canada, 2,400,000 from India. The vast majority had made an individual
> decision to enlist. What force pulled those young men, as it had pulled
> their fathers, half way around the world to fight for a country on which, in
> most cases, they had never set eyes? Was it simply an affinity of blood and
> speech?_

Slipping India into that list is just bizarre and tantamount to distorting the
truth (not the number, perhaps, but certainly the argument he bases on the
number). These 2.4 million "volunteers" were not so much pulled by any
affinity of blood and speech as grabbed by the scruff of their neck. Meanwhile
countless millions more were struggling at home to overthrow the oppressive
rule of the British.[1] The vast majority joined the relatively peaceful
struggle for freedom led by Gandhi, but many took up arms against the
colonizers and an Indian army even fought against the British and alongside
the Japanese in WWII.[2]

So excuse me if I find that rosy picture about the loyal Indian bleeding for
the "dear government" a little hard to digest. It would be a lot more
believable if the dear government hadn't been massacring and looting the
country for two centuries.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_independence_movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_independence_movement)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_National_Army](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_National_Army)

~~~
waps
It's very easy to "fight" against an unpopular enemy that won't retaliate,
like Gandhi did. The death toll of the Indian partition was breathtaking, and
Gandhi ... fasted, while refusing to implement basic security measures while
easily preventable massacres happened. He was also smart enough to choose his
captors wisely, in other words, in the partition he avoided contact with
muslims -himself- He had little qualms about sending millions to their death.

That's the theme of Gandhi's non-violence : it's only non-violence if you're
looking from very far away focusing on the person. If you were someone
affected by the political decisions Gandhi was involved in ... the political
change he affected probably felt more like a holocaust. You could say, if you
look at it from afar, that he didn't know this was going to happen, and he
didn't order it. But he did order people into situations that he knew
perfectly well were going to explode.

Here's one account of the immediate result of Gandhi's "non-violence":

    
    
      There are numerous eyewitness accounts of the maiming and
      mutilation of victims. The catalogue of horrors includes 
      the disembowelling of pregnant women, the slamming of 
      babies' heads against brick walls, the cutting off of 
      victims limbs and genitalia and the display of heads and 
      corpses. While previous communal riots had been deadly, 
      the scale and level of brutality was unprecedented. 
      Although some scholars question the use of the term 
      'genocide' with respect to the Partition massacres, much 
      of the violence manifested as having genocidal tendencies. 
      It was designed to cleanse an existing generation as well 
      as prevent its future reproduction."[1]
    

Mahatma Gandhi was a skilled orchestrator of public violence, who was very
careful about constructing his public image. He has about as much claim to
being a non-violent person as Hitler has, who has as far as I know never hurt
a fly personally (actually Hitler did military service as a soldier, so I
guess that's probably not true). Mahatma Gandi saw himself as being "above"
base violence, saw himself as upper class, so he wouldn't touch arms himself.
Not because he doesn't believe in violence, but because he doesn't believe in
people of his social caste doing anything that could be understood to be work.
He started out his political career recruiting for the army, and he's done the
same job ever since.

Like most of this kind of "heroes" his non-violence is not the result of a
belief that violence is wrong (or he wouldn't have recruited for the army),
but the result of the worst aspect of Indian society : the caste system. His
non-violence is about him personally refusing to do anything related to
violence, except of course, command them from a distance. He would only
involve himself in strategy, ordering people around and deciding what is
"decent" "good" and "moral", on a grand scale. Personally committing violence
is just one of those things he won't do himself, he'll hire/order others to do
that for him.

And like any other monster that just happened to do successfully what is
popular now, he has a cult following. At least this particular popular monster
had the decency and self control to never rape and torture people himself,
unlike the ubiquitous Che Guevara.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India)

------
forgottenpaswrd
Freedom? When I go to North America I don't see native Indians, most of them
were exterminated in order to steal their land. Is that freedom?

You will find even disrespect to what they call "Hispanic people" that in fact
are more native American that they are, from California to New Mexico or
Florida.Those were not exterminated because they were lately incorporated from
other countries.

In all the south you find lots of blacks living in misery, the descendants of
slaves. Is that freedom? In Spain slavery was forbidden by law in XVI century.
In practice there were abuses but by law any native Indian was a citizen like
any other.

When you go to any Latin American country you find a significant population of
native Indians, all of them somewhat different from another. It is not the
same the people from Colombia to the people in Ecuador, Brazil, or Argentina.
This difference makes hard for them to unite and became a US competitor. Also
US has done anything he could to divide and conquer, including destroying by
force those governments that did not align with US interest.

In the past it was Europe who controlled South America, now it is the US.
Brazil is slowly getting independent, as it is big enough.

Don't get me wrong, I like the US and have lots of north American friends, but
there is propaganda in any country of this world and people inside them
believe it blind folded without thinking for themselves.

~~~
aminok
Native Indians were killed almost totally by disease, not armed force.

~~~
nate_meurer
Completely. Fucking. Irrelevant.

~~~
aminok
Europeans are not morally responsible for spreading diseases to the Americas
that killed the natives. That was inadvertent and in many ways inevitable.

------
ggreer
I found the arguments interesting, but difficult to evaluate. I simply don't
know enough history to engage with many of the author's points. The same is
probably true for most readers.

If I had any criticism, it would be this: It praises western government too
much. While I'm certainly glad I live in the US, it seems clear to me that
better forms of government exist. The problem is that nobody has invented
them, or no country has tried them. This is understandable. Switching systems
is not only incredibly hard, it's stupendously risky. Things have to get
_really_ bad before people are willing to switch.

Also, anything better would probably sound ridiculous to us today. To quote
Vernor Vinge:

 _If you go back to the year 1200 and you tried to explain to some noble lord
why a democracy and intellectual freedom works better, he might be the rare
sort of person who would listen to you. That 's possible, that he would listen
to you. But he would be quite right to laugh in your face and say, "You know
what would happen? If I tried to open myself up to that? Tomorrow, I would be
dead. There would be another clown up here on the hill, and he would be doing
the same thing that I'm doing. What you're talking about is anarchy and it is
impossible."_

(from around
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzRuPGnJxCs#t=52m25s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzRuPGnJxCs#t=52m25s))

Finally, even if I believe the author, he offers no solutions. If the
anglosphere's special sauce is being diluted, what can we do about it? I've
sat around for five minutes thinking, but nothing particularly good comes to
mind.

Overall though, I enjoyed reading this article. Then again, I'm from the
anglosphere.

~~~
alexeisadeski3
>If the anglosphere's special sauce is being diluted, what can we do about it?

It's quite obvious that the author is proposing you vote 'Whig' in order to
stem the dilution. Unfortunately I, personally, don't think that any of the
conservative parties in the Anglosphere are of much use (if they were, at
least a potential solution would be much easier!).

------
Apocryphon
"Which nations? All definitions include five core countries: Australia,
Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States."

It's very appropriate that this article was posted in HN. After all, these are
the five guys of the Five Eyes- the intelligence network that's spying on the
world they 'civilized.'

[http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/07/10/2276191/snowden...](http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/07/10/2276191/snowden-
five-eyes/)

~~~
alexeisadeski3
I'm more anti spying than anyone else, but how is this relevant?

~~~
Apocryphon
Undoubtedly the democratic institutions and cultures of the Anglo-American
culture achieved great things. But the triumphalist tone of this article not
only whitewashes the cost in blood that created this civilization of law, and
ignores injustices that still go on today.

It just comes out sounding really self-congratulatory. I'm no fan of Howard
Zinn or Marxist historical revisionism. But this article makes it sound like
the game is done and the West has won. Perhaps if it had been more
prescriptive, urging the Anglosphere to strive to be better, to refine the
rule of law, increase personal liberty, and reform representative government,
then it would be more convincing.

~~~
alexeisadeski3
One of the article's points is that civilization isn't secure, it's always
under threat from enemies both foreign and domestic - that there are lots of
things wrong with the Anglosphere with need to be fixed.

So then someone points out something wrong with the Anglosphere, something
which needs to be fixed, and that comment gets voted to the top. I don't get
it.

Further, it's not as if the author is trying to paint the Anglosphere as
perfect. The best, healthiest culture in existence? Yes. Perfect? Obviously
not.

~~~
eevilspock
By whose definition is it the best and healthiest? Most powerful != best or
healthiest.

 _Anglosphere_. What a load of crap. If the center of gravity of this
article's definition of "civilization" is currently in America and previously
in Britain, it's an artifact of history, not of "Anglo". The center was once
in Italy, and before that in Greece. If you've read Russian literature you'd
see the democratic spirit was there too.

And then there's India, a piece of this so-called "Anglosphere". What did
India do? It threw out the tyranny that was the British Empire. You'll
probably argue that this somehow proves the beauty of the "Anglosphere".

~~~
sounds
The article is very particular to note the origin of the word "Anglosphere."

Which of Stephenson's novels is your favorite?

~~~
Apocryphon
I suspect that the author may have just looked up the entry for the word on
Wikipedia. I was surprised that Stephenson had been the one to coin the term;
I'm still wondering if that's an accurate claim or not.

------
JackMorgan
To the majority of commenters: the article never says, "every anglosphere
action and belief was always perfect and in mankind's best interest", it
states that the commitments to certain basic tenets allowed the highest peak
of human personal freedom, equality, and safety in history. Saying, "some
points along the path to that peak were not that high" is obvious and useless.
Likewise saying, "the peak could be higher" is also obvious and of no value.
We should be instead trying to determine what else should be combined with
these tenets to produce an even higher peak, a system of government that will
allow for greater safety, freedom, and equality for all humankind.

------
VladRussian2
well, to me it was expressed in the phrase i read somewhere "the year Magna
Carta was signed <something about state of my old country 800 years ago>"

And curiously enough, 800 years later, my old country still hasn't reached the
mental state that "the power of the king may be limited by the people". When i
read about Latin/South America a lot of things sound familiar. The article
compares AngloSaxon world against Spanish when it is basically AngloSaxon
world against any other - i mean pick any place in Africa or Eurasia ...

------
ravich2_7183
_What raised the English-speaking peoples to greatness was not a magical
property in their DNA, nor a special richness in their soil, nor yet an
advantage in military technology, but their political and legal institutions._

This is no doubt aimed at Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, (Geography) & Steel"

------
sounds
I see several commenters attacking Daniel Hannan, so let me share the best
links I found as I researched him:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Hannan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Hannan)

[http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/4555/DANIEL_HANNAN_hom...](http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/4555/DANIEL_HANNAN_home.html)

[http://www.votewatch.eu/en/daniel-
hannan.html](http://www.votewatch.eu/en/daniel-hannan.html)

P.S. Wouldn't comments be more interesting if they scrupulously avoided
attacking the messenger?

------
Apocryphon
There certainly shouldn't be anything wrong with celebrating Anglophone
cultural heritage, or the accomplishments of Anglo civilization. And there
certainly isn't anything wrong with examining what caused the Anglosphere to
become preeminent, the best virtues that helped shape its success.

Where I feel the article fails is in somehow presuming that the former led to
the latter. Despite the author's protests of being triumphalist, the article
comes off as praising the Anglosphere as an almost unqualified success, and it
makes it sound like there is something inherently greater about Anglosphere
culture. He mentions many good things that were formative to its rule of law
and regard for liberty- and ignores those accomplished by contemporaneous
civilizations- the Althing, the Golden Liberty of the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. (Oh, sure, he pays lip
service to the Swiss, the Dutch, and the Scandinavians- why not the rest of
the Low Countries as well?- but should they be discounted simply because their
nations and empires were smaller? What makes the Anglosphere greater, its
culture better, than those other countries with a long tradition for respect
for the rule of law and personal liberty?)

Maybe my disagreement comes from viewing history as a complex system, easily
altered with a few tweaks here and there- call it the Sid Meier Model of
History. What the Anglophones achieved was great. But they weren't the only
ones to achieve it. And they needn't be the only ones to achieve it.

The way I see it, if we were living a couple of millennia ago, we'd be saying
the same about Rome. And with good cause. The Roman Empire was _glorious_. It
was a pinnacle of human civilization. But there is always a pinnacle at some
point. They come and go, and are not intrinsic to any one culture, nor one
people. Success is created as much by luck as it is by culture or people.
Perhaps if some battles had happened differently, we'd be remembering Carthage
as the great classical empire. Or, had things not fallen apart as terribly as
it did in the Revolution, we'd be praising the achievements of the modern
Francosphere. Roll the dice, and some other civilization succeeds, not because
of their intrinsic greatness, but because there _has_ to be someone at the
top. Someone with the most rule of law, the most democratic institutions. The
Anglosphere (and the Swiss, and the Swedes, and the Dutch...) won because of
their unique set of circumstances, their roll.

(As much as this author tries to bring up parts of the British Empire to show
that he's not praising the West as a people or a culture but instead a
concept, it's unconvincing. The five core nations of the Anglosphere are made
up of Britain, America, and the White Dominions. India's democratic success is
not quite at the same level. Singapore is very rich and has a strong rule of
law, but is very undemocratic.)

My conclusion is not to bury the Anglosphere's legacy, but neither is it to
praise it without reservations. We should certainly take what is good from its
history. But we shouldn't pretend that it is exceptional; if we do that, we
pretend only one culture is capable of its success. We discount the victories
of other civilizations. (We also ignore that perhaps liberal democracy isn't
the true end of history- perhaps some alternate government model may in fact
arise and be even better for standard of living.) We forget that the
Anglosphere is just as human as any other ball. Like Rome, thousands of years
from now Anglo-American culture will show its influence from one end of the
Solar System to another. But some other pinnacle will exist just the same.

And at the same time, as the Romans said, we should also never forget: Memento
mori.

------
pavpanchekha
The article cherry-picks its history and has a disagreeable tone; but this is
an easy dismissal. I think this article begs a deeper analysis.

I see the main virtue of the article thus: it identifies a successful (by some
measures) political system; attempts a deconstruction into its components; and
then draws some conclusions from them.

The political system of England and its sister nations (the article argues) is
successful in providing a robust government that maintains important personal
freedoms. While the main support the article lends is pointing out the failure
of most other countries' political schemes, we can also find strong evidence
elsewhere. For example, the United States has ended slavery and granted
suffrage to the poor, to former slaves, and to women, all while maintaining a
nonviolent transfer of power between administrations and fundamentally similar
Constitutions. Of course, the American Civil War was anything but nonviolent,
American Presidents have been assassinated, and some Constitutional Amendments
fundamentally change the structure of that nation (for example, the 14th).
Nonetheless, it is hard to argue that other political systems can claim even
such results.

The article then attempts to deconstruct what this "Anglo-Saxon civilization"
entails. The author provides three broad components: the rule of law; personal
liberty; and representational governance. For example, the author groups the
protection of property under personal liberty (it might justifiably be grouped
under the rule of the law, but I believe the author means, by "rule of the
law", the simple belief that no entity is above the law).

Of course, one is a fool if one says the United States', or England's,
political system is perfect. The shared history of the "anglosphere" (let's
assume for a moment this is well-defined) is a history of a political system,
but also of its use for racism, xenophobia, class schisms, for the destruction
of civil liberties. But I think we can perhaps attempt to understand a few
points: whether or not the political schemes used in England and her sister
countries are in fact more successful than other schemes; if so, how we can
characterize the successes, and perhaps distinguish them from its failures;
and if so, how we can characterize the necessary components of this political
system as leading to successes or failures.

Now, I do not claim the linked article was good; in fact it had so many flaws.
But it is easy to criticize these flaws, much harder to write an article like
the linked. Yes, we do not do a writer justice by blindly nodding along to his
words. But it is so easy to find a flaw to complain about---maybe trying to
understand what the article is saying, and trying to correct its flaws, is a
more noble exercise than criticism?

------
eevilspock
Did we just get trolled? (read the comment threads and see)

------
firstOrder
> Third, representative government. Laws should not be passed, nor taxes
> levied, except by elected legislators who are answerable to the rest of us.

This must be why the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association's slogan in
1967 was "one man, one vote". The native population of northern Ireland saw
American blacks in Mississippi on the telly and wanted to get the kind of
enfranchisement they were getting.

Workers in Manchester in 1819 who had a rally for the vote were massacred by a
cavalry charge.

Of course all of this was paradise compared to what Rhodesians, Indians, South
Africans etc. were going through.

What a load of bollocks

------
alexeisadeski3
The central premise is true, and bears repeating.

------
Apocryphon
Tell it to South Africa, or Rhodesia.

~~~
wycx
Why not ask some people from Angola, Mozambique, Ivory Coast or the Congo
about it?

~~~
eevilspock
What is your point? Apocryphon lists a couple of counterexamples to the
author's notions of the so-called "Anglosphere". You provide counterexamples
to a notion of a Portuguese-sphere. Are you agreeing that all of this,
starting with the author's article, is rubbish?

~~~
wycx
Answer me this: It is the 18th or 19th century. You are in a less
technologically advanced country. Your fate is to be colonised. I will allow
you the choice of which European power will colonise you. Who would you
choose, based on observations of how countries fared with different
colonisers?

I think you can make the observation that countries that were colonised by the
British (i.e. the Anglosphere) ended up stronger legal, administrative and
educational infrasrtucture and traditions than countries that were colonised
by other European powers (i.e. Portugese, Belgian, French, German, Spanish and
Dutch).

I am not implying that they ended up better off than if they had never been
colonised at all. I am not implying that colonisation did not take a terrible
toll on the colonised. Nevertheless, the era of colonisation has left a
legacy. Some of it is good and some of it is bad. We do not get to live in the
counterfactual world where there was no colonisation. We do get to see the
results of various approaches to colonisation.

Does this legacy tell us anything of the colonisers?

~~~
jleyank
There was one country that managed to get through this period without being
colonized: Japan. However, they tried to play the role of the colonizer in
some places and pay the price for their actions today.

------
ilaksh
Brown people are repressed abused and have resources stolen and withheld from
them by white people while white people live in relative prosperity. Then
white people use the relative instability and corruption in these repressed
regions to support their own racism.

~~~
alexeisadeski3
Pretty sure the article is about different cultures within the "white people
world," not about comparisons of "white" and "brown" cultures.

