Torture, Secrecy and the British State

[Paul Rigby]

Death of a Congo pygmy

An editorial, CIA-and MI6-serving, not to mention utterly hypocritical, in this morning’s Grauniad (“the finest British liberal daily CIA money could buy”), reminded me a) of a brief piece I intended to cobble together (but then misplaced the key clipping for); b) why I stopped buying the Observer (again); and c) why I loathe the BBC.

First up, that editorial:

Editorial, “In praise of… Patrice Lumumba,” The Guardian, Thursday 1 July 2010, p.

Of all the deaths in Congo's terrible history, Lumumba's is the best remembered

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/...-editorial

"Much that is incredible, extravagant, ambiguous and unjust has been written about Patrice Lumumba", his friend Thomas Kanza once noted. He was right. Congo's first prime minister, a hero of independence 50 years ago this week, was overthrown and murdered less that a year after taking office. Of all the deaths in that country's terrible history, Lumumba's is the best remembered: a man whose killing doomed hopes of African independence. It is too easy to think that, had he lived, the Congo would have thrived. Lumumba was not a saint and the challenge of running a vast country whose population had been denied basic education by Belgian rulers interested only in exploiting its wealth would have sunk any government. But the Congo, which became Zaire, would have been spared the autocracyof President Mobutu and perhaps the hideous war that followed his death. This week the Belgian king arrived in Kinshasa to mark Congo's half century as an independent state, a peculiar re-enactment of his predecessor's role granting independence in 1960. Then, Lumumba, denied a formal place at the ceremony, denounced colonial rule. Belgium conspired to overthrow him; so did the United States. No one knows who ordered his death, only that Belgian troops were involved in it. Now Lumumba's sons say they want justice. More than that, though, DRC needs peace and prosperity, rather than the continued abuses of its latest discredited government. That would be the best tribute to its lost leader.

Now for the establishment whitewash which had me bouncing the neo-con Observer off the wall (and which clipping I mislaid under a pile of other stuff):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/...aphne-park

Mary Warnock, “What today's young women can learn from Daphne Park,” The Observer, Sunday, 28 March 2010, p.29

My friend broke barriers in MI6 and at Oxford and she had more fun doing it than her heirs could hope for

Daphne Park, who died on Wednesday, was probably the most remarkable woman I ever knew. I remember first meeting her soon after she came to take up her appointment at Somerville college, Oxford. I was at one of the hospitable but not very easy receptions that John Maud, then master of University College, used to give where his wife, a former concert pianist, used to play, mostly Brahms, and very loud, so that the room shook. One was constantly having to finish conversations in a hurry to seem to listen.

Daphne came up and introduced herself and it was some time before I realised she was the new principal of Somerville. She looked so startlingly unlike her predecessor, who had been tall and rather austere. Daphne was short and stout and wonderfully friendly and seemed (most misleadingly) ordinary. We talked about Moscow, where my brother had been ambassador in the early 1970s, and where I had stayed with him, and I assumed she was a former member of the Foreign Office. I even commiserated with her about how difficult it was to switch from that hierarchical world to being head of a college (I knew because my brother became master of Corpus, Cambridge, after retirement, and John Maud had made the same switch).

I did not discover what her real profession had been until later, nor the extreme courage she had displayed in the course of her life. Things kept coming her way after she had left MI6, Somerville among them, and, like me, she was inclined to say "yes" to everything, so she was never bored.

Reading her obituaries, I found myself reflecting on how different things were for those of us whose careers started in the late 1940s. There were still many professions where women had to be pretty determined if they were to get in and even more determined if they were to stay when they married and had children. I was lucky, because it was easy to combine a university job with a family (though the college of which I became a fellow was still suspicious of marriage and scandalised by pregnancy), but it was a long time before the Foreign Office allowed you to stay on after marriage. Daphne Park, though she could perhaps be described as lucky in having no family obligations, certainly opened up MI6 for women to reach right to the top and even be married.

But though women then needed determination and had to be far more scrupulous than men about never missing even half a day's work, never getting ill, never showing bad temper or resentment, in fact behaving impeccably, I believe that their lot was in some ways easier than the lot of women now. If they did succeed, they got a great deal of respect for being the "first woman" to do this or that. Once established in their jobs, they could expect to stay there and it was generally assumed that they had got where they were on merit, not because of anti-discrimination laws.

Of course, the marriage bar is no longer relevant. Women get round that easily enough by living with their partner without marrying. But the fear of pregnancy and children remains for all employers. It is expensive for them and no legislation can change that. Things are really worse, not better, than in the old days.

Life in universities, at any rate, is vastly less enjoyable now than it was then. It is regimented, ill-paid, constantly assessed and it carries with it an obligation to produce a string of publications, often a joyless business, but necessary if your department is to retain its reputation for productivity. And no one can assume that she will not be sacked or her department closed around her. Even teaching undergraduates and graduate students must be less fun than it used to be, with IT introducing increasing opportunities for production-line written work and the constant threat of plagiarism.

Young women starting out in whatever profession still need determination, but they also need the kind of courage that I would not have been capable of, though Daphne Park might, to face change, perhaps spells of unemployment and, even with anti-discrimination laws, immense competition for any job they apply for. I used to despise the concept of "networking" when it was first in the air about 30 years ago, but I now believe it is necessary, especially for women. If I were a young woman who, for example, had been to one of the 25 schools of the Girls' Day School Trust, I should make as much use as I could of its networking organisation, Minerva, and use it to look for freelance work when regular work failed and ruthlessly exploit any contact I could make through its communication system. Communication is now easy, but we used not to need it to anything like the same extent.

It seems as if those of us who had our first jobs in the middle or late 1940s were still pioneers, not in the heroic sense of the suffragettes or the first women doctors, but in the sense of embarking hopefully on a path that was trodden by not so very many people.

I do not know when this hopefulness (accompanied, perhaps, by some self-satisfaction) came to an end for women, but it had certainly long ended by 1980 and the "first woman prime minister" did nothing to restore it; neither, I fear, did anti-discrimination law. There may be more equality between the sexes at the beginning of a career, but there comes a point along the way when it seems to disappear. And what has been lost is any pleasure that women once got in being at least slightly out of the ordinary.

Perhaps it is still true now, as it always has been, that women will be happiest if they do not think much about equality, but just go ahead and work very hard in whatever their job is and whatever they enjoy. After all, working hard and enjoying it is a pretty good reward in itself, but it may in fact also be the best recipe for reaching the top. This is nothing new.

All the same, what my generation never had to show was the flexibility, the facing, even welcoming change, that everyone, men and women alike, needs to show today. I would not like it.

And people wonder why Britain’s spook-thugocracy gets away with it generation after generation, when one of our leading “moral philosophers” champions a right-wing criminal and fanatic as trail-blazing feminist!

MI6’s most overt British daily mouthpiece, The Torygraph, offered this predictably fulsome tribute to the far-right battle-axe:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituari...mouth.html

Park was a moral pygmy, one of the legion of fanatic European anti-communists utilised by the CIA to destroy a giant, a man whose bravery dwarfed that of the charlatans who destroyed both him and his country. Inevitably, the pygmy became a BBC panjandrum:

“She was a BBC governor between 1982 and 1987 under the then Director-General, Alasdair Milne, who identified her as a hardline opponent in his memoirs.”

To end on a more positive note: Here is what genuine courage sounds like...remember it, because you are never likely to hear anything remotely resembling it from any corporate whore among the Anglo-American political classes:

Speech of Patrice Lumumba, 30 June 1960 (with english subtitles)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzPO4KQCZP8