The Princess, the Fairytale, and the Blood Sacrifice

29 July 1981; London was as deserted as if a neutron bomb had hit it. My wife and I (also newly married that year) cycled up to her aunt’s house in Highgate to the Royal Wedding party she had organised for her show-biz pals; we had the normally traffic-thronged streets to ourselves.

We all laughed, drank and ate extravagantly, sunning ourselves in her huge and luxuriant garden. Show-business seemed the best way of framing this event, which a normally sceptical and hard-to-move British public had become more engaged with than anything, by all accounts, since the Queen’s Coronation nearly 30 years previously.

So what was it the captivated so many of us about the Royal Wedding? It certainly wasn’t the groom – the heir to the throne has never been enormously popular. It was of course Diana who did it, a myth in the making when the media referred to her as “Lady Di”, before she even became Princess of Wales. Shy, elegant, beautiful, innocent and unassuming in her manner despite her impeccable pedigree (her mother was a personal friend of the Queen’s), she was a better fit for the role of fairytale princess than anyone Hollywood could have come up with – the charismatic unknown who rescues a tottering movie.

I hardly need to recap the story of possibly the most written- and speculated-about person on the planet for the rest of her short life. The point of bringing her up is to focus on the symbolic dimension of her life and death, as the sacrificed princess who dies in order to perpetuate the dynasty. In the royal houses of pre-Roman Britain a son could only inherit the kingdom from his father if his mother had been a ‘throne-princess’ – a virgin descendant of the same royal house; in other cultures the virgin princess is literally sacrificed – it’s her blood which guarantees the longevity and survival of the kingdom.

When Diana died in 1997 the conspiracy theories abounded; many friends of mine were convinced that she’d been murdered by the British Secret Services because she was about to marry a Muslim (the Egyptian playboy Dodi Al-Fayed). Others locate the ‘blood conspiracy’ on a more occult and symbolic level; for a detailed account of these see this link .

Whether one believes any of this or not isn’t the point: what clearly happened to Diana was that she was the recipient of a huge volume of projections, acting out the unlived, unexplored and disowned areas of people’s psyches in the same way that movie and music stars do – and that this was also her downfall. Young and inexperienced herself, and lacking effective support and guidance from her stuffy new ‘family’, she was overwhelmed by the vortex of incoherent but powerful emotions that swam around her.

And today, of course, another Crown Princess is to be installed, when Kate Middleton marries Diana’s elder son. But the circumstances are very different from those of William’s parents: they’re the same age, and have been lovers for eight or nine years. The excitement of the public seems to me much less; William and Kate seem more like a typical “we might as well get married” 2011 couple than the stuff of fairytales. Mindful of his mother’s fate, William has asked that they be allowed to live ‘a normal life’ – a strange request from a man who will one day wear the crown of England. But we can take this too on a symbolic level – he and Kate are refusing as far as they can the projections which destroyed his mother, to ‘desacralise’ the monarchy in a sense.

A columnist in the London Guardian suggested as much: that what William had in mind was to bring the British monarchy closer to the Scandinavian model: the Kings and Queens of Denmark, Norway and Sweden – which are among the most open and egalitarian societies on the planet – minimise protocol and in some cases even have normal jobs.

However, as Timothy Garton Ash went on to point out, he has plenty of time to think about it; his grandmother is likely to rule for another 5-10 years, after which his father will take over. Though Charles will be an old man by then, the Windsors are long-lived, and we’re likely to have to wait till 2035 or 2040 before we see King William V (aged nearly 60 by then). Who knows what, if anything, will be expected from him at that point?

Personally, I wish them well. Refusing other people’s projections is a good way to embark on any of life’s adventures, marriage very much included. May the tragedy of his mother’s short life not be visited upon William or upon his family.

Tripoli, 1973

It was Friday, so we were going to the beach as usual. As in most Muslim countries, the weekend was Friday and Saturday – and we were none of us so devout that we objected to working on Sunday. But Friday of course was the big one, the Muslim holy day.

One was very conscious of Friday in Libya; the place I lived was called Suq-al-Juma’a – Friday Market. Once a sleepy little village with a large square where camels and goats were traded, it was gradually being absorbed into the city: white concrete villas like mine springing up among the prickly-pears and the old mud-brick courtyard houses. Next to our house was a small mosque; the call to prayer went out five times a day, every day, starting at 6:00 am in the summer – though it was on tape. The elderly Hajji who owned the dusty little store opposite our house and doubled as the imam was no longer expected to drag his old bones up those steep, narrow stairs.

Anyway, back to the beach. I and the two other young unmarried male teachers (we had little else in common, but Libya had thrown us together) had planned to meet at the school as usual with our swimming and snorkelling gear and pile into my yellow Renault for a day at the ‘40 km beach’. I never did find out what the locals called it, but it was a popular spot; a long bar of sand with a grassy bluff a couple of hundred metres back from the sea, on which stood a small shrine to a local wali (saint), a low white structure made of whitewashed daub with a dome and crescent on top, like a miniature mosque.

But I don’t recall seeing many of the numerous Libyan families who flocked to the ‘40 km beach’ on Fridays and Saturdays paying their devotions to the wali. Instead they would all gather on the beach, the men in their bathing trunks and the women in their thick blanket-like barrakans that covered every part of their bodies, leaving only a Cyclops-like hole around the bridge of the nose to squint through. While the women took care of the young children, the men and older boys would barbecue immense quantities of lamb in between dips in the sea, before finally piling into their Datsuns or Toyotas to drive back to the city.

On the way to the beach we stopped, as we often did, at a small café-cum-gas station to get a coffee and to buy some Fanta. On the television – there was of course only one channel, and it was in black and white – the country’s new young leader Colonel Gaddafi was holding forth in his usual elaborate, ritualised, impassioned and rhetorical style. The few customers in the bar were watching, respectful and slightly baffled.

My Arabic wasn’t good enough to understand most of what he was saying, but I guessed that, like most of his speeches, it was about the unequal relation of the Arab world with the Western powers, especially the British and the Americans: Palestine, oil, Saudi Arabia etc. Plus, of course, the history of Libya itself, a backwater Italian colony up till World War II, and an Anglo-American protectorate from then till 1969. The Italians never found the oil, but the Brits did in, back in the 1950s: with its pro-Western puppet monarch Libya had been a safe haven for BP, Shell, Esso and the rest – and the Americans even had a huge air force base right on Tripoli’s corniche, a mere 8 km from the city centre. The West had taken the place for granted, and it was almost undefended when that unknown 27-year old junior officer staged his military coup. Almost the first thing he did, of course, was to kick out the Americans.

We drank up our coffee and left fairly hurriedly – the atmosphere was never too friendly during Gaddafi’s speeches, and spent a pleasant day frolicking on the beach. On the way back I stopped for gas, and when I went in to pay he was still speaking – which made six or more hours non-stop, outdoing even his great hero Nasser. (The Egyptian revolutionary leader nationalised the Suez canal, provoking the disastrous Anglo-French invasion of 1956; his many-hour-long speeches were broadcast on outdoor loudspeakers all over the Arab world, causing grown men to stop in the streets and burst into tears of pride and passion.)

Over the year and a half or so that I was there, Libya gradually became less and less hospitable to Westerners, as the populace got to know more of the history that they’d never learned in school (those who’d even gone to school). There was a huge amount of natural grandeur and beauty to the place: incredible Roman and Greek ruins, awe-inspiring desert landscapes, and of course those astonishing, endless, largely deserted, sandy beaches, but I was glad enough to leave all the same. This wasn’t primarily because of the politics but the enforced celibacy and the lack of alcohol and merry-making – the lack of pretty much anything, in fact, in this vast country three times the size of France, with a population then of less than 3 million. I had my life to get on with, and I went back to London to get on with it.

That was more than half a lifetime ago: then I was a young man in his early 20s, and now I’m an old geezer heading for retirement age. And Gaddafi is still there, madder, crueller and more despotic than ever. Who else was in power in 1973, and is still there now? Not even Robert Mugabe, or Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni; in 1973 the unshiftable Silvio Berlusconi was still crooning ballads on cruise ships.

But come to think of it, there is one head of state who’s lasted even longer. When I came back to London Queen Elisabeth II’s face had already adorned Britain’s coins and banknotes for 22 years – and, like Gaddafi, she’s still there now. I wonder, if the Brits tried to overthrow the Queen, and she was hunkered down in Buckingham Palace surrounded by tank traps and anti-aircraft guns, would Gaddafi send his air force to support the Republican cause?

An idle fantasy – next year (let’s hope) Gaddafi will be gone, but the Brits will be throwing garden parties to celebrate the Queen’s 60 years on the throne; little paper flags will be waved all over the country, and hardly a protest will be heard.

The Chinese are Coming (Back)

So it’s official (or at least, we have it on the authority of ‘The Economist’): China will become the world’s no. 1 economy before the end of this decade. It’s only a few years ago that forecasters were setting this date for 2040, with China only passing Japan around 2020 – but thanks to seemingly unstoppable growth the Middle Kingdom in fact took the no. 2 spot from its old rival last year. The date of 2019, if it’s revised, is likely to be corrected downwards – it could be as soon as 2016 or 2017, depending on the relative performance of the two economies.

OK, enough numbers already. Does it matter – and if so, what does it mean, to Americans, to other Westerners, to Chinese, and to the people of the planet as a whole? There are a number of competing narratives about this in circulation, and I’ll briefly review these before offering my own view.

1. The economic historian’s view
China, as a technically advanced country with a huge population, has been an economic giant for centuries, if not millennia, and it’s only the Western industrial revolutions of the past 200 years that have eclipsed it temporarily. As recently as 1820 China accounted for 30% of the world economy (see http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33604.pdf), a far higher proportion than it’s likely to have in 2020, or even 2030 – so all that’s happening is a return to the status quo. Why worry? Be happy!

Of course, a country with 1.5 billion people absolutely should have a larger economy than one with a mere 300 million, but this view doesn’t take into account the utterly different political, environmental, and military-strategic conditions of today’s world from that of 200 years ago. In any case, the Qing Dynasty China of those days was a rigidly conservative , deeply introverted and economically self-sufficient country with almost no interest in exploring the world beyond its own borders – arguably resembling today’s People’s Republic even less than Monroe’s United States resembles Obama’s.

2. The cultural historian’s view
Another historical precedent which is often cited is the transition in world hegemony from Britain to the United States that took place in the early 20th century; what we’re about to see is an analogous transition. But of course there’s a profound difference, in that Britain and the United States shared the same language, and to a considerable extent the same political and cultural value systems, whereas China and the United States very much don’t. Even if China was an electoral democracy there would be huge differences, but the fact that it’s a nominally Communist one-party state points to a massive disjunction and discontinuity in world-views; how this plays out will determine much of the history of this century.

There are a number of different perspectives on this discontinuity, depending on whether one imagines China converging towards the West, or vice versa – or the two simply remaining on separate and distinct tracks. For such as Martin Jacques and Joshua Cooper Ramos (of the ‘Beijing Consensus’) China will increasingly project its cultural values, and even its political system, around the world, establishing some sort of more or less enlightened autocracy as the norm around and perhaps beyond the developing world. For others, such as Will Hutton, China’s authoritarian political system is its Achilles’ heel, and it will not only fail to establish any kind of world cultural hegemony but won’t survive in the long run as a unitary state without significant reform.

Whichever view one takes, it’s pretty clear that some kind of war (friendly or otherwise) for hearts and minds is under way, and we in the West can’t assume that ‘our’ model will prevail in the long run, or that China will neatly metamorphose into a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy.

3. The right-wing warmonger’s view
Talking about war, the new Republican majority in the US House of Representatives wasted no time in affirming their belief in the nation’s sacred duty to take up arms against anyone challenging its supremacy. Rep. Randy Forbes, new chair of an Armed Services subcommittee, commenting on the proposed cuts to the Pentagon budget, remarked: "Even more appalling, though, is the fact that the administration is not being honest with the threat we face with China”. According to this view, pretty widely held on the American right, China’s size and economic importance automatically make it a threat; add to that their determination to enforce (often questionable) territorial claims in the South China Sea, and the fact that they’re Communists with nuclear weapons, and the danger is as self-evident as that posed by the old Soviet Union.

Of course, if you operate on the assumption that America must always be the world’s no. 1 nation militarily, and that it has some kind of God-given duty and right to occupy this role, then war with China probably is inevitable sooner or later. (Though it’s far from inevitable that America would win.)

Understanding China
One thread that runs through all these different narratives is that we in the West don’t really understand China and what values it represents. Of the ‘experts’ I’ve cited so far only one (Joshua Cooper Ramos) is fluent in Mandarin; most people writing about China (myself included) can at the most manage everyday conversation; almost none of them could read a newspaper, blog article or textbook. Imagine, by analogy, a French or German commentator on the United States who relied on translators and interpreters for their information – how much credibility would they have? And the United States is an open society, at least as regards information, unlike China, where people can be jailed for ‘disclosing’ what in most other countries would be freely available on a thousand websites. Combined with the country’s huge size, population, and diversity, this makes it extraordinarily difficult to arrive at any kind of valid generalization beyond the numerical data that dominate discourse around China, so accentuating the emphasis on the material and economic aspects of its development, rather than the philosophical, cultural and spiritual aspects.

And then of course there’s the apparently huge discontinuity between the traditional values of beauty and harmony as perceived by foreigners as well as the Chinese themselves, and the brash, hectic, ultra-competitive and hyper-polluting reality of China in 2011. This kind of cognitive dissonance applies to many societies: France is challenged by its failure to successfully assimilate recent generations of immigrants as equal citizens, while the ’American dream’ of hard work rewarded by upward mobility seems to have ground to a halt recently. But it exists in an extreme form in China, where even the physical form of the cities has changed unrecognizably, and you see few if any of the comforting reminders of the past that abound in Western cities such as London, Paris, or Washington. The entire country seems to be hectically, frantically, blindly rushing towards a future which the Party, for all its extraordinary ability to hold onto power and maintain economic stability, can no more foresee than anyone else.

Do the environmental crisis, the rise in food and oil prices, or the lack of transparency doom China to some kind of catastrophe in the near future, or will the people’s resourcefulness, creativity and ability to withstand hardship enable them to adapt peacefully to a more sustainable model of development? We should all hope that the latter is the case – not only as compassionate global citizens, but because a troubled China will sow trouble all around the world.

But then of course, as Lao Zi says, in the end “the weak overcomes the strong, the hard gives way to the gentle”. It’s just a question of taking a long enough view – which, of course, is itself a traditional Chinese accomplishment.