30 November 2017
Damned If We Do
Is land yesterday’s asset?
by J.R. Thomas
Thanksgiving Day in the United States was this year marked by a relatively new but increasingly powerful ceremony in which the early settlers are damned to the brims of their furlined hats and to the soles of their leather boots. Not damned by those they dispossessed as they moved up the Potomac River and settled Jamestown, by the native Americans who three hundred and fifty years ago began that slow retreat westwards until their famous last stands in the Great Plains and the foothills of the Rockies. No, no, the cursing comes from the spiritual descendants of the settlers themselves, sometimes their lineal descendants.
Sandy Grande, describing herself as an activist and educator, says that America is a myth and the United States is on stolen land. Ms Grande is Professor of Education at Connecticut College, where her website is in itself an education in the use of modern buzzwords to obscure what it is that she actually wishes to tell us (“Her research interfaces critical Indigenous theories with the concerns of education”). Even without her highlighted approving quotes from Che Guavara, you might suspect she is not hot on capitalism or the defence of property rights – not those of modern Americans anyway; not a natural Trump supporter, you may divine. The Pilgrim Fathers she describes as Puritan separatists who, far from breaking bread in those early Novembers with the inhabitants they found living in Massachusetts, massacred them. In the words of Dr Heinz Kiosk of Stretchford University, splendid fantasy creation of the late magnificent Daily Telegraph columnist, Peter Simple, Professor Grande would no doubt agree that “we are all guilty”.
But Professor Grande, in her incoherent intemperate way, has a point. Much historic conflict has revolved around land. And western colonists have often been at the bottom of it. Drawing arbitrary lines on maps has caused a lot of trouble to the rest of the world, in Africa, in Europe, in the Middle East, even when there seemed to be sensible logical reasons for where the lines were drawn. So, much trouble has come from the simple idea that there should be a Jewish homeland on the ancient soil of Israel, as embodied in the Balfour Declaration whose 100th anniversary is this month. There the lines were drawn with some sensitivity so as to carve out the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Gaza, but those affected did not particularly appreciate losing only parts of their lands. Much criticism has been lodged of Balfour and of the many Western politicians who agreed a statement of intent creating a nation on land that was occupied and owned by others. It was in truth a problem that was recognised at the time but it was felt that in such a sparsely populated and barren area nobody should mind an influx of settlers and the forming of a new state. As we now realise, the existing inhabitants did mind, a lot; their sense of injustice becoming a flame that, fuelled by the oil wealth of their co-religionist neighbours, has grown to be one of the main threats to world peace today.
The Rohingya people of north west Burma (Myanmar if you choose) are not a threat to world peace; perhaps alas for them. If they were, they might get more meaningful help towards a resolution of their position. The Rohingya have a long and complex history, much of which is only conjectural, but are a mainly Muslim stateless people who have lived for hundreds of years in a predominantly Buddhist area. For centuries the land they lived on was of little use and the population low, but the growth of Burmese nationalism coincided with a population explosion and the increasing need for land to grow food. That has now reached the present tragic position as the Rohingya are forced to flee. The resolution will almost certainly be that the remaining population will be forced into exile, a stateless people who will become even more stateless and completely landless. And whose dispossession will destroy the almost saint like reputation of Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of Burma.
This ancient urge to control rolling lands is still a factor in politics much closer to home. Scottish lairds, whose estates tend to be much larger, yet much poorer, than estates in England, have long been a favourite bête noir of the Scottish National Party, and would be well advised to consider reinstating drawbridges and battlements at their baronial residences. The SNP see the lairds as stooges of an English landowning class, living mostly south of the Border and educated at English public schools. Gradually the lairds find their toes nibbled by sharks; restrictions on the amount of land that can be owned, free public access by walkers, increased regulation of hill-land, and now business rates on sporting land (no, not football pitches, shooting estates). The wise lairds are increasingly identifying themselves as modern socially aware Scotspeople and sending their children to Scottish schools. That may help or it may not but it is the deep political resentment of that concentration of land ownership that is the real problem.
Which is odd; as odd as Professor Grande’s bad tempered reaction to Thanksgiving. Land does not really empower anybody in the twenty first century. It may be nice to have; to look from your front porch or top turret across a view that you own, all yours, to have and too hold, and to pass in due course to your children is no doubt a wonderful feeling. But it hardly grants economic superiority, let alone any rights of droit de seigneur (reserved now only to Hollywood producers and senior legislators). The average Scottish laird knows only too well that his landholdings slowly shrink under the modern expense of owning land that in many years struggles to pay for its own upkeep. The English squire may be a little better off, but only if he has turned his great house into either an hotel or a destination tourist attraction with so many visitors that it is probably rendered unlivable.
Those British estates look pathetically small against American ranches that can spread as much as a million acres; cattle ranches in the west are quite frequently over two hundred thousand acres. But, unless sitting on oil, even land on that scale doesn’t produce anything much except bulls and big hats.
Land is yesterday’s story in the struggle between rich and poor, between capitalism and socialism, between past and future; wealth and power now sits in different places and different forms. Things done wrongly in the past can’t be righted now; the people who suffered are long dead. We can’t undo now what was wrong then; we can’t even really understand why things were done or why people did them. To rip the legs off the Thanksgiving turkey and throw them in a sulk at the wall won’t help anybody.
What we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history, says the old joke. Fighting over and over again long decayed battles rather proves the joke to be true. Time, Professor Grande, to learn from history and think about how best to create friendship and respect and happiness among all modern American citizens. America is divided enough in 2017 without creating yet more fights; time to interface education with some new theories, Professor.
If you enjoyed this post please share it using the buttons above.
Please click here if you would like a weekly email on publication of the ShawSheet
