Cyril Radcliffe, from India to Cyprus: partition and British imperial policy

This piece is in response to a small twitter exchange with the eminent historian of India William Dalrymple, which had me pointing out that, at the fag end of British colonial rule in Cyprus, Cyril Radcliffe who had, a decade earlier, devised plans to carve apart India as the sub-continent moved towards independence, was also responsible for being the first to codify British proposals to partition Cyprus in 1956.

On further study, this is not quite right.

In fact, as some in the UK colonial establishment began to seriously consider partitioning Cyprus – parcelling out portions of the island to Turkey and Greece and retaining a chunk for the UK for the purposes of military bases – Radcliffe, who had been appointed Constitutional Commissioner for Cyprus in February 1956, came up with proposals that reflected those in the British ruling elite squeamish about butchering Cyprus.

The background to Radcliffe’s involvement in Cyprus is, of course, the EOKA uprising that broke out in April 1955 and was aimed at ending British rule (which had begun in 1878) and the union of the island with Greece.  

To Greek Cypriot demands for self-determination, Britain responded that some parts of the British empire were too strategically important to ever be allowed this kind of freedom.

Initially, EOKA’s campaign was intended to be limited and put on display how serious Greek Cypriots were about ending British colonial rule; but, as often happens with armed insurgencies, the violence escalated and took on a life of its own.

While the departure of the Greek Cypriots from purely political means to achieve their ends somewhat played into the hands of more hardline British imperialists, who could now treat the Cypriot clamour for an end to colonial rule as a security not a political issue, there was still a British recognition that there needed to be some movement to satisfy Greek Cypriot demands (Greek Cypriots constituted 80% of Cyprus’ population) for greater political involvement in running the island.

This is where Radcliffe enters the story. In February 1956, Radcliffe was tasked by the British government to survey the island’s political landscape and come up with a constitution that would square the circle of maintaining British sovereignty while, at the same time, allow for self-government for Cypriots based on liberal democratic principles.

The first interesting point to emerge from this is that less than a decade after what we now regard as one of the great human catastrophes in history – the partitioning of India – in which Radcliffe is somewhat of a villainous figure, in 1956 his reputation was still high enough in British colonial circles for him to be called on when British rule in Cyprus had run into trouble.

It also suggests that Radcliffe, often portrayed as a man tortured by the consequences of his role in the partitioning India, was not averse to becoming involved in another colonial quagmire where partition was high on the agenda.

As with India, Radcliffe had no previous experience of Cyprus and only nine months elapsed from the time of Radcliffe being appointed as Constitutional Commissioner to the release of his report. He visited Cyprus twice, from July to September 1956, always under armed escort, for four weeks in total, where he spent most of his time conferring with the island’s governor, Field Marshall Sir John Harding, and listening to Turkish demands for partition. Greek Cypriot luminaries on the island refused to meet with Radcliffe, in protest at the treatment of Archbishop Makarios, the undisputed political leader of the Greek Cypriot community, who had been deported by Harding to Seychelles in March 1956.

Radcliffe’s report, submitted to the colonial office in late 1956, began inauspiciously, purporting to be impressed with the educational and cultural accomplishments of the Cypriots but bewildered that this hadn’t resulted in political advancement, seemingly oblivious to the distortions colonial repression and manipulation had on political life on the island.

‘The people of Cyprus, I have reminded myself,’ Radcliffe declared, ‘are an adult people enjoying long cultural traditions and an established education system, fully capable of furnishing qualified administrators, lawyers, doctors and men of business. It is a curiosity of their history that their political development has remained comparatively immature.’

Cyprus had, since 1931, following small-scale anti-colonial riots, been run as a tinpot gubernatorial dictatorship, with the constitution and legislature suspended, political parties banned, censorship, petty restrictions on the expression of anti-colonial feeling, deportations, and so on, and it was Radcliffe’s task to end this sorry state of affairs and, hopefully, earn the loyalty of Cypriots, particularly Greek Cypriots, whose attachment to Greece had perennially posed the biggest threat to the colonial status quo.

The constitution Radcliffe envisaged for Cyprus depended, as Robert Holland says, on ‘the old imperial device of dyarchy’ – in which powers devolved to the local population, in the form of a Legislative Assembly, would be balanced (or, in reality, superseded) by those retained by the colonial authorities, in the person of the Governor of the island, who would also have exclusive powers in matters of defence, foreign affairs and internal security.

Having rejected Greek Cypriot demands for a full-blown democratic constitution and self-determination – which would have inevitably led to Enosis – Radcliffe also spurned Turkish and Turkish Cypriot demands for a federation, which everyone understood, if adopted, would be nothing more than the prelude to the Turks’ ultimate aim, partition.

Even if the Turks regarded partition as a compromise – their original aim in the event of a British withdrawal from Cyprus was the annexation of the entire island – Radcliffe saw no merit or justice in sundering the island and instead proposed widespread safeguards for the island’s Turkish minority within a unitary state.

Holland suggests that Radcliffe’s experience of partitioning Punjab and Bengal in 1947, the horrors that accompanied this, had prompted him to agree with Harding that partitioning Cyprus was a ‘confession of failure’ and ‘a counsel of despair’.

In this regard, Radcliffe said in his report that it would be manifestly unjust and undemocratic that the Turkish minority, comprising 18% of the island’s population, ‘be accorded political representation equal to that of the Greek Cypriot community’.

In Radcliffe’s opinion, acceding to the Turkish demand for a federation was not logical. There was ‘no pattern of territorial separation between the two communities and, apart from other objections, federation of communities which does not involve also federation of territories seems to me a very difficult constitutional form’.

Given the fact that Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities were mixed throughout Cyprus with no discernible geographic separation, it was clear to British colonial administrators, like Radcliffe, that Turkish demands for a federation/partition could only come about as a result of civil war between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, widespread ethnic cleansing and a probable war between Greece and Turkey.

Not only did the British balk at the humanitarian consequences of agreeing to Turkey’s partitionist aspirations, but the subsequent convulsions would not only likely make Britain’s position in Cyprus untenable but would also jeopardise the entire southern flank of NATO – a scenario that prompted the Americans to warn the UK at the time against the ‘forcible vivisection’ of the island.

However, Radcliffe’s good sense in rejecting partition for Cyprus was not reflected among Tory party imperialists and the British defence establishment – smarting now over the Suez humiliation and the prospect of Britain being ejected wholesale from the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean – or those in the colonial administration in Cyprus who resented the EOKA uprising and wanted to punish the Greek Cypriots for it. These three centres of power all came to the conclusion that partition would be preferable to Enosis and that even if they couldn’t envisage Britain doing the dirty work of ethnic cleansing, on which partition was predicated, then at least the threat of partition should be used against the Greek Cypriots to frighten them into accepting continuing British sovereignty of the island. 

Thus, despite Radcliffe resisting Turkish demands for partition, when presenting his report to the House of Commons, colonial secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd insisted that partition of Cyprus was very much on the agenda and, indeed, that Radcliffe’s proposals for self-government could be interpreted as portending a long-term outcome of ‘double self-determination’.

‘As regards the eventual status of the island,’ the colonial secretary said in the House of Commons on 19 December 1956, ‘Her Majesty's Government have already affirmed their recognition of the principle of self-determination. When the international and strategic situation permits, and provided that self-government is working satisfactorily, Her Majesty's Government will be ready to review the question of the application of self-determination.’

He went on: ‘When the time comes for this review, that is, when these conditions have been fulfilled, it will be the purpose of Her Majesty's Government to ensure that any exercise of self-determination should be effected in such a manner that the Turkish Cypriot community, no less than the Greek Cypriot community, shall, in the special circumstances of Cyprus, be offered freedom to decide for themselves their future status. In other words, Her Majesty's Government recognise that the exercise of self-determination in such a mixed population must include partition among the eventual options.’

Whether Lennox-Boyd was cynically using the threat of partition to coerce Greek Cypriots to stop demanding an end to British rule or if the British really had decided at this point that partition of the island was the best way to protect imperial interests is a moot point.

What is not moot is that Britain in 1956 had the opportunity to explicitly tell Turkey that its ambition of partition was unacceptable and would never be considered while Britain had responsibility for the island. Rather than doing this, the British chose instead to appease Turkey, giving it to believe that partition was a viable solution for Cyprus and one that Britain was prepared to consider.

As for the immediate effect on Radcliffe’s constitutional proposals, Lennox-Boyd’s allusion to partition, even if it was only made to tantalise the Turks and scare the Greeks, proved fatal for their prospects.

For Greece and Greek Cypriots, Radcliffe’s diarchy proposals were the same old British colonialist hypocrisy – Time magazine said Radcliffe’s constitution offered Cyprus ‘a façade of self-government carefully designed to preserve what the British in India used to call their paramountcy’ – and conceit, espousing liberal democracy while at the same time insisting that it be severely curtailed to preclude any challenge to British colonialist rule and sovereignty.

Worse than the prospect of continuing British ‘dictatorship’ in Cyprus was the inevitable suspicion felt by the Greek side, after Lennox-Boyd’s performance in the House of Commons, that Britain would use its remodelled administration of Cyprus to gradually steer the island towards partition.

Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots were more amenable to Radcliffe’s report. Even if Turkish prime minister Adnan Menderes couldn’t persuade Lennox-Boyd to ditch Radcliffe’s ‘academic exercise’ and go for immediate partition – Menderes told Lennox-Boyd, no doubt referring to the genocide/ethnic cleansing of Greeks from Anatolia and Asia Minor from 1915-23, 'we have done this sort of thing before, and you will see that it is not as bad as all that’ – the Turkish side was reassured that Britain regarded Radcliffe’s constitutional proposals as a potential stepping stone towards dividing Cyprus and thus ‘logical material for negotiation’.

While the British were furious with the Greek side for rejecting Radcliffe’s proposals for self-government – the Foreign Office referred to the Greek government’s reaction to Radcliffe as 'ungracious and ungenerous and very stupid' – what really did for Radcliffe’s attempt to end the violence on Cyprus wasn’t the stubborn attachment of Athens and, more especially, the Greek Cypriots to immediate self-determination and Enosis – but the drivel and machinations of Lennox-Boyd who, in order to appease Turkey and play to the gallery of diehard imperialists in the Tory party, introduced the spectre of partition.

In her book Fettered Independence: Cyprus 1878-1964, Stella Soulioti, a close ally and confidante of Makarios, suggests that – had Harding not made the stupid decision to deport Makarios and Lennox-Boyd hadn’t sought to clumsily blackmail Greek Cypriots with the threat of partition – Radcliffe’s proposals could well have served as a basis to end the conflict in 1956. Makarios, she says, was not inflexible in pursuing self-determination/Enosis and was prepared to contemplate a constitution that provided for self-government.

In fact, Soulioti says that Christopher Woodhouse, the Conservative politician with a long record of political, military and academic connections to Greece, had advised the Greek ambassador to London at the time, Giorgios Seferis, that Athens should accept Radcliffe’s proposals because they would eventually lead to Enosis; Woodhouse adding that he had consulted Radcliffe about this and that Radcliffe had agreed that this was the case even if he ‘could not say so publicly’.

Meanwhile, Nancy Crawshaw, in her book, The Cyprus Revolt, which is hostile to the Greek pursuit of Enosis, lauds the Radcliffe proposals and praises Radcliffe for his ‘outstanding contribution to the search for a compromise’.

Regardless of the merits of Radcliffe’s constitution and who was responsible for its precipitate demise, it was the last time proposals that aimed at a unitary state were put to Greek Cypriots.

After 1956, violence on the island intensified, with an increasingly fanaticised Turkish side now turning to riots, bombs and bullets in pursuit of partition, an aim for which they didn’t just have support and sponsors in Ankara but also from many in London and in the colonial administration in Nicosia.

Thus, while Britain still had legal sovereignty of the island, all post-Radcliffe proposals aimed at ending the conflict took on a greater tendency towards federation and, thus, partition. This process ended with the so-called Zurich-London agreements (1959-60) – negotiated by the UK, Turkey and Greece and from which Cypriots were excluded.

These agreements, which provided for a highly circumscribed independence and precarious bicommunal constitution for Cyprus, quickly began to unravel and by 1963-4 collapsed in a convulsion of violence as Turkish Cypriots withdrew from government and retreated into armed enclaves from where they hoped to create partition on the ground. Again, Britain – which, as a result of the deal that brought independence to Cyprus, had retained two large sovereign military bases on the island and a role as a Guarantor Power dedicated to ensuring ‘ the independence, territorial integrity, and security of Cyprus’ – had a choice: work towards calming the deteriorating situation in Cyprus or exacerbate it by leaning towards partition.

Martin Packard says in his book, Getting it Wrong: Fragments from a Cyprus Diary 1964, that reconciliation between Greek and Turkish Cypriots was possible in 1964 and that Britain was committed to this at first, only for a sudden change in policy to occur, with the same circles that had argued for partition during the EOKA period gaining the upper hand over those in the British establishment opposed to it.

Britain’s increasing acquiescence to partition coincided with greater US involvement on the island. If the Americans had been skeptical of partition in the 1950s and warned the British colonial authorities against it, by 1964 they saw partition as the optimal solution for the island and, unlike the British, were not squeamish about bringing it about.

America's cynicism, British dereliction, Greece’s stupidity and Turkey’s opportunism converged in 1974 when the partition that had first been mooted by the British in 1956 as a bluff to appease the Turks and terrify the Greek Cypriots came to pass as a result of the Athens junta’s botched coup against the Cyprus government (the junta had by now come around to the idea of the partitioning Cyprus and intended to do so on Greek terms) and Turkey’s two-phased invasion of the island.

To end, and to bring us back to where we started, with Cyril Radcliffe, inextricably tied to Britain’s colonial legacy in India and Cyprus, both of which suffered the same calamity – partition, massacre, lost homelands, unresolved bitterness and pain – it’s worth pointing out how, in fact, while India’s dismemberment has been much written about and is a well-known part of the story of the end of empire, the catastrophe in Cyprus is largely ignored.

Christopher Hitchens says such a loss of memory in Cyprus’ case would be unforgivable.

‘It would mean,’ he says, ‘forgetting about the bad and dangerous precedent set by [Turkey’s] invasion; by a larger power suiting itself by altering geography and demography. It would mean overlooking the aspiration of a European people to make a passage from colonial rule to sovereignty in one generation. And it would mean ignoring an example, afforded by Cyprus, of the way in which small countries and peoples are discounted or disregarded by the superpowers (and, on occasion, by liberal commentators).’

Indeed, if we include in the discussion another British-empire-in-retreat partition, that of Palestine in 1948, we can see that  the partition of Cyprus finalised by the Turkish invasion of 1974 bears bitter comparison with the the Nakba as well as the Partition of India.

Thus, the Nakba (1948) saw 700,000 Palestinians out of a population of 1.1m in Mandatory Palestine (i.e. 70 percent of the Palestinians) ethnically cleansed, with the number of Palestinians killed 10,000 (i.e. one percent of the Palestinian population).

Indian partition (1947) resulted in 15m people out of a population of 340m (i.e. 4.4 percent of Indians) being made refugees, with 1-2m killed (i.e. 0.3-0.6 percent of Indians).

As for Cyprus, as a result of the Turkish invasion that brought about the partition of the island, 220,000 Cypriots – (180,000 Greek Cypriots and 40,000 Turkish Cypriots) – were, at the behest of the Turkish army and Turkish Cypriot militias, either expelled, in the Greek Cypriot case, or encouraged to move, in the Turkish Cypriot case, i.e. 33 percent of the population of 642,000. Seven thousand Cypriots were killed during partition – 6000 Greek Cypriots and 1000 Turkish Cypriots, i.e. 1.1 percent of the the island’s population.

British-inspired, Turkish-imposed partition had a devastating effect on Cyprus, equivalent to the Nakba and Indian partition in its human consequences, though Cypriots have had to shout louder to tell the story of the outrage done to their country, their voices drowned out by British colonial and Turkish expansionist narratives that put Cyprus’ fate down to a squabble between primeval and perennial ethnic rivals who needed to be separated from each other for their own good.

Bibliography
1. Crawshaw, Nancy: The Cyprus Revolt
2. Hitchens, Christopher: Cyprus: Hostage to History
3. Holland, Robert: Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus
4. Novo, Andrew: The EOKA Cause
5. Packard, Martin: Getting it Wrong
6. Soulioti, Stella: Cyprus: Fettered Independence
7. Time: Cyprus: Proposed Constitution

‘Put out the light, then put out the light’

It was during the Third Crusade (1191) that Cyprus was wrested from Byzantine control – from the reprehensible rebel governor of the island, Isaac Komnenos – initiating 300 years of Lusignan (French) rule, during which Cyprus – or the Kingdom of Cyprus, as it was known – became a Western base for continuing Crusader campaigns in the Holy Land, noted for the wealth and sybaritic living of the Latin royal court and ruling class, which imposed the Western feudal system on the unhappy Greek population and persecuted the Orthodox church in favour of the alien Roman Catholic dogma.

In 1489, the exhausted Lusignan dynasty sold Cyprus to the Venetians, who turned the island into a military bastion to protect Venetian interests in the Eastern Mediterranean against the Turks and Egyptians. The Venetians squandered the island’s reputation for prosperity and continued the repression of the island’s Greek population.

From the start of Venetian rule, Cyprus was the target of Ottoman raids – the Turks attacked the Karpasia peninsula in 1489, while in 1539 the Turkish fleet attacked and destroyed Limassol.

In 1570, a full-scale Ottoman invasion of the island was mounted. The capital, Nicosia, was captured, sacked, and 20,000 Greeks and Venetians massacred; but in the port city of Famagusta, 8,000 Greek and Venetian defenders, under the leadership of Marcantonio Bragadino, held out against the 60,000 besieging Turks for nine months, until August 1571, when Bragadino surrendered to the Turkish commander Mustafa Lala under terms that would leave the local population unmolested and allow the Venetian garrison safe-conduct to Crete; a meaningless agreement it transpired since as soon as the surrender was confirmed, Turkish troops went on the rampage in Famagusta and across the island and Lala had the heroic Bragadino seized, tortured, mutilated, flayed alive, his skin stuffed with straw then paraded on an ox in a mock procession in the streets of Famagusta, before the remains were sent to Constantinople as a gift for Sultan Selim II, otherwise known, because of his predilection for drunken debauchery, as Selim the Sot.

Outraged by the sadism and perfidy of the Turks and inspired by the tragic resistance at Famagusta, two months later Europe united to defeat the Turkish fleet at the Battle of Lepanto (Nafpaktos), one of the most significant engagements in world history, which ended Turkish expansion westwards.

The Turkish defeat at Lepanto came too late for Cyprus, and for 300 years – until the British took over in 1878 – the island suffered the usual depredations associated with Ottoman rule. Indeed, repression and decline were so acute in Cyprus that frequent rebellions and uprisings often involved both Christian and Muslim Cypriots.

Anyway, it is during these Ottoman-Venetian wars over Cyprus that the action of Shakespeare’s Othello (1603) takes place.

Othello is sent to Cyprus to command the Venetian forces against the threat of Turkish invasion, and though the Turkish fleet is destroyed by storms as it approaches the island, the Moor is overwhelmed and destroyed by a different sort of tempest, brought on by fear, paranoia, self-doubt, self-loathing and stupidity, as he is led to believe that his young bride, Desdemona – from the Greek, δυστυχισμένοι/distihismenoi/ill-fated one – has cuckolded him with his trusted lieutenant, Michael Cassio.

Above, from Orson Welles’ superb version of Othello, is the most famous soliloquy from the play.

Othello approaches his wife’s bed with murder – or ‘sacrifice’, as the Moor says – in mind, preparing to inflict on her ‘a guiltless death,’ as Desdemona says, though I’m not convinced by her protestations of innocence:

‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul:
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!
It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster:
Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men.
Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume.’

Chaos and goodness: from Hesiod and Plato to Christianity and Nietzsche

What does Nietzsche mean when he says: ‘Christianity is Platonism for the masses’? An interesting essay, Chaos corrected: Hesiod in Plato’s creation myth, by E.E. Pender, gives us an idea.

The subject of the essay is Plato’s attempt, particularly in the Timaeus but also in the Republic, to establish a new creation myth for the Greeks that would supplant Hesiod’s Theogony, which Plato objected to on the grounds that it wasn’t sufficiently edifying and, indeed, that Hesiod’s depiction of the gods and their role in creating the universe was fundamentally wrong.

In particular, according to Pender, what Plato wants to correct in Hesiod is the ‘moral chaos’ of the Theogony, in which the gods are often portrayed as jealous and spiteful, engaged in plotting, deception and violence. For Plato, god is incapable of malevolence. He is by nature good and his motive in creating the universe is to advance goodness.

‘Unlike Hesiod’s Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus, Plato’s supreme god is not seeking to create a world order that will allow him simply to gain and then hold on to power. This god and those he creates are themselves good and their aim is to create further goodness.’

Furthermore, Pender says, into Hesiod’s universe, in which chaos is the primal force and strife and power politics define the relationship between the gods, Plato wants to interject a benign and rational being – a demiurge or craftsman-father – able to impose harmony and rationality. Whereas Hesiod identifies a universe permeated by disorder, out of which an ordered cosmos can never fully emerge, Plato sees a world infused with goodness, always striving to achieve perfectibility.

Plato also wants to correct Hesiod when it comes to defining the attributes of the Muses, the goddesses that inspire in the creation of art and the pursuit of knowledge. In Hesiod, the Muses exist to soothe grief and help men forget their troubles; but in Plato they lose their psychogogic qualities and acquire a more transcendental and metaphysical role, which is to guide the human soul (through philosophy and philosophical exercises) towards divine harmony and reason.

In Plato’s creation tale, then, Pender concludes, ‘the principle of goodness is eternally present, the triumph of order and reason is assured by design, human beings have the means to become like gods’.

In which case, to return to Nietzsche and his ‘Christianity is Platonism for the masses’ – a statement, it’s worth stressing, intended to insult Christianity, Platonism and the masses; we can now see that it is not a long road to travel to get from Plato’s ‘eternally present principle of goodness’ to Christianity’s depiction of God as the epitome of goodness; from Plato’s ‘triumph of order and reason assured by design’ to Christianity’s God the Creator and Jesus the embodiment of divine logos; or from ‘human beings [that] have the means to become like gods’, to Christianity’s belief in transfiguration, in which man, innately good (i.e. even if not born good, then always capable of it), aspires, via communion with God or redemption through Jesus, to become suffused by the divine.

* Chaos corrected: Hesiod in Plato’s creation myth is contained in the book Plato and Hesiod, which you can download as a PDF from here.

A review of Diana Markides’ The Cyprus Tribute and Geopolitics in the Levant 1875-1960

Diana Markides’ The Cyprus Tribute and Geopolitics in the Levant 1875-1960 is a remarkable account of the political economy of British imperial rule in Cyprus.

Acquired from Turkey by Disraeli at the Congress of Berlin (1878), which settled yet another Russo-Turkish war, the British prime minister boasted that Cyprus would become a crucial asset for the empire, a place of arms in the Eastern Mediterranean to serve Britain’s grandiose ambitions to extend its influence in Egypt, the Levant and Asia Minor, securing the land route to India and protect shipping and trade east of Suez.

Markides argues that Britain’s geopolitical and military justification for acquiring Cyprus was half-baked – for example, Cyprus had no natural deep water harbours and to develop them was uneconomical – and, indeed, a fabrication designed to conceal the real reason for taking over the running of Cyprus from the Ottoman empire, which was to secure money to service the loan British and French creditors had made the Ottoman empire that enabled it to fight the Crimean War (1855). 

In a convoluted scheme, any surplus (the excess revenue over expenditure) Cyprus generated would not be recycled into the local economy but sent to the Ottoman government in Constantinople – the Turkish sultan nominally held suzerainty over the island until 1914 – which would then divert the money to pay back British and French bankers and bondholders.

This ‘tribute’ would make up for the shortfall a similar Ottoman debt repayment scheme imposed on Egypt was encountering because of the weakness of that country’s finances and, at the same time, assuage any objections Paris had at Cyprus falling into British hands in a region where France, ensconced in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, felt was its sphere of influence.

With all surplus money raised on the island wending its way via Constantinople into British and French coffers and with no money forthcoming from London for any expenditure on infrastructure projects on the island, Cyprus was left to stagnate. Desperately needed improvements to hospitals, quays, customs houses, hotels, antiquities management, public utilities, prisons, roads could not be paid for, while, without a properly-capitalised agricultural bank, peasant-farmers couldn’t take out affordable loans and were left at the mercy of the bane of the peasant-farmers’ existence, the village money-lender.

Despite repeated appeals from colonial officials on Cyprus made to London – particularly the Treasury – to loosen the island’s financial burden or to find money to send directly from the metropolis to spend on the island’s development and gain the loyalty of a population smarting at being fleeced – the Whitehall mandarins, crass and short-sighted, wouldn’t budge.

However, as elsewhere, there was more to the British imperial project in Cyprus than financial exploitation. To hide the iniquitous side of empire, Britain cloaked its rule in a veneer of liberalism and modernity.

Thus, in Cyprus, as well as rescuing Cypriots from 300 years of arbitrary Ottoman depredation, Britain also allowed a free press, laid the foundations for a modern legal system, expanded educational opportunity and introduced a popularly elected system of local government and a national legislature.

But here we encounter the fatal flaw in the British imperial model that eventually would spell curtains for it: Britain couldn’t control what modernity unleashed while liberalism had its limits, i.e. it was permissible so long as it didn’t significantly challenge British rule.

In Cyprus’ case, what this meant was that while a legislative council was instituted in 1882, not only was it rigged so that the six British-appointed representatives plus the three Muslim legislators could always out-vote the nine Greek Cypriot officials – a tie gave the casting vote to the island’s high commissioner; but its powers were also severely circumscribed, bills involving finance and taxation could not be introduced while decisions taken by the legislature could ultimately be struck down by Orders in Council.

While the advantage of the legislative council to Greek Cypriots was that it allowed political expression and popular opposition to government policies – particularly the loathed tribute; its con was was that by binding the Muslim community to the British imperial authorities, the ethnic split on the island became entrenched and institutionalised.

Thus, even if the tribute was as crushing to the Muslim population as it was to the Greek Cypriot majority, the fact that the money was going to Constantinople and into the sultan’s purse reassured the Muslims that Cyprus was still in the Ottoman orbit. It wasn’t until the formalisation of the British occupation in 1914, the end of the Ottoman empire in 1923 and the penetration of Kemalist Turkish nationalism into the consciousness of the island’s Muslims that its political co-operation with the British colonial authorities deteriorated.

Still, the British never gave up trying to play off the Turks against the Greeks, regarding the latter as a far greater threat to its authority than the former, and when, as in 1931, politics on the island became too heated – economic malaise and government attempts to rein in expressions of Greek nationalism prompted popular protest that ended with the burning down of Government House – the government simply shut the legislature and resorted to political repression.

Only after the Second World War was the issue of the tribute finally laid to rest allowing Cyprus to embark on rapid economic growth. This coincided, however, with a shrinking British empire that increased the significance of Cyprus to Britain both from a strategic and ideological point of view. Military facilities imagined since 1878 finally began to be built – in 1954 Middle East Headquarters were moved from Egypt to Cyprus – and the government in London was declaring that some British colonies were too important to the economic well-being and security of the UK to be allowed independence. Cyprus had now become a symbol of British prestige and part of the delusion that Britain was still a superpower.

As for the Greek Cypriots, greater prosperity had not increased their loyalty to Britain or convinced them of the British argument that they were materially better off under the current regime than uniting with impoverished Greece. Rather, the Pandora’s box of liberalism and modernity – exacerbated by the social changes on the island and global political realignment brought about by the Second World War – made Britain’s presence in Cyprus unsustainable.

The scene was set for the denouement of British rule in Cyprus – EOKA’s guerrilla campaign to drive the British off the island and unite the island with Greece and the revenge Britain exacted on Greek Cypriots for their audacity, which entailed bringing Turkey into Cyprus politics and encouraging partition of the island, a goal Turkey fulfilled with its 1974 invasion.

Markides’ book digs deep into the peculiar nature of British rule in Cyprus, but it is much more than a case study. Its interest also lies in demonstrating the grubby economic motivations that sustained the British empire in its entirety and how, at its worst, the imperial project was an expression of avarice and misanthropy.

It also convincingly locates the island’s fate within the geopolitics of the day – the Eastern Question, the crumbling of the Ottoman empire and the anxiety of France and Britain to limit the advantages accruing to Russia from the fallout – and hints at how issues of debt and selfish financial interest continue to this day to prevail when it comes to the Eastern Mediterranean.

The EU’s squeezing of every last penny out of debtor nations such as Greece and Cyprus, regardless of economic sense and socio-political consequences, and the EU’s refusal to sanction Turkey for its threats and violations of Athens’ and Nicosia’s sovereignty for fear of disrupting the Turkish economy and putting at risk Turkey’s ability to pay debts to Spanish, French, Italian and German banks, is eerily reminiscent of European powers’ obtuse attitudes to the region 150 years ago.

Poverty: from Plato to Laurel & Hardy

 

Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me; it was radiant with sunlight… I owe it to my family, first of all, who lacked everything and who envied practically nothing.’ (Albert Camus)

Poverty (Penia) is a goddess with two sisters, Amykhania (helplessness) and Ptokheia (beggary). In Plato’s Republic,  poverty is a terrible evil, a source of meanness, viciousness and discontent. Similarly, Aristotle, in the Politics, regards poverty as a social ill, the parent of revolution and crime. In Wealth (Plutus) – read an excellent, Australian-dialect translation here, by George Theodoridis) – Aristophanes asks what would happen to society if everyone suddenly became rich and answers, paradoxically, that inequalities, conflict and misery would increase. In the play, the goddess Penia appears as an old hag, who warns those who think bestowing wealth on all Athenians will be an unmitigated blessing that:

‘[Poverty] is the very fountain of all joy! Of all life, even!… If Wealth were to… spread himself around to everyone, who’d be doing any of the work then or even any of the thinking?'’

The goddess then goes on to suggest that the poor are in fact more virtuous than the rich:

’And let me tell you another thing about the poor. They are modest and civil, whereas the rich are all arrogant.’

The virtues – or otherwise – of poverty become of increasing interest in Greek ethics. Although never endorsing the alleged moral advantages of penury, Socrates does make clear, in the Apology, that he is indifferent to wealth and that a preoccupation with wisdom is far more important than, and perhaps even incompatible with, any pursuit of money or luxury.

The belief that neither wealth or poverty have much to contribute to virtue is shared by the Stoics and Epicureans – who regard poverty as just one of life’s many misfortunes, fear of which should be confronted and overcome. (Seneca advocated living rough from time to time, for a period of three to four days, to get used to poverty in case we should fall victim to it).

The Cynics, however, didn’t just denounce wealth as a prohibition to virtue, they went one stage further and developed a cult of poverty, embracing indigence as a positive way of life, ‘an unending task in which one strives for a more and more complete renunciation of possessions and the desire for material possession’.* Previous Greek virtues of beauty, honour and independence were turned on their head by the Cynics, who valorised, instead, ugliness, humiliation, dishonour and dependence – begging and, more radically, slavery, were positively accepted.**

Finally, we note that it was not a big leap from Cynic humiliation to Christian humility, from Cynic destitution to Christian asceticism, and from the Cynic exaltation of poverty to Christian love of the poor.

 *E. McGushin: Foucault’s Askesis.
**M. Foucault: The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II).

Cartledge and Castoriadis on democracy: politics, philosophy, religion and tragedy

Democracy, in which the biggest blockhead has the same right to vote and the same weight in voting as the genius, is a form of madness... (Thomas Bernhard) 

Democracy is under attack, not just by populism and authoritarianism in the West, not just by those who want to place limits on parrhessia (free speech) – the right and ability to criticise and, ultimately, upend society’s prevailing institutions and ideas and, of course, the right and ability to defend society’s prevailing institutions and ideas; and not just by the West’s more vehement civilisational opponents, who reject the idea of mutable, man and woman-made laws, in favour of laws that were supposedly divinely conceived and revealed; but also by those who want to wrestle the concept and meaning of democracy from the West and claim it wasn’t a Greco-Athenian invention – for this is to commit one of the worst sins in the modern world, to privilege Western civilisation. For opponents of the West’s exclusive claims to democratic creation and custom, democracy existed and was practiced in other, non-European civilisations, in the Middle East, India, and China prior to classical Athens and, during the so-called European Dark Ages, in Islamic societies and in pre-colonial tribal life in Africa, North America and Australia. 

It is this attempt to claim that democracy was not an Athenian (and hence Western) innovation that motivated Paul Cartledge to write Democracy: A Life. What he’s produced is a necessary and scrupulous antidote to those who bandy the term democracy about without understanding its unique history or intricate meaning, the full implications of the demos obtaining and discharging kratos. Refuting arguments that activities like public discussion, deliberative assemblies and responsive government are proof of complex democratic life, Cartledge describes how Athenian democracy originated after the long rule of the Peisistratid tyrants, operated in its various iterations, presents us with its proponents, who equate democracy with political freedom and equality, and its critics, who see it as a license for demagoguery and a recipe for social turmoil (stasis), then guides us through democracy’s travails and demise in the heterogenous grandiose Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine empires, its resuscitation in the Italian medieval communes and city states before its full-blown resurrection in American, French and English politics and political thinking from the 17th century onwards. 

Cartledge identifies three distinctive characteristics and components to Athenian democracy.

1. Following Aristotle, Cartledge asserts that democracy is more than the rule of the masses or the many. It is the rule of the poor, a conscious attempt by one social class to curb the oppressive power and influence of another. (Similarly, oligarchy, is not the rule of the few or the elite. It is the rule of – or, perhaps more correctly, for – the wealthy). 

2. Democracy is the specific and ‘highly codified system of laws and practices/precedents developed over decades’. (Moses Finley’s ‘devices and institutions’). Perhaps surprisingly to moderns, for the Athenians it was not elections that defined their democracy – elections had a whiff of elitism about them with their elevation of, supposedly, the most qualified or the best (the aristoi) and were used sparingly in Athens. Rather, sortition (the random drawing of lots) was the preferred method for choosing archons (magistrates) to run city affairs, officials to sit in the the Boule (Council of 500), with terms restricted to one year and service only possible twice in a man’s lifetime, and the Dikasteria (popular jury-courts). The Ecclesia (Assembly) was open for attendance to all male citizens, while devices such as ostracism – the exile of citizens threatening to become too powerful – and graphe paranomon (accusation of unlawfulness) – the timely revision of a law deemed to have been made in haste or as a result of bad arguments or advice – were designed to keep in check the demagogue or those with tendencies to tyranny.

3. Cartledge also asserts that for the political aspects of democracy to exist and flourish, there must also be an accompanying culture of democracy. This is what Aristotle called the ‘way of life’ and Isocrates called the ‘soul’ or ‘animating spirit’ – the ‘life and soul’– of a polis. 

For Cartledge, following Jean-Pierre Vernant, democracy only becomes possible with the ’desacralisation of knowledge’, when the Greeks make the breakthrough of jettisoning religious (or mythical) ways of thinking about the universe (cosmos), nature (physis) and, ultimately, society, and adopting a more rational approach. 

‘With the Milesians,’ Vernant says, ‘the origin and ordering of the world for the first time took the form of an explicitly posed problem to which an answer must be supplied without mystery, an answer gauged to human intelligence, capable of being aired and publicly debated before the mass of citizens like any question of everyday life.’

One of the most striking expressions of the demise of myth-based explanations of the universe and human affairs was the emergence in Athens of a new art form, tragedy. Rooted in the cult of the god Dionysus and his annual festival, the Dionysia, Cartledge argues tragic drama functioned to question Athens’ most fundamental beliefs about itself. 

According to Cartledge: ‘The slippery, ambiguous, and ambivalent nature of Dionysus (deadly violence alternating with ecstatic release) made his worship an excellent medium and arena for such profound questioning without running the ultimate risk (always lurking in the Assembly) of causing outright revolutionary upheavals.’

Cornelius Castoriadis: democracy and Chaos
For another theorist of Athenian democracy, Cornelius Castoriadis, the Ionian intellectual revolution had its origins in Hesiod’s Theogony – the narrative that sought to explain to Greeks the genesis of the gods and the universe.

For Hesiod, Castoriadis points out in The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy, in the beginning there is Chaos and it is out of this total void that the cosmos is created. However, this cosmos is impermanent, subject to corruption, decay and death, with Chaos always lurking ready to reassert itself.

The fact that the world is neither fully chaos nor fully ordered creates the conditions for politics and philosophy.

‘If the human world were fully ordered,’ Castoriadis says, ‘either externally or through its own “spontaneous operation”, if human laws were given by God or by nature or by the “nature of society” or by the “laws of history”, then there would be no room for political thinking and no field for political action… no sense in asking what the proper law is or what justice is.’ 

Similarly, in terms of philosophy, if the world were sheer chaos, ‘there would be no possibility of thinking at all’, while if it were fully ordered, as it is in religious or totalitarian societies, ‘there would not be any philosophy, but only one, final system of knowledge’.

Since men and women, unlike God, are flawed and since they are not coerced or chained by any ‘laws of history’, the responsibility for instituting society falls on their weak shoulders in the full knowledge that this process is precarious, never complete, always contested and subject to rupture and change.

Politics, then, is not court intrigues or factional rivalries but the explicit questioning of the established institution of society – and the positing of alternative ways of instituting society; while philosophy is not the musings of the sage or the religious expositions of the priest-mullah-rabbi-shaman, but the explicit questioning of the instituted collective representation of the world – and the positing of alternatives.

Politics and philosophy, or judging and choosing, were created in Greece. Good and evil, just and unjust, true and false, thinkable and unthinkable were not determined by sacred books or prophets – Greece had no Moses, no Bible and certainly no Mohammed and no Koran; it had poets, philosophers, legislators and politai (citizens), The laws of a city were not miraculously revealed, they emerged as a result of society’s deliberations.

Religion and democracy
While it would be specious to characterise Greek cities – even the most radical ones, like Athens – as irreligious or indifferent to the sacred, religion was, as Moses Finley says, ‘pervasively in the background’ and as such provided the intellectual space for doubt and interrogation regarding the role of the divine in human affairs.

This questioning of the role of religion and the gods in society is demonstrated by Hecataeus of Miletus – ‘The tales (muthoi) told by the Greeks are many – and ridiculous’; and by Plato, particularly in the Timaeus but also in the Republic, wherein the philosopher sought to establish a new creation myth for the Greeks that would supplant Hesiod’s Theogony, which Plato objected to on the grounds that it wasn’t sufficiently edifying – he was outraged by Hesiod’s depiction of the gods as unjust, malicious, envious and resentful of humans. 

Furthermore, in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, the poet makes clear that the Olympian gods – whose rule is depicted as arbitrary and spiteful, characterised by ‘eternal anger and an inflexible mind’ – the epitome of that most loathsome of regimes to the Athenians, tyranny – took power by overthrowing the previous government of the Titans, led by Kronos – who himself had brutally usurped power from his cruel father, Ouranos – and that the Olympian gods will perish in the same ruthless way.

Burning with resentment at his treatment at the hands of Zeus, Prometheus revels in the knowledge that the king of the gods will soon be dethroned, that he will go from being a ruler to a slave, who ‘will suffer even greater pains than those I am suffering now’.

If the gods can be called ridiculous, condemned for their dubious morality and oppressive rule, considered vulnerable to being deposed, then it’s not such a big step to claim that the gods don’t exist at all.

‘As for the gods’, Protagoras says, ‘I can know nothing; neither how they are, nor if they are, nor if they are not, nor about how they might look.’ 

Indeed, Protagoras places man, not the gods at the centre of the universe. ‘Man is the measure of all things’, the Sophist says; while in Sophocles’ Antigone, this extolment of man is suggested by the chorus’ famous observation that: ‘Πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.’ (’

Wonders abound in this world yet no wonder is greater than man’).

Man’s deina – his awesomeness, power, wondrousness, which the chorus then proceeds to characterise in detail – ingenuity, hard work, mastery of speech and thought, skills in adjusting to nature, propensity for good government – don’t make man better or superior to the gods, but distinguish him in that he has the ability to change, learn and create. 

The gods, Castoriadis says, cannot change – ‘they are what they have been since they first existed and what they will be for ever’ – but man, and only man among all beings, has the power to alter himself, to transform his relations not only with nature, but also with his own nature.

In terms of politics and philosophy, this uncertainty towards the gods and their benevolent predisposition allows – or rather impels – the Greeks to decide for themselves what sort of society they want to live in, what laws they should and shouldn’t have, how they should live their lives without the gods holding their hand, guiding them through the morass of ethics and morality, politics and philosophy.

At its best, this break with the gods can tend to democracy and freedom, at its worst, to tyranny or social breakdown. (In the modern era, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Camus have all wrestled with the problem of morality in a godless world).

Democracy and tragedy
How then do democracies resist the temptation to permit everything? If democracy is necessarily unwilling to constrain what can and cannot be questioned, if, theoretically, nothing is off-limits, if there are no boundaries and no taboos as to what can be said and thought, how do democracies gain legitimacy and allegiance, establish a common identity and interest among citizens, and prevent a slide towards fragmentation, nihilism and self-destruction? 

For Castoriadis, elaborating on Cartledge’s view of tragedy as a means to critique society, tragedy’s role in Athens was, primarily, ontological, to remind the audience that Being is Chaos – there is no order or meaning attributable to the world, what we intend and desire and what life offers us are at odds, mortality is inescapable, hope for a just and happy afterlife under the regime of a benign god are vain. If there is an afterlife, it is far worse than life in the material world – as attested by Achilles in The Odyssey, when he admits to Odysseus he’d rather be a slave condemned to an existence of back-breaking humiliation than Lord of the Dead: 

‘No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!
By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man –
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive –
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.’

Democracy is only possible on this tragic ontological foundation – freed from hope for a blissful afterlife, man is ready for thought and action in this world – which was why Plato, the ferocious anti-democrat, rejected it, asserting the ‘philosophical monstrosity’ (according to Castoriadis) that Being is good, that there is an underlying harmony and rationality in the world, that God’s motive in creating the universe is to advance goodness. (Nietzsche noted that ‘Christianity is Platonism for the masses’).

If tragedy was democratic, Castoriadis says, because it was a conspicuous reminder of mortality, that is, ‘of the radical limitation on human beings’, then democracy is a ‘tragic regime’ because the demos has to consider where its power stops and to set its own limits. Just as man is circumscribed by death, so the demos is circumscribed by awareness of its own temporality.

Tragedy’s political dimension, Castoriadis argues, its inextricable association with democracy, is that it presents to the demos the question of hubris, warning of the consequences of going too far, of exceeding boundaries and of the necessity of self-limitation, i.e. limitation not set by extra-social admonitions or precepts – the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount – but by the commonwealth of citizens in constant discussion.

This is the lesson of Sophocles’ Antigone, not its modern interpretation of standing up to power, of rebellion against the state, but that being the sole one to think right (monos phronein) – which both Antigone and Creon are guilty of – is an act of hubris and makes you apolis – beyond the political community of men.

Antigone, Castoriadis says, demonstrates that ‘contrary reasons can coexist and that it is not in obstinately persisting in one’s own reasons that it becomes possible to solve the grave problems that may be encountered in collective life.’

Democracy today
Both Castoriadis and Cartledge agree that the challenge for modern societies is to become more democratic – to continue with the project begun by the Greeks 2500 years ago. Both agree that what exists in modern Western societies would not be recognisable to Athenians as a democracy. Rather, the Greeks would identify our political system of representative democracy as oligarchic – rule of/for the few or the wealthy – even if Castoriadis would term them ‘liberal’ oligarchies. Democracy, Castoriadis says, does not mean human rights, lack of censorship or elections. It means direct democracy. ‘There is no democracy but direct democracy. A representative democracy is not a democracy.’

Indeed, Cartledge reminds us that those we are led to believe played a major role in reviving democracy in the modern world, setting the standards the West has followed for the last 250 years, i.e. the Founding Founders of the American republic, were in fact vehement anti-democrats, fearing that Athenian direct democracy amounted to mob rule and devising a system to avoid such an unpalatable outcome.

Castoriadis and Cartledge also agree that the prospects for making liberal oligarchy or representative democracy more democratic – or enhancing the elements of it that tend towards democracy – are not good.

This pessimism stems from the emergence of human (individual) rights and their superseding of political (collective) rights – the right to be involved in civic life, the making and unmaking of laws – and is reflective of Benjamin Constant’s belief that modern men and women are not interested in public affairs but only in the protection of their ‘delights’ from the state. 

For Castoriadis, democracy is in crisis. The fetishisation of these ‘delights’ has been followed by a descent into apathy, privatisation and individualism, the erosion of the democratic ethos – ‘responsibility, shame, frankness (parrhessia), checking up on one another, and an acute awareness of the fact that the public stakes are also personal stakes for each one of us’. This state of affairs is best described by two words: conformism and insignificance – conformism expressing the waning of social and political conflict and insignificance the sterility and banality of contemporary culture.

Meanwhile, Cartledge points to the growing hostility both outside of and within Western societies of religiously-minded actors who contemptuously reject the democratic imperative of parrhessia and of man-and-woman made laws in favour of the inviolability of divinely-inspired speech and laws that brook no questioning let alone offer themselves to variation.

For Castoriadis, a religious structuring of the world that posits a deity who has miraculously transmitted his strictures and laws to humanity via a chosen messenger, strictures and laws that are immaculate – for god is immaculate – and must be upheld and obeyed for all time, is the antithesis of democracy and democratic life. The philosophical foundation of democracy is secularism – a recognition that religion must be detached from the state and curtailed in public life – the defence of which used to be the preserve of the radical left, though a significant part of the left has now, in the name of anti-imperialism, found alliance with religious believers in a shared resentment and hostility to Western political values and history and entertains anti-democratic religious discourse and practices as an affirmation of cultural egalitarianism, a conviction that all cultures have the same intrinsic value and worth. 

Bibliography
Cartledge, Paul: Democracy: A Life (2016)

Castoriadis, Cornelius: The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary, in The World in Fragments (1997)
The Retreat from Autonomy: Postmodernism as Generalised Conformism, in The World in Fragments (1997)
Castoriadis, Cornelius: The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy, in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (1991)
Power, Politics, Autonomy, in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy (1991)
Castoriadis, Cornelius: Aeschylean Anthropogony and Sophoclean Self-Creation of Man (1991), in Figures of the Thinkable (2005)
Heritage and Revolution 1996), in Figures of the Thinkable (2005)
What Democracy? (1990), in Figures of the Thinkable (2005)
Castoriadis, Cornelius: Postscript on Insignificance: Dialogues with Cornelius Castoriadis (2011)
Castoriadis, Cornelius: The Problem of Democracy Today (1989) http://www.athene.antenna.nl/ARCHIEF/NR01-Athene/02-Probl.-e.html
Finley, Moses: Politics in the Ancient World (1983)
Pender, E.E.: Chaos Corrected: Hesiod in Plato’s Creation Myth, in Boys-Stones, G.R. & Haubold J.H. (eds) Plato and Hesiod (2009)
Theodoridis, George: Translations of Prometheus Bound and Antigone at https://bacchicstage.wordpress.com
Vernant, Jean-Pierre: The Origins of Greek Thought (1984)
Whitmarsh, Tim: Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (2017)

Cyprus, Rimbaud and the British empire

Long ago, if my memory serves me, my life was a banquet where everyone’s heart was generous, and where all wines flowed.
One evening I pulled Beauty down on my knees. I found her embittered and I cursed her. (Rimbaud: A Season in Hell).

In return for the Ottoman empire ceding it Cyprus in 1878 under the provisions of the Treaty of Berlin which ended the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878, Britain agreed to continue its support to preserve Turkey against perceived Russian ambitions in the Balkans and the Caucuses.

Britain’s support for Turkey was hugely controversial domestically. Gladstone was appalled that Britain was backing Turkey in the Balkans, particularly after the atrocities committed by the Turks in suppressing the Bulgarian uprising in 1876.

‘Let the Turks’, Gladstone wrote, in his famous pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Eastern Question, ‘carry away their abuses, in the only possible manner, namely, by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Blmhashis and Yuzbashis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province that they have desolated and profaned.’

The Anglo–Turkish Convention, it seemed to Gladstone, was a tawdry deal – ‘an act of duplicity not surpassed and rarely equalled in the history of nations’ – another demonstration of Disraelian showmanship and vanity in which Britain committed itself to preserving the Ottoman empire, a murderous and base entity for Gladstone, in exchange for Cyprus, a pointless adornment to the British empire, which was accumulating colonies like a thief accumulating swag.

But Disraeli was convinced that Cyprus would be a vital asset for the British empire – an Eastern Mediterranean Malta or Gibraltar – a military and naval bastion to protect Turkey in Asia Minor and British imperial interests in the Suez Canal and the Middle East.

During the 300 years of Ottoman rule, Cyprus had lost its reputation for prosperity acquired under the Lusignans and Venetians and suffered neglect, depopulation and the arbitrary oppression associated with the worst excesses of the Ottoman empire.

Indeed, the British appear to have been taken by surprise by the extent of the destitution the Turks left behind on Cyprus and soon realised that if the island were to serve the interests of the British empire its infrastructure and sanitary conditions would have to be dramatically improved.

Thus the British occupation of Cyprus began with grand plans for roads, railroads, harbours, forts, hospitals and canals – hardly any of which materialised, but did initially encourage an influx of Europeans and European capital looking for employment and profit.

One of those to arrive on the island in 1878 was Arthur Rimbaud, the brilliant French poet/ex-poet/anti-poet, aged 24, who, helped by his knowledge of Greek, found work at a quarry in Larnaca and then – after catching typhoid and returning to France to recuperate – as a foreman on the project to build the new British governor’s summer residence in the Troodos mountains.

(Sir Garnet Wolseley, the first British governor of Cyprus, was so appalled at the state of Ottoman Nicosia – and was ‘very anxious to get out of [it]… it is one great cesspit into which the filth of centuries has been poured’ – that one of his first acts was to order the construction of a villa in the more salubrious surroundings of Troodos from which to rule the island).

Regarding Rimbaud’s Cypriot sojourn, we know through letters he wrote to his family in France of the arduous conditions of his work, that he complained about the heat of the plains and the cold of the mountains, that he requested arms to protect himself from the workers under his authority dissatisfied with irregular pay, and that he left the island suddenly – either because of illness, an argument with his employers or, according to Ottorino Rosa, who knew Rimbaud a few years later in Ethiopia – where Rimbaud was a merchant, gunrunner and, possibly, a slave trader – because Rimbaud had killed a subordinate in a fight.

But the details concerning Rimbaud’s year in Cyprus remain sketchy – Christopher Hitchens mischievously speculates that Rimbaud may have had a homosexual relationship with Captain Herbert – later Lord – Kitchener, who was on the island at the same time as Rimbaud, conducting the British Survey of Cyprus – and all that’s left of Rimbaud’s presence on the island is a plaque in the governor’s – now president’s – summer residence, which reads: ‘The French poet and genius Arthur Rimbaud, heedless of his renown, was not above helping to build this house with his own hands.’

Yellow Sky: rapine, hubris and redemption

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

(Shakespeare: The Tempest) 

Yellow Sky (1948) is an utterly brutal Western, which asserts that, when it is not mitigated, human nature – or at least how it is expressed in the context of the American West – is nothing but greed, violence, jealousy, fear and suspicion.

A gang of bank robbers in their desperate effort to outrun a posse are forced to enter the desert – the film is shot in Death Valley – where, on the verge of death, they fight over the last few drops of water, the beating sun and their weakening bodies turning them insane, until they see a town, Yellow Sky, which although isn’t a mirage turns out to be a ghost town, deserted, its shops, hotels and bars abandoned and collapsed.

This one last cruel trick seems to have sealed their fate, which is to die of thirst and exhaustion. Only for a beautiful young woman to appear out of nowhere, whose motivation in directing them to water is not to save them, however, but to drive them out from Yellow Sky as soon as possible. But why the ferocity in her determination to get rid of them? Is it simply the fear of a lone woman being confronted by several smelly, brutish, leering men who’ve appeared out of nowhere? Or is she hiding something? What is such a beautiful woman doing in such a godforsaken place?

The outlaws discover that the woman is in Yellow Sky with her grandfather who they surmise is a gold prospector. Dreams of wealth and sexual gratification now overwhelm the men, even as they fall out as to who is going to rape the woman first and whether they should take all the old man’s gold or split the treasure with him. The men’s morality is put to the test. How evil are they? After an adult life of robbing and murder, taking what they want without remorse, is there any residue of conscience left in them that will prompt them to spare the woman from rape and let the old man keep some of his hard-earned wealth?

William Wellman directed this masterpiece, Gregory Peck is Stretch Dawson, the conflicted leader of the gang, Richard Widmark, his ruthless no. 2 (or alter ego, if you prefer) and Anne Baxter plays Constance May, the object of the outlaws’ desire. The taut script and spartan dialogue full of bitterness and irony was written by Lamar Trotti and based on WR Burnett’s novel, Stretch Dawson. Indeed, Yellow Sky bears all the hallmarks of Burnett’s numerous novels and screenplays, Little Caesar, Scarface, High Sierra, This Gun for Hire, The Asphalt Jungle – avarice, rapacity, hubris, the thin veneer of civilisation:

‘The worst police force in the world is better than no police force… Take the police off the streets for forty-eight hours, and nobody would be safe, neither on the street, nor in his place of business, nor in his home. There wouldn’t be an easy moment for women or children. We’d be back in the jungle…’ (The Asphalt Jungle).

Yellow Sky’s template is Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with Anne Baxter’s character as Miranda and Grandpa as Prospero.

In the Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, Tony Howard explains the relationship between The Tempest and Yellow Sky:

‘William Wellman’s Yellow Sky turned The Tempest into a harsh post-war Western where a gang of criminals (bankrobbers replacing aristocrats) stumble on an isolated old man and a girl. The elemental metaphors are reversed. Shakespeare’s sea gives way to thirst: fleeing across a desert, on the brink of death they discover no magic island but a ghost town where a prospector and his granddaughter guard water and gold. Wellman focuses on the girl, who is constantly threatened by rape but protects herself with tough talk and a rifle, and on the Caliban question: can any of these degenerates be redeemed?’

The Man Who Would Be King: the hubris of liberal imperialism

 

‘I’ll make a damned fine Nation of you, or I’ll die in the making!’ (Rudyard Kipling: The Man Who Would Be King).

In Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King (1888), two Tommy adventurers in the British Raj believe they’ve found the opportunity to make their name and fortune by convincing the people of Kafiristan, in northern Afghanistan, who, as the name suggests, are holdouts against Islam, that they are gods, the reincarnation of the Greek warriors who conquered the region under Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC.

Getting carried away with the luck he’s stumbled across and the power he has assumed, one of the British charlatans, Daniel Dravot, begins to imagine bringing all sorts of glories to his new kingdom.

‘In another six months,’ says Dravot, ‘we’ll hold another Communication and see how you are working.’ Then he asks them about their villages, and learns that they was fighting one against the other and were fair sick and tired of it. And when they wasn’t doing that they was fighting with the Mohammedans. ‘You can fight those when they come into our country,’ says Dravot. ‘Tell off every tenth man of your tribes for a Frontier guard, and send two hundred at a time to this valley to be drilled. Nobody is going to be shot or speared any more so long as he does well, and I know that you won’t cheat me because you’re white people — sons of Alexander — and not like common, black Mohammedans. You are my people and by God,’ says he, running off into English at the end — ‘I’ll make a damned fine Nation of you, or I’ll die in the making!’

Dravot takes for his queen one of the most beautiful women from the local population. However, resenting the advances of this outsider, she bites his lip when he goes to kiss her causing blood to pour from her would-be husband’s mouth. The Kafiris realise that Dravot is not a god but a man – gods do not bleed – and the game is up.

Dravot is killed by his ‘subjects’ and his companion Peachy Carnehan is forced to flee, carrying the decapitated head of his friend, begging his way back to British-controlled India, where his experiences have driven him mad and only fit for the insane asylum.

The story of Westerners’ doomed efforts to impart more enlightened rule on unwilling and unconvinced locals was made into a superb film by John Huston in 1975, starring Sean Connery as Dragot and Michael Caine as Peachy.

Huston’s best films – The Maltese Falcon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Asphalt Jungle – all have the same ‘poetry of failure’ theme as The Man Who Would Be King; the madness and disaster that comes from hubris or excessive desire – for wealth, power, sex.

On Steven Runciman’s 1453: The Fall of Constantinople

1453: The Fall of Constantinople, by Steven Runciman (ISBN: 9781107604698). Paperback: £10.99.

I’m not sure if there’s much consolation in being a tragic hero – better to prevail than be transfigured – but tragic heroes is precisely how Steven Runciman describes the Greeks in his essential account of the siege and fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, which has recently been reissued by Canto Classics.

Beleaguered, outnumbered 10 to one, waiting in vain for the Western aid they had been promised for agreeing to church union, the Greek defenders (and a small group of Genoan and Venetian confederates) refused the besieging sultan’s offer to surrender Constantinople or convert to Islam, and chose instead to trust in their own bravery, the righteousness of their cause and divine intervention to preserve one of the last vestiges of Greek liberty.

But after two months of relentless siege and assault, the Turkish warlord, Sultan Mehmet, frustrated by the resistance of the Greeks, ignoring the advice of some of his commanders to lift the siege and avert further humiliation, decided to make one, final overwhelming attack to take the city.

The speeches made by the Greek and Turkish leaders on the eve of the decisive assault reveal what the two sides believed they were fighting for.

The Byzantine emperor Constantine Palaiologos tells his soldiers that a man should always be prepared to die for his faith or country, his family or sovereign; but now, he says, we are being asked to give up our lives for all four; while Mehmet’s words to his forces are in stark contrast to the heroism and dignity of the Greek emperor. Mehmet urges his troops on by reminding them of the three days of looting they will be allowed should they capture the city, and he inspires his commanders not only with the promise of booty, but also by stressing their sacred duty as Muslims to vanquish this famous Christian capital.

And indeed, once Constantinople is taken, the story of the city becomes one of plunder and depredation.

Runciman describes the pillaging of private homes, churches, businesses; the massacres of men, women and children, the ‘rivers of blood running down the streets’; a slaughter that only abated when the Turkish soldiers realised that keeping the Christians alive and selling them as slaves was a better idea, not that this spared the elderly, infirm and infants who could bring no profit, and were consequently killed on the spot.

As commander in chief, Mehmet was entitled to the greatest share of the loot, which he had paraded before him so he could decide precisely what he wanted. Then the sultan selected 1200 Greek children to be sent as slaves, 400 each, to the three most important Muslim rulers of the time, the sultan of Egypt, the king of Tunis and the king of Grenada; while, from the most prominent Byzantine families, Mehmet had his pick of youths, girls and boys, for his personal seraglio, with those resisting a life of sexual slavery being put to death, as Runciman illustrates with the case of the Grand Duke Lucas Notaras and his son and son-in-law:

‘Five days after the fall of the city [Mehmet] gave a banquet. In the course of it, when he was well flushed with wine, someone whispered to him that Notaras’s fourteen-year-old son was a boy of exceptional beauty. The Sultan at once sent a eunuch to the house of the [Grand Duke] to demand that the boy be sent to him for his pleasure. Notaras, whose elder sons had been killed fighting, refused to sacrifice the boy to such a fate. Police were then sent to bring Notaras with his son and his young son-in-law, the son of the Grand Domestic Andronicus Cantacuzenus, into the Sultan’s presence. When Notaras still defied the Sultan, orders were given for him and the two boys to be decapitated on the spot. Notaras merely asked that they should be slain before him, lest the sight of his death should make them waver. When they had both perished he bared his neck to the executioner. The following day, nine other Greek notables were arrested and sent to the scaffold.’

But even if Runciman does not flinch from describing the Turkish capture of Constantinople as being a ‘ghastly story of pillage’ and is not prepared to cover up Mehmet’s ‘savageries’; he is not a crude Orientalist, out to demonise the Turks and Islam and portray Byzantium’s demise in terms of a heroic West versus a barbaric East.

For not only would associating Byzantium with the West be problematic, but it is also clear that, for Runciman, the external agents most responsible for the downfall of Byzantium were not the Turks, but the Franks and Latins, with the disaster of 1453 overshadowed by the catastrophe of the Fourth Crusade in 1204, during which Western Crusaders seized and devastated Constantinople and dismembered and irreparably weakened the Greek empire.

In the third volume of his history of the Crusades, Runciman famously says that ‘there was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade’, and describes the sacking of Constantinople in 1204 as an act of ‘barbarous brutality’, ‘unparalleled in history’, committed by ‘Frenchmen and Flemings… filled with a lust for destruction’.

Thus, the powerful, wealthy and magnificent city seized and sacked by Crusaders in 1204 (and which the West held until 1261, before Greek restoration), was not the city the Turks captured in 1453, which Runciman describes as dying and melancholy, poverty-stricken and sparsely populated.

For Runciman, the Turkish seizure of Constantinople in 1453 did not destroy Byzantium, it merely provided the coup de grâce to a doomed city.

Indeed, memories of 1204 and experience of repressive Western rule in places like Crete, Cyprus and the Peloponnese, provided evidence to many Greeks that the pursuit of church union with Rome in exchange for military support to fight the Turks was both a religious abomination and politically misguided. Not only was there no difference in terms of brutality between Western and Muslim rule – indeed, many Greeks believed the Franks and Latins to be less civilised than the Turks and Muslims; and not only did the policy of church union overestimate the ability and willingness of the West to aid Byzantium against an assertive and powerful Turkish empire; but there was also a case for maintaining the integrity of the Greek church and Greek culture, avoiding the bitter division bound to follow any attempt to enforce religious subordination to Rome, and accepting a period of Turkish subjugation as the most effective way of preserving the Greek nation and offering the best chance for its long-term revival.

Nevertheless, Runciman’s reluctance to demonise the Turks does, in places, lead him to express an undeservedly generous assessment of their ascent to power and rule, which is matched by an excessive willingness to pin the blame for Byzantium’s tragedy on the West.

Thus, after Byzantine defeat at the Battle of Manzikert (1071), Runciman is keen to stress the ‘orderly and tolerant state’ established in Anatolia and Asia Minor by the Seljuk Turks. He describes their government as ‘wise and able’ and argues that ‘the transition of Anatolia from a mainly Christian to a mainly Moslem country was achieved so smoothly that no one troubled to record the details’. Similarly, Runciman praises Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, as a ‘leader of genius’, while his son, Orhan, is described as a ‘great ruler’, whose administration was so reasonable that many of his Christian subjects preferred it to that of the Byzantines. There were no forced conversions, Runciman declares, and apostasy only occurred when Christians followed a natural inclination to join the religion of the ruling class. As for Mehmet, Runciman says, despite his savageries and the destruction in the immediate aftermath of conquest, under his rule, Constantinople was rebuilt and soon became a thriving city of commerce and finance. ‘Long before his death in 1481,’ Runciman writes:

‘Sultan Mehmet could look with pride on the new Constantinople… Since the conquest its population [of Turks, Greeks, Jews and Armenians] had increased fourfold; within a century it would number more than half a million. He had destroyed the old crumbling metropolis of the Byzantine Emperors, and in its place he had created a new and splendid metropolis in which he intended his subjects of all creeds and all races to live together in order, prosperity and peace.’

However, the ‘details’ that Runciman said do not exist to record the Islamisation of Anatolia and Asia Minor are, in fact, painstakingly chronicled by Spyros Vryonis in his The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century, in which the author describes a period of savage conquest, a succession of raids and annexations characterised by pillaging, massacre, enslavement and forced conversion of the Byzantine population. Thus the four centuries it took the Turks, from 1071 to 1453, to subjugate Anatolia, Asia Minor and Thrace, did not involve, as Runciman suggests, a ‘smooth’ evolution but was accomplished in a way that amounted to a holocaust for the vanquished.

As for Mehmet’s alleged vision of a tolerant, harmonious empire, this never materialised and could never materialise, given the nature of the Ottoman state, in which religious discrimination and persecution were ingrained. Order was maintained through terror and repression and peace dependent on the whims of the sultan or his pashas or beys who, at any moment, could decide that their Christian subjects, their culture, shrines and very lives, were an affront to Muslim ascendancy and should be suppressed if not extinguished.

Moreover, just as there were Greeks who believed, prior to the fall of Constantinople, ‘better the sultan’s turban than the cardinal’s hat’*, many others, from the political and intellectual elite, admired the West and believed church union would bring about a rich fusion of Greek and particularly Italian humanist culture. Indeed, something of this fusion occurred in Crete and the Ionian islands, on the periphery of the Greek world, where Turkish rule was delayed or never penetrated, with Venetian sway eventually contributing to a cultural breathing space and even flowering for Greeks that was never possible under the Turks. As Runciman himself acknowledges, the Ottomans’ narrow-mindedness, informed by fear and loathing of their Christian subjects, ensured that Greek learning, art and letters were discouraged and ceased to exist for the duration of the Turkish empire.

* Ironically, this statement is attributed to Lucas Notaras, who, as noted above, was executed for refusing to give up his son to become the sultan’s sexual slave.