White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Busting Statues Is Like Burning Books

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By Llewellyn King

Messing with history is not a cool thing to do. But there is a lot of it going on; particularly, pulling down monuments or going after other people’s religious statues. This kind of heresy goes from the grotesque to the downright evil.

Topping my list of the grotesque is Nkotozo Qwabe, a young South African now studying as a Rhodes Scholar, who leads a movement to pull down the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at Oxford and, among other things, to ban the French flag from the campus. Compatriots of this ingrate have already removed a statue of Rhodes at South Africa’s University of Cape Town.

On the evil side is ISIS, and its ongoing destruction of antiquities in Iraq and Syria — most recently, the monumental ruins of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria. With it, as with their razing of Hatra, Nineveh and Nimrud and other archaeological sites in Iraq, ISIS has turned to dust a world heritage: a cultural heritage and artifacts so precious that they rise above religion.

ISIS and the anti-Rhodes activists are trying to adjust history to passing present values. Knocking down an ancient temple or a statue is, in its way, book burning. It is destroying the record in order to distort the record.

Universities, here and abroad, are vulnerable to the demands of minority groups. Oxford has already removed one Rhodes plaque. At Princeton, students are demanding that Woodrow Wilson’s name be expunged for his support, as they see it, of white supremacy.

Decent people and institutions accede to the inane and foolish wants of minorities to appear reasonable to the unreasonable. Princeton has already gone some way down that slippery slope.

At Oxford, Qwabe is not content with just demonizing Rhodes. He has denounced the French for their colonial and current activities, and compared the French flag to the Nazi flag. And he has criticized Oxford for being Eurocentric. Why would it be anything else? Founded in 1096, it is the second-oldest European university.

Qwabe would have us, and the people of Africa, believe that Rhodes was a villain of unspeakable proportions, practicing racism and genocide. In reality, by today’s standards, he did some bad things and some very good ones, which include funding Qwabe’s attendance at Oxford.

Qwabe’s history is about as shaky as his gratitude. Rhodes was a controversial figure who believed absolutely in British exceptionalism as epitomized in the British Empire. He went to South Africa from England for his health and made a fortune in diamond mining. He entered politics and became prime minister of Cape Colony, on the tip of South Africa. There he seemed very enlightened, establishing a franchise that was open — as open as any at the time — and was not to be matched in South Africa until the fall of apartheid.

Where Rhodes’s dealings get murky is when he financed the push into what is now Zimbabwe. Rhodes defrauded the king of the Matabele, Lobengula, in the south of the country, but saved the Shona tribe, in the east and central region, from certain extinction at the hands of the Matabele, a newly arrived offshoot of the Zulus in South Africa who conquered lesser tribes, killed the men and boys, and forced the women into polygamous marriages.

Another good thing that Rhodes did was to cut off a chunk of South Africa, then known as Bechuanaland, now Botswana, from control by the Afrikaner Boers in 1895.

Rhodes also lavished his wealth on universities, including his alma mater Oxford and South African universities, including Cape Town, located on his former estate, and Rhodes, the eponymous university.

Rhodes did some reprehensible things but he believed in the public good as saw it — that being a manifestation of the British way of life, justice and values. Obliterating Rhodes’s historical role, and the few statues that point to it, is to meddle with the truth.

This same poison is at work on U.S. campuses, where student radicals bar speakers they disagree with from appearing. Punishing the memory of the great figures of history because they fail the social acceptability tests of the present is a disturbing part of the current academic scene, where free speech is under attack and free ideas are doctored to fit the values and prejudices of the moment.

There is a linkage between the thinking that is destroying the precious monuments of pre-Islamic civilization and punishing the memory of Rhodes and Wilson. The difference is only in degree. — For InsideSources


Is There a Jobs Catastrophe in the Making?

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Disruption is in the air: disruption in Congress, disruption in the workplace, disruption in the well-being of the middle class. History may well term this the Age of Disruption.
 
This need not be all bad.
 
Disruption is only a problem if it is poorly managed, or if forces beyond control devastate existing order. Take the Russian Revolution or the recent tsunamis in Asia. Nowadays, we tend to think of disruption as being uniquely in the province of technology – and it is this disruption that harbors the most future shock.
 
The most serious disruption now getting underway is the disappearance of jobs; not the replacement of old jobs, but the utter disappearance of jobs. Jobs that once were are going into the ether or, call it what you will, to the cloud. Gone for good.
 
For the first time since the Industrial Revolution was ushered in by the substitution of human and animal labor by shaft horsepower derived from a waterwheel or a steam engine, technology is subtracting jobs rather than adding them. This is a disruption that hurts.
 
From Oxford University comes one of the most disquieting studies on the future yet to appear. Two researchers, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, predict that 47 percent of American jobs are at risk in the coming years from computerization.
 
Their conclusions are stupefying: nearly half the jobs in the United States could disappear in a few short years. Worse, according to the Oxford University researchers these jobs will affect the great middle reaches of employment, from the white-collar jobs down to unskilled workers.
 
Their study “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?” should have every parent and every policy wonk asking: What should be done? What can we do to save half of the population from not being able to find a job at any level, of being driven to compete for minimum-wage employment?
 
Until now, each leap forward in technology and its corresponding increase in productivity has had two effects:

1. The economic benefits have been shared with the workers. That has ended.

2. New prosperity from automation always led to new demand for more goods and services. This maybe ending. Depressed wages do not lead to new purchases.

In turn, this history has led to a pervasive economic myth that the relationship between automation – even automation using advanced computers – will always lead to more jobs and more prosperity.
 
Yet the market for labor is changing dramatically, and that lockstep has lasted pretty well since the first loom in England substituted shaft horsepower for human labor in the 18th century.
 
That happy union may be broken. The Oxford researchers, in a National Public Radio interview, suggested that the only safe jobs might be those that require a high degree of education and interpersonal skills like the law, teaching and management consulting.
 
My own daily reminder of the world of jobs that is changing is my Kindle. It reproves me. Its value is that I am never without a new book, and it is more portable than any but small pocket books.
 
But I used to publish books and every time I open the electronic book, I think of the long chain of people who were involved in making a book years ago: typesetters, printers, binders, warehouse staff, book wholesalers, and finally the clerks who took your money — all worthwhile jobs with dignity.
 
Books and book stores are not worse hit than many other things, but they are suffering. When did you last speak to a person at your bank, airline, insurance company or utility?
 
A nation that does all of its business online may be efficient in the short term until online leads to the breadline.
 
Disruption is the new normal and we need to understand it. New industries need to be sought. An example of a newish industry that has flourished in recent decades is tourism. A century ago, a few rich people traveled. Now tourism is the world's largest employer.
 
Old remedies for new problems won't do it. The jobs deficit won't be fixed by what we seem to have on the table: lower corporate taxes and less unionism. Less general wealth is the wrong kind of disruption and we are heading that way. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate