Fair point, Premier,
about the need to question Castle accounts, and about the cultural assumptions that both lie behind propaganda and are reinforced by that propaganda. Keep the Irish impoverished and deprived of education, destroy their economy, then call them lazy stupid dirty “white chimpanzees”.
Dr Mitchell argues that it's not possible because they alter and rewrite the nature of Casement's work in the Congo and the Amazon
—your pronouns are a bit vague here. Do you mean he argues that it isn’t possible that the Black Diaries are genuine? Is he saying that if they are genuine this opens up “an appalling vista”?
I can’t see how this is so (unless Mr Mitchell is defending a political position rather than investigating an historical controversy). I don’t think the diaries “alter and rewrite the nature of Casement's work in the Congo and the Amazon”; they merely means that he was human, not superhuman. Casement was wrong to exploit young Africans and South Americans—if, of course, he did so—but that possible wrong does not negate the great good he did.
If we consider the incredible pressure Casement was under we might understand how he could develop something like a split personality. He was homosexual (I’m taking it that no one seriously denies this nowadays, only the Diaries?) at a time when active homosexuality was a serious crime, so he stood to lose freedom and reputation if his lifestyle came to light. And he also stood to lose his mind—he hints at this fear—to the family strain of madness. In some ways it’s amazing that such a tortured soul achieved so much good.
On your other point: I can see how people might look to
post-modernism/post-colonialism … to decipher and move beyond [imperial] cultural biases [and so prevent them] becoming part of today's cultural landscape and to avoid the enormous damage they did to the world in the past
The problem here is that postmodernism /post-colonialism introduces its own cultural biases and does huge damage too—or can do. It employs the same straitjacket imperialism did against its opponents, merely turned inside out and fitted with more finesse.
For instance, to point out that the nature of imperialism varied from one imperial power to another and from colony to colony, to point out that the phenomenon was something of a mixed curse, or at any rate more nuanced than the unmitigated horror it appears today (New Imperialism anyway), is to invite condemnation as a closet imperialist. To point out that the Zulu-Matabele
Mfecane makes even the German atrocities in Südwestafrika seem almost like mild chastisement is to brave roars of “racist!” (For you can only have white imperialists in the brave new post-colonial world.) In recent years there is a concerted effort to deny that there ever was a
Mfecane; as David Ahrens pretended some forty years ago about cannibalism, it was all a myth to justify white imperialism.
The dreadfully dangerous aspect of postmodernism is that it confers respectability on such politically motivated mischief. Mary Lefkowitz wrote
Not Out Of Africa because she was so incensed by an afrocentrist lecture given at Wellesley College—no money-grubbing community college but one of America’s premier women’s universities—back in the early 1990s. The fool on the podium was unable to answer her questions on points of history, of course, so turned abusive, until she, who had questioned a racist agenda, was branded a racist!
Worse, when she complained to the college dean at such nonsense having been hosted by an institution of higher learning, she was told that “each of us had a different but equally valid view of history”.
You see the terrible danger? But it’s not just any ahistorical rubbish that can be fobbed off as serious history—it depends on the political slant of the rubbish. For had David Irving been allowed to peddle his brand of rubbish and a member of the history department complained to the college dean, you can be damn sure the dean would not have said that Irving’s view was “equally valid”.
As political correctness stifles intellectual enquiry (“You mustn’t say that!”), postmodernism can confer spurious legitimacy on equally politically motivated nonsense. However laudable our ideology, when we start thinking with it we cease thinking as historians.
Thanks for the link to Brian Murphy’s book. It sounds interesting though I doubt that I’d be surprised by anything in it. Trying to finish
Coolacrease at present. So many books, so little time…