How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions

264 Pages·2005·1.51 MB·English

by  Francis Wheen

HOW MUMBO-JUMBO CONQUERED THE
WORLD
A Short History of Modern Delusions
Francis Wheen
Dedication
For Bertie and Archie
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: Two Messiahs
Introduction: Dare to Know
1 The voodoo revolution
2 Old snake-oil, new bottles
3 It’s the end of the world as we know it
4 The demolition merchants of reality
5 The catastrophists
6 With God on our side
7 Us and them
8 Candles in the wind
9 Right is the new left
10 Forward to the past
11 Voodoo revisited
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …
About the author
Interview with Francis Wheen
Life at a Glance
Favourite Books
About the book
Mumbo-Jumbo Never Sleeps
Read on
Have You Read?
Francis Wheen’s Guide to the Web
Index
About the Author
Notes
Praise
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Two messiahs
Tehran, Wednesday 24 January 1979
Three army tanks block the entrance to Mehrabad International Airport,
following an announcement by the Shi’ite Muslim leader Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini that he intends to return to Iran on 26 January after fourteen years of
exile. ‘Khomeini is not coming, not at all,’ a major tells reporters.
It is eight days since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled abroad, with mass
demonstrations and strikes convulsing the country he has ruled for three decades.
The tanks in the roadblock – British-made Chieftains – are themselves
symptoms of the malaise which laid him low: both Muslims and Marxists were
enraged by his dependence on Britain and the United States, his use of military
force to crush dissent and his apparent contempt for Persian traditions.
Shahpour Bakhtiar, the prime minister, said after the Shah’s departure that
Khomeini was welcome to return home, but has adamantly refused to accept the
Ayatollah’s demand that he should yield power to an Islamic theocracy. As the
tanks arrive at the airport, Khomeini’s principal envoy in Tehran, Mehdi
Bazargan, holds a news conference at which he describes his old friend Bakhtiar
as a ‘reasonable, logical and patriotic man’ who must now accept the inevitable
and give way to the Ayatollah. To mollify liberals, socialists and other secular
opponents of the Shah, who have become increasingly fearful of Khomeini’s
ambitions, he adds that the proposed new government will be called an ‘Islamic
Democratic Republic’ rather than merely an ‘Islamic Republic’.
What will it mean in practice? In an interview with the newspaper Ettelaiat
the Ayatollah denounces dancing and cinema as unIslamic, and limits his
promises of free speech to exclude ‘things not in the national interest’. At the
Tehran news conference, Bazargan rejects models such as Libya and Saudi
Arabia, explaining that he favours a government like that ‘we had for ten years
under the Prophet Mohammed and for five years under the Imam Ali’. In short,
the intention is to restore a regime that last existed almost 1,300 years ago.
Monday 29 January
In Tehran, troops open fire on demonstrators who have burned two cinemas, two
restaurants, a liquor shop, several bordellos and a nightclub. The protesters are
seen ‘chortling with delight’ as they throw champagne bottles from the club’s
cellar on to a bonfire.
At the American embassy, Iranian soldiers guarding the grounds have to be
replaced after one shoves an assault rifle into an American officer’s belly and
yells, ‘Yankee go home!’ As the original sixty-man contingent drive away in
trucks, they all shout the same refrain.
Outside Tehran University, where at least thirty-five people were killed by
army bullets yesterday, Major-General Taghi Latifi is dragged from his
Mercedes 220 and badly beaten. A leaflet distributed on the campus says the
time has come to establish a ‘people’s army’ and attack the United States and
Israel. ‘We have to get guns,’ it adds. Thousands of students take up the chant:
‘Machine guns, machine guns, the answer to everything.’ On sale inside the
university are photographs of the Shah holding a glass of wine and Empress
Farah wearing a one-piece swimming suit. Even girls whose blue jeans are
visible beneath their ankle-length Muslim robes brandish the photos as proof of
the royal couple’s dissolute habits.
Alarmed by the crescendo of violence, Shahpour Bakhtiar announces that the
country’s airports will reopen tomorrow. Americans, Europeans and Iranian
Jews make plans to leave as soon as possible. At his villa in the Parisian suburb
of Neauphle-le-Château, Khomeini issues a statement confirming that he will
return within the next forty-eight hours. ‘If there is any blood to be shed, I want
to be among my people.’
Thursday 1 February
Accompanied by a retinue of journalists and Iranian students, Khomeini boards a
chartered Air France Boeing at Charles de Gaulle airport. Throughout the five-
hour flight to Tehran, the black-robed, white-bearded seventy-eight-year-old
reclines on a carpet in the first-class compartment. As they enter Iranian
airspace, a French reporter asks: ‘What are your emotions after so many years of
exile?’ The Ayatollah, who has ignored previous questions, murmurs ‘Hichi’ –
the Farsi for ‘nothing’.
Khomeini steps off the plane at 9.30 a.m. to a thunderous reception from at
least a million supporters, many of whom have waited all night for a glimpse of
their hero. In a brief statement at the airport, he says that ‘final victory’ will
come only when ‘all the foreigners are out of the country and uprooted … I beg
to God to cut off the hand of all evil foreigners and all their helpers in Iran.’ He
is then whisked into a limousine for a triumphal motorcade through the centre of
Tehran to the cemetery of Behesht-e-Zahra, where he pays tribute to the
hundreds who died in the months of demonstrations against the Shah. From
there, he is flown by helicopter to his new revolutionary headquarters, a former
girls’ school near the Iranian parliament.
According to the BBC correspondent John Simpson, who travelled from Paris
with Khomeini, ‘a millennial frenzy took over the entire country. People wept
and shouted and beat their chests in an ecstasy of hope and joy.’ Newspapers
publish ecstatic poems which reflect this chiliastic optimism:
The day the Imam returns
No one will tell lies any more
No one will lock the doors of his house;
People will become brothers
Sharing the bread of their joys together
In justice and sincerity.
London, Wednesday 10 January
James Callaghan, the British prime minister, looks tanned and relaxed on his
return to England after six days at an international summit in Guadeloupe, where
he was photographed swimming with young air-stewardesses during a break
from discussing the Soviet nuclear threat. Britain, by contrast, is freezing and
paralysed: thousands of lorry-drivers are on strike, most ports and many factories
have shut down, all roads into the city of Hull are blockaded by secondary
pickets, hundreds of schools have closed for lack of heating oil, supermarkets are
running out of food and railway workers have announced that they will begin a
national strike next week. And all because of Callaghan’s insistence that no pay
rise in the private or public sector shall exceed 5 per cent, at a time when
inflation is above 8 per cent.
Arriving at Heathrow airport, Callaghan is asked by a reporter about ‘the
mounting chaos in the country at the moment’. The avuncular smile that earned
him the nickname Sunny Jim disappears at once. ‘Please don’t run your country
down,’ he admonishes. ‘If you look at it from the outside, you can see you are
taking a rather parochial view. I do not feel there is mounting chaos. I don’t
think that other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting
chaos.’
A few hours later the political editor of the Sun, Walter Terry, files his report
of the press conference: ‘Sun-tanned premier Jim Callaghan breezed back into
Britain yesterday and asked: Crisis? What crisis?… Not even the threat of up to
two million people being laid off work next week worried jaunty Jim.’ The Sun’s
editor, Larry Lamb, adds the coup de grâce by repeating Terry’s pejorative
précis in a huge front-page headline: ‘CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS?’
Wednesday 28 March
A day of high parliamentary drama. For the past couple of years Callaghan’s
minority Labour government has limped from one crisis to another, kept alive by
wily parliamentary manoeuvring and makeshift alliances – first with the Liberals
(during the ‘Lib-Lab pact’ of 1977–8) and then with the Scottish and Welsh
nationalists, who were cajoled into acquiescence by the promise of a Devolution
Bill. On 1 March, however, referendums in Scotland and Wales failed to deliver
the support necessary for the home-rule proposals to become law, whereupon the
nationalists abandoned Callaghan.
The Ulster Unionists have also backed the government in recent months, but
only in return for legislation increasing the number of parliamentary seats in
Northern Ireland. When the Bill received the royal assent last week, they too
decided there was no longer any advantage to be gained from propping up a
wheezing and enfeebled administration. Seizing her opportunity, the
Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher has tabled a motion of no-confidence in
Her Majesty’s government. If passed, it will precipitate a general election.
The debate is preceded by feverish and often farcical horse-trading. Having
won round three Welsh Nationalists by promising a new scheme to compensate
coal-miners suffering from lung disease, Callaghan still needs to find two more
votes before tonight’s division. The Labour minister Roy Hattersley gives Frank
Maguire, the Independent member for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, three
bottles of whiskey plus the promise of an inquiry into food prices in Northern
Ireland. Some Ulster Unionists try unsuccessfully to trade their votes for a
pledge to build an expensive natural-gas pipeline under the Irish Sea.
Opening the debate, Margaret Thatcher says that ‘the government has failed
the nation … Britain is now a nation on the sidelines. Rarely in the post-war
period can our standing in the world have been lower or our defences weaker.’
Labour has ‘centralised too much power in the state’, paying ‘far too little
attention to wealth creation and too much to its redistribution’.
The prime minister, who celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday yesterday,
attacks the Conservatives and their ‘lap dogs’ in Fleet Street. He also sneers at
the Liberals and Scottish Nationalists for allying themselves with the Tories:
‘The minority parties have walked into a trap … It is the first time in recorded
history that turkeys have been known to vote for an early Christmas.’ He
concludes with a surprise announcement that old-age pensions will be increased
in November: ‘Let need, not greed, be our motto.’
Ill and dying members are brought from their beds, some by ambulance, to be
wheeled through the lobbies at 10 p.m. But the seventy-six-year-old Labour MP
Sir Alfred Broughton, who suffered a heart attack a week ago, is too weak to
leave hospital. If the vote is a tie, the Speaker would be obliged by precedent to
exercise a casting vote on behalf of the government. Because of Sir Alfred’s
absence, however, the no-confidence motion is passed by 311 votes to 310.
Callaghan, the first British prime minister to have his government brought
down by a censure motion since Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, announces that he
will seek a dissolution of parliament and a general election as soon as essential
business is cleared. ‘Now that parliament has declared itself, we shall take our
case to the country.’
Friday 4 May
The Conservatives have won an overall majority of forty-three seats in
yesterday’s general election – the biggest margin of victory by any party since
1966. Labour’s share of the poll, at 36.9 per cent, is its lowest since 1931. While
Audrey Callaghan moves the family’s belongings out of the back door of 10
Downing Street, her husband leaves by the front door to ride to Buckingham
Palace and hand in his resignation to the Queen. He then departs for his Sussex
farm, pausing briefly en route to offer commiserations to staff at the Labour
Party HQ in Smith Square.
Shortly afterwards Margaret Thatcher is summoned to the palace, where she
formally accepts her appointment as prime minister by kissing the monarch’s
hands. She is then driven in a black Rover to Downing Street. Looking rather
subdued and slight among the swirl of reporters and burly police officers, she
quotes a favourite phrase of her former colleague Airey Neave, who was killed
by a car-bomb at the beginning of the election campaign: ‘There is now work to
be done.’ Before disappearing through the door of No. 10 to get on with it, she
also recites ‘some words of St Francis of Assisi, which I think really are just
particularly apt at the moment’: