John reviews Boris Johnson’s presentation of the TV series ‘After Rome’ quite favourably. He even finds hope for redemption for Boris, as long as he gives up Tory politics. ‘Crikey’, as Boris would no doubt say. Well, this is the season of goodwill. What do you think?

With his comedy hair style and affable manner, Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, graced our TVs this December with a two-part documentary on the relationship between Christianity and Islam (After Rome: Holy War and Conquest. BBC 2, December 2008)

Boris is an old-fashioned Tory: a public-school boy who was never allowed to grow-up and drifted from one institution of power to the next without really knowing what he was doing. He is one of the traditional elite who bluff and bluster with such undue self-confidence they somehow manage to inspire confidence in others, well, at least enough people to creep into office. Boris even managed to become Mayor of London just by not being the terminally uninspiring Ken Livingstone (with the help of that pernicious rumour-mongering rag The Evening Standard)

At heart Boris is a liberal. Overall, his treatment of history was thoughtful and interesting, although you couldn’t help thinking there was something missing.

Only when he was interviewing three Muslim students did the other shade of Boris show itself. One of them said “I don’t know if that’s what you mean by democracy… I would love to see the Arab world becoming a very democratic world, but it’s very problematic when the west tries to impose it… Maybe it’s because of our previous experience with the west; because of the crusades… the trust is just not there… if it’s an idea coming from the west we go against it.”

Poor old bungling Boris couldn’t get his head around this. The programme interpreted it to mean that even Muslim democrats don’t accept democracy if it is given to them by the west, as if possessed of some childish obstinacy. After all why should intelligent Arab people be unhappy about being bombed and bullied into democracy and western values?  

The students were, I think, grasping for a quite different idea, which is this: there is a kind a ‘democracy’ in the west. It consists of holding elections every four or five years, informed by a biased and corrupt media, to a tightly-controlled legislature, which is part of a bureaucratic state that invariably serves the interests of a minority. That minority are the owners of private capital whose profits always come first, even before human life. This is hardly going to inspire democracy-loving people to action.

It is obvious to people in the east that western foreign policy towards them is determined by these vested interests and this poisons the very idea of democracy. Democracy can, as the student said, mean different things. It can mean the deep democracy that Marxists call ‘worker’s democracy’: with right of recall of representatives, mass participation, real economic power and where big business is not running the show. That would be worth fighting for.

The simple points Boris made quite well were these:

• Christianity and Islam are alike. Apart from being theologically similar, they both have a moderate majority, a fundamentalist fringe and a history of hypocrisy.
• Just as Christianity is economically and politically dominant today, Islam was in the past. There are other reasons, that have nothing to do with religion, why the Christian world is dominant at this particular moment in history.
• Capitalism and the development of science have marginalised the influence of Christianity in the west. The Islamist extremists are fighting because they fear that it will do the same to Islam in the east.

The capitalist mode of production got its first foothold in Northern Europe and spread rapidly across North America (areas that for other reasons happen to be Christian). It has since spread, by a combination of the gun and the cheap commodity, to the whole world. It has turned most of humanity into wage labourers and had a profound affect on human consciousness. Everywhere the old false certainties are draining away.

Now that capitalism can barely manage the laborious, uneven, convulsive progress of the past, what is going to happen now?

The sewer of history is blocked and it’s just beginning to back up. A new age of religious hypocrisy worse than anything the Crusaders and Jihadists of the past could dream of awaits us. Unless, that is, the forces of reason take up the fight and we finally overcome this iniquitous and crisis-ridden system.

That was what was missing! After nearly two hours of documentary Boris nearly got there. Minutes from the end he said “When you look around this city we are in, Cairo, a place of 20 million people, some of them living in unimaginable poverty, you realise its not just religion, it’s the economy, stupid! These people can see with their satellite dishes all the prosperity from which they feel excluded, and that sense of exclusion and resentment can be channelled into religious resentment as well”