THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2019| 13
The United States and Britain are
united in having political leaders who
have insulted and mocked immigrants
for electoral purposes. President
Trump’s anti-immigrant tirades are well
known, but Prime Minister Boris John-
son of Britain has voiced similar senti-
ments, including comparing Muslim
women who wear face veils to “bank
robbers” and “letter boxes.”
A few days earlier, Tell MAMA, a
group that monitors anti-Muslim activi-
ty, revealed that anti-Muslim incidents
rose by 375 percent in the week after Mr.
Johnson’s comments. For those of us
who grew up in the ’80s, the current
climate brings back painful memories of
a Britain we had hoped was long gone.
In the mid-1980s, I was a bored and
dissatisfied British Pakistani teenager
living in the gritty, unloved town of
Luton, 30 miles north of London. My
father had left Pakistan in the early
1960s. When my
mother, my siblings
and I joined him a
decade later, he was
working on the pro-
duction line of an auto
plant.
Britain in the 1970s
was an uncomfort-
able time to be in an
ethnic minority
group. The far-right
National Front party,
whose manifesto
called for the repatriation of “colored
immigrants” and “their descendants
and dependents” were fighting in elec-
tions and marching in cities and towns
across the country.
Growing up, my parents were ada-
mant that I was not and should never
even aspire to be British. To my parents,
the irreducible core of my identity was
being Pakistani and being Muslim.
Britain was simply where we had ended
up. I was instructed never to speak
English to my parents, only Urdu. My
parents forbade me from attending
school assemblies because Christian
hymns were sung. My family’s social
circle was populated entirely by fellow
Pakistanis.
I wanted to belong, but I was told I
was different and it was not only par-
ents telling me so. In 1987, when I was 16
years old, Britain had elected the Con-
servative Party for the third successive
time. Margaret Thatcher had been
prime minister for half of my life.
It was a time when to have brown
skin, to have an unusual name and
Pakistani heritage felt like hurdles that
a working-class boy like me would
never be able to surmount. I wanted to
belong and to feel British but I was
convinced that Britain could never
belong to me. This was a time when
there were no British Muslim role mod-
els in media, popular culture or politics.I should have felt despondent, but I
didn’t care because I had a one-word
escape plan: America. For the teenage
me, America was not an actual place so
much as it was an idea and ideal. I
learned about America not through
travel but from John Hughes and Martin
Scorsese, from Studs Terkel and John
Steinbeck and, most importantly, from
Bruce Springsteen.
I was introduced to Springsteen’s
music in the fall of 1987 by a Sikh friend
at sixth form, the college British stu-
dents attended between high school and
university. He claimed that Springsteen
was the direct line to all that was true in
this world. Once I started listening, it
was confirmed as nothing but the truth.
Springsteen sang about many things,
about fathers and factories, highways
and rivers and, crucially for me, he
came from a place almost as unloved as
Luton: New Jersey. When he sang, “It’s
a town full of losers and I’m pulling out
of here to win,” he was talking about hishometown, but he could have been
referring to mine.
His songs were always quintessen-
tially American. I fell in love with Amer-
ica as it was depicted in his music: the
rattlesnake speedways, the dusty ar-
cades and yes, even the New Jersey
Turnpike. In Springsteen’s music I saw
America as a land of hope and dreams.
It was a nation that had its challenges
but it was a generous-hearted place. If
Britain would not accept me, I would be
reborn in the U.S.A.
The first time I visited the United
States was in 1990 when I took a Grey-
hound bus across the country before
finally ending up in California, where I
had a summer job selling encyclopedias
door to door. Wherever I went people
were intrigued by my British accent, but
were always friendly and only dimly
aware of Islam or Pakistan.
The Sept. 11 attacks significantly
changed the Muslim experience of the
United States. A year later, when Itraveled to New Jersey for a Spring-
steen concert at the Giants Stadium, a
man asked me how could he trust that I
was a fan and not someone who was
going to blow the stadium up. He asked
me what my favorite Springsteen song
was. I responded by listing a few titles
that only true fans would have named.
My faith in America was tested. I kept
hoping during the Bush years that the
America I had fallen in love with as a
teenager was not lost forever. My faith
was rewarded with the election of
Barack Obama, who embodied an idea
that chimed with both me and Spring-
steen. During both his 2008 and 2012
campaigns, Springsteen campaigned
for Obama.
The election of Donald Trump into the
White House marked the arrival of
someone whose vision of America was
the polar opposite of the vision articulat-
ed by Springsteen and Obama. Where
Springsteen’s America was open, wel-
coming and self-critical, Trump’s Amer-
ica was narrow, fearful and arguably
race-defined.
I wrote a memoir about the influence
of Springsteen on my experience of
being a Muslim teenager in the 1980s
small-town, working-class Britain, and
it was recently turned into a movie and
released in America.
I traveled from coast to coast, attend-
ing screenings and following the reac-
tions people had to the film in person
and on social media. People laughed
when Javed, the character based on my
teenage self, rhapsodizes about how in
America you can be anyone you want to
be — the distance between the hope and
reality so stark.
The most encouraging thing to me
has been the extent to which the film
has connected with people so out-
wardly different from the characters in
the film. In New York, I had a couple
from New Jersey approach me after a
screening to tell me how much they
connected with the film. They had
never met any other British Pakistanis.
“You are just a Pakistani version of us,”
the man said. It seemed such a simple
statement but, in a time when the presi-
dent and his supporters seem deter-
mined to deepen divisions by saying
that certain communities who pray or
look a certain way have less right to
claim citizenship, it felt hugely signifi-
cant and cheering.
In “Long Walk Home,” written after
George W. Bush was elected for his
second term, Springsteen sang that the
“flag flying over the courthouse means
certain things are set in stone. Who we
are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.”
The America I fell in love from afar all
those years ago will have to take a long
walk home. Yet conversations with
Americans who were moved by the
story of a brown, Muslim boy from a
British town left me with hope.Sarfraz ManzoorSARFRAZ MANZOORis the author of the
memoir, “Greetings from Bury Park,”
and co-writer of “Blinded by the Light,”
a movie inspired by it.How Springsteen unites the worldThe
songwriter
and singer
gave hope to
working-class
boys in towns
thousands of
miles from
New Jersey.BRYAN DERBALLA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESSam Gyimah was one of the purged.
He’d been warned that if he supported
a bill to prevent a no-deal Brexit, his
political career in Prime Minister Boris
Johnson’s Conservative Party would be
dead. But like 20 other terminated
Tories, he put country before career.
“No deal would be catastrophic,” he
told me. “The Boris project is coming
off the rails.”
In just over six weeks as Britain’s
leader, Johnson has purged, and pro-
rogued, and pontificated, and postured,
and pronounced plenty of do-or-die
piffle (it looks like die right now). He
has lost his majority of one, his brother
Jo, Winston Churchill’s grandson, the
good will of many Tories and several
votes in the House of Commons. As for
“the people,” whom he claims to repre-
sent, Johnson never had them, having
been elected by 92,153 members of his
own party, most of them at the far end
of actuarial tables. Hubris, thy name is
Boris.
Yes, a grotesque hubris for Johnson,
with no legitimacy, to think that he can
railroad Britain out of the European
Union on Oct. 31 — the most conse-
quential political step in decades,
precipitating mayhem in industrial
supply chains, airports, ports and
hospitals, as well as the possible break-
up of the United Kingdom.
But the people voted for this in the
2016 referendum! No, they did not.
They voted for the smooth, orderly exit
promised by Johnson and his ilk. Cha-
os at Calais was not on the Brexiteers’
make-believe menu. There is no evi-
dence, none, that a majority of “the
people” want Johnson’s no-deal Brexit.“Johnson’s attempt to subvert Parlia-
ment spooked everyone,” Gyimah, a
former universities minister, told me.
“Most Conservatives were ready to
give him time, but this was one provo-
cation too many.”
He was referring to Johnson’s cyni-
cal maneuver to run down the clock on
a no-deal Brexit by “proroguing” Par-
liament for five weeks, no later than
next Thursday. Britain, as Gyimah and
others have now demonstrated, is still
a parliamentary democracy. Parlia-
ment is not a dispensable inconven-
ience sitting at the whim of the tal-
ented Mr. Johnson.
Now, cornered, Johnson wants an
Oct. 15 election, a move rejected by
opposition parties. He thinks he can
win it through a “people-against-Par-
liament” campaign with a hard-line
Brexit message that will swing sup-
porters of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party
to the Conservatives.
It’s a risky bet. John-
son has lost Scottish
Tories; he needs
those seats for a
majority.
Daily debacles
have defined John-
son’s misrule. His is
already a primer in
ineptitude — and he
hasn’t even tried to
buy Greenland. This
bumbling has not
gone unnoticed in the Britain beyond
Little England.
Still, Johnson is right about one
thing: Britain needs an election. It
cannot, at this point, decide its future
for the coming decades — and that’s
what Brexit will determine — without
the balance of political forces being
clarified. An election would in effect be
a form of referendum on the 2016 vote.
If the “Remainer” parties, principally
the Liberal Democrats, do well, the
election could be the forerunner of an
actual second referendum, based this
time on reality rather than fantasy.
The problem is that Mr. Overreach at
No. 10, a man borne aloft by the hot airof wit and charm but devoid of the
ballast of a moral center, has lost the
trust of all but his inner circle of
schemers.
So even Johnson’s push for an elec-
tion — on the face of it a plausible
means for the opposition to oust him —
meets suspicion that it’s just another
diabolical ploy to run down the clock.
Hence the current parliamentary push
to prevent an election before legisla-
tion that will make a no-deal Brexit
illegal is locked in. This in turn would
pressure Johnson to do what he’s
vowed never to do: seek an extension
beyond Oct. 31 for Britain’s exit. “I’d
rather be dead in a ditch,” he says.
That’s what happened to Muammar
Qaddafi.
The opposition wants to keep the
government in place for now, but make
sure it’s powerless. The government
wants to dissolve Parliament and call
an election in a bid to recover power.
Brexit is the ne plus ultra of riddle
multipliers. That’s because there’s noworkable way to do something so
obviously contrary to the British na-
tional interest.
Johnson once observed that his
chances of becoming prime minister
were “about as good as the chance of
finding Elvis on Mars, or my being
reincarnated as an olive.” So this gifted
buffoon, who could be dismissed as
inconsequential if he had not done so
much damage to his country, proves
that anything is possible. Johnson is
now more likely to return to earthly
existence as a twig than survive the
current storm.
The best outcome for Britain would
be an agreement to delay Brexit for
several months, with an election in
November. Trench warfare between
Parliament and Johnson will deter-
mine whether that happens. Johnson’s
hand is weak.
When the British stiffen, they tend
not to relent. Those 21 Tories are he-
roes. Where in Trumpland are 21 Re-
publicans with spines?Boris Johnson’s do-or-die debacleHis govern-
ment is
already a
primer in
ineptitude
—and he
hasn’t even
tried to buy
Greenland.Boris Johnson speaking at the House of Commons on Wednesday.JESSICA TAYLOR/U.K. PARLIAMENTRoger CohenopinionObituaries of Robert Mugabe, the former leader of Zim-
babwe who died in Singapore on Friday at the age of 95,
tend to divide his history into three eras: the revolution-
ary leader of the liberation struggle against white mi-
nority rule; the statesman who negotiated with Britain
and the white rulers for the creation of Zimbabwe and
soon became its first leader; the despot who ruthlessly
crushed his opponents and drove his land into penury.
But it is hard to determine when one period began or
another ended. There were signs of the budding tyrant
already in Mr. Mugabe’s dealings with revolutionary
comrades during the liberation wars of the 1960s and
’70s. And when Mr. Mugabe was finally overthrown by
the military in November 2017, long after he had laid
waste to his once-prosperous land and revealed his
dictatorial face, the generals treated him with almost
reverential deference. Announcing “Comrade” Mugabe’s
death on Friday, his successor, President Emmerson
Mnangagwa, spoke only of the “icon of liberation,” with
no mention of his ouster.
That reverence for the leaders of liberation struggles,
however unfortunate their post-liberation rule, is not
unique to Zimbabwe, or to Africa. The fight against
colonial rule invariably becomes the founding narrative
of a new nation: It was so in the United States, and even
more so in developing nations that achieved independ-
ence after World War II. Mao Zedong’s huge portrait
still gazes down on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, where
the movement against the chairman’s authoritarian
legacy was so brutally crushed, and Fidel Castro is still
revered across much of Latin America, though he drove
Cuba into economic ruin and more than a million coun-
trymen into exile.
Some African nations have been especially loath to
strip the halos off revolutionary heroes, given the insta-
bility of countries shaped more by the imperial designs
of European rulers than by ethnic boundaries. Hon-
orifics like “comrade” still echo the romance of revolu-
tionary Pan-African ideologies. As late as 2015, with
Zimbabwe already in ruins and Mr. Mugabe unwelcome
in much of the world, the African Union appointed him
chairman for the year.
Yet the same zeal, tenacity, loyalty and ruthlessness
required to wage a struggle against a colonial power
become handicaps in trying to lead a country. Nelson
Mandela in South Africa is among the few revolutionar-
ies who made a smooth transition. And Mr. Mugabe,
partly by virtue of his longevity, must rank among the
most spectacular failures, driving a rich, well-educated
and promising country to the point where the central
bank was printing 100-trillion-dollar bills — that’s
$100,000,000,000,000 — that barely covered a bus fare.
Mr. Mugabe was sufficiently different from the carica-
ture of the revolutionary dictator in other ways to en-
sure that historians will study him closely. He was a
revolutionary who didn’t wear camouflage fatigues; a
ruthless and murderous dictator who spent evenings in
his earlier years in the State House curled up with his
wife and a Graham Greene novel; an ascetic loner with
a passion for learning and an insatiable hunger for
power.
But the bottom line will have to be that however much
he achieved in his 95 years, he destroyed far more.The “icon
of liberation”
who led
Zimbabwe to
independence
also drove the
nation into
poverty.
MUGABE, A HERO TURNED DESPOT
President Trump’s Justice Department — for it is in-
creasingly clear that the department has been reduced
to an arm of the White House — has opened an antitrust
investigation of four auto companies that had the temer-
ity to defy the president by voluntarily agreeing to re-
duce auto emissions below the level required by current
federal law.
The investigation is an act of bullying, plain and sim-
ple: a nakedly political abuse of authority.
The department is supposed to prevent companies
from acting in their own interest at the expense of the
public. The four automakers, by contrast, are acting in
the public interest.
That the government of the United States would fight
to loosen emissions standards in the face of the growing
threat posed by climate change also boggles the mind.
Not content to fiddle while the planet burns, Mr. Trump
is fanning the flames.
The investigation is particularly striking because the
department has shown little interest in preventing cor-
porations from engaging in actual anticompetitive be-
havior. This summer, for example, the department
blessed T-Mobile’s acquisition of Sprint, a deal likely to
harm mobile phone consumers and workers, and to
impede innovation.
If the Justice Department wants to get serious about
antitrust enforcement, there are plenty of places to get
started. This investigation is an embarrassment. It
might as well wheel out the statue of Lady Justice and
replace it with a bronze marionette.The Justice
Department is
roughing up
Mr. Trump’s
political
enemies and
threatening the
environment.
APARODY OF ANTITRUST ENFORCEMENT
A.G. SULZBERGER,Publisher
DEAN BAQUET,Executive Editor
JOSEPH KAHN,Managing Editor
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor
JAMES BENNET,Editorial Page Editor
JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Deputy Editorial Page Editor
MARK THOMPSON,Chief Executive Officer
STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON,President, International
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA,Senior V.P., Global Advertising
CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing
HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P.,International Circulation
HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific
SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial OfficerPrinted inAthens, Denpasar, Beirut, Biratnagar, Doha, Dubai, Frankfurt, Gallargues, Helsinki, Hong Kong, Islamabad, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Kathmandu, Kuala Lumpur, Lahore, London, Luqa, Madrid, Manila, Milan, Nagoya, Nepalgunj, New York, Osaka, Paris, Rome, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei, Tel Aviv, Tokyo.
The New York Times Company620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018-1405, NYTCo.com; The New York Times International Edition (ISSN: 2474-7149) is published six days per week. A.G. SULZBERGER, Publisher ©2019 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. To submit an opinion article, email: [email protected], To
submit a letter to the editor, email: [email protected], Subscriptions: Subscribe.INYT.com, [email protected], Tel. +33 1 41 43 93 61, Advertising: NYTmediakit.com, [email protected], Tel.+33 1 41 43 94 07, Classifieds: [email protected], Tel. +44 20 7061 3534/3533, Regional Offices: U.K. 18
Museum Street, London WC1A 1JN, U.K., Tel. +44 20 7061 3500, Hong Kong1201 K.Wah Centre, 191 Java Road, North Point, Hong Kong, Tel: +852 2922 1188, DubaiPO Box 502015, Media City, Dubai UAE, Tel. +971 4428 9457 [email protected], FrancePostal Address: CS 10001, 92052 La Defense Cedex, France, Tel. +33 1 41 43
92 01, Commission Paritaire No. 0523 C83099. Printed in France by Paris Offset Print 30 Rue Raspail 93120 La Courneuve