Section:GDN 1J PaGe:4 Edition Date:190821 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 20/8/2019 17:48 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian Wednesday 21 Aug ust 2019
4 Opinion
T
he historian AJP Taylor argued
that Europe was plunged into the
fi rst world war by the inexorable
operation of train timetables. He
was not ignoring historic rivalries
between the continent’s great
powers, nor truncating the sequence
of diplomatic failures that turned
competition into military confrontation. But at a critical
moment, carefully laid mobilisation plans could not
be deactivated. Escalation to calamity proceeded
metaphorically and literally on rails.
Reading about the summer of 1914 in the summer
of 2019 is salutary. It is a reminder to keep anxiety
about Brexit in perspective. There are times when the
language of bloody apocalypse is justifi ed. Operation
Yellowhammer is not one of them. But there are echoes
of an older, bloodier emergency: the nation’s course
irreversibly changed by a combination of cultural
complacency, political pomposity, bogus patriotism and
unthinking submission to the timetable.
Years before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was
assassinated , most statesmen across the continent
thought a European war would sooner or later have
to be fought. Some expected it would be glorious and
short. Others anticipated the horror but said it would
be spiritually purgative. As martial drums grew louder,
pacifi st voices grew fainter. A fog of fatalism descended.Even with a century of hindsight it is impossible to
discern a point of no return, a junction at which all future
paths converged on disaster. If history doesn’t aff ord
that view, how are we to know in real time when such a
moment is close, or has been passed?
Sometimes a weight of bad choices already made
presses down on politicians, driving them deeper into
an error that they see plainly enough. “ I am in blood/
Stepped in so far that should I wade no more/ Returning
were as tedious as go o’er ,” Macbeth tells his wife at the
mid point of his tragedy.
There is a less poetic version of the same thought
captured on a 1964 tape-recording of a conversation
between United States president Lyndon Johnson and
McGeorge Bundy , his national security advis er. The
choice was between propping up the corrupt South
Vietnamese regime or abandoning it to the Viet Cong.
One path led to military quagmire, the other to pillory
at home for surrendering Asia to communism. “I don’t
think it’s worth fi ghting for and I don’t think we can get
out,” said Johnson. “It’s the biggest damn mess.”
What felt like limited choices was really the limit
placed on imagination by misjudg ments inherited from
predecessors: military hubris, ignorance of Vietnamese
history, misapplication of cold war ideology to a post-
colonial liberation struggle. Johnson then added his
own mistakes. By the time US national humiliation
was complete in the mid-1970s, it was a bipartisan
monument assembled across political generations.
Brexit is not a military atrocity, and there is no moral
equivalence implied by comparison with Vietnam. Still,
I sense that our incumbent Johnson is also trapped in
the mid way point of a longer tragedy, the parameters of
which we are unable to grasp.I
ntuitively, the return of parliament next month
feels like the beginning of a fi nal act. In truth, we
cannot plot the current moment on a narrative
arc that bends out of sight into the future. Many
pro-Europeans expected that by this point public
opinion would have shifted defi nitively against
Brexit. The strategic folly of surrendering a lead
role in a continental power bloc was advertised in
every scene during the article 50 negotiations, alongside
lurid examples of prominent leavers’ mendacity. But the
great Damascene moment has not come. It might never
come. An orderly transition is still available. Gloomy
forecasts can be wrong. In turbulent scenarios there will
be foreign capitals, collaborationist civil servants and
defeatist remainers to blame.
Zoom out still further, and Brexit could look like the
prelude to a wider unravelling. If the European project
is rattled by fi nancial crisis and fractured by vandalistic
nationalism, the debate will be whether Britain was wise
to get out when it did, or criminal in failing to stay at the
critical juncture. One side will celebrate Brexit as a heroic
leap from the fi re escape, the other will deplore it as the
arsonist spark that ignited an inferno.
If, by contrast, the EU is resilient and our neighbours
fl ourish, it might still take many years for the foolishness
of Britain’s self-relegation to be accepted as fact. The
error will have to be composted under a layer of events,
mulched by transitions of power until it beds down as
consensus. Sometimes it needs a new generation of
politicians to call some policy a bad business from the
start because they weren’t there at the start.
We are transfi xed by frenzy on the stage before us:
manoeuvres in anticipation of a no-confi dence vote.
We suppose that all possible routes are still open. Pro-
Europeans must hope that there is a way back, that it is
not a just a choice of gradient on the downward slide.
Yet I sense fatalism creeping into formerly strident anti-
Brexit voices. I glimpse shudders of dread that events are
being driven not by the MPs who will vote in the coming
weeks but by a critical mass of cowardice, ignorance
and ideological prejudice that was reached months ago,
maybe years. The past is harrying the present.
It could be an illusion. I hope I am wrong. But already
it feels as if decisions not yet taken this autumn are
shrouded in a mist of inevitability – the accretion of a
million mistakes already made. Looking back, maybe
historians will judge that the point of no return, the laying
of the rails, happened long before the summer of 2019.H
ow comfortable would you feel
typing the word “lesbian” into
a search engine in the offi ce? If
your answer is “not very”, then
you’re probably aware it’s a term
that more often than not returns
salacious results. It’s the online
refl ection of the far-too-frequently
sexualised reaction to female same-sex relationships.
Now that has changed. After a long-standing
campaign by the Twitter account @SEO_lesbienne and
the French news site Numerama – which highlighted
that typing in “lesbian” returned a wall of porn – Google
has announced a tweak to its algorithm. Users are
now met with Wikipedia , BBC News and newspaper
comment pieces. (There was, however, when I searched
still a paid ad for lesbian porn on page one of the results.)
Google made the change not long after it displayed
a rainbow fl ag on its logo during Pride. Perhaps the
company realised that explicit search results such as
this appearing underneath the symbol of LGBT+ rights
was not a great look.
But this isn’t the only area of concern for Google
when it comes to its algorithms reducing LGBT+ people
to their sex lives. Gay YouTubers have found that their
videos are being demonetised, made inaccessible via
search and age-restricted. This despite the fact many of
these videos consist merely of interviews, advice and
comedy sketches, and often are specifi cally targeted
at young people who may be struggling with their
sexuality and turn to the Google-owned YouTube as a
source of support.
Two content creators, Bria Kam and her wife,
Chrissy Chambers, along with six others, are now
suing YouTube for “discrimination, fraud, unfair and
deceptive business practices”, and “unlawful restraint
of speech”. This has a real-world impact, as Chambers
says: “Age restriction means we can’t reach the young
women who look up to us, who need us as a sense of
community and support .”
Meanwhile, although these LGBT+ creators are
not being allowed to earn money from advertising,
YouTube is permitting homophobic adverts to run
alongside them or as pre-rolls, including anti-gay
marriage missives. There’s also a lack of action on
homophobic comments. And Google is far from the
only culprit. Twitter, notoriously, is slow and in many
instances useless at cracking down on online hate
speech and harassment (in whatever form it comes in).
Prejudice against LGBT+ people is on the rise:
leaders who have used homophobic language are being
elected across the globe – from Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro,
who once said he would prefer a dead son to a gay one,
to Boris Johnson , who once referred to “tank-topped
bumboys” in an old column. That makes it more
important than ever for the internet platforms that so
monopolise our attention, opinions and politics to get
on the right side of these issues.Hannah Jane
Parkinson
Just like 1914,
the plunge into
calamity now
feels inevitable
There’s more
to lesbians
than our sex
lives, actually
Soldiers say goodbye to their families at Victoria station,
London PHOTOGRAPH: TOPICAL PRESS/GETTY IMAGESRafael
Behr
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