if they are not themselves to be fatal-
ly hidebound by the imperial past, must
abandon their streak of self-hatred and
the colonially induced dark area of self-
denial in their African slave heritage.
So says Hirsch, a self-confessedly ‘privileged’,
Oxford-educated woman raised in suburban
Wimbledon back in the Thatcherite 1980s.
Just as the Jamaican nationalist Marcus
Garvey banned adverts for skin-bleaching
chemicals from his ‘black pride’ newspa-
per Negro World, so Hirsch calls on black
women to chuck out their straight hair wigs
and bottles of skin bleaches and go Afro-
natural. Even Meghan Markle had tight-
curled hair as a child. It is only a shame that
her hair is now so straight (or ‘tall’ as they
say in Jamaica).
An amalgam of autobiography and
polemic, Brit(ish) scorns all perceived
nostalgia for the imperial past. To Hirsch
it seems surprising — shocking, even —
that some older Commonwealth citizens
should hold romantic opinions of empire
or display a pious Anglo-patriotism. (‘It’s
a British thing, this nostalgia for empire,’
she complains.) In all likelihood, such
nostalgia has more to do with emotions
invested in remembrance of the past —
the legendary period of their youth, when
lives were organised and given mean-
ing by the Union Jack. Hirsch, less for-
giving of nostalgia, has argued elsewhere
that Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square
should be torn down: the high seas admi-
ral was a pro-slavery ‘white supremacist’
and cad. Driven by a powerful sense of
racial awareness and grievance, Brit(ish)
can be tough-going at times, especially if
you happen to have a sense of humour.
(Zora Neale Hurston the author is not.)
Dead earnest, Hirsch explores her Judeo-
Ghanian ‘identity’ as it played out in the
south-west London of her teens, when she
pretended to be Jamaican (‘jerk chicken and
urban youth culture’ seemed more cool to
her than her African identity). The author’s
partial ‘whiteness’, inherited from her Jew-
ish father, seems to have had an ambivalent
effect. On the one hand, ‘I am the eternal
outsider’, Hirsch tells us; on the other, her
paler shade of black has conceivably made it
easier for her to deal with the world at large
— that is, with white people.
She has worked as a high-profile journal-
ist on the Guardian and was called to the Bar
(what could be more overwhelmingly white
and stuffed with antiquated, precedence-
ridden fogeys than the London Inns of
Court?). Still, Britain’s class and racial
divides remain stubbornly in place, we are
told, again and again. An insidious ‘shadism’
has ensured that a minority of white (or near
white) people occupy key government posts,
while the black (or near black) population
remains separated from them by the pow-
erlessness and poverty of their lives. Maybe
that is because Britain is 45 per cent white.
At any rate, Britain must come to terms
with its involvement in the slave trade (‘the
biggest atrocity of human history’) and the
arrogance attendant on its empire-build-
ing. Hirsch is critical even of Black History
Month because it implies that black history
is only worth studying for four weeks. And
she perceives a racist element in white mid-
dle class feminism (Reni Eddo-Lodge did,
too, in her recent book Why I’m No Longer
Talking to White People About Race).
In some ways an admirable guide to
our mixed-up, mixed-race modern nation,
Brit(ish) is nevertheless something of
a penance to read, as everything in it is seen
through the narrow, hating and occasional-
ly hateful lens of race and colour. No doubt
that is the point, yet most British people
today surely take no such great interest in
colour, do they? Predictably, online trolls
and bloggers have tried to show Hirsch up
as a crypto-racist. In 1960s and 1970s Brit-
ain, not uncommonly, conservatives depict-
ed Garveyite Black Power movements as
an equivalent, anti-white racism, ‘Enoch
Powellism’ in reverse. Needless to say, the
analogy is absurd: people with white skin
generally enjoy the liberty of not having to
define themselves in terms of race. But, as
Zora Neale Hurston said of Marcus Garvey,
Brit(ish) could do with ‘lightening up’ in the
humour department.Now it can be told
David Edgerton
The Doomsday Machine:
Confessions of a Nuclear
War Planner
by Daniel Ellsberg
Bloomsbury, £20, pp. 420Armageddon and Paranoia:
The Nuclear Confrontation
by Rodric Braithwaite
Profi le, £25, pp. 387Deployed in vastly exaggerated numbers,
nuclear weapons were maintained in place
not just by secrecy, but by banalities and lies.
The atomic bomb has been, from the very
beginning, both extraordinarily public and
secret. Everyone knew about what was
regarded as a momentous development in
human history. It kept many clichés in cir-
culation for decades — humanity as scien-
tific giants and ethical infants; the desire for
international control; the idea of moral sci-
entists who did, or should, reject the sweet
blandishments of the bomb. At the same
time, insiders knew and did things which
were the deepest and most troubling secrets
of the deep state. For those few in the know,
and assiduous critics, there was a huge mis-
match between rhetoric and reality.
Sir Rodric Braithwaite and Dan-
iel Ellsberg, both in their late eight-
ies, were once insiders. Both were the
products of first-class education (Ellsberg
was a member of the super-elite — the Har-
vard Society of Fellows), and both served as
military officers in the 1950s before taking
up elite careers — Braithwaite in the Brit-
ish diplomatic service, ending up as chair-
man of the Joint Intelligence Committee;
Ellsberg among the economic theorists in
the RAND corporation, as one of the ‘wiz-
ards of Armageddon’.
Ellsberg became famous in the early
1970s as the man who leaked the Pentagon
Papers, a huge internal report on the fail-
ing war in Vietnam. He did not go to prison
because the US government acted illegal-
ly to discredit him, actions which were of
a piece with the Watergate break-in. Both
men have now written compelling books
which are deeply critical of their peers
and the system they worked for, one with
British understatement, the other with
ruthless limpidity.
Ellsberg’s main work from the late 1950s
onwards concerned nuclear strategy. He
reveals here that he stole far more nuclear
documentation than the Vietnam material,
and proposed to release both, fully expect-
ing to go to prison for life. The nuclear
papers were lost in a tropical storm, and thus
remained secret and Ellsberg free. He now
tells, in the form of a memoir which takes up
the first part of his book, what exactly he wasSubscribe for
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or go to http://www.spectator.com.au/T021A0330 333 0050 quoting A152Ahttp://www.spectator.co.uk/A152AINTRODUCTORY OFFER:Iran is our natural allyThe National Trust in trouble Boris in LibyaThe lesson of HoustonDATES WITH DIANAMY TAKICan you forgive her?Isabel Hardman and Matthew Parris on Theresa May’s fate