His Prominence

 For some reason, the name of Cecil Rhodes still connotes the utmost in prestige in our society. Elite students still scramble over themselves each year to secure a Rhodes Scholarship—despite the fact that it is named for a man who effectively stole a bunch of land in South Africa, dispossessed its inhabitants, reduced them to a system of virtual slavery, and governed for years as a capitalist dictator. 

Surely here is proof of that old truism—remarked by Henry Fielding among others—that if a swindler only swindle on a large enough scale; a robber only rob enough territory; a murderer only kill enough people—he will cease to be condemned as a criminal and start to be sanctified as a statesman. For "power has never lacked eulogists" (Elias Canetti; Stewart trans.). 

The real Cecil Rhodes, after all—the historical Cecil Rhodes—was by all accounts a pretty straightforward highwayman and marauder; a base crook of the sort whom—when he appears in non–English-speaking countries and without the blessing of charters from the British crown—we have no trouble recognizing as little more than a cartel boss running a glorified criminal syndicate. 

Mark Twain summarizes some of Rhodes's methods, in his 1897 book Following the Equator: 

Mr. Rhodes and his gang [...] are chartered to rob and slay, and they lawfully do it [...] They rob the Mashonas and the Matabeles of a portion of their territories in the hallowed old style of 'purchase!' for a song, and then they force a quarrel and take the rest by the strong hand. They rob the natives of their cattle under the pretext that all the cattle in the country belonged to the king whom they have tricked and assassinated. They issue 'regulations' requiring the incensed and harassed natives to work for the white settlers, and neglect their own affairs to do it. This is slavery[.]

What strikes one most about Twain's account of the Rhodes enterprise—in the indelible South Africa section of his book (the last and probably the strongest section of Twain's great anti-colonial travelogue)—is how cruelly Rhodes misused even his own supporters. Of course, we all know there is no honor among thieves—but it still surprises and offends on some basic snobbish level to realize there is no honor among founders of prestigious Oxford scholarships. 

Twain's account of Rhodes's role in the Jameson raid, for instance, reveals a man willing to gamble with the lives of hundreds if not thousands of his own most enthusiastic fans if it can serve his greed and ambition. First, he was willing to exploit the British "Uitlanders" of Johannesburg, by blabbing their ill-considered request for aid to the world and enlisting the enthusiasm of the then–Poet Laureate (as Twain points out, the Johnnesburgers quickly tried to retract the letter, but Rhodes continued to use it to serve his ends). 

As Twain puts it: Mr. Cecil Rhodes, Premier of the British Cape Colony, millionaire, creator and managing director of the territorially-immense and financially unproductive South Africa Company; projector of vast schemes for the unification and consolidation of all the South African States, one imposing commonwealth or empire under the shadow and general protection of the British flag, thought he saw an opportunity to make profitable use of the Uitlander discontent above mentioned—make the Johannesburg cat help pull out one of his consolidation chestnuts for him.

Then—perhaps most disgracefully—Rhodes gambled with the lives of hundreds of young men who signed up to invade the Transvaal with Jameson. At least 27 of these young idiots died in the course of the raid, being denied thereby the opportunity to grow up into more considerate men, who might have thought better some day of flagrantly violating international law by attacking a nation at peace with one's own government—and all thanks to Mr. Cecil Rhodes. 

In spite of this, Rhodes seemed to suffer no loss of esteem and favor in the eyes of the British crown and its apologists in the press. As Twain observes: One fact is sure: he keeps his prominence and a vast following, no matter what he does.

And here is where one finds oneself ever less able to evade comparisons with another glorified mafioso and adventurer of our own time—the one currently sitting in the White House. As Trump famously put it in 2016: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" And he has since gone on to shoot and blow up a great many people around the world, and of him too it could still be said, as Twain said of Rhodes, he keeps his prominence and a vast following, no matter what he does.

Trump's own version of the "Jameson raid" after all was January 6; and he too continues to escape accountability for it to this day. On that day in 2021, of course, he, like Rhodes, used his own supporters as a cat's paw. He too gambled with their lives without risking his own. When his supporters—who trusted his word enough to believe that they were actually saving democracy from a "stolen election"—were risking decades of prison time to raid the Capitol, Trump was tweeting about it from the safety of his dining room. 

A federal judge recently ruled, in the civil case stemming from these events, that Trump's tweets on that day were "official acts" and therefore covered by the Supreme Court's newly-minted doctrine of presidential immunity. But the judge's description of Trump's actions leaves little doubt as to his opinion of the moral character of the president's role on January 6* (and "[t]here is a tremendous point there," as Twain mordantly puts it: "It can be put into the form of a maxim: Get your formalities right—never mind about the moralities"): 

Plaintiffs acknowledge that President Trump was told at 1:21 p.m., minutes after he returned to the White House from the Ellipse, that rioters had started to overrun the Capitol. [...] He then sat in the White House dining room to watch the events unfold. [...] A moment of crisis was now before the President of the United States. A coordinate branch of the federal government was under attack. It fell to him to decide how the Executive Branch would respond. He could have used persuasion or force, or both, to put down the riot. But he chose instead to remain idle and, eventually, post the 2:24 p.m. tweet. The tweet arguably poured gasoline on the fire, but that President Trump, in Plaintiffs’ view, exacerbated the crisis is no less an official act than if he had exercised the powers of the presidency to quell the riot. 

Rhodes himself could not have done better in exploiting a batch of ignorant young fools who were willing to risk their lives on his behalf—without ever directly putting his own life and reputation in harm's way. Just as Trump always left himself with just enough wiggle-room as to the extent of his direct involvement in egging on the riot, Rhodes too always ensured he had a margin of plausible deniability. But both men's actions leave little doubt in the eyes of history as to their willingness to reap the benefits of others' illegal actions on their behalf. 

Rhodes was himself the only man who could have effectively postponed Jameson, but that would have been a disadvantage to his scheme; indeed, it could spoil his whole two years’ work, writes Twain. And so, he maintained a strategic and significant silence, as he puts it. 

So too, as Judge Mehta observes, Trump could have "used persuasion or force" as President of the United States to stop the attack on the U.S. Capitol by his own supporters—but instead, he "arguably poured gasoline on the fire." 

But no matter how shamelessly Rhodes conned and exploited his own biggest supporters, Twain writes, he never lost his popularity. And neither, seemingly, can Trump manage to alienate his own fans—even when he puts their lives and freedom in jeopardy and effectively robs them of their life-savings. 

[H]e keeps his prominence and a vast following, no matter what he does, writes Twain. He tricks the Reformers into immense trouble with his Raid, but the most of them believe he meant well. [...] He raids and robs and slays and enslaves the Matabele and gets worlds of Charter-Christian applause for it. He has beguiled England into buying Charter waste paper for Bank of England notes, ton for ton, and the ravished still burn incense to him as the Eventual God of Plenty.

That last one sounds particularly familiar. Many of Trump's own supporters proved willing to fork over actual U.S. dollars in exchange for $TRUMP meme coins—crypto tokens which then proceeded to lose an estimated 97% of their value. Investors reportedly lost $3.8 billion dollars on the scheme. Many of them were Trump's most ardent grassroots supporters, who believed in his word so much that they entrusted their own savings to his venture. 

And yet, even after they have been beguiled into exchanging meme coin waste paper for U.S. Treasury notes, ton for ton, the ravished still burn incense to him as the Eventual God of Plenty. (The willingness of many retail investors to vote infinite confidence in Elon Musk's unprofitable ventures, based on his starry-eyed visions of the future, also seems relevant here.)

What is the secret of his formidable supremacy? Twain asked. One says it is his prodigious wealth—a wealth whose drippings in salaries and in other ways support multitudes and make them his interested and loyal vassals; another says it is his personal magnetism and his persuasive tongue, and that these hypnotize and make happy slaves of all that drift within the circle of their influence; another says it is his majestic ideas, his vast schemes for the territorial aggrandizement [...]; and another says he wants the earth and wants it for his own, and that the belief that he will get it and let his friends in on the ground floor is the secret that rivets so many eyes upon him and keeps him in the zenith where the view is unobstructed.

To quote the poet John Davidson:

If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,

He would take it, ask for more, and eat them all.

How many of the purported "great men" of history have in fact been little more than monsters of infantile narcissistic appetite of this sort? 

Who's to say there will not be a "Trump scholarship" some day for which ambitious youngsters will compete? This may sound like a dystopian horror to us—but no more so than the ongoing prestige and recognition of the Rhodes name must be for the descendants of the Matabele. History has plenty of times before christened common swindlers, crooks, and murderers with the surname "The Great," as Fielding observed, if they happen to practice their crimes on a large enough and lasting enough scale. 

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue, writes Twain. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law. Christian governments are as frank to-day, as open and above-board, in discussing projects for raiding each other’s clothes-lines as ever they were before the Golden Rule came smiling into this inhospitable world and couldn’t get a night’s lodging anywhere.

And they are still at the same tricks to this day. We now have the U.S. government claiming the right to "run" Venezuela because it happens to have the misfortune of existing in the Western half of the globe ("we are taking back our hemisphere," as our Secretary of Defense put it); just as we have the Russian government claiming the right to invade Ukraine in order to secure its "sphere of influence" (which Twain calls "a courteous modern phrase which means robbing your neighbor").

In 150 years England has beneficently retired garment after garment from the Indian lines, until there is hardly a rag of the original wash left dangling anywhere. In 800 years an obscure tribe of Muscovite savages has risen to the dazzling position of Land-Robber-in-Chief; she found a quarter of the world hanging out to dry on a hundred parallels of latitude, and she scooped in the whole wash. [...]  Some have been hard at it in the borders of China, in Burma, in Siam, and the islands of the sea; and all have been at it in Africa. Africa has been as coolly divided up and portioned out among the gang as if they had bought it and paid for it. And now straightway they are beginning the old game again—to steal each other’s grabbings. 

And who's to say that in another hundred or a thousand years, we will not sanctify our current robber chieftains as more "Great Men" and titans of history, whose name we will be proud to bear over our diplomas and within our CVs? (A Trump Fellowship? A Putin Scholarship?) To do so is no more than custom; and as Twain says, custom sanctifies all things. 

In many countries we have chained the savage and starved him to death; and this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to it; [...] In many countries we have burned the savage at the stake; and this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to it;[...] In more than one country we have hunted the savage and his little children and their mother with dogs and guns through the woods and swamps for an afternoon’s sport, and filled the region with happy laughter over their sprawling and stumbling flight, and their wild supplications for mercy; but this method we do not mind, because custom has inured us to it; [...] In many countries we have taken the savage’s land from him, and made him our slave, and lashed him every day, and broken his pride, and made death his only friend, and overworked him till he dropped in his tracks; and this we do not care for, because custom has inured us to it; [...] In the Matabeleland today—why, there we are confining ourselves to sanctified custom, we Rhodes-Beit millionaires in South Africa and Dukes in London; and nobody cares, because we are used to the old holy customs, and all we ask is that no notice—inviting new ones shall be intruded upon the attention of our comfortable consciences. 

[...] 

There are many humorous things in the world, Twain concludes; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.