Lord Palmerston’s Multicultural Human Zoo

 

Speaking from the vantage point of Lord Palmerston’s British Empire circa 1850, Schiller Institute U.S. President Webster Tarpley chaired the panel on “Lord Palmerston’s Multicultural Zoo” at the Schiller Institute’s conference on Feb. 20. Tarpley served as tour guide through the centuries, and as the “choral” backdrop to the historical drama, introducing each of the seven speakers in turn and concluding the panel. What follows is Tarpley’s introduction. Subtitles have been added.

I am now standing in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament in the part of London called Westminster. It is the year of grace 1850. Around me lies Victorian London, the London of Dickens and Thackeray, of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle. This capital city is now the center of the greatest colonial empire the world has ever known, shortly to embrace between one-fifth and one-fourth of the total population and land area of the Earth. Although in theory there are still empires ruled by the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Belgians, and the Danes, all of these, in this year of 1850, are but the satellites of the British Empire. Britain is the mistress of the seas, the empire upon which the sun never sets. It is the new Rome on the banks of the Thames.

The empress is Queen Victoria, who is largely occupied with Prince Albert in her business of breeding new litters of Saxe- Coburg- Gotha to take over the royal houses of Europe. A quarter- century from now Victoria will be made empress of India to reward her for so much breeding. But for all of Victoria’s wealth and power, Britain is not really a monarchy; it is an oligarchy on the Venetian model, and the most powerful leader of the British oligarchy in these times, between 1830 and the end of the American Civil War, is Lord Palmerston.

Henry Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston. Palmerston is the man the others – the Russells, Disraelis, and Gladstones – simply cannot match. Palmerston was first a Tory, then a Whig, always a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, and for 35 years there is scarcely a cabinet without Palmerston as foreign secretary or prime minister. In London they call him Lord Cupid, a Regency buck always on the lookout for a new mistress, perfectly at home in a ménage à trois. On the continent they call him Lord Firebrand. The schoolboys of Vienna sing that if the devil has a son, that son is Lord Palmerston. “Pam” is an occultist who loves Satanism and seances. And here, between Big Ben and the Foreign Office, are the haunts of this nineteenth- century devil, Lord Palmerston, old Pam.  (more...)

Lord Palmerston’s Multicultural Human Zoo