It’s Just Wrong, and They Should Say So

This week: if you think handing asylum seekers to the Taliban is good politics, you’re a bad person. Also: on the non-existence of purple; and a map of the mid-Tudor world.

The Taliban is a terrorist organisation which happens to run a country. It has committed atrocities including denying the most basic rights to women and girls, repeatedly massacring civilians, and committing cultural genocide against the peoples of Afghanistan. The asylum seekers that Nigel Farage’s party is looking at paying the Taliban to take, by contrast, are the people who fled from that appalling regime. No wonder, as some enterprising Telegraph hack has confirmed, the Taliban is open to discussions.

Over 3,600 coalition soldiers, including 457 Brits, died in the war in Afghanistan, if anyone cares.

I’ve been trying to come up with a take on this for two days and I can’t get beyond: this is wrong. It’s just wrong. That doesn’t seem like enough, I know – but so baffling has the discourse around this become that it just seemed worth doing the internet equivalent of saying it out loud, partly as a line in the sand, but also frankly to check I haven’t gone completely f*cking mad.

My horror here isn’t really even directed at Farage: his comments were disgusting, sure, but he’s a Type 6 on the Bristol Stool Chart in a pinstripe suit, that’s par for the course. (Also, he – unlike an unnerving number of other people in this debate – seems to have realised he’s gone too far and rowed back.) My real shock is reserved for the news organisations like the Times which are treating the plan as savvy but unworkable, rather than an obvious moral abomination; or the PM’s official spokesman, who sneered at its practicality without at any point questioning the premise that collaborating with war criminals to rid yourself of inconvenient people might be in some way wrong.¹

Future historians will surely debate at great length whether it was economics or media culture or simple incompetence that led the Starmer government’s moral compass to break so completely – that in its obsession with electoral calculation, it entirely forgot that politics had a moral component, too. But they surely won’t debate who, out of the Taliban or the people who fled from their regime, were actually the baddies.

Sometimes, these things are not complicated. Paying despots to take a bunch of refugees who fled them in the first place is wrong. And the refusal of my government – or much of the media – to say so disgusts me.

An Extremely Awkward Gear Change

The improved and updated edition of The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything will be available in the shops in just 15 days. (That’s a week tomorrow, maths fans!) Not only is it a great read, it’ll make an excellent birthday, early Christmas or autumn equinox present for the nerd in your life.

If you want a copy TOUCHED BY MY VERY OWN HANDS, which it would have to be when I sign and dedicate it for you, you can order one from Backstory here. Please do, I don’t want to look bad in front of the book shops.

If, on the other hand, you’re a North American, you may be interested to know that A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders, as they called it on that side of the pond, is currently half price in the Barnes & Noble sale.

On the non-existence of purple

Did you know that purple doesn’t exist? The internet certainly knows that. Google the phrase “purple doesn’t exist” and you will find articles explaining the fact published by everyone from Mail Online to Unilad to the Economic Times of India. And little wonder: the internet loves to tell you that everything you know is wrong, and what better “well, actually” could there be than “that colour you’ve been able to identify since you were five years old isn’t really there”?

So: the colour purple doesn’t exist. Alice Walker lied to you.

Except – it does. It obviously does. Everyone from Cadbury Chocolate to the UK Independence Party to the artist at one time known as Prince has made use of purple in their branding. Emperors stretching from Rome to Japan have clad themselves in purple, because a particular rare dye made from the secretions of sea snails – Tyrian purple – made it the most exclusive of all colours. There’s a fairly reasonable chance that, if you look around, you’ll spot something purple right now. (I did – it’s a massive pillow.) Purple absolutely definitely exists. You apologise to Alice Walker, right now!

To explain how purple can be legitimately said not to exist, even though it very definitely does, we need to remind ourselves of some primary school science. Colour is a property of the wavelengths of light. The visible spectrum – which ranges from around 350 nanometers at the violet end to around 750 nanometers at the red end, and which represents a mere 0.0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum – can be represented by a spectrum, made famous by both the cover of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and rainbows. Do stop me if I’m going too fast for you here.

Great album, to be fair. Image: D-Kuru/Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 3.0.