America [3]

Last year, I said that I didn’t think it mattered which way the US election went. Trump, I said, would claim victory regardless of circumstance: he would either perpetrate the kind of electoral fraud that he spent four years accusing the Democrats of perpetrating against him, or else he would seize power in an actual coup. Either way, there would be a kind of civil war, and the UK would have to decide which side to support.

I now see that this was a comforting fantasy on my part. I wanted to believe that although Trump would certainly win, he would not win legitimately. That would have allowed me to say that the Prime Minister and the King ought not to treat with Trump and allowed nice Americans to say Not My President with some level of plausibility. I was, in short, in denial. I was not ready for Trump to actually win a second term.

Trump may not command the support of an overwhelming majority of the population. No party in a democracy ever does. Our own dear Kier had a landslide victory even though two thirds of the people who bothered to get up off their bottoms and cast their vote would have preferred a different Prime Minister. He won fair and square according to the rules he was playing by, but it would be futile to claim that he has a massive popular mandate.

Slightly more than half of America didn’t want Trump to be their President. But equally, slightly more than half of America didn’t want Harris to be their President. And slightly more Americans didn’t not want the white crook than didn’t not want the black woman. And seventy seven million people voted for him. Seventy seven million.

In 1987, about four million more of my fellow countrymen wanted Mrs Thatcher as their leader than wanted Neil Kinnock to do the job. But I didn’t see this as a metaphysical crisis. I saw it as a difference of opinion. Like Ronald Reagan, I was pretty confident that if the earth had been invaded by aliens, both sides would have buried their differences. I even thought that Mrs Thatcher probably agreed with me that it would be better if people were well educated and healthy and had somewhere to live.

You don’t need to explain to me that Mrs Thatcher’s theory—that the best way to bring about a Good Life for everyone was to sell the council houses, close the mines, cut taxes for the rich and abolish free school milk—didn’t work. I agree with you: that’s why I have always been a Trot rather than a Tory. But I am prepared to contemplate the possibility that Mrs Thatcher did believe it: that she was mistaken as opposed to actively evil.

Of course, the Tories did actively evil things. All politicians, by their nature, sometimes do. I don’t think that a conversation about how your lot tried to cosy up to General Pinochet, yeah, well, your lot had tea with Gerry Adams is particularly profitable.

Unless, I suppose, you think that the Right in general and Mrs Thatcher in particular have always been either corrupt or plain sadistic. Unless you think that the question was never about calcium deficiency in the post war era, and always about taking treats away from small people just for the hell of it. [1]  And yes; the superstitious belief that if only we were allowed to hurt criminals than there wouldn’t be any crime does sometimes shade into a ghoulish enjoyment of the idea of torture. When they started to talk about hanging, you sometimes felt that there was something more than disinterested penal theory behind their eyes. No motive is ever pure. I imagine that they would say that we had a superstitious belief that if only you were kinder to hooligans they would miraculously stop hooliganing and that our approach wasn’t showing any particular sign of working better than theirs. But I am on the whole inclined to think that Olden Days Tories were not closing the mines because they had a fetish for unemployed Welsh people but because they thought it was economically the correct thing to do.

There was sex, of course: clause twenty nine and the Alton Bill. And there was race: Thatcher felt that Enoch Powell had made some good points but should have moderated his language. Everyone always thinks that the years when they were regenerating from kids into young adults were the best years. At least, they think that those years were the normal years; that the way things were done when you were a teenager is the way you would naturally expect things to be done and everything since has been a temporary aberration. I am as bad. I wonder why McDonalds replaced the perfectly good Wimpy Bar. I am inordinately fixated on the first twenty seven issues of one particular comic book and two seasons of one particular children’s TV show. If I imagine a school, I imagine a 1978 comprehensive school, and am surprised (often, but not always, pleasantly) to hear how much schools have changed in the last half-century. I don’t think that the 1970s and 1980s were a golden age. I think we normalised an awful lot of shit.

But I would make two claims:

1: I grew up in a world where politics was often an honest disagreement between two more or less plausible points of view

2: I grew up in a world where the people who were actually evil mostly pretended not to be.

    But maybe, after all, they are not Fascists.

    One of them made a Hitler salute at a rally. But that could have been a random hand gesture.

    Then another one made a Hitler salute, but that could have been a joke about the first one making a Hitler salute.

Then a third one made a Hitler salute, but that could have been a gesture of defiance because the liberals had made such a fuss about the first two.

So maybe, after all, they are not Fascists.

The Leader described himself as a King, but that could have been a joke. “The King is dead, long live the King” is a well-known turn of phrase: if the Mayor of Bristol said “Traffic congestion on the Gloucester Road is dead, long live the King” I wouldn’t understand him to be making a play for Charles’ job. Quite bad taste to make that joke so relatively soon after the late Queen’s passing, and when the King hasn’t been so well, and where the young Prince of Wales can hear it; but perhaps these colonials aren’t as good at nuance as we Brit’s are?

The Leader put out a photograph of himself wearing a crown, but that could have been a joke at the expense of the people who complained about the first joke. The idea of a Republican King is quite funny, if you think about it. The idea of a Republican King who describes democratically elected leaders of other countries as dictators is also quite funny.

Maybe they are not fascists.

One of the Leader’s supporters proposed changing his country’s law to allow the Leader to stand for re-election in 2028, even though the law currently says you only get two goes. The Leader would be eighty-six in 2032 and a big part of his election campaign was that his opponent was too old for the job at eighty-two. But he isn’t responsible for what his supporters say.

Another group of the Leader’s supporters have formed an organisation to campaign to allow him to stay in power until 2032. They are using an image of the Leader in robes with a laurel crown, explicitly comparing him with a Roman emperor.

But the leader isn’t responsible for his over-enthusiastic followers. And they may also be joking.

They really may be joking. I said before that I can imagine speaking at a public meeting in the days when there was still a Labour Party and saying something like “I read in the papers that I am a Trot, so viva la revolucion”. I would be saying it because I am obviously not a revolutionary, not because I am.

I read the other day that a school teacher had been fired for threatening to smack a naughty pupil: he had been joking, the pupil knew he had been joking, everyone knew he had been joking, but everyone agreed that a teacher simply can’t make those sorts of jokes.

Maybe they are not fascists.

When a lessor elected official told the Leader that they would obey the federal law, the dear Leader replied “I am the federal law”.

The dear Leader said that if a person is fighting to save his country, then anything he does is legal. [2]

Some of the things we have read about the Leader and his supporters may not, in fact, be true.

It may even be that some of the things I have written here are not, in fact, true.

The Leader’s tame scientist did not, in fact, say that billionaires were an oppressed class and that other people had no right to entertainment and should roll about in the mud where they belong; although the fact that everyone believed it for a moment tells us something.

This kind of thing may be written by satirists. It may be published by the Leader’s opponents to make him look bad. It may, indeed, be published by the Leader’s supporters so they can accuse the Leader’s opponents of publishing them in order to make them look bad for trying to make him look bad. Or the fake reports may be published by the Leader’s supporters in order to sow doubt and make it easier to deny that the Leader has said something dangerous and stupid when he really has said something dangerous and stupid.

These tactics were widely used by the principled individuals who fought a noble campaign to keep women and black people from writing reviews of computer games and winning prizes at science fiction conventions. They called them “false flag” operations. There were also false false flag operations and false false false flag operations. It was bloody confusing.

Yes, I have, as a matter of fact, read George Orwell’s essay on Fascism. And he was right: in 1945, people applied that word much too widely, without any clear sense of what they meant by it. (Everyone always applies words too widely without any clear sense of what they mean.) But people should not be allowed to point to the essay and conclude that “Fascism doesn’t mean anything” or “People will shout Fascist at anything they don’t like”. That stops us from calling a right wing militarist populist authoritarian ethno-nationalist a right wing militaristic populist authoritarian ethno-nationalist.

The Leader and his Acolyte both openly celebrated the relative success of the Very Far Right Alternative Fur Deutschland party in the German election. The Leader’s Acolyte, indeed, stated that “only the AfD can save Germany.” [3]

The Leader and his Acolyte have both spoken positively about Nigel Farage.

The Leader’s Acolyte has talked about giving trillions of pounds to Nigel Farage.

The Leader’s Acolyte believes that a civil war in England is inevitable, and implied that last summer’s failed pogrom was the first stage of it.

The Leader’s Acolyte has spoken positively of Tommy Robinson Whose Real Name is Yaxely Lennon.

The Leader’s Acolyte appears to have endorsed Andrew Tate’s comedic bid to style himself unofficial Prime Minister of the UK.

But after all, they may not be fascists.

The Left bandy that word about far too much.

[1]  I remember school milk. It was never a treat; always a ghastly lukewarm ordeal. One of the earliest punishments I remember was for wasting your milk.

[2[  Save his country from what?  The current UK leader of the opposition says that only the Conservative Party can save western civilisation. Save it from what?  The last Prime Minister but two wrote a book entitled “Ten Years To Save The West”. Save it from what?

[3] Save Germany from what? 

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America (2)

We all know the story of the Good Samaritan. It is probably the most famous story in the Christian Bible. The other main contender would be the Prodigal Son. They are only found in Luke’s Gospel: perhaps Matthew and Mark didn’t think they were very important. Luke says that he is offering his Gospel as an improvement on the others, so maybe there was an honest difference of opinion about what mattered and what didn’t.

Both stories seem to say that you ought to love a person even if they are, or have become, unlovable; even if they have offended you in the worst way possible; even if they are, on base and ground enough, your enemy.

And whatever preachers may sometimes claim, Jesus doesn’t say “And this will blow your mind! The good father welcomed the wicked son back! And try and get your head around this! The Samaritan was the true neighbour!” He seems to take the conclusion for granted.

If you asked a hundred people to retell the story, ninety seven of them would say that it is about a Jewish traveller who was set upon by highway robbers and was helped by a traditional enemy of the Jews who happened to be passing at the time. So the reverse is true: Jews should help Samaritans when they are in trouble; and by extension, everyone should help everyone.

The two travellers who ignore the wounded man are certainly Judeans: one of them performed religious ceremonies in the temple and the other was a member of a caste who did other kinds of religious work. Priest is a job description and Levite is a tribal designation: all Priests were Levites but not all Levites were Priests. I imagine my Jewish readers will explain that it was rather more complicated than that. My guess is that the Priest and the Levite were on their way to Jerusalem, to perform some kind of ceremony there, where the injured man was travelling from Jerusalem to the commercial town of Jericho. The text doesn’t say that; but if they had all been going the same way along such a dangerous road wouldn’t they have set out together?

So the message might be primarily racial: the two Jews didn’t help the Jewish man, but the Samaritan did—so aren’t all these racial distinctions pretty silly?

It might have been a more generally anti-temple message. The two professional god-botherers don’t act on their beliefs; so what was the point in having them to begin with?

It might even have been an anti-cult message: killing animals on the altar according to the correct procedure doesn’t help an injured man. Only practical action does.

There have been attempts to allegorise the story. The injured man is the human race; the first two travellers represent Religion; the third represents Jesus himself. William Langland rather delightfully identified the Priest with Abraham, and therefore with Faith; the Levite with Moses and therefore with Hope and the Samaritan with Jesus and therefore with Charity. Which only works if you don’t know what a Samaritan is.

But nothing in the text particularly says that the traveller was Jewish. If he was travelling away from Jerusalem, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe the point of the story isn’t “The Samaritan helped his enemy.” Maybe the point of the story is “The Samaritan didn’t bother to ask who the traveller was: the fact that he needed help was sufficient.”

Nearly everyone would say that this was the core of the Christian message. You ought to love your neighbour, even if he’s your enemy. Your enemies are also your neighbours. There are no such things as enemies. Love asks no questions. Love fulfills the law. On this command hangs the Torah.

Very many people would say that this is the “true” Christian message, and that all the God stuff was thought up years later by Popes and Emperors in order to keep the common people docile.

In Sunday School, we were taught, implicitly, that before Jesus came along the idea of loving your neighbour had never occurred to anyone. The Jews were much too busy washing their hands and avoiding shellfish to have considered the idea of kindness. It’s a shockingly antisemitic idea. It was still a shockingly antisemitic idea when a very clever writer said that Jesus was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change.

Do gurus and prophets introduce new ideas into the world? Or do they merely re-iterate old ones? There is a funny scene in the Vicar of Dibley when the sincere but dippy clergywoman tells a parishioner that God wants us to love our enemies. The parishioner asks if that includes the ex-boyfriend who cheated on her. “Yes, it does; unfortunately, it does,” she replies. But she is quite clear that that is why Christmas is worth celebrating: because it marks the birth of the man who introduced this astonishing idea into the world.

Eugene Peterson’s Bible paraphrase says that the lawyer in the story was looking for a loophole. I don’t think that’s in the text, but it’s a pretty good supposition. “The Torah says we should love everyone, but that surely doesn’t mean everyone everyone, does it?” It may be that some canon-lawyers of the time sometimes said that “neighbour” means “in-group”: that “love your neighbour” meant “love fellow, Torah observant, Judeans” and that Jesus’ take on this was “there are no out groups, ever” [1] 

Is helping out people who you have every reason to hate a specifically Christian virtue?

Or is helping out people who you dislike simply part of the Tao, the universal morality that all human beings have at all times believed in?

Was a British Quaker Red Cross volunteer patching up a German soldier at the Somme doing something on the level of a Jew lighting a Hanukkah candle or a Muslim putting off his dinner until the sun goes down: a cult practice which may well be spiritually beneficial for them but which you wouldn’t expect anyone outside of their faith group to join in with? Or was he doing something that everyone ought to do? Was Jesus reminding the Pharisee of something that he already knew but had forgotten; or asking him to judge his Torah against a higher universal law? Or was he just saying something like “In the future, the distinct thing about Christians will be that they are nice to people they dislike, in the same way that the distinct thing about Sikhs is their head-ware and the distinct thing about Jews is that thing they do to baby boys?”

You see, currently, there is a charitable organisation that specifically provides medical assistance and shelter for people who have been mugged on the Jerusalem-Jerico highway. They have volunteer doctors and nurses, and reciprocal arrangements with all the local inns. The medics are volunteers who get called away from their regular jobs, but the medical equipment and the ambulances and the inns cost money, and the state doesn’t provide them with any help at all. They rely entirely on charitable donations. They often make appeals on my Facebook feed.

And whenever they do, comments appear underneath.

“Why are you helping Samaritan travellers” they say “Charity begins at home!”

“Why are you providing a taxi-service for Samaritans who are invading my country?” they say.

“If he didn’t want to be mugged, he should have stayed at home!” they opine.

“There is a fifth column of radical Marxist lunatics who want to replace Judeans with Samaritans” they say “And also to let boys use the girls’ bathrooms!”

“All these Samaritans travelling down the road are drug addicts, rapists, and child abusers” they say 

“And when they get to Jerusalem, they eat the dogs. They eat the pets. They eat the dogs. That’s where Covid came from. Join the dots. Wake up, sheeple. You are traitors!”

My question is: are the people who write this stuff evil?

Or are they merely not Christian?

Have they stepped outside the Tao and rejected the universal morality of the entire human race?

Or have they merely rejected some highly specific Christian taboos?

Do they need to be evangelised?

Or simply guillotined? [2]

There was an advertisement on Facebook for Co-Op Car insurance. It was illustrated by a picture of an older, dark-skinned lady driving a motor car.

The following comments appeared beneath the advertisement.

• ✔✔✔

• ✔✔

• ✔

• Co-op UK?? [Graphic of gravestone marked “White Couples in TV Adverts”]

• Africa?

• Do you operate many stores in Africa? You need to update your ad people. They must be showing the African one in England.

• Any discount for white folks?

• [Image of a monkey]

• [Image of four young people of colour, labelled: Netflix: The Beatles]

• Sadly you are right

• Box ticking

The emoji of the tick or tick-box has replaced the swastika and the NF icon as the sigil which racists use to identify themselves. It represents a racist conspiracy theory that a shadowy cabal forces insurance companies to employ dark skinned models in their advertising. They are issued, metaphorically, with forms, and only employ dark skinned people so they can metaphorically tick the metaphorical “we employ dark skinned people” box on those forms. Racists post the racist tickbox emoji whenever a non-white person appears on social media in any context—an actor, a photographic model, a journalist, a politician or even a cartoon character. The message is absolutely clear. No dark skinned person ever gets a job on their own merits and if the mysterious shadowy cabal were abolished, there would be no visible dark skinned people on social media ever again.  

The single word Africa and the question about Co-Op stores in Africa needs no explanation: it refers to the obviously racist belief that the UK should be a Caucasian ethno-state; that dark-skinned people are by definition not British, and the only place you would expect to encounter a dark skinned person would be on a different continent.

The racist photo of the Beatles in black-face is based on the racist conspiracy theory that because some TV companies sometimes employ dark skinned actors in some roles, it follows that no light skinned actor is ever employed in any role, even of an historical character who had obviously light skin. A glance at recent movies about, e.g, Bob Dylan, Amy Winehouse, Ruth Ellis and the Munich Olympics would reveal this to be racist bullshit. I grant that the guy from the boy-band was played by a chimpanzee.

Until recently, American racists applied the racist acronym “CRT” to books and organisations that they didn’t think were racist enough. School text books that implied that dark-skinned people existed and had a history and that slavery was not an unqualifiedly good thing were said to be pushing a “CRT” agenda. [3]

The racist codeword “CRT” has been largely supplanted by the racist codeword “DEI”. “DEI” carries the same connotations as the racist green tick: it implies that any dark skinned person in any job has been put there by a mysterious shadowy cabal with sinister ulterior motivations. Ncuti Gatwa, Kamala Harris, Rishi Sunak, Kemi Badenoch and Michelle Obama have all been described as “DEI hires”. If the made up thing called DEI were magicked away, the world would be reassuringly mono-racial again.

No-one in Europe has ever used Diversity, Equality and Inclusiveness in this sense: we have tended to talk about Positive Discrimination or protected characteristics. When British racists use the term they are parroting the racist language they have learned from American racists.

When I was at school, children whose reading and writing was substantially below what would be expected of their age group were called “remedial”. Now they would be termed “special needs”. In my mother’s time, they would have been called “backward”. My grandfather might still have spoken of “the remove” (as in “fat owl of the”). Never at any time has anyone in the UK used the word “retarded”, and, thankfully, “retard” has never been used as a term of abuse.

In the UK, we have a Labour Party, who were at one time thought to be Socialists: their opponents sometimes called them Commies or even Trots. We have a Conservative party, who are often called Tories. Somewhere in between, not as far to the left as Labour used to be and not as far to the right as the Tories are now we have the Liberal Democrats. They used to be called just the Liberals; then they formed an alliance with the Social Democrats and became the Liberal/SDP Alliance, then they merged and became the Liberal Democrats. For a brief and embarrassing period they were part of a Conservative/LibDem coalition, which helpfully shortened to Condems.

Never at any time in this country has “Liberal” meant socialist or radical; it has always meant middle of the road or moderate. If you were the kind of person who wanted to imply that people who were not quite as far to the right as you were mentally handicapped, the natural English portmanteau would be “Trots-medial” or “Spe-Socialist-al Needs or “Rem-omunist” English quizzlings who use the term “Libtard” are parroting offensive language that they have picked up from American duh-brains.

The comments that I have quoted are from the very thinnest end of the racist wedge. I have also seen references to corn-bread, fried chicken and cannibalism; claims that dark skinned people are uniformly drug addicts, that they all carry knives and infectious diseases; and are invariably in the UK illegally.

People who write this sort of thing do not have legitimate concerns or grievances. They are not putting valid ideas in intemperate language. Certainly, some journey, some process, has brought them to where they are now. It may very well be that they can be brought unto true repentance. Nothing is evil in the beginning. But right here, right now these people see a photograph of an old lady driving a motorcar; a family throwing a stick for a dog on a National Trust Property, or an office worker ordering a cheeseburger at McDonalds and see, not an old lady, a family, or an office worker, but a black old lady, a black family or a black officer worker; and are immediately moved to excrete terms like foreigner, African, drug-addict, refugee, invader, tick-box, or DEI from their arsehole of a mouth.

A discussion about how they became evil and how they might be cured from being evil is well-worth having. But you and I are not saying that dark-skinned people can’t be British, and they are. You and I have never tried to set fire to a hotel or stood outside a mosque chanting blasphemous slogans. Say misguided, if you want to. Say lowlife racist worm. But we have lost and for the foreseeable future they are in charge.

[1]  Richard Dawkins asserted in the God Delusion that “love your neigbour” only ever meant “love your fellow Jew”. So it is just possible that the original meaning of the parable was “Love not only Judeans, but also Galileans and Samaritans —but obviously not those pagan bastards.” But that’s not how the church has understood the story for the past two thousand years.

[2]  “You don’t seriously think that people who write racist comments on social media should be beheaded?”

No, obviously not. But I couldn’t work out what else to write in this space.

“Hanged” would sound as if I was seriously advocating capital punishment.

“Put up against the wall and shot when the revolution comes” sounds too Communist, and also too frivolous.

“Exterminated” is okay if you are thinking of Daleks, but less okay if you are thinking of Hitler.

“Burned at the stake” is even worse.

Strike out “guillotined” and insert your choice of

“Have their membership of the human race rescinded”

“Permanently exiled to the Phantom Zone”

“Sent to their bedrooms and told to stay there until they are ready to be nice”

[3]  In the racist newspeak, “agenda” always has a negative connotation: homosexuals and dark-skinned people have “agendas”: Christians and the Republican party do not.

[Continues]

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