Brendan O’Neill

Left's moral superiority fails intelligence test

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:03:22 +0000

The Australian, 11 February 2012

IF you thought liberal snobs were insufferable enough already, with their tendency to view anyone who disagrees with them as dumb and dangerous, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

This week, their heads got even bigger and their sense of moral superiority soared when they were provided with actual scientific proof that they are better than us mere mortals in the mob.

Yes, it is now an “empirical fact”, as one commentator put it, that liberals are smarter than right-wingers and other allegedly prejudiced folk.

According to a study published in the Canadian journal, Psychological Science, people with high IQs are likely to become liberals, whereas individuals with “lower cognitive abilities” tend to gravitate towards “more socially conservative right-wing ideologies that maintain the status quo”.

In plain English - for any stupid right-wing people reading this - if you’re bright you’ll become a lefty and if you’re dumber than a bag of hammers you’ll veer to the right. Why? Because apparently people with low IQs are drawn towards political creeds that “provide psychological stability” and “a sense of order”, which they’re more likely to find in conservatism than in PC circles.

It is testament to the arrogance of many modern liberals that they seized upon this study as cast-iron confirmation of their moral superiority. From The New York Times to The Guardian, commentators who have always felt instinctively better than the rabble could now claim scientific proof it was true.

The study shows conservatism is “the refuge of the dim”, British columnist George Monbiot said. “It feels crude, illiberal to point out that the other side is more stupid than our own”, he said, before crudely and illiberally pointing out precisely that.

Another commentator says the study could be a great debate winner: “Next time you call a group of right-wingers idiots, you can back yourself up with one word: Science!” In short, why go to all the intellectual bother of having hard arguments with people when you can just throw a scientific paper at them and say: “Case closed: you’re stupid!”

There’s a brilliant irony to this use and abuse of science to prove liberal superiority: these supposedly clever liberals didn’t once stop to think that maybe the Canadian study is flawed, and that maybe it is a bit dodgy, when you consider the darker moments of the 20th century, to use so-called science to demonstrate one’s moral supremacy over other groups of people.

No sooner had these commentators’ self-congratulatory columns rolled off the presses than academic experts - people who know a thing or two about stats - were questioning the findings of the Canadian study. William M Briggs, Professor of Statistical Science at Cornell University in New York, described the study as “a contender for the worst use of statistics in an original paper ever”.

Ominously titled Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes, the study was carried out by two researchers at Canada’s Brock University. They reached their conclusion that “less intelligent children come to endorse more socially conservative ideologies as adults” by looking at research into about 16,000 people in Britain in the past 50 years.

These individuals’ IQs were measured at age 10 or 11; then later in life, between 30 and 33, they were asked about their ideological outlook. Lo and behold, the ones who were dumb as kids had morphed into right-wing adults.

Yet as Briggs and others point out, the research is based on a flawed understanding of IQ. Our intelligence levels are not fixed by the ages of 10 or 11. Some people become bright later in life, often in their teens.

In only measuring IQ at 10 or 11, and then political attitudes in the 30s, the Canadian study will have placed many of these late-developing intelligent people in the low-IQ box, so even people who are actually quite clever, yet who become right-wing, can end up being categorised as “less intelligent children” who became “socially conservative adults”.

What’s more, as Briggs points out, many of the questions asked of the subjects when they hit their 30s are so vague that, in effect, it was left to the researchers to work out whether their answers made them “conservative” or “liberal”.

Briggs says the study is a “textbook example of confused data, unrecognised bias, and ignorance of statistics”.

If liberals are so clever, why did they fall for such flimsy “science”? In the irony to end all ironies, their feverish embrace of this study rather confirms that its conclusions are inaccurate and that liberals can be as dim-witted as anyone else.

Even worse, there’s something very dubious about using science to try to claim political superiority. Did these liberals not pay attention in history class? If they had, they would know that, in modern times, only the most reactionary groups of people, from anti-democrats to eugenicists to a certain German political party, mashed together pseudoscience and talk of “low IQ” to try to prove that certain people are inferior.

Indeed, when Monbiot says the Canadian study confirms what good people already knew - that the Western world is full of “misinformed, suggestible voters” - he breathes life back into a virulent strain of 19th-century snobbery.

Monbiot says modern-day conservative politicians are forced to “appeal to stupidity”, which sounds a lot like a complaint made by a right-wing American thinker in the late 1800s, who said the problem with mass democracy is that politicians “are compelled to discard their political knowledge, their deliberate judgment, their calm and conscientious reflection all must be withdrawn or brought down to a conformity with those who possess the least of these qualities”.

For decades, eugenically minded authoritarians argued against the inclusion of black people and workers in democratic politics on the basis that they were of “bad odour and low intelligence”. Monbiot’s claim that, today, “low-information” sections of society lack the “cognitive abilities” and “capacity for abstract thinking” to take part in serious politics is simply a more PC version of that old low political outlook.

We have witnessed something very worrying in response to the Canadian study: a new trend among left-wingers to rehabilitate some of the worst prejudices of the old authoritarian right.

Read more of my articles for The Australian and other publications here.

In blaming mankind for causing snow across Europe, Greens sound eerily like 16th-century witch-hunters

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:09:56 +0000

Global Warming Policy Foundation, 7 February 2012

Whenever it snows these days, there will always be an eco-miserabilist at hand to tell us it is our fault – that freakish wintery weather is as much “manmade” as is hot weather and droughts. And so the Independent, having told us in March 2000 that, as a result of climate change, “snow is starting to disappear from our lives”, now tells us that, as a result of climate change, snow will become a more regular feature in our lives. Under the headline “Science behind the big freeze: is climate change bringing the Arctic to Europe?”, the Indie says the reason we’re all freezing is because manmade global warming caused “a dramatic loss of sea ice” in the Arctic, generating “a chill Arctic wind [which] has engulfed much of Europe and killed 221 people over the past week”.

In short, it is your fault and my fault and everybody’s fault that it has become so chilly recently. Our wicked antics, our carbon-emitting lifestyles, brought this Siberian winter upon Europe and killed all those homeless and old people. I wonder if environmentalists ever stop to think how much they sound like the witch-hunters of yesteryear? Because however radical Greens think they are, the truth is that this isn’t the first time in history there has been a fashion for blaming long or dark or weird winters on foul individuals and their apparently problematic lifestyles. No, the sixteenth-century hunters of evil witches did likewise, pinning the blame for cold weather on sinning mankind long before the Independent and other modern Greens had the same idea.

One of the key mad beliefs behind witch-hunting in Europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries was the idea that these peculiar creatures had warped the weather, that they had caused “climate change”. As the German historian Wolfgang Behringer argued in his 2004 book, Witches and Witch-Hunts: A Global History, “large-scale persecutions were clearly linked to years of extreme hardship and in particular the type of misery related to extreme climatic events”. During the Little Ice Age, the period of unusual coldness that kicked off in the mid-1500s, there was an upsurge in witch-hunting. There was another outburst in 1628, described by historians as “the year without a summer”, because once again people’s crops failed as a result of very cold weather and they were desperate to find someone to blame – usually a cranky old woman who could be labelled a “witch”.

As Behringer says, when the “climate stayed unfavourable or ‘unnatural’ the demand for persecutions persisted”. That is, whenever there was extreme coldness the hunt would start for someone evil to hold responsible. Johann Weyer, the sixteenth-century physicist who publicly opposed witch-hunting, described how one woman was forced to confess to causing climate change. A “poor old woman was driven by torture to confess – as she was about to be offered to Vulcan’s flames – that she had caused the incredible severity of the previous winter of 1565, and the extreme cold, and the lasting ice”. That old dear was clearly a very early victim of mankind’s climate-change hysteria.

Blaming man for causing today’s freezing conditions across Europe, and branding as an “idiot” anyone who calls this thesis into question, is a modern-day, more PC and less violent version of what those witch-hunters did to little old ladies suspected of “causing the extreme cold and lasting ice”. For all its scientific pretensions, contemporary Green hysteria actually speaks to an age-old human discomfort with change, especially unpredicted change, and to a deep authoritarian instinct to blame natural calamities on mystical or magical or plain destructive human beings. Let’s just be thankful that contemporary eco-witchfinders lack the authority to hurl people into “Vulcan’s flames”.

Read more of my articles in my archive here.

Comment le Bloody Sunday a-t-il été moralement pris en otage?

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:30:50 +0000

Liberation Irlande, 6 February 2012

Il y a quarante ans, 13 catholiques de Derry furent tués sous le feu des parachutistes britanniques. Un quatorzième mourut de ses blessures par balles cinq mois plus tard. Pendant des années, cet événement qui prit le nom de Bloody Sunday fut considéré par beaucoup de gens comme un acte d’accusation contre la domination britannique en Irlande. Mais aujourd’hui, il est utilisé pour justifier la domination britannique en Irlande. Ces dernières années, l’Etat britannique a porté un coup des plus subtils et des moins critiqués : être parvenu à s’approprier moralement cette atrocité, avoir pu transformer le Bloody Sunday, de preuve de la nocivité de son rôle en Irlande qu’il était, en un événement qui montre que la générosité britannique, générosité de type thérapeutique surtout, est requise vis-à-vis de cette nation irlandaise apparemment enfantine.

Les 14 hommes tués, dont sept adolescents, faisaient partie d’une foule de 10.000 manifestants. Ils réclamaient des droits égaux pour les catholiques en ce qui concerne le logement, l’emploi et le vote, dans cette entité dirigées par les protestants où les catholiques avaient deux fois et demi plus de chances de se retrouver au chômage que les protestants. Dans les quatre années qui précédèrent le Bloody Sunday, en particulier depuis une manifestation à Derry en octobre 1968 qui fut brutalement réprimée par la police locale, les tensions allaient croissant en Irlande du Nord. L’armée britannique arriva en août 1969 pour soutenir ses alliés protestants locaux, et l’internement sans procès fut introduit en août 1971. Toutes les manifestations furent interdites. C’est sur cette arrière-plan que des milliers de catholiques portèrent un défi aux lois d’exception britanniques et manifestèrent pour les droits civils le 30 janvier 1972.

La réponse des parachutistes transforma le conflit. Beaucoup de catholiques croyaient qu’il était possible de réformer l’Irlande du Nord pour en faire un endroit où davantage d’égalité règnerait, mais cette croyance fut déchirée par la force brutale avec laquelle la Grande-Bretagne semblait vouloir préserver le caractère sacré de l’une de ses dernières colonies. Un très grand nombre de nationalistes se radicalisèrent avec le Bloody Sunday, pensant que la liberté authentique ne serait obtenue qu’avec l’expulsion des des forces britanniques d’Irlande du Nord et l’unification de l’Irlande. Il s’ensuivit une longue et sanglante guerre entre l’IRA et les forces militaires britanniques.

Ces dernières années, l’histoire du Bloody Sunday a été ré-écrite de façon subtile mais radicale. Au moyen du révisionnisme universitaire et de l’opportunisme politique, parallèle aux 12 années de l’enquête sur le Bloody Sunday menée par Lord Saville de Newdigate (1998-2010), le Bloody Sunday est passé du statut d’événement historique à celui de tragédie privée, du statut d’incident à l’intérieur d’une guerre qui couvait depuis 4 ans et qui continua pendant 20 ans, à celui d’une malencontreuse rencontre entre des maniaques de la gâchette et des catholiques innocents. Le Bloody Sunday a été amputé de son contexte historique et transformé en une sorte de drame tragique en un acte où de méchants soldats britanniques (sévèrement réprimandés par l’enquête Saville) croisent des manifestants catholiques globalement présentables (les victimes ont été lavées de tout soupçon par Saville et des excuses ont été présentées par David Cameron, [premier ministre britannique] à leurs familles)

La ré-écriture du Bloody Sunday par l’Etat britannique a eu un double impact : d’une part, elle a contribué à déshistoriciser cette journée; d’autre part, elle a joué un rôle dans l’intervention thérapeutique de l’Etat au sein de la vie des gens en Irlande du Nord, eux qui apparemment ont besoin d’une nouvelle armée d’experts financés par l’Etat britannique pour les assister dans leur tête-à-tête avec leur passé tragique.

Cette soustraction du Bloody Sunday hors de l’Histoire se voit très clairement dans les conclusions de l’Enquête sur le Bloody Sunday. Contrairement à l’enquête initiale, menée par Lord Widgery en 1972 et qui fut largement interprétée comme une opération frauduleuse de blanchiement de l’armée, l’enquête Saville est considérée comme donnant la Version Officielle et Vraie des Evénements. Cependant, le véritable tour de force de Saville a été d’abstraire le Bloody Sunday du cours de l’Histoire dans lequel il était plongé, de retirer le 30 janvier 1972 de toute la continuité qui va de 1921 (mise en place de la partition du pays) passe par 1968 (début du soulèvement des catholiques) et arrive au début des années 1970 (l’Etat britannique répond en instaurant la loi martiale). Au lieu de cela, Saville, en invitant les familles des 14 victimes à exprimer leurs émotions en huis-clos et en réprimandant les soldats, réussit à réduire Bloody Sunday à une sorte de bagarre de cour d’école ultra-violente qui nécessite l’intervention du bon maître d’école qui examine les faits et distribue les blâmes.

Grâce à Saville, Bloody sunday est désormais vu comme une journée où certains militaires britanniques ont perdu la tête (Saville dit que les paras ont ‘perdu le contrôle’), ce qui causa grande détresse à certaines familles de Derry. Bien sûr, Bloody Sunday est l’occasion d’exprimer des griefs privés, mais c’est aussi un événement historique qui a des causes et des conséquences. Mais tout cela est évaporé loin du regard public dans un processus de souvenir officiel qui a ravalé le Bloody Sunday au rang du massacre de Dublane, avec des paras et des catholiques à la place du tireur solitaire et des enfants de l’école [l’équivalent en France serait l’épisode de Human Bomb avec des enfants de l’école primaire de Neuilly]
Saville n’a pas blanchi les paras individuels de leurs responsabilités dans les événements comme l’avait fait Widgery, non, il a procédé à un blanchiement beaucoup plus profond, transformant un tremblement de terre politique en une bataille de rue de cinglés. En focalisant l’attention sur les erreurs de jugement et la turpitude morale des soldats pris individuellement, Saville a blanchi le rôle historique de l’Etat britannique, se servant de la force pour dénier le droit à la démocratie et à l’égalité en Irlande.

De cette façon, en se faisant le procureur du Bloody Sunday, l’Etat britannique, auteur de l’atrocité, peut désormais rétablir son autorité morale en Irlande au moyen de cette approche apologétique vis-à-vis de ces événements historiques si tragiques. En réprimandant quelques uns de ses soldats et en offrant des excuses aux victimes, l’Etat britannique passe entre les filets de l’Histoire et de la politique du Bloody Sunday, parlant du haut de cette position de réparateur sans passions des offenses passées.

Aujourd’hui, un des moyens par lesquels la Grande-Bretagne justifie la continuation de sa présence en Irlande consiste à apparaître comme un manager moral du passé, un entremetteur de la réconciliation entre communautés blessées, et son détournement moral du Bloody Sunday a été un moment-clé de la réhabilitation de sa domination sur la nation voisine.

Répondant à la controverse au sujet du coût de l’enquête Saville (200 millions de £), Lord Eames, archevêque d’Armagh, a dit que le combat contre le « trauma psychologique » infligé par de tels événements n’avait pas de prix, étant donné que « la conséquence cachée, l’héritage des Troubles, est un mal d’une immense grandeur si difficile à apaiser ». Cette déclaration est révélatrice. Bloody Sunday est saisi sous les griffes d’un nouveau concept, selon lequel certains événements ‘hord de contrôle’ dans la guerre 1969-1994 a non seulement causé des traumatismes aux individus et aux familles, mais aussi un « traumatisme national », que les lords, les juges et les psychologues britanniques doivent soigner.

Et de fait, Lord Eames est également président du Groupe Consultatif sur le Passé, un vaste dispositif consacré à la gestion des séquelles psychologiques de l’héritage des Troubles, pourvu de sommes astronomiques qui inondent des enquêtes sur le « traumatisme national » (une enquête a estimé à 22% la proportion de personnes qui continuent de se battre mentalement avec les événements de la guerre). Le Bureau du Premier Ministre de l’Irlande du Nord a pondu un rapport intitulé « Vivre avec le trauma des Troubles », qui conclut en suppliant les acteurs politiques de reconnaître ‘les effet à long terme de ces événements traumatisants’.

Il s’agit-là d’une profonde réorganisation de l’autorité politique britannique sur le peuple irlandais. Autrefois, la Grande-Bretagne justifiait sa domination en Irlande en termes moraux ou nationalistes, parlant du besoin de protéger les protestants du Nord contre l’engloutissement dans la République irlandaise intolérante; désormais il justifie sa présence en termes thérapeutiques, se présentant comme celui qui prodigue la réparation psychologique à ceux qui souffrent, y compris à ceux dont a souffrance a été engendrée par des éléments britanniques ayant ‘perdu le contrôle’.

Cette nouvelle approche reproduit nombre de préjugés anciens, mais enrobés dans un emballage davantage politiquement correct. Auparavant, les propagandistes britanniques présentaient les Irlandais comme des êtres inconstants, enfantins, inaptes aux choses sérieuses impliquées par la direction de ses propres affaires; désormais ils les dépeignent sous les couleurs d’un peuple traumatisé, abîmé par la vie, ayant besoin du soin constant des experts psychologues et des évêques financés par le portefeuilles britanniques. Aujourd’hui comme hier, les capacités politiques et la robustesse morale du peuple irlandais sont mises en doute par des agents extérieurs dévoués au point d’assumer la charge de l’autorité sur eux.

Bloody Sunday n’a pas été cet incident de malades où les paras ont ‘perdu contrôle’. C’était une phase de la guerre menée par l’Etat britannique pour garder le contrôle sur sa colonie d’Irlande du Nord. Et aujourd’hui, 40 après, cet événement tragique est utilisé par ce même Etat britannique pour réaffirmer et consolider, en termes thérapeutiques, sa gouvernance de l’Irlande du Nord. Les historiens du futur seront sans soute étonnés de voir avec quel cynisme et quel succès la Grande-Bretagne a réussi à prendre le contrôle moral du Bloody Sunday.

Read more of my articles in my archive here.

An acceptable hatred

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:03:20 +0000

The Spectator, 4 February 2012

There is a brilliant irony to the campaign to ‘kick racism out of football’: its backers — the commentators and FA suits driving this petit-bourgeois push to clean up footie — think in a similar way and use very similar lingo to the football-terrace racists they claim to hate.

Indeed, they have fully appropriated the racial thinking of those dumb blokes who used to hurl bananas at black football players. But they have turned it against white working-class football fans, whom they look upon as childish, inferior, tribal and monkey-like.

Much has been made of recent, allegedly racial clashes on the pitch involving John Terry of Chelsea and Luis Suárez of Liverpool. These incidents are evidence, observers and activists tell us, that the mass sport of football is still riddled with oafish racist attitudes. In truth, as befits a sport in which 30 per cent of professional players are black (putting to shame the diversity targets of every other profession), racism is massively on the wane in Britain’s football stadiums. It is incredibly rare today to see a fan making monkey gestures or noises at black players, not least because he’d probably get a slap from one of his fellow fans.

Yet the more racism disappears from British football, the more the PC lobby becomes obsessed with it. That’s because it is through accusations of racism against football fans that these people can express, in seemingly nice, liberal terminology, their own loathing of the white mob.

Ian Buruma, echoing those bygone fans who viewed black football players as a different breed to ‘us’, says that football fans are ‘primitive and tribal’. Violence is always bubbling under the surface in this popular sport, he says, because it consists largely of ‘collective aggression… evoking the days when warriors donned facial paint and jumped up and down in war dances, hollering like apes’. Monkey chants are bad, but comparing ordinary footie fans to apes is OK, apparently.

The view of working-class fans as a peculiar tribe is widespread. A Telegraph writer recently slammed the ‘tribalism which has blighted English football’ and the ‘one-eyed outlook of hate-filled fans’. When Liverpool dared to defend its striker Luis Suárez, after he was given an eight-match ban by the Football Association for using racist language, the head of European football’s anti-racism body accused it of ‘whipping up’ ‘tribal fervour’.

Another key plank of the old racial thinking was that blacks were really overgrown children, less intelligent than us adult whites. This prejudice has also been rehabilitated by the self-styled warriors against racism in modern football. ‘The mentality of the football fan is essentially that of a child,’ says the Independent’s Brian Viner. ‘Children are unable to tune in to the adult world and the same applies to most football fans.’

Others cleave to the view that football fans are worse than childish simpletons — they are animals. A writer for the Evening Standard says fans are like ‘Pavlov’s foaming dogs’. The loathing on display at football matches has become ‘part of the fabric of the game’, he says. ‘The hatred is programmed now.’

The Guardian’s sometime sports columnist Marina Hyde rails against offensive chanting at football matches with all the censorious vigour that her granddad, the Tory politician Sir Rolf Dudley-Williams, campaigned against smutty TV dramas. She prefers to refer to fans who chant foul things as monkeys rather than dogs, labelling them ‘knuckle-dragging cretins’.

There it is again — the monkey image, that view of ordinary fans as knuckle-scrapers, hollering like apes or foaming like dogs as they express the tribalistic hatred that has been programmed into them. Behind the liberal veneer, these outbursts against uncouth fans are only a slightly more erudite version of throwing bananas at people you fear and loathe.

The campaigners against racism in football like to fantasise that, to the extent that the old racial hatred has declined in football stadiums, it is thanks to their awareness-raising campaigns. Nonsense. Attitudes changed because the more that working-class people rubbed shoulders with black people, working with them, living with them, cheering the same teams as them, the more they realised that these blokes were actually just like us. Such a breakthrough is impossible between today’s snobbish football observers and the white fans they love to hate, because these snobs will never, not in a million years, rub shoulders with those dogs and apes.

Read more of my articles for The Spectator and other publications here.

Making a meal of democracy

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:44:33 +0000

The Big Issue, 31 January 2012

Exactly what century are we living in? Like you, I thought it was the twenty-first, all zappy and hi-tech and interconnected, where we look with wide-eyed wonder at the strange behaviour and stiffness of those Downton Abbey characters.

Yet it seems we were wrong. It seems Britain has quietly been thrust back to the sixteenth century. For last week, a bishop – loved by God, sure, but elected by nobody – marshalled other bishops and some Lords and Ladies to strike down proposals put forward by elected government officials.

And having an unelected man of the cloth boss about politicians who were voted in by us, the people, doesn’t strike me as a very suitable thing in the twenty-first century.

In his capacity as a peer in the unelected House of Lords, the Rt Rev John Packer, Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, was rebelling against the Lib-Con government’s proposed welfare reforms, specifically its plan to introduce a benefit cap of £26,000 per household.

Now, it doesn’t matter a fig what you think about those reforms – I know good people who are in favour of the cap, and I know good people who are against it. Whichever side of the divide you find yourself on, though, you should be more than a little freaked out about the fact that, in 2011, it is still possible for holy men and wealthy men to block proposals put forward by the democratic representatives of commoners.

The bishop clearly sees himself as representing some higher, mystical authority than us mere plebs. So despite the fact that the government’s proposed reforms were a) put forward by elected officials and b) have the support of 76 per cent of the public, according to polls, still the bishop and his equally unelected mates sought to flamethrower them.

Packer said his amendment to the government’s reforms was about standing up for those who have “no voice” – specifically children, whom he claims will be hit hard by the government’s proposals. “Children have no vote in society”, he said. “This amendment goes some way to protect them.”

But there’s a reason children don’t have the vote – because they are not considered mature enough to have a say in the important business of running a country. That is something best left to adults, to morally autonomous men and women who fought for centuries for the right to influence local and national political affairs.

In claiming to speak “on behalf of children”, the bishop and his buddies in the Lords arrogantly elbowed aside the millions of adults who voted for the Tories or the Lib Dems and whose cross in a box should carry far more political weight than one man who happens to wear a cross around his neck.

Yet alarmingly, the bishop has been heartily cheered by many liberal columnists who normally balk at the idea of religious men meddling in political affairs and who aren’t usually fans of the unelected second chamber.

Kath Viner, deputy editor of the Guardian, tweeted that the bishop made her “proud to be from Ripon!” Other left-leaning commentators, exasperated by the Lib-Cons and clearly disillusioned with the masses too, are increasingly calling on the Lords to shoot down bills they don’t like.

One describes the snoring inhabitants of the Lords as “the only decent politicians left”. Another describes them as “a blessing”. Radical campaign groups such as 38 Degrees – which describe themselves as democratic – call on their supporters to “Email a peer” in order to try to convince him or her to vote against government measures on welfare, the NHS or whatever.

This is a very dangerous game. In calling on the Lords to fight battles on our behalf, the anti-Lib-Con side of the cultural elite are empowering the least democratic, most aloof section of the British political class.

Indeed, today, people like the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds do not derive their moral authority over the moronic masses from God – rather they get it from the likes of Polly Toynbee, from increasingly desperate members of the liberal classes who are so keen to get one over on the Lib-Cons that they will even sidle up to unelected peers and plead with them to use their aristocratic clout to put the Commons (and by extension commoners) in their place.

We shouldn’t flatter the second chamber in this way. We should abolish it. It is more than 200 years since Thomas Paine, that great British radical, described the House of Lords as “the remains of aristocratical tyranny”. If you are opposed to government proposals, then you should say so in free and open and mass debate, rather than trying to coax these descendants of tyranny to ride roughshod over the democratic realm.

Read more of my articles for The Big Issue and other publications here.

The moral hijacking of Bloody Sunday

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:37:36 +0000

spiked, 30 January 2012

Forty years ago today, 13 Catholics in Derry were shot dead by British paratroopers. A fourteenth man died from his gunshot wounds five months later. For years, what came to be known as Bloody Sunday was held up by many as an indictment of British rule in Ireland. Yet now it is used to justify British rule in Ireland. One of the most subtle and least-criticised coups carried out by the British state in recent years has been its moral appropriation of this atrocity, its transformation of Bloody Sunday from evidence that Britain plays only a destructive role in Ireland into an event which shows that British largesse, especially of the therapeutic variety, is still required in that apparently childish nation.

The 14 men who were killed, seven of whom were teenagers, had been part of a crowd of 10,000 protesters. They were demanding equal rights for Catholics in housing, employment and voting, in a sectarian, Protestant-run statelet where Catholics were two-and-a-half times as likely as Protestants to be unemployed. In the four years before Bloody Sunday, since a fledgling Catholic civil-rights march in Derry in October 1968 was brutally broken up by the local police force, tensions had been running high in Northern Ireland. The British Army arrived in August 1969 to back up Britain’s local Protestant allies and internment without trial was introduced in August 1971. All marches were banned. It was against this backdrop that thousands of Catholics in Derry defied Britain’s emergency laws and marched for civil rights on 30 January 1972.

The response of the paratroopers transformed the conflict. The belief of many Catholics that it was possible to reform Northern Ireland, to make it a more equal place, was shattered by the brutal force with which Britain seemed determined to preserve the sanctity of one of its few remaining colonies. Huge numbers of nationalists were radicalised by Bloody Sunday, coming to believe that it was only through the expulsion of British forces from Northern Ireland, and the unification of Ireland, that proper freedom could be attained. There followed a long, bloody war between the IRA and British military forces.

In recent years, however, the history of Bloody Sunday has subtly yet dramatically been rewritten. Through academic revisionism and political opportunism, and particularly through the 12-year Bloody Sunday Inquiry overseen by Lord Saville of Newdigate from 1998 to 2010, Bloody Sunday has been turned from an historic event into a private tragedy, from an incident in a war that had been brewing for four years, and which continued for another 20, into a freak encounter between trigger-happy paras and innocent Catholics. Bloody Sunday has been wrenched from its historical context and transformed instead into a kind of one-off tragic drama starring evil British soldiers (who were severely chastised by the Saville Inquiry) and mostly decent Catholic protesters (the victims were exonerated by Saville and their families were apologised to by David Cameron).

The impact of the rewriting of the Bloody Sunday story by the modern British state has been twofold: first, it has helped to dehistoricise that day; and second, it has helped turn it into a vehicle for therapeutic intervention into the lives of people in Northern Ireland, who apparently require a new army of British-funded experts to help them come to terms with their tragic pasts.

The removal of Bloody Sunday from history can be seen most clearly in the conclusions of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry. Unlike the initial inquiry into Bloody Sunday, carried out by Lord Widgery in 1972 and widely written off as a whitewash, the more recent Saville Inquiry is seen as providing the Official Version of Events. Yet the key accomplishment of Saville was its abstraction of Bloody Sunday from the historical flow, its removal of 30 January 1972 from any sense of continuity between 1921 (when Partition was enforced) and 1968 (when northern Catholics first started rising up) and the early 1970s (when the British state responded with martial law). Instead, through inviting the families of the 14 victims to express their emotions in a rarefied chamber while simultaneously slapping the wrists of the soldiers involved, Saville reduced Bloody Sunday to the super-violent equivalent of a playground fight that called for a good headmaster to intervene and make amends.

Courtesy of Saville, Bloody Sunday is now understood as a day on which certain British soldiers went OTT (Saville said the paras ‘lost control’), causing great distress to certain Derry families. Of course Bloody Sunday is an occasion of private grief - but it is also an historic event with causes and consequences. All of that has been airbrushed from the record by a process of official remembering which has reduced Bloody Sunday to something like the Dunblane massacre, only involving paras and Catholics rather than a lone gunman and schoolchildren. Saville didn’t whitewash the individual paratroopers’ responsibility for the events, in the way Widgery did; no, he partook in a far more profound form of whitewashing, turning Bloody Sunday from a political quake into an out-of-control streetfight. In focusing attention on the misjudgement and moral turpitude of individual soldiers, Saville whitewashed the historical role of the British state in using force to deny democracy and equality in Ireland.

Indeed, so thorough has been the lawyerly makeover of Bloody Sunday that the British state, the author of the atrocity, can now assume its moral authority in Ireland through taking an apologetic approach to such tragic historic events. In scolding some of its soldiers and offering apologies to their victims, the British state has extricated itself from the history and politics of Bloody Sunday, taking the elevated position of a dispassionate fixer of past wrongs. Today, one of the key ways Britain justifies its continuing presence in Ireland is as a moral manager of the past, a facilitator of reconciliation between hurting communities - and its moral hijacking of Bloody Sunday has been a key plank in this rehabilitation of its rule in a neighbouring nation.

In response to the controversy over the fact that the Saville Inquiry cost a total of £200million, Lord Eames, the Lord Archbishop of Armagh, said no price was too high when it came to combatting the ‘psychological trauma’ inflicted by such events, because ‘this hidden consequence or legacy of The Troubles is probably just as desperate a need to meet as any of the physical’. It was a revealing statement. Bloody Sunday has become bound up in a new theory which says that certain ‘out of control’ events in the war of 1969-1994 didn’t only cause trauma to individuals and families, but also ‘national trauma’, which it is incumbent upon Britain’s lords, lawyers and psychologists to address. Indeed, Lord Eames himself is co-chairman of the Consultative Group on the Past, a vast outfit devoted to working out how to deal with the psychological ‘legacy’ of The Troubles, while untold amounts of money have been pumped into investigating the scale of ‘national trauma’ (one academic survey estimated that 22 per cent of people in Northern Ireland are still struggling to cope mentally with events from the war). The Office of the First Minister of Northern Ireland has produced a report titled Living With the Trauma of The Troubles, which implores all political actors to recognise the ‘long-term social and psychological effects of these traumatic events’.

What we have here is a profound reorganisation of Britain’s political authority over the Irish people. Where once Britain justified its rule in Ireland in moral or nationalistic terms, talking about the need to protect the Protestants in the North from being swallowed by an ‘intolerant’ Irish Republic, now it justifies its presence in therapeutic terms, presenting itself as the neutral provider of psychological repair to suffering people, including those whose suffering was caused by British elements who ‘lost control’. This new approach reproduces many of the prejudices of old, only in more PC lingo: once, British propagandists presented the Irish as a fickle, childish people, not up to the serious business of controlling their own affairs; now, they depict them as a traumatised, damaged people, requiring the constant care of brain experts and bishops funded from the British purse. Both historically and today, Irish people’s political capabilities and moral robustness have been cast into doubt by outside actors keen to assume moral authority over them.

Bloody Sunday was not a freak incident in which paras ‘lost control’ - it was part of a war by the British state to maintain control over its colony of Northern Ireland. And now, 40 years on, that same tragic event is used by the same British state to reassert, in therapeutic terms, its governance of Northern Ireland. Historians will surely look back in amazement at how cynically and successfully Britain took moral ownership of Bloody Sunday.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Curbing free speech works against truth

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 09:09:17 +0000

The Australian, 28 January 2012

As of this week, it is against the law in France to say: “I don’t think the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians.” Under a new act, passed by the French Senate on Monday, anyone who denies or “minimises” the genocide suffered by the Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1915 could be jailed for one year or fined €45,000 ($55,500).

A government minister says the act is part of a drive to “repress racist and xenophobic statements”. That is, the French government is mainly concerned with preserving the safety and self-esteem of its population of 600,000 ethnic Armenians.

A senator in France’s upper house who voted for the act says it is also about establishing the truth in the face of “continuing denial of a tragic historical event”. Who could be opposed to the desire of the French state to protect its Armenian population from hurt feelings and its commitment to the project of affirming the truth about history?

Well, I am. I’m against this massively illiberal law, which is a disgrace to 21st-century Europe and particularly to that birthplace of modern liberty, France. Whatever the backers of the act might tell us, the truth is their speech-curbing piece of legislation will do nothing to establish historical truth or improve cultural attitudes towards Armenian people.

As it happens, I believe that what the Turks did to the Armenians during and after World War I was a genocide. From 1915 to the early 1920s, between one million and 1.5 million Armenians were either massacred or marched to their deaths by Ottoman Turkish forces. In some parts of the empire, entire Armenian populations were destroyed.

However, there’s still great scope for debate about the nature and the naming of these tragic events. For example, many people mistakenly see the Armenian genocide as a neat precursor to the Jewish Holocaust of World War II. They tend to read history backwards, projecting the terminology of the Holocaust on to the events of 1915, so that we end up being presented with two samey events from a pretty warped century in human affairs.

Some even refer to the “Armenian Holocaust” of the 1910s.

But there are great differences between the Armenian genocide and the Jewish Holocaust, not only in terms of scale but also in terms of intent.

It unquestionably involved the brutal wiping out of huge numbers of an ethnic group, but it lacked the design of the Nazi plan to liquidate every Jew on Earth. It was a brutal assault on a people, a genocide, but was it part of a carefully worked-out program of industrial extermination?

Historians must be free to raise questions such as that without the threat of being hauled before the courts for “minimising” Armenian suffering.

As the Socialist Party senator Jean-Pierre Sueur said, as he voted against the act, “it isn’t the business of the law, and especially criminal law, to intervene in the field of history and to rule in terms of historical truth”.

Indeed. Such clumsy and censorious state intervention into matters of historical interest do not help to clarify issues, far less get at the truth; rather they make things more cloudy, discouraging researchers from openly speaking their minds for fear of having their collars felt by the cops.

John Stuart Mill, that great English defender of freedom of speech, argued more than 150 years ago that truth can be established only through testy debate in the public arena.

In his fiery 1859 pamphlet On Liberty, he said: “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action.” In short, it is only by submitting your ideas or beliefs to the rigours of public discussion and ridicule that you can be sure they are correct, true, right. If you erect a moral or legal forcefield around your theory, denying anyone the chance to pick it apart, then it isn’t “the truth”; it’s a prejudice, a received wisdom, which you cleave to more out of habit than conviction.

The French government hasn’t established the truth of the Armenian genocide; it has turned the Armenian genocide into a state religion that you question at your peril.

As to the claim that this law will help improve cultural relations, the opposite seems to be the case. It has provoked huge tensions between France and Turkey (which denies it committed a genocide against Armenians) and it has angered Turkish people living in France. There have been hot-headed protests against the law, mainly by young French-Turks who feel their people are being singled out for a censorious slap on the wrists by the French state.

The end result of this legal instrument to control what people can think and say is that some communities feel relieved (the Armenians) but others feel aggrieved (the Turks). By turning a historic event into a contemporary flashpoint issue, France is stoking up tensions, not combating xenophobia. The whole debacle demonstrates the extent to which genocide has been politicised in recent years.

The motivation of Nicolas Sarkozy and his party in pushing the Armenia genocide law is really to garner support at home, not just among Armenians but also among native French people concerned about Turkey’s demand for more influence in Europe, and also to look tough abroad, to appear uncompromising in relation to increasingly powerful Eastern states.

Such cynical politicisation of a historical event has come with a very high price: the denigration of free thought, the straitjacketing of academic debate, and the intensification of West-East tensions in this supposedly modern Europe.

Read more of my articles for The Australian and other publications here.

A Marxist defence of Page 3 girls

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:51:17 +0000

Left Central, 25 January 2012

Proving that the Leveson Inquiry has become a magnet for every campaigner who wants to tame or censor the tabloids, yesterday’s line-up before his lordship included a bevy of feminists angrily railing against Page 3 in The Sun.

For some women’s rights activists, Page 3, with its scantily clad ladies making philosophical comments in speech bubbles, represents everything that is wrong with tabloid culture.

It is sexist and offensive, they say, and it contributes to a climate in which women are looked upon as fleshy objects to be ogled by goggle-eyed blokes. It must be banned, they demand.

Harriet Harman has joined this shrill chorus calling either for the outright banning of Page 3 or for The Sun at least to be put on the top shelf in newsagents, next to porno mags. And yet in her next breath, Harman has the gall to declare: “I am going to be a champion of press freedom.”

That she cannot see any contradiction between campaigning to crush Page 3 and claiming to be a defender of freedom of speech not only highlights the severe irony deficit in New Labour – it also says a lot about the weird politics of the anti-Page 3 lobby.

The fact is that shutting down Page 3 would be an assault on press freedom. If you are committed to true freedom of the press, to the age-old idea that newspapers should be free to publish what they believe to be true or interesting or fun, you can’t then add the caveat “Oh, except for Page 3 in The Sun – that page has got to go.”

As Karl Marx said in a stirring piece on press freedom, the true defender of liberty in publishing will fight for the right of rags to publish tittle-tattle as much as the right of serious papers to publish serious news.

“You cannot enjoy the advantages of a free press without putting up with its inconveniences,” he said. He went on: “You cannot pluck the rose without its thorns!” – meaning that even when you pick a beautiful flower you’ll frequently end up with a little prick. It’s the same with the press – there’s some good stuff out there, well worth reading, and there are a lot of pricks, too. That is in the nature of having a free, open press.

The boob-blockers of the anti-Page 3 brigade are driven by the same impulse as every other censor in history – not so much by disgust with images themselves, but by a belief that some images might warp fragile people’s minds and make them go mental.

Censors are always motivated by the fantastically paternalistic fear that if a certain section of the population claps eyes on a saucy or tempting image or overhears controversial words, then it will be driven mad with lust or hate.

And so it is with the Mary Whitehouses cleverly disguised as radical feminists who would like to see Page 3 erased from history. They fret that Page 3 is harmful to both men and women.

The campaigners behind Turn Your Back On Page 3, which presented evidence at Leveson yesterday, say Page 3 is guilty of twisting men’s minds, “encouraging negative attitudes towards [women]… and at worst, acts of violence against [women]”. In short, blokes – especially the tea-swilling sort who read The Sun every day – are easily made violent; they’re such seething pits of anti-women sentiment that just one image of a topless girl called Cherri from Essex could be enough to make them go out and attack some unsuspecting women.

The campaigners think Page 3 is bad for women, too. It causes negative feelings “within us,” they claim, which help to “stall our progress.” In short, women are such sensitive wallflowers, so lacking in moral robustness and sass, that an image of a possibly younger, more attractive, certainly less-clothed female could tip them over the edge into self-pity and inaction.

For a bunch of people who claim to have women’s interests at heart, the anti-Page 3 set is pretty sniffy about women’s ability to cope with the modern world’s daily tumult of words and images.

In their belief that both men and women should be prevented from seeing Page 3 – men because it drives them wild with desire, women because it makes them feel sad and inadequate – the warriors against Page 3 echo that super-snobbish line from the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960: “Would you let your wife or servant read this book?” Only they’ve updated it, effectively saying: “Would you let an uncouth bloke or a fragile woman look at these tits? After all, there’s no telling what damage such an image might do to these volatile/fragile constituencies…”

We should defend Page 3 from these radical censors, not because that page in The Sun is interesting or valuable (it isn’t), but because the censorious sentiment behind the desire to squish it is underpinned by a pernicious paternalism that has no place in the twenty-first century. Keeley, Cherri, Sam, Suzanne and the rest – keep doing your thing.

Read more of my articles in my archive here.

The Twitter tantrum over the rumoured Princess Bride remake exposes the immaturity of my generation

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:16:38 +0000

Irish Independent, 24 January 2011

What is more annoying: Hollywood unwittingly exposing its artistic exhaustion by continually remaking movies/TV shows from the 1980s, or the fantastically predictable response of thirty-something kidults who treat every such remake as an invasion and pillaging of that lovingly cultivated bit of their brains titled “Childhood Memories”? It’s the latter.

Sure, Hollywood might be so hard up for ideas that even the super-naff 1980s can start to look like a bottomless well of wonderful storylines (there’s even discussion about a Hollywood remake of Rentaghost, FFS). But the nostalgic preciousness of people who are knocking on the door of 40 and who want their pasts to be preserved forever in formaldehyde smacks of something far worse than cultural laziness – it stinks of infantile cultural protectionism.

The thirty-something adultescents were at it again yesterday, when a rumour swept through the Twittersphere (where these people spend a large part of their lives) about a possible remake of The Princess Bride. First released in 1987, The Princess Bride is a somewhat overrated fantasy story involving farmboys, giants, kings and a very knowing narrator with his tongue pressed firmly against his cheek. It didn’t make much of a splash in ’87 (how could it when the far superior Robocop was also released?), but over the years it has transmogrified, largely as a consequence of film-critic revisionism, into a cult classic of the Eighties which all culturally switched-on people must dutifully profess to love and bore on about at interminable length at dinner parties.

So the news that the movie might be getting a makeover had people of a certain age spitting (or at least Twitting) in fury. “Remaking the Princess Bride is NOT COOL”, trilled the Twitterati; one of their number even threatened to “fly to America and shoot everyone involved” (for a joke, obviously. Everything on Twitter is a joke, unless it involves Jan Moir, in which case it is deadly serious.)

Let’s leave to one side the rather embarrassing fact that The Princess Bride is *not* being remade, which means that, not for the first time, tweeps in their hundreds of thousands fell for an unsubstantiated rumour. The more striking thing revealed by the outburst of Princess Bride apoplexy is that there is something weird about people who were children in the 1980s (I was one of them, sadly), where they seem determined to erect a moral forcefield around all their cultural memories in order to protect them from the greasy fingerprints of modern-day plunderers.

Whether it was last year’s big-budget Hollywood version of The A-Team or Steven Spielberg daring to revisit his own brilliant 1980s franchise, Indiana Jones, with a new movie in 2008, there will always be some hybrid adult-child chucking his or her toys out of the pram and effectively saying: “Leave my culture alone!” The release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008 even generated an irate Facebook page called “Stephen [sic] Spielberg Has Raped My Childhood”. That’s the tenor of all the spasms of kidult fury with Hollywood remakes – a feeling that horrible Hollywood men hellbent on making cash are raping MY memories, boo hoo.

Hollywood’s conservatism – where it feels safer remaking one-time hits rather than investing in anything spectacularly new – is nothing compared with the conservatism of the super-nostalgists desperate to ringfence their mental photo albums from external interference. Their tantrum-like protectionism brings to mind those kids who won’t let other kids play with their toys even when they are no longer playing with them.

But why not entrust something like The Princess Bride (which, after all, was a book long before it was a movie) to a new director and a potential new audience? The re-interpretation of old characters and storylines – from Tarzan to James Bond to King Kong – has been part and parcel of the film world for decades. The kidults should prise open their eyes to the fact that, no matter how many times they geekily giggled over their VHS copies of The Princess Bride, that story does not belong to them and their generation. Let go, people, and grow up.

Read more of my articles for the Irish Independent and other publications here.

Concordia provides no morality tale

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:14:56 +0000

The Australian, 21 January 2012

EVEN before all the bodies have been recovered, even before we know the full story of what happened to this ill-fated ship, commentators are clambering over the wreckage of the Costa Concordia to pontificate about the arrogance of humankind with big, seafaring machines.

In commentary circles across Europe, the sunken cruise liner off the coast of Italy is being turned into a symbol of hubris. We imagine we can construct massive ships, “skyscrapers of the sea”, as one columnist snottily refers to them, and use them to traverse vast oceans - but then nature intervenes and exposes “the fallibility of our civilisation”, says one observer.

That has been the sneering undertone of much of the coverage of the Concordia tragedy: a powerful sense that sunken ships are the price we pay for fantasising that we have the right and the ability to build big and sail far.

Much of the commentary seems myopically obsessed with the size of the Concordia, Europe’s largest cruise liner when it was launched in 2006, weighing a whopping 112,000 tonnes.

In our age of meek thinking, when anti-consumerist tracts such as Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More become bestsellers and all forms of development must be “sustainable”, it is trendy to be anti-big. And so it is that commentators have mocked cruise ships for being “large tower estates lying on their sides” and “gigantic, floating hotels”.

A writer for the Guardian couldn’t resist comparing the Concordia with that other very big thing we all love to hate these days: the banking system. Just like the Western world’s financial casino of recent years, ships like the Concordia are “dangerously over-engineered to make someone more money”, said the columnist. And just like the banking system, the Concordia now has an “acute liquidity crisis” (geddit?).

Again and again, we’re treated to info about the size of the Concordia that is cynically designed to make our jaws drop or to make us wince at the vulgarity of the kind of people who take cruises (whisper it: unsophisticated families and pensioners who’ve saved their pennies).

A comment in one British broadsheet mentions in passing, and for no obvious reason, that the Concordia had “a giant spa and two swimming pools covered by a crystal roof”. How decadent. A writer for the Times was shocked to discover that the Concordia “apparently had a Formula One simulator”. None of this affected bemusement at the ship’s contents sheds any light on why it went down (it didn’t sink because it had a Formula One simulator). But it does shed some light on the mish-mash of anti-cruise snobbery and anti-big thinking motoring much of the media coverage.

Apparently, the big mistake humans always make is to imagine they can defy nature, in this instance by building a humungous ship for the purpose of lazily crossing oceans that put the fear of God into earlier shipless generations.

As one writer put it: “The trappings of high-technology civilisation make us feel more secure, (but) much of the time we are just a moment away from primal disaster”. So apparently those photos of the Concordia lying on its side really reveal “the fallibility of modern civilisation”.

There has almost been a whiff of glee, certainly schadenfreude, in some commentary. For all the techno knowhow that went into this vast ship, still “the better part of a billion dollars can be holed by a rock”, trilled one columnist. “If there was anyone who thought 100,000-plus tonne ships in the 21st century were unsinkable, they will be thinking again”, said another, as if this sinking is not just a tragedy for those who died but also a morality tale for all of humankind - about how we remain, even in the zappy 21st century, vulnerable to Mother Nature’s whims.

In truth, this is not a tale of technological arrogance earning a slap on the wrist from nature. Far more straightforwardly, the sinking seems to have been a result of serious human error - largely on the part of the show-off captain - rather than a consequence of the ship weighing more than 100,000 tonnes and having a Formula One simulator on board.

Also, sailing on cruise ships - even massive ones - is remarkably safe. About 21 million people sail on such ships every year, yet the last time there was a mass loss of life was in 1992, when a Greek cruise liner hit a trawler, causing 30 deaths.

The desperate attempts to shoehorn this sad event into a human-bashing morality tale in which our pesky ambitions get us into trouble once again echoes the moralisation of the Titanic tragedy.

This year also happens to be the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, another seafaring disaster that has been turned by miserablists and misanthropes into evidence that humankind’s arrogance is potentially lethal.

In truth, it was bad engineering on the Titanic that caused its problems. And it was an individual case of human carelessness that caused the Concordia to sink. Both of these things can be easily overcome. Our response to the Concordia disaster should be to sympathise with those who suffered, and then to go back to building even better, and bigger, vessels that might help to shrink our planet and extend our horizons.

Read more of my articles for The Australian and other publications here.

Shades of open prejudice in war on whalers

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:35:00 +0000

The Australian, 14 January 2011

THERE’S a bit in Bridget Jones’s Diary where Bridget get terribly embarrassed after her gauche mother describes the Japanese as a “very cruel race”.

Fancying herself as modern, Bridget thinks prejudices like that belong firmly in the past.

Not any more, they don’t. Thanks to the eco-warriors of the anti-whaling lobby, who are currently clashing with Japanese whale-hunters in the Southern Ocean, the old, backward view of Japs as a peculiarly heartless people is making a comeback.

It is now positively fashionable to be as blinkered as Bridget Jones’s mum, just so long as you dress up your Jap-bashing in the finery of animal rights activism.

Reading about the antics of the anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd, you could be forgiven for thinking this gaggle of unemployable hippies was engaged in a life-and-death struggle to defend human decency against an army of barbarians.

With their mission to stop Japanese whaling by any means necessary, the Sea Shepherd activists fancy themselves as a cross between Malcolm X and Mary Poppins, radical and angry but also possessed of a Disney-like concern for the poor, defenceless creatures of this benighted planet.

This week, when three Sea Shepherd activists boarded one of Japan’s whaling ships only to be held captive by the Japanese (er, what did they expect would happen?), whale-loving greens talked it up as a wicked act of war.

Sea Shepherd’s supporters treated us to stories about Japanese “dressed like ninjas” who were using “security overkill” against these bloody decent Australians. Desperate to turn their moralistic mission against whale-murdering Japs into an international stand-off, these self-selected spokespeople for the whale community called on the Australian government to send customs or navy ships to “shadow” the Japanese whalers.

The attempt to transform Sea Shepherd’s cynical seafaring shenanigans, this overblown act of adrenalin-pumping adventure tourism, into a clash between the Australian and Japanese authorities shows what lies behind concern for whales today: a desire to exert the moral authority of what are presumed to be Good People (in this case Australia) over Bad People (Japanese).

One of the key driving forces behind much international animal rights activism is not so much love for animals as disgust and disdain for wicked human beings especially human beings with dark or “yellow” skin.

So Australia’s anti-whalers have successfully rehabilitated what many of us considered to be long-dead prejudices against the Japanese.

Echoing World War II propaganda that tended to depict the Japanese as uniquely wicked - far more weirdly sadistic than the Germans, say - the Sea Shepherd website informs us that the whaling carried out in the Southern Ocean is “cruel and barbaric, a gross sadistic perversion”.

A columnist for The Courier-Mail once lamented the “uncivilised barbarity” of that whaling nation of Japan, in contrast to Australia, which is “a civilised nation of pet-lovers”.

Here, the issue of whaling is openly used to advertise the decency of white folk who own puppies over yellow people who scoff whale meat.

Sea Shepherd has also referred to Japanese whalers as “viciously cruel” and as “terrorists”. On one eco-website, a contributor to an online debate about Japanese whaling said explicitly what other people generally only hint at - that the Japanese kill whales because they are “f . . king evil bloodthirsty amoral wankers”.

Sometimes, there’s a very thin line between international animal rights activism and xenophobia. Often, expressing concern for God’s creatures is a cover for communicating disgust with ungodly human beings.

So posh Brits just love to campaign against Spanish maltreatment of donkeys and bulls, believing Spaniards have a weirdly cavalier, very Mediterranean attitude towards animal welfare. American animal-rights activists kick up a fuss about French people’s penchant for eating horses. And dog charities go mental over the fact that Koreans eat “man’s best friend”.

One such charity - Dogbiz - makes all sorts of lurid claims about Koreans’ dog-chomping behaviour, claiming these peculiar people “take great delight in watching the poor animals die, wagging their tails in a last moment’s desperate but futile plea for mercy”.

Once again, the tag “animal rights” is used to doll up what is in fact just bemusement with Johnny Foreigner, incomprehension of the cultural practices and culinary antics of strange people “over there”.

Indeed, the British anti-fascist magazine Searchlight once discovered that many far-right groups in Europe were consciously campaigning around animal rights, seeing it as a useful way of posturing against foreigners. “The far Right have become animal lovers,” said Searchlight.

In the 1990s, a group of British fascists joined forces with Italian fascists to set up an animal rights group called Greenwave, whose aims were to secure “a total ban on all animal experiments, a total ban on the use of animals in any form of entertainment and a total ban on all hunting or shooting of animals”. No doubt they’d like to ban whaling too.

This is not to say that the Sea Shepherd people are fascists or far Right. But there is something unsettling about people who make it their mission to curry international disgust for foreign cultural practices they either don’t understand or don’t like.

You don’t like whale-hunting? Then don’t do it. You don’t like the idea of whale meat? Then don’t eat it. But please stop branding as cruel, perverse, heartless and foul those people who have been doing such things for generations, and who think it is perfectly normal behaviour.

Read more of my articles for The Australian and other publications here.

Lawrence case: the elephant in the room

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 10:10:24 +0000

spiked, 5 January 2012

With every media outlet, from the Sun to the Socialist Worker, editorialising about how the conviction of David Norris and Gary Dobson for the murder of Stephen Lawrence was a ‘glorious day’ for Britain, I knew it would be a thankless task to go on the radio and ask: ‘What about the double jeopardy rule?’

On Nick Ferrari’s breakfast show on London’s LBC radio this morning, I argued that all the people describing this case as a victory for justice are overlooking the fact that it is a victory built upon the wreckage of some pretty important legal principles. One longstanding legal protection in particular - the double jeopardy rule, the idea that no one should be tried twice for the same crime - had to be dismantled in order to get Dobson back in the dock. Having been acquitted of the murder of Lawrence in 1996, Dobson was what we used to call ‘autrefois acquit’, previously acquitted, which in the past would have meant that he could not have been tried for the murder a second time. That all changed in 2003, when New Labour ditched the double-jeopardy rule.

Ferrari was having none of it. ‘But these men are wicked’, he said. Even my agreement with him that the men are indeed lowlifes, alongside my argument that ‘this isn’t about them, it’s about what kind of justice system we want to have’, didn’t wash. ‘I disagree with everything you say’, Ferrari told me, and cut me off mid-sentence.

Double jeopardy is the elephant in the room of the Dobson and Norris conviction. Sure, journalists are mentioning it, usually in fluffy factboxes titled ‘How this case came to court’, but no one wants to discuss it in detail. No one wants to discuss the extraordinary amount of history and progressive tradition that had to be consigned to the dustbin of ‘bad ideas’ in order to secure one conviction against two nasty blokes.

The double-jeopardy rule had existed in some form or other for centuries. There was a Roman maxim which said ‘nemo bis in idem debet vexari’ – no man shall be punished twice for the same. It’s there in early Christianity, too, in St Jerome’s insistence in the fourth century that ‘there shall not rise up a double affliction’. It’s also in the sixth-century Digest of Justinian, the seed of much of modern jurisprudence, which insisted that, ‘The governor should not permit the same person to be accused of a crime of which he has been acquitted’. An academic study of the double jeopardy rule in history points out that it is one of the ‘few legal rights recognised by the Christian fathers throughout the Dark and Middle Ages’ (1).

In twelfth-century England, a form of double jeopardy was codified in the Constitutions of Clarendon, which, in an attempt to rein in the authoritarian instincts of Henry II, stipulated that no man could be tried for the same offence in both the ecclesiastical courts and the king’s courts. It had to be one or the other. From England it spread to the US, where the eighteenth-century revolutionaries and their successors made a bar against double jeopardy a key plank of their new republic’s constitutional guarantee of liberty against state power. In each historic period, the purpose of the rule against ‘double afflictions’ was strikingly similar: to protect individuals from potentially being hounded and interminably retried by governors, crown forces or cops determined to stick them in jail. That’s because being permanently at risk of prosecution is itself a kind of life sentence.

Yet where the double-jeopardy rule survived the Dark Ages, it could not survive the New Labour years. Proving they’re even more allergic to liberty than those pointy-hatted men who ruled Europe in that bleakest period of cultural and moral deterioration, New Labour suits decided to ditch the double-jeopardy rule in 2003. Taking their cue from the 1999 Macpherson Report into the Stephen Lawrence case, which proposed a new ‘power’ to override the double-jeopardy rule, New Labour’s Criminal Justice Act 2003 made it possible to retry someone for a serious offence of which he had previously been acquitted or convicted.

And so it was that a legal protection that had existed in various forms for two millennia, articulated by everyone from Romans to saints to revolutionaries, was discarded – all in the name of bringing a few rotters from south London back to court to answer for the killing of Stephen Lawrence. Add the ditching of the double jeopardy rule to recent assaults on the right to silence and even on the right to trial by jury in some instances, and you can clearly see that it is not justice that is being boosted here, but rather the power of the state over the once-sovereign individual. The further legal denuding of the individual before the forces of the state is simply too high a price to pay to secure convictions against people we don’t like. The immediate losers might be people like Dobson, but the long-term losers are all of us, with our rights and protections, fought for over centuries, further eroded by the state and its compliant media cheerleaders and supposedly liberal supporters.

You don’t have to be a friend of Dobson or Norris to recognise that undermining long-standing legal protections for a narrow and fleeting end is never a good thing to do. Isn’t there also an old legal maxim about how ‘hard cases make bad law’?

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Using tabloid tactics to slay the tabloids

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:50:52 +0000

spiked, 3 January 2012

The singer Charlotte Church caused waves when she told the Leveson Inquiry in November about the Sun’s ‘countdown clock’ to her sixteenth birthday and her reaching of the age of sexual consent. The clock, which apparently appeared on the Sun’s website in late 2001, when Church was 15 years old, was ‘disgusting’, she said, and made her feel ‘uncomfortable’. She said she had been ‘totally appalled’ by this tabloid device ticking down to the moment when it would be lawful to have sex with her.

Respectable journalists were also appalled. For the past six weeks the ‘countdown clock’ has been held up as evidence of just how depraved the Murdoch tabloids had become. A New Statesman writer said Church’s evidence made ‘a little bile rise in [my] chest’. This week, a writer for the Guardian reported as fact (and in colourful language) the idea that ‘Church was 15 years old when Britain’s best-read daily newspaper began a public countdown to the day on which she could be legally fucked’. Photos of Church with her head in her hands at Leveson now frequently accompany broadsheet reports about the evil Murdoch press.

But did the Sun really put a Charlotte Church countdown clock on its website in 2001? There’s no evidence that it did. News International denies that it ever did. A look back at newspapers from 2001 and early 2002 (Church turned 16 on 21 February 2002) suggests that a ‘Charlotte Church countdown clock’ did exist, but it had nothing to do with the Sun. On 13 December 2001, the Daily Mirror (Welsh edition) reported, under the headline ‘Charlotte in sick internet countdown’, that a ‘twisted new website is counting down the hours and minutes until Charlotte Church is old enough to have sex’ - but it made no mention of the Sun being involved, far less that it hosted the thing (1).

On 2 January 2002, the Glasgow Daily Record also reported that Church was being ‘targeted by web perverts’, who had ‘set up a website counting down the seconds until she is old enough to have sex’, but again no mention of the Sun was made (2). Far from the Sun, or any other tabloid, being involved in counting down the moments to Church’s sexual maturation, it seems the redtop press campaigned against the ‘sick, twisted’ website heralding Church’s sixteenth birthday. In January 2002, Web User magazine reported that, under pressure from Sony, which managed Church’s career, the website had successfully been shut down, and it gave the URL of the website as: http://www.geocities.com/ enchantedgeneration/charlottechurch.html (3). So not a Sun initiative at all, but something set up anonymously through Geocities (a website-building device people used pre-Blogger). That is, it seems it wasn’t a tabloid invention, but one of those typically sad websites set up by loner pranksters.

What’s more, it seems Church found the whole thing quite amusing back in 2002, when she turned 16. At Leveson in November she said the clock had made her feel ‘horrible’ and ‘really uncomfortable’. Yet when she was asked by Heat magazine in February 2002 how she felt about the clock, she said ‘I laughed my socks off’ (4). (Again, neither Heat magazine nor Church made any mention of the Sun being involved when they discussed the clock in 2002 - probably because it wasn’t.)

How did a daft age-of-consent website set up by losers and laughed off by an admirably robust 16-year-old Charlotte Church become so mythologised, now re-fantasised as a wicked device invented by the evil Sun to humiliate a teenage girl? How is it that where the 16-year-old Church laughed off this mysterious, long shut-down clock, today a 25-year-old Charlotte buries her head in her hands as she says the clock made her feel ‘horrible’ while decent journalists say the idea of it makes them feel like vomiting?

This is all further evidence of the hysterical, fact-lite climate that now surrounds the tabloids, where any accusation, however flimsy and unfounded, can be hurled at the low-rent press and quickly become accepted as fact. In the febrile atmosphere created by the phone-hacking scandal and the closure of the News of the World, and stoked by that showtrial disguised as an inquiry, Leveson, it seems unsubstantiated claims have taken the place of cool-headed investigation as everyone rushes to denounce the ‘evil’ emanating from the tabloid underworld.

The Guardian has now added a correction to the piece it published this week, in which it was baldly stated that ‘Church was 15 years old when Britain’s best-read daily newspaper began a public countdown to the day on which she could be legally fucked’. That claim has been removed because News International denies it, says the Guardian. This brings to 40 - 40 - the number of articles about the Murdoch tabloids over the past year the Guardian has either had to correct, retract or apologise for, including all the articles stating that News of the World hacks deleted key messages from Milly Dowler’s mobile phone (this now seems to be incorrect), an article claiming the Sun was planning to doorstep a junior counsel at the Leveson Inquiry (this was not true), and the claim that Murdoch papers hacked Gordon Brown’s family medical records (again, not true). How many more BS stories are going to be written by journalists who claim, in the irony to end all ironies, simply to be ‘cleaning up the press’? Leveson and its cheerleaders are starting to look about as reliable as the Sunday Sport.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

How protest became a prisoner of the media

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:28:38 +0000

spiked, 29 December 2011

2011 was the year in which protest became a prisoner of the media. Many end-of-year commentaries have gushed about the fact that, in contrast to the ‘complacency and apathy’ of the 2000s, 2011 was a year of political tumult everywhere from Tunisia to Manhattan. Yet while some of these protests were refreshing, there was something weird about them, too: the extent to which they were dependent on the media. Modern protest is increasingly reliant upon the media not only for impact, but also for ideas, and this gives the media extraordinary power to create political possibilities today.

It is fitting that 2011 ended with Time magazine naming ‘The Protester’ its Person of the Year and using a photoshopped image of an Occupy protester crossed with an Arab Spring protester on its cover. Because in many ways, these protesters are creations of the media; certainly they are creatures of the media, their complaints of the past 12 months having been sanctioned and, more importantly, shaped by the media class.

The Occupy movement was set in motion by the media, by one of the most elitist magazines on the market: the ‘anti-capitalist’ Adbusters. Having spent the past 22 years railing against the ‘army of zombies’ that makes up modern Western society, with our ‘glazed eyes, blank stares, faces twisted into ugly masks of want’, Adbusters decided to kickstart a live-performance version of its disgust for the masses. It published a one-page advert in its July edition saying, ‘What is our one demand? Occupy Wall Street, 17 September. Bring tent.’ The non-brainwashed sections of society, those good people who aren’t a part of what Adbusters brands the ‘billions and billions’ who have been ‘disfigured’ by consumerism, heeded the call and headed to Wall Street.

It is remarkable how much the outlook of Adbusters, which is only a more quirkily stated version of the anti-consumerist, anti-wealth sentiment rife amongst the respectable media classes, has infused the now-global Occupy movement. Occupy Wall Street complains that ‘the working class of [America] has been brainwashed’. A placard at Occupy London says capitalism has turned the masses into ‘chumps and tarts’. Here, the supposedly radical occupiers faithfully ape the political posturing of their founders and patrons in the cliquish liberal media. And they have the temerity to call themselves ‘the 99%’.

The Occupy movement wasn’t only founded by the media - it has been sustained by it, too. Occupy has continually sought legitimacy and traction, not in the public square, with its unpredictable hordes, but in the media square. The absence of any clear constituency for these self-styled voices of radicalism to engage with means they increasingly see the media as their key, perhaps only platform. And their dearth of a political alternative, their absence of an overarching ideal, means they’re extremely prone to having their agenda set for them by others. It is striking that influential voices in the media have implored the Occupy movement to ‘resist the pressures to clarify [its agenda]’ and to stick with its ‘lack of concrete demands’ - because it is the very amorphousness of Occupy that allows media practitioners to project their concerns on to it, to influence the political agenda through treating the occupiers almost as ventriloquist dummies.

So when a supportive columnist says the great thing about Occupy’s ideology-lite, goal-free protesting is that it opens up a space for ‘creating new possibilities’, you can’t help feeling that the only class ‘creating possibilities’ today is the media class. They continually project their own politics and prejudices on to the Occupy movement, claiming it’s all about social inequality, the problem of greed, the need for higher taxes, or whatever their social set’s bugbear happens to be. It’s notable that Time magazine’s end-of-year issue congratulated Occupy for its role in ‘shifting the national conversation’, by which it meant rejuvenating chattering-class debates. Apparently, ‘the Nexis news-media database now registers almost 500 mentions of “inequality” each week’, compared with only 91 a week before Occupy started.

How fitting that a movement founded by the media, sanctioned by the media and crowned ‘Person of the Year’ by that most respectable media outlet should have its success measured in terms of newspaper word-counts rather than real-world shifts. Time is really pleased that Occupy has acted as a kind of willing conduit for the arguments of the respectable media class, boosting the standing of today’s cultural elites.

Of course, radicals have always had a relationship with the media. French revolutionaries published propagandistic pamphlets. The street-fighters of 1968 loved having their protests photographed and written about, while civil-rights protesters from the American South to Northern Ireland chanted ‘The whole world is watching!’ when there were TV cameras around. Yet in the past, radicals used media outlets to communicate their own ideas and demands. Today, we have an almost perfect inversion of that scenario: now, the media class uses radicals to push its own narrow political agenda.

There are three problems with the unholy marriage between protest and the media that was consummated in 2011. First, it nurtures a nasty elitist outlook, where those who fail to join in the media-celebrated protesting - the vast majority of people - are denounced as uncaring or dumb. Where Adbusters labels us ‘zombies’, Time prefers to fret about those who are still in an ‘internet-induced fugue state, quietly giving in to hopelessness’. Second, it allows for the undemocratic setting of political agendas, where small groups of cut-off hacks and activists claim to speak on behalf of ‘the 99%’ and claim to have a special insight into what are the big problems facing the world (Time says the biggest problem is ‘hellbent megascaled crony hypercapitalism’ - expect to see that on an Occupy placard soon).

And third, it gives rise to a very shallow, contradictory form of solidarity. One of the reasons modern protesters are so drawn to the media, seeing it as a tool for ‘globalised action’, is because they feel they have more in common with other middle-class ‘creators of possibilities’ overseas than they do with the everyday people who inhabit their own streets. This is not internationalism, but rather a means of escaping the disappointing masses at home by creating media-enabled links with like-minded people abroad. Sadly, the largely educated protesters of the Arab Spring have also played this game, preferring to link up with decadent Occupy movements in New York and London rather than engage with and enthuse and potentially lead the people of their own nations.

The media has won its new political authority by default rather than design: it is the corrosion of the old political constituencies and the crisis of political thinking that created the space for the smart set to wield such influence. Consequently, we’re obliged to ask of 2011: was it really an historic year of political upheaval, on a par with 1848, or the year when the undemocratic, pious media class successfully conquered and colonised the world of protest?

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Moral relativism on display in this year's obituaries

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:21:08 +0000

The Australian, 27 December 2011

YOU can tell a lot about a society from how it treats its dead, from whom it chooses to eulogise and whom it prefers to bury beneath a slurry of slurs.

Which means that 2011 — a year in which many VIPs shuffled off this mortal coil — has provided a fascinating insight into early 21st century morality.

We’ve had a terrifying glimpse into the muddled moral relativism of the left.

Judging from the disparity between left-wingers’ pity for Osama bin Laden after he was killed by a SWAT team in May and their disdain for Christopher Hitchens after he succumbed to throat cancer in December, it seems pretty clear their moral compass isn’t only wonky, but busted.

Following bin Laden’s death, the liberal set went into paroxysms of fury against that Great Satan, America, accusing it of “executing” an unarmed man.

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury and High Priest of Cant, said the killing gave him “a very uncomfortable feeling”. One-man kangaroo court Geoffrey Robertson, alarmed that anyone would dare to kill a man without first having it legalled by him, went all wobbly-chinned over this “cold-blooded assassination”.

These bin Laden pitiers weren’t driven by political principle, but by moral cowardice; they fretted that bin Laden’s demise might have blowback for latte-sipping folk in London, New York and Sydney. One British writer panicked out loud about the possibility of “another terrorist spasm”.

Yet where the death of bin Laden generated handwringing on the left, the death of Hitchens, that implacable opponent of bin Laden’s bizarre brand of Islamism, gave rise to a little sneering.

Alongside the many hagiographical reminiscences by people who claim to have once got very drunk with “The Hitch”, there was also barely concealed glee that this supporter of the Iraq war had finally kicked the bucket. “Don’t forget Hitchens’ love of war”, counselled a writer for ABC’s The Drum, implying that Hitchens was a “deplorable apologist for genocide”.

Back in May, the American magazine The Nation had called for “moral restraint” in response to the death of bin Laden, yet it showed no such restraint in its own response to Hitchens’s death.

One of its writers described the time Hitchens spat a cigarette at him (which apparently is a far worse crime than knocking down the World Trade Centre) and suggested Hitchens was directly responsible for mayhem in the Middle East. Apparently he used his “prodigious gifts” to “promote wars that produced a killing field”. Hitchens writes, people die.

I disagreed with Hitchens on Iraq. Yet I also dislike the way that support for that war has been turned into a secular sin amongst the chattering classes, so that one demonstrates one’s personal moral hygiene by haughtily declaring the wars were “not in my name” while scrubbing from one’s dinner party list anybody who dared to say “let’s bomb Saddam”.

It’s notable that none of these leftish Hitch-haters mentioned his support for NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. That’s because they backed that war. At least Hitchens had the virtue of consistency, whereas his critics flit like confused fleas between cheering the bombing of evil white men in the Balkans and weeping over the bombing of poor brown folk in the Middle East.

The death of Colonel Gaddafi in October also exposed political hypocrisy among the modern commentariat. Having cautiously cheered the stirring Arab Spring for much of 2011, observers balked when it reached its bracing conclusion in Libya with the final deposing of a dictator.

They labelled Gaddafi’s killing a “war crime” (surely it was just an act of war?), with one international lawyer arguing that it would have been better if Gaddafi had been put on trial in The Hague rather than being dealt with in Libya, since this would have helped “stay the hand of vengeance”.

In short, Arabs can’t really be trusted to rule upon matters of life and death. Yes, they’re good at chucking stones, but the serious business of deciding who’s bad and who’s good and who’s guilty must apparently be left to well-educated white folk in Europe.

Meanwhile, deaths in Celebville this year offered an insight into the entrenched culture of risk-aversion and disdain for anyone who’s too rebellious.

The death of Elizabeth Taylor from congestive heart failure in March led to global outpouring of nostalgia for a time when celebs weren’t just cardboard cutouts saying PR-approved things but were mouthy, ballsy, independent-minded.

And yet the untimely death in July of that modern-day siren Amy Winehouse led to high-profile demands that overly reckless people be “rehabilitated”.

Winehouse was wrong to say “no, no, no” to rehab, said every obituarist in Christendom, and we must all learn from her death the fact that human beings are fundamentally self-destructive unless they open themselves up to moral policing by the new priestly class of nanniers, nudgers and psychobabblers.

The response to the death of celebrity innovator Steve Jobs in October revealed the cultural elite’s discomfort with modernity and progress — at least the kind that benefits the masses.

In the 1990s, when Apple was basically just the provider of smooth white computers to graphic designers and broadsheet commentators, Jobs could do no wrong in the eyes of the smart set.

Yet before his death, he had the temerity to include the little people in his techno-revolution, providing gadgets to the man in the street as well as the pontificator in his ivory tower. Thus, the hagiographies following his death were tinged with regret, with references to his creation of “iZombies” and “iPhone hostages”. It spoke to the bitterness of techno-snobs who would have preferred to have kept Jobs’s machines all to themselves.

The year ended with the weirdest and potentially most consequential death of all: Kim Jong-il. Western observers stared in bemusement at North Koreans banging their heads on desks in grief for the Dear Leader, but judging from the commentary they might not be the only ones who miss him.

Given he was both an off-the-peg symbol of evil for Washington and a source of endless gags for filmmakers and cartoonists, Kim’s passing could end up hitting us all pretty hard. 2012 could be a “ronery” place without him.

Read more of my articles for The Australian and other publications here.

The most important history lesson of 2011

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 12:56:10 +0000

spiked, 22 December 2011

Everyone is talking about what a tumultuous year 2011 was. And ‘tumultuous’ - meaning a ‘disorderly commotion or disturbance’ - is indeed the most apt adjective to describe the past 12 months. For this was a year in which many important things happened, yet no one is quite clear why or how or who was ultimately responsible. History was made - lots of it - but often it appeared as if nobody was in the driving seat. If you want to know what historic breakthroughs look like at a time when the history-making human subject has been talked down for years and effectively put out to pasture, behold 2011.

Marx famously said, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’. Today, man not only continues to make history in circumstances that are not of his choosing - he also doubts or denies that he is making history at all, preferring instead to see himself as the victim of forces beyond his control, the plaything of some sentient thing called History rather than the master of history.

This was a year in which agency was accorded to events that had none, and was denied in other events that truly were driven by human ingenuity and heroism. So the catastrophe in Japan in March, when an earthquake and tsunami flattened towns and villages and killed 20,000 people, was discussed by many as an example of ‘Nature’s fury’, as if she (they always see Nature as an angry woman) made a decision to punish hubristic mankind. ‘Nature suddenly decided to go “Thwack!”’, said one observer, almost with a sense of glee, and she revealed that mankind is ‘hopelessly irrelevant… dwarfed by phenomena beyond our control’.

Yet the Arab Spring, which kicked off in Tunisia and Egypt in January before spreading to Bahrain and Syria, was talked about as an ‘earthquake’, a ‘flood’, a ‘storm’, an inexplicable thing which spread from one country to another like a ‘virus’. Former Republican presidential candidate John McCain came in for some flak when he said the Arab Spring was ‘a virus spreading throughout the Middle East’, but he was only expressing in un-PC lingo an idea that has become entrenched: that the Arab uprisings are a weird and contagious, almost malarial phenomenon (liberal observers prefer to say ‘meme’ rather than ‘virus’).

So we anthropomorphise natural disasters, and naturalise manmade political upheaval. We see agency in what are in truth the amoral whims of nature, with commentators calling the Japanese tsunami an ‘all-conquering aquatic bulldozer’, yet we see strange viruses at work in something human like the Arab Spring, as if that rebellion of millions against their rulers was born of some kind of herd mentality. The personification of the tsunami, the idea that we’re ‘dwarfed by phenomena beyond our control’, speaks to mankind’s increasing meekness and view of himself as the object rather than subject of history. And it has very real consequences. In response to the unhinged panic-mongering over the Fukushima nuclear-power plant in ‘thwacked’ Japan, Germany promised in May to shut all its nuclear power plants by 2022.

Also this year, political agency was conferred on the August riots that rocked English cities, yet was withheld from the European masses’ continuing disgruntlement with the oligarchy in Brussels. Observers decreed that the looting and burning in London and elsewhere were ‘highly political’ acts, carried out by ‘rebels with a cause’. Yet the same observers bent over backwards to delegitimate European peoples’ permanent, sometimes unspoken rebellion against the institutions of Brussels and Strasbourg, referring to such opposition as ‘Europhobia’, as if it were a disease of the mind (‘phobia: a persistent, abnormal and irrational aversion to a specific thing’). Small mobs of shoe thieves are talked up as rebels taking a stand against the Liberal-Conservative government, while masses of Greeks and Irish and Italians who communicate their fury with the illiberal, anti-democratic Brussels regimes through referenda or graffiti are branded ‘phobic’; once again, instinctual events are historicised while political feeling is pathologised.

One of the most striking things about 2011 is how even political actors themselves disavowed responsibility for their actions, preferring instead to see themselves as reactants in a kind of a great experiment rather than potential authors of their destinies. That was the most tragic thing about the Arab Spring: the disconnect between the heroism and organisation that was required to get tens of thousands of people on to the streets to chase Ben Ali and Mubarak from office and how the protesters conceived of themselves - as people with no political authority, possessed only of a Twitter-style emotional angst. The Arab rebels have celebrated the fact that they are leaderless and bereft of ideology and goals (one Egyptian writer noted the ‘complete absence of ideological rhetoric’), which means they weirdly deny their own history-making potential even as they demonstrate it physically.

Indeed, across the world this year, there has been a widespread unwillingness to clarify political problems or articulate political demands. In the Spanish ‘Indignados’ movement and the Occupy movements in New York and London - laugh-out-loud caricatures of the Arab Spring - activists openly celebrate the fact that they are ‘independent of any democratic structures and party hierarchies’ and have ‘no political programme’. They even use McCain-like language about viruses, claiming their movement consists more of ‘unthought’ than thought, where creeds emerge ‘without much articulation as to why they’re necessary, almost as [reflexes]’. What we have here is people making a virtue out of vacuity, where the denigration of the human subject and of the idea that man might remake his world is turned from a negative into a positive: apparently, not knowing how to clarify crises and pursue goals is not a bad thing - it’s ‘liberation from dogma’.

What these radicals seem not to realise is that their disavowal of grubby politics in favour of myopic process (the Occupy movement is now entirely devoted simply to keeping itself chugging along) almost exactly echoes the outlook of the political elites in 2011. For our rulers, most notably in Europe, have likewise made it their aim to decommission politics and replace it with technocracy, because apparently things like the economic crisis are better dealt with by experts rather than through engagement with hoi polloi. Indeed, the economic crisis is now also looked upon as a kind of tsunami that dwarfs mankind - so it apparently isn’t appropriate to have a democratic debate about it, or even to treat it as a political issue, and instead what we really need is ‘expert’ firefighting. In the ousting of democratic governments in Greece and Italy, and their replacement by unelected, Brussels-approved gangs of alleged know-it-alls, 2011’s sidelining of history-making man in preference of apolitical, lifeless managerialism reached its nadir.

This has indeed been a tumultuous year - yet while much has happened, all sides deny historic responsibility for having made it happen and eschew historic responsibility for pushing it in a certain direction. Everywhere we look, historic man is being muted and mocked, whether he’s viewed as a victim of Nature or is forcibly elbowed off the political stage (as has happened to the peoples of Greece and Italy) or is voluntarily elbowing himself of the political stage (as threatens to be the case in the Arab world). Yet the fact is that man did make history this year: Japan rebuilt itself; the Arab people got rid of tyrants; and even in Athens, so thwacked by Brussels, there is graffiti everywhere saying ‘Fuck the EU’. If we can find a new language in which to express and celebrate people’s desire for political change and historic impact, 2012 could be an exciting year.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

From paedos to tabloid hacks: modern-day witches

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 13:26:16 +0000

Anorak, 16 December 2011

GUARDIAN journalist Nick Davies stands accused by the Sun and others of “sexing up” his reports about phone hacking at the News of the World.

Following the revelation that it probably wasn’t News of the World journalists who deleted key voicemail messages from Milly Dowler’s phone, as Davies claimed on the front page of the Guardian in July, some are now wondering if Davies has been over-egging the pudding in order to make tabloid hacks appear *really* evil.

If this is the case, it wouldn’t be the first time Davies allowed his desire to brand a bunch of people as evil to override his responsibility as a journalist to be completely accurate and objective.

Back in the late 1990s, he was similarly chastised, by a judge, for sexing up his newspaper reports, this time in relation to incidents of child abuse that allegedly took place in Welsh care homes.

During the Bryn Estyn care-home panic of the 1990s, when some care-home workers in Wales were accused of acts of child abuse, many of them falsely, Davies wrote regular reports for the Guardian.

During the tribunal of inquiry into the Bryn Estyn affair in 1997, Davies was singled out for criticism by Sir Ronald Waterhouse, the retired High Court judge in charge of the tribunal, who accused Davies of going totally OTT in his descriptions of what allegedly happened in Welsh care homes.

In his Guardian reports, Davies compared what had allegedly happened in care homes with the Holocaust, describing the inquiry into the affair as a “little Nuremberg“, and wrote sentences such as: “for years the muffled sound of scandal has been leaking from the closed world of Britain’s children’s homes” and “now, finally, for the first time, the truth is pouring out“.

Sir Ronald was not happy. He slated the Guardian’s “highly coloured reporting” and wondered if Davies was “reporting [on] the same tribunal that I have been attending“.

All of this was documented, exhaustively, by the late Richard Webster, in his brilliant, Orwell Prize-shortlisted book The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt. Webster showed how hysteria about children’s care homes led to numerous false accusations of abuse being made and subsequently to shattered lives and broken reputations.

He argued that the modern paedophile panic was part of a long and tragic tradition of hysterical witch-hunting, and said that “even ostensibly critically minded journalists” – referring to Davies – “have willingly become part of this modern search for evil“.

Indeed, there is a common thread tying together earlier hot-headed journalistic campaigns to uncover child abuse in every single care-home and religious institution and the current broadsheet campaign to reveal rottenness at the heart of the tabloid press.

In both instances, journalists have become so swept up in the rush to find a modern narrative of evil, in which they can pose as brave warriors for goodness against unspeakable depravity, that they have allowed their desire to make hysterical accusations to leap ahead of their responsibility to check facts and report the truth.

Having once indulged in “highly coloured reporting” in the name of exposing allegedly Holocaust-like conditions in care homes, is Davies now doing the same in his war against the evil tabloid witches of Wapping?

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

Getting the rioters to do their dirty work

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:23:36 +0000

spiked, 6 December 2011

Well, that’s convenient, isn’t it? A four-month Guardian/London School of Economics study into the riots that rocked English cities in August has found that the rioters were pretty much Guardian editorials made flesh. Concerned about government cuts, annoyed by unfair policing, shocked by social inequality and outraged by the MPs’ expenses scandal, it seems the young men and women who looted shops and burnt down bus stops weren’t Thatcher’s children after all – they were Rusbridger’s children, the moral offspring of those moral guardians of chattering-class liberalism.

This is a blatant case of advocacy research, of researchers finding what they wanted to find, or at least desperately hoped to find. For months now, the Guardian has been publishing articles arguing that the rioters were politically motivated, under headlines such as ‘These riots were political’ and with claims such as ‘the looting was highly political’ and the riots were a protest against ‘brutal cuts and enforced austerity measures’. And now, lo and behold, a Guardian study, Reading the Riots, has discovered that the rioters were indeed ‘rebels with a cause’, with 86 per cent of the 270 rioters interviewed claiming the violence was caused by poverty, 85 per cent arguing that policing was the big issue, and 80 per cent saying they were riled by government policies. Reading this study, we are left to marvel either at the extraordinary perspicacity of Guardian writers, or at their ability to carry out research in such a way that it confirms their own political preconceptions.

This study looks less like a cool-headed, neutral piece of sociology, and more like a semi-conscious piece of political ventriloquism, where rioters have been coaxed to mouth the political beliefs of the middle-class commentariat. This is not to say the Guardian and LSE researchers have been purposely deceitful, inventing evidence to suit a political thesis. Advocacy research is more subtle and less conscious than that. It involves a kind of inexorable pursuit of facts that fit and evidence that helps bolster a pre-existing conviction. So mental-health charities keen to garner greater press coverage always find high levels of mental illness, children’s charities that want to raise awareness about child abuse always find rising levels of child neglect, and now Guardian researchers who want to show that they’re right to fret about Lib-Con policies and outdated policing have found that these are burning issues amongst volatile English yoof, too.

In terms of both the way the research was carried out and the comments that were made by the rioters who were interviewed, we can see advocacy research in action. As one commentator has pointed out, the selection process for the study means that it is largely the ‘upper crust’ of the rioters who ended up being interviewed. Many of the 270 interviewees were recruited through their connections with community organisations, meaning they may have already been infused with, or at least influenced by, the mores and outlook of community activism, of the kind you’ll frequently find in the Guardian ‘Society’ supplement. As a Telegraph writer says, ‘The sort of rioter who agrees to be interviewed as part of a social science research project for the Guardian is unlikely to be representative’. Indeed, the Guardian admits that ‘a large majority of the 270 people interviewed for the project had not been arrested’ – that is, they’re the ones who got away with it – and they were ‘surprisingly articulate’. These are the sections of inner-city youth more likely to be au fait with the liberal classes’ explanations for the rioting.

Also, we shouldn’t underestimate the keenness of the interviewees to say things that might make their rather pointless anti-social behaviour in August appear grand and meaningful. Where some of the interviewees are fairly honest about their opportunism – one says the rioting was ‘a festival with no food, no dancing, no music, but a free shopping trip for everyone’ – many of them adopt the kind of political language that had already appeared in the serious press in an attempt to make their behaviour seem purposeful. ‘It felt like I was part of a revolution’, said one; another described his fellow looters as ‘a battalion, a squadron, a troop of men’, as if he were involved in a political war rather than an exercise in kicking in JD Sports’ windows. With the researchers talking only to ‘the right kind’ of rioters and hoping to hear a political message, and the rioters keen to parrot some of the political excuses that had already been made for their behaviour, it was inevitable that this report would end up as something like a 1.3million-word Guardian editorial.

The Guardian writers now promoting this report as evidence that they were right all along – with one of them claiming the rioters were ‘far more politically conscious’ than many people thought – imagine that they are doing the opposite of what the Lib-Con government did in response to the riots. Where David Cameron and his cronies condemned the rioters as feral or amoral, this report and its cheerleaders claim to reveal that the riots were in fact ‘political in nature’, if also ‘destructive and incoherent’. Yet this is just the flipside of what the Lib-Cons did. Government officials claimed to see in the rioters evidence of a widespread and dangerous ‘gang culture’ (a claim that was challenged by spiked long before anybody else), while their Guardian critics claim to see confused but definitely socially-aware protesters. Both sides see simply what they want to see in the weird tumult of August, imagining that the rioters confirm either their prejudices about feckless youth or their fantasies about reruns of 1960s-style, anti-conservative uprisings.

If anything, the riot-related advocacy campaigning of the Guardian is worse than what Cameron and Co. indulged in. Where Cameron’s shallow and predictable claims that this violence all sprung from bad parenting and ‘Broken Britain’ were opportunistically designed to make him and his government look strong in retrospect, through taking on has-been rioters, the advocacy aim of this latest piece of research is somewhat more sinister. What we have here is a pretty naked attempt to add a touch of physical force and menace to Guardian-style arguments about cuts and inequality and the monarchy and MPs, an attempt to harness the violence of the rioting to the various causes of the liberal commentariat. Feeling, perhaps, that their measured, middle-class demands for nicer policing, fewer cuts to the public sector and more banker wrist-slapping lack urgency and oomph, the Guardian and others are now effectively arguing that the failure to address such issues causes actual violence; that the alienated youth of Britain not only share this general outlook, but are willing to use violence to pursue it. It is moral blackmail in place of proper conviction and proof.

What gets lost in this dual attempt to politicise the rioters, with the Conservatives slamming them as badly mothered urchins and the Guardian kind-of praising them as ‘political in nature’, is any serious attempt to get to grips with what was new and different and unusual about what occurred in August. The riots did indeed reveal a great deal about modern Britain, particularly about the dearth of social solidarity amongst younger generations of poorer communities and the collapse of police and state authority in inner cities and elsewhere in England; yet neither of these things can seriously be discussed so long as all political factions remain more interested in plonking the rioters on their knees and getting them to mouth What We Want To Hear.

Read more of my articles for spiked and other publications here.

This showtrial of the tabloids is a threat to press freedom

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 14:59:01 +0000

The Australian, 3 December 2011

ALL those people who thought the post-News of the World Leveson inquiry into press ethics would be a proper inquiry, coolly and neutrally interrogating a specific problem, must be feeling pretty stupid right now.

Because it is becoming increasingly clear that Leveson is, in fact, a show trial of the scummy tabloids, a public forum in which every posh celeb and snooty broadsheet journalist will be given a couple of hours to sound off about the red tops.

Inquiry? Pull the other one. This is the institutionalisation of bourgeois disgust for tabloid culture, the elevation of anti-tabloid sentiment from a predictable, yawn-inducing dinner-party prejudice into a permanent public performance.

Set in motion by British Prime Minister David Cameron in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World, Leveson has given rise to a great deal of teeth-gnashing over the sins and crimes of “tabloid culture”. Yet however bad “tabloid culture” can get - and it can get very bad, as we saw in the hacking of murder victim Milly Dowler’s phone - it pales into insignificance in comparison with the “cultures” on display at Leveson itself. At least three rotten cultures are being given free rein.

First, there is the age-old beast, snob culture. This inquiry is really a glorified, very expensive platform for the respectable classes to look with disgust and horror upon the newspapers of hoi polloi.

So when Joan Smith, a columnist for The Independent, appeared at Leveson a couple of weeks ago, she described herself as “a different breed” to your average tabloid hack.

That’s what the inquiry is really all about: breeding. There are those with good breeding, like actor Hugh Grant and the various sons and daughters of privilege who make up the staff of broadsheet papers, and there are those with bad breeding, primarily the tabloid hacks and paps whom Grant told Leveson are being recruited from the “criminal classes”.

For decades, snobs have lambasted the “toxic tabloids”, holding them responsible for every societal ill from mass stupidity to political corruption and looking upon their readers as the drone-like devourers of useless information.

As the British academic John Carey noted in his seminal book The Intellectuals and the Masses, early 20th-century snobs were appalled by the emergence of the mass newspaper, viewing it (and its readers) as “brutal and prejudiced and unthinking”. Carey quotes one early 20th-century writer as saying the masses “vomit their bile and call it a newspaper”.

That outlook still lingers today, only now the snobs have been given a whole courtroom, rather than just a ballroom with clinking champagne glasses, in which to let rip against the allegedly demonic tabloids and their herd-like consumers.

The language some of them have used to attack modern-day tabloids is eerily similar to that deployed by those olden-day poshos who looked upon mass newspapers almost as acts of violence against decency. So comedian Steve Coogan told Leveson that tabloid hacks are “sociopathic”. Grant says tabloids have nurtured “a culture of pure evil”. A Guardian writer described tabloid hacks as “an off-putting example of the species”, while another journalist preferred to brand them a “bloodthirsty breed of sharks”.

It goes without saying that the millions of people who read the pure evil produced by this lesser species of human being must be spectacularly dumb.

For all the legalistic window-dressing, Leveson looks increasingly like an anti-tabloid two minutes’ hate cleverly disguised as a year-long inquiry. The snobs are vomiting their bile and calling it “an inquiry into press ethics”.

The second dodgy culture unleashed by Leveson is celebrity culture, where, simply by virtue of being famous, celebs are afforded sweeping authority over the affairs of us mere mortals.

In recent years, there was evidence that many sensible people were at last starting to tire of celebrity culture. They’d had enough of Bono presuming to speak on behalf of the African hordes or Sharon Stone claiming to be an expert on China-Tibet relations. Yet now, all that healthy cynicism about celeb specialness has been undone by Leveson, which has made actors, comedians and TV presenters into judge, jury and executioner on matters of political life and press freedom.

Even broadsheet journalists who are normally super-cynical about celebs who “do politics” are slavishly bowing before Murdoch-maulers such as Grant and Coogan, desperately hoping that because these folk are famous their anti-tabloid ranting will have an impact on the fickle masses.

One man has dared to stick his head above the parapet and attack the rather sordid, camera-clicking, celebrity nature of Leveson. Graham Foulkes, whose son was killed in the 7/7 terror attacks in London and whose phone was targeted by private investigators in the pay of the News of the World, has decided to snub Leveson because he says it has been “hijacked by celebrities”.

With searing accuracy, he says Leveson is just “endless celebrities babbling away about how their lives have been ruined by media intrusion”. And he reckons that as a result of this orgy of celebrity self-pity, there’s every possibility the “government will impose overly restrictive codes of practice on solid, important journalism”.

Indeed. When you make aloof, cocooned celebs into leading experts on media matters, when you treat famous people as the new royalty, whose thoughts and feelings apparently count for more than those of plebs, there’s no telling what new knee-jerk restrictions might be placed on press freedom in the name of protecting the celebrity class from over-eager, “criminal” paps.

And the third morally dubious culture on display at Leveson is victim culture, where political and media activists try to get the victims of crime and misfortune to do their dirty work for them.

This unsightly enterprise is widespread these days. Political campaigners frequently push people who have suffered serious hardship to the forefront of their campaigns, in the hope that these people’s sad and haunted faces will silence dissent and make political agenda-setting an easy, streamlined affair.

So at Leveson, the anti-Murdoch lobby is hiding behind haunted figures such as the parents of Madeleine McCann and the parents of Milly Dowler, in the hope that their very understandable distress will convince the public that the tabloid press must be punished and muzzled and put back in its cage.

Here, the cheerleaders of Leveson seek to use the moral authority of victimhood to override proper democratic debate and to impose new press regulations that nobody can possibly challenge. I mean, who are we to question the desires of people who have had truly dreadful experiences?

If you were expecting Leveson to provide a serious, neutral assessment of the state of the press, forget it. This mish-mash of snobbery, celebrity politics and victim culture, with its promotion of tiny cliques of well-to-do broadsheet types and famous folk over that allegedly ugly blob of “tabloid readers”, is far more likely to represent a regrettable turning point in the history of press freedom.

Read more of my articles for The Australian and other publications here.

Plain packaging is an infringement of free speech

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:17:56 +0000

The Australian, 26 November 2011

WHY do people’s critical faculties go up in a puff of smoke when it comes to the debate about cigarettes? In the name of “stamping out smoking”, it seems governments can be as bossy and intolerant and censorious as they like, and no one will raise an eyebrow.

This week, it took Philip Morris, the tobacco giant, to do what liberals and libertarians should have done ages ago: challenge the Australian government’s plan to bring in plain packaging for cigarettes.

As of December next year, it will be illegal in Australia to sell cigarettes in boxes branded with the evil logos of Marlboro, say, or Benson & Hedges.

Instead, cigarettes will have to come in olive green packets free of branding. The packets will still carry graphic health warnings, however, hectoring dumb smokers about how their filthy habit might kill them and possibly their children, too.

Philip Morris has accused the Australian government of “infringing on its trademark rights”. It also says there is no hard evidence that moving to plain packaging will reduce the number of smokers. That’s no doubt true; after all, people fork out cash for ciggies not because they like the fancy logo on the box, but because they like the nicotine inside it.

Yet Philip Morris is, if anything, being too polite. This is more than a trademark issue; it’s a free-speech issue. What is happening here is that companies are being denied the right to publish perfectly reasonable and inoffensive material - the names of their products - and at the same time they’re being forced to publish government propaganda about smoking.

That is, not only will they be denied the liberty to project their logos and designs into the public sphere, they will also be obliged, by law, to continue to publish disgusting images of blackened lungs or dead bodies alongside scary sentences about how smoking destroys lives.

For years, it was considered paramount in a civilised society that people should be free to publish what they like, and that no one should be forced to parrot the government line, much less publish grotesque images handpicked by the authorities.

Imagine if such authoritarian tactics were applied in other areas of life. Imagine if government officials started sticking black tape across the face of Tony the Tiger on packets of Frosties (too much sugar can be bad for us, after all) or banned bottle shops from displaying those oh-so-tempting words “BEER” and “WINE”. Imagine if a political magazine were forced to carry on its cover government messages about health and wellbeing. There’d be outrage.

Yet in the name of the “war on smoking”, the Australian government, closely watched by other anti-smoking governments across the world, can get away with censoring images, banning brand names, and strong-arming companies into publishing images of half-dead humans.

Some will say it doesn’t matter, because the target is only Big Tobacco, and no one cares about them. In truth, the target is as much us, the public, as it is the tobacco companies.

Censoriousness is always underpinned by prejudice. The desire to black out certain words and images is never simply about the words and images themselves. Rather it is about the perceived impact such words and images will have on the public.

Censors are always driven by the fantastically snobbish and paternalistic fear that if a certain section of society claps eyes upon a saucy or tempting image or overhears an offensive word, then they will be driven mad with lust or hate and will do something crazy.

And so it is with the censoring of cigarette brands. This, too, is about officialdom covering our eyes, lest we fall like lemmings for the lure of the Marlboro Man and start puffing on 40 cigs a day. It is because they believe we are easily enslaved by brand names and advertising, that we are weak-willed and easily hooked, that governments feel the need to hide certain products from our view.

Whatever you think of Big Tobacco, you should be concerned about the real precedent that will be set by the plain-packaging law: one in which the state gets to present itself as the moral saviour of the fickle throng, using heavy-handed tactics to save us from our own worst instincts.

Read more of my articles for The Australian and other publications here.