The Responsible Thing

"The other goat, the scapegoat chosen by lot to be sent away, will be kept alive, standing before the Lord. When it is sent away to Azazel in the wilderness, the people will be purified and made right with the Lord."

                                                    Leviticus 16:10

It seems to me that many of the obstacles we human beings face vis-a-vis work, family, relationships, politics, religion etc., are really the result of our failure to accept responsibility for our own actions. After all, why admit and own your mistakes, experiencing personal growth as a result, when it is much easier to blame your failures on the actions of others? Yet if we never take responsibility for our actions, then there is little, realistically, that we can ever do to affect their consequences for the future. Like the man said, those who fail to learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed forever to repeat them.

Ironically, this is not entirely our fault, but learned behaviour that we been taught since year dot: Woman brought sin into the world, the Jews killed Jesus, immigrants are stealing your jobs. Society's scapegoats are all around us. Then, society shirks its responsibilities like no-one else. Scapegoats provide an endpoint under which all unpleasant truths can be buried. Drug users causes crime, but few dare ask what causes drug use, because then the answer generally comes back as poverty. Drugs are the individual's problem, but poverty is societal, so society takes drug use as its terminus, rather than be in anyway implicated in the inequalities that its poverty perpetuates.

We each trace our problems back until we find a comforting version of reality and then rest on our laurels. By which I mean that we stagnate. When we nominate something as the avatar of all our personal misfortune, we give that avatar immense power over us. For instance, if you consider certain words or images to be blasphemous or profane, then all that anyone else has to do to exert influence over is you is to use those words or images in your presence. No wonder so many people around the world burn the American flag, when it is the only form of retaliation that they have against the ubiquity of US invasion and airstrikes. Why bother with a Predator drone, when you can wound millions of patriotic Americans with little more high-tech equipment than a 50 cent lighter?

The problem with blaming anything on any class of people (women, men, Jews, Muslims, the poor, the young etc.) is that there will always be more of them than there are of you. It's a simple physics problem: a large mass exerts a greater force upon a smaller object than the smaller object does on the larger, proportional to the difference in their two masses. If you're one person seeing a particular demographic of a million or more as preventing you from finding work, then you're never going to find work. Not because of those million others, but from that single malfunctioning thought in your head that has you beat before you even try.

Even worse is what our prejudices tell others about our inner-lives. Most blame and scapegoating is the externalisation of personal faults. If you want to know about a person's personal fears and anxieties, take a look at what they blame on others. Politicians demonise those on benefits, while crying poor and claiming expenses (politicians should be means tested the same as everyone else). Homophobic men are scared that gay men will objectify them in the same way that they objectify women. The guy that tells you certain ethnicities smell is usually the one who could himself do with forming a closer relationship to soap and water.

Moreover, the scapgoater will always be more afraid of the scapegoat than the scapegoat is of their persecutor. Hence, American cops are more afraid of unarmed black men than the other way around, presumably because African-Americans have been subjected to the worst indignities that white America has to offer for 240 years in a row, and they have endured. Like the homophobic man, the racist is ultimately afraid that they will be in treated in the same way that they have treated their victims. For the same reason, heavily armed Israeli settlers, with the full financial and military backing of the government of the United States of America behind them, lose their minds at the sight of a few Palestinian kids throwing rocks. The downside to loading all of your fears onto the shoulders of others is that you tend to become mortally afraid of them out of all proportion to their actual dangerousness. "When you stare into the abyss," as Nietzsche reminds us, "the abyss also stares into you."

Inversely, lack of personal responsibility also leads people to take credit for things in which they had little or no involvement. Look at the British attitude to the Second World War. To listen to people in this country, you'd think Britain defeated Nazi Germany all on its own. Yet 80% of Hitler's forces were defeated by the Red Army, at the cost of twenty million Russian lives. More Soviet troops died at Stalingrad than Britain and America lost during the entire war combined, and it was still only the second biggest loss of life that the Russians suffered (750,000 at Stalingrad, 850,000 at Leningrad). Most of us alive today would not be here without them.

Indeed, if western society was half as civilised as it likes to think it is, you'd think we'd spend as much time commemorating the lives of people that we have killed as we do our own sacrifices. We hold silent vigils to remember the Somme, D-Day, 9/11, but when do we ever fall silent for the victims of Fallujah, Dresden, or the Irish and Indian famines of the nineteenth century that left millions dead thanks to British governmental indifference? The need to shirk our responsibility leads us to dismiss these fallen as enemies that deserve no respect or remembrance, even when they have become our enemy through no fault of their own. We celebrate Olympic victories, Shakespeare's birth, and great British inventions like the world wide web, but when do we ever bear responsibility for Britain's part in the eradication of the hundred million people that lived in the Americas, before Europeans arrived with their guns and their disease? This is not an attitude worthy of a civilised society. A shirker treats other people as they have treated others. The responsible person treats others as they would like to be treated themselves. This is why I could never believe in the death penalty. Isn't one murderer enough? Why should the rest of us become implicated in the crime?

For Britain, Hitler is the ultimate endpoint to negate all else. Hitler killed eight million people, but he's dead now, so you don't need to worry about people like him anymore. That way you can forget that it took thousands of ordinary people to perpetrate the horrors of the Holocaust (and definitely forget about any assistance the Nazis may have received from the IBM corporation). It allows us to sweep all other colonial atrocities under the tiger skin rug, as well as deferring, indefinitely, any discussion about how Stalin virtually defeated Hitler single-handedly, having already killed twenty million of his own people, and what this tells us about the convenient view of the Second World War as a battle of good versus evil. Hitler is also a convenient endpoint because he is just about the only one of the various genocidal maniacs to besmirch the 20th century that Britain didn't support at any point.

I am bound to say at this point, because there are many sensitive and fragile souls that shatter into a thousand pieces whenever anyone expresses an opinion in any way divergent from their own (see Polyphemus and the Myths of Monomania), that of course I am not belittling anything that happened back then. Both my grandfathers fought with distinction in the war. What I am saying is that they had pretty much wrapped it all up 28 years before I was even born. I therefore find it hard to claim any credit for the result, any more than I can claim to be a Petty Officer, just because my dad served in the navy. These are events that occurred independent of my existence. A football crowd may conceivably alter the course of a football match. Claiming credit for something that you didn't bear witness to, and over which you exerted no influence, is tantamount to theft. Or hypocrisy. Either way, the result is unpleasant.

Which only leaves the individual, struggling to make sense of the world. One way is to make others bear the burden for one's mistakes, which only leads to increased feelings of nausea and impotence. Another approach is to recognise that most of what happens in the human sphere of existence is an admixture of judgement and luck. There is little to be done about bad luck. Ill-judgement, on the other hand, can be mitigated against, but it requires the honest assessment of past liability in order to be successful. The most futile lie is the one that we tell to ourselves. A fault can only be corrected if it has been traced back to its proper source. If the source is misidentified, the item will continue to malfunction.

 

Catharsis

 What does you conscience say? You shall become the person you are.

Catharsis

This is still my catharsis. The routine I need to stick to day in day out, to gain a sense of perspective and practice the basics of my art so that I may excel in it. During the last

peak, when I was addicted to sitting here, I churned out some not bad stuff. Here can I write what I want, when I want, so that I may go on and write what I need to write. Without this I soon sink into lethargy and lack of confidence. It does matter what I write here, whether it is inane and shit. This is the foundation from which I can build a career. Nothing is disallowed (double negative, I hate it when that happens).

Was talking to a friend about positive role models, and the lack of, last night. I told her that I wanted to be my own role model. This is true. Whereas I find many writers and musicians appealing, none of them attract me wholeheartedly. Back to the Eponymist ideal again. The idea of individuality (Christ being the only Christian). I can take pointers from people, but ultimately I stand alone. I don’t believe in nationality or religion or race. At best, any social group is a loose conglomeration. At best, unified through one or two ideals. Which is fine. Society could not operate without community spirit. However, one of the reasons for the breakdown of society in the west is a realisation that these ideals have become transparent. Immigration and the global ideal are partly to blame. The world has moved forward so fast that our narrow perceptions have not been able to shift with it. Acclimatise to it. Our perceptions need to be refocused. Religion and the family unit used to provide the bedrock, but they have slowly been eroded. The downfall of at least one these is due to it being based on erroneous assumptions, dressed up as truth. Can you guess which one?

We have to become fluid. To be able to shift our allegiances according to the situation. There are times when I am affected by national boundaries. Football, I mean. In fact, sport is almost the only time when most of us feel a strong pull from nationality (or it should be). I envisage a future where there are no longer any nations. A persons country will be made up only of the places that they have been to. Not an phoney affinity with people they have never met or place they have never seen. My nation is Liverpool and Cardiff. Madrid and Paris. Amsterdam and Bruges. I want to live in a world where in one regard a person maybe my opponent, yet in another they will be my contemporary. As a writer, I consider Hemmingway fascinating, but as a man I doubt we would have much in common. He writes with a passion for his subject, but I have little desire to experience bull fighting or fishing. This is what we should all be moving towards.

I believe that the purpose of the universe is to achieve infinity. The best way for it to do that is by generating as many possibilities as possible, thereby increasing the chances of it happening. Infinity is the point at which all possibilities have been played out. Now, if this is true, then life on this planet should be diversifying in as many ways as it can. Originality is the key. Certain well meaning types will tell you that there is nothing original. That may be true. But there is always a new spin to an old idea. A unique rendering of prevalent influences. This is the code to which I hope to stay true. A fresh form injected writing machine. All artistic disciplines should be in a continued state of growth. That is why I hate popular culture so much. The continued re-rendering and re-hashing of the same ideas over and over again. The law of diminishing returns. These are possibilities being played out it is true, but when so much time seems to be spent on producing works of dubious artistic value, it is hard to see where our next evolutionary step is to come from. Stagnation abounds and I think this is its one objective. I am a big admirer of the Bard, but the comedy in his plays is simply not very funny. Comedy has moved on in leaps and bounds in the last four hundred years (Python, Bill Hicks, Spaced), just as it should.

Anarchy. The more and more I think about anarchy, the more I read, the more I come to the conclusion that we are all of us, for the most part, anarchists. The basic tenet of anarchism is this: Do whatever you want to do, so long as it does not interfere with anyone else. This is one of the principles I try to abide by: Do what you want but do no harm. Something I’ve not always followed as closely as I should. Now, is this not what we do every day of our lives. We may go to work, but no one forces is us. We do it through our own volition. Okay, so we do it to get paid, but it may be said that there is a contract between employee and employer. A symbiotic relationship. One cannot survive without the other. We get married, have children, but then there is merely a refocusing of our anarchic principles. Our family becomes us and the family may do what it wants, as long as it does no harm (including to itself).

The problem with a large part of the anarchist movement, as I see it, is that they only hear the first part. “What, do what I want? Cool! See ya.” “Hang on, there’s more…Oh fuck it.” But isn’t that always the way with ideologies? They get distorted and perverted for personal gain, until they bear little relation to the original idea (cf. the major religions of the world)! The problem with the anarchist movement is that it seeks to politicise what is in essence a personal philosophy. Anarchism is a lifestyle choice. As soon as you try to mould it into a movement it ceases to be anarchy. Buddhism is very close to anarchism. It is essentially about meditation. When you pervert it into religion it ceases to be Buddhism. There’s a great line in the film ‘Dogma’. All about how humans have missed the essential point of religion. It isn’t about religion, its about ideas. “Ideas can be changed. Religion is what gets people killed.”

I do not seek to enforce any idea upon my fellow man, except one. Be yourself. Be the person that you are. What does you conscience say? asks Nietzsche. You shall become the person you are. Be your own religion. Your own ideal. Your own political party; your own role model. Be your own trail blazing its way toward the horizon. And if any other line happens to intersect yours, well then that’s just a happy coincidence. A bonus. I think Henry Miller put it best:

…you won’t be dead, you won’t be indifferent, you won’t be insensitive, you won’t be alarmed and panicky, you won’t be jittery, you won’t throw rotten eggs because you don’t understand. You will want to understand everything, even the disagreeable things. You will want to accept more and more – even what seems hostile, evil, threatening. Yes, you will become more and more like God. You won’t have to answer and advertisement in the newspaper in order to find out how to talk with God, God will be with you all the time. And if I know what I’m talking about, you will listen more and talk less.

Okay, that’s enough cultural referencing for the moment. I am your sheep herder, kneel before me. Quiet!

Get it done.

The Internet Void versus The Infinity of Fools

With apologies to passive-aggressive Facebook posters (you know who you are).

The Internet Void versus The Infinity of Fools

“He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.”

                                                Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

There was a time when I believed that the internet would set us free as a species. That so much virtual space would open up the borders to infinity and we would never have to deal with anyone we didn’t like ever again. Yet you only have to take a cursory glance at the comments section under any YouTube clip or newspaper article to realise that people seek out conflict on the virtual plain more now than ever before.

I think that ‘internet troll’ is far too polite a term for people who attack others online. Troglodyte is more apt. Trolls merely live under the bridges of the information superhighway, but troglodytes live in darkened caves beneath its surface, blind to all but their own non-thoughts and nonsense, only poking their heads out into the daylight to vomit up some piece of bile onto Twitter or an article on climate change.

Most of the kind of nonsense that happens on the internet these days is borne out of personal cowardice and fear. The internet offers anonymity, as well as an uncensored, unfiltered funnel down which to pour our own self-hatred. Hatred is really just another name for fear, redirected and amplified away from self.

In my experience, people judge others by their own standards and most manifestations and excuses for prejudice can ultimately be traced back to negative self-image. Men who are homophobic are either afraid of confronting doubts about their own sexuality or else they are scared that gay men will treat them in the kind of inappropriate ways in which they act towards women. People who hate a particular religion or race because they think they are sneaky or dishonest are themselves not to be trusted. People who accuse other people of smelling bad are usually the ones with the questionable personal hygiene habits. We each reflect in others what we find lacking in ourselves, in the same way that we seek out friends and partners who have the strengths and skills that we wish that we possessed.

I began this article by quoting my favourite aphorism in the whole of philosophy. The internet has become the void, the abyss. It is so big and so unwieldy, with so much that is horrific and vile just a few short keystrokes away, that it fills us with a kind of primal terror. Like staring into the night sky or snorkelling above the falling away of a continental shelf, the fear of the unknown terrifies us and sends us paddling back to shallower waters. Rather than stretch our horizons, we stick to familiar territory. The internet is an infinite expanse, yet most people obsessively circle around the same dozen websites time and time again.

Most of our fears about content in cyber space are really just reflections of the fears inside our own heads. Yet rather than immerse and marvel in the intensity of our own imaginations, we cower away from them and blame anyone but ourselves for the images, thoughts and ideas that run through our heads. We can, for instance, worry that our children are exposed to pornography online like never before. Yet children, certainly boys, have always been able to get hold of porn. It may be extreme, but by virtue of the fact of it being freely available, it becomes ultimately worthless. It’s very rare that I watch pornography, given how mind numbingly boring it is, mainly designed as far as I can see for men dishonest about their own sexual preferences to watch other men get sucked off while still kidding on that they’re 100% straight (just be honest and free yourself). Yet the most graphic pornography I’ve ever been exposed to was German and seen when I was eleven at scout camp, from the personal collection of the dad of the kid passing it around the tent. His dad was Akela, the head of the Scout Group. It’s easy to fall into the trap that the internet is making the world a worse place for children to grow up in, but the truth of the matter is that things are at worst just as bad as they always were. Yet by blaming new media it becomes so much easier to abnegate ourselves of the responsibility of honestly educating our children. Pornography isn’t the problem. The problem is the attitude of society towards women that makes their mistreatment a viable voyeuristic activity.

What the internet is doing is making us more claustrophobic. In captive chimp colonies when numbers become too high or not enough personal space is allowed, individual members will eventually turn on one other. We are becoming an infinite number of monkeys shoehorned into a finite cage. There was a time when any person could hold a particular view about the origins of the universe, even if that view was enforced by church and state, and they could remain blissfully unaware that anyone could hold a contrary view. These days, you can express an opinion online on anything from evolution to England’s starting eleven and be told you’re not only wrong but also a cunt by ten thousand random idiots in a micro second. Is it any wonder if we become claustrophobic? Is it any wonder if personal responsibility starts to dissolve when an inner monologue and self-checking is lost to the hive mind?

Look at any newspaper website comments section and you can see that the majority of comments are posted by people who don’t even read that paper or subscribe to its values. Guardianistas attack Mailites, Sun ‘readers’ (<even I’m doing it) post on The Daily Mirror. Rather than exploring the untouched plains of the internet, we seek out people we hate, like we’d rather be with someone we hate, just so we don’t have to face life alone. We have to have someone to push against, be in dynamic opposition against. Not much point being a racist if you don’t seek out Muslims to shout ‘Paki’ at. Not much point hating women and blaming them for your own inadequacies if you don’t make cowardly rape threats from behind the safety of a plastic screen. How brave of you. Well done you (sarcasm emoticon).

The internet makes idiots of us all and somehow reduces us to the belief that anything that we have to say is of equal value and deserves to be shared with the whole of humanity. Again, check the comments on YouTube or any article touting the 10 Greatest Albums/Films/Garden Hoes of All Time to witness an abject lesson in banality. “I don’t agree with your choice. I think The Godfather should be no 1 and The Godfather 2 no.” or “Typical left wing, bleeding heart liberal press.” quickly descending into comments about 9/11 being an inside job or Americans ranting at British people about how we’d all be speaking German if not for them, like they were personally at fucking Normandy on D-Day. We need to be saved from ourselves. Who cares what you think? If you’ve got something to say, start a blog to ring fence your opinions and save us from your non-thoughts. Or take a course in journalism so at least you’ll have an editor to reign in your exuberant hatefulness.

Mind you, the internet renders even traditional forms of journalism meaningless. Most newspapers these days are more full of editorials and personal opinion pieces than anything like actual news and much of it is as badly thought out and written as your average Facebook post (‘I am a beautiful flower and if you don’t appreciate that then the problem is with you not me, even though I’m the one posting this passively aggressively, clearly demonstrating in the process that I’m the one that needs to work on my self-image. How many likes for my maudlin post? I’m so alone.’).

Yet here’s the nub of the matter, folks. I still believe that the internet will eventually set us free. Or a version of it. We are only at the beginning of our journey into cyber space and this is a period of adjustment that we need to go through. After all, Dunbar’s Number is the number of relationships that the average person can comfortably maintain at any one time. Dunbar’s number has a value of 150. Just 150 friendships that we can maintain, which shows that despite living in towns and cities and supporting national sports teams, we are still essentially villagers who haven’t yet evolved to live like city dwellers. Like Dunbar’s Number, we haven’t evolved beyond basic expressions of intolerance and hatred. We can talk about national pride, but our brains aren’t sophisticated enough to think like members of multi-racial, multi-opinionated societies, comprising millions of individuals. We want everyone to think in the same way that we do in order to validate our belief systems.

I blame monotheism. The idea of one god was originally imposed upon western society in order to set in the public’s mind the idea of their being one ruling family, chosen by god to rule in perpetuity. Monotheism has infected us with a kind of monomania, where everyone must worship one god and be of one sexuality, one nationality and one personality.

What the internet has done is to confront us with how erroneous this mind-set is. In my personal fantasies, I believe that what we are going through at the moment is the first step towards the annihilation of nation states and the establishment of new countries dedicated to more useful criteria for patriotism, like knitting or Game of Thrones or Star Trek or Justin Bieber or Joyce or Dylan or Nina Simone or Creole cooking or football or golf or cricket or redheads etc. etc. Which must terrify the ruling elite, if they ever envisage such a situation. Western capitalism and hierarchical systems in general have always ruled by the principle of divide and conquer. Get us to hate the least powerful, immigrant workers, the unemployed, the disabled, etc., in order to focus our rage away from the real enemies of society (i.e., them). Yet if we were to once again form mini-societies based upon common ground then capitalism would eventually give way to collectivism. No mega-rich is the wealth is passed around between is us.

Eventually we will probably all retreat into a virtual environment anyway, where everyone’s tastes can be catered for, whether that’s enrolling in your very own version of Hogwarts or abusing virtual children. Unhealthy behaviour on both counts, but it will be our children who will have to discuss what’s acceptable behaviour when they get there. Eventually cyber space will cure even death and then, essentially, we will all remain children forever anyway. As we start to take our first steps into the tide pool, it seems that we are already learning how to remain childish.

(this article is open for comments, but I won't read them. It might be more productive to cut out the middle man and just smear shit on the wall).

Get it done.

Modern Epilogue - The Descriminating Individual

I: Fairy Tales (all photos in part I courtesy of John Harrison)

The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid,
And the marshals and cops get the same,
But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool.
He's taught in his school, from the start by the rule,
That the laws are with him, to protect his white skin,
To keep up his hate, so he never thinks straight,
'Bout the shape that he's in, but it ain't him to blame,
He's only a pawn in their game.

In this talk (I do not intend to lecture here), I am going to discuss some of the themes explored in my story, ‘Modern Fable’.

Briefly, ‘Modern Fable’ tells the tale of Tom, a teenage member of a far right group in a provincial northern town. Tom meets a genie, a genie who can erase from history any section of humanity Tom wishes. Yet as he gets rid of first Pakistanis, then Arabs, then Asians, humanity regresses to the level of the Yahoo. Finally he erases all Africans, humanity ceases to exist and only Tom remains, trapped on a prehistoric world of his own making.

Now, the advantage in telling a fairy tale is that certain narrative conventions can be circumvented without the need for extensive explanation. In the land of fairy tales, geese lay golden eggs; monstrous beanstalks sprout from magic beans overnight; and even the sky can come crashing in. Yet the main reason in choosing a fairy story is that racism, like all forms of arbitrary prejudice, is childish. And naïve. And unevolved. It is based on no real accounting of the world. No interaction or data gathering. It is based on the follow-the-leader mentality of the herd, a lack of introspection, ill conceived notions, half heard conversations, and tall tales. It is something we should have outgrown, unlike fairy tales, by age 12. And in that sense it is the ideal medium in which to illuminate the intellectual slavery inherent in judging others purely in terms of their ethnicity.

We all like a good yarn. Here’s one I heard the other day. “It concerns a woman…”

“living in a terraced house, who is awakened one night by a scuttling above the bedroom in the space between the roof and rafters. Imagining there are rats in the roof, she urges her husband to go and investigate. He squeezes through the trap door… and stumbles across a Pakistani sleeping on a mattress. But that is not all. There is a series of mattresses the length of the street, each containing a sleeping Pakistani. They were said to have gained access through a single Pakistani household at the end of the street and to have been wandering around freely.”

The preceding passage is taken from ‘City Close-Up’, Jeremy Seabrook’s 1960’s study of the working classes of Blackburn, Lancashire. Believe me, this tall tale was still doing the rounds when I lived and worked in the town and it hadn’t changed in thirty years. It persisted until quite recently in local lore when the mass demolition of said terraces made the lie harder to maintain. Seabrook recounts hearing the same tale repeated in Birmingham and Manchester:

“Each time I was told this story, it was said to have originated in a different (and named) street in the town. Nobody could identify the protagonists. It was invariably told to the storyteller by a friend who personally knew the individuals concerned, but who remained always at one remove from the actual informant.”

A description which could be equally well applied to any urban legend. Like an urban legend, it plays on our basic primal fears. The Pakistani hiding in the attic, he's the escaped lunatic on the roof of the car, the husband's decapitated head in his hands; he's the Yucca plant full of eggs that hatch, releasing thousands of tarantula babies, each ten times as venomous as the adult. Of course, the tale of the escaped lunatic is an old fashioned campfire story. And tarantulas lay their eggs underground and are caring parents, not prone to abandoning their brood. The young are no more dangerous than the adults, who aren't particularly venomous to humans anyway. Coincidentally, this is a tall tale I have also been told in Blackburn.

More than merely a primal fear, this story plays on a regional fear, for an Englishman’s home in his castle, and what true Englishman would not become incensed at the threat of foreign invaders squatting in his keep? What conscientious family man hearing this story could help but fear for the safety of his wife and children? It is a tale designed to strike terror and fury into the heart of the hearer: To swell the mindless ranks of the far-right: To dehumanise both victim and audience alike.

Knowledge is power, so let’s consider three more passages as cautionary tales against adopting scapegoats:

“Nearly all the people I interrogated had stories to tell. Whole villages, they said, had been put to fire and the sword. One man, whom I did not see, told an official of the Catholic Society that he had seen with his own eyes Germans chop off the arms of a baby which clung to its mother’s skirts.” (1)

“All Hutus must know that all Tutsis are dishonest in business. Their only goal is ethnic superiority. We have learned this by experience from experience.” (2)

“[T]hey are a sinister flood creeping upwards to engulf himself and his friends and his family and to sweep all culture and all decency out of existence.” (3)

Here we see where such tales lead us. (1) is taken from ‘The Times', 1914. It is a classic piece of propaganda (note the reporter had not actually met the eyewitness). Its aim was to portray the Germans as inhuman monsters, already in Belgium and but a short sea crossing from English shores, thus hastening enlistment into the British Army. The First World War was an entirely futile exercise to all but a few men, not involved in the actual fighting. Ten million died in the ensuing conflict of commerce and colonialism. All that it achieved was to lay the foundations for the next world war, where the enemy actually was monstrous. Further propaganda ensued, ensuring that millions more died in the gas chambers.

Modern propaganda is little different. Iraq's phantom weapons of mass destruction are the most recent, and least sophisticated, example of political misdirection, but there are many others. In 1999, for instance, Serbian atrocities in Kosovo were massively inflated in order to justify NATO's bombing of Serbia. I took part in the Amnesty International campaign calling on the UN to intervene, but it seems that in those post Cold War, pre 9/11 days, NATO needed a ‘conflict’ to justify its existence. Five thousand missing Kosovans were inflated to a hundred thousand, the spectre of Hitler invoked, and the bombs rained down. In fact, the majority of the ethnic cleansing took place after, and in direct retaliation for, those airstrikes. They ended when the west put economic pressure on Russia, which put economic pressure on Serbia, which withdrew its forces from Kosovo. If only someone could have thought of that in the first place!

(2) is the fourth of 'The Hutu 10 Commandments', published in 'Kangura', a Rwandan newspaper, in 1990. This and other demonising propaganda left a million Tutsis dead, slaughtered by their brainwashed neighbours. As with all such lies, it better described the ambitions of the authors than the intended victims. The editor of 'Kangura' was eventually convicted of crimes against humanity in 2003 and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

"He who fights dragons too long," warns Nietzsche, "becomes a dragon himself." It is a quote I will never grow tired of repeating. If we allow ourselves to be manipulated by dehumanising propaganda, then we are required to become as vicious as the enemy we seek to quell and can fast find ourselves hacking at our neighbours with machetes; blowing ourselves up in packed tube trains; firing up the ovens. "Sometimes I gotta ask myself what I feel about things." Bill Hicks once remarked. "That way I can get a closer reading of what's true." It's good advice.

And what of (3)? Time for a multiple choice question. (3) is a quote taken from which of the following:

(a) 'Mein Kampf' - Adolph Hitler
(b) ‘The Road to Wigan Pier' - George Orwell
(c) ‘Judaism in Music’ – Richard Wagner
(d) ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ - H G Wells

The answer is (b), although the other three have something in common. Richard Dawkins (of whom much more later), notes H G Wells's comments in a 1902 edition of 'Anticipations':

"And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with the black?...the yellow man?...the Jew?...those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go."

I quote this as an aside: Beware of socialists, for they can turn fascist in an instant!

Back to (3): “[T]hey are a sinister flood creeping upwards to engulf himself and his friends and his family and to sweep all culture and all decency out of existence.” This is how Orwell describes the Middle Class attitude to the Lower Classes in 1930s Britain. It could equally be today’s editorial on immigration in any right leaning British newspaper. Here we find a new objection to racism. For you see, prejudice is cyclic and it is top down. The things I have heard said of Muslims are the same things I have read of people saying about Jewish refugees in the '40s. Before the immigrants arrived in Blackburn the town’s failing were blamed on the Irish. The loutish behaviour we now condemn our children for is little different to the actions Orwell notes were ascribed to working class ‘Hooligans’ a century ago. If your strata of the community is making accusations against the one immediately below it, you can be damm sure you’re being accused of exactly the same things by the one above you. And if you refuse to accept them as true of you, why accept them as true of anyone else?

It is called prejudice for a reason. It’s pre-existent, pre-programmed, it exists whether there are Pakistanis or Muslims or Asians or Africans or not. In fact there is only one person with whom those feelings have any resonance. Like Tom, who is there left to blame when all your other excuses have been found out?

Let’s hone in, because I want to focus on one example of racial childishness. I have heard many disparaging comments made against people of Middle Eastern decent, but most germane to the current discussion is this: They smell. A typical ‘joke’ goes, “Why do Pakis smell? So blind people can hate them too.” There are many others told like this, equally as unfunny and unpleasant, serving only to confirm the idiocy and inadequacy of the teller. And five minutes later that same person will be bragging about how northerners are so much friendlier than southerners. Five minutes after that, he’ll be slagging off Scousers or Mancs or anyone else that has irked him in that instant.

So, Pakistanis smell do they? I’ve always found this a curious statement. For a start, it’s a tautology: Everything smells. You mean people of a certain ethnicity give off a different odour to you? Well let’s counter that claim by returning to ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, for Orwell talks of “four frightful words... that were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.”

“That was what we were taught – the lower classes smell. And here, obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling. Race hatred, religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical repulsion cannot.”

Racism is the act of making false pronouncements about those you keep at a distance and therefore know nothing about. Take one failing, one flaw of humanity as a whole and make it the exclusive domain of whosoever you wish to demonise. The lower classes smell. Pakistanis smell. The Chinese used to say that Europeans smelt like corpses. I’ve been on public transport when a group of builders have boarded at the end of the day and smelt that sickly sweet odour of sweat. At such moments I can appreciate Orwell’s comments, in a poorly ventilated carriage the stench is quite nauseating. Yet by taking the advice of Bill Hicks, I am led to one inescapable conclusion: It is human beings that smell. This is where lack of interaction leads to misapprehension, for your experience of an entire race may come exclusively from the man behind the counter in your local off licence. You credit his body odour to his ethnicity because our sight and smell combine forces to create a false impression, never considering that he might smell because he’s overweight, or has poor personal hygiene, or just that he’s man; or that, yes, he has a different natural odour to you because his culture dictates a different diet and his antecedents evolved in a different climate to yours. People from that part of the world have only started to live in Britain in any great numbers in the last few decades and you have not yet had the hundreds, the thousands of years to acclimatise to his people the way you have to all the other minorities that surround you. You’ve even fallen into the trap of categorising those minorities as a single, superior race.

I have yet to hear a serious objection to any group that didn’t, on closer inspection, apply to the whole. I know Asian families who live quite handsomely on benefits and I know white people working and claiming incapacity benefit. Moreover, tax avoidance schemes by large corporations cost the UK economy a hundred billion pounds a year, including the proprietors of the selfsame newspapers that demonise benefit fraud. Refugees are blamed for jumping the housing list, as if they’re the ones running the councils and housing agencies. Yet the houses and flats they are given are so dilapidated that only someone fleeing tyranny would lower themselves to live in them. The French are described as arrogant by the English, which is like the Swiss mocking Germany for its efficiency. And diving is considered the exclusive domain of foreign footballers. Again, not a failing of foreigners, but overpaid footballers who start to believe their own bullshit and think they can get away with anything. Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard are as guilty of this as Drogba or Ronaldo. These are the transparent excuses with which the narrow mind seeks to justify its pre-existing prejudices.

Before moving on, here’s one more passage which nicely draws together everything under discussion up to now: Of propaganda and cyclic prejudice; of scapegoats and becoming the dragons we have slain. It is told by the American historian, Howard Zinn:

“In the 1960s, a student at Harvard Law School addressed parents and alumni with these words:

‘The streets of our country are in turmoil. The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting. Communists are seeking to destroy our country. Russia is threatening us with her might. And the republic is in danger. Yes! danger from within and without. We need law and order. Without law and order our nation cannot survive.’

There was prolonged applause. When the applause died down, the student quietly told his listeners: 'Those were words were spoken in 1932 by Adolph Hitler.’”

He who fights dragons too long becomes a dragon himself.

Best Things Ever #11 Close Reading: No-One Came, Deep Purple

“Maybe it’s because I’m only starting.” Gillian’s voice screams, “That I think it won’t take too long.” The opening lines to, ‘No-One Came’, the final track of Deep Purple’s classic 1971 album, ‘Fireball’. Our hero is an idealistic singer in a band, but he could be any artist starting out on their career:

“Maybe it's because I can see you laughing,
That I think you've got it wrong.”

Many of us fancy ourselves visionaries, so far ahead of our time, the world only catches up years after our death. He blames his failure to gain instant success on the crowd’s misapprehension, but he seems willing to do anything to please them: Dress like a mythical outlaw, grow his hair long, dance and quiver like Elvis, even climb to the top of the mountain. Yet it is clear what our hero desires from all of this: To be a legend, to achieve immortality, like Elvis, like Robin Hood or Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, braving frozen wastes to conquer the snow capped peak.

‘No-One Came’ is about failure. A warning to all future musicians that fame is granted to the few and immorality to less. The best you can hope for is to live for now, to embrace fame for the time it is given you and accept it when it’s gone. "You spend your money and lie in bed forgotten, and you wonder what you did it for."

Yet the song is about more than mere failure. It is about the glorification of failure. Through the first two verses, the singer wears out his voice trying to make it big. He is ridiculed and he is ignored. He gets taken for a ride by a man whose intentions are not entirely clear. He lives a life worth a million songs, but crashes and burns and lives the rest out in obscurity, because while drummers and guitarists die young, singers linger. “There's a law for the rich and one for the poor and there's another one for singers. It's die young and live much longer. Spend your money and sit and wonder.” And all the time the song’s refrain haunts us:

“No one came for miles around
And said man your music is really funky.”

Which Deep Purple then punctuate by performing a grinding solo section. Coming out the other side, it’s as if our hero has emerged from a trance. He has seen into the future, as told in the previous verses, and awoken the same idealist he was at the start. He recognises the two-facedness of show business and wonders if he can make it by being honest. He knows the best that he can hope to achieve, but sees that, "It’s only the glitter and shine that gets through", reaching for his Robin Hood outfit. He makes it, but has seen his fate ("I've come and I've gone before you wink an eye"), and crashes and burns just as he has foreseen. Fame is transitional, but the money’s good and you have some fun, which is the best you can hope for. It’s like life. And like life, the journey is more important than any destination.

‘No-One Came’ is a gem of a song on an album of great tracks. Any album with a song named after an Isaac Asimov character (‘The Mule’) gets my vote. Ian Gillian has said that the inclusion of ‘Someone’s Daughter’ was a mistake, but it’s a bit of fun and a natural break in the wall of unrelenting melodic rock. ‘Fireball’ also has its title track to recommend it, one of the greatest opening tracks, with an opening itself that demands attention, and a Hammond organ solo of sheer class. As ‘No-One Came’ remind us, the best that a musician can hope to achieve is to compose a piece that will live on beyond them, bring pleasure to future generations, and ensure their immortality. Mission accomplished lads.

And Another Thing... Question Time?

So I guess you’re all wondering (or rather, in my sad little world I imagine you’re all wondering?) what I have to say about Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time. Well strap in people, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

I think I’m in love with Bonnie Greer. Of all the people involved in the build up to Thursday’s edition of Question Time, including Nick Griffin and the BNP, the three major political parties, the BBC and the anti fascist lobby, she is the only one to come out of this with any credibility. At least she attempted to debate Griffin on his myopic world view and correct his basic schoolboy errors, but in the era of the sound bite in-depth political analysis is rarely permitted. Still, I think Nick was quite taken with our Bonnie. She said later that she’d had to restrain herself from slapping him. He’d probably have enjoyed that.

Greer also came off well because she was the only non-politician on the panel and therefore the only one of the quintet afforded the luxury of honesty. For everyone else it was bullshit as usual. Liberal Democrat MP, Chris Huhne, fell into the same trap that sadly most Lib Dems fall for on Question Time (even the usually excellent Vince Cable). They accept credit for any party political success, while distancing themselves from any unpopular policy, claiming they have always been opposed to whatever it is. You can’t have it both ways and you end up looking frankly ridiculous. Besides, he was largely a spectator. And why weren’t the Green Party invited, given that they are the only political party to have a declared policy for tackling the BNP?

I’m not sure, but I think Jack Straw maybe a genius. After all, it takes real talent to be on the same program as the leader of the British Nationalist Party and still be the most pathetic person present. Jack is the Les Dawson of politics, he’s so inept he must be doing it on purpose. He even managed to make the most idiotic statement of the evening by positing that unlike the BNP, the three main political parties have a moral compass. Oh I’m sorry Jack, when did you start using that then? Where was your party’s moral compass when you were lying about Iraq’s chemical weapons, fabricating evidence and leading the country into an illegal invasion (if that’s not a tautology)? An invasion which left at least 100,000 Iraqis dead, an estimated 5 million Iraqi children orphaned, as well as being a catalyst for the London Underground bombings which killed 56 people. Oh and then there’s all the British service men and women who have died on active duty in that country and the small matter of transforming a fringe terrorist organisation into a major global force. Maybe if you wiped some of the blood off you would see that what you think is a compass is in fact a medal from Dick Cheney for services rendered to the oil industry.

Nor should we let the Tories off the hook here. Never EVER forget that within a month of the Halabja gassings in 1988, the Tories were in Bagdad offering Saddam more money and more aid. When the Tories inevitably regain power after next year’s general election, let’s be sure to remind them of that fact every time Iraq is mentioned.

Which brings us to Griffin and the BNP. Or as I call them, simpletons. By which I mean, people who take a highly complex, interconnected global society and reduce it to a series of false dichotomies like black and white. Still, Griffin’s appearance did cause me this weekend to take a long, hard look at myself. Literally. I’ve been staring at my skin intensely and I have reached a staggeringly exhilarating conclusion: I’m brown! Granted, a very pale shade of brown, but still brown. Now, for someone born in Scotland, of Irish ancestry and who rarely leaves the house during daylight hours, I should be the whitest person in the country and yet I am brown? Which should come as no great surprise really, my ancestors were Africans, as were everyone’s, millennia of migration and evolution have lightened my skin tone, but it cannot diminish my true nature entirely. On the rare occasion when I do venture out into sunlight, the melanin in my skin darkens my complexion and I achieve colour balance with my ancestors. Not only are there no people coloured black or white in the world, the colours black and white do not exist in the natural world, period. Look at anything black closely and you’ll see it is in fact a darker shade of another colour. To pick one glib example, consider Guinness. What colour is it? Black? Wrong, it’s a very dark green. The same is true of the colour white.

If Jack Straw is Les Dawson, then the BNP are the Spinal Tap of British politics. They’re not meant to be treated seriously, they’re meant to be pointed towards and laughed at. Griffin makes much capital out of the fact that white indigenous people are being usurped by immigrants, but he seems sketchy on who these indigenous people are exactly. At one point he made reference to the Maoris and how no one would argue that they are not an indigenous people, yet the Maoris only arrived in New Zealand a couple of hundred years before Europeans, so yes, I would have to take issue that point. The Australian Aborigines have a greater claim, as do those descended from the Mongols that crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas, but the routes both those peoples used were so treacherous that they essentially remained isolated until ships were built that could travel vast distances from Europe. No such claim can be made for the British. The country has been a multicultural society for millennia, what with the Picts and the Romans and the Vikings and the Saxons and the Normans all variously taking their turn at trying to tame this land. Griffin speaks of Great Britain as if it were a static nation prior to the 1950’s. The planet Earth has existed for 4.6 billion years. The country of England as we know it has existed less than a thousand years, Great Britain a little over four hundred years, and the UK barely a century. Good news Nick, it turns out the people you wanted to protect don’t actually exist in the real world. The ‘indigenous’ population of Great Britain is in continual flux, exactly the way it always has been. Why don’t you put your feet up, have a cup of tea (that traditional British drink direct from the Indian sub-continent) and chill the hell out.

And then there is the attitude of the anti-fascist groups. Now don’t get me wrong, as long as fascism exists then there need to be organisations that can meet them head on, one of the many reasons I will be voting Green next year. But really, there is such a thing as overkill people. In the weeks and months leading up to this event, I have received a series of emails from the Hope Not Hate campaign calling for action to be taken to get Griffin banned from appearing. All too often these emails descend into the same pejorative language as used by Griffin and his ilk. Fascism is no way to fight fascism. And if you’ve read ‘The Discriminating Individual’, my essay on race and racism, you know what quote is coming next. All together now:

He who fights dragons too long becomes a dragon himself

And yes, I am repeating myself, but I find I have to because we don’t seem to be learning. So listen up, because I’ve got a lot of other projects to be working on and I don’t have time to be stopping every five minutes waiting for those slow on the uptake to catch up. STOP BOOING THE BNP! Don’t you understand that they like it, it gives them an inflated sense of self importance? It also gets them off. Think about that: Every time you shout at a member of the BNP, they become sexually aroused. That should be incentive enough to quit.

Don’t boo, turn up at BNP rallies and laugh at them and they’ll soon go crumble into dust. You only had to watch Griffin’s disingenuous performance on Question Time, his answers filled with hypocrisy, half-truth and ill judged humour, to recognise what a sad deluded little man he is. As a student of body language, it was far more enlightening to watch his facial expressions and listen to the cadences in his voice than what he actually said (I rarely listen to what politicians say, it saves a lot of time and effort if you just assume they’re lying). You can tell Griffin doesn’t believe half the things he’s saying and the other half are so ludicrous that quarter of hour’s serious debate would set him straight on a number of issues. Sadly, only Bonnie Greer even tried. For the political triplets it was time for some much needed blame shifting. “Look,” they seemed to say, “we know we’ve supported the invasion of other nations, mismanaged the country’s fiancés, mortgaged your children’s future to the banks, colluded in rendition and torture, broken countless manifesto promises and taken the piss on our expenses forms, but that guy’s a racist!”

In fact, the saddest thing about Thursday’s performance is just how much Griffin came across like any other politician, which was probably why the program format was changed to concentrate on the BNP. If the program had followed its usual format then the difference between the four elected representatives would have been virtually indistinguishable. Not in policy, but in the level of political spin each employs to conceal any lack of actual substance. The program was largely a character assassination, but no one should have been surprised by that, Griffin was never going to be treated fairly by the BBC, not because he’s fascist, but because he a member of a fringe political party and anyone who has studied the BBC knows how much it panders to the established order. There is a urban myth that the BBC is somehow a lefty liberal corporation, but in terms of news media, the opposite is very much the case, easily demonstrated by the BBC’s role as chorus to the government’s attempts to build a pro-war consensus (see ‘Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq’ for more in-depth analysis).

900,000 people voted for the BNP in last year’s European elections, a sad reflection on the state of education in this country. To vote BNP is to lay bare a complete lack of knowledge of physics, astrophysics, chemistry, biology, history, natural history, evolution, genetics, as well as myriad other subjects. Again at the risk of repeating myself, countries generally get the government they deserve and if people in our society see the BNP as a viable alternative then it is we as a society that have failed and it is for us to do something to redress that, instead of trying to sweep them under the carpet and pretend they don’t exist. The BNP are dangerous, but not terribly so. Far more concerning is the prospect of a greedy, lying, murdering, narcissist becoming the EU’s first President. Griffin is all talk, but Bliar is actually dangerous and the only fit place for him is a cell in the Hague.

And yes, a British population of 70 million is a worrying prospect, but I think by that point we will have far more pressing matters to deal with. The myopic self-centredness of the British media rarely seems to connect a British population explosion with a more general global explosion. It is said that if the rest of the world consumed the same amount of resources as the USA we would need three more planets to meet the demand. So what then happens when China again becomes the dominant superpower? We’re about to find out.

Every time I hear about the supposed Islamification of Britain, I have to seriously ask if these people have ever been to Britain. As Aussie comedian Brendan Burns says, Britain hasn’t even adopted Christianity yet! Griffin accuses Islam of being a violent religion which oppresses women. In other words, a religion. After all, the Old Testament condones murder, rape, theft, paedophilia, slavery, drug use and genocide (all within its first five books), but most Jews and Christians ignore these anachronisms, as do most Muslims of the more violent sections of the Quran. Griffin and the BNP want to stem the tide of immigration and preserve Britain’s unique character. I’m sure the Saxons said the same about the French in 1066. Besides, it’s too late. One in ten relationships in Britain are already classed as ‘mixed race’, whatever that means, and that number will only increase. Short of wholesale genocide, that level integration can never be reversed. Britain is changing just the way it always has and I for one take comfort from that. The only immutable force in the universe is change itself. Get over it.