First published, 15th January 2015
It’s intriguing that when those who put their lives on the line in defence of their right to free speech, others so readily use it to condemn them.
I wanted to get my final thoughts written down before public domain discourse returns to shopping, kittens, puppies, Easter eggs and all the other concerns over which we so love to exercise a little free expression. Not that I’m a preacher. Far from it. I have no need to nail my ninety-five ways to self improvement on any cathedral, mosque or synagogue. My words are written, folded and pushed under the door of my cell to be blown away by the wind. That’s how I like it and my editor works for me not the other way round…
It interested me that a week ago, even before the bodies of the victims of the Charlie Hebdo murders had been buried, the knee jerks of the press chose so readily and deliberately to condemn the victims. I mean, we all had a choice of what to say, what to emphasise as being the important lesson. What to think. Of course there are complexities: historical, political, social contexts behind an event like last week’s killings. But, when given a choice of what to preach about an event like this, why choose to use the opportunity to criticise the victims rather than stand united for free speech and free thought? In any case, surely the appropriate response to opinions we don’t like is to present counter opinions – in a civilised society, I mean. Not whips, guns and bombs. Even bigots, like those in the Vatican, who still adhere to the morality of the Old Testament, might be persuaded to condemn twelve lives for some cartoons. But no.
I wonder what the apologists for orthodox Muslim Jihâd violence would have to say to the children of Raif Bedawi who now every Friday morning is sadistically tortured for exercising his own right to express himself in such a way that it offended. What would that Enid Blyton of the present age (what’s her name? You know, the woman who wrote Prince Harry and the Crock of Shit or whatever) have to say? Maybe this?:
“Sorry, but he kind of deserved it. It’s your religion. So … Um. Would you like a signed copy of my latest novel? It’s an attempt to understand the world of adults. Not very good, I’m afraid but … whatever.”
Seriously, JKR, try meditating on what Mr Bedawi and his family are going through every Friday morning for the next twenty weeks. Maybe you could use it to inspire you into writing a good book for grown-ups. Who knows?
Well, actually, pro-Jihâd apologists have sort of ignored the floggings of Raif Bedawi. Those so willing to attack French colonialism or American imperialism (or just about anyone/anything that has tried to stand against Qutbism and Wahhabism including, of course the Satan state of Israel) scurry past the site of the Nigerian genocide with the averted gaze of denial. How do the Boko Haram mass murders tie in with apologist thinking? I don’t know. But I can’t help feeling that the apologists continue to give Jihâdists a license to kill. Well done there…
I want to work out for myself what lies behind the apologists’ position. Why is the West so confused? Why are Islamic states, like Saudi Arabia, in contrast so clear headed?
I think there are two cultural/historical/political/moral bodies of opinion that have fuelled the confused response to the recent atrocities. One lies in that paradoxical double headed monster Christian capitalism and the other lies in post colonial relativism or pluralism. The former has a great deal to do with the West’s insatiable thirst for oil and the latter with post colonial European nations’ attempts to set the rules to make multiculturalism work.
American apologists like Bruce Crumley (Time) and Teju Cole (The New Yorker) have their caustic opinions promulgated by publications whose editorial policies dictate that anything spoken against Saudi Arabia directly or that might raise public awareness of the abuses of human rights, the realities of jihadism, Qutbism and Wahhibism (and their khaliphate agendas) must be gagged. We ought to remember that there is as much of a threat to or control of free expression of opinion in the West as there is from ISIL and other Islamic states.
Of the twelve member states of OPEC, eight are Islamic theocracies. Nearly 80% of oil supply is controlled by the Islamic two thirds of the cartel’s membership. The oil crisis of 1973 reminded the West that their economies were effectively owned by Islam. Sure, when the oil prices were deliberately hiked, in an attempt to support the establishment of a Palestinian state during the Yom Kippur war, CIA operatives were sent in to assassinate King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. The Americans replaced him with pro-American King Khalid. Since then, America’s policy towards Saudi Arabia has been one of a sort of creepy amicable accord. Certainly the US has had a long Machiavellian history of siding with despots and dictators (they do so at least until the alliances backfire which, of course, they always do). Even Lorenzo de’ Medici knew The Prince was nuts. Someone needs to explain the importance of foreign policy integrity to whoever is behind America’s political thinking… Poo-tee-wit.
Everyone knows that, other than having its own love of firearms, America is profoundly monotheistic and run by a one percent of Christian-professing oligarchs. It’s these aspects of American culture that help to fuel its rather distasteful admiration for the tough stance taken against critics by their monotheistic brothers in the Islamic world. You see this in the monotheistic bias in their media: mess with faith and criticise Our Fuehrer who Art in Heaven then accept the consequences, guys. All good old divine retribution. Fuck yeah!
Hmm.
Meanwhile, in Europe, there’s the problem of multiculturalism. Confused thinking regarding pluralism and relativism feed the big ‘shut up’ when it comes to taking a critical stance against religions and Islam in particular.
During the collapse of the European colonies after the Second World War, Britain had to work out how to deal with its ‘commonwealth’ citizenry. It became government policy to open its borders to post colonial immigrants. This meant that people from previously oppressed and exploited nations were given the opportunity to live in the country of their old colonial masters so that they could be cold and wet and exploited for cheap labour by the onepercentocracy like the rest of its citizens. Over the next sixty years, governments and social ministers had to invent rules to ensure Enoch Powell’s prophesy didn’t come true.
Well, I suppose in many ways the ‘experiment’ of multiculturalism in Britain has been a great success but there is a growing danger emerging in more recent times that multiculturalism can only function if people are gagged. The gagging orders of the big ‘shut up’ come primarily in the form of the fundamental key word ‘racism’ without which social pluralism begins to unstick.
Ask a young child what ‘race’ means and they will look at you with their blind innocence. To be racist, a child has to be taught by its dumb ass parents what ‘race’ refers to. What it might mean. Well, here’s the beginning of the problem. ‘Race’ doesn’t refer to any biological fact about our species at all. Thanks to modern genetics and the wonderful progress in our understanding of phenotype and genotype variations in our species, achieved through the Human Genome Project (HGP), we can now all look at each other like the young child and shrug.
The best we can say is that we are all descended from ancestors who lived in a place we now call Africa. The old idea of ‘races’ has actually something of a colonial history about it. Racial supremacism promulgated by Christian European colonialists said more about the power dynamics between colonial masters and their colonised populations than anything biologically real. And yet we’re stuck with the misnomer and its misconceptions. But today, ‘racism’ is a powerful tool for pluralists who want to silence the right to discuss issues like immigration and population control, and, of course, religious differences. Any intelligent discussion about social identities, social and cultural differences is banned.
A good example of how race and racism are being used in the big ‘shut up’ relates to the word “Islamophobia”. The origins of this particular gagging order go back to the British Government’s commission of inquiry into attitudes towards Muslims living in Britain. The findings of the Runnymede Trust commission linked fear of the Muslim religion to racism. The Swedish libertarian socialist, Mattias Gardell, defines “Islamophobia” in the website forum Levande Historia as:
“Socially reproduced prejudices and aversion to Islam and Muslims, as well as actions and practices that attack, exclude or discriminate against persons on the basis that they are or perceived to be Muslim and be associated with Islam.”
Interestingly, since the Runnymede Trust published its report in 1997, and after the report was distributed by the Blair government to the country’s police forces and the social services and after its findings were filtered to the priests of the press, the value of the racist gag tag has begun to be questioned.
Well, whatever, as a free thinker and language user, I resent governments, commissions, journalist preachers and academics dictating to me how I must or must not use words. It is very important, in these times, for free thinking individuals to be able to articulate difficult and important issues in an attempt to analyse the nature and effect of ideologies that threaten that free thinking and discussion.
We do need a word that can be used to express a fear of an ideology, a fideism that is based in and pronounced by a text like the Qu’rân. Do we have to keep jumping though the hoops of political correctness imposed on us by libertarian socialists, every time we want to think about contentious issues that we desperately need to be able to discuss?
I am fearful of fideisms generally, of monotheism. I am fearful of Nazis, Stalinists, all nutcase belief systems from Cargo cults in Vanuatu to alien cults in Jones Town. I’m afraid of Islam. I’m afraid of tigers and heights too. I’m afraid of things that might endanger me in some way. But I don’t hate tigers. I don’t hate heights either (not literally). I love tigers, actually. But they scare me. I like mosques and a great deal of Islamic art. But I fear the ideology and some of its literal interpretations. Fear of an ideology is not to be confused with a fear of people or the background glow of past religious art and culture. Leave it in the past where it belonged…
Having said this, I am sorry for people who, as children, were brainwashed by adults (and yes, I think Dawkins is absolutely right when he states that religious indoctrination of the young is child abuse). To take away from children their natural inquisitiveness and fill them with death cult lunacy is a tragedy that unfolds with every new generation’s crushed chance to think freely for itself. I fear the way so many of us don’t or can’t think for ourselves. My fear of Islamic monotheism I shall call ‘Islamophobia’. I am also Christianophobic and Judaiophobic. All Fuehrer death cults terrify me:
Please don’t burn me to death. Please don’t shoot me. Please don’t gas me. Please, just go away.
Of course, we have to find out how to make multiculturalism work. Why? Because if we don’t, we end up like monotheists – the fires are lit, the ovens are stoked, the flogging and stoning begins. But using the big ‘shut up’ is not the right way to go about this.
The biggest problem in trying to make multiculturalism work lies in the pluralist paradox. The pluralist paradox is really just the self-contradiction: It’s better not to think we are better. Pluralism and moral relativism are moral value positions that seek to dismantle the taking up of moral value positions: It’s better not to think of yourself as being better. That’s a contradiction.
You can’t build a theory of how to make different groups with different social identities coalesce on a contradiction. This paradox comes to the surface only when the the pluralist party gets gate crashed by a bunch of guys who don’t want to play ball.
What do pluralists suggest we do with non pluralists? Well, at the moment they try to use the big ‘shut up’ and hope that the bullies might just go away. Cajole, flatter, support the bully. It’s like we’re telling the battered victim of domestic violence that she probably deserved a good beating – or else it can’t be so bad. Stop wingeing bitch. (Which is, of course, what social services and the police in Britain have been trying for decades). The British have an odd tendency to feel annoyed at the victim more than the aggressor. It’s maybe a general human thing. I mean, people get rather turned on by power don’t they?
No. We need to have a better understanding of how ethics can actually work for us. Moral systems and beliefs are not sent down by the Fuehrer. They are invented by humans to allow different social groups and individuals to live side-by-side and to allow for some sort of social harmony (check out all other social animal species: no Fuehrer, no morals, no wars). Morals are social tools needed by humans (because they are so aggressively destructive) and they can work. But pluralism and moral relativism fail us because they attempt to deny the importance of rules that allow human beings to criticise, condemn or defend themselves against those who seek to impose their ideologies on the majority. Pluralism gags us when we most urgently need to speak. Worse still, it allows the aggressor to use it to defend their own anti-pluralism against us. We are being silenced both from within and outside and it’s potentially disastrous.
Apologists and appeasers nearly helped destroy western civilisation in the last century and, in spite of the millions who died fighting fascism then, we’re being silenced once again by the same gang. Santayana must be rolling in his grave!
So what’s the solution? What are the pragmatics here? Where are the tools to help us dig our way out of this mess? Well, we have them right in front of us. They were invented after the catastrophes of the Second World War and the Holocaust and we’ve forgotten how to use them. The first is the potential power of the United Nations (not perhaps as it has become but how it was originally conceived) and the second is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Most importantly, both are secularist. The declaration of human rights, rather like the American constitution – before it got screwed by Christian fideists – is a post enlightenment gem. It allows us to put human dignity above ideology. It can be used to make even fideists lower the whip, look down on their victim and feel human compassion and pity. It can be used to curb attempts by monotheism to turn its followers into psychopaths. We need to use these tools to measure what it is for a state or regime to be civilised, respected and one worthy of the community of nations.
World governments (except Britain’s conservatives under Thatcher) turned their backs on South Africa’s apartheid. There were economic sanctions. White South Africans were made to feel ashamed. It worked. Eventually it worked. Why are we failing to do the same against Saudi Arabia, while we dig through the rubble and wash the blood from our streets?
You know, it took the West over a decade to put the British educated orthodox Muslim Abu-Hamza Al-Mazri behind bars. Europe refused to ‘dirty’ its hands with the deed and passed him over to the Americans. He was finally put in a cage on 9th January 2015, much to the shame of European libertarian socialism and having cost the British tax payer an estimated £2.75 million in welfare payments alone. In contrast, the Philippine government has taken just a few weeks to put street children of Manila in cages in order to clean things up for the Pope’s visit this week. CNN reported Pope Francis’ verdict regarding the Paris killings from a Christian moral perspective:
If a friend “says a swear word against my mother, then a punch awaits him,” Francis said. Vatican Radio reported that he then “gestured with a pretend punch” directed at the friend, Alberto Gasbarri – an action that many journalists interpreted as a joke. Vatican spokesman Thomas Rosica later told CNN the remark was “spoken colloquially,” adding the Pope wasn’t advocating violence or in any way justifying the terror attacks. Right after the punch gesture, Francis said, “It’s normal, it’s normal. One cannot provoke, one cannot insult other people’s faith, one cannot make fun of faith.”
It’s all enough to make any decent human being weep.
Dedicated to Raif Bedawi and his family