What will they say of me if I’m assassinated with a sharpened carrot by some deranged vegan or clubbed to death by the Duke of Gloucester with a scale model of one of the vast wind turbines he plans to inflict on the Northamptonshire countryside?
This isn’t a question I feel comfortable asking even in my head, let alone in a place where real people can actually read it.
First, I don’t want to give the wrong people out there any funny ideas.
Second, I’ve got this superstition that if you say stuff like that it makes it more likely it’s going to happen.
It’s not just a superstition, either, it’s an observation borne of reading lots of military memoirs and seeing lots of war films. Whenever a character feels funny, or forgets his lucky charm or has a sudden premonition of his own doom you can be sure as eggs as eggs he’s not going to survive the day.
Not, incidentally, that I have had such premonition. It’s just that I’ve been following the case of the Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard – an outspoken critic of Muslim fundamentalism – who narrowly escaped being assassinated this week on his doorstep by a man with a gun.
And what bothers me about the incident, apart from the incident itself, is how little it has been reported. The reason for this, my friend Douglas Murray has suggested – and I’m inclined to agree – is because of an attitude in our liberal media (mostly – but not wholly, I fear – subconscious) that “people like that” kind of have it coming to them.
By “people like that” I mean pretty much anyone of a right-wing persuasion who sticks his head above the parapet and says the unsayable, as the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn did about Islam and immigration before he was murdered by an animal rights activist, and as the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh did, also mainly about Islam, before he too was savagely murdered in the street.
After the Theo Van Gogh killing I was talking to an old flame of mine from my Oxford days – lovely girl, apolitical, not a malicious bone in her body – about the incident. She’d been living in Amsterdam for a few years so I was interested to hear her take on it. And what she said shocked me almost more than the killing itself.
“Oh you don’t understand,” said my lovely, sweet friend. “What you have to realise is that Theo Van Gogh was a provocateur. He was constantly saying outrageous things and looking for trouble.” In other words, the bastard deserved it; invited it.
Did he? Did he really? Did Theo Van Gogh really deserve to be shot eight times in the street with an HS 2000 handgun, semi-decapitated with one knife, stabbed in the chest with another, then have both knives stuck in his body with a five page note attached?
Is that really the result he was striving for, would you say?
Personally, I’m guessing not.
I reckon what Theo would have much preferred would be to have lived to 101, chain-smoking furiously all the way, and peacefully in his bed by his son Lieuwe, perhaps as a result of exertions earlier during a coke fuelled romp with an attractive blonde 70 years his junior.
He would have wanted this a) because it’s a much more congenial way to go and because b) it would have been an indication – not a major one, but an indication, at least – that the tide had turned during his lifetime and that he’d begin to win the argument.
There’s a popular misconception that people in the media such as Van Gogh, or the similarly late Andrew Breitbart, or, er, me who say outspoken, provocative things do so because they’re pathetic attention-seekers who’ll do anything to get noticed, perhaps to make up for the lack of love they received as children.
But it’s not. If you’re born a pathetic attention seeker, there really are a million and one better ways of getting your fix. You can become a politician. Or a rock star. Or a Radio One DJ. Or a TV personality. Or a flasher. Or a streaker. Or the assassin of someone famous like John Lennon.
Certainly, though, the main reason I write and speak and Tweet to provoke – and I’d hazard a lot of money it was the same with Breitbart and Van Gogh – is from a mixture of rage and a sense of holy duty.
I do it because I’m fucked off. Really, really, really fucked off from the moment I read the first story of the day in my newspaper or online till the second I finally manage to turn off my dark thoughts about how fucked the world is and finally manage to fall asleep. What fucks me off are the increasing assaults on our freedom of speech. I say what I say and do what I do to test its bounds. But I wonder whether it’s worth it any more. We’ve reached the point where, it seems to me, that you can be judged more harshly for what you say or the way you say it than on your actual deeds. Perception is all. You can be the biggest, most incompetent, ruthless bastard; you can cheat on your wife with rent boys; you can ruin thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives with the policies you introduce. But so long as you manage your image OK, talk nicely, say the right things at dinner parties, never offend the social mores of our time, then you’re off scot free.
George Macdonald Fraser wrote about this in 2008, his parthian shot before he died. Where initially – in the Seventies and Eighties – his Flashman character was more or less admired for his roguishness (redeemed by his unflinching honesty), in the Nineties something started to change. Critics began commenting on Flashman’s political incorrectness “in order to make a point of distancing themselves from it.”
Fraser wrote:
“ I find the disclaimers alarming. They are almost a knee-jerk reaction and often rather a nervous one, as if the writer were saying: “Look, I’m not a racist or sexist. I hold the right views and I’m in line with modern enlightened thought, honestly. They won’t risk saying anything to which the PC lobby could take exception. And it is this that alarms me – the fear evident in so many sincere and honest folk of being thought out of step.”
That was five years ago. Things are worse, now. So much worse that I quite often ask myself whether it’s even worth going on doing what I do.
See it seems to me that this battle is already lost. Our politically correct culture has grown so decadent it is beyond repair.
Suppose that vegan were to finish me off with his sharped carrot tomorrow. The worst thing about it wouldn’t be the undoubted pain and humiliation of succumbing to death by vegetable at the hands of a bloodless tofu-muncher.
The real horror would be this. Everyone would think I kind of had it coming to me. Almost no one – save Douglas, and what few other Happy Warriors there are left: no more than about 20 of us in the media I’d say – would have the moral and intellectual clarity to understand why I didn’t.
Nah you’re talking bollocks. Get a grip you fairy, there are plenty of us out here and we need a leader. And despite you not looking like Errol Flynn and wearing glasses, you’re it. So pull your bloody finger out, there’s a war to be won!
Hooray.
James,
There are lots of people who have had enough of the political correct bullshit. Don’t worry. There’s more of us than the metro-liberal pricks found in Notting Hill and Primrose Hill.
Everyone I talk to has had enough of wind farms, multi-culturism and the EU.
So, I say UP YOURS to:
1. The BBC.
2. The Guardian.
3. The EU.
4. Supporters of Wind Farms.
5. Pro-immigration and multi-culturism supporters.
Seconded. There are many ‘out here’ that are fed up with PC-BS.
The problem is to overcome the inertia. What we need is for everyone to vote NOT ‘LibLabCon’ – any party you like except mainstream.
I understand you. Brutal dictatorial authority, wearing the mask of compassion, has fought – and is fighting – a very clever campaign. The pendulum is so long overdue for a swing back to sanity that the term ‘tipping point’ hovers in the air. Just cling to the Churchill dictum: never give up.
What you are saying is, I suggest, your personal take on:
“I don’t like it sergeant – it’s quiet – too damn’ quiet…”
At which point – Kerthunk! = the Apache arrow goes into your chest.
Fear not. We are with you. Shout it. You are entirely correct.
There are two things about which I panic; running out of Marlboro Lights and not having a G.M. Fraser novel to hand…
I doubt very much that you are in anyone’s cross-hairs. You don’t rip into Islam very much and you do highlight that Wind Turbines harm wildlife, so there’s not much reason for you to be on the serious fanatic’s lists.
The Eco lobby is made of up mainly rent-seekers, must-be-seen-to-be-fashionables. This lot aren’t known for taking personal risks, despite what they may tweet or email you.
Your right James in what you say. Just recently I have been provoking people to try to get them to voice an opinion .
It’s quite obvious to me a large section of people now choose deliberately not to have an opinion about any thing except fucking football and music.
John birch on February 11, 2013 at 5:11 pm
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Your right James in what you say. Just recently I have been provoking people to try to get them to voice an opinion .
It’s quite obvious to me a large section of people now choose deliberately not to have an opinion about any thing except football and music.
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Well, James, there are millions who think as you do but who unfortunately lack your skills at wordsmithery; so don’t understimate the lobby and you just keep churning out the counter-counter cultural reverse agitprop. You could start by telephoning that prick Gove and explaining to him that citing Antonio Gramsci as his guru on education was not a good wheeze. It either exposed the administration of which he is part as the vanguard of the Long March, or exposes him personally as a dim prick who should change his speech writer, who is obviously a commie mole. I’d be interested to hear his response to that.
David Kelly.
James, you are one of the best columnists in the media and I guess honest journos are bound to make enemies. Keep on fighting the b*st*rds; you’re right, they’re wrong and you’re not alone.
Progress is being slowly made since the dark days of Blair and people are increasingly turning against the metro-liberal w*nkery that dominates our country.
Eventually the paradigm will shift and you will be able to claim major credit for that for exposing their lies and their morally bankrupt causes