Let Them Eat Dog.

Let Them Eat Dog: The Spectacular Hypocrisy of the Anti-Yulin Movement.

“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” said the great princess. And how contemptibly naïve she was. For those words would hasten forth the ringing of the death knell for the French monarchy.  L’Autrichienne had issued a statement so trite, so appallingly unaware, so out-of-touch with popular opinion in France that the people, the French people, normally so calm and considered and averse to the idea of strikes and demonstrations, had no choice but to revolt.

The mass ‘anti-brioche’ movement had been born, and, with overwhelming verve and vigour, the people signed en-masse a petition condemning such cruelty to Vienoissaries, and calling on the government to ban such a gross demonstration of culinary immorality.  

There followed a revolution, during which sense and decency was restored. Brioche was allowed to live a long and happy life, bread was restored as the basic ingredient in the national diet, and the rest, as they say, is history. 

Except that it isn’t.

For one, the great princess to whom Rousseau attributes that memorable phrase was almost certainly not Marie Antoinette. But that is a minor quibble. No, the most important fact of the matter is that the first iteration of the French Revolution was not a popular reaction to the Dauphine’s goute immorale but a protest against the appalling conditions faced by the French citizenry; conditions that, incidentally, had forced many to resort to far more desperate acts and means than being cruel to man’s best friend. 

The anti-Yulin protest is as inaccurate as the above parody. The Yulin dog-meat festival, a ‘tradition’ that has been celebrated in the Guangxi city of the same name since the mid-‘90s and that received State approval in 2009, might appear to be an expression of particularly poor taste. But, as is so often the case, those campaigning against it are disinclined to explore beneath the surface of the issue. I contend that the festival, and the uncountable equivalents which will escape condemnation by avoiding the attention of viral-moralists, is caused by human suffering. I contend that those who truly wish to see an end to expressions and exercises of barbarous cruelty would better serve their mission by focussing not on one trivial example of it but on that which causes such things to be popular.  

Friends and colleagues have been inclined to highlight the hypocrisy demonstrated by signatories to Change.org and other petitions; those who will lambast the Chinese government for allowing such a festival to occur before settling down in front of the television with a burger made of the less-appetizing remains of a tortured pig or cow or chicken. They are correct to do so. And, as someone who unashamedly salivates over the prospect of a good sausage, I could hardly claim to be bastion of coherent morals if I were myself to have signed the petition. 

But my objection to it, and the particular hypocrisy which I have found most galling, is different. And I should request here, now that I find myself just past the outset, that the reader does not mistake this as a piece by one in favour of battering Chihuahuas to death with sticks and stones. (I am not. Not least because, if the purpose of this capital punishment were that the executioners should be able to devour the carcass, it would be more efficient – it would produce a higher yield - to find and kill a real rat.) Rather, the objection contained herein is to a moral theory that places fluff and paws and cuteness above the rights and liberties of nasty, carnivorous human beings. 

It’s inconvenient, isn’t it? The Chinese… no, the human race in its entirety is not particularly attractive. We’re not fluffy and cuddly. Our noses are often protrusions of unappealing dimensions. Our faces so often lack the features necessary to redeem their lack of symmetry. Our ears are dull, we have hands and not paws, we lack tails, and we are obese and bipedal. And we kill and maim and butcher each other every single day. It’s hard to care, isn’t it? Human suffering produces human apathy. It’s an unpleasant truth, but a truth nonetheless.

But it is worth remembering that China contains perhaps the largest population of disenfranchised people on the planet. Its state, its Party, suppresses dissent with violence and oppresses its people with means that (and clichés are occasionally necessary) can only be described as Orwellian. It brutalizes its ethnic minorities, such as Uyghurs and Tibetans, where it is deemed necessary in order to assuage the Han majority. It is slowly but inexorably bringing its overseas territories and provinces, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, under the complete control of the mainland, against the wishes of their peoples. This is but one facet of a resurgent, aggressive nationalism that is expressed elsewhere in the form of dangerous and flagrantly illegal irredentism, as demonstrated by the hard line and tough stance taken by The Party in its dispute with Japan over the Senkaku islands, and with territorial disputes in the South China Sea. 

The Party, in an exercise in newspeak reminiscent of Airstrip One, counters claims made about its almost total lack of respect of human rights by international observers, not least those of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, by saying that it adopts a different definition of the same. The Party defines human rights in relation to the Four Cardinal Principles, which are: 

1. We must keep to the socialist road.
2. We must uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat.
3. We must uphold the leadership of the Communist Party.
4. We must uphold Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.

More recently The Party has expanded its definition. Human rights in China are now considered in relation to its ‘national culture’ and its level of economic growth. (George Osborne would doubtless approve.)

So it is quite proper, says the Party, that China be allowed to execute people (more than every other country that still utilizes capital punishment put together in the ‘90s) who have never seen a trial let alone a jury and then to harvest their organs. It is quite proper that the One Child Policy, and the bizarre and inhumane rules and laws that have spawned from it, should be celebrated; maintained where necessary and redefined elsewhere (with the effect of exacerbating problems of sex-selective back-street abortions and abandonments). It is absolutely right that The Party should maintain strict control of the press, and indeed of all information. It is necessary that it should permit those religious and superstitious practices and traditions that it can control, such as Yulin, whilst seeking to eliminate (in the case of Falun Gong) or impose its own doctrine (in the case of Tibetan Buddhism) on those that defy The Party’s rule. The Party is the religion, and all condoned festivals and ceremonies and traditions are condoned because they conform to its doctrines. More on that later. 

It can maintain the absence of a judicial system and workers’ rights. It can treat its rural and migrant workers as subhumans. It is proper that freedom of political expression and opinion be suppressed and that their advocates be treated as ‘counterrevolutionaries’. It is essential that The Party maintains the myth of a common cultural enemy. Orwell’s dystopia never really required anything other than Goldstein and a one-at-a-time rotation of a foreign foe to achieve this effect, but The Party in China has demonstrated its flexibility in continually coming up with new dangers, new pariahs, new enemies.

I am flirting with crass and artless danger. Perhaps there is already too much paint on the canvas. Suffice it to say that all of the above, and the rest of the exhaustive list that I have not the space or the time to include here, are not just condoned under The Party’s definition of human rights; they are the Party’s definition of human rights. All of this, all of these crimes, are human rights, according to The Party, because they are necessary to ensure the upholding of the Four Cardinal Principles and the continuation of economic growth.

What, then, is the real problem? Is it that some Chinese people (and not, as many Twitter morons seem to believe, the entire population of China) have taken part in the ceremony? Is it that some Chinese people eat dog and cat meat? Rest assured, Yulin does not represent the sum total of animal cruelty and questionable culinary tastes in China. Or is it rather that festivals like Yulin are created, and are popular, because the conditions in which the people of Guangxi are forced to live in, and those of other states and cities and provinces, make them popular? 

Surely it is telling that the official response in China, the state-sponsored backtrack, has coincided not with the advent of a large and international animal rights protest – for the festival has been the subject of international protests for years – but by the involvement of China’s rapidly growing middle class; the social group that is becoming increasingly vital in maintaining the country’s economic growth; the class with access to education; the class with expendable wealth; the class that can afford to keep pets, such as dogs, for pleasure. They have the luxury of being able to afford to care; the money to back the morals.

 I return again to the point made previously; that The Party is, intends, and has always intended to be the religion of China. People will often cite the country as a part of a desperate and misguided attempt to defend the crimes of religion. What they seldom realise is that The Cultural Revolution did not seek to eradicate religion. It sought and it was successful in its quest to adopt the religious impulse itself. It has its own clergy, it has its religious hierarchy, it has its scriptures and its incontrovertible truths and its contempt for free thought and liberty. It is especially ironic that The Party, which still occasionally boasts of its adherence to Marxist-Leninism, is itself the very essence of that which Marx argued so forcefully and ably against.

“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”

That the Yulin festival has been the subject of an international outcry; a great popular movement that claims to decry cruelty, is, then, spectacularly hypocritical. The Yulin festival is but one tradition, one expression, one festival that was created with the express purpose of maintaining the totalitarian religion. In limiting ourselves to attacking its expression, we ignore the fact that the denial of the rights of the Chinese working class to indulge in such activities will only increase the human suffering (and, by extension, the suffering of animals) whilst The Party, the summum malum, that which creates these illusions to glorify itself, remains in power.

A mass movement? Great. A popular revolt? Fantastic. But it is my firm belief that the eliciting of such a sentiment by nothing more substantive than the suffering of a few cute animals is worse than impotent; it is counter-productive.

It is not unworthy of us, it is not a sin, to focus our attention on human suffering, on the abject facts of the human condition, and on the causes of human depredation and exploitation. Perhaps, if we were able to be exercised by these, and if we were capable and more inclined to direct our ire at that which truly deserves it, we might achieve something more meaningful than the downscaling of one minor festival.

 

 

Tory Peer in Call for 'Practical' SRE in Primary Schools.

Conservative peer in call for ‘practical’ sex ed lessons.

The Conservative peer Lord Sleaze is to push ahead with his controversial SRE campaign despite widespread criticism of his proposals. In a speech tomorrow, Lord Sleaze is expected to call for ‘practical instruction’ to be included as part of a scheme entailing mandatory SRE education for primary school pupils.

TNN contacted Mr. Sleaze, who had this to say on the subject.

“Now look. I know this proposal has its critics, but I tell you: I went to a private school; one that was free to pursue its own agenda as regards sex education. They accepted the need for practical lessons as a matter of course. And, clearly, it’s done me no harm. Look at me now!”

Mr. Sleaze, who attended the Bernard Law Catholic School for Boys in Boston, Massachusetts,  before pursuing his political career in the United Kingdom, added that “though the Conservative party is obviously not in favour of lowering the age of consent, or encouraging that kind of thing in general, it is undeniably true that young people are not sufficiently educated in these matters. Education is vital if one is to hold a sensible, informed opinion on anything.”

Mr. Sleaze was unwilling to comment on the reluctance of parliamentarians to introduce compulsory politics, ethics and citizenship classes into the national curriculum.

Critics of his proposal have claimed that primary school children are too young to be educated in matters relating to sex, let alone involved in practical demonstrations. However, the notoriously outspoken peer has been unrepentant. 

“Most of my critics have mothers and fathers who were fourteen or fifteen at the time of conception. So, yes, I suppose I should declare an interest in this matter, as many of these thoughtless cretins wouldn’t have been born had my proposals been enforced two or three decades ago.”

Lord Sleaze has made the news in recent weeks after being linked with the loss of a Home Office dossier containing information of suspected paedophiles within the political system. However, he does not look kindly on those who accuse him of wrongdoing.

“This is exactly why [Home Secretary] Theresa May’s proposed reforms on free speech and the human rights act are necessary,” he said. “This nonsense. This lurid speculation. Of course I wasn’t involved in Operation Cover—err, in this matter. The loss of this document is tragic, to be sure, but to suggest that I had anything to do with it?! Nonsense. Sedition. Seditious nonsense. I’m as fervent an advocate for free speech as anyone you’ll meet, but free speech comes with responsibility. Namely the responsibility not to slander me.”

Lord Sleaze’s speech to UKMBLA UK will be broadcast live on TNNTV from 13:00 tomorrow.

'Why I'm Joining ISIS'

 There is, at first glance, very little to distinguish Salusbury Road from any other just-off-central London backstreet. Mile after mile of terraced housing, broken only by the occasional shabby chemist, shabby off-licence, or shabby estate agents’ equally shabby offices. But appearances can, from time to time, prove deceptive. Inside one of these unremarkable flats sits a very remarkable man, and I, with curiosity overpowering my apprehension, have been sent to meet him.

Baruch Mendelsohn is surprisingly easy to find. In fact, he’s a well-known figure in these parts, especially amongst the community of drug addicts and homeless people that make up society’s shadow in the Brent Council area. One man, a cheerful old sod with a fondness for Sour Diesel and a beard that wouldn’t look out of place in Middle Earth, sings in praise of Baruch.

“He’s a top lad, Barry,” says the vagrant. He can’t remember his own name, but he’s enamoured by ‘Barry’, who gives him food and money, and occasionally steps out to share a joint on the porch of the old, run-down police station.

This story is repeated, in one form or another, and with varying degrees of erudition and eloquence, up and down the road. By the well-spoken woman with the well-fed dog who begs outside the tube station, by the singing Rasta-man, and by the odd couple who can be found wandering drunkenly, hitting each other with half-full cans of Special Brew and, on this occasion, kicking an unopened pack of sausages up the street. “Top lad,” “Great guy,” “Love him to bits.”

 The Sleeping Man is perhaps the only exception. Huddled in an alcove next to the bookshop, he shouts and swears when I mention Baruch. But then, as I soon discover, The Sleeping Man does little else. He shouts and swears at dogs, at children, at women; at anyone who crosses his eye line. The Sleeping Man does not discriminate.

All very well and good, but how do I square this with the profile I’ve got?

This profile, written and sent to me by Mr. Mendelsohn himself, paints a very different picture. Indeed, I’ve been told that I am to address him not as Baruch Mendelsohn but as Baadir Mohamad, he having “Renounced [his] Jewish faith and [his] kafir ways, turned [his] back on decadence and sin, accepted the truth of the al-Quran,” and so on. B.M. is apparently unaware that one does not need to write ‘the’ before ‘al-Quran’; it translates as ‘the the Quran’. A quibble, but possibly quite revealing.

The mental portrait I’m trying to create is shattered as I’m accosted outside Starbucks and whirled around to face who I assume – who I hope – must be Baadir.

“Mr. Mercer!”

I’d been expecting to be confronted by a cliché; by a Choudary clone or Hamza doppelganger, all wild eyes and austere robes and liberated facial hair. But Baadir Mohamad isn’t any of that. Or rather, he’s not quite any of that. I seem to have caught him in the very early stages of his metamorphosis. An almost indiscernible hint of mania in the otherwise friendly blue eyes, something not-quite-unpleasant in the crooked-toothed, tarnished-silver smile; traces of some artificial colourant in his thinning hair.

“Mr Mohamad, I presume.”

“Please, call me Baadir.”

These introductory niceties having been concluded, Baadir takes me, bizarrely, by the hand, and leads me to a door not ten yards away from the ‘coffee’ shop (I use the term in its broadest possible sense). Two flights of stairs later, and I’m in the unremarkable flat with the very remarkable man.

We’re sitting in his kitchen, which doubles up as a living room. There’s a copy of the Quran next to a bottle of fabric softener on top of the washing machine, and the surface next to that is covered with a sea of unwashed plates. The place reeks of marijuana and cigarette smoke, and I’m hit with a strange and sudden realisation. Sitting here, on this disgusting sofa, it occurs to me that this is how it must feel to be a discarded fag butt.

My first question, the one I’ve been most looking forward to asking, concerns his Jewishness. What does he think of it? Do Jews really control the world?

“They control the media, certainly,” is his reply. He reaches for a pile of papers on the kitchen table and picks one out, seemingly at random. “This,” he says, “is something I was writing for my blog before it was taken down. This should explain it.”

And it does, after a fashion. I can’t repeat much of what I read; it would be impossible to print. It’s called ‘Letter from The Fat Controller’, the title taken from B.M.’s bizarre theory; that the Fat Controller of Thomas the Tank Engine is a metaphorical depiction of our Jewish overlords.

Does he really think Islamic State will accept him? He doesn’t look particularly Jewish, but he doesn’t look much like a Salafist, either. Wahhabi doctrine forbids you from shaving, and Baadir clearly has, and recently. His appearance is somewhat transigent; as though he dresses with one inept eye on fashion whilst the other looks toward the future he claims he desires.

“They will, when I get there. I can’t look the part now; I’m too easily noticed, and they’re watching me.”

This is undoubtedly true. When I ask him how he plans to get to Syria, he explains that he’s already tried, and been prevented. He also tried to move to Birmingham, believing that there might be some truth to the Fox News claim that the city is all but ready to declare itself an Islamic state, but was prevented again. He’s set his sights on a move to Tower Hamlets, from where he intends to plot his escape. Either he’s being coy, or he really has no idea how he’s going to go about it.

When I ask him about his family his expression becomes dark. Born and raised somewhere near Luton, he left home when he was fourteen, arrived in London when he was nineteen, and claims to have never been back. Having been born and raised somewhere near Luton myself, I can attest to the fact that the closer you are to it, the more it f*cks you up.

“My mother,” he says, “is a decadent western whore.”

“How so?”

“She can’t cook. She doesn’t cook. She doesn’t tend the house. She goes out to work and leaves the place to fester. She’s not married; wears makeup and no veil. She made me a bastard. She made me the way I am, or rather, the way I was.”

“Do you still speak to her?”

“Every Tuesday.”

Curious. “You said she made you the way you were. What were you?”

He pauses. “You know the story of Lut?”

I do. Lut, or Lot, is amongst a handful of figures from scripture who have survived plagiarism twice, appearing first in the Torah, then in the Bible and finally in the Quran. His story is contains that of Sodom and Gomorrah.  “Ah,” I say, “so you are-“

“I was,” he interrupts, “but I am cured.”

“But you blame your mother?”

He shrugs, non-committally. “One way or another it’s her fault. And I won’t stop until the black flag of jihad flies above her house. Maybe it’s her nature. Maybe it’s because she had me vaccinated. You know about vaccines? You know the Jews in the CIA invented them for their war on Muslims? They sterilise us, they infect us, they make us mentally ill.”

“Are you mentally ill?”

“Again, I was cured.” The source of these ‘cures’ is to be found in the Finsbury Park mosque, Abu Hamza’s alma mater. Baadir’s conversion owes itself, at least in part, to the toxic blend of Saudi Wahhabism, oil wealth, and Prince Charles, that royal speaker to vegetables. “Allah is the cure,” Baadir continues.

When I ask him about his other diagnosis he waves me away, claiming he can’t remember. Schizophrenia or MPD; one of those. So, as he begins to roll a joint, I ask him… why. Why Islamic State? Conversion is one thing, terrorism is surely quite another.

“You mean you can’t see it?!” he exclaims, gesticulating toward the window. “Look at it. It’s filthy. It’s corrupt. The women are all prostitutes, the men are all beggars and sinners. The scriptures are clear; we do this, and we win. We have to win. There is no way we won’t win. The people who accept that might be saved, but the rest can burn.”

“And you’d be prepared to behead people?”

“Sure, why not.” He shrugs again. “I’ve seen the videos. I could do it. And it’s not as though I’d be beheading real Muslims.”

Alas, our time together is almost over. We both have places to be. Baadir is heading out to the Two Brewers in Clapham, which means I have to change my plans and head elsewhere. The Two Brewers describes itself as being ‘gay friendly’, and it’s full of friendly gays. It serves as a useful staging ground for trips into other worlds. Perhaps Baruch isn’t as dead as Baadir likes to pretend. Perhaps Baruch is still in him, somewhere. Perhaps someone else will be, later.

-----

“One for the road?”

He’s offering me a joint. I hate the stuff, but how often does one get the chance to take a spliff from a wannabe jihadi?

“Sure,” I say.

I’m still wondering, as I make my way back up Salusbury Road, what it is that separates us. We are the same age, we have similar backgrounds, we share many interests. And yet, he fantasizes about joining Islamic State, about beheading infidels and blowing up history, whilst I do not. Quite the opposite. Let the infidels keep their heads, I say, and history has a lot going for it.

The nameless old sod from earlier is sitting on the porch of the old, run-down police station. He eyes me up, meaningfully, as I stride toward him, and beckons with his gnarled old claw. Well, why not?

“Alright, Barry?” he asks, as I squat down beside him.

“Barry?”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Never mind, old sod. Got a light?”

The real threat to free speech? It’s us.

The real threat to free speech? It’s us.

 “All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”

George Bernard Shaw is too seldom referenced in discussions on free speech. This is a shame, for two good reasons.

Firstly, his statements on the subject are useful because they highlight the value of criticism. Simply put: “It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one's uncles.” 

Secondly, his record should serve to educate one on a dangerous compulsion. Allowing criticism of views and ideas he disliked, Shaw’s support for Stalin, ‘moderate’ eugenics and the doctrine of Lysenkoism is a lesson in the uncritical. Partisanship is one thing; wilful blindness is quite another.

It is worth remembering that Shaw was writing at a time when cultural and ideological differences between East and West could manifest themselves in any place and at any time. Lysenko was to the East what Mendel was to the West: it was not uncommon to hear or to meet someone who genuinely believed that there was a difference between Eastern science and Western science, or communist science and capitalist science. But whilst Lysenko’s theories were eventually shown to be little more than nonsense wrapped in a thin layer of plausibility, the years in which it was the sponsored pseudoscience of the Stalinist state (which imposed  its ‘official science’ on large parts of the Eastern bloc) had already done immeasurable damage to knowledge and to society in the Soviet Union. Not so much a brain drain as a brain purge, the 1948 declaration that the whole field of genetics was nothing more than “bourgeois pseudoscience” led to the arrest, imprisonment and even the execution of an astonishingly large number of once-prominent and celebrated scientists.

That Shaw expressed much of his support for Stalinism in the years after Arthur Koestler had stumbled out of love with the regime, and after Victor Serge had been imprisoned by the state he once worked for, and after Rosa Luxemburg had penned many vital criticisms of the decline of Leninism, is something for which the English author deserves to be criticised. Serge, the man who exposed the Tsarist origins of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and who may well have coined the term ‘totalitarianism’, did not have the benefit of the same hindsight that could and should have been enjoyed by Shaw. It makes his criticisms of the secret police and of Stalinism in general all the more remarkable. And Orwell, who was by no means silent on the ills of capitalism or the follies of ‘The West’, could never be accused of having overlooked the equivalent flaws of ‘The East’. Much of what we now know about Stalinist Russia we owe to those brave individuals who did write, who did speak up, and who did not censor themselves out of fear for their own safety, much less of causing offense.

Judgements on the critiques of the two systems that originated on either side of the iron curtain could only be made after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War; only after the communication of ideas ceased to be counterrevolutionary; only after introspection and self-criticism ceased to be so wholly un-American.  Shaw would have been wise to stay true to his principle: ‘the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.’

If the Cold War was a clash of civilizations, then we are now living through a clash between civilization and its antithesis. Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, al-Shabaab, Jabhat al-Nusra: these are not glimpses of a proto-civilization informed by an alternative ideology. They are the sworn and self-professed enemies of the very premise of civilization.

When we grant even a modicum of respect to their nihilistic worldview, we assume that they are an expression – however vulgar, however loathsome, however perverted - of an idea that is fundamentally equal to the foundation of any civilization. And in doing so, we insult the memory of the many peoples, societies and cultures that once occupied and still occupy what we now misguidedly call ‘the Muslim world’. These, after all, are the people who destroyed the ancient statues of Buddha at Bamiyan, who bombed the al-Askari Mosque, who burned museums and their priceless collections and to whom countless historical documents and artefacts have been lost because their very existence was deemed to be an implicit criticism of Islam. We see a good deal of misplaced handwringing after attacks on ‘our own’ culture, but the masochists – those who prefer to blame Salman Rushdie, Jyllands-Posten, South Park and Charlie Hebdo than defend them – tend to have very little to say about the cultural atrocities inflicted on societies ‘over there’, atrocities that are not committed by ‘us’ but by the ‘them’ that we supposedly oppress and provoke.

But countries and regions and the legacy of the people who did so much to preserve the relics of ancient Greece and Persia, whilst the forces of Christendom were doing their best to wipe all traces of pre-Christian art and culture from the world, are not and will never be represented by the bin-Ladenists, by the Salafists and the Wahhabis, or by the followers of Khomenei or Zarqawi or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. And if we want, as we should, and as our friends in Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan certainly do, to be allowed to enjoy the art and the writing and the music and the poetry of the region – whether that be the old, like Rumi and Tabrizi, or the new, like Khaled Hosseini and Kanan Makiya – then it is vital that we do not lessen our own commitment to freedom of speech and expression in some stupid attempt to appease the fanatics. Instead, we should hold to it and fight for it all the more, not just for us but for those who lack those rights.

Yet in Europe and the United Kingdom we are increasingly being told that we have a duty to be silent. That we have a responsibility not to offend. That we are morally obliged to keep our criticisms, thoughts, jokes and ideas to ourselves. As though the other side would simply disarm and go away if we only stopped publishing cartoons! Specifically cartoons depicting a certain illiterate peasant who lied about a revelation that never took place, and who built on that lie a military campaign with the aim of creating an empire. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions,” and there are few propositions more unintelligible than the premise of religion.

The trend is particularly worrying on this side of the Atlantic. Our lack of a written  constitution and a codified bill of rights, coupled with and partly caused by the position of the monarchy and its relationship with government, and exacerbated by our continuing involvement with a European Union that has no interest in protecting free speech and no constitution of its own that protects it, leaves us in a uniquely vulnerable situation. It adds significant and unnecessary weight to a burden we seem reluctant to bear. It requires us to stand as the sole protectors of our most important right, and the only defense against ourselves.

This is an exceptionally dangerous state of affairs. George Orwell’s essay, The Freedom of the Park, makes the point that the real threat to free speech in this country comes not from a capricious and totalitarian government but from a capricious and tyrannical compulsion toward self-censorship.

 “The relative freedom which we enjoy depends on public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech... if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. The notion that certain opinions cannot safely be allowed a hearing is growing.”

This can be allied with another of Thomas Jefferson’s statements—“the only security of all is in a free press”—to make, in summary, the case: If we are truly concerned with free and equal rights, not just for white middle-class men on this island but for everyone, then it is vitally important that we do not allow the censorship, by ourselves or by anyone else, of thoughts and ideas that offend a minority, and especially not the majority. Noam Chomsky is right when he points out that “Goebbels was in favour of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favour of free speech, then you’re in favour of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favour of free speech.” 

This is an effective summary of Milton, of Mill, of Paine, of Voltaire, of Jefferson, and of the many others besides, whose work forms the scaffold on which the principle of free speech and a free press has been erected.

To adopt anything less than complete adherence to what those in the United States call First Amendment absolutism is to pre-emptively condemn the very people you think you are trying to protect. (The irony of that title is that, as Christopher Hitchens so eloquently put it, “It commits us to an unshakable principle while it obliquely reminds us that absolutism is what the freedom of speech actually makes impossible.”) The point is well made in the dialogue between Roper and Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All seasons. When Roper tells More that he would happily cut down every law in England to get after the devil, More issues the following response.

 “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? ...Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”

For the avoidance of doubt, I am fully aware of the logical consequences of this position. And I’ll make it very clear: I have no time for hate speech laws of any kind. The Austrian government might have congratulated itself for arresting the historian and holocaust denier David Irving for thought crime, but I would defend his right to hold, speak and publish his views even if he had no redeeming features whatever.

Nor do I have time for nonsense non-words like ‘Islamophobia’, the wilful conflation of race (which doesn’t exist) and religion, which is designed with the express purpose of silencing criticism of the latter. The reader is welcome to attack me with speech or in writing and on any topic they choose. It takes a lot to make me cry. But I reserve the right to reply in kind and I reserve the right to attack any person, any idea, any religion, any ideology, at any place and at any time.

Again, and whether it is an expression of self-flagellation or an imposition from outside: “The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.” We may hope that this condition is reasserted and enforced by the governments – our own amongst them – that seem to be denying its proud entailments. But we must first recognise and acknowledge its value ourselves.