Black Mediocrity

I see Diane Abbott, the Shadow Minister for Public Health, is in trouble again, shooting off her mouth. She’s part of the Labour Party front bench and, as I say, the Shadow…oh, wait a minute, I think that should be Black Minister for Health, out of the shadows! Yes, she’s Black, the caps used deliberately here, for she takes pains to play her race card, something she does repeatedly as an all round mouth and professional Black woman. (Italics give a spot of added emphasis, just in case the point had escaped you!)

Not known for her subtlety, her latest gaff, as you may very well know, was a bird-brained tweet on Twitter, where, in discussion with one of her followers, she made an obviously racist remark, a generalisation about the attitude of whites, or should that be Whites, or maybe Whites.

Responding to a comment from another black woman, to the effect that the term ‘black community’ was born of lazy thinking, Abbott wrote that she was playing into the ‘divide and rule’ agenda. “White people”, came the twit, “love playing divide and rule. We should not play their game.” It’s a tactic, she continued, as “old as colonialism.”

Now the little house collapses around her ears. With several brickbats flying in her general direction (a perfect little storm in the press!), she says that her words were ‘taken out of context’ and ‘maliciously interpreted’. It’s just so amusing when politicians reach for this stale phrase; it must be on the most thumbed page of their professional lexicon. Unfair! Unfair!; you’re taking my words out of context. I’m not at all sure what context her words should be taken in, other than that of her bird brain.

She’s since been forced to issue a weasel-like apology by Big Brother Ed, the leader of the benighted Labour Party. But she will not be prosecuted under race relations legislation, despite a number of complaints lodged with the Metropolitan Police. Now just imagine if Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, had made some off the cuff remark about black people. No, you have no need to imagine. And all poor Aiden Burley did was to hire a costume!

Abbott has history here, a pattern of stupidity all based on her Black perceptions of the world. I wrote about her on the My Telegraph blog in June, 2010, a piece I called Diane Abbott – hypocrite, certainly; racist, perhaps. This followed a broadcast of This Week, a late-night BBC news show, in which she appears as a regular guest. In defending her decision to send her son to an expensive private school, when her own party’s policy is against the independent sector, she said that “West Indian mums will go to the wall for their children.” “So”, Andrew Neil, the show’s host, asked, “black mums love their kids more than white mums, do they?” Answer came there none, whereupon Neil went for the jugular;

Supposing Michael [Michael Portillo, the other regular] said white mums will go to the wall for their children. Why did you say that? Isn’t it a racist remark? If West Indian mums are as wonderful as you say, why are there so many dysfunctional West Indian families in this country? And why do so many young West Indian men end up in a life of crime and gangs? You didn’t want your son to go to a school full of kids who have been brought up by West Indian mums.

The paradox here, as I indicated at the time, is that she clearly does not believe that West Indian mothers are somehow better than other mothers, for she was prepared to buy her son a way out from a significant West Indian presence in her local comprehensive;

In doing so Abbott has freed him from the dangers of the gang culture that besets West Indian boys, something that she herself alluded to recently, a culture nurtured by worthless state schools. But it’s alright for others, the sink comprehensive and all that it leads to, alright for the benighted people who send this hypocrite, this champagne socialist, to Parliament. All black people are equal but clearly some black people are more equal than others.

On reflection I think that should be be all black people are equal but clearly some Black people are more equal than others.

Diane Abbot represents everything that is wrong with so much of contemporary and public life. I think of the great figures of the past that have walked through the corridors of Westminster and debated in Parliament, figures of stature, intellect and substance. Then I think of this woman, a small-minded, silly, tweeting pygmy; a Black mediocrity. You can take those remarks in any context you like.

I judge therefore I am

This is my response to a discussion on Blog Catalogue, under the heading “We are all racists”, the proposition being that we automatically judge people who are different from our own ‘tribe.’ My remarks are addressed to the poster.

Ana Speaks

I don’t suppose that you’ve ever heard of Enoch Powell, a British politician once almost universally condemned, even by his own Party, as a ‘racist’ because of his famously infamous Rivers of Blood speech, in which he gave warning of the possible effects of mass immigration. He was once asked in a television interview with David Frost if he was a racist, to which he replied;

It depends on how you define the word “racialist.” If you mean being conscious of the differences between men and nations, and from that, races, then we are all racialists. However, if you mean a man who despises a human being because he belongs to another race, or a man who believes that one race is inherently superior to another, then the answer is emphatically No.

So, yes, by the first definition, I, too, am a racialist. I agree with the argument put forward in your post that we are all racialists to that extent. Beware always of the small-minded and stupid here; for all too often their denials of racism disguises the fact that they are racist in the second sense of Powell’s definition, a form of psychological compensation for their own worthlessness.

Where I differ from you is over the question of skin colour. I do not believe that there is a ‘black race’ any more than there is a ‘white race’. If I judge people it’s most often a cultural reflex rather any on the basis of deductions made on the basis of skin colour. If I entered an underpass and saw that the exit was blocked by a gang of youths it would make no difference at all to my level of apprehension if they were white or if they were black.

Did you ever see Crash, the 2004 movie directed by Paul Haggis? It’s really quite clever, exploring race prejudice on a whole number of levels, not just the obvious ones. Here, in London, some of the worst racism is not white on black, but black on black, with people from the West Indies hating people from Somalia.

There is also the wider question of prejudice, which can overlap with racial perceptions, though not always. I admit my own shortcomings here: I dislike gypsies because I have seen how gangs of East European Roma operate in London. They have no place here; I don’t want them; I don’t know anyone who does. Less specifically, I dislike fat people and I dislike the stupid, probably the first more than the second, because they have the power to do something about their affliction and chose not to. See; prejudgement in the purest sense!

We live in a complex world, too complex, in so many ways, to be taken in without forms of mental categorisation. I judge therefore I am. :-)

Heil Big Brother!

I originally wrote this for Retarius and Anastasia, a site which I share with an Australian friend of mine. My discussion with Yun Yi on my previous blog reminded me of some of the issues raised, so I’m publishing it here also.

There they are, all wearing black shirts, all raising their right arms in stiff salute, all shouting ‘Sieg Heil’, all praising Adolf Hitler and his commitment to ethnic purity. Where are we exactly – in the back streets of Munich or Berlin, or any other place in the west where unregenerate extremism continues to exercise its baleful fascination? No, as a matter of fact this is Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia.

Yes, indeed, there is a Nazi movement in Mongolia, including a group which goes by the name of Tsagaan Khass – White Swastika -, led by a man who calls himself, wait for it, Big Brother. Please stop laughing; it’s all true! Big Brother has a rather confused view when it comes to Hitler, which involves some bizarre cherry-picking;

We don’t agree with his extremism and starting the Second World War. We are against all those killings, but we support his ideology. We support nationalism rather than fascism.

What Big Brother fails to mention is that in Hitler’s racial pyramid the Mongolians came close to the bottom. It’s such a bizarre irony that Nazism is now embraced by at least some among the ‘degenerate horde’ as a positive ideology.

There is really no great surprise in this. Racist nationalism is often adopted by people with a deep sense of personal grievance or inferiority, people who excuse their own failings by scapegoating some minority or other. In Germany it was the Jews. I confess I don’t know an awful lot about Mongolia but I’m guessing that Jewish people are something of a rarity. No, it’s not the Jews that Big Brother and his kind are getting upset about – it’s the Chinese, or the Chinks, their term, not mine.

China is imperialistic and evil, the message goes out; the Chinese are a danger to the ‘pure blood’ of Mongolia. Just how is this danger manifested, you may wonder? Well, you see, the Chinese have a lot of money, allowing them to come and ‘take’ Mongolian women.

This fear of deracination is not simply the fantasy of a fringe; it feeds on wider prejudices among the nation. One of the most popular urban myths in Ulan Bator is that the Chinese government has a secret policy of encouraging its male citizens to come and have sex with Mongolian women. A popular hip-hop track regularly played the capital’s bars and clubs is called Don’t Go Too Far, You Chinks, with a chorus of “shoot, shoot them all.”

There have been attacks on some foreigners, something that the US State Department has warned potential visitors about, though those in most immediate risk from this xenophobia seem to be Mongolian women themselves, threatened with head shaving if they sleep with foreigners. Tsgaaan Khass takes an altogether moderate approach here, insisting that its role is simply one of “law enforcement.” Their policy is to carry out targeted checks, going to hotels and restaurants to make sure that Mongolian girls are not involved in prostitution and foreigners are not breaking the law.

We don’t go through and beat the shit out of everyone. We check our information and make sure its right.

Now that’s a reassurance, I feel sure you will agree.

Nigger Jim and the Devil

Thanks to a discussion thread on BlogCatalog I now know that New South, a publishing house in Montgomery, Alabama, has produced a bowdlerised version of one the great classics of American literature. Huckleberry Finn has been sanitised, or is it whitewashed? Whitewash, how can I use such a racist expression? It has rather been blackwashed, meaning the word 'nigger' has been washed out! Jim is no longer a 'nigger', a word, incidentally, used by both Huck and Tom Sawyer without any kind of malice or derogatory intent. No, he is simply a 'slave'.

What arrogance, what appalling conceit to start removing words, words chosen with care by the author, a particular word chosen by Mark Twain, simply because it does not meet with contemporary standards of good taste or political correctness. In my response I suggested the next step is to start a wholesale process of going through the literature of the world, removing the words and phrases we do not like, as directed, of course, by the Ministry of Truth. Even the titles of books will have to be changed, including The Black Person of the Narcissus though in the States that will doubtless appear as The African-American of the Narcissus! Once you start this where does it end? Those concerned about ageism will also start to demand repackaging. Let's hear it for The Mature Man and the Sea. You don’t like war and rumours of wars? OK, let's have Peace and Peace.

I suppose it’s of some significance that this censored version has appeared in Montgomery of all places, the first capital of the Confederacy, on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War. I think they doth protest too much, and by their embarrassment over words shall ye know them. New South would seem to be anxious to bury the Old South, to bury history by corrupting literature, by corrupting the message and the meaning behind literature.

The blogger who raised this raised something else - on his own web page - which exercises my intellect and imagination, namely the alleged anti-Semitism of The Merchant of Venice. The author, Ian Thal, an American Jew, writes "...no matter how often nice liberal do-gooders try to pretend that Shakespeare had liberal attitudes towards Jews, we need to confront how many times his heroes compare Shylock to the Devil..." Before proceeding I should make it clear that he is not calling for censorship; no, he is arguing that work, even allegedly anti-Semitic work, should be read and understood in context.

Those who know me will understand that I'm about as far from being 'a nice liberal do-gooder' as a lion is from a polar bear! But words are so important. To use liberal or illiberal, anti-Semitic or pro-Semitic in relation to Shakespeare is, quite frankly, meaningless. On the balance of probability it's highly unlikely that Shakespeare ever met a Jew, officially absent from England from the expulsion of the late thirteenth to the readmission in the mid-seventeenth centuries. So the attitudes, and the words, the comparison of Shylock, and by implication all Jews, with the Devil is merely a reflection of the prejudices and the caricatures of the day, based, most likely, on stock demonic figures drawn from Medieval morality plays.

The other error here is to read any work of literature as biography, or as a mirror of the author's views; that Antonio and his crowd somehow reflect the attitudes and outlook of Shakespeare himself. It's lazy thinking based on no evidence at all. Think of Shylock, think of the subtlety of his character. Yes, he has malevolent and vengeful qualities but he is not unremittingly bad like Marlow's Barabas; he is not an archetype. He is vengeful because he has reason to be vengeful. He has been insulted all his life by the fops around Antonio, who both need him, need his capital, but treat him with condescension and contempt. Who would not be angry in such circumstances? But look how Shakespeare treats him, giving him some of the most eloquent lines in the whole play;

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means,
warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer
as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?
Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his
sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge.
The villainy you teach me, I will execute,
and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

This is not a devil: this is a human being; this is a man. More than that, his appearance on the stage probably marks the first time in history that the English were urged to look at a Jew as a man and not as a demon. Such a defence in the Middle Ages would have been unthinkable. In the end he is also a man betrayed, betrayed even by his own daughter, so far as I am concerned one of the most worthless characters in drama, totally without nobility, compassion or a sense of duty towards her elderly father. This may be my modern sensibilities but I like to think it was not that far from Shakespeare's intention. The Merchant of Venice is a great play, full of complex emotions and characterisation. It deserves to be better understood. It is better understood, and not simply by 'nice liberal do-gooders.'

Hating the quality of whiteness

I wrote this for another site I belong to earlier this month. I’m adding it here for Jaycee.


Eugene Terre’Blanche, the murdered leader of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweing, was buried earlier this month amidst much Nazi-style gesturing and gnashing of teeth. Once again a tale of two nations seems to be unfolding, with the local black community looking on in an understandable mood of apprehension. But the baton has been passed on. The racist is dead; long live the racist. And the new racist is not white; he’s black – he’s Julius Malema.

I’ve mentioned before in previous blogs on South Africa that this man is the leader of the African National Congress’ youth wing, and one of the main political props of President Zuma. There was an interesting account of his background and outlook in The Daily Telegraph recently by Rian Malan, drawing attention, once again, to Malema’s trip to Mugabeland, where he sang Kill the Boer, that old ANC favourite from days gone by, feasting with his friend and picking up tips on how to run a successful decolonialisation programme.

Malema, as the report details, though relatively young and poorly educated, rose to prominence as a supporter of Jacob Zuma’s bid for power, intimidating and threatening violence against any opponents. A socialist and champion of the poor, very much in the model of Mugabe, his efforts were rewarded, as well-appointed houses, a fleet of cars and a Breitling watch fell into his hands, seemingly like manna from heaven.

Alas, it’s the old, old story, the story that has seen the Wabenzi, the big shots, advance across the rest of Africa in their limos; it’s a story of socialism for the many and wealth for the few, wealth for people like Mugabe and Malema. Their socialism is also accompanied by forms of racism, racism born of the need to create scapegoats, covers for their own venality and incompetence.

But Malema denies being a racist, denies hating white people. It’s just the quality of “whiteness” he hates, to use his own bizarre words. He was even more bizarre when he was in Harare, saying “They are so bright, so colourful, we refer to them as white people. Maybe their colour came as a result of exploiting our minerals and perhaps if some of us get opportunities in these minerals we can develop a nice colour like them.” I hope you can make sense of this gibberish, because I most certainly can’t!

He certainly has his eyes on those minerals, on the wealth of South Africa, having the support of a powerful faction within the ANC- perhaps even the President himself- for the same kind of ‘indigenisation’ that ruined Zimbabwe. This man is a dangerous, muddle-headed, greedy and unprincipled demagogue. If South Africa is to be destroyed, if the goose that lays the golden eggs is to be killed, he and his kind will be the cause, not Terre’Blanche and the ghosts of the past.

The Foundations of English Racism

Continental-style racial theories made their way into England from about 1840 onwards. One of the earliest exponents was none other than Thomas Arnold, the famous headmaster of Rugby School, and a leading historian. He advanced a universal theory of world history, in which he assigned a special role to the Aryans, specifically the Germanic races, which included, of course, the Anglo-Saxons. Race theories in general made their way into the oddest corners of British intellectual life. Consider the following;

You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the Jews do not greatly participate. The first Jesuits were Jews; that mysterious Russian diplomacy which so alarms Western Europe is organised and principally carried on by Jews; that mighty revolution which is at this moment preparing in Germany, and which will be, in fact, a second and greater Reformation, and of which so little is as yet known in England, is entirely developing under the auspices of Jews, who almost monopolise the professional chairs in Germany...

Who wrote that? Why, none other than Benjamin Disraeli in his 1844 novel Coningsby, and himself of Jewish origin.. His view, for all its fancy, was benign: it was, nevertheless, to find a malign echo in the coming development of European anti-Semitism.

But we have to go further north, to Edinburgh, in fact, to discover the man who has been described as the "real founder of British racism." His name was Robert Knox, a leading anatomist and an anthropologist, best known now as the chief client of the Edinburgh body-snatchers, Burke and Hare. His published work included The Races of Men, in which he described the Jewish race as 'sterile parasites.'

For Knox, race was the key to all human activity-"...that the race in human affairs is everything, is simply a fact, the most comprehensive, which philosophy has ever announced. Race is everything: literature, science, art-in a word, civilization depends on it." The highest races were the Germans, the Saxons, and the Celts; the lowest were Black Africans. Though now Knox's work is almost completely forgotten, it was widely admired at the time, by Charles Darwin, among others

Aryans

There is a lot of good academic monographs on this topic. One of the best I ever read, though slightly dated now, is The Aryan Myth-A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe by Léon Poliakov.

The main thing to focus on is the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century, in particular the development of specific national myths used to explain the alleged superiority of a particular community or people. The seminal work here is Arthur de Gobineau's 1855 Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races , where the Aryans, the speakers of Indo-European languages, were held to be responsible for all of humanity's greatest cultural achievments; and at the peak of the Aryan pyramid, in Gobineau's estimation, were the Germanic races of northern Europe. The greatest danger was that the 'purity' of this original race was subject to etiolation and dilution:

After passing through the age of the gods when it was absolutely pure; the age of the heroes, in which the mixtures were moderate in strength and number; the age of the nobility, where human faculties remained considerable though they could not be renewed from dried-up sources, it has descended, more or less swiftely according to the environment, to the final confusion of all the elements...The portion of Aryan blood, already subdivided so frequently, which still exists in our countries and which alone sustains the edifice of our society, advances daily towards our last frontier before total absorption.

As you can see, the myth is based on a descent from an original, and mythical racial Garden of Eden, a source of all purity, moving by stages towards contemporary anthropological and political realites. Of necessity it is a theory that has to be modified by practice and reality.

Over time it goes through many subdivisions, with the Nazis devising their own categories of superior and inferior, giving Gobineau's cultural model a specific biological twist. As you have quite rightly hinted, the whole theory is eclectic and selective, allowing people like Rosenberg to 'adopt' races like the Finns: even the Japanese were later described as 'honorary Aryans.'.

One of the best critiques of this whole pseudo-intellectual farrago puts the position as follows:

Naturally there is no such thing as a pure race, not even a Jewish one...Race: it is a sentiment, not a reality; it is 95% sentiment. I don't believe that it is possible to prove biologically that a race is more or less pure.

Who said this? Why, Benito Mussolini, in an interview given to the historian Emil Ludwig in 1932. He went on to say, soon after meeting Hitler for the first time, that if Nazi race theories were correct the only pure race in Europe was the Laps! :))

Was Enoch Powell a Racist?

I addressed myself in debate to this particular question. Here, below, is the answer I gave.

No, I do not think he was a racist. He was, rather, an angry man; angry at his party and angry at the leadership. His anger, his alienation, it is probably better to say, took him down a dangerous road, a road marked by insensitivity and misjudgement

The essential point to note was that the Rivers of Blood speech had the immediate effect of turning Powell into a kind of folk hero, even as he was being cast into the wilderness by the then leadership of the Conservative Party. London Dockers marched on Parliament to demonstrate their support, as workers in Wolverhampton and the Black Country demanded his reinstatement. Opinion polls taken at the time gave him an approval rating in excess of 70 per cent. He also received thousands of letters of support.

So, as far as race relations in the late 1960s are concerned, the picture revealed is not very attractive. On the basis if the measures I have given, one has to conclude that most of the British people harboured some form of racial prejudice. Powell did not create this; he simply gave shape and direction to underlying emotions, feelings that had slowly been building up ever since the arrival of The Empire Windrush from Jamaica twenty years before, beginning the first wave of post-war black immigration to England. At the time Labour back-benchers wrote to Prime Minister Clement Atlee, saying that "an influx of coloured people would cause discord and unhappiness among all concerned." By the late 1950s, with the rate of arrivals averaging 50,000 a year, this 'discord and unhappiness' achieved open expression in the Notting Hill race riots.

Although racism at this time was probably best explained as a kind of post-imperial hangover, it took on new and more worrying forms in the 1960s, the time just prior to Powell's speech. In sociological terms it was also becoming a largely working-class and, indeed, a regional phenomenon. There were two basic reasons for this. There was a large constituency of people, former Labour voters in the main, concentrated for the most part in the West Midlands, Powell's own political hunting ground, who felt they were being increasingly neglected by the government of Harold Wilson. This was the area, moreover, where black immigration was heaviest, leading to competition for housing and jobs. During one particularly notorious by-election for the Smethwick constituency, the successful candidate, Peter Griffiths, beat Patrick Gordon Walker, a senior Labour politician, by, amongst other things, the distribution of the most scurrilous forms of campaign literature, including one leaflet saying "Vote Labour for more nigger-type neighbours." This key event in British electoral politics showed that black immigrants had become scapegoats for more deep-rooted social ills. It really only needed the 'Rivers of Blood' to turn this from a local into a national phenomenon.

Racism is still with us; it will always be with us. But so much has changed since 1968. In general people are much more accepting; open discrimination is disallowed by law and black people are to be found at all levels of public life. There have been tragedies, there has been violence; but Powell was a poor profit. The Tiber is not foaming with much blood, and is never likely to.

Gatsby, Race and Cultural Pessimism

In The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald makes an oblique reference, in the character of Tom Buchanan, to the theories of Lothrop Stoddard on the decline of the white race. There is a background, in the fashion of Oswald Spengler, to this kind of cultural pessimism.

There is also, it might be said, wider concerns of sexual anxiety, fears at one and the same time of miscegenation and inadequacy. I'm thinking specifically here of Henry Champley, one time foreign editor of Le Temps, and his wonderfully eccentric White Women, Coloured Men, his bizarre and salacious travel book, published in 1936.

In this he urges white women to beware of the dark races; for his travels in the USA and the Far East have convinced him that The coloured people have discovered the White woman as an idol worthy of being desired above all else. The problem for Mr. Champley is that the white woman has also discovered the coloured races! She is therefore urged to resist the tempations of racial mixing and promiscuity in favour of 'heroic humility', which, I assume, means being at the disposal of dear old Mr. Champley! :-))

Actually this whole cultural trend has a wider resonance than Stoddard's specifically American concerns. It's already evident before the First World War, in work like The Conflict of Colour, where Putnam Weale warns his fellow Britons against the perils of the Japanese alliance. In the mid-1920s, independently of the American school, the poet Leo Chiozza Money published The Peril of the White, saying that The whites of Europe and elsewhere are set upon race suicide and internecine war.

Is it surprising, then, that Fitzgerald allows the ridiculous Buchanan to voice such views? Always remember Nick's thought in Gatsby I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. I dare say Tom and Mr Champley would have got on well, though. :-))

The BBC and the Gypsy; the Manipulation of News

I assume most people in the UK saw the BBC news reports from Northern Ireland about the attacks on ‘Romanians’ in Belfast. I have to say the whole thing made no sense to me. Did the people of Northern Ireland have a particular prejudice against Romanians? Why Romanians and not, say, Poles, who have a higher visible presence throughout the United Kingdom? Why were Romanians concentrated in such numbers in such a confined location? I suspected there was something more to the whole story: it simply made no sense to me as it stood. Now, I have to tread carefully; for you see the people in question were not Romanians at all: they were Roma, gypsies, if you prefer.

Yes, I reached that conclusion myself because, well, they looked like gypsies rather than people of mainstream Romanian ethnicity. But it was James Delingpole, the Daily Telegraph blogger who revealed the full facts, repeated in The Spectator (27 June)

It maddens me to discover that news is being 'managed' in this fashion, that ‘Auntie’ is deliberate treating us as like children. It's not a question of racism; it is a question of being allowed to form our own judgments and make up our own minds. In place of this we get the usual tired and pious platitudes from politicians and the press, the same platitudes trotted out over the electoral advance of the BNP: how ‘disgusting’ it all is, how ‘abominable’ people are; and so on and so on, yawn, yawn. There is no attempt whatsoever to uncover motives; there is no attempt to explore all the nuances of the story in a way that would make it comprehensible.

The story as it stood did no service to the people of Belfast; it did no service to the general community, to the rest of us; above all, it did no service to the Roma themselves. Prejudice does not take shape out of nothing: it arises from a long tail of tradition. Let me say this and let me say it openly: the Roma are not liked and they are not trusted, neither here nor in Eastern Europe. In Italy, for example, as Delingpole reports, almost 70% of the population wants the Roma expelled. Pure racism, is it?

We have to face these questions, and face them openly. It does no good at all to hide behind news management. Actually it’s more than news management, far more: it’s a deliberate attempt at the management of morals; Lord forbid that we should reach the wrong conclusion. The point is lots of people will reach the wrong conclusion if they are treated in this way. Prejudice is only defeated by reason and policy not by half-truths and lies. Facts, key facts, must not be withheld. For when they are it is easy to conclude that there genuinely is something to hide. If anything is more guaranteed to perpetuate suspicion and dislike it is truth by half-measure. By this process the Roma will never escape being thrown into the role of victims.

The BBC is now manipulating the news in various ways: the point is to make it understandable

Fear and Loathing

I come across people on some of the social networks I belong to who express some Nazi sympathies, not people, I have to say, with whom I have any direct interaction, if I can avoid it. Some of them say that they want the right to declare their own pride of race, ‘white pride’, in the way that others express, say, black or brown pride. This is usually followed with a catalogue of complaints about this race or that ethnicity. The truth is, of course, that one does not need symbols of ‘white pride, certainly not Nazi symbols, if one has sufficient confidence in oneself and one’s inheritance. Such an identity is an expression, rather, of deep forms of fear and self-loathing, a fear of confronting oneself, a fear of confronting an essential truth: there are people who would always be at the bottom of the heap no matter how the human race was structured. I would go so far as to say that hatred of others, hatred of other races, is a form of self-defence, a way of misting the mirror. In the end if the all of the out-groups disappeared, if humanity were reduced to a homogenous whole, the mirror would demist. Then these people would see themselves for what they truly are. That is the real horror.