On holiday, not long ago, I picked up a back copy of an American
magazine which contained an interview with Saul Bellow. He was
discussing the sort of racist and xenophobic billingsgate and humor
which is now touched, if at all, with the tip of the verbal thumb and
forefinger — certainly among the British — much in the way that frank
sexual language was handled a generation ago.
In his childhood, said Bellow, “Nobody could claim any protection.
Of course, the respectable WASPS were somehow out of it, but even they
came under attack. Nobody was immune. Not Jews, not Italians, not
Greeks, not Germans, not Blacks. Everything was out in the open. Which
gave an opening to freedom of opinion. Everybody took abuse. This is
what’s disappeared since then. Without any increase in Liberty. … It
was a far more open society than before ethnic protectionism began.”
Today in Britain, however, “nigger,” “wop,” “kraut,” “frog,” “dago,”
“Paki,” and the like are status words. For the bien-pensant,
they inflict automatic moral inferiority on those who dare to use them
in conversation (unless they happen to be Black or Asian) and confer
superior rank — i.e., “oppressed” victim — on those to whom they
refer (especially if they are Black or come from the Indian
sub-continent).
The historical reasons for this are well enough known. In our
particular case, they stem mainly from disapproval of certain kinds of
xenophobia plus (in the case of Africans and Asians) our rejection of an
18th and 19th-century tendency to suppose that pro tem technological
advantage meant permanent Darwinian superiority. These days, we
disapprove of the natural human tendency to apply this confusion to
certain political and social opinions.
Contrary to most contemporary rhetoric among the “oppressed” (and the
bien-pensant), such errors did not occur first among the
so-called “white” nations of Western Europe. Many centuries ago, it was
a fundamental article of faith among the Chinese that in their “Middle
Kingdom” (i.e. the natural center of the world, the universe, whatever)
they were culturally, biologically, etc. vastly superior to the
“Long-nosed” and other devils who crossed their frontiers from time to
time.
In spite of certain traumatic events in the 19th and 20th centuries,
the Chinese have never lost this belief. For obvious reasons having to
do with public relations, it is not greatly stressed today; but, in
Chinese hearts, this faith is probably as strong as it ever was. The
Chinese were, in other words, the original racists — long before
Europeans pushed the ideas of Arthur de Gobineau and his ilk into the
fake science which was used to justify the politics of the Holocaust.
Racist pogroms, like slavery (supposedly another Original Western Sin),
occur in every developed culture; with few exceptions, the higher and
more developed the culture, the stronger the racism. (In India and
Islam, of course, it had and has a social and religious rather than a
pseudo-scientific basis. In Africa, as we saw in Rwanda, it was and is
tribal.)
I mention all this to cut through a tendency of opponents and victims
of “European” racism to vaunt it as something peculiar to our
soi-disant Sinful Western Civilization. What is unique about our
Judeo-Christian culture is not the generally homo-sapient phenomenon of
racism; it is our categorical opposition to it. Most of today’s Sturm
und Drang on this issue resounds in the halls of the United Nations;
but, it has no cultural roots among the non-Western “oppressed” there
(who tend to shout the loudest). Their comminatory rhetoric was learned
(not to say stolen) from Western European heirs of our 18th-century
enlightenment; in the circumstances of the United Nations, it evokes
biblical images of motes and beams.
Anti-racism, then, is hypocritically exploited by many but it really
belongs to us in the West. Today’s version has deep and powerful roots
in Western horror and guilt over the hideous aberration in our history
called the Holocaust. (As for slavery, the Western experience of that
was brief and driven less by racism than by commercial motives; those
motives still operate in Africa and the Islamic world where slavery
exists — as it always has.) Armed with these powerful “Holocaust”
emotions, politicians and journalists lurk, aiming to cadge a few votes
or, eyebrows raised and hands held high, claw for the moral high ground
with sanctimonious “anti-racist” rhetoric. As night follows day, a
decent cause is corrupted, twisted, and warped into a barrage of easily
manipulated cheap shots. High dudgeon, energetically pumped-up, becomes
a convenient political tool.
Worse than that, it has given birth to the social murrain of
political correctness which parallels exactly the procedures of George
Orwell’s thought-police. There are even a few pompous idiots in the
British media (and, no doubt, in the United States) who propose to
smother even the profession of humor with this totalitarian wet blanket.
If they had their way, these new Holy Willies would set- up a new branch
of the civil service which controls and censors funny stories. Bravo.
The humorist stops telling jokes and becomes one — a bad one.
More unsettling still is the mendacity which accompanies this. Terms
like “multiculturalism” are falsely applied to a society whose core
culture has been for more than a millennium and still is the Western
European Judeo-Christian culture (which, I say again, gave birth to
anti-racism). The tolerance which sustains our liberal Western
tradition is poisoned at its roots by the phony “cause” of
multiculturalism.
In Europe and the United States, we do, of course, have a
multi-ethnic society — which is quite a different matter. Confusing
this with “multiculturalism,” is the inevitable way to a fracturing and
break-up of our society along neo-tribalist lines of mutual suspicion
and bigoted hostility; this process is already fueled by the energetic
growth of a vicious victim-culture based on fake historical (i.e.,
anachronistic) moral standards which, if allowed to flourish, will
certainly close down our open society; exactly as Saul Bellow
suggested.
In Britain, this is not futuristic fantasy or a vague, subjunctive
possibility. Recently, one Colin Parker, a civic employee in the
Northwest of English town of Stockport, was summarily dismissed from his
job for the crime of daring to utter the word “Paki” in private
conversation. He was then hauled before a magistrate’s court on a
criminal charge of “harassment” under Britain’s notoriously illiberal
Race Relations Act, though he had not used the dreaded “racist” word to
any ethnic member of the public or staff; he was, in fact, discussing a
newspaper article with a friend. His plea that he had meant no offense
was not accepted. This was a de facto enforcement of a recent
recommendation by the McPherson Enquiry (set up after the police bungled
the investigation of a racist murder in London) that “racist” language
should be criminalized. In fact, the recommendation went further,
demanding criminalization when such billingsgate was uttered in the
privacy of one’s own home. This conjured-up a vision of social and
political terror of the kind that existed in Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union where the wrong word spoken in private could result in
imprisonment or worse.
The Americans, though they have — particularly in the academic world
— their share of sanctimoniously censorious imbeciles, still retain
some sense of the value of the free speech which is protected by their
Constitution. Of course, using the wrong language in the wrong place —
for instance, a white man in a Harlem street babbling about “buck
niggers”, “darkies” and the like — may have unpleasant consequences for
those who are stupid enough to commit such a solecism. But, there would
be no question of arrest and criminal charges for shooting-off one’s
mouth.
When Britain’s well-intentioned bien-pensant and pompous
little civic commissars attempt to stifle “unacceptable” speech, they
invariably do so in a selective and flagrantly unjust manner as in the
Colin Parker case. Certain companies have now been driven to insert
special software into their computer networks to spot “unacceptable,”
i.e. “racist” language. This witch-hunting procedure, it is worth
noting, applies only to members of the majority “White” community. When
a Muslim bigot loudly called for the enforcement of the famous fatwa
against Salman Rushdie — thus breaking the British law against
incitement to murder — no action was taken against the man. The most
vicious racist language is immune from official attention and untouched
by the beady-eyed enforcers of the Race Relations Act, provided only
that it is used by members of an ethnic minority group.
Experience in a number of cultures around the world shows clearly
enough that this brand of official injustice and hypocrisy envenoms
“race” relations far more than the jokes and billingsgate which — more
often than not — can serve as a safety valve for the outrage which is
provoked by a “multicultural” double standard. If, having lived more
than half my life in the United Kingdom, I have to choose between “ugly”
language and the souring of British society into a rancid little tyranny
thought-policed by sanctimonious hypocrites, I know which I prefer.