Category Archives: Terrorism

What’s so bad about political correctness?

‘Be not too moral,’ said Henry David Thoreau. ‘You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.’

People who really live for change, the people who really care about their fellow man, are the people we never hear from, the ones who have no need to posture about ideologies, who have no need to lecture others about ‘tolerance’.

Political correctness is the ideology which props up a dangerously false niceness. It is the marketing strategy of the power hungry, the propaganda of the bully, who wishes to whitewash his reputation. Thus we have pictures of Harvey Weinstein wearing a ‘pussy hat’ and joining female celebrities on the Women’s March last year.

The point is not the hypocrisy. Anyone with ideals is manifestly hypocritical. The point is the way virtue is used as part of a power strategy, a way of securing status and abusive control over others through the manipulation of reputation.

Reducing good morals to a set of tick boxes or making complex ethical dilemmas into matters of sloganeering, robs human life of an essential part of its evolving value. Human agency requires a confrontation with competing goods. To do good, we must live with conscience, come to understand our own sinful natures and meet face to face with the capacity for evil in each of our own souls.

Political correctness is the creed of the godless. It turns moral action into a simplistic algorithm, an automated exchange of inputs and outputs. It requires no wrestling with demons, no dark night of the soul, no solitude of contemplation. And most of all, it comes at no real cost to the moral agent who lives by such a creed.

Jesus Christ said ‘I come not abolish the law, but to fulfil it’. The shift from rule-based religious dogma into the emancipatory truths of the Christian gospel, is a shift from prescriptiveness towards the moral growth of the individual self. In other words, Christ came to teach that it is not the washing of hands or the observance of ritual propriety that makes us a good person, or which secures our place in heaven. Rather it is quality of our souls.

Good behaviour does not emerge from simple algorithms of ‘niceness’. Good behaviour emerges from a cleansing of the spirit. Good actions are the fruit of a good soul, they are not ways of buying our way into heaven.

This too was the message of Krishna to Arjuna, as he stood poised on the fatal edge of battle. How can I do good, Lord, if I am to kill my brethren? Krishna’s answer was that it is the quality of one’s soul, the cleanness of one’s consciousness that marks a truly holy man, not the simplistic dogmas of right and wrong found in worldly life.
Some may defensively say that this is a license to rudeness and power-grabbing in itself.

Like the fascist misuse of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Not so. It is merely a reminder that we do not become good, we do not find salvation, in simplistic moral prescriptions. The proof of this is to be found in the way abusive people use politically correct language to cover up the truth of their souls. Or the way vicious killers use the rhetoric of human rights to add a veneer of respectability to their murderous exploits.

ISIS understood the power of political correctness. Not only did they use hipster-quality video propaganda and publish their own glossy and attractive magazines, they also exploited the cognitive dissonance that would affect the bourgeois minds of western observers, by seeming to add PC behaviours to their barbarous tactics.

At one point, as they were executing gay men by throwing them off the rooftops of buildings – as cheering mobs slavered at the brutality below – jihadis would hug the men before hand, offering the supposed milk of human kindness as a precursor to brutal execution. This nasty fake compassion is a direct product of politically correct morality, and shows how sadistically it can be exploited.

If we were able to rise above PC prescriptiveness, we would feel no cognitive dissonance. We would not be susceptible to the confusion tactics of ISIS propaganda. It is the fact that we have reduced morality to a set of simplistic soundbites, that makes both genuine moral discourse impossible, and evil people able to market their dangerous ambitions as essential to human emancipation.

What’s so wrong about peace, love and understanding? Nothing, as long as it is not just skin deep. Very often the most moral among us, are not the best at marketing their own virtue. Anyone can talk about charity and goodwill, the real test of our humanity comes when it is not convenient for us to do so, and when talking about morality becomes irrelevant to a genuine moral outcome.

‘Love and peace’ is not enough: We must show them who we really are

Our enemies think of us as a decadent race. They think they have the advantage over us. They believe that they have a passion and a readiness to die for something greater than themselves, and we do not. They believe we are ripe for the plucking, because we are on the turn.

We need to show them that we too are friends with death. That we are not hiding our faces from the devil. That we are not so conceited that we live in some cartoonish, deathless world of consumerism fuelled by infantilism, just as they believe we do.

We must reject the critique of western civilisation, that it is somehow all simply founded on exploitation. That is self-hatred, and a gross oversimplification. Unfortunately, all societies, all nations and civilisations have exploitation and bloodshed in their history. The human DNA is packed full of trauma, and each of us has inherited monsters, rapists, abusers and warmongers. We are, without doubt, descended from tyrants and imperialists.

However, that is only a fraction of the story. The history of civilisation is a history of man’s battle with himself. Everything from Greek democracy right down to the speeches of Martin Luther King Jnr, through Michelanglo’s David, is a catalogue of desperate self-transcendence. Whatever our faults as a civilisation, the need to overcome our animal impulses is a defining feature of who we are, and what we have become.

Western civilisation is not decadent. Western culture is not the product of empire. Western civilisation is not the preserve of fat, white, iphone-addicted MacDonalds-munching morons.

No, our civilisation, with its secular ideals, its love of beauty and the belief in man’s capacity to overcome himself, is the product of the essential evolutionary impulse, the knowledge that culture can conquer death. We must get back the deeply understood knowledge buried in our biology, that we are parts only of some greater whole, some greater potential and cosmic project.

This knowledge is our greatest weapon against our enemies. They have missed this crucial piece of the battle plan. They have missed it because they are incapable of understanding it. Their minds are swept up in the passionate, bloodthirsty conviction of moral righteousness that attaches itself in desperation to anything that resembles the finality of truth.

They are convinced that this conviction and zeal gives them the upper hand. That they alone have the capacity to sacrifice themselves for a higher, divine order. In their narcissistic lust for martyrdom, they have blinded themselves to the fact that civilisation has the advantage. That they are fighting a losing battle.

However, it remains for us to reconnect with the beauty and brilliance of what our forebears have bequeathed us. It is time to stop apologising, to stop navel-gazing and indulging in guilt over our power and history. It is perfectly possible for us to extend the powers and privileges of our liberties and freedoms to those who were previously exploited, while at the same time salvaging the best of our inheritance.

Every family has a history of abuse and trauma. But every family equally has the assets of survival, struggle and overcoming that can be harnessed by its young. To salvage what is best in our culture, without guilt, without shame, without self-flagellation, does not mean we live in denial of the crimes of the past. It simply means we understand the context of those crimes, and we make sure that whatever powers we glean from our past are not excluded to the least among us.

And like our forefathers, we learn too to see this inheritance of survival and self-overcoming as the very blood of our culture, it is the means by which our genes survive.
We are not impressed by the supposed self-sacrifice of our enemies. We are not intimidated by it. Because, contrary to what they tell themselves, we are entirely familiar with it. We have seen it before, we too were once a culture that delighted in the egotism of a death wish. Some say that our culture is done for, that we are living in the last days of Rome, that the empire is collapsing on itself. History is repeating, and we are prisoners to inevitability.

Such gloom and self-hatred is the work of false prophecy. No culture before us has survived its own crimes of slavery and exploitation, no culture in history has triumphed over its own savagery, the cults of nationalism, pathological war, like the culture we call our own.

The 20th century is a blot of demonic shame on the history of human life. However, we came through it. And not only did we survive it, we learned from it, we grew, we innovated our way out of the squalor.

Rather than merely rise from the ashes of our unthinkable past crimes, we have emerged a resilient and loving people, willing to extend the hand of brotherhood to all who may wish to join us.

However, somewhere along the line we have convinced ourselves that we need to abandon our past in order to be free of its crimes. This is to give the enemy a free pass. The crimes of our history are not the products of our culture, but aberrations of it. It is our democratic values, our humanism, our love of beauty, truth and the ‘known rules of ancient liberty’ that define the best of our inheritance, not the many instances of our failure to live up to these ideals.

Our enemies are counting on us to hate ourselves. What they don’t understand is that civilisation triumphs over warmongering every time, because civilisation is never undermined by its own failures, and neither are we.

These people think they are the only ones with a cause. They think they only have the zeal and fire to die for the sake of their future generations. They think they and they only have the capacity to face horror, death and the monster of malevolent darkness. They think they have the upper hand because they write us off as scared, spineless, self-consumed animals, buried under technology, privilege and wealth.

They lack the intelligence to see what we are. To see that we are the product of Hellenistic democracy, the Renaissance, the birth of science, the emancipation of slaves, the suffrage of women. Our past is full of war crimes and slaughter. However, through all the struggle and blood we have bequeathed to the world landmark innovations of human progress that our race will never be able to undo.

We need to let our enemies know that if they go to war with us, they go to war with history itself. That even if they kill us, they cannot kill what we represent. That they may be able to rob us of individual life, but they will never rob us, or the world, of the indefatigable victories of our culture. And we must let them know that we too, then, have a creed worth dying for, and that we too are willing to sacrifice comfort, ease, and privilege to ensure that the triumphs of our civilisation also triumph over their boring, childish, conceited barbarism.

Defence Of The Realm: A liberal proposal for counter-terrorism

As I sat last night in my messy, dreary Vauxhall room news reports came in that my local tube station had been shut down due to an ‘incident’, following the police responses in London Bridge and Borough Market.

Immediately, the nightmare of reality struck. I had only minutes before been watching social media videos of people in a bar I frequent, being told to duck under tables by armed police in London Bridge. Now it seemed like the terror was on my doortsep.

Vauxhall is a vibrant gay area. More gay, actually, than Soho. The clubs and bars are filled nearly 24 hours with proud, ostentatious revellers delighting in their sexual freedom. It’s always an adventure coming home at night to dodge the crowds of half-naked ravers. Even as late as 10am in the morning I have run into emaciated drag queens with their make-up smeared and their tights laddering as they meander sexlessly home after a night of drugs and drink.

All of this makes me love Vauxhall. Since the attacks in Orlando, however, I’ve been increasingly conscious of the possibilities of this vivacious, liberal and joyful district of London nightlife getting its own taste of the horrors of barbarian slaughter.

So there I sat, quivering with fear and numb with disbelief that a routine, uneventful day had turned into a hellish bad dream.

For the best part of an hour there was no news about the events in Vauxhall, other than that police were dealing with a third incident in the area. The only piece of news I had to go on was that some attackers were thought to be at large, and that police were searching for gunmen.

These turned out to be rumours, but as the helicopters circled above me, and the sirens whined with a discordant, orchestral regularity through the nearby streets, I was tense with fear.

I had images of the streets around my square and its wider area being stalked by balaclavad gunmen. I studied the reports coming in from London Bridge, as policemen unflinchingly confronted the attackers and news of the brutal knife slashings became more detailed.

I now realise just how brave the servicemen and women really are who treat the victims, and the impossible resolve and commitment security officers have to confront these bloody attacks. Cowering in my poet’s garret I was forced to admit that such people are ten times the citizen that I am, and that I owe them daily for my liberty.

That’s to say nothing of the ordinary people caught up in such attacks, who refuse to flee for their own safety, but charge towards the tragedy in order to ensure the injured can be saved. More than a few times today I have wept at the simplicity and innocence of the courage shown by bystanders swept up in the horrors at London Bridge.

On LBC radio today Colonel Richard Kemp called for greater powers of internment and deportation in counter-terrorism operations. For years I have angrily objected to such measures. Since Tony Blair’s silly, totalitarian proposals for extended detention and the Bush-era ‘extraordinary rendition’ practices of the CIA, I have scoffed at any suggestions that seem to resemble these ill-considered responses.

I’m a John Stuart Mill liberal – to the core. I do not believe that we should mess around with the rights and liberties that took centuries to pry from the hands of established power. The right to trial and free speech are both threatened by many of the hardline proposals jingo-istically called for by right wing commentators.

However, as John Locke, the grandfather of modern liberty, teaches us, the integrity of a right can only be measured by its limitations. Rights that are never subject to review or sensible restrictions under unusual circumstances, are not in fact rights, they are just excuses for license.

Speaking to LBC’s Andrew Pierce, Col. Kemp said: ‘I’m not suggesting that we should turn this country into a police state, or simply go rounding people up without good cause. But I think, there are some people, that we know are involved involved in terrorism, and these three may turn out to be just such people.’

Col. Kemp called for vigorous powers of ‘detainment, deportation and exclusion’, and said that often the only reason known jihadis cannot be tried is due to intelligence being so sensitive it can’t be used in court.

Col. Kemp is former Commander of the British Forces in Afghanistan, and also the former Head of Counter Terrorism Intelligence in the Cabinet Office.

In short, he’s not some blathering Farage-type. He knows what he is talking about, and is concerned that our security services are faced with an impossible task if they cannot take decisive action, simply because that action may be deemed politically incorrect.

Taking into consideration Col. Kemp’s commentary, I think it is time Britain introduced a new Defence Of The Realm Act. The Manchester and London Bridge attacks, while not being classic acts of war, do establish a war-like threat to our security that renders ordinary liberty subject to review.

The act will give the government and security services powers of arrest and conviction that are not subject to the typical transparency of legal scrutiny. It will also allow the government to revoke citizenship in cases of established threat, and to deport or intern individuals deemed to be dangerous.

These are terrifying powers in themselves, and easily abused. However, if properly implemented they will help those who guard us while we sleep to the finish the job they have started.

I advocate these powers, only on the grounds that a Defence Of The Realm Act will not hand over open-ended powers to undemocratic state actors. In order to prevent abuse, I also recommend the following in-built checks on new powers:

  • Decisions made by private courts be reported on to parliament in as much detail as possible
  • Those making such decisions are taken from across the political spectrum
  • Decision-makers are reshuffled every three months, so that power is retained in the office, not the office-bearer
  • Extend powers are explicitly understood to be temporary
  • Six-monthly reviews of these powers are conducted under the full scrutiny of parliament
  • A monitoring body is set up independently to scrutinise ongoing investigations that use these powers

 

There may be many more review-conditions for such legislation, and many far more accomplished people able to decide on what those checks and balances should be. The point is simply that amendments to liberty and justice can be made without our services falling victim to corruption, abuse of power and the compromise of the constitution.

None of these kinds of laws fill me with joy. I am a libertarian by nature, but in war, tolerance becomes a liability. We need to act, and we need to let our enemies know that we mean business, and I fully believe we can do that without eroding the liberties and privileges of citizenship of which we are rightly proud.