Home: Blog: 2006-02-20 Defend the Bastards

Send money, or the kitten gets it.Let's face it. If you were going to start an appeal to tug at the heart-strings of the nation, you'd choose a cause which inspired compassion. People with leukemia perhaps, or a primary school which was about to be closed down, or perhaps some abandoned kittens.

That's it: Manny's Appeal to Save St. Belinda's School for Abandoned Kittens with Leukemia... I mean, you'd barely get to the end of the name before several old ladies would have sent you their life savings.

On the other hand, a mad tub-thumping cleric preaching theological fascism, and a stuck up British historian selling the more modern, secular variety, are not what you might call immediately sympathetic.

Take Abu Hamza for instance. My most serious problem with the man is believing that he is real, and not, say, Chris Morris. He preaches rubbish so vile that even Osama bin Laden has been known to mutter steady on there, Abu, old man. If Morris had disguised himself as a wildly improbable muslim cleric in order to mock the prejudices of Noel Edmunds (and few things in this world are more important), he would have invented Abu Hamza. Only the fact that Hamza has actually been sent to prison dissuades me: and even now I'm wondering if Morris isn't sitting in his cell and wondering if it isn't time to remove the fake beard and hook.

However, for all his pantomime nastiness, Hamza is positively cuddly when put next to David Irving. Irving is a highly educated idiot who found acceptance as a serious historian from a bunch of old Nazis because he was prepared to edit their diaries for publication, print their self-serving fantasies as fact, and deny that anything nasty ever happened to Jewish people.

I could have felt a tiny spark of human feeling for him if, when he had gone into court today, he had continued to loudly deny the holocaust - which he - and it is not entirely clear - believes either didn't happen, or wasn't entirely a bad thing. But faced with a few years being alternately beaten and shagged by large violent Austrian men (something most National Socialists would consider a positive privilege), he suddenly announced a change of heart as convincing as Nick Griffin musing that he might join a kibbutz.

Let's face it: you're going to care more about the fictional kittens, even when you know they're fictional. At some level, so do I. So it is with a certain feeling of futility that I bring you my latest campaign:

Defend The Bastards

And yet it must be so, if we believe in liberty, and in free speech. Abu Hamza and David Irving are tonight in prison for stating particular opinions. Tell me that they are simultaneously revolting and idiotic opinions, and I will happily agree. Tell me that you recognise no right of freedom of speech, and I will argue with you, but I will at least respect you as a rational and consistent authoritarian bastard. But tell me that you believe in freedom of speech 'except for...', and I will hit you with a large, wet, fish.

It's the only language you people understand.

Freedom of speech is not meaningful if it is only extended to some opinions.

In the entire history of humanity, there has never been a dictatorship so bizarrely draconian that it demanded actual silence from its citizens. In Nazi Germany, for instance, it was permissible to mention the rain, or complain that you'd been given a beer with fag ash floating in it, or opine that the Fuhrer was looking particularly handsome these days. Even within range of the attentive ear of Stalin's dreaded KGB, Soviet citizens waiting for a bus could often be heard remarking that it was, for the 274th consecutive day, a bit nippy in Moscow that morning, and that they greatly hoped the traitor Leon Trotsky would not be permitted to divert the world's working class youth from the path of true socialism.

In short, freedom to say some things has been granted by every dictatorship in history. The difference between this 'freedom' and actual freedom of speech lies precisely in the way we treat those who say that which is either subversive or despicable: and if those of us who speak subversion don't defend the freedom of the despicable then we will deserve no defence ourselves. Either Abu is free to call for jihad and obligatory beards for women, and David is free to deny the holocaust, the invention of the aeroplane, and his own birth, or ultimately none of us is free: that we are not in jail yet is only because we happen to be either in the mainstream, or just not much of a threat at the moment.

Now, wipe that fish off your face, and help me put up these posters.

Manny