How does it feel to be written off by a vampire onion with a fake CV?
“Double six. Two of yours. Two actual living, breathing human beings.”
Something pinged when I watched this interview. A connection was made where before there had only been a fuzzy proximity. And in that moment, one of the fundamental and perennial problems of politics crystallised.
“Low-value people”? Who defines people in terms of their value? As if it were some predetermined, unchangeable quantity? People who don’t see people as people, that’s who; people who see people as pieces in a game. Their game.
Look at yourself through Iain Duncan Smith’s eyes for a second. What are you? A pawn? A bishop? A king? Are you worth sacrificing for guaranteed mate in four?
Perhaps Risk is a better analogy. Up to six can play, diplomacy and chance have a greater role, and troops can be replenished. (There’s probably an even better one in the world of video games, but since I’ve been out of that world for a good 15 years now, I’ll leave that to the fancy of the digitally minded.)
The metaphorical link between politics and games has always been strong. Games started out, after all, as simplified simulations of life. Military commanders have long used counters on boards to represent troops. Game theory, under the right conditions and parameters, has been revealed as one of the better approximators of human behaviour. And increasing computer processing power means that the gap between simulations and reality is fast dwindling to nothing. It should come as no surprise that the opposite transformation sometimes occurs.
“And then I ate him. Artists are a bit … stringy”
But when it comes to real policies, which affect real people – people you know, people you love – is it really acceptable to think, and legislate, in terms of pebbles or pieces of plastic? How does it feel when a vampire onion with a fake CV writes you off on the basis of a report drawn up by a prematurely balding double-barrelled nanny’s boy straight out of Oxford via Harrow? Who made this fucking loser God?
I can’t shake the image of Duncan Smith, and sundry shadowy halitotic sepulchraves like Dominic Cummings, releasing silent farts in their Soho club, cradling a brandy and sniggering as they dispatch five infantry and two cavalry from Japan into Kamchatka. And then your disability benefits are stopped. Kaboom.
I like to think, if more people kept this image in their skulls as they walked into the polling booth, that our governments would look very different from the way they do today.
An epidemic of abuse is threatening to tear western civilisation apart. Who stands to benefit?
“But what about that time you …”
In my last post I wrote the epidemic of abuse sweeping the western world – against individuals, but also against entire groups, including immigrants, liberals, “experts”, academics, Muslims and the mainstream media. I mostly talked about the how. Now I’d like to focus on the why.
When public debate consists almost entirely of ad hominem attacks, it does far more than create an unpleasant atmosphere. Let’s follow ad hominem reasoning to its logical conclusion. (It may be that only 10% of the population are thick enough to swallow this logic, but as Brexit and Trump have shown, 10% is enough.)
Tony Blair, because he took the country to war against Iraq, cannot be trusted on anything ever again. Hillary Clinton, because she conducted some government business on a private email server and happened to be secretary of state when terrorists attacked the US embassy in Benghazi, can never run for public office. Tim Farron, because he avoided, as a Christian, saying that gay sex was not a sin, is the embodiment of evil. Jeremy Corbyn, because he once spoke to members of the IRA and Hamas, is a “mutton-headed mugwump” whose every word must henceforth be disregarded.
Furthermore, according to the guilt by association fallacy: because a handful of immigrants claim benefits, they’re all at it. Because the EU once passed a slightly fussy law about bananas, the entire institution is corrupt, from root to branch. Because the Guardian once published a column in favour of feminism, the entire media is irrevocably biased. Because you haven’t personally taken in a displaced Syrian family, you’re not allowed to advocate for the humane treatment of any refugees.
And at least 598 people seem to agree with the sentiment that because Yvette Cooper is a member of the Labour party, which happened to be in power for part of the period during which a group of men of Asian origin were found to be running a child abuse ring in Rotherham, she has no right to talk about the dangers of internet grooming.
(Donald Trump, on the other hand, can misspell basic words, mishandle legislation disastrously, go bankrupt four times, lie through his teeth, mock a disabled reporter, make openly racist comments and boast about sexually assaulting women, and still be allowed to run the most powerful nation on the planet.)
Quite apart from being the logical equivalent of – well, bollocks, frankly – this speaks to a fantastically grim view of human nature. A single misdemeanour, or error of judgment, renders your entire existence invalid. Make one mistake – or even have a fleeting association with someone who once made a mistake – and you forfeit all right to express an opinion again. (Except if you’re Donald Trump. He can screw up as badly and as many times as he likes.)
We all make mistakes. Human beings are flawed creatures. And as I argued last time, we’re all, inevitably, hypocrites. But by the reasoning of the far right, this means that no one in the entire world should ever be listened to again.
Thus, there can never be any laws. No decision can ever be taken by any authority, because no one on this earth is perfect enough to have authority. “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” a chap called Jesus once said, knowing full well that no man born is without sin.
There’s more. By ad hominem logic, no one is ever allowed to change her mind. People do not learn from their mistakes. No one can grow or become a better person. No more Martin McGuinnesses; once a terrorist, always a terrorist. (Everyone you ever had a drink with is a terrorist too.) Every feud is eternal, every war unending. In this universe, apologies are pointless, redemption impossible. Thou must not forgive. Rehabilitation? Ha.
I’ve straw-manned a little here, but I hope it’s clear that this way of thinking is more than just deluded; it’s destructive. The tribalism produced by the guilt by association fallacy, by demonising entire classes of people at a stroke, entrenches opinions, feeds resentments, and creates deep and damaging divisions. This assumption that the acts of a few in a group reflect the disposition of all of them breeds distrust, intolerance, hate. Ad hominem reasoning, combined with the guilt by association fallacy, undermines trust in the system in a way that threatens the very stability of society.
And yet the far right (and, to a comparable extent, the far left) seem to be pushing this exact agenda. Who on earth stands to benefit from this?
It all sounds a bit tinfoil-hat, until you remember that it is Vladimir Putin’s plainly stated aim to disrupt and undermine western society. The sanctions imposed after the invasion of Ukraine are biting. Russia is suffering economic hardship, is concerned about Nato, has imperial ambitions in central Europe and the Balkans, and Putin, a KGB officer when the Soviet Union fell, is still smarting over the defeat. Russia doesn’t have the will or the military might to declare open war on the west, but it does have the wits.
People better qualified and connected than I are exploring the diplomatic and economic avenues. What turned my eye eastwards was the methodology being used: ad hominem. Because if anyone can be said to have made ad hominem an art form, it’s the Russian government and the various iterations of its intelligence agencies.
Russia’s love affair with whataboutery dates back to a diplomatic exchange in 1905. After Moscow was criticised over the Kishinev pogrom, its US ambassador responded: “Well, Americans recently lynched blacks.” For reasons that we’ve been through, the point was irrelevant, but it successfully moved the focus of the debate away from indefensible ground. So successfully, in fact, that the appeal to hypocrisy became the central plank of Russian foreign policy for the next 115 years.
So enamoured are Russians of this strategy of digging up and inventing incriminating evidence that they have their own word for it: Kompromat. (Here’s all the legit dirt you’ll get on me, by the way, far-right fucks. You’re welcome.)
In Vladimir Putin, we have possibly the finest practitioner of the dark art of the smear ever to have walked the earth. When Putin – or Russia, and by extension, Putin – is criticised, he unfailingly responds in the same way. Instead of answering the charge – he never, but never, directly addresses negative questions – he will point the finger at his accuser. Tu quoque. Whataboutery. Tu quoque.
The day after the arrest of Julian Assange, when Putin was asked about the lack of democracy in Russia, he replied: “As far as democracy goes, it should be a question of complete democracy. Why then, did they put Mr Assange behind bars? There is an American saying: ‘He who lives in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones.’”
This was all a bit of a joke before the internet took such a big role in our lives. Now it’s a clear and present danger, because social media allows people to pursue this strategy on a previously unimagined scale. Now it’s not just a bloke on the telly momentarily dissing you. That bloke can pay people to run multiple accounts and create automated accounts – bots – to boost his signal, and mobilise what appears to be millions of people to discredit you.
People don’t generally alter their opinions much if they hear one negative comment about something. But it’s a different story when they hear thousands, or millions. And this is exactly what’s happening. Tabloid newspapers, far-right demagogues and internet spambots have been systematically smearing immigrants, liberals and the EU in a bid to tear up the very fabric of western society. The Russian Method ™, honed over a century, has finally found its perfect attack vector: unlimited voices at instant speed, all reading from the same hymn sheet. Even better, it’s all untraceable.
It’s not for me to say whether Russia is orchestrating the far-right resurgence, merely colluding with it, or that alt-right nutsacks like Paul Joseph Watson have simply torn a leaf from Putin’s playbook. But at the very least, the convergence of interests here is extraordinary. Whichever way you slice it, the far right in Europe and America are using Vladimir Putin’s tactics to further Vladimir Putin’s agenda.
There may be no smoking gun as yet, but there are a hell of a lot of fingerprints.
I’ll finish by suggesting a few things we can try to do to stop this in a couple of days. In the meantime, here are some solid reads on related topics.
Online debates these days unfold with all the dignity and decorum of a stag do at a Reading Wetherspoons
Let him who is without sin …
“Whoever first hurled an insult at his enemy instead of a spear was the founder of civilization” – Sigmund Freud
Insults are nothing new. From the 4th century BC ding-dong between Demosthenes and Aeschines, to Shakespeare’s “You starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat’s-tongue, you bull’s-pizzle, you stock-fish!”, to Noel Gallagher’s laceration of Robbie Williams as “the fat dancer from Take That”, incivility is as old as civilisation. We start calling each other names in the playground and, if the Leave voters I’ve encountered online are any guide, there’s no upper age limit on abuse.
But suddenly, it’s Ragnarök out there. Get involved in an online discussion about anything from topiary to the Tweenies and the chances are you’ll be set upon within minutes. Political “attack ads” were once frowned upon; now they’re the norm. There’s hardly been a single positive message in the UK general election campaign thus far; it’s just been smear after slur after slight. Most modern debates – usually online, but increasingly in real life – unfold with all the dignity and decorum of a stag do in a Reading Wetherspoons.
It’s all rather odd, because as I’m sure you already know, attacking a person in this way, instead of the substance of what they’re saying (or in the case of political debate, their policies), is a fallacy: a failure of reasoning that renders a claim invalid. In this case – the argumentum ad hominem fallacy – abuse is invalid because the truth of a person’s statement has nothing to do with their character, past behaviour or friends. Just because it’s Tony Blair saying, “Two plus two equals four”, that doesn’t mean the real answer is five. Much as it pains me to quote Margaret Thatcher, on this point, she had it right: “If they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”
Civilisation is supposed to be advancing. We are devising ever better theories to explain the world, sending more kids to university, sharing more information, faster, than ever before. The use of logical fallacies should be declining, not increasing.
So why the recent explosion of invective? Some blame the global climate of fear since 9/11 and the ensuing jihadi atrocities. Some say it’s deindividuation: when we’re online, or part of a large group, we enjoy anonymity; our actions have fewer repercussions for us, either because we are untraceable, or we because we share responsibility with others. When we are at one remove from the consequences, our actions tend to be less inhibited.
Others point to the bubble effect, the fact that people tend to assort themselves into groups of like-minded people. If we spend too long in these echo chambers, hearing only what we want to hear, then we are likely to react more aggressively when someone attacks them.
These theories all have merit, but I don’t believe they are enough to explain the extent of the poisoning of discourse, or the speed with which it’s happened. Echo chambers have always been with us – we’re a tribal species – and abuse is less effective online than in the real world, because while we may be anonymous, our opponents often are too, so we don’t have as much informational ammunition.
There’s something else going on. I have a theory of my own, but before we go into that, it would be helpful to look at abuse in more detail. First, a key distinction. There are two broad classes of ad hominem, which serve different purposes. The first is relatively innocuous and is largely accepted as a legitimate debating tactic.
“You, sir, are drunk.” “And you, madam, are ugly … but at least I shall be sober in the morning.”
Winston Churchill’s zinger to Lady Astor is a regular chart-topper on “Top 10 Putdowns” lists – but like all ad hominems, it’s a fallacy. From a purely logical perspective, Lady Astor is in the right. Churchill’s comeback is fallacious; as well as being offensive, it’s irrelevant. He’s also drawn a false equivalence. While he is quite capable of controlling his level of inebriation, poor Lady Astor has no such dominion over the shape of her face.
But if Astor wins on substance, Churchill wins on style. This is a class of ad hominem that you might call a joust. It’s usually found in the context of the cut and thrust of repartee, and its purpose is to throw the opponent off balance. If your interlocutor has the upper hand in a discussion, a droll, well-targeted personal attack can move the debate to surer ground. Since people’s natural reaction to being attacked is to defend themselves, they’ll often attempt to defend the slight instead of driving home their advantage.
Jousts take place in real life, in real time, in the real world. If they hit the mark, they earn kudos for the wielder. Churchill’s comment may have been mean, but it was quick, it was (presumably at least partially) accurate, and it took some courage – presumably Dutch – because the target of his tongue-lashing was standing right next to him. Above all, it was funny.
Many of the greatest literary minds in history have been able practitioners of the joust. Chaucer, Swift, Pope, Voltaire, Johnson, Twain, Byron (“Posterity will ne’er survey/A nobler grave than this:/Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:/Stop, traveller, and piss”), Wodehouse (“She’s got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need”), Wilde (“I never saw anybody take so long to dress, and with such little result”) and Orwell (“He is simply a hole in the air”) all earned their stripes partly by tearing others off a strip. We excuse these slights, applaud them even, because they show qualities that we aspire to: intelligence, originality, speed of thought. Besides, there’s often a sense that the target had it coming. Who are you going to side with – the guy who won the second world war, or some judgmental fuddy-duddy?
The second class of ad hominem is the smear. It too is rapidly becoming an ingrained part of public discourse, but it is, I will try to argue, far more dangerous, and has no place there. Smears come in four main varieties.
Trump’s gibes have the same drawback as jousts – they’re irrelevant to the discussion – and none of the merits. They’re not funny. They’re inane, unoriginal, and, as often as not, false. They do not signal a quick wit, because for the most part Trump delivers them via Twitter, or in prepared speeches to adoring crowds. And they are anything but brave, because Trump’s opponents are rarely in the same room when he vilifies them. To compare the US president’s infantile taunts to Shakespeare’s eloquent excoriations is to stick a Lego staircase next to the Taj Mahal.
The “reporter who no one has heard of” was David Cay Johnston, winner of the Pulitzer prize for journalism.
And yet here he is, signing poorly drafted executive orders like baseball cards, merrily topping up the swamp with the contents of every septic tank in America, and hooking his drives ever closer to the nuclear bunker. How so?
When you look at the Mango Mussolini’s modus operandi, all becomes clear. Shower your enemies with insults; see which gains the most traction (ie likes and retweets); then use it again and again, until it becomes irretrievably associated with the target. So Hillary Clinton becomes “Crooked Hillary” at every mention; the New York Times “the failing NYT”; and rival for the Republican nomination Ted Cruz “Lyin’ Ted”.
These remarks are not designed to artfully throw Trump’s opponents off balance or to enhance his comic credentials. They’re not really directed at his opponents at all; they’re aimed at the wider world. Trump is not trying to undermine what his rivals are saying now, but everything they have ever said. These are cynical, systematic smear campaigns. And incredibly, through sheer force of repetition, they worked.
Most people are smart enough to realise that, just because a hay clump stapled to an overripe satsuma repeats something over and over again, that doesn’t mean it’s true. Unfortunately, it seems there are just enough credulous idiots out there for Trump’s bullying tactics to pay off. By means of a million gutless, leaden, charmless, bogus backstabs, Trump managed to destroy the credibility of everyone who stood in his way.
TL;DR: Your argument is rubbish because you are rubbish.
“L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend a la vertu.” – François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
The tu quoque – Latin for “you also” – is a special case of ad hominem also known as the appeal to hypocrisy. Here, instead of trying to undermine the target’s argument by maligning their character, you are attempting to do so by pointing out things they have said or done in the past that contradict their current position.
A tu quoque often feels somehow more cutting than a basic ad hominem, because, well, no one likes a hypocrite. However, it is just as invalid as a criticism, because it too fails to disprove the premise. Whether your past or current actions are 100% consistent with your view or not is completely immaterial. Let’s take a recent example.
We live in a world where personal and public interests do not always align. (This is why we need governments; to balance private freedoms against the general good.) Politicians aren’t just politicians. They are also, despite appearances, human beings, and many of them are parents.
When you’ve got your MP’s hat on, grammar schools are a bad thing. Most studies have concluded that while they might benefit the few who attend them, they have a deleterious effect on other schools; they suck in all the best pupils and the best teachers, and regular schools suffer as a result.
But now look at the question from the viewpoint of the MP as parent. Grammar schools exist. The kids who go there do better. Given the choice between sending them to a grammar or to a comprehensive, which way do you swing? The effect of your decision on other people is infinitesimal – but it could make a huge difference to your child. You’re technically a hypocrite if you choose the grammar, but it doesn’t mean your opposition to the principle of grammars is wrong.
When Lily Allen and Gary Lineker spoke out in defence of refugees last year, they were bombarded with incandescent messages along the lines of “Well, how many are you taking into your mansion?”
Like May’s tirade, the detractors were missing the point. It isn’t Lily Allen’s job to look after refugees. There are lots of childless couples who’d probably be more than happy to take in a Syrian orphan, for example. The alt-right are constantly frothing at the mouth about the atrocities committed by Isis – but how many of them are donning combat fatigues and heading off to the Levant? If Allen and Lineker are hypocrites, so are they.
Few of us have the time, the equipment or the expertise to devote our lives to solving all the world’s problems. There are others better placed to tackle these matters: police, governments, charities. All we can do is flag them up, perhaps donate some cash, or if we’re lucky enough to have a free weekend, organise a trip to Calais to hand out clothes and food.
The fact is, we’re all hypocrites on a regular basis. Have you ever sat in gridlock and moaned about the traffic? You’re part of the problem! Ever merrily sucked on a fag while gravely warning a young relative never to take up the habit? Pot, meet kettle! Worried about overpopulation – and you have two kids? You’re a fine one to talk!
TL;DR: Your argument is rubbish because not every single thing you have ever said and done in your entire life has been 100% consistent with it.
3) Circumstantial ad hominem
The implication that a person has taken a position purely because it suits their agenda; they cannot be trusted on a particular issue because they have a horse in the race, or their judgment is otherwise clouded.
There’s sometimes something to this one. Most prisoners on death row insist that they are innocent, because it’s hugely to their advantage for others to believe them. However, by strict logical criteria, their claim is not automatically untrue simply because it is in their interest. We just need to take it with a healthy pinch of salt.
TL;DR: Your argument is rubbish because you are biased.
4) Guilt by association
Fetch the Nurofen. We are now entering the realms of spectacularly twisted logic, where the cognitive gymnastics can induce migraines in the unprepared.
4) is essentially 3) on steroids. The association fallacy is the most egregious and toxic of ad hominems, since it attempts to invalidate someone’s point by smearing them on the basis of her membership of, or tenuous association with, a particular group.
It’s become depressingly common practice, in online discussions, for your opponent to try to dig up dirt on you. They’ll read your profile, scan your previous tweets or comments, even Google you in their quest for incriminating evidence. Failing that, they’ll use whatever they find to try to pigeonhole you.
Why? Because then they can write off your opinion on the basis that they have already written off the opinions of everyone in your group. “Aha, you live in London! Of course you’d parrot pro-EU propaganda – membership benefits the metropolitan elite!” (Forty per cent of Londoners voted Leave.)
As well as committing the same logical misstep as the other smears – implying that a person’s identity is somehow relevant to their point – the association fallacy asks us to accept two further false propositions: a) that the entire group’s views and values are without merit; and b) that everyone in that group thinks and acts in exactly the same way.
Loath as I am to cut the hate-fuelled shitrag that is the Daily Mail any sort of slack, the continued attacks over its historic sympathy for Hitler and the Blackshirts make no sense. For one thing, everyone involved with the paper in 1934 is dead. New office, new owner, new staff. The words “the Daily Mail” now refer to a different entity; there is no immortal “Daily Mail soul” that inhabits everyone who sets foot in its offices. (True, the current team is starting to look more and more like its historic incarnation, but from a logical standpoint, there is no reason why this should be so.)
The guilt by association fallacy effectively means that no one can ever be right, because it holds that your view is worthless if you, or any group you have ever been associated with, have ever done anything wrong.
Telltale phrases: “Typical Leaver”, “You liberals are all the same”, “Just what I’d expect from a Muslim”.
TL;DR: your argument is rubbish because I consider (erroneously) that everyone in the group I have assigned you to (erroneously) is wrong about everything.
I used to think that humanity was slowly waking up to the preposterousness of generalisations like “All men are bastards”, “All Jews are stingy” and “All Gypsies are thieves”. But suddenly, writing off entire cross-sections of society at a stroke is enjoying a renaissance.
I picked the Daily Mail example for a reason. Of all the smear campaigns mounted in the last few years, one of the most sustained and successful has been the coordinated effort to discredit the entirety of the world’s journalists – or, to use the dismissive alt-right term, the “MSM” (mainstream media).
Organisations like the Mail, Express and Fox News haven’t helped the cause with their rabidly partisan headlines and editorials, and it’s true that the Independent, for example, has a strongly pro-EU slant. But the far right demagogues would have you believe that every journalist in every media outlet in the world is part of some huge conspiracy to deceive you, to keep a boot on the throat of the working classes and maintain the status quo.
The alt-right pursue this narrative by seizing on any and every mistake, oversight or lapse of judgment from any publication or broadcaster and magnifying it to ludicrous proportions. So, because the Guardian once ran an erroneous story about Jeremy Corbyn sitting on the floor of a train, we now cannot believe any Guardian story we read. Because Buzzfeed runs listicles and fluff pieces on its site, its investigative journalism is worthless. Because the BBC once published a news item about the negative effects of Brexit, it is irredeemably biased in all matters. The fact that Nigel Farage – an MEP for a party with no representation in parliament who only bothers turning up for work to sour the UK’s foreign relations – gets more airtime than any other politician in the UK is neither here nor there.
Yes, the mainstream media have made mistakes. And yes, some lean in a particular political direction. But on the whole, they try to give a reasonably balanced view of things. They are bound by ethical standards and libel laws, and subject to the oversight of a regulator. When they get things wrong, they apologise, they retract, and they print corrections.
Again, most people don’t buy into the alt-right’s absurd narrative. But a small, significant section of society have swallowed the lie, and now routinely reject any facts from mainstream sources as “biased” or “fake news”. To them, all of the media – from the Independent to the Guardian to the Mail to the BBC to ITV to CNN to the Times to Al-Jazeera to Buzzfeed to the South China Morning Post to the Dumfries & Galloway Standard – are all part of some vast conspiracy to prop up the metropolitan elite. We have now reached a point where a Brexiter, in a discussion about Brexit, will demand that you provide evidence to back up your point – and then, when you do, airily dismiss it because it happened to be published in the Sunday Times.
So if no conventional news sources can be trusted, who are these people listening to? Who has stepped into the information vacuum to expose The Real Truth? Blow me down with a feather, if it isn’t those selfsame alt-right demagogues! The alt-right demagogues, whose newsgathering resources generally stretch to a Twitter and YouTube account and a camcorder in their mum’s basement. The roving-reporter alt-right demagogues, like Paul Joseph Watson, who openly admits that he hardly ever leaves his Battersea flat, Julian Assange, who has been trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy for five years, and Katie Hopkins, who broke her world exclusive that there were quite a few Asian shops in London by going to the shops.
(This post is plenty long enough without a diversion into the shameless mendacity of the alt-right, but I’ve posted a few examples here, and there are plenty more at Snopes, FactCheck.org and FullFact.)
It wasn’t enough, of course, to smear the media. They are, after all, just mirrors to majority opinion. If a new order is to be imposed, all the traditional institutions must be undermined.
Dominic Cummings’ “Take back control” was very clever. The NHS promise on the bus probably did it for some people. The Breaking Point poster, even though immigration from outside Europe had precisely jack shit to do with the EU, undoubtedly won over a few racists. But for me, the real stroke of genius from the Leave contingent, and the turning point of the whole campaign, was Michael Gove’s “People have had enough of experts.”
Never mind that he was told to say that by one of the exact same metropolitan elite experts he was maligning. Never mind that he apologised abjectly for the comment the next day and retracted it altogether months later. In one pithy phrase, Gove manage to articulate the fury of millions of underachievers. He also single-handedly destroyed the last scrap of trust the public had in the system. Suddenly, the opinion of the man in the street was just as valid as that of someone who had spent years mastering her subject.
Gove’s (or, rather, Cummings’) ludicrous argument, that, because some trusted individuals once made an incorrect prediction, all their predictions are worthless, was the final justification for a Brexit vote among a decisive group of waverers. This arrant nonsense, combined with parallel whispering campaigns – Boris Johnson merrily defaming the EU in his columns for the Telegraph and Spectator, and the relentless demonisation of immigrants and Muslims in the Express, Mail, and far-right “news” sites – was what dragged Leave over the line.
For years, liberals ignored all this mudslinging, I guess because they assumed no one was gullible enough to believe it. Hopefully, they’re waking up to the fact that they can’t afford to ignore it any more.
(I’ve got more to say on this subject, but I’ve already wittered on for too long. Part two will follow shortly.)
1 thought on “The art of the smear: how the far right destroyed public discourse”
“Yes, the mainstream media have made mistakes. And yes, some lean in a particular political direction. But on the whole, they try to give a reasonably balanced view of things. They are bound by ethical standards and libel laws, and most submit to the oversight of a regulator. When they get things wrong, they apologise, they retract, and they print corrections.”
No, they don’t generally try to give a balanced view. Bias towards establishment politics is very real and *very* bias. That’s not to say the neo-fasc bullshit is true, but that just because the neo-fasc accusations are bs it doesn’t make the MSM unbiased. They’re biased in different ways.
A far from comprehensive selection of the hatemongering bullshit being spread by the far right
This isn’t intended to be a fully fledged post – more of a resource. It will never be exhaustive, but I want to keep a record of some of the most spectacular examples of fake news and or/twisted facts circulated by far right and so-called libertarian websites.
I’ll just make the one observation for now: if your cause is really so just, why do you need to make so much shit up?
The deception: Self-styled alt-right “counterculture” guru Paul Joseph Watson posted this tweet on 16th January 2017. The wording is unambiguous: anti-fascist protesters were plotting an acid attack at an event to celebrate Trump’s inauguration.
The deception: A group of Muslim immigrants in Berlin kidnapped a teenage girl and raped her repeatedly for 30 hours.
The truth: The girl, a 13-year-old Russian-German, later admitted making up the story. None of the far-right websites bothered updating their articles or taking them down.
The deception: Paul Golding, leader of the confederacy of cunts that is Britain First, posted a video on his Twitter account purportedly showing British Muslims celebrating the terror attack in the Champs-Elysees in Paris in April 2017.
The truth: The video, filmed in 2009, showed Pakistani cricket fans celebrating victory over Sri Lanka, as anyone who watched the video to the end – and saw them shouting “Pakistan” and hugging passing white people – could have worked out.
The deception: Hillary Clinton supporters staged violent riots after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.
The truth: There was some trouble. But a number of far-right websites and Twitter accounts used pictures from the 2011 London riots as “proof” of the violence. (The picture above was used, inter alia, in a Guardian article in June 2016, five months before the supposed riots.)
The deception: Schools in the US are forcing non-Muslim primary school children to pray to Mecca.
The truth: It was a tornado drill.
The deception: A four-year-old boy was beaten by a gang of Muslim immigrants in Sweden.
The deception: When news broke of an explosion near the team bus of the Borussia Dortmund football team in April 2017, a rumour circulated that Islamic jihadists were responsible. Paul Joseph Watson was quick to point this out to his 573,000 followers on Twitter.
The deception: A few weeks back, a lot of Islamophobes on Twitter circulated the above photo, claiming that it showed a mass execution of gay men in Saudi Arabia (or sometimes Iran). The tweets were all deleted when the con was pointed out, but I saved the photo.
The deception: Muslims never speak out against jihadist terror.
The truth:
If you find any particularly egregious examples of equivocation, misrepresentation, or outright mendacity designed to fuel hatred like this, let me know and I’ll add them to the list. But please make sure it’s all properly sourced.
On 31 July 2016, this story appeared on the Sun’s website. The headline was “Hundreds of Syrians in UK arrested over string of offences including rape and child abuse”.
The report went on to explain that in response to Freedom of Information requests, most of the police forces in England and Wales had supplied figures showing that almost 900 people of Syrian descent had been arrested in the UK over the previous year.
Towards the end of the story, the reporter included the line: “In England and Wales the majority of offences that Syrians were arrested for were immigration violations.” The number of actual arrests for rape listed in the story is two.
The Express story – the story that ran, and still runs, under your byline – did not see fit to include the rather pertinent information about most of the arrests being for immigration violations.
On September 30 2016, after a complaint to the Independent Press Standards Organisation pointing out the misleading presentation of the article, the Star amended its headline.
How do these people form their abhorrent views of racial and religious minorities, I wonder?
On March 11 2017, eight months after the Sun on Sunday story, the far-right, pro-Russia, lunatic conspiracy website Planet Bros ran this “article”, rehashing the information in your report and linking directly to it, with the slightly – but crucially – adjusted headline, “Police Arrest 900 Muslim Migrants In England And Wales For ‘Sickening’ Crimes”. Needless to say, the detail about immigration violations is nowhere to be seen. [Edit, 16/6/17: this story has since been taken down. Which I suppose is to be regarded as a small victory.]
Thousands of people shared it online. It is still being retweeted as I write.
I work in news, so I know it’s highly unlikely that you wrote the headline for the original story yourself. I also know it’s probable that the words you wrote were significantly changed and/or reordered by a desk editor or subeditor. However, your name is the only one publicly associated with the Express story, and so it is to you that I write.
I ask only this. Are you happy with the way your report was presented? Are you happy that your work is actively being used to mislead people, to poison public discourse, and to stir up hatred against an entire race of people, most of whom are guilty of nothing more than overstaying their visa?
Are you happy to be contributing, however indirectly, to the deaths of innocent human beings?
Yours sincerely,
Andy Bodle
Update: Siobhan McFadyen’s response
(Received by email, 16/6/2017, three months after my request)
“I, Siobhan McFadyen, have reported Andy Bodle to police for harassment. Your claims and false, threatening and defamatory.”
I’m extremely curious to see whether writing one blogpost, sending one email and listing some incontrovertible facts constitutes harassment in the eyes of an English court of law.
3 thoughts on “How are you sleeping, Siobhan?”
Fear is the path to the dark side.
Fear leads to anger.
Anger leads to hate.
Hate leads to suffering.
– Yoda
For the Quebec mosque shooting, let’s not ever forget the bittersweet aftermath: the eulogy of Imam Hassan Guillethttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/08/quebec-mosque-attack-eulogy-alexandre-bissonnette-victim-too
Why dont you grow up you troll! This article is a couple years old.
Grow up? For pointing out that egregiously misleading articles are spreading hatred and resulting in death? Not likely, you fucking vile subhuman.
The article is eight months old, and as I mention in the post, people are retweeting it again, right now, as propaganda to support the false narrative that all refugees are rapists.
I can only assume that you’re one of the lizard-brained proto-fascists that fell for it, and the other lies just like it.
Since I’m probably not going to be updating this as often as I should, for all the latest on the EU clusterfuck, check out Jon Henley’s excellent weekly Brexit briefing for the Guardian.
NB: The jolly impressive Brexit Shitstorm Forecast is a much more comprehensive resource on the same subject. I don’t want to steal their thunder. However, since it tries to be both compendious and balanced, there’s a lot to get through. My page will just consist of edited lowlights.
1 thought on “Project Fear Watch”
Hi,
You might want to note that Sonos is increasing its prices due to Brexit:
An open letter on Brexit to my MP, Keir Starmer QC
Keir Starmer QC MP
House of Commons
London
SW1A 0AA
February 10th 2017
Dear Keir,
Why did you become an MP?
Your previous job, as director of public prosecutions, was better remunerated, so it can’t have been for the money. You seem a humble and conscientious sort, so I doubt it was for the glory. Was it, then, because you wanted to make the world, or at least your country, a better place? I ask because I’ve been wondering whether your actions of late are fully consistent with that aim.
I’m not a religious man, but I’d like to quote you a passage from the Bible that offers an insight into the wisdom of crowds.
Now at the feast the governor was accustomed to releasing to the multitude one prisoner whom they wished. And at that time they had a notorious prisoner called Barabbas. Therefore, when they had gathered together, Pilate said to them, ‘Whom do you want me to release to you? Barabbas, or Jesus who is called Christ?’ For he knew that they had handed Him over because of envy.
The governor said to them, ‘Which of the two do you want me to release to you?’
They said, ‘Barabbas!’
Pilate said to them, ‘What then shall I do with Jesus who is called Christ?’
They all said to him, ‘Let Him be crucified!’ (Matthew 27:15)
The argumentum ad populum – the contention that something must be right simply because most people believe it to be so – has been recognised as a fallacy since Thucydides. The unspoken truth behind the representative democracy we have accepted as our political system is that ordinary people are not good at governing themselves.
Ordinary people do not have teams of advisers. Ordinary people do not have a civil service to carry out exhaustive research on the pros and cons of any proposed policy. We do not always have top-drawer educations, or the luxury of spare hours to meditate on problems. Few of us are able to see even the small picture clearly, never mind the big one. This is why we entrust MPs with the running of the country.
Never has there been a more exquisite demonstration of this point than the EU referendum. It’s clear beyond a shadow of doubt that hardly any Britons – on either side – bothered to acquaint themselves even fleetingly with the workings of the European Union, or the benefits and drawbacks of membership, prior to the vote. Those who did found themselves confronted with hysteria, hyperbole and rampant disinformation.
Even now, when I engage in online discussions with Leave voters, I find the majority still parroting the flagrant falsehoods published in the Sun, Mail and Express and on far-right conspiracy websites such as Breitbart and Infowars: lies about bendy bananas, lies about EU accounts never being signed off, lies about Turkey’s imminent accession and David Cameron’s World War Three (it was, as you know, a triumphant bit of straw-manning from Boris Johnson).
While I do not doubt that some people voted Leave in good faith and in full possession of the facts, some of the reasons I have seen and heard have ranged from the trivial to the downright absurd.
Even before the vote, it was clear that many of these motivations were incompatible. Opponents of free movement, for example, cannot possibly have their wish at the same time as those who want to create a flexible, deregulated “European Singapore”. We cannot both drastically reduce immigration and give more money to the NHS. Whatever shape Britain (or, as seems likely, its former component parts) is in when Brexit is over, a sizeable proportion of Leavers are going to be bitterly disappointed – on top of all the Remainers, and many of those who didn’t vote.
No one can say with certainty how deep and lasting the damage wrought by Brexit will be. (That fact alone should have been deterrent enough.) Most of the unaccountably maligned “experts” are pessimistic: between 3% and 9% off the country’s GDP, job losses in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, cooperative enterprises such as Erasmus and Cern wrecked, reduction in revenue for universities, loss of tax and talent from the skilled migrants now making plans to work elsewhere, and a colossal dent in the UK’s soft power. Even many Leavers quietly admitted that the UK might suffer economically and politically, at least in the short term, though they assured us that the advantages (the muezzin call of “Sovereignty!” that we hear five times daily) would eventually compensate.
Should article 50 be triggered, the ultimate fate of the country will hinge, of course, on the exit negotiations. The omens here are not good. We started out by offending our longstanding allies with our arrogant (and baseless) announcement that we would be better off without them. Theresa May’s bullish stance and the casually offensive remarks of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage then rubbed salt into the wound. And given that the EU is keen to make the prospect of leaving as unattractive as possible to deter other members from following suit, and given our woeful shortage of skilled trade negotiators, I see very little chance of us emerging from these talks with a lovely cake and a pleasant throb in the belly.
The UK, then, looks set to end up poorer, more divided, and more isolated on the world stage – at a time when the authoritarian right is enjoying an alarming renaissance, when Donald Trump’s presidency is destabilising world peace, when radical Islam still poses a potent threat, and when Vladimir Putin’s expansionist ambitions are gathering momentum.
Brexit risks being not just a faltering step backwards from economic, political and cultural standpoints, but a giant leap.
It comes as no surprise, then, that applications from foreign students to study at UK universities have already fallen by 7%. It will not shock you, either, that a large number of EU citizens resident in the UK are making preparations to leave. For some, the vote on Wednesday 8th February against the amendment on article 50 guaranteeing their rights was the final straw.
These are not scroungers, dossers or health tourists. These are hardworking, talented human beings who contribute hugely not just to the economy, but to society. They have jobs, they speak English (often to a higher standard than some of the natives I’ve encountered online), they have built lives here, and many have found love here. But their abysmal treatment at the government’s hands, and the new wave of xenophobia unleashed by the referendum vote, have made them feel unwelcome, and uncertain about their futures.
We risk throwing out not just the bathwater, but the baby, and the bath.
I’ve heard North Korea’s nice this time of year
I should add at this point that, if the government persists in its pursuit of a recklessly hard Brexit, if liberal values continue to be scorned and undermined, if racially motivated attacks continue to multiply, then I will be joining them in leaving. Am I overreacting? You be the judge.
Never mind that Brexit has destroyed my retirement plans. Never mind that the vote has already cost me almost £2,000 in increased holiday costs and grocery bills. What truly horrifies me is what seems to be happening to my country.
For simply airing the possibility that a hard Brexit might not be the best possible outcome for the country, or for suggesting that perhaps not every single Muslim on these shores is a western-hating rapist intent on killing us all, I have been called a traitor, a moron, a “cuck”, a “libtard”, and worse. For espousing views that I once saw as synonymous with the land of my birth – openness, tolerance, cooperation, trust – I have received multiple death threats.
I suddenly live in a society where where perfidious hatemongers like this man have acquired unquestioning followings in the hundreds of thousands.
A society where behaviour like this, this, and this is becoming normalised. People are being verbally and physically abused, in some cases killed, for the crime of wanting to help other people – or simply for wearing the skin they were born in.
The country is falling to bastards and fools: bastards who weave lies and fools who believe them.
If this is the new Britishness, then I want no part of it. I refuse to contribute any more to a country that tolerates, or even celebrates, racism, ignorance and spite. I’ll go to Canada, or Ireland, or Germany, where something like the British values of old still pertain. And I know for a fact that I will not be the only one.
A promise is just a promise
Theresa May seems intent on pursuing Brexit to its most brutal extent, no matter the cost. One can only assume that this is because she regards the referendum as a form of contract with the people of the UK; a promise.
But governments break promises all the time. The Tories broke nine of their 2015 manifesto pledges within 100 days of taking power. At least three more have gone for a burton since June 23:
But there is a larger problem here. What if fulfilling one promise means breaking others? What if enforcing a disastrous Brexit leads, as it well might, to the breakup of the UK? To new borders and sectarian strife in Northern Ireland? To lost jobs, to further cuts to the NHS, to higher taxes, more austerity? Who is to say that the Brexit promise outweighs all others?
Politicians don’t like to make U-turns because they think they are a sign of weakness. But sometimes, backtracking is the bravest thing you can do. The sunk cost fallacy has been acknowledged as a fallacy for almost as long as the argumentum ad populum. You can always turn back. And sometimes it is the only sensible course of action.
In any case, Brexit is not the “will of the people”. It is the will of at most 17.4 million people – a total that undoubtedly included many who were voting purely in protest at Cameron and austerity. Even fewer wanted a hard Brexit, with all the upheaval and economic woe that it will entail.
I was delighted to discover that you were standing as my MP. You seemed that rare and precious thing: a politician with brains, integrity, conviction. A man who thought and spoke well and was not afraid to take an unpopular stance. As a result, in the 2015 general election, I put a cross next to a Labour candidate’s name for the first time. When Labour lost, and Jeremy Corbyn took over the leadership, I thought he, too, seemed a decent man.
But unless you, and the Labour party, abandon your policy of pusillanimous submission to Theresa May’s every unmandated whim, unless you begin making substantive efforts to minimise the damage wrought by Brexit, and in particular, unless you start offering some credible support to my European friends in this country, whom you have, until this point, unforgivably betrayed, I will have no choice but to switch my allegiance to the Liberal Democrats, the only party that has shown consistent integrity on this issue. Until I emigrate, of course. Then you can do what the hell you like.
History is studded with stories of people in power faced with difficult choices. On the one hand, the safe option: give in to the will of the most vocal, even though they know the consequences are likely bad. On the other, ignore the clamour of the ill-informed, have the courage of your convictions, and choose the more difficult, but ultimately more beneficial, course of action. Those who choose the first path are invariably, like Pilate, reviled. Those who choose the second are feted as heroes.
You don’t eradicate the language and behaviour documented above by appeasing it. You eradicate it by fighting it with every sinew. Every day these bastards are not resisted, they grow bolder. To allow a hard Brexit is to pander to their tiny-minded, combative, backward, binary vision of the world.
How will you be remembered?
Yours
Andy Bodle
16 thoughts on “Bastards and fools: an open letter to my MP”
Thank you Andy,
Eloquently and accurately put. There are probably millions who support your letter.
Please keep in close touch with Starmer. Never give in – never.
I have not read every word (I will save it for later) but the words I have read reflect my thoughts also. Like you I was pleased to have Keir Starmer as my MP. But I feel sadly let down by him. I wrote him a letter recently, pleading with him to stand up for what he knows is right. I did get a reply, which reads as though it is not a generic response. But it was along the lines of the people voted out and therefore we are going to leave. Very very sad.
Well said. As James Surowiecki noted in his book, “The Wisdom of Crowds”: “If army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule: Just do what the ant in front of you does. The ants eventually end up in a circle. There’s this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days; the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died.”
Thank you Andy,
You are not alone. What is happening here is both unbelievable and terrifying. My country, it seems, is dead – or certainly close to.
Extremely eloquent & powerfully expressed. I agree with every word. I used to believe that Britain, with all it’s faults was a fundamentally decent & fair country; not any more. Words cannot express my profound disappointment & sense of betrayal, but you have come close, thank you.
This makes me feel an incredible amount of despair because every word is true. I hope that you got/get an adequate response. I no longer feel at home here in the country I was born and bred in. It is not looking like the place that I will stay if we continue down this destructive path. This is a brilliant letter. Well done.
A brilliant letter. Says it all.
Hopefully, this can be used as inspiration for writing to Lords too.
Thank you for your eloquent reflection of the views of so many British people who are being led into this catastrophe by a sycophantic government.
I am still awaiting a similarly well written and persuasive argument in favour of leaving the European Union but have stopped holding my breath.
I have read every word Andy, and agree with each of them. Your letter exactly promotes my views on this mindbogglingly stupid course of action. I feel so sickened by the responses engendered from some members of the leave brigade that I feel like I should renounce my citizenship of the UK on purely concientious grounds alone!
I live in Spain and have done so for some years, more than 15, so I and my ilk were denied access to the so called democratic vote on this issue. I have always been fairly proud of my nationalty, even though I understand that historically we were bloody brutal. The era of empire building was not one we can be proud of in any humanitarian way, most nations of Europe and the so called civilised world were engaged in this activity and pulled no punches in ataining their goals. It has never been a consideration for me to become a Spanish citizen but I am seriously considering it now!
I ruly hope your letter gains some purchase with Starmer but my opinion of most Labour and Conservative MPs is tgat they are self serving and toe the oarty line. This I suspect is what will happen hear! I refer you to the soeach of Anna Soubry. So sad and pathetic!
What a fantastic letter which sums up everything I feel about our country in 2017. The one thing I would add is that I think it impossible to find a Leave voter who can make a reasonable case for Brexit being something objectively beneficial to the country. You mention the two opposing views in the Brexit camp. So rather than it being the will of around one in 4 people, the Brexit we actually get will be the hoped-for outcome of what… Perhaps one in 10?
“The will of the people”…
Starmer’s central point seems to be, from his generic reply email: “Although the referendum was, technically, advisory, it was politically binding. None of us who campaigned day in and day out ever suggested that the exercise was simply advisory.”
Sadly a ‘technical’ error has left us in this mess. I’ve also written to him, and gone on susequently to join Lib Dems.
Huge thanks for expressing my thoughts in such an eloquent way. It is beyond my comprehension that decent, thoughtful and caring MPs (I do believe such beings exist!) can act in such a collectively disastrous way. Brexit is not the will of ‘the people,’ nor is it democratic to slavishly follow a vote based on so many lies and so much ignorance. Thank you again.
Hello agree with every word of your eloquent and well researched letter. Great examples we see and despair. Where is Spitting Image when we need them as never before.
I’m shocked that Britain is horrified by Trump yet complacent, even supportive, of May. As she ignores most of the divided country and drags it, plan free, vision free into what’s effectively, a war with Europe .
Can they not see the connection?
Thanks so much for writing and we can only hope you receive a considered reply from Keir Stormer. I was totally thrilled when he first stood up and defended parliament in the commons. Since there I’ve been bitterly disappointed in his lack of consistency. I’m up the way and Tulip Siddiq had the integrity to stand up for remain. All good thoughts and thanks again. Brightened up my Monday.
I want to see Mr Starmer’s response to this fantastic and unfortunately true letter. You have put into words the feelings of so many of us.
Angry is the word too for many of us. Angry that the government disrespects the people enough to do what they did – and blame ‘the will of the people’ for actions that they had been considering for many years. AS it is our country is damaged – probably irreparably, and that is also something that any of us are angry about. The social divide is something that wont heal easily.
I only hope that you manage to get this letter our there – to others who might well need to read it. Well done Andy.
Thank you. I wish I’d written this letter. My own MP, to whom I have written many times, invariably replies with a ‘cut and paste’ response which rarely directly tackles any points I make. I’d love to know what kind of reply you get.
If I get a reply, Margaret, I will publish it here. Thanks for your feedback!
The fascists on social media don’t have a following. They’re trying to build one
That’s about the size of it.
The rise of the alt-right is undoubtedly a concern; but perhaps not as big a concern as you feared. And you can stop it getting any bigger without leaving your front room.
A year of interacting with fascists on social media has taught me a few things. First off, a lot of them are bots, automated accounts set up by … well, that speculation’s for another day.
Second, many of them are the same people operating several accounts. Most haven’t even made the effort to conceal their multiple personas, using similar handles and profile pictures. Even those that have soon give themselves away by using the same boilerplate phrases, or making the same grammatical mistakes.
Why do they bother? Well, the first lesson of movement-building 101 is to create the impression that your constituency is bigger than it really is. There are a lot of weak-minded people around, and a lot more who like the idea of being part of a club. If they think everyone else is becoming a fascist, FOMO might lead them to sign up. And the bigger a movement appears, the more likely it is that those who disagree will be cowed into silence.
Sure, 17 million Brits voted Leave and 60 million Americans voted for Trump. But the vast majority weren’t fascists. Many were disillusioned, protesters, people misled by the media. On the whole, they voted for change – not violent revolution.
The reason the fascists have taken to Twitter and Facebook is precisely that they haven’t found enough people in the real world who support their ideas. They don’t have a following; they’re trying to build one.
And the good news for decent folk everywhere is that they’re shit at it. Today’s fascists are, broadly speaking, as dumb as posts. They communicate almost exclusively in slogans and memes, are barely conversant in their native language, and can rarely muster followers in double figures. This generation of Nazis couldn’t organise a putsch in a beer hall. And most of them are either atrophied virgins cowering in their mummy’s basement, pensioners who wouldn’t last a second in a fight, or nihilistic trolls who only believe what they write for as long as it takes to rattle a liberal. Any far-right action right now would basically consist of few fat shaven-headed football fans on Stella, hoping for a ruck.
Nigel Farage cancelled his march on the Supreme Court in December not on security grounds, but out of fear of an embarrassingly small turnout. Though it may not seem like it at times, decent folk outnumber these cowardly shits by a factor of hundreds to one, and they’re generally younger and brighter to boot.
While I don’t think the fascists have the courage or the numbers to take to the streets at this point, that might not always remain the case. But we need not let things get to that point. Nazification is not inevitable.
All decent folk have to do to prevent any further rise of the alt-right is speak up. Stop pretending they’ll go away; start objecting, resisting. If enough voices combine in a huge shout of “NOT ON MY WATCH”, they will remain fragmented, disorganised, disheartened.
Wars and intolerance and hate have been a blight on human history. But the direction of progress is unmistakable. The more tolerant we are, the more successful we are. The more we cooperate, instead of competing, the more safe and prosperous and happy we become. Humanity has achieved its dominance of this planet precisely as a consequence of its humanity.
So, by all means, block a Nazi today. But make sure you (metaphorically) punch him in the face first. Let him know that he is on the wrong side of history; that this petulant little burst of fascism, as Barack Obama put it last week, is a comma, not a period.
I am British, and glad to be British. But first and foremost, I am a human being
You do not represent me.
A fair few insults have been lobbed my way over the last six months. “Snowflake.” “Moron.” “Condescending prick.” “Cuck.” “Elitist.” “Libtard.” Most of them hit with all the force of a bullet thrown by a child, because most of the lobbers know nothing about me, and the rest know nothing at all. The most interesting one, by virtue of its sheer absurdity, was “traitor”.
The reasoning, I think, is that by arguing for the UK to stay in the European Union, or at least to remain on the closest terms possible, I am somehow denigrating it. Because I would prefer that my motherland remain a member of a progressive trade and customs union than become an inward- and backward-looking pariah state, I deserve, in the eyes of some, to be thrown in the Tower.
This is wrong-headed on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to begin, but here goes: I love my country. I love the gnarly combes of Exmoor, the wind-lashed crags of Gwynedd, Oxford’s defiant skyline, Whitby’s apologetic charm, the breathless majesty of the Lakes, Edinburgh, august and Escherian, the clumsy clash of then and now that is London. I love the internationally scorned food and the wildlife and the literature and the heritage and the majority of the people, and I don’t even mind the climate (England’s rainy reputation is overblown, and it’s never too hot or too cold for more than a few days). Crime is low, unemployment is low, the police and judiciary aren’t a law unto themselves, and until recently at least, most of our politicians seemed to rate the common people’s needs almost as highly as their own.
In short, I’m a reasonably well-travelled man, and I’ve yet to find another place on earth I’d rather live.
Now I’ve always been under the impression that when you love something, you want the best for it. And I happen to think that close cooperation with your neighbours, unfettered trade, attracting the best talent from around the world and open borders (with appropriate security checks) are beneficial to the UK – more so than isolationism, anyway – and 40 years of relative peace and prosperity would seem to back me up.
Only in the mind of a raving lunatic could taking a sober view of your country’s strengths and weaknesses be equated with hating it. Only someone who has read the Daily Express and nothing but the Daily Express could pretend that an aversion to huge risks being taken with your country’s economy and reputation is tantamount to treason. If your dad wants to bet the family house on a poker game, it is not treacherous to try to dissuade him. You’re doing it for his welfare as well as yours.
You are free to disagree with any of my reasoning here, any of my logic, or indeed my conclusion (provided you have reliable evidence to back it up) – but don’t you fucking dare question my motive. I may not be your kind of patriot, but I will defend the values of this country with my dying breath.
Whether I am proud of my country is a different question. Yes, I feel lucky, and grateful, to have been born in a relatively safe and prosperous country, where the citizens enjoy extensive choice, wide-ranging freedoms and where many, if not all, have opportunities to improve themselves. And during major sporting events, I generally root for England or Team GB, because, well, it’s more fun if you pick a side.
But proud? What’s your definition? In my view, you can only truly be proud of something if you have personally contributed to it. If you write a good book, or help build a sturdy house, or raise a child who wins a public speaking competition, then you are perfectly within your rights to be proud. But I don’t believe you have that privilege if your connection to the success is entirely coincidental.
Between 1845 and 1852, a million Irish men, women and children died during the potato famine, thanks largely to negligence by the British. Does that make you feel bad? From 1899 to 1901, 28,000 Boer women and children and at least 20,000 black people died in concentration camps set up in South Africa by the British Empire. Do you accept personal responsibility for that? During the Mau Mau rebellion of 1952 to 1960, at least 5,000 Kenyans were tortured by British soldiers. Shouldn’t you be ashamed?
Of course not. You had nothing to do with any of these events. But if that’s your logic – if you won’t carry the can for things you didn’t do – then how can you bask in the glory of England’s 1966 World Cup victory in 1966? How can you take pride in the Industrial Revolution or the Battle of Waterloo when you had no hand in either? How can you take any credit for Team GB’s Olympic medal haul in Beijing?
I’m careful not to litter, I pay my taxes, recycle, hold doors open for people, give odds and sods to the homeless, donate to a few charities and generally try to show consideration to my fellow man. But since I consider such behaviour the baseline for human decency, and since none of it has made Britain appreciably greater, no, I can’t say I feel proud, per se. And unless you’ve personally done something to add to the country’s wealth or reputation, neither should you.
I have a theory as to why the Brexit debate has divided the country so bitterly – why facts and reason are so often tossed aside in favour of emotion and aggression, and why so many people, from both Leave and Remain camps, have “doubled down” since the vote, becoming ever more convinced of their own rectitude and ever angrier with their opponents. It all boils down to this question of national pride and to our core sense of identity.
Most psychologists are agreed that humans base their self-image – the picture you have of yourself in your own head – on a few simple concepts. There’s no consensus on which is the most important, and they probably vary from person to person anyway, but chief among them are gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, region, sexuality, age, political affiliation and job. If someone were to ask, “Who are you?”, you’d probably reply something like, “I’m a middle-aged straight white British male writer.”
These concepts are very important to us – fundamental, in fact, to our sense of wellbeing. When they are threatened, we become defensive, sometimes to the point of irrationality. This may be why people are often accused of being “hysterical” when they talk about race issues, or gender equality. Because these subjects are so precious to us, we don’t always think straight when thinking and talking about them. We use emotive language, we oversimplify, our hearts run away with our heads.
For some people, their race and/or nationality is such a core component of their self-image that it blots out everything else. It trumps values, personality, rational argument. According to their maddeningly simple world-view, things like me are good and things unlike me are bad. Tell them they must choose between saving the life of a white British paedophile and a Pakistani doctor and they’ll choose the Brit every time.
I am not immune to those impulses. When someone attacks my gender, or my town, or my football team, I feel that rush of blood, and I want to spring to the defence of the People Like Me. But I also know that this sort of tribal thinking is dangerous.
When your mind works this way, in this automatic, tribal, binary, type-1, caveman kind of way, you think of life as a zero-sum game. You think every gain for another tribe is a loss for your own. But history shows us that life is categorically not zero-sum. Trade benefits both parties. Marriage (happy ones, at least) benefits both parties. The most successful creatures on earth – ants, bees, termites, chimpanzees – are the social species, the cooperators, the traders, the sharers, the communicators, the dividers of labour. It is the unparalleled cooperative skills of humans that have propelled us to become the dominant life-form on earth.
Tribal thinking – the unthinking, slavish devotion to People Like Me – lies behind all the -isms: sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia. Tribal thinking has been a major factor in every war.
But we move on. Sexism, racism and homophobia are on the wane, for good reason. The more humanity shakes off this mindset, the further it advances. Our time on this planet has been marked with less violence and fewer wars because we have slowly figured out that US VERSUS THEM is not the answer. US WITH THEM is infinitely more productive.
That’s why I try to fight the tribal impulse. Certainly, nationality and race are measures of how we see ourselves, but they’re not the only measure, and they’re probably among the least useful ones. Instead of building our self-image on accidents of birth, we can use other foundations: the company we keep, what we say, what we write, what we do.
I am British. I am glad to be British. But I am not glad to be British simply because I was born in Berkshire. I am glad to be British because a majority of people with whom I happen to share this little isthmus share many of my values. Values of tolerance and curiosity and openness and inventiveness and hope. And if those values are ever eroded, I may well stop being glad to be British.
I am British. But first and foremost, I am a human being.
I had planned to bang on at my usual mind-numbing length about the relative merits and dangers of patriotism and nationalism and the differences between them, but while researching this post, I discovered that far finer minds than mine – some of the greatest intellects ever to stalk this earth – have already done most of the heavy lifting. So to round off, here’s their wisdom on the subject.
“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Samuel Johnson
“Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.” Bertrand Russell
“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” Albert Einstein
“The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?” Pablo Casals
“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.” George Bernard Shaw
“If I knew something that would serve my country but would harm mankind, I would never reveal it; for I am a citizen of humanity first and by necessity, and a citizen of France second, and only by accident.” Montesquieu
“I am not an Athenian or a Greek, I am a citizen of the world.” Socrates
“Borders are scratched across the hearts of men By strangers with a calm, judicial pen, And when the borders bleed we watch with dread The lines of ink across the map turn red.” Marya Mannes, Subverse: Rhymes for Our Times
“Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill.” Richard Aldington
“Patriotism, the virtue of the vicious.” Oscar Wilde
“A patriot loves his country; a nationalist hates everyone else’s.” Georges Clemenceau
“Patriotism is the love of one’s country and the desire to serve her; nationalism the hatred of others and the desire to do them ill.” Pierre de Coubertin
“Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.” Guy de Maupassant
“The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.” Sydney J. Harris
“Nationalism is a state of mind permeating the large majority of the people and claiming to permeate all its members; it recognises the nation-State as the ideal form of political organization and the nationality as the source of all creative cultural energy and economic well-being. The supreme loyalty of man is therefore due to his nationality, as his own life is supposedly rooted in and made possible by its welfare.” Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism
[Thought I’d better put a positive one in, for balance. But there really aren’t many.]
“It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.” Arthur C Clarke
4 thoughts on “A patriot and a traitor”
You missed this fabulous quote:
“Patriotism, n.: Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.” ― Ambrose Bierce
That was a beautifully written piece, Andy. No one who took part in the referendum is a traitor, we all voted for what we thought was best for our country. Nor does the fact that a narrow majority voted to leave the EU somehow make it the right decision and therefore something we must all support.
I must correct you on one point though: we’re not an isthmus.
We are if you consider Iceland a major landmass … I concede. I just like the word 🙂
Brilliant article that helps us see why we are so divided and angry.
On the first day of Brexit, my true love sent to me
A lie on the side of a bus.
On the second day of Brexit, my true love sent to me
Nigel Farage
And a lie on the side of a bus.
On the third day of Brexit, my true love sent to me
Fake news sites
Nigel Farage
And a lie on the side of a bus.
On the fourth day of Brexit, my true love sent to me
Bob Geldof shouting
Fake news sites
Nigel Farage
And a lie on the side of a bus.
On the fifth day of Brexit, my true love sent to me
“Unfinished business”
Bob Geldof shouting
Fake news sites
Nigel Farage
And a lie on the side of a bus.
On the sixth day of Brexit, my true love sent to me
Jo Cox’s killing
“Unfinished business”
Bob Geldof shouting
Fake news sites
Nigel Farage
And a lie on the side of a bus.
On the seventh day of Brexit, my true love sent to me
Leave voters crowing
Jo Cox’s killing
“Unfinished business”
Bob Geldof shouting
Fake news sites
Nigel Farage
And a lie on the side of a bus.
On the eighth day of Brexit, my true love sent to me
Andrea Leadsom
Leave voters crowing
Jo Cox’s killing
“Unfinished business”
Bob Geldof shouting
Fake news sites
Nigel Farage
And a lie on the side of a bus.
On the ninth day of Brexit, my true love sent to me
One country splitting
Andrea Leadsom
Leave voters crowing
Jo Cox’s killing
“Unfinished business”
Bob Geldof shouting
Fake news sites
Nigel Farage
And a lie on the side of a bus.
On the tenth day of Brexit, my true love sent to me
Look, sterling’s crashing
One country splitting
Andrea Leadsom
Leave voters crowing
Jo Cox’s killing
“Unfinished business”
Bob Geldof shouting
Fake news sites
Nigel Farage
And a lie on the side of a bus.
On the eleventh day of Brexit, my true love sent to me
Food prices rising
Look, sterling’s crashing
One country splitting
Andrea Leadsom
Leave voters crowing
Jo Cox’s killing
“Unfinished business”
Bob Geldof shouting
Fake news sites
Nigel Farage
And a lie on the side of a bus.
On the twelfth day of Brexit, my true love sent to me
Bankers decamping
Food prices rising
Look, sterling’s crashing
One country splitting
Andrea Leadsom
Leave voters crowing
Jo Cox’s killing
“Unfinished business”
Bob Geldof shouting
Fake news sites
Nigel Farage
And a lie on the side of a bus.
***
On the thousandth day of Brexit, my true love sent to me
Mass unemployment
Scots independence
Fresh Irish troubles
Bye, bye Gibraltar
Endless remoaning
Tourism waning
Health service failing
Colleges closing
Expats returning
Town centres burning
Fascists saluting
…
Bankers decamping
Food prices rising
Look, sterling’s crashing
One country splitting
Andrea Leadsom
Leave voters crowing
Jo Cox’s killing
“Unfinished business”
Bob Geldof shouting
Fake news sites
Nigel Farage
And a lie on the side of a bus.
The deception: Paul Golding, leader of the confederacy of cunts that is Britain First, posted a video on his Twitter account purportedly showing British Muslims celebrating the terror attack in the Champs-Elysees in Paris in April 2017.
“Yes, the mainstream media have made mistakes. And yes, some lean in a particular political direction. But on the whole, they try to give a reasonably balanced view of things. They are bound by ethical standards and libel laws, and most submit to the oversight of a regulator. When they get things wrong, they apologise, they retract, and they print corrections.”
No, they don’t generally try to give a balanced view. Bias towards establishment politics is very real and *very* bias. That’s not to say the neo-fasc bullshit is true, but that just because the neo-fasc accusations are bs it doesn’t make the MSM unbiased. They’re biased in different ways.