Though I think the points raised about Free Speech are valid, the reason behind this rant was simple; I fucking HATE Kilroy-Silk.
You may have seen over the weekend that Robert Kilroy-Silk has quit his job as the Most Annoying Little Smear of Dogturd on British Television, saying, "the time is right for me to go" (though personally I felt that 1976 was the right time for him to go, preferably into an oversized mincing machine). I'm sure that the fact that the BBC scored an extra million viewers in the slot where his program was before it was suspended did nothing at all to convince the arrogant dollop of rectal bacteria that maybe the public DIDN'T share his belief that he could walk on water, and maybe cure lepers of their ailment. And I'm especially sure that the uproar over his column in the Sunday Express branding all Arab people as barbaric, suicide bombing, women abusing limb amputators had no bearing at all on his long overdue decision.
Anyway, I've just about stopped laughing at the downfall of this abhorrent little man now, so I now find myself looking back over the couple of weeks since his initial racist faux pas. There are two things about it that really interest me. One is the response of Kilroy to the swathes of people who were offended by what he wrote. The other is the somewhat surprising defence used by his apologists; that he was simply exercising freedom of speech.
So then; what did the silver haired simpleton say in his defence? Well, firstly he said that he couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. To a certain extent, he actually has a point; the column was a reprint that had been published earlier in 2003 with not a squeak of protest being raised. He then went on to apologise for causing offence whilst, at the same time, standing by what he'd said. This is a quite stultifying piece of arrogance on his part; he seemed to be implying that, as what he said is sparkling with universal truth, it must therefore be the fault of those oversensitive suicide bombers that they got offended. As he was magnanimous enough to forgive them for that and say sorry, he assumed it would sooth their angry, tea towel encased heads.
Even the fact that he stood by what he said should indicate that Kilroy thought he was hosting an edition of his program. Only this time, he was unable to shout down or ignore guests who disagreed with his ill-informed bigotry. He couldn't fake the face of a sensitive listener before closing the program with a semi-retarded stream of clichés that belittled whichever poor sod he'd just been patronising, whilst trying to bolster his own hype of a straight talking man of the people. No, this time he found that he was on the defensive. And faced with the task of justifying how "Arabs have never contributed anything to civilisation" is a valid statement (all the science, mathematics, medicine, and astronomy that we got from Arabic and Persian worlds mustn't count in his world; I'll make the differentiated between Arabs and Persians, even if Kilroy didn't know or care about it), he decided to tuck his tail between his legs and resign. Though he didn't actually withdraw his remarks. He didn't even spend much time trying to qualify them; had he been pointing the finger at one or two Middle Eastern governments, I daresay that he wouldn't have come in for so much, or any, flak. So, not only has the BBC lost a bullying, arrogant egotist, but a cowardly one to boot.
And it would have ended there, were it not for the multitude of people who were willing to defend Kilroy for braying this jingoistic headspew. When I read about the BBC's decision to suspend him from his job because of the comments made I, perhaps naively, expected the reaction of the overwhelming majority to be the same as mine; hate-filled, mocking laughter. Instead, there was a chorus of cries that Kilroy was being picked on for his "courageous stance on free speech" and that his suspension was "political correctness gone mad".
This was a reaction that took me entirely by surprise; Kilroy had made some pretty hateful comments; had he replaced the word 'Arab' with the word 'Jew' or 'Black', then there would have been a race to Kilroy's house, with the lucky winner getting to change him from an annoying minor celebrity into about 200 pounds of rapidly cooling meat. Should we really be talking about protecting bigotry under the heading of free speech? Does that mean I can start ranting about wogs, spiks, kikes, poofs, slags, ragheads, and so on and so forth, and claim the same justification? Of course it doesn't.
So what about the charge that the BBC are pandering to the politically correct by suspending him? Well, there is a certain amount of logic to that argument; why the hell wasn't he suspended when the article was first published? But beyond that, there is no real case for the BBC to answer. There are laws against inciting racial hatred in this country, and Kilroy has fallen foul of them by pretty much anybody's definition. His employer has every right to suspend him for his public declaration of racism. Would you expect to still have a job if you marched into work offering a cheery "Sieg Heil" to all of your colleagues? If you wrote a newspaper article stating that all Black people are worthless as a race, would you really be surprised to find a P45 waiting for you in your day job? Personally, I find it far more offensive that he got away with these remarks earlier. If I were to complain about anything in this incident, it would be that the media are only against racism when it's newsworthy.
Finally, as we reached the last desperate dregs of humanity who attempted to stand up on behalf of Kilroy, we had that old favourite; "There wouldn't have been as much fuss if it had been a non-white making these comments". I always enjoy seeing racists whining that they're not allowed to be as bigoted as those goddamn pesky blacks. Well, much though I hate to sprinkle foul-smelling urine on their parade, they're talking complete and utter asshat. If this is a case of de poor ol' white man getting victimised, how come he had to publish the bilious cack twice before anyone raised an objection? And if non-whites do get away with more bigotry than whites, how come Abu Hamza (the London based Moslem cleric/James Bond villain wannabe with the hook for a hand) was barred from preaching at his Finsbury Park Mosque for his racist, anti-Semitic nonsense?
All in all, I find myself wondering whether these apologists would have been quite as vehement in defending an Arab making negative comments about English culture? If it's all about free speech, then those same people are presumably equally irate at Hamza being silenced. Except that they're not. The majority of these people are arguing for the same right that Kilroy seems to have dedicated his life and career too; the right to remain ignorant racists. If stopping someone in the public eye from encouraging hatred of another person based on nothing more than race is "Political Correctness gone mad", then pass me the straitjacket.
Oh, and if anyone reading this actually sympathised with Kilroy and gets offended at being called racist, relax; it's just me exercising my right of free speech.
Monday 19 January 2004
Wednesday 7 January 2004
I want the truth
"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?" Anyone with a passing familiarity with the legal system as seen in the world of film and TV will recognise those words as one of the cornerstones of a trial (when I first head them spoken in a real trial I had to stifle a giggle; I was half expecting the defendant to bark "You can't handle the truth" at the court clerk...). It's a ritual formula that assumes there is a definitive story behind whatever chain of events led to some poor b*stard standing in the dock. I've always assumed the same; that most events in life have a clear beginning, middle, and an end. And there is always one version of the story that is the pure, unvarnished truth. But now I'm not so sure. I've just finished a relationship that, although it was unquestionably the right thing to do, I didn't hugely want to end. I did so because of my obsession with knowing 'the truth'. So this seems as good a time as any to ask if there really is any such thing as a universal truth.
For example, think of any event witnessed by yourself and some of your friends. If I were to ask each and every one of you what happened at that event, would your stories be exactly the same? Of course they wouldn't; unless you'd had time to get your stories straight then everyone would give a slightly different version (I once sat in on police interviews with 3 clients accused of burglary. Their stories matched identically. Right down to the exact words used in answer to the questions. Astoundingly, the police didn't believe them. Mind you, I was their solicitor, and neither did I). Does that mean that one of you is telling the truth and the others are all lying? Well, perhaps it does (I'm sure we've all been guilty of embellishing a story), but I think it more likely that all of you will promise faithfully that you are giving me the truth.
So what does that mean? That we're a race of chronic liars (or, to use the correct name for a group of liars, lawyers)? Well, I like to display a little more faith in my fellow man, so I'm going to say that it does not (though if we really are all predisposed towards lying, that's probably another fib). What I think it does demonstrate is that the truth, far from always being something immutable and fixed in stone, is a little more flexible than we may have thought. The truth varies according to who it was that witnessed the event, and what their perception of it was.
Okay; that sounds like abstract bumslop of the worst kind so I'll explain myself a little more. The best place to see that the truth varies depending on your own perceptions is, perversely, politics. Usually, the wide and varied political spectrum is split into two for ease of identifying where one's basic sympathies are; left wing and right wing (or Liberal and Conservative). It is rare indeed that you'll find any sort of agreement between these two sides (mainly because the Conservatives want to preserve all the existing evils and injustices of the world. Liberals want to replace them with an entirely new set of evils and injustices), and you will see this being reflected in the media. There are left wing papers (The Guardian, The Mirror) and right wing (The Times, The Mail). Generally speaking they report on much the same stories. But the reports are rather different to one another.
Take the recent and continuing war in Iraq. Should you read the Mail (assuming you can find news about the war in between the pages and pages of jingoistic, anti-immigrant bile) , then the invasion wasn't just necessary, it was an imperative. It was about freeing a nation from a tyrant. The subsequent steady stream of dead soldiers and civilians is regrettable but shouldn't affect our resolve to bring freedom to the Iraqi people. If however you read the Guardian, then the war is nothing more than a grab for resources by the Americans. The soldiers dying every day are evidence that the Iraqi people don't want the kind of freedom offered to them by an invading army. The indisputable fact is that Iraq was invaded. Yet here are two wildly different versions of just why it happened, and what the result is.
I have my own bias; I'm more inclined to find the left wing version of events more to my liking. And I can produce all manner of reasons and justifications as to why I believe it that are, in my mind, unassailable. Yet I've spoken to people who are equally as adamant that the political right is, well, right. And they (well...some of them) can produce completely valid facts and figures that would seem to prove that they are correct and I am mistaken (and what with my temper, mistaken at the top of my voice). How can this be? Well, mainly because we look for the facts that back up our beliefs and then do our best to either ignore those tricky points that debunk our opinions, or we look for more facts to make those troublesome opposing ideas seem like naively held beliefs at best, lies at worst.
Of course, I'm just talking about people who are able to articulate just why they hold the beliefs they do, and why they believe in one version of events rather than another. I'm excluding entirely another category of people; those screeching idiots who are only able to shout down an opposing view. I'm inclined to believe that these people are not remotely interested in the truth, be it universal or not. Being too stupid to have any actual beliefs of their own, they are interested only in one thing; being seen to be right. Happily, these people are incredibly easy to humiliate into silence; try pressing them on specific facts and watch them dissolve into a red-faced, teary-eyed mess reduced to ranting "You're wrong!" ad infinitum. Unfortunately, an awful lot of these type of people seem to hold fairly important positions in society, and so it means we actually give credence to the menstrual waste that they laughably refer to as their version of the truth.
As a side note, if I had to pick one of the many insultingly idiotic arguments used by this group of people to justify why their blinkered Me-Muppetry cannot be disproved by any available facts as the worst, it would have to be "The media is biased towards the Liberals/Conservatives (delete according to political affiliation), so they will never report facts that prove what I say is right. Not that they have to, because I'm right and I know I am. And if you disagree, you're an idiot". These are always the same people who will cheerfully refer to newspaper articles that support whatever they're braying out as proof of how clever they are. Funnily, they only accuse the media of bias when they produce something that disagrees with them, but I digress.
What I'm driving at in this little rant is that we cannot expect to get a nice, neat version of events that is the undisputed truth. Usually, an event happens. Then different people give their different perceptions of what happened. We then have to look at those different perceptions and make up our own minds as to where the truth lies. As a race, we seem inclined to look for something that fits the 'story' structure; we look for explanations that have a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. The fact that our lives rarely fit the storybook mould doesn't seem to bother us; we expect the rest of the world to do so. So it's not really the truth we look for, but the story that we're most inclined to hear.
But of course, that's just my perception of the truth. Yours could be completely different.
For example, think of any event witnessed by yourself and some of your friends. If I were to ask each and every one of you what happened at that event, would your stories be exactly the same? Of course they wouldn't; unless you'd had time to get your stories straight then everyone would give a slightly different version (I once sat in on police interviews with 3 clients accused of burglary. Their stories matched identically. Right down to the exact words used in answer to the questions. Astoundingly, the police didn't believe them. Mind you, I was their solicitor, and neither did I). Does that mean that one of you is telling the truth and the others are all lying? Well, perhaps it does (I'm sure we've all been guilty of embellishing a story), but I think it more likely that all of you will promise faithfully that you are giving me the truth.
So what does that mean? That we're a race of chronic liars (or, to use the correct name for a group of liars, lawyers)? Well, I like to display a little more faith in my fellow man, so I'm going to say that it does not (though if we really are all predisposed towards lying, that's probably another fib). What I think it does demonstrate is that the truth, far from always being something immutable and fixed in stone, is a little more flexible than we may have thought. The truth varies according to who it was that witnessed the event, and what their perception of it was.
Okay; that sounds like abstract bumslop of the worst kind so I'll explain myself a little more. The best place to see that the truth varies depending on your own perceptions is, perversely, politics. Usually, the wide and varied political spectrum is split into two for ease of identifying where one's basic sympathies are; left wing and right wing (or Liberal and Conservative). It is rare indeed that you'll find any sort of agreement between these two sides (mainly because the Conservatives want to preserve all the existing evils and injustices of the world. Liberals want to replace them with an entirely new set of evils and injustices), and you will see this being reflected in the media. There are left wing papers (The Guardian, The Mirror) and right wing (The Times, The Mail). Generally speaking they report on much the same stories. But the reports are rather different to one another.
Take the recent and continuing war in Iraq. Should you read the Mail (assuming you can find news about the war in between the pages and pages of jingoistic, anti-immigrant bile) , then the invasion wasn't just necessary, it was an imperative. It was about freeing a nation from a tyrant. The subsequent steady stream of dead soldiers and civilians is regrettable but shouldn't affect our resolve to bring freedom to the Iraqi people. If however you read the Guardian, then the war is nothing more than a grab for resources by the Americans. The soldiers dying every day are evidence that the Iraqi people don't want the kind of freedom offered to them by an invading army. The indisputable fact is that Iraq was invaded. Yet here are two wildly different versions of just why it happened, and what the result is.
I have my own bias; I'm more inclined to find the left wing version of events more to my liking. And I can produce all manner of reasons and justifications as to why I believe it that are, in my mind, unassailable. Yet I've spoken to people who are equally as adamant that the political right is, well, right. And they (well...some of them) can produce completely valid facts and figures that would seem to prove that they are correct and I am mistaken (and what with my temper, mistaken at the top of my voice). How can this be? Well, mainly because we look for the facts that back up our beliefs and then do our best to either ignore those tricky points that debunk our opinions, or we look for more facts to make those troublesome opposing ideas seem like naively held beliefs at best, lies at worst.
Of course, I'm just talking about people who are able to articulate just why they hold the beliefs they do, and why they believe in one version of events rather than another. I'm excluding entirely another category of people; those screeching idiots who are only able to shout down an opposing view. I'm inclined to believe that these people are not remotely interested in the truth, be it universal or not. Being too stupid to have any actual beliefs of their own, they are interested only in one thing; being seen to be right. Happily, these people are incredibly easy to humiliate into silence; try pressing them on specific facts and watch them dissolve into a red-faced, teary-eyed mess reduced to ranting "You're wrong!" ad infinitum. Unfortunately, an awful lot of these type of people seem to hold fairly important positions in society, and so it means we actually give credence to the menstrual waste that they laughably refer to as their version of the truth.
As a side note, if I had to pick one of the many insultingly idiotic arguments used by this group of people to justify why their blinkered Me-Muppetry cannot be disproved by any available facts as the worst, it would have to be "The media is biased towards the Liberals/Conservatives (delete according to political affiliation), so they will never report facts that prove what I say is right. Not that they have to, because I'm right and I know I am. And if you disagree, you're an idiot". These are always the same people who will cheerfully refer to newspaper articles that support whatever they're braying out as proof of how clever they are. Funnily, they only accuse the media of bias when they produce something that disagrees with them, but I digress.
What I'm driving at in this little rant is that we cannot expect to get a nice, neat version of events that is the undisputed truth. Usually, an event happens. Then different people give their different perceptions of what happened. We then have to look at those different perceptions and make up our own minds as to where the truth lies. As a race, we seem inclined to look for something that fits the 'story' structure; we look for explanations that have a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end. The fact that our lives rarely fit the storybook mould doesn't seem to bother us; we expect the rest of the world to do so. So it's not really the truth we look for, but the story that we're most inclined to hear.
But of course, that's just my perception of the truth. Yours could be completely different.
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