The Final Post on Griffin-Irving Thursday, Nov 29 2007

Here’s my final take on the matter, summarised neatly.

 - It was a terrible error of judgement, and an extremely revealing one at that, for the Union to invite Griffin and Irving. The Union was under no obligation to bring these people to Oxford, and in my opinion should never have done so.

- However, seen as the Union is a private institution, whose members voted 2-1 in favour of the event going ahead, that must be respected if one believes in freedom of speech (both for Griffin and Irving, and for the Union, incidentally).

- Consequently, those protesters who said that this was not a freedom of speech issue either hadn’t thought hard enough about what freedom of speech is, or were being dishonest.

- In the end, i was mighty pleased that so many people turned out to protest. Regarding the technicalities of the issue I likely disagree with many of the people who were protesting, but regardless of that, I think it is a wonderful and important thing when people do turn out in force to let Griffin et al know they are not welcome, whatever the Union takes upon itself to do.

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Hear Hear Wednesday, Nov 28 2007

I saw this over on the Virtual Stoa, and thought i’d reproduce it here because it strikes me as the best thing written by anyone on the entire Griffin-Irving debate.

loneraven: “Maybe I’ve as little chance of getting attacked on the street tomorrow as I do any day. But here I am, thinking about it. Here I am, going to sleep at night thinking, there are far-right groups in Oxford tomorrow, oh dear. And why should I have to think that? Why? See above where I’m a human being, where I deserve to feel safe every second of the time in my home city, where white people don’t have to worry about visual indicators and I do. How dare the Union blithely invite RACISTS into my city, so safe in their straight white male privilege that they don’t have to think about the consequences of what they’re doing? I am not straight, white or male, and I have no uncomplicated identity, no simplicity or belonging – but I am an Oxford student. No one is allowed to contest the basis upon which I’m here, at this place and at this time. How dare they take the one thing that I have all of my own, my home, and compromise that?”

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Charles Fourier on the Giraffe Monday, Nov 26 2007

“I shall not say much about the peacock here, since this hieroglyph is
difficult to interpret without knowing the laws of Social Movement. Let us
turn instead to a figure which is easier to understand, that of truth and
its effects in Civilisation. Let us examine whether God has faithfully
depicted the sad fate of truth in our social state.

The hieroglyph of truth in the animal kingdom is the giraffe. Since the
characteristic of truth is to surmount error, the animal that represents it
must be able to raise his head higher than all the others: this the giraffe
can do, as it browses on branches 18 feet above the ground. It is, in the
words of one ancient author, a most fine animal, gentle and agreeable to
the eye. Truth is also most fine, but as it is incapable of harmonising
with our customs, its hieroglyph, the giraffe, must be incapable of helping
humans in their work; thus God has reduced it to insignificance by giving it
an irregular gait which shakes up and damages any burden it might be called
upon to bear.

As a result we prefer to leave it to inaction, just as nobody will employ a
truthful man, whose character runs counter to all accepted customs and
desires. Truth is only beautiful in our society when it is inactive, and the
giraffe, by analogy, is only admirable when it is at rest: when it walks or
runs it provokes jeers, as truth provokes jeers when it takes a practical
form. If a man were to go to a party in high society and speak out openly
and truthfully about the escapades of the fine ladies there, or about the
shady dealings of the businessmen or other men in the salon, there would be
an outburst of indignation, and all present would agree in remaining silent
about it and reviling the speaker. Matters are much worse in politics, where
truth has even less play: thus, to represent the way truth is repressed, Gd
has cut the giraffe’s horns down to their roots, so that they are no more
than sprouts, permanently unable to branch up into antlers; God’s chisel has
cut them off at their base, in the same way as, in our society, the chisel
of authority and public opinion has cut down truth to its mere emergence,
forbidding it to develop further. Yet even the most deceitful among us still
want to seem truthful, and although we are enemies of truth, we want to deck
ourselves out in its dress: by analogy, the only thing we want from the
giraffe is its dress, its skin, which is extremely beautiful; so when we
catch one we treat it rather as we treat truth. We say to it, Poor beast,
you are good for nothing but to remain in the desert, far form the society
of man; we may admire you for a little while, but in the end we must kill
you and keep only your skin, just as we stifle truth and keep only its
outward appearance.

From this explanation we can see that God has created nothing without a
purpose, even the giraffe which is supremely useless, but as God was obliged
to represent all aspects of our passions, he had to use this animal to
depict the complete uselessness of truth in Civilisation. If you wish to
know what purposes truth will serve in societies other than Civilisation,
study this problem in the counter-giraffe, which we call the reindeer, an
animal which provides us with every service imaginable: you will see that
God has excluded it from these social climates, from which truth will also
be excluded for as long as Civilisation lasts.

And when the societary order has enabled us to become adept at the use of
truth and the virtues which are excluded from our lives at present, a new
creation will provide us, in the anti-giraffe, with a great and magnificent
servant whose qualities will far surpass the good qualities of the reindeer,
which so excites our envy and arouses our anger at nature for having
deprived us of it.”

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The Police Thursday, Nov 22 2007

As in the band, not the fascist pigs.

 I recently noticed that they have the weirdest songs. On first listen they sound like catchy love tunes, but if you listen closely, it’s not so. For example, ‘Can’t Stand Losing You’ is about Sting topping himself because his bird’s dumped him. But not in a tragic, timeless way. More like a 13-year-old, ‘i’m going to kill myself and then you’ll all be sorry’ way. Similarly, ‘Every Breath You Take’, the more I listen to it, sounds like the internal ramblings of a psychotic stalker:

Every step you take, i’ll be watching you

Oh can’t you see, you belong to me?

And so on.

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English Football Thursday, Nov 22 2007

Hats off to Croatia; a better team, who played better on the night, wanted it more and got a victory they deserved.

 England have been abysmal throughout the qualifying campaign and did not deserve to go through to Euro 2008. Whose fault is it? Well where to begin? Over-payed players who are outclassed by men earning a 10th of their salary, who lack passion, inventiveness and flair, and who can only play as part of a multi-national team; an incompetent manager; a Football Association that hasn’t known its arse from its elbow for as long as I’ve been alive; a Premiership that rewards importing big name players from abroad and relegates the importance of grass roots. The list goes on.

 All I can say is that I hope not qualifying for 2008 results in some serious top-to-bottom reform of the English game, in all departments. The England team is shockingly bad. The one good thing to come out of this campaign is that it puts to death the persistent lie that England are a good team. We have been knocked out of the last three major tournaments by the same manager, and on the last two occasions by the same team, Portugal, who are hardly one of the best in the world (though clearly better than England). Yet the myth persisted that we were somehow world class. Well facts are facts, and world class teams qualify for major tournaments. To put it bluntly, England are shit. The whole world has known it for a long time, now we have to admit it to ourselves.

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Fascists and the Oxford Union Wednesday, Nov 21 2007

I have so far kept out of the debate as to whether Nick Griffin and David Irving should be allowed to speak at the Union. However I recently received an email urging me to oppose their speaking. So as a way of saying my piece on this matter, here first is the email:

 Dear all,

You may have heard that the Oxford Union has invited Holocaust
denier David Irving and BNP leader Nick Griffin to speak in a ‘forum on free
speech’ debate on Monday 26th November. I am writing to you to try and rally
support for the campaign to retract these invitations.

Retracting these invitations is by no means a denial of the right to free
speech of these men. It is simply refusing to lend the credibility of the
Oxford Union name to their views. There is a world of difference between
defending free speech and choosing to provide a platform for fascists. Far
from being champions of free speech, history shows that when fascists rise to
power they destroy freedom of speech, democracy and human rights. They have
murdered millions of people and attempted to annihilate entire communities.

This is a non-partisan issue: it concerns us all as individuals and as
students. This is an opportunity for  members of the Oxford Union, and, by
association, students and alumni of the University of Oxford, to decide whether
they mind the credibility of these people being raised in their name.
 

 And here is my response:

“Retracting these invitations is by no means a denial of the right to free
speech of these men”.
- yes it is.

“There is a world of difference between defending free speech and choosing to provide a platform for fascists.”
- no there isn’t.

“Far from being champions of free speech, history shows that when fascists rise to power they destroy freedom of speech, democracy and human rights”
- So surely we should want to do the opposite, and preserve freedom of speech…i mean, we don’t want to be like them, do we?

“This is a non-partisan issue”
- not for fascists it isn’t.

At the end of the day, if Irving and Griffin are so wrong (which obviously i think they are), then it should be no problem taking them on in public and showing why they are a bunch of lying, racist, anti-semitic fascists. You give them more credibility and more attention by trying to ban them, because then *they* play the freedom of speech card. I mean come on, these people defend positions which are indefensible for anyone with a modicum of common sense and decency. Having a debate with these scumbags should be a walk in the park; getting these people out in the open is the best way of exposing exactly what they are. Refusing to engage with them leaves it publically ambiguous as to whether they actually have a point/case, and fuels their myths about liberal jewish conspiracies running the world.

Incidentally, does anyone feel like taking on the BNP front line on the street when it gets nasty? I bet not. It’s easy to ban people, self-assured in your own superiority. It’s a lot harder to tackle them head on, be it in the debating hall or on the streets. Which means asking yourself whether a denial of the extension of freedom of speech to racists and holocaust deniers says more about your own personal insecurities than it does about the racists and holocaust deniers themselves.

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University of Columbia Wednesday, Nov 21 2007

Undergraduate politics students here at Oxford have recently been bombarded with appeals to submit work to the University of Columbia’s undergraduate politics journal. One of the requirements they stipulate is this:

“Normative scholarship is acceptable but must remain strictly objective.”

I’m not exactly sure what these people think that sentence even means – and that in itself is surely a problem – but I rather worry that it potentially rules out pretty much everything I have written in the past 2 years.

I do wonder if  I will ever be able to read a sentence without analysing it for its philosophical inconsistencies and/or ambiguities. I suspect not…but then again i feel rather justified in this case.

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The world is well on its way to going completely mad… Monday, Nov 19 2007

Hardcore Guevara readers will recall a post 6 months back about offence, and how it can be used to do crazy, nasty things to freedom of speech.

There’s a piece in today’s tehgruan, which you can find here, about the Advertising Standards Agency pulling adverts because people complained they were offensive.

My favourite parts are, firstly, the banning of an MFI advert because a woman slapping a man for not putting down the toilet seat condones domestic violence! That sounds pretty wacky, not to mention symptomatic of having lost all touch with reality, as well as any appreciation of human beings’ capacity to distinguish between genuine violence and slapstick. But it gets better. For consider what chief executive of the National Consumer Council, a Mr Ed Mayo (do you reckon his mates call him ’sandwhich’?) had to say about the impact of advertising upon children:

“If companies pay for adverts that make violent behaviour seem acceptable or, worse, funny or cool, then they are directly sponsoring bruises, tears and hurt in the playground and homes of Britain’s children”.

Is this guy serious? Is he seriously maintaing that a picture of a man with a thin phone next to a cut on his cheek “directly sponsors” children’s physical and psychological suffering? It seems he is. What I cannot understand – or rather, what i can understand and makes me sad and depressed - is why people like this are given national coverage when they should be left alone outside Marks and Spencer’s with their megaphone and sandwhich board, alongside the guy with last week’s dinner in his beard who’s busy warning us all that the end is nigh.

 Like i’ve said before, it’s not just the polar bears who are on their way out…

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Silenus the Daemon Monday, Nov 19 2007

The daemon stood silent, stiff and motionless, until at last, forced by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and spoke these words: ‘Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard and hardship, why do you force me to say what it would be much more fruitful for you not to hear? The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second-best thing for you – is to die soon’.

 - Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

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It’s that time of the year again Saturday, Nov 17 2007

When it’s cold outside, so you have to wrap up warm. But every time you go into a shop the heating is on full blast, so you sweat like a pig if you are in there longer that 30 seconds. The result: you can’t do 15 minutes of shopping without smelling like Steven Gerrard’s post-match groin.

 The solution? Ban heaters in shops. This will have the added bonus of rekindling the ordinary working person’s interest in unionisation, as we all know the retail sector is the least unionised of all.

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