Idiot Joy Showland

Who is it that threatens free speech? When the French government bans all Gaza solidarity demonstrations at the height of a vicious massacre in Palestine, it’s not a threat to freedom of speech: it’s a public safety measure. When the French state bans Muslim women from wearing the veil in public, it’s not a threat to freedom of speech: it’s a defence of secularism. When fanatical Zionists plant a bomb under the car of a French Jewish journalist who won’t toe the party line on Israel, it’s not a threat to freedom of speech: it’s a criminal act, certainly, but not an existential threat to the general ability for you or for me to say whatever we want. In the UK newspaper offices are raided by spies and kids are sent to prison for burning artificial poppies; this isn’t a threat to free speech either. It’s strange. The capitalist state, once the existential enemy of all freedom, a monster to be kept constantly under watch, is now the armed guarantor of liberty. Threats to free speech don’t come from the powerful any more. It’s “the Muslims”: a mass both hydra-headed and faceless, like a handful of worms. A persecuted minority, the suffering conscience of Europe. (Did you know that it’s now illegal to build minarets in Switzerland? Or that several towns in Italy have banned non-Italian restaurants? Whose freedom is under threat?) Or if it does come from a state, it’s one far away, surrounded by barbed wire and guns pointing inwards. The poor and the despised: this is who we must defend ourselves against?

How do you exercise free speech? You don’t do anything. You hoist up your Je suis Charlie placard, you queue in the cold to see a stupid and ugly Seth Rogen film, because this is your duty to the ideal of liberty and free expression. Freedom means obedience. Is this Hegel we’re reading? You must passively and dutifully admire the courage of those who dare to ruthlessly satirise any and all targets. In other words, those who have stockholders and distribution networks, while you have forty Twitter followers and the right to pen a letter to the editor. Freedom of speech belongs to the brave, the few, the moneyed.

What does free speech do? It offends, and there’s no such thing as a right to not be offended. Fine. But why is it assumed that what really offends “the Muslims” is the mere depiction of the prophet Mohammed, that if all other things were equal “they” would still fly into a murderous fury at stick-figures? France has been killing and occupying in Muslim lands since 1830. Across Europe Muslims are subjected to discriminatory laws and police surveillance; outside Europe Muslims are slaughtered by the hundreds from the air; Muslim-majority countries are plunged into chaos and bloodshed on the whims of a paternalistic Atlantic elite – and all of it is done in the name of freedom, a freedom that quickly reveals itself as the freedom to mock the victims. Such bravery. It’s just cartoons, it’s just satire: but it’s not; it’s bombs and missiles,

Is this all it is? Is freedom of speech nothing more than the freedom for a multi-million dollar studio to make a warmongering film, or the freedom to publish a racist magazine? Freedom that only punches down, that only repeats and intensifies the discourse of power and oppression that already comes from all sides (but especially from above), that is lauded by presidents and parliaments, that is threatened only by those that it oppresses – is this, in the end, really the best we can do? Is the freedom to repeat really freedom?

The armed attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo was a vile and senseless act of murder. I condemn it utterly, it repulses me, and my sympathies are entirely with the families and loved ones of the victims. I can only hope that the perpetrators are caught, and that they face justice. All this is true; I really do mean it. But it’s also politician-speak, inherently false. Read any article against the sacralisation of the magazine, especially one written by anyone from a Muslim background, and you’ll see a paragraph like this one, either strangely stilted (I utterly condemn…) or falsely slangy and overfamiliar (a bunch of gun-wielding cockwombles…). Why should this be necessary? Why do we feel the need to prove that, like all sane and decent people, we don’t somehow support the gunning down of ten innocent journalists? Why this ritualised catechism; why can’t we get straight to the point? Is this not itself a kind of restriction of free speech?

The line now is that you cannot criticise Charlie Hebdo, because they had the bravery to criticise anything. Je suis Charlie: you have to identify yourself with an openly racist publication. Why this identification? Protesters in the United States said that they were Mike Brown and Eric Garner because they, too, could be killed by cops, because they, too, were black. Do you also say that the French are stupid like blacks? Do you also show Boko Haram’s kidnap victims as pregnant grotesques demanding welfare money? When the Egyptian coup regime was killing thousands of demonstrators on the streets of Cairo, the cover of Charlie Hebdo showed a bearded man holding up a book against a hail of gunfire and being shot through the chest; the caption read The Qur’an is shit: it doesn’t stop bullets. If they were really ‘equal-opportunity offenders’ relentlessly satirising anyone and anything without any thought for taste or morality, their next issue will be of this type, a ruthless mockery of the victims. We never liked them anyway, or something like that. It wont happen.

As soon as you question the value of this free speech that isn’t really free, the assumption from your defenders is that you must want to impose some kind of censorship. I have no desire to censor. My title here is from Louis-Ferdinand Céline, another French racist, whose hatred was this time ranged against my self and my people; a great writer, even a great writer of antisemitic screeds, who I would never want to censor. It’s assumed that you must want to limit criticism of Islam. I have no particular love for Islam; there’s a lot about it I don’t like. I don’t like the concept of tawhid, or the figuraion of the One as a uniqueness. I don’t like the circumscribed universalism, the community always facing the horizon-figure of the kuffar. I will always support the freedom for anyone to argue against any set of concepts. But this is different from the victimisation of an already persecuted minority. I also support the right of people to fight against those that would destroy them. Free speech fanatics have pointed approvingly to the verdict in the Skokie Affair; where would they have stood in the Battle of Cable Street? I believe in satire; sometimes I even try to do it myself. But I also believe that satire only works when it punches up, that free speech is only really a freedom when it threatens power, not when it becomes the cruel laugh of imperial sadism. The Interview didn’t do this, neither did Charlie Hebdo. Nobody should be killed for this. But they mustn’t be applauded either.

What happened to the English that turned them into the most evil people on the planet? There’s not much in their national prehistory to explain the horrors that would come later: the English are, even according to their own national mythology, a supremely wimpy tribe. When the other Germanic peoples were pushed from their homes by the constant westward pressure of the Huns they went off on grand adventures, pouring through the cracks of the rotting Roman empire, sacking the great cities of Africa, tearing Europe down and building it up again. The Anglo-Saxons, meanwhile, settled for a few damp and undefended islands on the surf-softened periphery of the continent. They could have had Byzantium; they settled for Basildon. Most historians now conclude that they didn’t even have the guts to conquer the place outright, but just slowly assimilated its existing residents into what passed for their culture.  No classic primal scene, just a miserable clump of soil in the middle of a grey sea, where the English festered, waiting to erupt. Maybe there was. Maybe they saw something on their journey, those first witlessly seasick Saxons, tactically chundering over the sides of the Britannia-bound banter boat. Some primordial nymph or siren lurking in the chilly waters of the North Sea, all blue tits and seaweed-strewn limbs and timeless malice, who emerged wreathed by storms and lighting before the bedraggled ancestors of our modern hell, saw a bunch of easy marks, and told them: accept my evil, and I will let you conquer the world. Something that struck madness and bloodlust into their hearts and those of their children even unto the hundredth generation. For centuries the promise went unfulfilled: the English had to stay cooped up in their island-prison, being periodically humiliated by the other dregs of Europe (such as the Normans, an utterly wretched gang of lost Vikings led by the walking embodiment of preening insecurity) and using their spare time to compose tediously alliterative poetry. But when it finally came to pass, it did so with raging hatred; four centuries of unrelenting revenge against the world.

When the Chinese set sail across the world, it was in pursuit of knowledge; when the Spanish did it, it was for gold and glory. The explorations of the English seem to have been propelled by a sense of fidgety restlessness, a brutally murderous boredom. For all the massacres committed by the Catholic powers in the New World, they at least left some gasping harried remnants of the old cultures. Where the English went, they tended to kill every living thing.  There are, by some accounts, only twenty-two countries that have not at some point or another been attacked by this top bunch of lads. (It’s still going on; every summer, systolic contractions in the metropole send out streams of English to wash up like an oil sick against beaches the world over.) The result is that the sickness of the Anglo-Saxons is now spread across the world: the boredom and fury of centuries of imprisonment on that rainy island in the North Atlantic; from the endless suburbs of the United States to the cultural voids of Australia there are everywhere scars on the landscape that will be forever England. And it’s nothing if not a sickness. On top of their sadistic psychopathy the English have over time absorbed every possible personality defect into their national psyche: a horrifying range of sexual neuroses, a repugnant patrician narcissism, an unbearable prudishness, a whole complex of perplexing delusional psychoses, all wrapped up in a code of socially mandated autism. The English eat terrible food, enjoy ugly saccharine literature, make art without any gleam of merit and TV shows so gut-knottingly awful it’s a wonder entire production teams don’t commit ritual suicide out of sheer embarrassment. It’s not even as if they’re unaware of it all: the English are obsessed with these signifiers of Englishness. Endless fetishes: umbrellas, cigars, rolled-up newspapers, nuclear-armed submarines. There have been antique god-kings less self-regarding than the English middle classes. These people honestly believe that if everyone else were more like them – if they liked tea and gin, if they were decent and polite as only those sitting on half a century of imperial slaughter can be – there wouldn’t be any more problems. It’s charming eccentricity, they clamour. It’s not: it’s lunacy. The English aren’t a race, they’re an infectious disease. So I entirely support Scottish aspirations for independence.

I’m not alone. An entire country is emerging into a chilly blue-and-white dawn, and the grotesque historical abomination known as the United Kingdom might finally be finished forever. The Scots can govern themselves: no more English, no more Tories, a chance to build something new and human. The problem is that it won’t really work. Not that this month’s referendum will fail – there’s enough reason to be optimistic, even factoring in the No campaign’s recent rebrand to the nauseating ‘no thanks,’ the revelation that Scottish independence forms part of a massive jihadi conspiracy to split the union, fears that bekilted diehard irredentist militias might start firing mortars into Newcastle in an attempt to return the border to Hadrian’s Wall, the looming presence of another royal baby, and so on. Most psephologists (onomatopoetic creatures; snake-tongued and disgusting) still predict a narrow victory for the unionists, but this means nothing: as any cursory reading of Hegel will show, the metaphysical force that drives world-historical transformations expresses itself through the subjective will rather than being constituted by it. It might be the case that, for all the white papers, nobody seems to be entirely sure what an independent Scotland would look like, beyond being different to things as they are now – but this isn’t a bad thing: every worthwhile political programme starts with an anguished cry of ‘not this.’ The problem is that, unless you squint at them very hard, this and not-this are entirely identical. What’s being offered is a shitty simulacrum of independence. An independent Scotland will keep our beloved ghastly peg-toothed Queen, and she will no doubt keep the vast tracts of Scotland in which she conducts her strange summer blood-rites. Scotland will likely attempt to carry on using the pahnd sterling, and continue to submit itself to the mad whims of the Bank of England. Scotland might no longer host Trident, the UK’s nuclear albatross,  but it’s likely to maintain its NATO and US presence – and may even build new bases. Scotland also hopes to remain in the European Union, with the result that, when the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership comes into force, corporations will be able to sue the state for any future profits lost through any governmental policy that restricts the free market. Not that it matters: the SNP already has one of the most business-friendly platforms in Europe, and the restructuring that will inevitably follow any post-independence capital flight should quickly quash any dreams of Scottish socialism.

Across Europe once-solid borders are turning into a network of twanging rubber bands. Independence is almost in reach for the Catalans of Spain and the Flemish of Belgium. A non-binding referendum revealed that a significant majority of Venetians want to unshackle themselves from Italy; after that anything is possible. Occitanie libre, free Bavaria, a Sámi homeland, a Székely Empire, a glittering panoply of tiny strange new nations dancing in the gorgeous sunset of western civilisation. Some new states might take their names and identities from half-forgotten medieval liberties, others from hybridised immigrant cultures, others from dodgy mythology, apocalyptic cults, faint memories of visitors from beyond the stars. It won’t matter. The grand myth of our age is that the world is somehow becoming more global and more open, a smooth space lit up by the blazing trails of billions of lines of flight. In fact, there are more fences than ever – between Latin and German America, between Europe and Africa, between Israelis and Palestinians, between the rich and poor residents of the same cities and sometimes the same buildings. Capitalism doesn’t mind borders; they’re very good for isolating and exploiting people, especially those caught on the wrong side. All the capitalists ask is that their rule be entrenched on both sides of any barrier, and you can have any kind of state you like. The people ruling an independent Scotland will most likely be the exact same people ruling it today: international capitalists – in other words, the English.

Frantz Fanon wrote that the psychological tolls of imperialism could only be undone through the catharsis of violent anticolonial revolution. For all the plummy southern accents on the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland has dubious claims to being a colonised population. Educational massacre seems out of the question. What’s left? In the end it always comes back to the sea. It’s been well demonstrated that the primitive capital that set off the Industrial Revolution came from the transatlantic slave trade; from dark-age longboats to oil supertankers the sickness of the English is a sea-borne pathogen. Industrial-financial capitalism is the English madness reconfigured as a total world-system, rolling across the crested currents: illusions of representation, dispossession and death, alienation, atomisation, constant, aching, desperate boredom. If Scotland goes, it’ll be from one stacked undemocratic English-dominated system into another. The only way Scottish independence can become anything more than a sham is through a concerted effort from the whole of humanity to abolish the ocean forever.

Usually it’s reasonable enough. There is antisemitism, which human dignity holds to be repugnant and historical experience has shown to be brutal; and so to struggle against the murderous masochism of the antisemites there have to be people who are, professionally, not antisemites. Occasionally troubling reports will emerge from somewhere in the world. In a humid equatorial republic nobody usually cares about, the teenagers in one of the larger cities have taken to wearing shirts emblazoned with giant swastikas; meanwhile a café owner in a roadside village  has put up a big inflatable Hitler by his shack to tempt in the motorists. Worst of all, a few among the rising young national bourgeoisie have taken to reading Mein Kampf as a business strategy guide, in much the same way that their Western counterparts would make a show of reading the Art of War (you might not agree with what he did, but you have to admit that he did it very efficiently) and leafing through the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in the same way others might read Fifty Shades of Grey. This is, of course, extremely dangerous and utterly unacceptable. Groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Weisenthal Centre spend millions every year fighting against such antisemitism. It’s not always exactly clear how this is done, but it’s not hard to imagine. An age-gnarled woman, bent nearly double by seven decades of indentured labour, reels in shock in her rice paddy. The landing helicopter sends miniature tsunamis rippling across its surface. The noise is deafening. All this has happened before, when she was younger: back then it was soldiers with mortars and flamethrowers, now it’s something different. Out bounds a red-faced young man, the sweat already running in rivulets over the adipose crest of flesh where his neck meets his tightly buttoned collar. He has flipcharts and photos, he explains his loss and her guilt in an impassioned if slightly reedy voice; he wont rest until she recognises the suffering of the Jews of Europe.

All this work is highly necessary, and there’s nobody better at it than Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL. Bounding through a meadow on a cloudless summer day, his arms and tits wobbling in joyful tendrils, he fights the menace of antisemitism. Crouching by the peaty edge of a limpid gurgling stream, he catches a frog by its leg and keeps it in a pickle jar to torture later. Frogs, he exclaims, are antisemites. Running with his prize through the dappled silence of the woods, he trips on a protruding root; the jar smashes, the frog hops free. Trees, he bawls, are antisemites. Later, after the collapse of the last great trunk has sent a flood of embers rolling across the flat blackened earth, and the sharp resinated smoke has finally begun to clear, he finds the charred fringe of what was once his lucky blue cap half-buried in the ashes. Fire, he sobs, has always been tainted with the virus of antisemitism. From the burning of the Temple to the autos-da-fé to the Nazi crematoria, fire has shown itself to be an implacable foe of the Jewish people. Its policy of burning Jews and their possessions is one which it consistently refuses to recant or apologise for. Until it does so all Jews will continue to unite in quenching fires whenever or wherever they might occur. 

He wasn’t just good. He was the best.

But then something strange started to happen. Persistent and gruesome visions started to cloud his sight. One moment he was having lunch with a few of his donors, the next Abraham H. Foxman was crouching under the table, tightly gripping a butter-knife with both trembling hands. The frogs were on the march. A long slimy column of them, nine feet tall on their powerful hind legs, mottled eyes implacable, was making its way through the restaurant. They goosestepped in silence through the tables, padded feet hardly making a noise against the carpeted floor, leaving behind only a faint sticky residue. Hundreds of frogs: identical, stony-faced, skulls domed like Stahlhelme, webbing swinging like trenchcoats. The creature at the helm, a tiny but virulently coloured tree-frog, would point out one diner or another with a lazy wave of its hand; then one of the bullfrogs behind it would snap them up with a sudden dart of its tongue and swallow them whole. It was the Jews: the frogs were coming for the Jews. When he’d imprisoned that frog it was so easy to justify his action as a response to anuran antisemitism – but what if he’d been right? What if the antisemitism of frogs wasn’t just something he’d invented, but something he’d created?

Olive trees burst up spiralling through the pavements and speared Jews in their thorny branches; fires spread towards Los Angeles from the scrubby mountains and spared only those houses without mezuzot. It had long been a point of faith for Foxman and his associates that the material world was structurally, ontologically antisemitic: that what we understand to be reality was in fact nothing more than a phenomenal manifestation of the Jew-hatred that constitutes the actual substance of existence. He hadn’t actually meant it. Now the world of objects had finally, definitively turned itself against him. All those reports, all those TV appearances, all those thousands of things he’d condemned as antisemitic – how many antisemites were out there? When he saw other Jews recklessly endangering themselves, he wanted to scream. Put down that shuttlecock! Stay away from the terrarium! They’re antisemites! They want you dead! Without realising what he was doing, he’d managed to turn everything around him into an existential threat to the Jewish people – and the Jewish people didn’t see the threat; they kept on eating and drinking and intermarrying and assimilating as if nothing were wrong. Could it be that Jews were antisemitic? Abe retreated into one tiny room of his house, staring at the walls, and even then he didn’t feel secure: as Belshazzar came to understand, any wall can start prophesying your doom. At any moment the spraypainted swastikas might start to leach through. Abe stared, sleepless, waiting.

In the end Abe must have slept, because he then had a beautiful dream. With so many Jews in the world it would be impossible for him to protect them all from the peril; the solution, of course, was for there to no longer be any Jews. Abe dreamed that all the Jews of the world came together and became as one. First a brave few Jews dared to meld, forming a creature with four legs, then six, then eight, then eighty; a seething, bubbling ball of flesh that rippled with eyeballs and noses and teeth and tongues. Others dove in: they shed the cloak of their Jewishness, their ethics, their minoritarianism; naked and born anew they flung themselves into its roiling mass and were dissolved. Some were unwilling; they didn’t seem to understand that as Jews it was their duty – their nature – to abandon everything they thought it meant to be Jewish and join the flesh-ball. With its millions of mouths it sucked them in anyway: it was of them; they were of it. Then, from innumerable anuses, the creature disgorged guided missiles and wispy streaks of white phosphorus; from countless cunts it birthed reels of razor wire and chunks of concrete; its endless rows of waving cocks dribbled forth a pale fluid to cover the corpses from the eyes of the world. And Abraham Foxman woke happy, because finally he’d seen something that wasn’t antisemitism.