Should there be a law against it?

In Britain it is now a criminal offence to make any statement which might incite racial hatred. So, if you go around saying that all Irishmen are stupid or all Welshmen are thieves, then you may well find yourself helping the police with their enquiries and facing a sharp fine or even a term of imprisonment.

Some commentators consider this law to be draconian but it does take a clear political stance and one thing I have learnt over my lifetime is that nearly all racism is neither random nor ‘naturally’ grassroots-derived but rather politically or economically motivated, indeed directed.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, black Africans were slaves or treated as slaves. They were shackled, they died in transit under inhuman conditions, they were worked to death, they were unpaid. How do you justify treating a fellow human being this way? How can it be possible even legally to rape and execute black Africans at whim?

There was a simple answer. Black Africans were not human, they were sub-human. Indeed, they hailed from another, lesser, branch of the human family altogether. And there was no shortage of commentators and pseudo-scientists who popped up to argue that black Africans were so bestial that they were really no different from a cow or a horse, that they were incapable of moral understanding (probably the most obscene argument in history), that they were beyond civilisation and, yes, if you measured their brains they were smaller and lighter than a white man’s.

A not dissimilar process was played out with women. How do you justify treating half the human population as goods and chattels of the other half, deprived of any right to property, deprived of the vote, and incapable of any job other than domestic servitude and child raising. Easy – women may have a passing resemblance to men, but they are incapable of the higher thoughts and superior structured intelligence that men can aspire to because, let’s hear it from the scientists, their brains are smaller and weigh less and they lack the capacity to control their emotions which renders them even more irrational.

In Britain it was the Scots and the Irish. Yes, there were some educated, civilised Scots living in Edinburgh and parts of the Lowlands but the Highland Scots, as every right-thinking Englishman knew then, crouched in their hovels amid smoking peat, ate roots and were therefore virtually indistinguishable from pigs – all very convenient when you have some quasi-genocidal Highland clearances to arrange. And the Irish left to die by the English in their millions during the Great Potato Famine? Well, ditto as per the Highland Scots except feckless, lazy, stupid and mean-spirited to boot and only fit to build roads in a civilised country.

The Germans, come the start of World War One, were, it was widely argued, lusty singers of the hymn of hate, and loved nothing better than to toss babies into the air and skewer them as they came down, and sometimes eat them.

The Jews, of course, have a special history of victimhood but on a rather curious pretext. Nobody argued that the Jews were stupid or feckless – mean certainly, exploitative, sub-human, but not stupid or feckless. They were sub-human because they executed Christ and they are fiendishly clever and cultured, so fiendishly clever and cultured in fact that they held a stranglehold over the world financial system during the Great Depression years of the 1930s and enjoyed making ordinary decent folks suffer to their own profit. Off to the gas chambers with them, then, alongside those other sub-humans, the homosexuals and the gipsies.

Twice in my lifetime I have seen the veil covering the machine manufacturing this obnoxious guff slip. The first was at the start of the 1980s. In 1980, Brits knew very little about Argentinians except that they were Latino-exotic and produced some very gifted footballers, like Brazil. Then General Galtieri’s army over-ran the Falklands and within hours the racist propaganda machine was fired into life. The Argentinians were not exotic, they were not wizard footballers, they were slimy, greasy, cruel, ugly Dagos living under a vicious dictatorship as they well deserved to do. As the satirical magazine, Private Eye quipped “Kill an Argie, win a Mini Metro!”

The second time was during the WMD Weapons of Mass Destruction farrago. Anybody with half a brain could see that all the evidence was being fraudulently and maliciously concocted by the American and British governments to justify an invasion of Iraq, a lawless country under a brutal dictator populated by a people beyond the reach of civilisation, which happened to be sitting on a lot of oil. The whole of the Middle East happens to be sitting on a lot of oil, in fact, and who is sitting there – ah, the Muslims! What do we know about the Muslims? Well they too are sub-human religious fanatics who like nothing better than to blow up and otherwise kill or mutilate all God-fearing Christian people. It is in their religion; it is in their genes.

And as with all other campaigns of vicious racist bollocks, there are plenty of venal and corrupt political commentators and scientists willing to perjure their souls and to feather their own nests manufacturing race-hate filled gibberish.

But you say, the Muslims, 911! Maybe.

The question you may have to ask yourself is why all this racist propaganda is really being whipped up against the Muslims by members of the right-wing American establishment in particular? Obviously there is the oil and there may well be a politico-economic requirement to invade Iran soon on the pretext that one lonely Iranian soldier with a nuclear bomb in his hand is going to blow up the whole of America because he is a raving fanatical lunatic born of a crazed, almost sub-human people. However, more likely it has to do with Russia and especially China.

China is a real threat to the US. It outnumbers the US ten-to-one in terms of population, it has a thriving economy and it has nuclear capability. Its existence in the world might well justify something of an arms race. However, there is a lot of money to be made in China and the great and good gentlemen of the right don’t want to deprive themselves of the pleasure of keeping their snouts firmly planted in the trough. So sub-human, cruel, slitty-eyed, yellow people bent on the destruction of the US simply don’t exist officially for the time-being. It would be bad for business.

So what do you do? What do you always do under those circumstances?

You find a whipping boy, silly.

Hello little Muslim, you’ll do. You want to destroy the world now don’t you? You want to bring America to its knees? We had better arm up, hadn’t we? We had better put the country on maximum alert? We had better justify massive military spending. And, should we manage to blind-side world opinion, then we can probably invade your countries and grab your oil to pay for it.

Far fetched?

Well, put it this way. From my memory, the Columbine tragedy was committed by white Caucasians. Indeed, several such outrages have been committed by white Caucasians. Many of the world’s greatest serial killers have been white Caucasians, in fact nearly all of them. The two biggest homicidal maniacs in recent history – Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were white Caucasians. The rape of the entire world through the forces of colonialism was committed by white Caucasians. Charles Manson was a white Caucasian. Reverend Jones of Jonestown was a white Caucasian. The Klu Klux Klan are definitely white Caucasians. Even the Unibomber was a white Caucasian. Dammit, on all the anti-Muslim arguments used so far, shouldn’t these frantic American political commentators be demanding that white Caucasians are the great threat to America and that every white Caucasian should be sent packing back to where he or she came from, i.e. Europe, before they destroy the fabric of the US altogether.

But what would be the political point of that?