26/02/03

Perfidious Albion 

Taki

American Conservative

If you think comedy is dead, take a trip to that filthy, depressing, and lawless place I wrote about last column. Yes, I’m talking once again about Britain, where the famed Scotland Yard has just launched an investigation that could land me in jail for two years.

My crime? In a Spectator column last month I wrote that violent criminals in London and other big cities in the north of England were mostly black thugs that belonged to gangs. Here is the Independent newspaper reporting on the crime of the century and with a very straight face: “The prospect of a two-year stretch in jail looms for the Greek playboy and columnist. Taki and the Spectator are being investigated by Scotland Yard over an article he wrote on January 11. The investigation was triggered by a complaint from Peter Herbert, a lawyer and member of the Metropolitan Police Authority. The Yard’s Diversity Directorate will assess whether the piece incites racial hatred and thereby breaks the Public Order Act, for which the maximum sentence is two years.” The Independent, of course, is anything but independent. It is a slave to politically correct thought. Many British journalists are not only on the take, they will murder a reputation quicker than you can say Rupert Murdoch.

Journalists, I would have thought, are supposed to safeguard free speech. After all, that’s how we make our living. Not the Brits. Consumed by class envy and full of malice, they piled on as soon as they got the news. The tone of the article made me out to be almost a worse person than the killers of those two innocent girls. That’s par for the course.

The reason I wrote the offending column was very simple. On New Year’s Eve, two young black girls were killed when they were caught in the crossfire of two rival gangs . The brother of one of the girls was a gang member, ergo the gunfire. Now although the newspapers were full of columns by outraged pundits, the fact that the perpetrators were members of a totally black gang was somehow overlooked. Worse, the area where the killings took place was a no-go area for white people, another fact overlooked by reporters and pundits. Here are some more unpleasant truths: violent crime has skyrocketed in Britain, mostly committed by young, West Indian, unemployed youths. Politically correct newspapers have been following government guidelines for years in not mentioning the color of people committing these crimes.

If memory serves, in my article I mentioned that another columnist, one Melanie Phillips writing in the Daily Mail, had insisted that these gangs of “disaffected young people” suffered from lack of self-esteem and came from underprivileged backgrounds. (Phillips is no liberal, but has fallen into the PC trap). Well, I wrote, I remember millions of people who lost everything during the war, had very low self-esteem and absolutely no background, yet managed to live useful and law-abiding lives. This, of course, is anathema to the new breed of coercive European bureaucrooks striving to alter our culture and control our behavior and our thoughts. It is this persistent form of untruthfulness that makes political correctness so poisonous. It’s about pretending that things are different from what they are. It means adjusting what you say to what you think ought to be true, not what you actually know to be true.

My friend and colleague George Szamuely was outraged when he read the Independent’s description of yours truly, but he believes it’s government-inspired. I am against the coming war, against Tony Blair, and against big government. Why not shut the Greek pest up? And what better way of doing it than by having Scotland Yard’s Diversity Directorate decide that I incited racial hatred and thereby broke the Public Order Act. (I was under the mistaken impression that the Public Order Act punished people who went around yelling fire in crowded movie houses). Perfidious Albion indeed.

Actually, I am not a conspiracy theorist, and I think it is an effort by the PC police not only to throttle free speech, but to warn other writers to toe the line. What really made me laugh was the sheer envy of the hack who wrote the story. He brought in the politically incorrect things I have written in my lifetime—and there are hundreds—but like most English hacks, he got many facts wrong because he was obviously much too lazy to read his own copy.

The worst charge against me was, “When building a new house he declared that he would name it Palazzo Pinochet, after the Chilean dictator. General Franco is another of his heroes ...” (That he got right). Another allegation was that my wife is a Serene Highness and that my fortune is inherited. (Meant to incite class warfare, but I’m rather proud of being married to a princess and having got it the old fashioned way).

I must admit that I’ve never been very popular with the press. This was payback. William Kristol, a man I’ve never met because we don’t exactly run in the same circles, has described me as “loathsome.” I agree with him. If I sold myself to the highest bidder as he does, I would hate someone like me who cannot be bought. Just before Christmas, one Lloyd Grove, a gossip columnist for the Washington Post, wrote an item that was totally false, and I have sixty people who were present as my witnesses. (Many of them respected journalists and writers, unlike Grove.) Why attack the poor little rich Greek boy? Why not. Envy and the inability to do anything to my person drives these cheap hacks nuts.

In the midst of all this the reason I wrote the column has been lost. I was driven by an overwhelming sense of moral indignation against the Blair government, which closes its eyes to the problem of black crime. (Mostly black on black).

Now the Blair government and Scotland Yard might be able to do something. But before the neocons begin to celebrate, I advise them to hold the champagne. I do not push around easily and have the financial means to defend myself up to the highest court of law. I am an American citizen, and English law can shove it—especially the Yard’s Diversity Directorate.

Let this be a lesson to all of us. As Sidney Hook wrote, “The cardinal sin, when we are looking for truth of fact or wisdom of policy, is refusal to discuss.” The bureaucrooks who now run Europe will not discuss immigration or race because they know they will be shown to have been totally dishonest. It took the murder of Pim Fortuyn to convince the Dutch that Muslim immigrants brought intolerance with them and that since Europe and the United States are predominantly white societies rooted in Christianity, our responsibility to immigrants is to bring them into our culture— not the other way round. What those fat European politicos want—and the Brits are at the head—is to turn the continent into a Total State, a regime that will force people to be ashamed and frightened even to acknowledge the slightest difference between cultures. The power of political correctness has so corrupted the media that even the few conservative papers left are full of odious drivel about hate crimes, sex education for three-year-olds, and diversity.

Scotland Yard, instead of chasing crooks, has fired a shot across my bow. It is a laughable shot, almost as funny as the charge of anti-Semitism against Pat Buchanan. When the politically correct cannot win an argument, they charge racism, anti-Semitism, meat eating, cigarette smoking. Scotland Yard investigating whether or not I incited racial hatred is as absurd as Bill Clinton pretending to tell the truth. Stay tuned, as they say.