I spent one summer in the South of France being paranoid about dogs -- they seemed to be everywhere. I hated them.

Thursday, November 29, 2001
(Key West, Florida, USA)

ANDREW M. sends me the latest news from London. It seems that Blair the Blessed has now been talked into agreeing to adopt new pan-European legislation which will introduce a raft of new laws into the English way of life. At the top of Blair's agenda -- would that my own was so barren! -- is the creation of new anti-hate legislation which will make it possible for any European nation to issue an arrest warrant for the citizen of any other European country, who is deemed to be a hater.

Paying a sinister but belated tribute to the moneyed but unelected gentlemen who bankrolled his party into power, Blair is also promising to include the offence of "Holocaust denial" (what I call Holocaust debunking: Taking the bunkum out of the history of that tragedy).

European Union considers plans to outlaw racism
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Brussels

RACISM and xenophobia would become serious crimes in Britain for the first time, carrying a prison sentence of two years or more, under new proposals put forward by Brussels yesterday.

Holocaust denial or "trivialisation" of Nazi atrocities would be banned, along with and participation in any group that promotes hate. . . [click for whole article]

Well, let me be the first to volunteer and hold out my wrists for the manacles: I qualify as a hater, and have the scars to prove it. I can be classed as a serial-hater, particularly at this time of year, the season of good exploitation of Christmas for profit.

I spent one summer in the South of France being paranoid about dogs -- they seemed to be everywhere. I hated them.

And now there are certain words and phrases that dog us all, just the same. I have built up an allergy to them, and think I'm going to break out in hives whenever I hear them: whenever I see President George W Bush, and Blair, and their pompous friends taking those phrasebooks out for walks, there they are, those phrases, sniffing around lampposts and lifting their legs all over the unsuspecting passers-by. There's

the "peace process" (as in Ireland);

the "war on terror";

"weapons of mass destruction";

"network" (as in Al-Qaeda, or for that matter television);

"daisy-cutter," as in vacuum-blast bomb

 

-- and what a foul abuse that is of "daisy," one of the most innocent and evocative words in the English language; and so on. The list seems endless.

I hate the killers of the innocent, all of them. I remember back in 1960 when I worked for U.S. Strategic Air Command at a big airbase in Spain for six months, occasionally running into the B-52 bomber pilots in the canteen, and I watched bemused as they read their comic books, their fingers running along the lines, their mouths silently speaking the more difficult words. Real presidential material. I guess I knew then what it took to be a mass-killer from the safe height of 35,000 feet: the brainpower of your average Wheel of Fortune participant.

Unable to read properly, they spent their days sitting astride a multi-megaton thermonuclear warhead just a bunch of electronic digits away from being hurled at some unwitting enemy city.

That is one reason why I found it hard to sympathise much with those crewmen of the Kursk: all the sobbing images of their wives and sweethearts could not dispel the hard truth that the missing men were taking a salary for being ready to launch a nuclear holocaust at U.S. and British targets if their masters so choose, when suddenly a rather smaller bang put an end to their own pathetic lives instead.

Schaub, Heydrich, Hewel
Foto: Irving collection

I once wrote in HITLER'S WAR, that at the time of Stalingrad human life had suddenly become cheap. To understand Hitler, said Walther Hewel, one of his closest associates (far right, with Heydrich and Schaub), you had to realise that he regarded all human life as ants, and could kill with the same lack of compunction. I think that the new Washington regime is entering the same phase: to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, all "Arab" life is worthless. It's like the old Titanic joke: Iceberg, Goldberg: what's the difference! Arab, scarab: what's the difference.

The age-old laws of war need no longer bind upon us, thinks the current force majeure in Washington, if the opponents are "Arabs". Prisoners can be herded into a killing compound and liquidated by one means or another. Light blue touch paper and stand well back (a message that seems not to have sunk in with at least one C.I.A. ground operative).

Yes, governments habitually lie, and that is another hate of mine.

Let's call it Irving's Law: The first resort of any government is to the untruth. Hey, it is one of the prerogatives of power.

We are being lied to now on an historic scale, and it will take future historians to untangle the web of deceit that these governments are weaving (if new laws have not by then been passed against that too).

And here's another hate. I hate the look in the eye of U.S.Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as he gloats over the use of the word killing; he lingers over it, rolls it around his mouth like a truffle, finds different ways of digging his tongue into it, then shifts his gaze from side to side as he leers out of his eyeglasses with all the honest aura of a pawnbroker, and says it again but using a different phrase -- "taking out," perhaps.

All the time I am compelled to compare him and his educated and ill-assorted cohorts with the gentlemen who lolled and languished in the dock at Nuremberg in 1945. Now that is true hatred; but anybody who watches Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfovitz, Rice, and their ilk on television must inevitably agree that absolute power has corrupted absolutely, and with a swiftness that this time is truly astonishing.

It has corrupted the very way that our human language is spoken and understood. The Pentagon and President Bush announce with a certain smugness that they are "going after" any nation that they deem to possess "weapons of mass destruction", and we can feel those hives coming on again.

Never mind that the U.S. Congress has provided no kind of authorisation for any such twenty-second century crusade. The fact is that at present the only nations possessing such weapons are primarily the United States (and Blair's Britain) themselves, and they have not hitherto shown themselves to be too prudish to use them.

So there we have it. I am a hater of the most intractable kind.

I confess.

I hate the sunless London winter, with its dirty rain, crowded sidewalks, ill-tempered pedestrians, and loud and endless jangle-jingle of phony good cheer from the media.

I hate it when I see a pick-up truck (decked out with the now obligatory Stars & Stripes and some stock "patriotic" message bought at the local K-Mart) hurtling round a street-corner at me and my bike, the driver fixing her make-up with one hand, crooking her other inside the rim of the spinning steering wheel, and simultaneously conducting a cellphone conversation with some distant friend, who is no doubt terrorising some innocent bicyclist in her own part of the world in the same way.

Weapons of mass distraction, cellphones. They and their masts and infrastructure would make a great target for all those comic-book reading airmen, smart bombs, and under-employed special forces -- all those hideous masts that have sprung up across this country and my own, erected with all the absolute power that the obscenely rich global telephone industry now commands.

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