Some wise words from the past

Please listen to me, or you'll get something much worse

 

I thought the rise of Mr Trump was a good moment to revisit this posting from February 24th 2009. I thank the contributor to Twitter who reminded me of it.

 

The whole thing( which includes a lengthy interview with Nick Griffin), the BNP leader, can be found here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/02/please-listen-to-me-or-youll-get-something-much-worse.html

 

I do actually talk to members of the liberal elite, when I get the chance. Usually this is in broadcasting studios, as we wait to take part in discussion programmes, or university debates. Sometimes it is at 'literary festivals', those strange artificial gatherings to which I am occasionally invited.

These encounters (and of course I include Cameroon Tories in the liberal elite category) are difficult, and especially awkward for them, because I can sense their discomfort at the way my knuckles brush the ground. How, you can almost see them asking themselves, have I ended up in the same room as someone like this? I truly empathise.

Normally they would be insulated from people like me. I don't live near them, or take my holidays where they take theirs, or even eat or drink where they do. My tastes in almost everything from music to sandwiches are different from theirs. So I value these chances to remind them of the parallel world which exists, separate from theirs but there all the same.

And one of the points I try to make to them is this.

"You may regard me, and everything I say, as contemptible. But you should at least attempt to listen, if only because I am nothing like as bad as what you will get if you don't. I believe in pluralism, liberty of speech, freedom of the press, tolerance, the rule of law, an adversarial parliament, an independent civil service. I believe it is possible to persuade and to be persuaded, to make and to admit mistakes. I am opposed to violence in politics. I am even more opposed to racial bigotry."

This, by the way, sums up quite clearly why I shall always loathe the BNP, why I am not a secret supporter of it suppressing my views to save my job (as some of its members madly believe) and why I would never have anything to do with it, will always oppose it and would probably have to fly the country if it ever came to power. I differ fundamentally from it and draw my ideas from another tradition. I am, in a way, flattered by the way such people have adopted issues which I have been warning about for many years. They realise that these are important and that many people are concerned about them. But I think they have adopted them for propaganda purposes, not because they really care about them or have serious remedies for them.

To the liberal elite, I would add: "If you scorn my warnings about the effects of mass immigration, unchecked crime and disorder, penal taxation to finance needless empires of client workers, undisciplined education, state-sponsored immorality and the rest, then you will in the end deliver a large part of the electorate, so frustrated that they won't care any more about words like 'Nazi' and 'Fascist', into the hands of unscrupulous demagogues, who will employ these causes to seek power and may eventually destroy you - and me - completely."

I used to say: "It is all very well, during this period of artificial prosperity, to rely on people not caring enough. But if that prosperity ever ends, it will be much, much more dangerous".

Now I think I can leave off the last bit. That is why I was so alarmed by the outbreak of 'British Jobs for British Workers' protests. For a growing number of people, prosperity is a thing of the past. I am by no means sure it will ever come back. I fear that what is happening to us now is a permanent descent into the league of poorer, less stable countries.

I have also (though some of my critics on this site never seem to notice it) more than once opposed attempts to suppress and persecute the BNP, because freedom of speech only exists when you give it to people you despise. I also think of Hitler's sneering riposte to the Social Democrat MP Otto Wels, who bravely risked violence and arrest when he went to the last more-or-less free session of the Reichstag to oppose the Nazi takeover. Wels (I have written about this before) movingly opposed the suppression of opposition parties.

The trouble was that Wels's own party had in the past voted for legal restrictions on the Nazis (these restrictions had, as such things tend to do in free societies, failed). Hitler jeered at Wels's delayed conversion to tolerance in words which are hard to translate but could be summed up as: "Well done, pity you didn't think of that earlier when you were trying to ban us.��� I do not want to hear such words spoken in our Parliament by the triumphant leader of a national socialist party.

It is an old ploy, I suppose, the threat of something worse in the background to make yourself look more acceptable. But I have always meant every word. I am genuinely alarmed that this country might eventually incubate some sort of national socialist populist force, trashing liberty in the name of order and patriotism, thanks to the appalling combination of ill-educated ignorance and increasingly justified discontent created by the policies of the liberal elite.