Oxford Union Debate: An Internal Q & A

Question: So, Dave, what do you think about the Oxford Union inviting Nick Griffin and David Irving to its debate about free speech?

Answer: Well, Dave, young Tryl and his chums were within their rights to do it. But I wouldn't have.

Question: Why not?

Answer: Two reasons: one, because they're a pair of turds who, given half a chance, would cheerfully deprive the likes of me of my right to free speech; two, because inviting them was bound to result in a media furore and a street ruck, both of which have enabled them to pose as martyrs while the actual debate has barely had a mention.

Question: But Dave! You're avoiding the key issue! Never mind how things turned out. Surely your priority should be to defend the right of people you despise to express their opinions, however revolting you find them!

Answer: If they're not inciting violence - which is, of course, a bit of a grey area - then I do defend that right. But, at the same, I and others have the right to express our disagreement with their views and the decisions of others to provide them with a platform that invests them with undeserved respectability. Free speech is a two-way street - something callow libertarians forget in their eagerness to stick up for the rights of scumbags while heaping scorn on those who exercise their right to remind people that scumbags are what they are.

Question: Hang on, though. Isn't it true that people are rarely given the chance to hear the views of such as Griffin and Irving? Shouldn't they be given that chance and left to make up their own minds?

Answer: Oh, do me a favour! The reason why lowlife like those two don't get much mainstream airing is not that they've been censored in some mysterious way but that their arguments have long since been exposed as pernicious crap. No one prevents them organising politically, writing books, pamphlets and blogs and generally using all the freedoms a democracy puts at their disposal to propagate their views. And guess what? Almost no one is convinced. Tough.

Question: OK, thanks. By the way, Dave, do you know what they say about people who talk to themselves?

Answer: Yes, Dave. And in my case it's probably true. But, hey, it's still a free country!

Comments

[Kris]

it sure doesn't take much to "incite violence" these days. Draw a cartoon, and you're asking for it.

I don't understand all the hand-wringing. I get offended by what people say and do every damn day. Some times, I'd like to give people a slap for being so insulting, dumb and provoking, but I have a brain that stops me: I am not an automaton. For some unknown reason, others are. I think it's racist for you to assume others cannot also control their emotions in the face of insult and offence.

You "liberals" can try and bend over backwards to make sure "nobody offends" but I'm telling you, it's better to loosen the pressure valve with free speech rather than people's good will and humour being stretched to breaking point in a white riot while we all pander to islamists.

[DaveHill]

Just strikes me that the likes of Griffin, Irving and various right-wing libertarians who spend too much time admiring themselves online cry foul when they lose an argument - as they keep on doing. As for "liberals" and "pandering to Islamists", who do you have in mind exactly? If, by any chance, you're thinking of me, then I'm afraid it's a case of mistaken identity on your part. And "racist"...huh?

[Guessedworker]

For me, free speech is too much understood as an abstract principle, without recourse to how it actually works in practise.

If the "free speech" belongs to people like Griffin who understand and advocate the natural rights and interests of Europe's native peoples, which now include UN-backed rights, the liberal establishment media take every opportunity to defame the speaker, distort his position and generally prepare public opinion to reject him in advance.

So where is this famous free speech?

Really, if one believes that the principle is politically sacred, then the price of that belief is allowing all opinions to be made free of a priori delegitimisation. Anything else is cheating.

[DaveHill]

Hello Guessedworker. I've been told you are a BNP researcher. Is that true?

[Guessedworker]

Dave, the phrase was "theoretician", no less, and it appeared on a CiF thread. Nice that someone thinks I can occasionally manage to theorise! But no is the answer. And Nick Griffin wouldn't have me, anyway, because I don't buy his obsessive, realpolitik concentration on Moslems.

Dave, I'd be interested to know your opinion on media delegimisation of anti-liberal opinion. You know as well as I do that the poor, benighted English have extremely robust opinions on race-replacement, and so they should. They are on the wrong end of a long, slow zero-sum game, and they know it.

So I see the moral delegitimisation of Griffin & Co as a perfectly naked and deeply racist attempt by the Establishment to deprive the majority of a respectable voice.

[Political Umpire]

Kris I think you're a bit over the top, even though I don't entirely agree with Dave's analysis, never mind the characteristicly hysterical front page of the Independent (a name about as appropriate for the paper as 'People's Democractic ...' is for certain countries ...). Especially with the racist epithet.

As I see it:

1. Would I invite Griffin/Irving to any public forum of which I was in charge? A. No. Irving's life story is a great shame as he did have obvious ability. So did Mao, Hitler, Mugabe, Stalin etc, so I don't think it's controversial to say that. Both John Keegan and Max Hastings have praised his original research. But he has long gone off the rails and has published an endless series of crap in which he has deployed his substantial knowledge in a very selective and tendentious fashion (see the judgment in his case against Lipstadt and Penguin). Griffin, however, is just Alf Garnett in a suit, with no redeeming features. So I doubt either could make a valid contribution to any debate I might convene. And I don't think the OU should have invited them, for those reasons. Not because there might be trouble stirred up; if I thought they had valid arguments that would not deter me.

2. Having invited them, should the OU have withdrawn the invitation? It's up to the OU. But the protestors who set out to disrupt the proceedings were missing the point. The number of students who might have been persuaded by either DI or NG was, I would trust, nil. Unless the OU is full of bigoted dunces. In which case, its reputation will swiftly correspond. The fear of some here is that the reputations of NG and DI will be enhanced by speaking at a reputable forum like the OU; I suspect the opposite - that their reputations will remain as low as ever, but the OU's will go down and eminent members thereof will resign. That's the OU's own: (i) choice, (ii) fault and (iii) problem.

3. Does this mean that DI and NG's freedom of expression is being suppressed? No, for the reasons Dave gives, namely "No one prevents them organising politically, writing books, pamphlets and blogs and generally using all the freedoms a democracy puts at their disposal to propagate their views."

4. What is the parallel with the Danish cartoon controversy? Not much. There, a mob was threatening to murder those who drew or reproduced the cartoons. Their objection was that the cartoons offended their religious tenets. In a free society that doesn't wash: respect for the right to hold beliefs does not entail respect for those beliefs themselves. Thus the state should have used the criminal law to protect them from attacks. That would not be endorsing the cartoonists' work (any more than protecting Salman Rushdie inferred that his books were any good), simply protecting their right not to get killed because they had drawn something on their own forum and their own expense which was offensive to others on religious grounds. Just as someone else would receive protection against Sun readers if they wrote that Britain should become a Sharia law state.

By contrast, here we have idiots (DI and NG) wanting to peddle their poison. A private organisation such as the OU should know better than to invite them. If it wanted to, however, more fool it, but you pays your money and takes your choice. The mob attempting to stop them had no right to do so by criminal actions. Standing outside the institution and protesting is fine - their right - but criminal acts of trespass and damage (if any occurred; I don't know that they did) would not.

[Guessedworker]

Political Umpire writes: "if I thought they had valid arguments that would not deter me."

and "bigoted dunces"

"idiots (DI and NG) wanting to peddle their poison."

So there we go again. The usual moral inflation from a thoughtless near-intellectual and captive liberal.

Tell me, oh "ornament to the blogosphere", do the English enjoy any natural rights, and possess any ethnic interests?

If yes, do those interests exceed or fall short in importance of, say, prosperity or liberty? Or do they exceed them by, perhaps, an order of magnitude?

Are you really even politically aware? It does not seem so.

But let's see. Let's try putting the question the other way round.

What is it, precisely, in Nick Griffin's known arguments that is:-

a) Invalid.

b) bigoted.

c) idiotic.

It is only fait to war you, oh Dickie Bird of bloggers, that I will bodyline your replies if they are as invalid, bigoted and idiotic as your offering thusfar.

[Political Umpire]

It is indeed only fait to war me thus.

"do the English enjoy any natural rights, and possess any ethnic interests?"

I would hope that all people within this country have certain rights. What on earth that has to do with what I wrote above is anyone's guess.

"If yes, do those interests exceed or fall short in importance of, say, prosperity or liberty? Or do they exceed them by, perhaps, an order of magnitude?"

????? Would you like to rewrite this question so it makes sense.

As to Griffin:

In 1985, Griffin praised the black separatist Louis Farrakhan, saying, "white nationalists everywhere wish [Farrakhan] well, for we share a common struggle for the same ends: racial separation and racial freedom".

If that doesn't qualify as bigoted then I don't know what does. These days, of course, he's sought to resile from such sentiments somewhat, and obviously you now think he's unfairly treated. Your right, though I notice you mention "his obsessive, realpolitik concentration on Moslems". Doesn't sound like a bigot at all, does he? Entirely valid, politically aware etc etc.

Incidentally are the Sun, Mail, Telegraph and Spectator engaged in "delegimisation of anti-liberal opinion"?

[Guessedworker]

PU,

Well, it's perfectly obvious from your website that you are vainly individualistic. So it will be more difficult for you to understand the concept of a people to whom you belong, with whom you enjoy certain rights and interests, and to whom you owe certain responsibilities.

I expect you still think politically in left v right terms, and you are sublimely ignorant of the real exercise of power in this world ... of its transnationalism and managerialist nature, its confluency with certain narrow interest groups, and with the ethno-masochistic liberal-left.

There is, you see, another political sphere beyond the little left/right fishbowl. You might recall some words of Irving Krystol that pertained to this:-

"There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people," he says in an interview. "There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy."

Krystol, of course, was explaining the elitism in which he participates.

So where in this heirarchy of truth do you contemplate the political world?

Well, let me tell you that Griffin stands with Krystol. He knows what Krystol knows, and so do I. Any competently intelligent person involved in defending the rights and interests of a European people in the postmodern age will have to move outside of the little universe you inhabit, and come to terms with much greater forces operating on a much wider field.

As yet, you are ignorant. I invite you to learn.

As for Griffin in 1985, what were you proclaiming back then? Not much, I doubt. I was a racially-discontented Thatcherite seeking a grasp of matters I instinctively knew were greater those admitted to public debate. One is entitled to mature. In my case, I became what I am today: a speaker of political truths. Griffin has become more electorally attuned (that's his obsession, btw). You are yet to advance.

[Political Umpire]

Vain, yes, guilty as charged. I think all bloggers are to an extent. Individualistic? In the sense I believe in certain individual rights. Anyone who believes in free speech necessarily does too.

"As for Griffin in 1985, what were you proclaiming back then? Not much, I doubt."

Not much you doubt? You mean you DON'T doubt. Well I am younger than Griffin, but at no stage in my adult life have I banged on about racial segregation. Saying he became more electorally attuned suggests he hasn't abandoned that belief, only that he's learned it isn't politically savvy to repeat it. Which makes him a bigot alright.

The rest of your post rambles on about truth etc without bothering to say what any of these truthful principles/statements/ideas/facts might be. So I won't bother replying. Going back to your earlier analogy, I don't think Douglas Jardine would have selected you as an opening bowler somehow.

[Guessedworker]

PU,

I am sorry you didn't notice the ball. It must have gone over your head. It might help you to spend a little time in the nets here:-

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/the_problem_of_the_power_elite/

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/this_conservative_debate/

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/individualism_abstract_and_material/the

http://majorityrights.com/index.php/weblog/comments/up_close_and_proximate/

If you can imbibe 10% of the content of these essays you will cease making silly and self-harming remarks like, "... at no stage in my adult life have I banged on about racial segregation." I am fully aware that you don't bang on about racial segregation. That my point. Why don't you bang on about segregation? Because

1. You haven't been able to resist the delegitimisation of your own ethnic interests,

2. You haven't worked out what's coming, and why, and

3. You probably don't have much fighting spirit. All you can manage when you hear the word "Griffin" is the usual Pavlovian responses.

Time to snap out of it.

[budgie]

You write a lot but don't actually say much, Guessedworker. Getting on a bit maybe, the windbag years.