The Light's on at Signpost (14 page)

But that, thank God, is as far as the British literary world goes in the direction of p.c.—an acknowledgement that it exists, no more. In America, it seems, the cancer has gone much deeper, as I discovered when I wrote a book called
Black Ajax
in 1997. It was based on the life of Tom Molineaux, a former slave in the US, who came to England in 1810 to try to wrest the heavyweight championship from Tom Cribb, was cheated out of the prize, and died after a rapid decline into drink and debauchery. A sad tale, but one which I thought, in my innocence, that the American public would respond to with enthusiasm, since its central figure was a simple black man exploited, patronised, cheated, and ruined by villainous whites. In view of the racial climate in America, it seemed a natural.

But it wasn’t. It was readily accepted by British reviewers, who took no exception to the subject matter, and sold reasonably well, but in America it couldn’t even find a publisher at first; one described it as offensive, and seemed to think I was trying to make racist jokes, and only after much work by my agent was it taken on by a small publisher, who did well enough with it. That doyen of boxing writers, Budd Schulberg, wrote not unkindly of it in the
New Yorker
, and I received a favourable post from American readers. So how to explain the blank refusal of leading US publishers to have anything to do with it?

The answer, of course, was p.c. I had written the book in the first person, or rather persons, using witnesses such as Cribb himself,
William Hazlitt, various English pugilists, and other voices, real and fictitious. They told Molineaux’s story, and since they were pre-Regency Englishmen for the most part, their language and attitudes, being of their time, were politically incorrect, to say the least. They used words like “nigger”, and treated Molineaux with contempt, mostly, and while this was an absolutely true and fair reflection of the time and place and state of mind, American publishers could not see beyond the awful words and racist behaviour; no use to tell them that this was how it was, and that any historical novel which pretended otherwise would be false and useless.

But even if they understood that, and that a writer either presents historic truth or fails in his duty, they were still in the grip of p.c., and victims of what I believe is nowadays called “denial”. They knew the book was true, but they didn’t want to believe it, because of this ridiculous obsessive guilt that they seem to have about their country’s past, with its slavery and cruelty and exploitation and oppression of black people; they would rather forget that, or pretend it was different, and so they chose the easy road, and just ignored it.

I am not complaining. I wouldn’t want my book published by that kind of publisher, and it did perfectly well without them. What alarmed and depressed me was to discover what a grip p.c. had taken in the US; that truth was no defence if that truth was deemed offensive to modern fashionable taste and reminded it of a history it would rather forget. It’s profoundly worrying when people refuse to look history in the face because they’re frightened of what they’ll see there, and feel uncomfortable. It is akin to the kind of prejudice that bans
Huckleberry Finn
and
Oliver Twist
from library shelves because the politically correct are offended by what they call racial stereotypes, true though they may be.

I have run across the same sort of thing in Hollywood, where the Roman Catholic Church, and fear of picketing by ethnic minorities, both wield a powerful influence. I fell slightly foul of the
churchmen when, in a TV movie about Casanova for Richard Chamberlain, I depicted the debauchery and corruption of certain clerics—which was historically true, and I had chapter and verse, but that didn’t matter. It had to go, so the bishops and others in my
Casanova
behaved themselves, more or less, but the film, while it did well on US television in its bowdlerised form, has never to my knowledge been shown in Britain.

The Lone Ranger
, on the other hand, never even reached production, and while the weird vagaries of the movie industry, contractual foul-ups, etc., were to blame for that, political correctness stormed onto the scene, red in tooth and claw, at an early stage in the writing. I had given John Landis a script in which I had used a piece of Western history which had never been shown on screen, and which was as spectacular as it was shocking—and true. The whisky traders of the plains used to build little stockades, from which they passed out their ghastly rot-gut liquor through a small hatch to the Indians, who paid by shoving furs back through the hatch. The result was that in short order, frenzied, drunken Indians who had run out of furs were besieging the stockade while the traders sat snug inside, and did not emerge until the Indians had either gone away or passed out, leaving the little fort surrounded by intoxicated aborigines.

Landis was all for it—and then informed me that word had come down from on high that the scene wouldn’t do. It would offend “Native Americans”.
*
Their ancestors might have got pieeyed on moonshine, but they didn’t want to know it, and it must not be shown on the screen. Damn history, in fact; let’s pretend it didn’t happen, because we don’t like the look of it. I still say it would have made a splendid sequence, and I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn’t present the picture they would like. Hang it, my Highland forebears were a fairly primitive, treacherous, bloodthirsty bunch, and as David Balfour said, would have been none the worse of washing. Fine, let them be so depicted, if any film-maker feels like it; better that than insulting, inaccurate and dishonest drivel like
Braveheart
.

But that’s another story, equally politically correct in its way, in that it pandered to false prejudices and myths. P.c. comes in many guises, some of them so effective that the p.c. can be difficult to detect—the silly euphemisms, apparently harmless, but forever dripping to wear away common sense; the naїveté of the phrase “a caring force for the future” on poppy trays, which suggests that the army is some kind of peace corps, when in fact its true function is killing; the continual attempt to soften and sanitise the harsh realities of life in the name of liberalism, in an effort to suppress truths unwelcome to the p.c. mind; the social engineering which plays down Christianity, demanding equal status for alien religions; the selective distortions of history, so beloved by New Labour, denigrating Britain’s past with such propaganda as hopelessly unbalanced accounts of the slave trade, laying all the blame on the white races but carefully censoring the truth that not a slave could have come out of Africa without the active assistance of black slavers, and that the trade was only finally suppressed by the Royal Navy virtually single-handed; the waging of war against examinations as “elitist” exercises which will undermine the confidence of those who fail—what an intelligent way to prepare children for real life in which competition and failure are inevitable, since both are what life, if not liberal lunacy, is about.

P.c. also demands that “stress”, which used to be coped with by less sensitive generations, should now be compensated by huge cash payments, lavished on griping incompetents who can’t do their jobs, and on policemen and firemen “traumatised” by the normal hazards of work which their predecessors took for granted; that
“grieving” should become part of the national culture, as it did on such a nauseating scale when large areas were carpeted in rotting vegetation in trumped-up “mourning” for the Princess of Wales; and that anyone suffering even ordinary hardship should be regarded as a “victim”—and, of course, be paid for it.

Closely related to the grieving craze (for it is no less) is that of forgiveness. P.c. does not permit anyone to harbour resentment or hatred for an injury, however malicious and atrocious, or to seek retribution. This is also part of the Christian ethic (doing good to those that despitefully use you, turning the other cheek, and so on), and I suppose it’s a bit late in the day to point out that it’s an often contradictory philosophy
*
imposed only by centuries of religious browbeating on Northern peoples whose natures are more in tune with the Old Testament and who believe that the best reply to an injury is retaliation in kind, preferably with interest. That is politically
in
correct (with a vengeance, literally). It is also natural and human and logical, and anathema to the new p.c. morality which requires expressions of forgiveness from victims or relatives when some peculiarly vile crime has been committed. It’s as though there were a deliberate attempt to institutionalise forgiveness, to create a climate in which a good old-fashioned hatred of evil is never expressed. Forgiveness has become a wonderful excuse for inertia in the face of wickedness; indeed, it makes tolerance of wickedness a virtue—and that is the road to hell.

It is some years since I heard, with disbelief, an Irish father whose daughter had been killed in the unspeakable atrocity of the Enniskillen Cenotaph bombing, say that he forgave her killers. He is dead now, poor soul, and I have no wish to offend, but I have to say that I don’t think he was fit to be a father. A man who can forgive his child’s murderers may be a Christian, but he is something less than human, and he sets a dreadful example by, in effect, absolving them. I hate to think that my own father would have been so lost to his parental duty as to forgive anyone who had murdered me—but then I know it would never have crossed his mind. Vengeance, legal or otherwise, would have been his one thought, and if you think that un-Christian, just be thankful that it was a creed to which previous generations held. Because if they hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here.

“Grieving” and “forgiving” are both heads of the same Hydra of political correctness, and there are many, many more, although few quite as fatuous, dishonest, and maliciously provocative as the great cult of apology. This is part of the guilt industry so carefully nurtured by the liberal Left, which sees no evil save in the past of the white race (as already noted in the slavery question), and is strident in demanding that it should grovel for “crimes” committed in the past.

Thus we have Mr Blair apologising for the Irish famine (as though he personally was responsible for it, and there was the least cause for Britain to feel guilt about it), while the Pope regrets the Roman Catholic Church’s failure to denounce the Nazis, and a member of the British royal family says sorry for the destruction of Dresden. Then there is the bawling of the “Native Americans” for atonement (and compensation, naturally) by white America, the disgraceful demand from Indian sources that the Queen should apologise for “atrocities” allegedly committed by the Raj, and the even more contemptible cry from Afrikaners (a people whose record of beastliness is matched only by Germany, Belgium, and various banana republics) that she should apologise for the Boer War.

Words fail me, but it is necessary in the face of all this impertinent
and dishonourable whining that one should approach the matter calmly, as I do.

To begin with, it should be obvious that only the person who has done a wrong can apologise for it. For anyone else to take it on himself is not only wrong but impudent, since it may well be that the original perpetrator would not himself feel obliged to apologise if he were still here. But it is also wicked, for it is racism of the most repulsive kind, since to apologise for an act committed by one’s ancestors, or kinsmen, or co-religionists, is to accept the concept of racial guilt—and that is the kind of thinking which results in American-Italian children pursuing small Jews with cries of “You killed Christ!”

It is doubtful if this occurred to Mr Blair, intent on parading his p.c. virtue, and no doubt, in his pursuit of the chimera of a “peace process”, it seemed wise to placate Irish nationalism. His Holiness probably bowed to similar political pressure, although in his case he may have felt himself the embodiment of Catholicism, and so responsible for its crimes and misdemeanours. They were both misguided, to say the least; apologies, if they were ever due, would be the concern of Pius XI and Pius XII, not of John Paul; and of Sir Robert Peel and Lord John Russell, not Mr Blair, who is obviously unaware that, far from feeling guilt over the Great Hunger, Britain can feel pride at the huge efforts which its people made to alleviate it.

Similarly, apology for Dresden is an insult to Bomber Command; if apology were due (which it patently is not) it would have to come from them, no one else. And the suggestion that the Queen should apologise for acts committed in previous centuries is as foolish as it is insolent. Nor is the Archbishop of Canterbury in a position to apologise for “wars, racism, and other sins committed in the name of Christianity” during the last millennium. Nor is the Pope, who seems to have an obsession with apology, to make one to Africa for the slave trade.

To put it bluntly, it is none of their business, and they do wrong to take it upon themselves to speak for the dead. George Carey slaughtered no prisoners at the Siege of Acre, and John Paul did not work his ticket on the Middle Passage. And it is doubtful if the Crusaders or the slave-runners felt any reason to apologise. So condemn them by all means, if it makes you feel better, but don’t have the effrontery to apologise for them.

All this is crashingly obvious—unless you believe in racial guilt and inherited guilt, and it is hard to think of a more wicked, dangerous doctrine. It makes for enmity, hatred, and mistrust—between black and white, Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Muslim, German and practically everybody. The list is endless, and while such mutual antipathies are inevitable, that is no reason for going through the bogus and thoroughly hypocritical farce of apology. It serves only to keep the hatreds alive.

Which is why, while I cannot help feeling a dislike for the Japanese en masse, I cannot for a moment subscribe to the suggestion that modern Japan should apologise for atrocities committed by their fathers and grandparents. Those were the guilty ones, not their descendants.

The sickest joke about the apology racket is its complete one-sidedness. Some modern Indians demand apology from Britain for the Amritsar massacre—but does it occur to them that, if such apologies are due, they must cut both ways? Is modern India prepared to apologise for the appalling atrocities of Cawnpore, Meerut, and Jhansi? Do the “Native Americans”, beating their breasts about Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, feel like owning up to the massacre of helpless white prisoners at Fort William Henry and Fort Venango, or atoning for the abominations practised by the Apaches on the Rio Grande settlements, or the shattered wagon trains and butchered immigrants? Are the Irish republicans, keening over Drogheda and Cromwell, ready to apologise for the burned-out Protestants and the foul crimes of the IRA? Do we hear sincere apology, for their
part in the slave trade, from the descendants of those Africans who made such a good thing out of it?