La Nausee

So now you can get a degree if you are illiterate and intellectually incapable, incapable of independent thought, of reasoning outside a closely defined frame of reference: are severed, mindless, animal.

By the time there's no need to be literate, no need to be able to ratiocinate, no need to know anything at all outside narrow subject boundaries, no requirement to want to think, no need to be able to select and order data, no requirement to be able to construct arguments or analyse existing arguments, no need to be able to step outside a given frame of reference and question its foundations, no need for any intellectual skills at all, of course anyone can get a 'degree'. Honestly, I just want everyone to know I understand.
http://www.dillsplace.com/the-great-university-education-scam.html

The snowflake is a direct consequence of Monkey-Man.  Verbally unhandy, functionally illiterate, intellectually helpless, of course it squeals. 

Equal rights derive from our common humanity. I walk down the street unimpeded. You walk down the street unimpeded. I wear what I like. You wear what you like. I say what I like. You say what you like. Human history is a footnote to difficulty with these simple notions.

For some the order of the day is I shall say what I want to say, what I think, what I feel. You will say only what I permit you, what does not offend me, or worse, cause me to think or question. You will speak and write within my frame of reference and in terms acceptable to me. My discomfiture – my self – is of greater importance than another's right to speak. ‘I’ is the centre of the universe, the measure of all things. If ‘I’ finds something offensive, it may not exist. If you think the Bible is a sacred text, I must express myself in terms you consider suitable to discussing a sacred text. Why on earth should I? is a question ill-understood by the hierarchical mind. Why might you not express yourself in the frame of reference set by me? The Thought-Policeman’s ego, the vapid assumption of superiority, the right to tell others how to be, the ‘psychology of the individual’ as Jeeves would have put it, are too little debated, on the grounds they constitute personal attack and that is not intellectually valid. Argument ad hominem attacks the person in order to discredit what he says: if he is shown to have lied in the past, that is supposed to discredit his word on this occasion. It is distinct from attacking the person because what he says shows he is a creep, and an irrational creep at that .

The world's ideologies divide into cultures of the outside and cultures of the inside. A culture of the outside holds that the individual is moulded by the external world and so is both victim and slave - to environment, to fellow-humans, to self - is a hollow gourd or empty shell to be filled with the Beloved Leader's version of reality. Where no determined State attempts at brain-washing occur, the hollow gourd is merely a passive recipient of fate, a creature of instinct, to whom responsibility is meaningless. A culture of the inside holds that the individual has a central processing unit (CPU) otherwise known as mind that analyses the external world and forms himself or herself and so his or her own views from the results of this analysis, is capable of choice. Where there is no CPU, nothing inside to form oneself with, the opinions and reactions of others are defining and must therefore be controlled or censored. This underpins Orwell's 'Freedom is Slavery' and Marcuse's 'repressive tolerance'. You have no means of handling words that displease you. They therefore oppress you. The world's ideologies divide into cultures of the outside and cultures of the inside. A culture of the outside holds that the individual is moulded by the external world and so is both victim and slave - to environment, to fellow-humans, to self - is a hollow gourd or empty shell to be filled with the Beloved Leader's version of reality. Where no determined State attempts at brain-washing occur, the hollow gourd is merely a passive recipient of fate, a creature of instinct, to whom responsibility is meaningless. A culture of the inside holds that the individual has a central processing unit (CPU) otherwise known as mind that analyses the external world and forms himself or herself and so his or her own views from the results of this analysis, is capable of choice. Where there is no CPU, nothing inside to form oneself with, the opinions and reactions of others are defining and must therefore be controlled or censored. This underpins Orwell's 'Freedom is Slavery' and Marcuse's 'repressive tolerance'. You have no means of handling words that displease you. They therefore oppress you.

This has implications that have wholly corroded society. Firstly there is the victim culture. Since nothing is your fault, you are the product of socio-economic forces, it is wrong to deride, criticize, censure, abuse you if you behave like a piece of vomit. Secondly, what others see as intellectual corruption and social engineering is not understood as wrong – it’s only the socio-economic circumstances into which you were born that prevented you excelling academically, everyone is just as bright as everyone else, and having failed five CSEs in no way indicates that you are not just as good as someone who achieved an Honours degree. Thirdly, the censorious proliferate.

People have become frightened of words.  Words are suspect, dangerous, to be controlled.

Being literate is not the same as being verbal. I’m not going to draft the thesis I’m not going to write on the difference but Cockney rhyming-slang, witty backchat from squaddies that has everyone including the senior officers in stitches is verbal, while in terms of formal writing their practitioners may be fairly illiterate.  It doesn’t take long on a military forum to find someone if not let off then merely rapped over the knuckles because he was so very entertaining.  The craic of course is paramountly being verbal.  I can’t remember the statistic my father was fond on quoting but the gist was the average Irishman, whoever he was supposed to be, had a vocabulary something like six times the size of that of the average Englishman, whoever he was supposed to be.   The verbal are happy with words, enjoy them; something moves between the ears.  The dull leaden deadhead is not; nothing moves between the ears.

Of course they regard my degree as meaningless; it hasn’t equipped me to wield tools.  Or rather it has equipped me to wield the only tool that ever really mattered, the one between the ears, without which we’re still on the savannah gazing at fallen logs and unable to figure out how to build a shelter from them.  Imagination and rational abstract thinking are responsible for human achievement, the capacity to conceive what is not but could be.  Imagination says wish we had wings.  Thinking figures out how to build a machine that flies.  Deadheads never changed anything but of course as far as Rome and Riyadh are concerned nothing fundamental ever required changing. So long as they pray and obey. 

We know from, among other places, the Lascaux cave illustrations of 17000 years ago that there were creative, artistic cave-persons, and we know also by deduction that there were cave-persons whose approach to, say, fire was more pragmatic, shall we say, than to just squeal it was a mighty god, or else the species would not have moved on at all.  Is it not a most interesting question, then, why I or anyone else in a free country in the C21st century with the whole of world thought, the whole of world art, available for our contemplation should be bothered by the more retarded sort of cave-person?

Which is as much as to say that the war between the lame-brained and intelligence, creativity, imagination which is NOT 'merely' the creation of works of art but which is without which nothing, the ability to see how things could be different around this joint, to see things which are not there, but could be, visualize that fallen tree as a pair of wheels (offend against the gods), has been going on since the first members of homo sapiens stood on their hind legs, and one said oh, but it is raining, therefore we shall get wet, and the other said fuck that for a game of soldiers, I'm going to build a shelter. Imagination look at what things are, takes them apart and puts the pieces together in a different order, adds new pieces, jettisons superfluous pieces, makes things different.  Imagination does not practise given ‘skills to benefit the economy’.  Imagination looks at how things are done and finds  different, better ways of doing them,

The reductionist stares myopically at the world and fumbles for the territorial imperatives of the fruit-fly to guide his or her understanding. If a chimp can't do it, it's a Christian superstition. The individual characteristics of honesty, reliability, intellect, verbal dexterity are annulled by biological equality. They are illusion, superstition. Only grubbing around on the forest-floor is real. Words cause friction, words impede the New World Order. The rudiments of language are required only for appeasement displays and the chest-beating of the head monkey.

Where there is no human capacity to redo the wiring, there is no liberty. Where there is no liberty, there is no responsibility - if you are not free to choose you cannot fairly be held to account for your actions. Scientific fundies deconstruct the West with their 'practical man's' contempt for all that makes us human. Can you synthesize a word? Can you grow an idea? Arf, arf, we are all good practical men here. Man is the tool-making ape. Education consists in learning to wield tools, a technical training. No training of the mind can take place because the mind does not exist. Since mind doesn't exist, 6000 years of its coping with the illusorily complex business of being human are meaningless. The only reality is the PPO and the particular head of your monkey-troop, the god meme being a particular threat. (Since the primate genetic reflex shuts off questioning the head monkey, s/he becomes endowed with qualities such as omniscience, omnipotence, goodness - hence of course the god meme itself.) Since mind etc etc, the new high priests are endowed with understanding of the entirety of the human condition via a grasp of cell biology. Those who have received a technical training are superior to those who can think, because of course learning to think, to analyse arguments, doesn't actually exist. There are no internal differences between individuals in ability (or volition, desire to learn). Some have had tool-wielding pasted onto their exteriors, others not.

To our new professionals, therefore, aggressively anti-intellectual, ignorant of history and ideas, semi-literate, unable to develop or handle argument, only might is right. They are at once thuggish and vulnerable to any demagogue proffering 'the real truth': the tenets of liberal democracy are meaningless to them. They want good jobs. That is laudable, but why should a vocational training certificate be called a degree? Mind stands in the way of slavery and so it had to go, as did the not-so-traditional university, the university of the Enlightenment as a citadel of mind and free thought.

Naturally decision-making passed by accident into the hands of ignorant semi-literates programmed to beat up any supposed fascist who accurately describes them.

This monkey-madness has produced a generation of young doctors some of whom were functionally illiterate; their level of literacy was inadequate to their function.

These etchings of mine have not come about due to the discovery of doctors and biologists who cannot write cogently about reality, rationality or Racine but by the discovery of doctors and biologists who cannot write cogently about medicine and biology. The biological sciences are really going to benefit from a generation of ’researchers’ so fur-brained they can’t describe their first researches. How can you identify unanswered questions if you cannot think? Welcome to the world of those from whom clarity of thought is absent.

What the educational establishment is going to explain is this: No more than half a dozen pages are required – what you did, why you did it, how you did it, what the results were and what those results might mean: Blendit’s syndrome is a rare disease of the connective tissue, causing severe debilitation, especially in women of child-bearing age (1). Laggie et al (2) have shown that some 80% of sufferers in this group have a defect in the ability to produce the growth factor chronine. Chronine reacts with the hormone condosit in the production of healthy tissue (3, 4). Condosit is produced by the ovaries during the luteal peak (5). Silofome Z has been shown to stimulate the production of chronine in vitro... It is really isn’t very difficult, especially if you’ve been doing the work for the last two years. Of course you do have to have something resembling a mind. She approached the keyboard cautiously. Intraduction (was that how you spelled it?) My name is Susan and I am a doctor. No, that wasn’t what she’d seen in the journals.

We are talking (repetitively) of the inability to select and order data, of the inability to question and analyse given propositions, to stand outside a given frame of reference and question its foundations. It does not matter here whether we are talking of oncology or Origen. We are talking specifically of how it does not take everyone six months to produce half a dozen pages. Some of us, indeed, in our spare time, can put together in a couple of years the material for some 20 or 30 reasonably original contributions to thought. We are talking about the marked absence of any intellect whatever. Cannot write simple descriptive essays. The short word for this is stupid. Any undergraduate in the Faculty of Arts of a real university could knock off such a paper in his or her sleep, but then of course arts undergraduates do deal with original material, are expected to be able to sift Kant or Chaucer, are not spoon-fed from potted versions and summaries, are expected to digest vast amounts of reading and select from their reading. Note also that this inability is not an inability to write the original research grant, of which some junior doctors and scientists are equally incapable. It is an inability to describe what they fuck they have been doing with the grant money for the last two or three years.
 
But of course that’s all right, so long as there are no thinking people.  No, we don’t like people who are creative, well read, who question, who argue, who are capable of formulating argument, who, horror of horror, regard themselves as our equals in rights.  We like fresh-faced, well-scrubbed, mindless, ignorant, animals, devoid of intellect, devoid of education, devoid of all moral sense, whom we can manipulate, who will do anything we tell them to, who will believe anything we tell them, having no referents with which to compare it and being intellectually incapable of finding any, who look up to us and are rewarded by the illusion of total power over our enemies. 

Universal expectation that if I am hit hard enough and long enough and of course irrevocably and unrectifiably enough I shall change my mind, I shall destroy me, pervert, perjure myself, erase all displeasing to my masters and mistresses, which in this case is virtually all of me, toddlers throwing tantrums pummelling me with their fists screaming I have to give them respect, or in other words accept they have rights over me, which of course they do not.

To all the other filth, of course, the hysteric, the psychotic is to be stroked, cooed over, have its hysteria and psychosis massaged, encouraged, it’s a victim and of course it must be free to continue to tear at my body. There can be no question of encouraging its intellectual, moral and emotional development in any way.  Nothing is to be asked of it.  What do they whine?  No-one can do anything.  No-one can say anything.  You just have to go along with it.  As you insolent insolent traitor vermin know full well you are in the free world and you do not have to go along with it, the free world being an exercise in not going along with it.

They all are, of course, devoid of ethics, and so unfit to practise, when doctors are all enthusiastic criminal apes, when they have abandoned ‘human’ and simply see us all as bodies, with which they can do as they please, the expression doesn’t mean anything any more.

None of them has any interest beyond self, self-advancement and the triumph of whichever particular twisted deformed fascist death-cult is their choice. 

Following upon Islam’s spectacular display of savagery, barbarism, blood-lust, naked indication that they will not be content until people are dead, people get really twitched if it is described as a death-cult.  It’s a lot of things.  One, from Iran to Saudi is most unmistakably a death-cult; if intellectually impotent animals don’t like something about you, they kill you.  Were we all supposed to be terribly impressed by them?  Are we?  Terrorized is the word.  Muslims made a concerted attempt to terrorize the world into silence about Islam.  It should not surprise anyone that the West didn’t care to be terrorized. What was not supposed to happen is the reaction, Christ what have we got in this country.  Bunch of fucking nutters.  The twist of course that anyone insufficiently terrorized was and is routinely reviled. 

Despite its being political, intellectual and historical garbage that religion may not be offended, ‘religion is not to be offended’ became the pathetic mantra of the supposedly progressive classes, ritually and of course mindlessly chanted to pretend nothing had happened and if it had it was all Rushdie’s fault and if it wasn’t all Rushdie’s fault it was the fault of the free world for daring to exist. 

Thus Bernie Grant’s seminal contribution:
When, in 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, Grant’s instinctive response was to side with radical Islam. ‘The whites wanted to impose their values on the world,’ he argued, adding: ‘Burning books was not a big issue for blacks.’ It was a big issue for Abbott, though; she insisted that ‘this was a matter of principle. The Muslims were being misled, and she was opposed to censorship because minorities would suffer.’ [5]
https://thelionandunicorn.wordpress.com/2016/09/03/no-heavy-lifting-a-press-portrait-of-diane-abbott-pt-2/

Not quite on the world, just on England, where we live.  If they wanted to issue death-threats and riot, they were perfectly at liberty to do it someplace else.  Tehran springs to mind. 

We all had to be brow-beaten and brain-washed into accepting offence to religion was something terrible and awful even as we sat watching Dave Allen at Large, 20 years after Woodstock, this drivel of course most recently spewed by the Argentinian fascist pervert committed to the destruction of the free world they call the Pope.  They live in kindergarten.  All the little children are supposed to solemnly intone religion is not mocked because the Holy Farter says it isn’t.  All the little children will accept it’s OK to hit people who have offended you because the Holy Farter says it is, the hell with what Jesus said.  Drivel which now has a stranglehold

A proportion of Muslims had declared war on England at the behest of a head of a hostile foreign power.  Why were they not simply shown the door?  The answer to that is pay-offs, oil, deals, and the sodding Empire, which was clearly a very bad idea if for no other reason than it made creatures like Sacranie British subjects.  He was born in Malawi in 1951, when it was still a British colony.  He also attended Catholic school in Malawi.  Yes, I’m sure that gave him a really well-rounded view of C20th England.  Still it might have been an idea to have the strip of citizenship argument over the Begum bitch 30 years earlier.

‘Their chief weapons are, fear, surprise and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope’.  Actually the chief weapon here was ignorance, the ignorance of a generation and now three generations most thoroughly anti-schooled, who know no history.  How can anyone who grew up in England, went to English schools, went on to higher education, not know the basics of history?  Apparently very easily.  Just not tool-wielding, therefore irrelevant.

This of course needs to be seen in the context of the wider reverse evolution.  Muslims mustn’t be expected to cope with words; no-one must be expected to cope with words.

We have gone from ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me’ to a nation hysterical over language.  To be instead united in opposition to the fuckwit tards on all sides who use or wish to use sticks and stones would be useful but isn’t going to happen any time soon.

I’ve been in Internet wars that would probably have most respectable citizens fainting in coils.  There are indeed steps to be taken when called an inbred troll, a black poodle, honourless. Woe to the trolls in bread, for they are sandwiched. And to their kin, the poodles in bread, for they shall make your hair curl; woe to the on aweless ones, for aweless is one the most powerful drugs in the therapeutic armamentarium against Operation Mindfuck. You are so helpless you are defined by words on a page?

You are helpless. You have been brought up to be helpless in order that you will whine.

In order that you will demand protection from the master sheep-shearers and of course in order that you may be readily manipulated.

It  is of course really, really obvious that, if people are afraid to criticize people who are crap or who are behaving like crap, the crappy people will go being crappy and be confirmed in their belief there is nothing wrong with their crappiness, really, really, really obvious –  apparently not.

It is usually lost in debates about freedom of speech that it starts on your doorstep. It starts when you object to the lout pissing on your geraniums or some other such violation of the rules of social intercourse and not surprisingly don’t display much ‘respect’ when doing so.

It starts with his fundamental acceptance of your right to utter words he does not want to hear. This is not to say he will necessarily meekly accept your reproach and apologize. He may growl, swear, raise two fingers, perhaps even direct a defiant final spurt at your favourite garden gnome. He does not pull a gun or a knife and scream who the fuck do you fink you are, ‘e’s got ‘is fucking rights ‘e as. And of course ain’t you got no fucking respect.

It happens from time to time especially in the summer that people drive around with their stereos at max volume or stand on the street with some device deafening the neighbourhood and it used to be the case that other people said turn that bloody thing down and the perp might have sworn or hissed but generally turned the bloody thing down but people are less ready to take part in these normal social interactions because of the animals anti-education has spawned who might simply pull a knife or try to run you down.  Animal is the new normal. 

A line has been breached which, consequent upon the supposed abolition of the existence of mind, is essentially between human and animal. To be frankly feral is now acceptable and in somequarters held as the norm, to be self-obsessed, self-centred to the point of psychosis, consider that the rest of the species revolves around one and one's delusional beliefs, to have no concept of the equality and separateness of others, to regard them as under one's control to be silenced if they offend, to be incapable of either self-control (containing one's feelings) or self-command (changing one's feelings), to have as one's true god only power, wherein reality is whatever those with power say it is, The Good is whatever those with power say it is, questioning, argument alien and condemned, in short fascism.

If it’s not demonstrable, it can’t be binding. It is critical to today's intellectual corruption that realities that exist only in people's heads, whether their strange notions of the universe or their convictions of their own probity or intelligence in the face of the evidence, must be treated as sacrosanct, regarded with awe and 'respect;, considered superior to the findings of fact and reason

Respect is a word from ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ that has weaselled its way into the ‘Left’ on the sleazy and spurious grounds that ‘respect’ is what the nobs get and everyone else should have it too. Alas, little Trots, this ‘respect’ of which you prate is not what ‘the nobs’ get in any free and democratic society, let alone a Left-wing one. It denotes ‘you gotta be careful what you say’. Doubtless you stand up and tug your forelock also; assuredly those among the masses who most loudly squeal ‘ain’t you got no respect’ would not object. It is the antithesis of all the real Left stands for. In this model one does not tell ‘the important’ which end is up, one does not tell the manager he is a bloody fool, one does not tell his lordship he is a drunken pig, one knows one’s place and one’s reward on earth if not in heaven is one is not oneself told which end is up. The enthusiasm with which this deliciously feudal model has been adopted by the masses is hilarious.  The nobs don’t have to take criticism and can hit or otherwise punish those who proffer it? Oh, but they do, they do! It used to be called socialism, a creed, one might say, the raison d’etre of which was kicking the shit out of those with wealth and power. We on the Left voice our own opinions, not those of our masters, nor only those our masters permit we say.

The anatomy of corruption indeed is readily dissected.
Believe what they're told and think themselves intellectually superior to those who question because what they have been told 'must be' the truth so any divergence from it is lies. Do what they're told - that one's easy once they've been fed lies - and think themselves morally superior because virtue lies in obedience. Stripped of all individual psychological processes, whether those of the mind or those of the heart. Reality is whatever Master says it is. The Good is whatever Master says it is. Master knows best.
Do anything, tolerate anything because challenge to authority is 'evil'. To be organic, to be real, to be that arising from oneself, the activities of one's own heart and mind, is evil.
You gotta believe what you're told, regardless of whether it's garbage.
You gotta do what you're told, regardless of whether it's evil.
They have believed what they were told and followed regulayshuns and proseedyures. It is inconceivable to them they have done anything wrong.
Sleazy, servile, dishonest, cowardly, deluded, psychotic, feral and of course sexist or in short evil reptilian kitten-eaters.
In short the perfect citizens of a slave-society, a totalitarian state
http://www.dillsplace.com/index.html

That line is the division between words and violence, between words which people are capable of dealing with and physical assault overpowering by brute force, which they are not. That line has repeatedly been crossed by the vermin of medicine.

The Rushdie Affair of course was the apotheosis of the breaching of the line, the opening of the flood-gates, what you might call the word made flesh.  Whatever violence had previously gone on in anywhere from slums to boys’ public schools, to these people violence was given, assumed as a response to words, words didn’t matter, as frank psychosis was assumed the norm, no question of calming down, giving the other guy space, trying to see things from his point of view.  
 
It thus suitably marks the transition from a literate society, one in which the only acceptable currency was language, to one ruled by apes with clubs.  Without it, the wordless mindless assault I suffered at UCH would have been inconceivable, creatures who simply had and have no use for language and reason, to whom there is no need to speak, to whom it does not occur to speak, to argue, to reason.  Animals have treated me or be exact mistreated me like an animal, like a mare whose will is to be broken. 

The Dreyfus Affair of our Age – Nick Cohen
In 1988, the highest bid for the English language rights for The Satanic Verses bettered its nearest rival by a full $100,000. The literary agent Andrew Wylie belied his nickname of "the Jackal" when he told his client to turn the offer down. "Could you just explain again why I should not agree to receive an extra one hundred thousand dollars?" his puzzled author asked. Wylie was adamant. A company owned by Rupert Murdoch "would be the wrong publishers for you". Salman Rushdie sighed and agreed, contradicting all those who were to claim that he was in writing to get rich as he did it.
After the storm broke, Murdoch told the New Yorker, "I think you should not give offence to people's religious beliefs. I hope that our people would never have published the Salman Rushdie book." If Rushdie had gone for the money, Murdoch would have pulped his novel.
Rushdie's autobiography, Joseph Anton — the pseudonym he adopted when he went underground — is as multi-layered as his fiction. At times it reads like a literary Day of the Jackal. You know Rushdie must survive, just as you know that Charles de Gaulle must survive, yet the intensity of the malevolence directed against him makes you wonder how he can live. It is a psychological study of disintegration and redemption. Rushdie is in fear of his life and the lives of his young son and all those associated with his work. Assassins murder one of his translators and wound a second. Terrorists bomb libraries and bookshops from Karachi to the Charing Cross Road. Special Branch move him from house to house so often he can never settle. Whitehall tells him to keep quiet so as not to provoke his enemies. He is humiliated, afraid, isolated and silenced. Rushdie pulls himself together by ignoring the authorities, and taking on his adversaries in argument — and there is a lesson for us all there.
But as the Murdoch example illustrates, most of all and most depressingly, Joseph Anton is an account of how comfortable people in Western democracies react to the threat of political violence.
Not well is the politest available answer.
The teeth-sucking pundits who tell us to remember that moral issues are complicated and we must always look for shades of grey are usually right. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was an exception: the simplest moral question of my lifetime. On Valentine's Day 1989, a dying theocrat diverted attention from his military and political failures by ordering the murder of a citizen of a foreign country for writing a novel. The Rushdie Affair became the Dreyfus Affair of our age because it revealed how, when faced with such extreme provocation, ordinary political categories collapse. Whatever your opinions, if you supported Rushdie, you supported the freedom to write, read and publish what you liked, even when (I would say especially when) books were being burned and death threats issued not in some far away and forgettable dictatorship but in your own land. You supported the rule of law, for Rushdie had committed no crime, and placed the right of the individual to express him or herself above the rights of the collective. The enemies of Dreyfus said that they must keep an innocent man in prison to protect the collective honour of the French army and French state. The enemies of Rushdie said that the Ayatollah Khomeini's incitement to murder was understandable or excusable because it protected the collective honour of Muslims. No one who professed a belief in freedom of conscience and thought could hesitate for a moment before taking Rushdie's side. As it turned out, those who shouted the loudest hesitated the      longest.
Rushdie writes that he "learned how to withstand the Islamic attacks on him; it was after all not surprising that fanatics and bigots behaved like bigots and fanatics." Non-Muslim critics were harder to endure. Most came from the Right, or at least at first. Margaret Thatcher said she understood the insult to Islam. Norman Tebbit described Rushdie as "an outstanding villain". Hugh Trevor-Roper, Roald Dahl, Richard Ingrams and Auberon Waugh behaved as disgracefully as one would expect. Daily Mail journalists deplored and pursued a man who put his life on the line for the freedoms that made them a comfortable living. At one point Rushdie describes watching the news at a secret address, when the pudgy face of Geoffrey Howe popped up on the screen. Howe tried to placate fanaticism by pretending that as well as insulting Islam, Rushdie had insulted Britain by comparing it to Nazi Germany. "Where?" shouted Rushdie at his television. "On what page? Show me where I did that?"
The Right's animosity was understandable if not forgivable. Rushdie was a leftist, and an immigrant leftist to boot. He had supported the Nicaraguan revolution and been active in the anti-racist movements of the 1980s. Conservatives claimed that the slippery foreigner "knew what he was doing". Rushdie deliberately insulted Islam because he wanted to make money from the controversy. They then used the costs of the Special Branch protection the ungrateful migrant had forced on the taxpayer to create a caricature from Tory fantasy. Rushdie was a highbrow scrounger, a champagne socialist, who collected his royalties while milking the public purse. When a snide Prince Charles joined the hostile chorus, Ian McEwan said that His Royal Highness's security cost far more than Rushdie's even though the prince "had never written anything worth reading". Understandably, Rushdie was more outraged than amused. It took him four years to write The Satanic Verses. Did his opponents not find it strange that a serious writer would spend a tenth of his life creating something as crude as an insult? But of course, his enemies could not accept that he was a serious writer. "In order to attack him and his work, it was necessary to paint him as a bad person, an apostate traitor, an unscrupulous seeker of fame and wealth, an opportunist whose work was without merit, who ‘attacked Islam' for his own personal gain. This was what was meant by the much-repeated phrase he did it on purpose."
Like Howe, the Conservative grandees of the day had not read the book, any more than the most thuggish and philistine demonstrators on the streets of Bradford or Tehran had. They neither knew nor cared that the satire of the founding myths of Islam was a small part of a whirling narrative about the traumas of migration from West to East, traumas which the reader cannot help but notice all but did for Rushdie.
If Norman Tebbit still wants to talk about "outstanding villains", the most outstanding were Douglas Hurd and his officials in the Foreign Office. At one point, a reporter asked Hurd, the minister charged with protecting a British citizen from state terrorism and all British citizens from that same state's attempts to dictate what they could read, "What was your most painful experience in government"?
"Reading The Satanic Verses," Hurd said with the philistinism the British upper class habitually mistakes for wit.
Egged on by Edward Heath and Conservative backbenchers, the wider Foreign Office regarded a global campaign of murder as a distraction from the task of "normalising relations" with Iran. To please the theocracy, diplomats suggested that Rushdie might plead for clemency for an alleged terrorist accused of bombing a bookshop that stocked The Satanic Verses. Rushdie protested, but the authorities allowed the suspect to return to Iran unpunished nevertheless. Just in case you run away with the idea that a concern for the tender feelings of Muslims motivated Hurd and his contemporaries, I should remind you that they went on to do everything possible to prevent a  robust Nato response to the slaughter of the Bosnian Muslims in the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s. "Respect" for Muslim feeling did not concern them. In both instances, their chief desire was to strike illusory deals with arbitrary power, whether it was in its Iranian or Serbian form.
The world appears different now. If I were to show you an editorial urging us to "respect" regimes and movements that support the oppression of women, gays and Jews by biting our tongues and censoring our books, you would know without my prompting that it was from a leftish rather than a conservative newspaper. They were harder to spot, but the signs that the majority on the Left was prepared to outflank conservatives on the Right were there in 1989. Rushdie writes of how he was criticised from the Left by Germaine Greer, John Berger and John le Carré, whom I never thought of as left-wing, but I suppose is, if leftism is only anti-Americanism. Rushdie's sister Sameen understood how left-liberal thought was going wrong from the outset. "For a generation the politics of ethnic minorities in Britain had been secular and socialist," she said. "The fatwa was the mosques' way of destroying that project and getting religion back into the driving seat."
The honourable left-wing response was then and is now to fight back and support Muslims and ex-Muslims around the world who want to resist theocratic politics. In Egypt, Iran and across the "Muslim world", many realised what was at stake and put their own lives in danger by defending Rushdie's ideas and right to publish. But the calculating white leftist could not help noticing that radical identity politics were sweeping the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Supporters of Rushdie were a minority, frequently an embattled minority in Muslim countries. 
Just as the enemies of Dreyfus anticipated fascism, the left-wing intellectuals who went for Rushdie in 1989 anticipated a future when many on the Left would be happy to go along with reactionary and obscurantist forces as long as they were anti-Western. Had it not been for Khomeini's incitements to murder in 1989, wrote the constantly shallow and occasionally sinister Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in 1994, "the world would be hurtling, unchallenged, towards the inalienable right to wear blue jeans and eat McDonald's hamburgers". Many on the Left would concede acres of ground to avoid that appalling fate. Social democratic politicians with large numbers of ethnic minority voters, meanwhile made an equally debased calculation, and are still making it today.
I did not think that my opinion of Jack Straw could sink any lower until I read Joseph Anton. A few years before Khomeini's fatwa, the BBC had broadcast a play many Jews found offensive. While disapproving, Straw gave the proper response. "Democracy is about according rights of free expression to those with whom one profoundly disagrees," he said. When fanatics wanted to murder Rushdie and ban his novel, however, Straw forgot about free expression, and called for a universal blasphemy law that would have banned The Satanic Verses and all other books the religious found offensive. There were many more Muslims than Jews in Straw's Blackburn constituency and in the constituencies of other Labour MPs. As Rushdie reminds us, Tony Blair's Labour government went on to propose a bill to enforce Straw's prohibition, and very nearly succeeded in putting it on the statute book. I am ashamed to say that our freedoms to think, speak and argue feel safer now that Labour is out of power.
Rushdie's autobiography has two sets of heroes, who look all the more heroic when set against the politicians and intellectuals of Left and Right. The liberal chattering classes, who are the butt of so much mockery, behaved impeccably. They hid Rushdie in their homes, and although Literary London is the most gossipy corner of the planet, never revealed the locations of his hiding places. The other heroes are the protection officers of the "A squad" of the Metropolitan Police's Special Branch, who worked on the Rushdie "prot", and maintained their honourable record of keeping their charges alive. ("We're not like the Americans," they told him. "They lost one president and nearly lost another.") In 2003, when the security services decided that the threat had passed after 13 years, Special Branch threw a party for Rushdie at New Scotland Yard. We "want to get as many of the lads together as possible," said one officer. "It's been one of our very longest prots, and there's a lot of pride in what's been done, and a lot of appreciation for what you endured."
In their way, the cops knew what Rushdie meant when he said, "Wherever in the world the little room of literature has been closed, sooner or later the walls have come tumbling down." It is to Britain's dishonour that too many of their supposed superiors did not.
 
Martin Podhurst
December 22nd, 2012
12:12 PM
This is an important review with a great, all too appropriate title. Just read Zoe Heller's smug review and yours is spot on. Thank you.


Ed Cottrill
November 23rd, 2012
11:11 PM
Great piece, Nick. Rushdie did make some comparisons between Britain and Nazi Germany in his essay, "The New Empire Within Britain," published in 1982. Rushdie does say, "Britain isn't Nazi Germany," but he also states that Britain, unlike Nazi Germany, "has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism. It's still there, breeding lice and vermin, waiting for unscrupolous people to exploit it for their own ends." Howe's statement, though, was reported as (I can't say I heard it), "The British Government, the British People, do not have any affection for the book. The book is extremely critical, rude about us. It compares Britain with Hitler's Germany." So Howe was eager to affirm a lack of "affection," on behalf of the government, for a book he had not read. The government apparently so cherished its relationship with Iran that their first concern was to put together a poorly-researched brief distancing themselves from Rushdie. And was Rushdie's 1982 essay fair comment? Look no further than, e.g., the comment section of the 11 September Daily Mail story on Rushdie, for expositions on "what I can't stand about him," and, "we have this guy to blame for the rise of modern day Islamic Extremism." Astonishing.


Anonymous
November 6th, 2012
2:11 PM
Well said Nick. This is a well-written and important book, and its importance has nothing to do with whether you like Salman Rushdie or his work. Their stance on the fatwa is a good rule of thumb for assessing the politicians and writers of the time.


Charles Lambert
October 26th, 2012
9:10 AM
I still remember the despicable Shirley Williams bleating on about the 'deep offence' caused by Satanic Verses (in my opinion, Rushdie's best novel...) and the 'inappropriateness' of his receiving a knighthood... And the tongue-lashing she received from Hitchens (C) as a result.
 
Shall we just have it all again in five-year-old English
 
Perhaps if I put it in 5-year-old English.

I am not you.  We are agreed so far?  I am here and you are wherever you are.

There is only what is. 

What is may be pretty basic.  Fred said to Joe, “I’m buying the next round.”

Anyone who heard Fred say that to Joe and denies it is lying.

A lie is a false reality, a statement something is true that is not true, leading people to believe it is true and think and act in accordance with its being true.

Conveying a false reality is not necessarily a deliberate attempt to mislead.  Nonetheless, a false reality is something that pisses people off, be it ever so minor. Due to simple cock-up,  a delivery  promised for Tuesday, as a result of which you stayed in/took time off work, does not appear.

A belief system is a series of propositions abut the universe and its inhabitants, put into a box labelled ‘Marxism’, ‘Anglicanism’, ‘Sikhi’, ‘Buddhism’, whatever. 

There are generally some propositions you have to accept to belong in the box.  If you do not accept them you live in another box.  For example, Unitarians believe in God and Jesus, but do not believe Jesus was God incarnate, thus denying the Trinity. 

Broadly every individual on the planet thinks what he or she believes is true, because he/she wouldn’t believe it if he/she didn’t think it was true, or at least half-believe it, a definite maybe.  People do not go around cheerfully proclaiming, “Everything I believe is a total garbage.”

Broadly too, those individuals are divided into those who distinguish between their personal beliefs and universal truths.

It is those who insist what they believe is Truth with a capital T who are a pain in the arse to the rest of us, who say ‘x is true’ when what they mean is ‘I believe x is true’.

I am certainly not about to dwell in your ridiculous world of lies, accept your ludicrous delusional reality.

On a number of levels

The denial of the history of the free world. Religion is mocked and that mockery enabled the free world, in which we are capable of distinguishing between ‘x is true’ and ‘ you believe x is true’ and entirely free to do so.

Your conduct is that of a sick animal, as defined by law, as defined by psychiatry.  If your conduct is the will of this god of yours, then your god is clearly a sick animal. We are therefore now in the territory where the criminally insane are lauded and deferred to. Certainly I should think it your curious contention – sorry, five-year-old English: since you a sick nutter, it is your party line that it is not you before whom I should abase myself not your thoughts to which I should defer, but your god, of whom you are but the instrument.  I must accept the Will of this god, because it is further your contention that you alone possess truth; it is your monstrous contention – you’re a very sick nutter – that obedience to what you say, obedience to your (non-existent) authority is obedience to what God says, obedience to God’s authority. You haven’t a clue what God thinks, should it exist.  You merely think you know. I do know what it says it in the New Testament.  Within your own terms, since a) you are devoid of love and b) you are a coward, you do not represent Jesus. I should forget my silly self-willed notions and lose myself in God is I think your basic position, but it is of course absolute rubbish that complying with the will of a self-willed, ignorant vicious animal constitutes loss of self.  What you mean is I should lose myself in you.  You are about as selfless as any other vandal, a two-year throwing a tantrum because he doesn’t get his own way other people, they won’t all obey him.  Nonetheless the scam is you have no self, you are immersed in God, but the agent of his purpose. Loss of self constitutes union with reality.  The inside mirrors the outside.  You are clearly completely delusional, existing in a world solely inside your head. You claim to possess absolute truth, but so do many other belief-systems.  You have no rational grounds for that conviction, any more than any other.  But if you hit me, I shall magically understand you are right and everyone else is wrong.  You are beyond pathetic. I think my own thoughts.  You think your own thoughts.  It is a little bizarre that I should be expected to think, or at least pretend to think your thoughts and keep silent about my own thoughts.  Nonetheless it is a proposition often bought into.

Truth has been revealed to you.  Ah, you were there at the time?

You believe truth has been revealed to you.  Others believe a different truth has been revealed to them.  Others still believe no truth has been revealed to anyone.

Your beliefs are therefore to be respected because they are true,  Means because you think they’re true.

Argument by authority is a fallacy.

‘With god all things are possible.”   That may indeed be the case, evil grin, which physical laws applying depending on which side of the singularity you are.  Or simply if you are on the moon with less gravity. Nonetheless, this side there is the concept impossible things, for instance Virgin Birth, walking on water, rising from the dead.  You beliefs cannot therefore be held to be true.  They cannot be proven. 

In that majestic word of science, the effects described are not reproducible.

There is a good story about the man who built his house on rock and the man who built his house on sand
...a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: 25And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. 26And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: 27And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it. 
Luke 6
Your house is built on sand.  It is founded on the premiss of an omnipotent god who can therefore transcend the laws of physics but there is no proof of the existence of this god.

We are back therefore to argument by authority is a fallacy: God exists because you say so.

And historically as currently if people differ you’ll hit and hit and hurt them and kill them if they disagree with you, at very least sit hissing in your pit dribbling atheists are evil.  This is not impressive conduct.

We find ourselves at the argument by numbers.  A lot of people say so.  A lot of people have said a lot of things throughout history which have been shown to be flatly false.

Thus the concept of ‘faith’.  It is faith that underpins your conviction your truth is correct and everyone else is wrong, or in other words nothing whatever underpins it. People must have faith and not irritatingly require evidence. 

You would I think claim along with Murphy O’Connor that the absence of faith is the greatest of evils.

Why is the suspension of reason evil?

The answer of course is that once people start applying reason, your sand-castle collapses.

Reason or reality.  Once people emerge from the opium-haze and take a look at the world around them they discover the world is not as you describe it. 

Back to the series of propositions.  The person who put them together believes they make a coherent whole and convinces others of the coherence of the whole.

But others come along and worrit that it is neither coherent, not a whole, hence a) theology and b) all those nasty heresies and schisms.  Still others come along and say this proposition or that is garbage and vicious garbage to boot. 

A fairly arbitrary collection of propositions choosing to taste from all the available possibilities.  Clearly Mohammed was convinced the Jews had called it correctly and God is One, dismissing both Trinity and polytheism.  He could also have said Jews are really interesting people and the source of many of my ideas but preferred to say Jews are apes and monkeys.

Christianity crashed on reality.  Marxism crashed on reality.  Islam is badly, badly threatened by reality and will do anything to maintain the dream. Yes, I know it doesn’t look threatened, but if we recall that even Tariq Ramadan had to admit the large number of Muslims who couldn’t be said to be even loosely practising, the picture is different.

It is marketed as Europe’s fastest growing religion but that is a false statistic, because it takes no account of the rate of loss, since for rather obvious reasons Muslims who have lost their faith or are as loosely Muslim as some Brits are loosely Christian, do not stand up shouting, look at us!  They really need to do so and indeed there may come a point when they have to do so but that requires the protection of bodies such as the Labour Party who at least currently are in bed with their would-be assassins 
Muslims in the West have come into contact with key realities, lots of other belief-systems, the reality of women and gays.  For all I know all those no longer practising have become Muslim-flavoured Buddhists, though I doubt it; could well be some.  How many Muslim teenagers in England do not have phones?  Everything the world has ever thought is in their hip-pockets.  The trick is therefore to stop them looking, keep them convinced Islam is the sole truth, to close their minds. Faith-schools are a good trick. 

You claim to represent Christianity.  You are clearly a fraud.  There is no love in you.  You are a coward.  Cowardice is fear and perfect love casts out fear.  That too is a matter of reality, the gulf between what is mouthed and what is observed. After 1800 years of Christian governance, people starved.  There would not have been a French Revolution had the Church spent the previous 1789 years insisting people love one another.

That too is a question of stopping people looking.  The mongol metal mechanical monkeys are so hypnotized by what you appear to be, what they think you must be, they cannot see what you are. 

How do I come to be subordinate to you?  I am one human being on this planet.  You are another.  That you believe your god, of whose existence there is no proof, says I am is not sufficient cause and reason. 

Just curious as to the rationale here.  I may not think what I think, but must think what you think.  Precisely how do you envisage what in practical terms is neurosurgery – you enter my mind and excise all parts of it displeasing to you – except fear is supposed to compel me to do that to myself. 

The pollies who back this drivel should also of course be the laughing-stock of the educated world.  I mean, really, Blair, is this some kind of joke?  The answer to which is yes and the name of the joke is you.  I’m supposed to erase from my mind everything I have read and everything I have thought, which does not concur with the untenable, unproven, unprovable drivel of this creature.  Or at least pretend to.

Let me be precise here.  Why should I erase true things to appease a nutter.  I know Marxism exists.  I know there was an epoch called the Enlightenment.  Unless we are to potter off to that level of discussion of knowing in which there is a possibility we are all brains in vats being fed illusory bodies, illusory surrounds, an illusory world, with an illusory history by a mad scientist, I am familiar with the facts of the political and intellectual history of the free world.  Were I to be terrorized into babbling dirty rubbish, I should in fact still know these things.  Why should I split myself being what is and what is not?   Why should I or anyone do that? 

You are a real lawyer, I take it?  Sarcasm is the lowest form of..but it’s fun.  I gather the courts take perjury seriously

Perjury is a statutory offence in England and Wales. It is created by section 1(1) of the Perjury Act 1911. Section 1 of that Act reads:
(1) If any person lawfully sworn as a witness or as an interpreter in a judicial proceeding wilfully makes a statement material in that proceeding, which he knows to be false or does not believe to be true, he shall be guilty of perjury, and shall, on conviction thereof on indictment, be liable to penal servitude for a term not exceeding seven years, or to imprisonment . . . for a term not exceeding two years, or to a fine or to both such penal servitude or imprisonment and fine.

So why does the law have no problem with people knowingly making false statements or remaining silent in order to create a false reality in which all concur with drivel?  What on earth you thought you wer playing at, introducing the lying drivel of the Vatican – actually the word that occurs to me for you, Blair, is eaten, the unholy Trinity of Sacranie, Murphy O’Connor and the Cherie Amour simply sliced the top of your head off and ate your brain, then replaced it with an artificial one of their own devising.  I, you will gather, am not so susceptible.

Labour and the Tories look at the same country and reach radically different decisions about how best to run it.  But they don’t look at the country in its entirety, each leaving out the bits that offend against their preconceptions, usually with generous dollops of malice.  Thus the Tories don’t seriously think it matters what happens to poor people and Labour has decided to abolish intelligence as unequal.  They may or may not back up their positions with outright lies.

But no-one regards every word that drips from a polly’s mouth as Gospel truth or thinks pollies can’t be criticized, mocked, condemned.  Preferably not too many brazen lies, since we vote on the grounds that we believe one or other of the motley crew has got it right, or at least more right than the rest.

It is possible authoritarian, murderous, fascist regimes do not start murderous but if they are composed of lies they have to keep killing to maintain, protect, uphold the lies.

This is probably true of even something as personal as an ‘honour killing’.  At the level of the individual and his victim, many factors are in play, but at the level of the society which condones him the essential lie to be upheld is that women are subordinate to their male relatives. 

You’d really think fact matters to the mongol metal mechanical monkeys.  I mean, might they not give the wrong chemo or the wrong dose of chemo if they don’t first identify the facts.  The best I can come up is a computerized response.  They have no feeling for facts mattering in themselves as sane signposts to life, of truth being superior to lies.

Lies split any one individual between what is and what he or she thinks is.  Truth is bedrock.  Lies are a bottomless ocean in which to drown.  Some people prefer not to know.  Those who treat terminal illness must know of people who don’t want to know.  Fact will happen anyway.   You may feel in a situation such as being left by a partner you still love that truth is the bottomless ocean but that is pain talking.  It isn’t.  You now know where you stand and can conduct yourself accordingly.

But we can and do argue vociferously, mock, deride, cartoon the politicians in place to govern us.  By what sleight of hand can we not argue vociferously, mock, deride, cartoon the religious who seek to govern us via the politicians and whose edicts directly govern others, whether in the microcosms of religious communities here or abroad. 

In other words how in a democracy does religion come to constitute unaccountable authority, authority that is not to be closely scrutinized, pinned to the wall, have its dirty linen washed in public?

What are we not talking about?  People praying, meditating, helping old ladies across the road, comforting the broken-hearted, advocating peace and love.

What are we talking about?  Belief-systems that are actually politics in disguise, seeking to control society by controlling what people may say and write, what within their own communities or abroad, people may wear, with whom and under what conditions people may make love.  People regard Islam as totalitarian for the breathtakingly simple reason that some versions of it are: there is no area of life involving interaction with other humans in which people are free to make their own decisions.  People who assume control, assume mastery, assume the rights of property.

Yes.  Yes, Blair, you are mad.

The problem with being an Oxford lawyer and former Prime Minister is the problem with being a doctor or nurse: hard to plead diminished responsibility.  All of you are actually responsible for your actions, inaction being a form of action, a choice.  You are responsibility for choosing what you did.

OK, I believe there is one reality and every civilization in the world has got a handle on it.  According to taste and local considerations each emphasizes some bits, leaves out others, but it’s all the same trip, just as when you strip away local considerations, ‘flat earth’ religion is much of a muchness.

I just sit here waiting for a logical closely reasoned argument to convince me of why I may not believe that.  Believe it, mother-fuckers, you got Troof doesn’t hack it.  Psychopathic animals, delusional, belong in Broadmoor, convinced all are subject to the drivel between their ears. 

Respect for, deference to, uncritical acceptance of, refraining from pissing with laughter at unprovable and sometimes vicious and unprovable statements and those who propose them do not provide a rational foundation for society.

Which is why they don’t exist.

Right, if we now go back to the bit at the beginning.  If you can demand I express myself only in terms acceptable to you, why can I not demand you express yourself only in terms acceptable to me.   What is the difference between us, other than you have power and you think you have Truth.  But there is no foundation to your belief you have Truth, so your case rests solely on power.

And that fart Khomeini, what was with him, he was exercising free speech.  How come only he could freely state what he thought and felt?  What is with you farts?  Tell you what, we can all take it in turns, stick a pin in the phone directory.  Every day someone different is King and God and Law and he or she gets to dictate to everyone else.  

The carapace of self is of course impenetrable, the absolute assumption of illusional authority, superiority, the absolute assumption of command by Broadmoor cases.  Humans have invented countless gods.  I should imagine that most of those countless gods can find at least one fan in the UK and the US put together, both indeed plural and diverse societies; granted the UK alone possibly can’t come up with followers of the old religions of the American continent.  This one true god of theirs is used to being top dog and really does have to learn to play nicely with all the other children in the playground, not be school-bully. 

The reductionist stares myopically at the world and fumbles for the territorial imperatives of the fruit-fly to guide his or her understanding. If a chimp can't do it, it's a Christian superstition. The individual characteristics of honesty, reliability, intellect, verbal dexterity are annulled by biological equality. They are illusion, superstition. Only grubbing around on the forest-floor is real. Words cause friction, words impede the New World Order. The rudiments of language are required only for appeasement displays and the chest-beating of the head monkey.
Where there is no human capacity to redo the wiring, there is no liberty. Where there is no liberty, there is no responsibility - if you are not free to choose you cannot fairly be held to account for your actions. Scientific fundies deconstruct the West with their 'practical man's' contempt for all that makes us human. Can you synthesize a word? Can you grow an idea? Arf, arf, we are all good practical men here. Man is the tool-making ape. Education consists in learning to wield tools, a technical training. No training of the mind can take place because the mind does not exist. Since mind doesn't exist, 6000 years of its coping with the illusorily complex business of being human are meaningless. The only reality is the PPO and the particular head of your monkey-troop, the god meme being a particular threat. (Since the primate genetic reflex shuts off questioning the head monkey, s/he becomes endowed with qualities such as omniscience, omnipotence, goodness - hence of course the god meme itself.) Since mind etc etc, the new high priests are endowed with understanding of the entirety of the human condition via a grasp of cell biology. Those who have received a technical training are superior to those who can think, because of course learning to think, to analyse arguments, doesn't actually exist. There are no internal differences between individuals in ability (or volition, desire to learn). Some have had tool-wielding pasted onto their exteriors, others not.

To our new professionals, therefore, aggressively anti-intellectual, ignorant of history and ideas, semi-literate, unable to develop or handle argument, only might is right. They are at once thuggish and vulnerable to any demagogue proffering 'the real truth': the tenets of liberal democracy are meaningless to them. They want good jobs. That is laudable, but why should a vocational training certificate be called a degree? Mind stands in the way of slavery and so it had to go, as did the not-so-traditional university, the university of the Enlightenment as a citadel of mind and free thought.

Naturally decision-making passed by accident into the hands of ignorant semi-literates programmed to beat up any supposed fascist who accurately describes them.

I think I shall rewrite this.  It will amuse me to bring it up to date with the names of current politicians. Think I might add a couple of verses giving more detail about the bishops, lawyers, peers and spies. 

As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the Sea
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.
II
I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:
III
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.
IV
Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.
V
And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.
VI
Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.
VII
And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.
VIII
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.
IX
And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw -
'I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!'
X
With a pace stately and fast,
Over English land he passed,
Trampling to a mire of blood
The adoring multitude,
XI
And a mighty troop around,
With their trampling shook the ground,
Waving each a bloody sword,
For the service of their Lord.
XII
And with glorious triumph, they
Rode through England proud and gay,
Drunk as with intoxication
Of the wine of desolation.
XIII
O'er fields and towns, from sea to sea,
Passed the Pageant swift and free,
Tearing up, and trampling down;
Till they came to London town.
XIV
And each dweller, panic-stricken,
Felt his heart with terror sicken
Hearing the tempestuous cry
Of the triumph of Anarchy.
XV
For with pomp to meet him came,
Clothed in arms like blood and flame,
The hired murderers, who did sing
'Thou art God, and Law, and King.
XVI
'We have waited, weak and lone
For thy coming, Mighty One!
Our purses are empty, our swords are cold,
Give us glory, and blood, and gold.'
XVII
Lawyers and priests, a motley crowd,
To the earth their pale brows bowed;
Like a bad prayer not over loud
Whispering - 'Thou art Law and God.' -
XVIII
Then all cried with one accord,
'Thou art King, and God and Lord;
Anarchy, to thee we bow,
Be thy name made holy now!'
XIX
And Anarchy, the Skeleton,
Bowed and grinned to every one,
As well as if his education
Had cost ten millions to the nation.
XX
For he knew the Palaces
Of our Kings were rightly his;
His the sceptre, crown and globe,
And the gold-inwoven robe.
XXI
So he sent his slaves before
To seize upon the Bank and Tower,
And was proceeding with intent
To meet his pensioned Parliament
XXII
When one fled past, a maniac maid,
And her name was Hope, she said:
But she looked more like Despair,
And she cried out in the air:
XXIII
'My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!
XXIV
‘He has had child after child,
And the dust of death is piled
Over every one but me -
Misery, oh, Misery!'
XXV
Then she lay down in the street,
Right before the horses' feet,
Expecting, with a patient eye,
Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy.
XXVI
When between her and her foes
A mist, a light, an image rose,
Small at first, and weak and frail
Like the vapour of a vale:
XXVII
Till as clouds grow on the blast,
Like tower-crowned giants striding fast,
And glare with lightnings as they fly,
And speak in thunder to the sky
XXVIII
It grew - a Shape arrayed in mail
Brighter than the viper's scale,
And upborne on wings whose grain
Was as the light of sunny rain.
XXIX
On its helm, seen far away,
A planet, like the Morning's, lay;
And those plumes its light rained through
Like a shower of crimson dew.
XXX
With step as soft as wind it passed,
O'er the heads of men - so fast
That they knew the presence there,
And looked, - but all was empty air.
XXXI
As flowers beneath May's footstep waken,
As stars from Night's loose hair are shaken,
As waves arise when loud winds call,
Thoughts sprung where'er that step did fall.
XXXII
And the prostrate multitude
Looked - and ankle-deep in blood,
Hope, that maiden most serene,
Was walking with a quiet mien:
XXXIII
And Anarchy, the ghastly birth,
Lay dead earth upon the earth;
The Horse of Death tameless as wind
Fled, and with his hoofs did grind
To dust the murderers thronged behind.