Murdering Americans

by Ruth Edwards

  ‘At Freeman U, we reject the dominant cultural narrative that has indoctrinated society with the idea that white is better than black, that male is better than female and that abled is better than differently abled. And as a wise, deaf parent said to me recently, “How dare anyone say I was wrong to want my child born deaf. Or that I should want her deafness fixed. It’s not an affliction. It’s an identity.”

  ‘And how dare too anyone suggest that being American is better than anything else. Here at Freeman U, we are learning that—as Emma Goldman said—“Patriotism is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods.”’

  She looked slowly around the audience from the left to the right and the front—where the academics were sitting—to the back, and returned to her rather laboured reading. ‘When we have truly abandoned patriotism for the superstition it is, we will learn the truth of what Muriel Lester, the Mother of World Peace, said many years ago: that “war is as outmoded as cannibalism, chattel slavery, blood-feuds, and duelling…an insult to humanity.” It is our minorities who will teach us that.

  ‘There’s much more that I long to say to you, but I must stop now and introduce our Distinguished Visiting Professors from England, radicals all. Do you know what Angela Davis said about radicals? She said that radical simply means “grasping things at the root.” We are privileged to welcome to New Paddington four people who in their own country are a byword for radicalism. They are the kind of people that change the world. People you can learn from.

  ‘I’m going to ask them to tell you who they are and why they care and then I’m going to open proceedings to questions from the floor.’

  She turned to her left. ‘Lady Darlington. Tell us about yourself.’

  ***

  The true facts about Constance Darlington were that she had been head girl of one of the best girls’ grammar schools in England, had read law at Oxford, where—under the influence of a mesmeric lecturer—she had become a Trotskyite, had spent many weekends protesting noisily against the Vietnam war, had gone after graduation to work for the civil liberties lobby, and had been a fervently left-wing member of the Labour Party.

  In her thirties, married to a prosperous barrister and with two children and a nanny, Constance was elected to the local council, where she became a shrill voice for levelling down. She opposed the sale of council houses to tenants, as chairwoman of the education committee she fought against any selection for and in schools, and she made much headway in ensuring that non-English speaking children could be taught and take exams in their own languages—at serious detriment to their futures and vast expense to the taxpayer. Her own house being in a prosperous, middle-class area with excellent state schools (the only immigrants in the neighbourhood were doctors), her children were unaffected by her reforms. They did well at school, and with the help of private tutors, were sufficiently academically successful to win places respectively at Oxford and Cambridge, institutions which their mother campaigned to have closed to all but the products of state schools.

  Constance saw racists under every bed and insisted on the introduction of politically correct language to all council communications. It was she who caused much merriment in the media when reported to have objected on a school visit to infants being taught ‘Baa baa, black sheep’: although this was later alleged to be an urban myth and in her later incarnation Constance denied it, it did actually happen. In the mid-1980s, as leader of a council that was now flying the Red Flag over its headquarters, she easily won the nomination to stand in the by-election after the local MP died suddenly.

  Constance’s metamorphosis into the archetypal power-dressed, obedient, New Labour woman was swift. She would become one of Tony Blair’s most trusted acolytes, prepared to defend everything she had opposed in her youth: educational selection, private investment in hospitals, the authoritarian assault on civil liberties in the name of security, and the invasion of Iraq were justified by her in that prissy, reasonable tone that drove so many crazy.

  It was a bitter disappointment to her when she lost her seat in the 2004 general election. She had been promised the Cabinet portfolio of Culture (a natural choice, since she despised opera, classical music, and anything else remotely elitist), but now she had to make do with becoming a peer and a Lords spokesman on constitutional reform. Even that junior ministry was taken from her when the Cabinet minister to whom she reported and whom she had hitherto outranked, decided that she was a patronising bitch and insisted she be sacked.

  Constance being Constance, in telling the audience of herself she spoke in impenetrable New Labourese about a life-long commitment to radicalism, by which she explained she meant modernisation, which meant helping the young welcome challenge, seize opportunities, and feel a connection with their government. In these difficult times, what mattered most was ‘the fostering of a culture of respect in a diverse society.’

  She was extremely dull. Even though she spoke for under five minutes, the audience had stopped listening and the baroness, slightly regretting the third glass of wine at lunchtime, was fighting off sleep. The applause was polite.

  Rowland Cunningham wasn’t much better. An indifferent academic historian based in a university in the Midlands, in the early 1980s he had spotted a niche in the field of peace and conflict studies. Noting that owing to competition from ferociously learned and often belligerent military historians, studying conflict was much tougher than studying peace, he had elected to work on burgeoning peace processes. Being both timid and lazy, he had selected Northern Ireland as his specialism, for everyone there spoke English, it was less than an hour by plane from London, it was possible to stay well away from the danger areas, and as long as he was unremittingly pious, talked a lot about inclusivity, and always ended on a positive note, there were innumerable invitations forthcoming to make speeches, give lectures, and attend conferences in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

  In recent years Cunningham had branched out into comparing the Northern Ireland peace process with its South African equivalent, which provided the opportunity for several lucrative trips to the sun; he kept well away from violent Johannesburg because of his terror of getting hurt. He made contacts rather than friends, but as he tried hard to avoid being controversial, he made few important enemies, yet many unimportant people hated him because he had an extremely bad temper which he took out on them. He had been given a rich reward for having written a few articles in glowing support of government initiatives on Northern Ireland by being given a peerage for services to peace.

  What he told the Freeman audience in his sententious way made it seem as if he’d been anti-war and internationalist from the cradle. His platitudes were different from Constance Darlington’s, but they were just as platitudinous. The baroness’s chin dropped to her chest and she slept. Cunningham finished by saying that a lifetime dedicated to helping bring peace to the world had taught him how right Winston Churchill was to say ‘Jaw-jaw is always better than war-war.’ The mention of Churchill’s name jerked the baroness awake. She noticed Betsy was looking puzzled and hoped it didn’t mean she’d never heard of Churchill.

  The applause was perfunctory, but Jimmy Rawlings soon woke everyone up. ‘I don’t want to be called Jimmy Rawlings, brothers and sisters,’ he announced. ‘I want to be called Mujaahid, which means a fighter for Allah, not a fighter exploited by boxing promoters. Just like the great Muhammad Ali, brothers and sisters, I saw the light and gave myself to Allah.’ There was a wild cheer from the back.

  A retired boxer who had discovered that rabble-rousing was more lucrative than commenting on his old sport, Rawlings told a compelling if somewhat exaggerated story of a poverty-stricken upbringing in Bristol as the child of a white mother and a Nigerian father who had disappeared as soon as he was told of the pregnancy—never to return. Rawlings looked back on this time and realised it was the pain of living in a racist society that had driven his father away. He spoke eloquently of discrimin
ation and bullying and the hurt of knowing his home town had been central to the slave trade. He talked of how he learned to stand up for himself with his fists, and how he got into trouble with teachers. And then he told of the man who had seen him fighting another boy in the street and who had offered to teach them both to box.

  Rawlings had become a British champion, and had come close to winning a world title, but he put down his failure to go all the way to a lack of spiritual depth, which made him seek refuge in drink and drugs and promiscuity. But then he had discovered Islam, the radical answer to war and discrimination and all manner of bad things.

  For a long time, he explained, he had continued to be Jimmy Rawlings, but recently, seeing the suffering and exclusion in Britain of his co-religionists, for no reason except that they had a faith about which they cared, he had decided to change his name to show where his loyalties lay. ‘I am no longer British. I am a Muslim. I am not Jimmy. I am Mujaahid. My loyalties are with my brothers fighting in the resistance against imperialist bullying. The West must pay for its past sins.’

  The audience was split. The faculty applauded enthusiastically and at length, as did a minority of the white students and a majority of the black. There were no Asians in the audience: Marjorie had explained that they dominated the faculties of science, engineering, and computing and left those in the humanities to get on with it.

  ‘Thank you, thank you, Mujaahid,’ said a tremulous Diane Pappas-Lott. ‘We are very moved. Now, will you share your narrative with us, Lady Troutbeck?’

  ‘I’m the odd one out,’ grunted the baroness. ‘I’m neither a victim nor an idealist. I run a college where people are expected to read and to think, and in politics I try to stop the barbarians taking over and destroying the traditions that made my country a force for good all over the world. Unlike Mr. Rawlings, who appears to have elected to become a traitor, I am a patriot.

  ‘I accept the label of radical, but I’m a conservative radical. The roots I am grasping with intent to destroy them are the shallow, poisonous roots that produce the shoots of self-pity, moral relativism, and intellectual dishonesty. I believe in intellectual rigour and robust debate, with no quarter given and no offence taken. I am in favour of diversity, but by that I mean diversity of thought, not of lobby-groups competing to win the victim-stakes.’ She folded her arms and glared at the audience. As Dean Pappas-Lott looked at her in horror, about half the student body began to cheer.

  Chapter Eight

  ‘So how did it go?’ asked Mary Lou. ‘Are they going to run you out of town?’

  ‘It was odd.’

  ‘In what sense odd?’

  ‘Just odd.’

  ‘Jack, if you don’t give me a coherent account, I’m going to ring off this very minute. I have enough interviewing to do professionally without having to drag information out of you.’

  ‘Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Whoo!’ contributed Horace.

  ‘Whoo! Whoo! Wah! Wah! Whoo! Whoo! Wah! Wah!’ shouted the baroness. ‘Horace is getting very absent-minded, Mary Lou. He’s consistently forgetting half his lines.’

  ‘Wah! Wah! Wah! Wah!’

  ‘No, Horace. Whoo! Whoo! Wah! Wah! Whoo! Whoo! Wah! Wah!’

  ‘Jack! I really don’t have time to listen to parrot remedial class. Get on with it.’

  ‘All right. All right. I’ll cover him up.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, when she returned. ‘We had to introduce ourselves. Constance Darlington produced a lot of balls-aching New Labour guff, Rowley Cunningham was dreary about peace, Jimmy Rawlings projected himself as a victim who had embraced Islam because it can solve the world’s problems without conflict although since the world won’t come quietly he and his oppressed brothers have no option but to use violence. Oh, and now he’s calling himself Mujaahid, which means he kills for Allah or something similar. For the very best of reasons, of course.’

  ‘Including our safety and convenience, no doubt. And you?’

  ‘What you might expect. I called for intellectual rigour and criticised their idea of diversity.’

  ‘What was the reaction?’

  ‘Odd.’

  ‘How do you mean “odd”?’

  ‘Just odd.’

  ‘Jack!’

  ‘I don’t think anyone gave a damn about Constance or Rowley. No one asked them any questions, except for an enterprising lad who asked Rowley—a propos his quoting Churchill approvingly about jaw-jaw and war-war—if that meant Churchill had been wrong to fight Hitler. Rowley yammered about how if they’d got the jaw-jaw right at the Treaty of Versailles there wouldn’t have been a second world war to fight, but since most of them hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, he lost them. The lad attempted a follow-up question, but the dean told him he mustn’t hog the floor.

  ‘There were plenty wanting to ask me and the benighted Rawlings questions. I’d expected him to be popular, but I was surprised I’d had so much applause, though Marjorie wasn’t. She’d told me the students are getting increasingly conservative but I hadn’t thought it possible because of the way they dress and eat.’

  ‘Dubya wears lumberjack shirts and eats hamburgers.’

  ‘Yes. And look how unsound he’s been on free trade and public spending.’

  ‘Get on with the story, Jack. What did they ask?’

  ‘Rawlings was asked what he thought about 9/11.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘You certainly couldn’t accuse him of pussy-footing. He said he’d have been in favour of it had it been perpetrated by his Muslim brothers, but in fact it was the work of Mossad and the CIA, which was obvious since no Jews turned up to work that day, so he was against it as he’s against everything produced by the global Zionist conspiracy.’

  ‘Reaction?’

  ‘A few boos, otherwise muted apart from a crowd of fans at the back and some staff at the front, but then another student asked him if he agreed with someone called Ward Churchill when he described the Twin Tower victims as ‘“little Eichmanns.” He most certainly did agree, said Rawlings, as they were undoubtedly servants of Islamophobic capitalism. There were a lot more boos than cheers this time, but Dean Pappas-Lott told them to shut up as Freeman University was a temple of free speech, and everyone could say what they liked, so Rawlings produced a few more minutes of unfettered, nutty incendiary Islamobabble.

  ‘Hang on a minute. I’m going to pour myself another drink. You’ll be pleased to hear Stefano has found a brand of unsweetened tonic so I can have gin again.’

  She returned, happily smacking her lips. ‘That’s better. Have you ever heard of Ward Churchill?’

  ‘A fraudulent anti-Semitic academic, isn’t he?’

  ‘Marjorie tells me he’s a Professor of Ethnic Studies who went a long way by falsely claiming to be a Red Indian but is now in trouble because he’s been proved to be a plagiarist as well as a raving lunatic. I didn’t know that at the time but I pointed out that only barking bigots denied that several hundred Jews had died on 9/11. I had a go at Rawlings and Muslims in general for being anti-Semites and then denounced all those Islamists world-wide who spread hideous anti-Jewish propaganda, upon which a faculty member jumped up to support Rawlings on the grounds that Jews were the imperialists of the Middle East. I said some things never changed and sang them a verse from that 1960s Tom Lehrer song about the asinine National Brotherhood Week.’

  ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,’ sang the baroness, ‘And the Catholics hate the Protestants/And the Hindus hate the Muslims/And everybody hates the Jews.’

  ‘I hope Lehrer sang it better than that.’

  The baroness ignored her. ‘So I followed by asking why you could rubbish Jews but not Muslims and there was a bit of a brawl.’

  ‘How do you mean brawl?’

  ‘A few professors came in to denounce Israel. Turns out that like that crowd of academic Jew-haters back home, they’re agitating for the boycotting of Israeli academics unless they
explicitly reject Zionism. So I asked them if they’d extend that to a boycott of any Muslim academics who didn’t explicitly condemn Islamic terrorism, which, I pointed out, was a rather bigger sin than the Zionist one of wanting Israel to stay in existence. They got excited.’ She snorted. ‘Academics! Even the ones I love, I hate.’

  ‘I know what you mean. What happened then?’

  ‘Rawlings got excited. A lot of people got excited. You might say the air was thick with impotent expostulation. Rawlings said all non-Muslims were infidels. I said that in many parts of the world Islam was a primitive and cruel religion which treated women and homosexuals appallingly and that if it wanted respect it was about time it caught up with the Enlightenment, endorsed the concept of freedom of speech, and stopped trying to murder people because they said boo to Mohammed. I also said that even though I was an atheist, I thought Christianity was a vastly superior religion and Western civilisation way ahead of anything Islam had to offer these days, even if it was getting far too touchy-feely-weepy-waily. “When the chips are down,” I asked the audience, “do you want freedom or theocratic barbarism?”’

  ‘Wow!’

  ‘So Rawlings said I was a wicked, white, decadent, Islamophobe, which wasn’t universally popular, judging by the boos. I must say, academic politics here certainly seems livelier than what we have at home.’

  ‘Get on with it, Jack. What questions did the students ask you?’

  ‘What I thought about diversity studies.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘What you might expect. I said that women’s studies, black studies, queer studies and all the rest of diversity studies were bogus disciplines designed by fifth-rate academics to politicise the humanities and institutionalise a complex system of apartheid in universities. Whenever anything is called studies, I pointed out, there’s very little study involved.’