of course, we think of the Romans as this civilising force because we’re a product of the Romans. They were barbaric brutes who crucified their enemies and got the popcorn out for prisoners being mauled by lions and bears. Similarly, we think of the corporate US as a democratising, civilising force because we grew up under its cultural occupation and have internalised its values.
There are the literal meanings of words and then there are the doctrinal meanings. The doctrinal meanings are what things are understood to mean within the system and are often different from literal meanings. So, for example, ‘terrorism’ literally means something done to terrorise the general population. Yet Britain and the US terrorise civilians every day with drone strikes and so forth, but we don’t call this ‘terrorism’. The doctrinal meaning of ‘terrorism’ is that it only includes acts against us, not by us – a pretty important shift of meaning.
I saw this recently when the comedian Stewart Lee wrote an article titled ‘Where are all the right-wing stand-ups?’ Lee’s career since he got his own show is a bit like that episode where Father Ted gets an award and uses his speech to bitterly settle scores with everyone he’s ever met. Anyway, it’s interesting doctrinally, and interesting to me because Lee dismisses the idea that I’m a left-wing comedian. He wrote, ‘The Daily Mail inexplicably demonises Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle as “politically correct left-wingers”, yet to sensitive souls they appear callous, apolitical nihilists’, but at the end of the same paragraph he concludes I’m ‘too likely to be bluntly anti-war or pro-Palestinian to help Radio 4 out of its Trotskyite ghetto’. Of course, he’s absolutely right in strictly doctrinal terms because doctrinally ‘left-wing comedian’ means ‘a middle-class person concerned about social issues’. These will typically be people talking against the coalition, cuts and so on, but who generally draw the line at being bluntly anti-war or pro-Palestine.
Of course, to people outside a doctrinal system these things can look very strange. You’d have to explain to them that Stewart Lee – an Oxbridge graduate with a militant anti-piracy stance who appears on BBC Two punching up at the big targets of the day, such as the autobiography of Chris Moyles, mild-mannered comic Russell Howard and the ugliness of Adrian Chiles – is in fact a political comic. Someone like me, who was described by the Daily Mirror as a ‘racist comedian’ after a career of telling anti-racist, anti-war jokes, who took the newspaper to court and used the damages to help a Guantanamo Bay prisoner sue MI6 for defamation – I’m apolitical.
That’s the real reason doctrinal thinking is encouraged: it fosters an ability to be deeply irrational. Possessing the moral agility required to say that blowing up civilians with flying bombs is not ‘terrorism’, or even simply to call Paddy McGuinness a ‘comedian’, is tremendously useful to a society like ours. Because we don’t really need commentators to explain or reason; we need them to justify.
Of course, you’re welcome to take Stewart Lee’s view that the best place to criticise the behaviour of a crocodile is from inside its belly, perhaps in the hope that some day you will be so counter-cultural and innately radical that you’ll be given your own show on BBC Two and the opportunity to edit Radio 4’s Today programme. I’d argue that would never happen with a genuinely left-wing comedian who thought outside of the doctrinal system. Someone like Bill Hicks or George Carlin would have raised too many awkward questions. For a start, they’d have written an article titled ‘Where are all the left-wing stand-ups?’
As soon as you enter into something doctrinally important, language becomes charged and contested. In Iraq, troops fighting the US were called ‘insurgents’ in the BBC coverage. That’s quite an important choice of word, as an insurgency is something that happens against a legitimate government rather than, say, an occupying foreign army. In Libya, the troops trying to overthrow Gaddafi were referred to on the BBC as ‘activists’. Like they were the sort of people who’d get a petition up about him, rather than publicly sodomise him to death. The doctrinal importance of attacks on American soil is semi-religious. Blood spilled in the Temple. The Boston bombers got the same publicity they’d have achieved by attacking the Kabul Marathon with a dinosaur.
The modern doctrinal era begins with the destruction of the World Trade Center. The Americans, in an understand-able rage at the half-million dollar cost of the attack being funded by Saudi Arabia and carried out largely by Saudi Arabians, invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s good to remember that in years to come this whole period we’re living through will be written off in a couple of sentences under the heading ‘The Oil Wars’. ‘Britain over-reached itself in the Oil Wars, was destroyed, and became Sexcamp 3 for Workers of Shanghai MegaProvince’, the history books will read, as they sit in a petrol-soaked pyramid waiting to be lit as a warning signal to the Lastmen of the Garbagecities that their enemies the Crabmen have begun their final sideways march out of the sea.
Defence Secretary Philip Hammond said we should be proud of what we’ve done to promote peace in Afghanistan. He plans to visit soon; he’s just waiting till they’ve found a full Kevlar bodysuit in his size. We went into Afghanistan to get bin Laden and our mission there is more important than ever, now that we killed him, quite a while ago, in Pakistan.
The US is to open direct peace talks with the Taliban after more than a decade of war. Good to see the US has only waited twelve years and the loss thousands of lives before resorting to ‘speaking’ to them. The meeting will take place at the Taliban’s new office in Doha – I like the fact they’re opening new branches, so long as it doesn’t get like Starbucks where you’ve got a Taliban on every high street. I wonder why they need an office – perhaps they’re branching out and are going to start dealing with both insurgencies and van hire. I bet it’ll be another call centre – we’ll be plagued by the Taliban ringing up to ask if we need replacement windows or do we want to wait until after the car bombing?
There was outrage when burnt Korans were found at a NATO base in Afghanistan. They’d only been partially burnt. That’s because the book on how to maintain a bonfire had been burnt the week before, on a bonfire of books about codes of conduct in sensitive areas. US soldiers don’t understand why the word of the Koran should be precious, as most of the Christian beliefs they hold bear no relation to the literal word of the Bible.
It’s thought Afghan soldiers were passing pencilled notes to each other inside the books they take with them to battle. US soldiers could never do that; it’s hard to get pencil to show up on a cum-stained computer game. It’s been said that because some people have burnt Bibles it’s OK for troops to burn Korans. I’ll take that as giving me permission to restart my culling of Britain’s bouncers. The books were burnt because stuff was written in the margins that the soldiers didn’t understand. A translator is only $4 an hour, but they thought they’d take advantage of the spoils of war and splash out on a whole can of kerosene.
Can you believe it’s over ten years since we brought freedom to the Iraqi people? The freedom to choose exactly who shoots and tortures them. Tony Blair says he’s given up trying to tell people his decision to go to war was right. Instead he tells them it was ‘complex and difficult’. In the way that lying is often more complex and difficult than telling the truth. An angry protester breached security at the Leveson Inquiry to call Tony Blair a ‘war criminal’. Blair could easily stop people thinking of him as a war criminal. He just needs to have sex with a goat.
• • •
So, Abu Qatada has finally gone. Mrs Qatada should move in with Mrs Hamza. As both their husbands are now inside that would basically give us an Islamic fundamentalist version of Birds of a Feather . . . Dorien comes round boasting that she’s shagging the gardener and gets stoned to death. We’d all watch that.
Abu Qatada seemed to vary between being free and occasionally going back to jail, where either he would stay, be released or, ultimately, be deported. To truly get to grips with the twists and turns in that story what I did was every time Theresa
