The strange case of Kevin Myers: when victims kiss the feet of their tormentors

Yesterday I did something I don’t usually do: listened to a James Delingpole broadcast. Listen to it here (link).

Delingpole is what passes for edgy within the ranks of mainstream British conservatism: a posho who was best mates with David Cameron at uni, but likes to flaunt his rebel credentials by making jokes about “political correctness gone mad” or pointing out that the Arctic ice sheet doesn’t seem to have melted as much as some people predicted.

Here he is interviewing Kevin Myers, an Irish journalist who had his life destroyed a few months ago (link) after publishing a column containing a reference to Jews that could have been construed as slightly unflattering but was, in fact, a backhand form of praise.

I note that two of the best-paid women presenters in the BBC — Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz, with whose, no doubt, sterling work I am tragically unacquainted — are Jewish. Good for them. Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity.

The column was published in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times, which, I would imagine, does not have a very large readership, particularly at 3 o’clock on a Sunday morning. And according to a recent report, there are only 2500 Jews in Ireland. Nevertheless, within hours of his column being published, Myers’ career as a journalist had come to an end. “You will never write for this paper again,” he was told.

The primary interest of the podcast is that it provides more details of the case. In the middle of the night, Jews were already scouring through his old columns from the 1980s and even his memoir, looking for phrases and sentences they could twist out of context to make him look like an antisemite and trash his reputation, something they did with great success.

Its secondary interest lies in the pathetic display of submissiveness to Jews that both Delingpole and Myers continue to display. It shows us how deep the brainwashing is when even the victim of a monstrous injustice goes out of his way to defend the perpetrators of that injustice. And even to insist that they are not the perpetrators. According to Delingpole and Myers, it was SJWs who were to blame, not Jews.

Myers emphasises his philosemitic credentials, boasts of how many times he discussed the Holocaust in his previous columns; his support for Israel; his seal of approval from local Jews and the Israeli ambassador; none of which counted for anything. He even, absurdly, accuses his accusers of antisemitism – because they refused to accept the assurances of local Jews that he wasn’t an antisemite. Refusing to blindly accept whatever Jews say now apparently constitutes antisemitism.

Myers, unfortunately, and tragically, because his tragedy is the tragedy of our dying civilisation, reveals himself to be little or no better than his tormentors.

“I do believe in free speech, right up to the point but no further, not beyond the point where you’re inciting hatred.”

Once you’ve conceded that principle, you’ve legitimated your own persecution. All you have left is an ever-shifting, indistinct boundary around what constitutes “inciting hatred”.

Myers castigates the “far right”, clearly still convinced that “antisemitism” is a blind, unreasoning hatred. It apparently does not occur to him that it is awareness of such injustices, such tyrannical conduct, such contempt for objective truth, and their ever-present obsession with controlling what other people are allowed to say, that caused us to become antisemites in the first place.

Myers has been subjected to “The Ban” (herem), his life and reputation destroyed by the people to whom he offered his obeisance. He can’t understand the unfairness of it all. He doesn’t see that it is precisely through unfairness that tyranny is enforced. If people are destroyed for minor peccadilloes or for nothing at all, it creates a terror environment that intimidates everyone. For every Kevin Myers ruined for a trivially disparaging reference to Jews, there will be a thousand cowed journalists who stay away from the subject altogether in future. That is the method of tyranny – the tyranny we all live under – the tyranny of having an unsympathetic or actively hostile alien tribe deciding what we are allowed or not allowed to say in our public discourse.