Griffin and Irving at the Oxford Union

Oxford Unite Against Fascism, Oxford University Student Union, Oxford & District Trades Council, Oxford University Labour Club, Oxfordshire UNISON Health, Oxford Brookes University Unison branch and Unite Against Fascism have called a peaceful demonstration against fascist BNP leader Nick Griffin and Holocaust denier David Irving who are due to speak in the free speech form [sic] on Monday 26th November at the Oxford Union.

... Fascism threatens the safety of Black, Jewish, Muslim, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people of Oxford including students and academics. Wherever fascists are active or have a presence, racist attacks and other hate crimes increase.

For transport/coach details, please contact National UAF office ...

So ran the instructions to the thousand freaks, self-haters, simple minds and Jewish and “BEM” activists who screamed and occasionally became violent outside the Oxford Union Free Speech Forum last night.  How far we have come from the “rainbow coalition” invented by Ken Livingstone in his GLC administration of the early 80s.  Now the heir to this poisonous confection dictates acceptable speech and even debate about acceptable speech.

Anyhow, let’s get a flavour of what it was like inside the building.

Simon Darby of the BNP managed to record part of Nick Griffin’s speech - albeit, apparently, by employing technology no more effective than the wax disc.  You can hear it, complete with the baying mob without, and a heartening round of applause from Griffin’s audience to finish, here.

Griffin spoke in a separate room from Irving, who was in the main debating chamber.  The mob had made it impossible for some of the ticket-holders to access the latter.  So the police, who don’t seem to have been especially effective, ushered them to another room.  The speakers were split accordingly.

Irving’s account of his experience is posted at his Action Report.  But here’s the relevant passage:-

So at last, after thirty years, at around nine-fifteen p.m., I step onto the large open space in front of the large audience in the main debating chamber of the Oxford Union. I apologise that they have been kept waiting so long, but I have also been kept waiting, thirty years, for this moment: seven times the O.U. has invited me to speak, and seven times the invitation has been withdrawn, most recently under the presidency of Amy Harland, who kept strong until twenty-four hours from the date, and was then forced to cancel.

The chanting from outside continues, but the audience can hear every word I say.

Luke Tryl’s strictures on my planned opening have partly skewed my mentally prepared speech. I find myself fumbling my overture (“I am D J C Irving—D for despicable, as the Oxford Student wrote; J for Jew-hater; C for—well, I don’t know what, but equally untrue”). But within seconds I am into my stride as I set out the main points: the importance of the written word, The Book—I cite the case of Miklos Vásárhelyi, who was moved by reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm, as he told me, to risk his life and the well-being of his family to join the anti-Soviet uprising in Budapest in 1956 and become one of the doomed prime minister Imre Nagy’s revolutionary ministers; and from that I move to the need to protect every author’s freedom to research, write, print, publish, and distribute what he finds.

I remind the audience of the coachloads of demonstrators they have had to make their way through this evening: “Who pays for the coaches! Those things don’t come cheap.”

Tryl is still nervous. He asks me at one point to keep to the theme (I am explaining briefly what it is in Hitler’s War and Churchill’s War that the traditional enemy are anxious to suppress: the proven revelation that in 1940 Britain was never seriously at risk of Nazi invasion, that we bankrupted the Empire for no real reason, that our journey was “not really necessary” to use war-poster language: and that Winston Churchill and his gang maintained the “Nazi invasion” scare for their own personal reasons of power politics.)

I sit down to total silence, which is disconcerting. It reminds me of David Frost’s tactic on his television shows in the 1960s and 1970s: his audiences were instructed by an illuminated sign SILENCE - NO APPLAUSE at the appropriate times. I can’t see one here, though.

The Q&A session is scarcely interesting, so I will skip that.

Speak then, you vile man

Luke Tryl - a name of Ukrainian origin, Irving is at pains to tell us - is the President of the Oxford Union, and the prime-mover in inviting Griffin and Irving to address the Union.  He took pains to distance himself morally from these two untermenschen.  Likewise, as the Forum neared, the mainstream media has gorged at every opportunity on the “thuggishness” of Griffin and on his prosecution in 1998 for saying something or other about The Big H.  Irving, of course, was that “discredited” historian and, sin of sins, Holocaust denier.  Among men of the (always, “far”) right, reputations are only ever broken, and persons only ever disreputable.  The moral inflation of the mainstream political commentator is as absurd as it is ubiquitous, of course.  But faux-morality and the liberal mind are inseparable.

With the exception of Peter Tatchell, there was uniform agreement with Luke the Uke’s assertion that in a free society untermenschen should not be banned from making their vile arguments, but these should be roundly defeated by much “better arguments”.  Liberal arguments.  Luke’s arguments and Libby Purves’ arguments.  So even the granting of public speech to the untermenschen is a cause for yet more moral inflation.

Thus we see that the moral context which has been applied everywhere to these two men’s views - a mechanical and ritualistic delegitimisation - rules out a priori any possibility of them having genuine free speech.

That possibility only enters with the understanding that the English (and in Irving’s case dead Germans) have the same natural rights and interests as any other people.  Actually listening to the advocacy of those rights and interests is a revolutionary act in the liberal zeitgeist.  It turns everything upside down.  Now one must consider the racism of those who do not tolerate English or German rights and interests.  One must consider the whole meaning and drift of liberalism, the nature of democracy and the political class - left and right - and the greater political and demographic purpose of post-War immigration.

On the heels of these new considerations come many matters which, hitherto, have been automatically settled only one way.  Indeed, what was moral becomes less moral and what was tolerant becomes intolerant, and vica versa.

At this point, and only this point, is hearing unfettered enough to render free-speech meaningful, and a true social deliverance from bias and prejudice.

The applause at the end of Griffin’s speech does suggest that at least some of that bias and prejudice is lifting.  The mainstream media will likely be one of the last places that happens.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 at 07:27 PM in Free Speech
Comments (4) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Next entry: The Story of O

Previous entry: Republican Political Suicide Starts With County Chairs