Hurry to the newstands to get your edition of this week’s Spectator Australia, which contains “High Life” columnist Taki’s stirring endorsement of … Golden Dawn, the Greek fascist party. Here’s the endorsement from the UK/Australia’s leading conservative magazine:
“Golden Dawn came into being because of PC, poor Greeks at times getting fewer benefits than African illegal immigrants. Then GD became very popular with certain poor Greeks while it defended them from being mugged by Albanian criminals and drug dealers, and for safeguarding older folk after bank withdrawals. No, Golden Dawn is not house-trained, and many of its members tend to use rough language and get physical. None of them went to Eton, and none of their parents was my playmate when I was a child. But if they were lefties and railed against capitalism they would be treated like heroes, the way Bono, Bianca Jagger and other such untalented rappers and phonies are. Golden Dawn members might need some lessons in social etiquette, but what the bien pensant need much more is to get off the pot and their double standards. Golden Dawn members are mostly labourers, martial artists, cops, security personnel and good old-fashioned patriotic Greeks.”
Yes, the “playing rough” includes axe attacks on migrants and Leftists in the ’90s, vandalism of synagogues, a prominent member jailed for the attempted murder of three political opponents, numerous violent assaults on opponents, and a virulent and obsessive racism and anti-Semitism.
Still, at least someone’s standing up against the liberal elites, Nick Cater-style. UK Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, taking to Twitter, rather pathetically tried to defend publishing the article on the grounds of “diversity”, a bullshit argument. Any editor makes choice; the political right to free speech doesn’t include the right to a platform, or the obligation to lend one, if the opinion is not merely disagreeable, but vile by giving dishonest praise to people with an abhorrent philosophy.
Indeed, Nelson hasn’t always been so willing to encourage diversity — he defended The Spectator’s cancelling of a debate between George Monbiot and Oz moonbat Ian Plimer, after the latter decided to chicken out. The Speccie then ran an evening with Ian Plimer alone, absent all that pesky diversity of opinion. In that respect one of Nelson’s tweets is instructive:
So describing violent fascists as “not polite”, and endorsing them as a possible government for Greece, is on the same level as a disagreement on housing policy? What a wonderful illustration of the Right’s warped moral priorities.
The other interesting aspect of this is the Right’s selective abhorrence of anti-Semitism. Golden Dawn is riddled with literal Nazis, who believe the Jews should have been exterminated — a UK Channel Four embedded journalist had no trouble getting members to talk openly about it on camera. Taki’s endorsement of the party is not his first foray into anti-Semitism, yet the Australian Spectator in particular runs endless articles describing opposition to Israel as “jihadism”, covert anti-Semitism, self-loathing Jews, blah blah blah.
Now such articles run in the same pages as an actual endorsement of neo-Nazis. Will there be any sort of protest from Jewish community peak bodies? Or will they continue to go soft on the Right, because they’re pro-Zionist, even when support for Nazi parties becomes an acceptable opinion in “diverse” Britain? Because that approach worked so well last time.
Australian Spectator editor Tom Switzer — well-known for campaigning for the banning of Italian far Leftist Antonio Negri from speaking in Australia — must be very proud to introduce a magazine with that sort of rancid viewpoint (usually the preserve of upper-class “columnists” in the UK) into Australian life.
Oh dear I often enjoy reading GR and tend to credit him with honesty, albeit honest and consistent bias one has to admit at times. But this piece, to be charitable, is displaying the same symptoms as former lefty Paddy McGuinness once exhibited in his days of greatest output. Writing too much to ever pause and think that one might be better off shutting up.
Not only is Taki’s piece (which you link) nothing like a ringing endorsement of the Golden Dawn, and certainly not as a part of government, Golden Dawn only gets about 20 per cent of his article and the par. is aimed at the hypocrisy and humbug of the left. The idea that Taki would favour a true Nazi party (even in the 30s when, if he were of the right age, his sympathies would probably have been with the snobbish upper class who despised Hitler and his thugs, but, certainly, after the German invasion and occupation of Greece there is not the slightest chance that he would sympathise with Nazis as opposed to a Poujadist or perhaps Pauline Hanonite opposition to his opponents on the bien pensant left as he views them).
You mischaracterise The Spectator. The Australian edition was added to keep Spectator subscribers in Australia, of which there have always been quite a lot, loyal to a rather expensive mag which was obviously going to face the problems of all the print media in a digital age. Taki’s column has little to do with the Australian edition, except that it, together with nearly all the UK edition’s stuff, is printed in it. Certainly its Australian editor would have no say in the matter.
You mightn’t know GR, but The Spectator was probably taken by Australians who enjoyed a suite of overseas mags; e.g. NYRB, LRB, Atlantic, London Review of Books, perhaps Harpers and New Statesmen.
And you certainly haven’t taken time to acquaint or reacquaint yourself with the outrageous Taki’s column any more than you have been fair to the one you quote a small part of. In the case of the Taki column you should be thinking of a long conversation with someone over a dinner table where, especially after plenty of wine, some at least try to provoke as well as entertain. I know respectable people who object to Taki so much they would find it hard to be formally polite to him but, equally, you would surely find something to be said for the co-founder of the outstanding (and outstandingly good value, at least now that it is owned by Ron Unz) The American Conservative. After all, they were against the Iraq war from the outset!
I disagree with Warren’s comment – that the sanctioning of a fascist Golden Dawn takeover of Greece (“we should be so lucky”, don’t forget!) only references them for a paragraph or two is immaterial. Give an inch, take a mile. It’s a dangerous precedent for the next column, and the next. It’s a disgusting abdication of responsibility on the part of the editors.
Now, I tried reading more of the Taki piece and I couldn’t get past just how devoid of actual content it was (besides the author’s faux-self-effacement and smarm), but that’s another matter entirely.
Taki shoots at every corner of the political spectrum using his poor little rich boy theme as the springboard for his attacks.
One thing though..he’s consistently anti Israel, but I would not have described him as anti Jewish.
I buy the Speccie not for the Aussie content, which is so blindly pro Israel as to be absurd, as for the great UK theatre, book & gallery reviews….and for that feeling of walking down Piccadilly on a summers evening when one was resident there.
[Warren Joffe at 3:45 pm
Taki would favour a true Nazi party (even in the 30s when, if he were of the right age, his sympathies would probably have been with the snobbish upper class who despised Hitler and his thugs …]
Gotta laugh. Like Sir Oswald Mosley (6th Baronet) and Lady Diana* (Mitford) getting married in the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels with Adolf Hitler one of the guests! *Diana’s sister Unity was a veritable Hitler groupie. (Turning to Wikipedia to get my Mitford sisters clear, I find the amazing fact that Unity was “conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario.”)
And at the very top of the whole British aristocratic pyramid, well, we won’t even mention the sympathies of King Edward VIII (and Mrs Simpson) et al. …
So the Duke of Winsdor, Oswald Mosely, Verity Mitford and a whole swag of upper class English twits despised Hitler and his thugs?
Sorry Warren Joffe, you’re as silly and as deliberately offensive, in a trolling sort of way, as Taki. Try reading some British history some time, and then go on with your sweeping, self-congratulatory generalisations.