Newsletter #13: The New Taboo, the Emperor, Sin à la Suisse, A Queen's Woes, Vaccine Hoarders, Goddamn Commies, Blasphemy, Churchill, and A Passion for Well-Sealed Windows
Hello again folks, as Not-Creepy-At-All Uncle Joe might address you. It’s that time of the week when I regale you with plugs, updates, recommendations, and pontifications on diverse matters of peculiar interest to me.
Battle of Ideas festival and the launch of a new publication. As you no doubt know already, since I bang on about it all the time, I’m a member of the Free Speech Champions project. At FSC, we’ve been working on a new zine championing free speech and open debate on any and all subjects, to be distributed on university campuses. It’s aimed primarily at young people, particularly students, and, excitingly, the very first edition is launching this month. It’s called The New Taboo and is edited by Rob Lownie, fellow champion and Edinburgh student. He’s done a sterling job and devoted a lot of hours, days, weeks, and months to the zine, so let me publicly acknowledge his hard work and dedication here.
I’m taking over as editor for the next edition which comes out early 2022, and so I’m on a panel at the Battle of Ideas festival on October 10th alongside Rob and FSC founder Inaya Folarin Iman to discuss the zine and officially launch it. If you’re in London at the time, do come along! I’m going to be there for the whole festival weekend, which looks set to be a fantastic couple of days full of interesting discussions and debates. See here for information on The New Taboo’s launch and to purchase tickets for the festival.
Mendelssohn and the Emperor. A couple of days ago, I attended a classical music concert at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh—thanks to my friend, the soon-to-be Dr Jamie Weir, for inviting me. It was my first time at such an event and it was lovely. The time passed unexpectedly quickly—I cynically imagined it would be a long slog, sitting there listening to an orchestra, but I was wrong. It was quite the experience to be caught up so fully in music: it’s a very different experience to distractedly listening to it on your phone. I must go again. The pieces played were Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto and Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony (neither of these descriptions was used by the composers and are perhaps slightly misleading, given Beethoven’s antipathy to Emperor Bonaparte and the long gap between the visit to Scotland that inspired Mendelssohn and his completion of the symphony).
The Emperor Concerto was composed in 1809 as Napoleon marched on Vienna. Beethoven fled to a basement and covered his ears with pillows to protect what was left of his hearing and later wrote that there was “nothing but drums, cannons, men, misery of all sorts" around him. The Concerto is a joyous, soaring piece, and as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra performed it, I imagined, above the players, Beethoven walking the streets of besieged Vienna, dodging cannonballs and musket fire, grinning triumphantly—because he could still hear! Well, that may have been the wine I’d imbibed before the concert, and it’s a fanciful image contradicted by the facts, but who cares? I’ve now come to think of the Concerto as being an ode to the survival of Beethoven’s auditory capabilities, a life-affirming unintended consequence of battle and death.
Moral degeneracy in Switzerland. The Swiss have voted to legalise homosexual marriage by a significant majority—thus one of the last bastions of good old fashioned Christian morality has fallen to the Beast! Western civilisation is over, the traditional family is dead, the natural order of divinely-sanctioned heterosexual union, to be found throughout all nature (for who has not witnessed the glorious sight of a ram in a perfectly cut woollen suit sealing his admittedly bleatingly-spoken marriage vows to a ewe in a dazzlingly elegant woollen dress with a godly osculation on gentle lady-bovid lips?) has been overthrown!
Etc, etc. Okay, nobody ever really used the example of a sheeply espousal to argue for the exclusive legitimacy of heterosexual marriage, but you get the idea. What’s interesting to me is the relative normalcy of the Swiss move: there were vociferous opponents of gay marriage in the debate, of course, but to me, at least, it’s news barely worth a shrug, and I think this is the case for a lot of people in countries where gay marriage is now an unremarkable fact of life.
In Britain, gay marriage has been legal for less than a decade, yet the often ugly arguments over it are long forgotten. A fanatical admirer of traditionalist bovid nuptials would be laughed out of the room nowadays. This is a sign of progress, I think. Just as those who once railed against the unholiness or unnaturalness of interracial marriage or black voting rights are now historical exemplars of bigotry, so too with the opponents of gay marriage. Once something becomes so trivial as to barely merit any fuss, you know that it has become accepted.
And this is all the more surprising with gay marriage and gay liberation in general because absolutely everything was stacked against them for so long. Gays were loathed or pitied or beaten or imprisoned or shunned for centuries, and with such a deep-rooted and omnipresent virulence (from the pulpits to the psychiatry chairs), that the moral persuasion of the majority in such a short amount of time is nothing short of dazzling. I only hope that this success doesn't mean the opposite could occur: that is, those rights being stripped away near-instantaneously.
The Queen stumps up. The UK’s head of state and the commander-in-chief of its armed forces is to fund her alleged sex abuser son’s defence case. Sorry, let me translate that to make it more palatable: the Queen, that generous matriarch, is funding her dear son the military hero Prince Andrew’s defence against the salacious slurs of a slandering slut. You’ll see that the former description is the accurate one, but that won’t stop the propaganda.
At least Queenie is paying for it out of her private (though, as the legacy of a self-serving deal with other parts of the state, unjustly owned, not to mention possibly dodgy) income from the Duchy of Lancaster. Then again, with Michael Gove as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, maybe Andrew would prefer to plead guilty rather than be in the debt of that strangest of Aberdonians.1
Vaccine hoarding. Nick Cohen wrote an excellent article on the morally shameful and ultimately self-sabotaging failure of the rich world to keep its oath to send vaccines to poorer countries (part of its excellence owing to the fact that someone I guiltily admire, Gordon Brown, makes a cameo). See here. As a taster, the opening paragraph:
Even if you think humans are nothing more than a selfish, tribal species who care little for anyone beyond our clans and ourselves, the failure to vaccinate the world remains astonishing. It is not only a moral affront that rich nations are leaving millions to die needless deaths but an assault on our own self-interest.
And another great recent Cohen article for good measure, this one a sharp analysis of cancel culture and the corruption of the left, which used to be against the bosses but is now allied to them. See here. A taster:
[The woke left’s] predecessors had a trade unionist mentality. They instinctively sided with the employee against the employer whether they agreed with the employee’s politics or not. The new left understands that real power lies with management in societies such as the UK and US, where unions barely exist in the private sector. Their emblematic radical is not a strike leader or a feminist agitator but a diversity consultant who convinces HR to pay her or him to berate staff who cannot argue back.
John Nolte: “leftists…are deliberately looking to manipulate Trump supporters into not getting vaccinated.” Sonny Bunch reports in the Washington Post of an intriguing new development among Trumpanzees (Peter Hitchens’s term) and their ilk. In Breitbart, John Nolte argues that those gawdamn commies Nancy Pelosi, Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden and co. are mocking gawd-fearing vaccine-denying patriots so that their opposition to the vaccines will only be further entrenched, thus killing them off! I wonder if Nolte will convince his peers?
Blasphemy! I had occasion earlier today to re-listen to Labour MP Naz Shah’s argument in favour (effectively) of blasphemy laws in Britain from earlier this year (around the same time as a schoolteacher in West Yorkshire was being hounded for displaying cartoons of the alleged Prophet Mo). She says that if the law criminalises damage to statues and the like, then it should also protect Muslims’ sensibilities. We can argue about the former, but it is clearly a different thing entirely: it’s as much about property damage as national sensitivities. If the trashing of Lord Nelson was being criminalised, she might have a case for parity (though that would be as wrongheaded as reinstituting blasphemy laws). She is at least ecumenical in her fervour for punishing blasphemers: she so affectingly appeals for us to have sympathy for the feelings of many non-Muslim gods both well- and little-known. It’s old news now, but it shows that the insidiousness of religious supremacism is alive and well in the Mother of Parliaments.2 For shame.
A new Churchill book. Geoffrey Wheatcroft recently published a new study of Winston Churchill. It looks interesting and I’ll be reviewing it for Areo Magazine sometime soon. I’ve not read it yet, but I have glimpsed at previews, and it looks like a quasi-revisionist/contrarian take on the Greatest Briton. I see that Andrew Roberts and Christopher Hitchens appear in the index, and get the impression that Wheatcroft is somewhere between the two (Roberts being almost a hagiographer and Hitchens being a sometimes overzealous hatchet-wielder). I look forward to reading it.
Goodbye Mutti. It looks like Angela Merkel is approaching the end of her nearly two decades in power. In farewell, here is a tale of her passionate heart. Once asked what feelings her homeland arouses in her, Mutti replied: “I think of well-sealed windows. No other country can make such well-sealed and nice windows.” Oh, the blazing patriotic fire in that grand old bosom!
And that’s all for this week, folks. As I said above, I’m at the Battle of Ideas festival next weekend and so will be away from the world of Substack. See you in a fortnight, then!
Love,
DJS
Yes, yes, pedants, I’m aware that the Chancellor usually has little to do with the day to day running of the Duchy, electing instead to leave such grisly business to an underling. Anyway, I wrote at more length about Andrew’s travails and Britain’s weird Windsor affliction in a previous newsletter.
Another nod to the peasants (that was accidental; I meant to type ‘pedants’, but for the sake of humour I’m letting the Freudian slip stand): The phrase ‘mother of parliaments’ comes from an 1865 speech by John Bright and refers to England rather than to the Westminster parliament itself. Fully, the line reads: “England is the mother of parliaments.” So before anyone writes in, I’m aware of this, and in any case my use of the phrase works in either sense.
And another thing: religious supremacism in Britain is an oft-unremarked thing because so ingrained. A head of state who is head of the established church, bishops in the Lords (itself a blatantly undemocratic institution), and the appalling absurdity of state-funded faith schools where religious tenets, including creationism and homophobia, can be indoctrinated into the minds of children. Abolish the lot of them!