Melanie Phillips's Five Essential Truths

Melanie Phillips is a tough, no-nonsense, don't-suffer-fools-gladly kind of gal. I like to think that I am too, but I must admit that having the chance to sit in an audience and listen to a woman whose work I so admire could cause me to give way to gush, so I promise to do my best to keep that tendency in check. In honour of Melanie, I mean. Needless to say she was utterly brilliant last night (at Toronto's Village Shul), the thoughts springing from her mouth in fully-fleshed out, multi-clause sentences, studded with witty barbs, that were small masterpieces of expression. And needless to say, she cut through the thickets of madness that make life in our times so confounding, and exposed the light of day, the truth, that lies beneath. And the truth is this:

1. The "smart" people--members of the "progressive" intelligentsia--are a huge problem. They loathe themselves. They are wracked by guilt for the sins--some real, but most  imagined--of the West. They romanticize backward,Third World basket cases, and consider them to be their moral superiors (because they are not us, and because we have victimized them.) They cannot discern truth or reality because all their thinking is filtered through cockamamie ideology--anti-imperialism/capitalism/America/Zionism, pro-multiculturalism/environmentalism/feminism/scientism. They are moral relativists for whom there is no objective truth that can be arrived at via a marshalling of the evidence: there is only "opinion"--my opinion, your opinion--and one opinion is as good and as valid as any other (but, really, if you're a Third Worlder, your opinion is more valid than mine). They have convinced themselves that traditional nationalism is inherently racist and divisive, and that "transnationalism"--the wretched UN, for heaven's sake--is therefore our last, our best, our only, hope. Trouble is, the UN, to quote Melanie, "is a club of terror posing as the Parliament of the world." It is "dominated by terrible regimes"--tyrannies, despotisms and the power-crazed Organization of the Islamic Conference, an outfit that incorporates tyrannies and despotisms of the Islamist variety. It's also an outfit that dreams of the day when Israel will be no more, a genocidal longing it has transmitted to its transnational host, where it now festers and stews without let up.

And here's the real problem--the "smart" people are in charge of everything--the media, schools and universities, the mechanisms of governance--so they get to foist their up-is-down worldview on the rest of us. Many of whom drink it up, no questions asked (especially if it comes from the Beeb, which retains a reputation for truth and moral authority even though for many years now it has told the most horrendous lies in the most immoral way; Phillips says the damage wrought by the Beeb is "inestimable"). Which brings me to a second truth, a bright spot amidst all the gloom.

2. A lot of the "dumb" people, the ones without the expensive educations and the fancy degrees; the ones who go to work, have kids, pay taxes; the ones the "progressive" elites--the "sneereratti," as Phillips drolly calls them--ignore and/or deplore, appear to be immune to the intelligentsia's bad ideas. It is a truth universally acknowledged, says Phillips, that there is a direct correlation between going to university and becoming mad (in the stark raving sense). And the higher up the social scale you go, the more madness you will find (because the higher up you go, the more high-mindedness you find, and the likelier you are to be caught up--lost, really--in Utopian fantasies/derangements). It's the regular folks, the ones who do not cut reality to fit some kooky ideology, who offer the best hope for the future because these are the folks who can tell fact from fiction, truth from lies. Were you to ask such people, for example, what they think of Israel, they might admit that, actually, they don't think about it all that much (unlike the progressives, for whom Israel and Israeli infamy are consuming obsessions) but when they do think of it, they see a small, embattled country surrounded by much larger enemies. In other words, they can not only see reality, they can describe it--a refreshing departure from elitist blindness and fabrications. ("To find sane people," says Phillips, summing up an anecdote about her eye-opening experience in some dreary north England town, "you have to go to 'Armpitville'. The place to avoid at all costs is [elitist bastion] Hampstead.")

3. The Leftists and the Islamists are in cahoots (because they both hate the West and want to bring it down; because they are both inspired to a greater or lesser extent by the same toxic Marxist theory; because, after all, there is strength in numbers). And because the Europes rulers have with one or two exceptions (see truth #4) refused to do anything to halt Islam's march, a fascist right has stepped into the breach. There is a very real possibilty, says Phllips, that it could get "extremely ugly" in Europe as these two factions square off-have stepped into the breach. Asks Phillips: If and when that happens, with whom should we side--the extremist fascist right or the extremist Islamo-fascists/fascist left (i.e. with the rock or with the hard place)? Better it should never come to that. But will it?

4. No one can predict the future. And while Phillips admits that at the moment things are looking pretty bleak, that does not mean that, seemingly out of nowhere, there could not be a sudden turn-around. She notes that had you lived in 18th Century England, an epoch of aimlessness and debauchery, you could easily have said re the future that's it, we're doomed,  best to pack it in right now. And of course, you would have been dead wrong, since the century that followed saw England getting its act together and reaching the peak of its power and influence. So you never know. Will the West get its act together, cast off its civilizational ennui, and defend itself from the Islamist/jihadist threat? Possibly. And the fact that there are rumblings of discontent in Europe and that France, Belgium and the Netherlands (the Netherlands!) have banned the burqa, and sleepy Switzerland has banned the minaret may signal a new-found resolve. So it could be like the 19th C. succeeding the 18th C. Then again, "it could be Rome."

5. Israel stands at the centre of everything. It is on the front line of the fight against the Islamic jihad. Its fight and the West's fight are one and the same. But how to keep Israel alive and kicking when so many are intent on bringing it down--many of whom, sickeningly, are Jewish? (Phillips says she would never refer to these leftist Jews as being "self-loathing" because she's never met a group of individuals who love themselves more.) Phillips says we have to rethink how we go about helping Israel, because our current approach--defending Israel from its critics by forcing people to "look at the facts" is "hopeless." It puts us on the defensive, the wrong place to be because "we have nothing to defend." It forces us to play the game on Israel's enemies' terms--something we should absolutely refuse to do. A far more effective strategy, she says, would be to put our enemies on the defensive, to be "cool and forensic" as we point out their failings, their mendacity. To ask, say, "How can you justify pressuring Israel" when all these truly horrible things are occurring in Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, etc.?  We, after all, have history and truth on our side while they (Israel and the West's common enemies) do not. (As an example of how to fight back, she mentions the Cambridge Union debater, a young Jew, who was supposed to defend the proposition: "Israel Is a Rogue State." He "defended" it by turning the tables and arguing that Israel is indeed "rogue," but in an exceedingly good way. For having the chutzpah and cojones to pull a fast one, he was banned for life from the Cambridge Union Debating Society.)