Western freedom is heading for the crocodile’s pantry shelf

The ailing English novelist Julian Barnes recently announced that he has written his last book. Throughout his fifty-year career, he remained a studiously English and unnervingly intelligent writer whose prose veered between the elusive and the impenetrable. To paraphrase his mother, that which I could read, I couldn’t understand, and that which I could understand, I couldn’t read.

However, his perfect nightmare is clarity itself: Of being paralysed but not anaesthetised by the poisonous bite of a particular species of crocodile, which stacks its agonised prey inside a roofed larder deep within a river bank, enabling the croc to feast on fresh human flesh whenever peckish, the victim’s still-warm and conscious brains serving as a delightful digestif. 

That could also be a metaphor for life within a totalitarian regime, though clearly, the 2020s are not yet the 1930s, not least because we do not yet have the Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers double-act of Stalin and Hitler. But what this era has in common with that earlier one is that good and honourable people are drawn to both sides. This was symbolised by the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the Nazi anthem that today is still played whenever archive film of marching Wehrmacht troops is shown. (Otherwise, it is illegal in Germany and Austria: How fragile must freedom be if it is so vulnerable to a mere song?)

According to the American historian Samuel Mitcham, the Horst Wessel tune was originally composed by an unknown communist. Quite so: The devil will naturally share his best tunes with anyone. Modern divisions are not yet so acute, but are nonetheless real, and are embodied in the contrasting celebrity of two people. Most readers will have heard of Renee Good, but few of Scott Adams, two Americans who died six days apart. Both were victims of the culture war that is engulfing the Western world, in which the primary vector has been – roll of drums, please, and now a flourish of trumpets –  the media!.

The remorseless, pitiless agenda of the liberal media explains why Adams is largely unknown and Good is both renowned and mourned. By a happy coincidence, their contrasting names remind us of the Eden which mankind has repeatedly rejected throughout our bitter tenure on this earth. Furthermore, Adams was shot by an FBI man called Jonathan, a name which he shared with the biblical character who defeated the Philistines. So there it is: Life  invariably returns us to the ancient scriptures in which, as with a deeply literary novel,  that which we can read, we cannot understand….et cetera. 

Thus the fate of Scott Adams, who up until 2023, was one of the world’s best-known cartoonists for his portrayal of the office-serf Dilbert. Some 1,600 outlets carried his – to my mind largely incomprehensible – satires, until one dark day three years ago next month, when he read of the extraordinary revelation that only 53 per cent of American blacks would accept the statement, “It’s okay to be white.”

We know how the mainstream media would have treated a revelation that only half of the white population considered the statement “It’s okay to be black” to be acceptable: Unconditional condemnation of the whites. Adams – he clearly had not read the office-memo that he’d sent to Dilbert  – podcasted: “If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people ….that’s a hate group, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them…And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give white people is to get the hell away from Black people.”

The contrasting capital letters for whites and Blacks, as printed in The New York Times, reveals which side that legendarily “neutral” newspaper is on. And naturally, all 1,600 outlets carrying the Dilbert series immediately and permanently cancelled his cartoons, with his publishers Penguin Random House striking him from their catalogue. From being one of the most popular cartoonists in the world, he was overnight unemployed and unemployable, without the least pretence of due process or a drop of – dare I say it? – Christian mercy.

Now this is not an easy thing to say, but this was done by largely good people who thought they were behaving honourably, which of course is also true  of most lynch mobs. I cannot authoritatively state that the stress caused by the media’s abominable behaviour caused or intensified the cancer that last week killed him. But I can unequivocally say that the obituary in The New York Times matched in ignobility the newspaper’s   despicable behaviour throughout these culture wars, when it  described the words “It’s okay to be white” as “a phrase that has been promoted by white supremacists.”

This was a moral and factual nadir in many regards, not least because none of the Times’ staff seems to have denounced this trampling on the grave of a man who had brought pleasure to millions and to whom so much deliberate harm had been so gratuitously done. His offence – such as it was – would certainly have been acclaimed by liberals as an example of fearless free-thinking had his words been appropriately transposed into the mouth of a black person.

As with Adams, you are probably ignorant of the fate of Justine Damond, an unarmed white Christian woman in Minneapolis who, two months after George Floyd had been killed in that same city by policeman Derek Chauvin, had rung 911 to report an intruder in her garden. She was then shot dead on her own doorstep by a black Muslim police officer of Somali extraction, Mohamed Noor. He was briefly imprisoned and is now free, whereas the white Chauvin is still serving his 22 year-sentence for a “murder” that was nothing of the kind. Although Chauvin ‘s record shows that he was a truly dreadful police officer, it is equally clear that a politico-racial agenda was at work here, not least in the manner of his prosecution. This had been carefully orchestrated by state Governor Tim Waltz,  who in 2024 The New York Times backed for vice-President.

Okay, so Western freedom is not yet on the crocodile’s pantry shelf: But that’s not for want of the crocodile trying.  After all, as with reading and understanding, that which its prey thinks is evil is, for the croc, merely living. 

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.