Melanie Phillips and the hearts of darkness

The conservative journalist and author Melanie Phillips's latest appearance on Question Time in February this year provoked an outpouring of abuse against her on Twitter that was so vile and unrestrained it may well have eclipsed the repellent attacks made against Andrew Breitbart earlier in the year in the immediate aftermath of his death. The YouTube contributor MuggedVideos2 posted Phillips's QT appearance on YouTube (see above) and also took the trouble to list in the comments section the tweets he had himself witnessed made against Phillips concerning her appearance. I am reproducing them here in full, and am grateful to user MuggedVideos2 for compiling the list, which perhaps more than anything else brought home to me the extent of the nastiness and sickness that exists on the internet these days against conservative figures (the words in brackets after each tweet refer to the tweeter's twitter name):

An unutterable cunt (@richlieu_uk)
she's a mad cunt (@eds209)
such a condescending bitch. She's probably a dyke too (@AR4_NUFC)
Every time I see her I can't help shouting CUNT! (@bbbtmboy)
gobshite cunt (@sophiabotha)
senile cunt (@Millhaven_Curse)
the worst kind of cunt (@robloder)
she has done nothing to dissuade me from thinking her a cunt!! In fact she's cemented my hatred of her (@markandthezebra)
Melanie you're s bit of a cunt (@amina_yusuf)
Wannabe Zionist fascist (@olliewm)
Mad fascist harpy (@edmiller73)
horrible, fascist, ignorant worm (@74ndy)
She's defending bankers. Fuck off. #bbcqt
she is a JEW (@MattyNemesis)
horrendous white/Jewish extremist (@poorbastardmarv)
she's vile. However, I rather suspect that as a Jew, its unlikely she would have supported the Nazis in the 30's (@SGT_Arsehole)
she is a swivel eyed lunatic mad bitch. (@Lewisno1fan)
one ugly bitch (@Jewtree)
Chief Fascist Melanie Phillips will be spewing hot vitriol on #bbcqt tonight (@JohnEdginton) Fucking Melanie Phillips, Im going to want to kill in cold blood very soon...(@_fiaz)

So there we have it. I'm sure you get the picture. A little snapshot of how cool-and-edgy modern-day liberals like to describe people who hold differing (though well argued – but watch the clip above to judge for yourself) views to themselves. And the fact that the target of the abuse is a woman is irrelevant; in fact, in Phillips's case, it very disturbingly, seems to have fuelled an exceptionally acerbic level of invective towards her. One four-letter word in particular – c*** – kept making an appearance in the defamations. I was genuinely taken aback by this; after all, this is the most offensive word in the English language (at least to a British ear) and, what's more, in my experience it is reserved only for issuing the worst possible insult against a male individual who has done something particularly egregiously offensive; it simply would be unthinkable to use it against a woman, since this would constitute plumbing the depths of immorality and dishonour, comparable to stealing from your grandmother's purse or bullying a handicapped person – something heinous, which scrapes the barrel of undignified and shameful behaviour. I decided to pull the first tweeter (@richlieu_uk ) from the list above and have a look at his Twitter profile (see here). The description he offers of himself is as follows: "father husband writer thinker". Sounds like quite a deep and caring chap, doesn't he? He also on his twitter page links to a blog which he runs (see here). It turns out he is some kind of former respectable journalist. He got into journalism, he claims, in order to showcase a natural talent for writing and "to bring down the corrupt and venal, challenge vested interest and champion the weak against the powerful". However, things didn't work out for him in the profession. Despite apparently getting to interview prime ministers, he "worked for 13 years, watching as the drive for profit and profit and more and more profit drove it from much-respected to a tawdry rag".

This seems to be a carefully contrived image, clearly designed to create the impression of a sophisticated, talented, and cool-and-edgy radical, defending, through his brilliant writing, the interests of the downtrodden and wronged in an unjust and corrupt world. And a quick glance through a few of @richlieu_uk's random tweets removes any doubt (if there ever were any) that he is avowedly of a radical, liberal-left (possibly far-left) political persuasion – here are a few penetrating and cool-and-edgy tweets he posted yesterday (30 March): "don't think any self respecting Marxist would defend the Labour Party. Not since 1945, anyway"; "She's a government minister? Fucking hell. Democracy sucks";  "Synchronicity. Jung was right".

@richlieu_uk reminds me very much of an individual taken to task by the greatest living essayist in the English language, Theodore Dalrymple, who in an essay about the Sachsgate affair (made available for free by the author here) examined a blogpost made by an individual shortly after the scandal broke:

"The whole thing is ridiculous, and has brought all kinds of unpleasant people out of the woodwork. Essentially it is a fuss about someone making a joke about fucking someone, you know – that thing lots of adults do for fun – but has played as if Jonathan Ross has somehow tarred Manuel’s adult granddaughter by outing the fact that Russell Brand shagged her at one of his hot tub parties. As if sex is somehow dirty and taboo. The headline should be “Man shags woman, tells grumpy elderly relative, incensed newspaper readers foam at the mouth. Be sure to check out all of the comments from the new puritans, rabid anti-BBC types, armchair moralists, old people of questionable intelligence, and general fuckwits… It wasn’t that funny to begin with but the shitstorm of indignation from the illiterate opinionated twats of Great Britain has made it lolworthy (laughable)… All of those people that are morally outraged have been trolled hard (have been duped into overreaction by a deliberate provocation), and can go fuck themselves. If that’s the kind of people Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross have offended – good. Well done BBC – but it's stupid to suspend people for pissing off an elderly guest of the show". 

On this, Dalrymple commented:

The problem here is not lack of intelligence; I should guess that the writer is of above average intelligence, and probably has attended university. The problem is crudity, intellectual, moral, psychological and cultural.

Dalrymple (as his his wont) hits the nail on the head in his analysis: what we are dealing with here is ersatz sophistication; a new form of modern-day yobbishness, which, narcissistic-like, seems to imagine itself to be terribly important and having the right to make definitive judgements on any issue that crosses its path, while all the time being actually very basically crude. I would also add that individuals like the above commentator and @richlieu_uk, while loving to profess moral indignation at the drop of a hat and at every turn, are actually utterly unconcerned about issues of morality, or the plight or welfare of their fellow citizens. The apparent concern and apparent moralising is a self-righteous mask, a front, hiding an immature, embittered, malicious, envious, egotistical narcissist / misanthropist beneath. And sometimes, as with poor Melanie Philips above, we catch a glimpse of the real individual lurking underneath, heart of darkness and all.

This "Dorian-Gray syndrome" has already been touched on in a previous blog post. But to really get to the bottom of what is going on, and in an effort to give a full rational explanation for the hideous instances of nastiness that we see being posted every day on the Internet by liberal-leftists, we must turn to John Cleese's former shrink, and a book he wrote almost thirty years ago...