When a famous right-wing, straight white male dies, if your first instinct isn’t to gloat and trash his reputation then you clearly have no idea what it takes to be a progressive.
The death of Rod Liddle is currently being celebrated by all of us on the right side of history. And because we announce our pronouns and wear keffiyehs, we can refer to him as a scumbag who deserves to burn in Hell and everyone will know that we’re actually incredibly compassionate.
It’s a matter of simple mathematics. The population is divided into two factions: those who are good and those who are evil. Every time an evil person dies, the proportion of good people increases. Ergo, by dying, Liddle has made the world a gooder place.
Being kind is largely about efficiency. Since I heard about Liddle’s passing, I have been busily digging through his past articles and books in order to identify the quotations that will do the most damage to his legacy. Kindness is hard work.
Anyone in any doubt that he was a demon in human form should consult his archive of writing, most of which is available on the website of an extreme far-right magazine called The Spectator (an anagram of ‘protects hate’, which should give you some sense of its editorial strategy).
Need evidence of Liddle’s hatred? He once described the Welsh as ‘miserable, seaweed-munching, sheep-bothering pinch-faced hill tribes’. This kind of racism against people living in the Third World is utterly unforgivable.
Liddle also wrote that he had a policy of referring to trans women as ‘he’ and ‘him’, which makes him worse than Hitler. I mean, the Nazis may have done a few bad things, but at least they never misgendered Eddie Izzard.
Perhaps the most heinous thing he ever wrote was in September 2012, when he made the following admission: ‘The one thing stopping me from being a teacher was that I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids.’ A less sophisticated reader would assume that this was merely a dark and provocative joke, but as a left-wing activist I know better. Besides, jokes are a form of stochastic terrorism.
Liddle’s trick was to conceal his evil thoughts behind ‘satire’, an abusive strategy that bigots use to disguise their true feelings. It makes complete sense if you stop to think about it. Quite obviously, the best way for Liddle to conceal the fact that he wanted to shag kids was to write an article saying he wanted to shag kids.
He was also guilty of repeatedly inciting violence. In July last year, he wrote that he literally wanted to bomb the Glastonbury festival as a means to eliminate ‘street drummers, liberal politicians, provo vegans, radical rappers, spiritual healers, Billy Bragg, that bloke who owns Forest Green Rovers, druggies, tattooed blue-haired hags, almost the entirety of middle-class London’.
It is beyond belief that he was able to get away with this call for wholesale slaughter. He even specified the device he planned to use: ‘a small yield nuclear weapon’. When I called the police and asked them to search his property for it, the officer actually laughed, as though there were something ridiculous about mass murderers outlining their plans in advance in the national press.
As George Monbiot pointed out in the Guardian, these were not ‘jokes’ but ‘thought experiments’, and Liddle was verifiably and indisputably ‘floating the possibility of killing hundreds of thousands of people’. Monbiot is clearly an intellectual colossus whose powers of analysis verge on the preternatural.
Shamefully, Liddle later decried Monbiot’s ‘intense and consuming stupidity’ and said that his prose was ‘devoid of both doubt and humour’. But an unquestioning self-certainty is precisely what is required to be an effective campaigner for social justice. This is why I could never comprehend Liddle’s enthusiasm to participate in public debates. Imagine being so insecure in your belief system that you would be willing to hear different opinions?
Liddle’s underhand behaviour was reminiscent of that dead white male, Jonathan Swift. He famously incited people to eat babies and then used the predictable ‘satire’ defence to wriggle out of it. (Admittedly, a controlled programme of infanticide would certainly reduce humanity’s environmental footprint, but as a vegan I find the notion of child cannibalism to be deeply problematic.)
So good riddance, Rod Liddle. You join the pantheon of history’s villains along with Pol Pot, Benito Mussolini, Ivan the Terrible and Hulk Hogan. And although you will never again write your diatribes, we’ll not let the world forget your unique evil.
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