Live long enough and all your cherished memories of childhood will end up besmirched somehow. For many of us Boomers the 1970s are now nothing but a long, brownish and noisome stain. We might have expected Gary Glitter would be outed as a nonce and ditto the unequivocally foul Jimmy Savile. But come on, who would have thought there was a darker side to Benny Hill? His harmless and uplifting degradation of women was one of our regular delights, especially the bits where semi-naked babes chased him around parks, with a silly expression on his face, accompanied by fruity music. How we laughed. And so to find out now that all the time he was living a double life as a murderous IRA terrorist is kind of too much to bear.
We know this because he has been named by another 1970s light entertainer – or, perhaps more properly, Armalite entertainer – the famous and likeable Gerry Adams. Gerry was challenged that during the 1970s he was seen wearing a black beret, part of the IRA’s military uniform. He admitted it and added: ‘So did Benny Hill.’ It is rare for members of the IRA to give up the names of their colleagues so easily, but Gerry hadn’t even been waterboarded before he dobbed in Benny.
Possibly this is what is meant by truth and reconciliation, and in a new spirit of cooperation we will soon find out that Dick Emery and – oh, I don’t know, Melvyn Hayes from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum – were also tireless murderers in a long and dangerous battle against the Uppressive Brutts. Some of the IRA’s campaigns, such as when one terrorist blew himself up on a bus, had a slightly Benny Hill character to them, now I come to think about it. But it is still a little saddening to find that the Fastest Milkman in the West was also a dab hand with the Semtex.
It was at the end of that decade that another much-loved figure suddenly imposed himself upon our consciousness: the fun-loving Iranian cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. I always mentally file away 1979 as being part of the 1980s, much as 1961 was part of the 1950s, and old Ruhollah was one reason for that. He seemed to presage a new era of trouble, manifestly more dangerous than the occasional hijacked plane. There are those who today yearn for an Islamic reformation, forgetting that the Iranian revolution was precisely that and served as a template for similar transformation throughout the Muslim world. Ever since then, when Muslim leaders of countries have been overthrown, the person or cabal that replaced them has been more extreme, more obnoxious, more medieval – and while I am happy to keep an eye on Syria and cross my fingers, it seems to me that this tendency has not yet run its course.
This is worth bearing in mind, and maybe particularly if you are expecting the Iranian people to rise up and vanquish their tyrannical overlords, as Donald Trump occasionally ventures to suggest. Despite the assurances from several exiled dissident Iranian friends, I have grave doubts that the great mass of Iran’s inhabitants yearn for western freedoms involving proportional representation, equal rights for women and freedom of speech. They may yearn for enough money to buy a loaf of sangak, but that’s about it.
I have grave doubts that the great mass of Iran’s inhabitants yearn for western freedoms
There are, of course, pro-western liberals in Iran, but I would be prepared to bet that they’re limited to the largely well-educated metropolitan middle classes in Tehran, Shiraz and Isfahan. I don’t know this: it is merely a guess. Nor do I mean to denigrate the bravery and sacrifice of those who did turn out, six weeks ago, to demonstrate against the government and as a consequence were murdered in their tens of thousands. But it is a general conceit and delusion of the liberal-left – perhaps instilled by all those demos they go on where they feel so righteous and everyone is singing the same stupid chants from the same stupid hymn sheet – that demonstrators always represent a majority, even if it is a latent minority. Do you remember the pro-government protests which followed the Iranian riots? Astonishing in their size, I thought. And when the Berlin Wall came down and protestors sprang gleefully onto western soil, do you remember vast pro-communist counter demos in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary? Me neither.
It is hard to believe, then, that there could possibly be regime change, desperately though Trump pretends that there could and – to my mind, in a cowardly manner – urges the Iranians to stick their necks above the parapet. It was always a chimera and an act of deceit by the US to pretend that regime change could be effected by aerial bombardment. And if there is a change, it will most likely be of the kind that usually happens in an Islamic dictatorship – very bad people will be replaced by truly appalling people.
It may well be that both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are aware of this and don’t really care, so long as Iran is sufficiently wounded not to pose any kind of threat, least of all nuclear, to its neighbours and especially Israel. I hope that this is the case because it would demonstrate a certain realism which has not, you have to say, been evident in Trump’s late-night social media posts or snarled asides to the hacks. It would also be a morally justifiable goal – weakening Iran and wiping out its agencies in Lebanon and Yemen. It may even be a war which we should consider joining. I could not care one jot that it is ‘illegal’: there is no point describing wars as such when nobody anywhere takes the slightest bit of notice.
But Trump and Netanyahu should drop the faux concern for the people of Iran: it muddies the waters of what would otherwise be a straightforward, if lengthy, operation. There is no altruism at work here.
Comments