The Triumph of Victimhood
Fox recalls how before the corpses of the Charlie Hebdo journalists had even grown cold, many who had initially defended the principle of free expression had U-turned to denouncing as inflammatory and offensive the cartoons that catalysed the incident, implying that the Hebdo staff were themselves to blame for the violence they suffered. So low has the tolerance bar fallen that one no longer has even to be conscious of her own ‘racism’, ‘sexism’, ‘homophobia’, ‘cissexism’ or ‘Islamophobia’ in order to be guilty of these thought crimes. ‘Microaggressions theory’ has sprung up to diagnose your unconscious bias, and to legitimise victims’ feelings of being macro-aggrieved. Hate-speech legislation, such as in Britain, only bolsters this imbalance of power between victim and perpetrator, by defining ‘hate speech’ as any speech that someone claims is racist, etc, irrespective of the speaker’s intentions or the context of his speech. Who needs blasphemy law when we’ve got the freewheeling, arbitrary, and unlimited redefinition of terms such as ‘racism’? So broad now is the scope of the term it could feasibly apply to just about anything touching on race. This is particularly worrying because, if racism can mean everything, then it ceases to mean anything. Anti-racism should be a vivid, living ethic, not a dead dogma that we unthinkingly apply more promiscuously than a two-peckered billy goat.
