Eating Ourselves Alive

Culture The destructive urge goes beyond politics and even war. TakiMag I have only once been asked to be a witness in a libel trial in which the plaintiff denied that he was a cannibal, contrary to the allegation made in print by the defendant, but I suppose that that is infinitely more times than the great majority of people have ever been asked to be such a witness. (I should add that I was to be a witness for the defendant, though my knowledge of the plaintiff’s cannibalism was distinctly limited.) The plaintiff was Charles Taylor, the president of Liberia at the time. He dropped the case against Stephen Ellis, the author of the brilliant and definitive book about the Liberian Civil War. Taylor did so, he said, because of the cost involved, though no one believed this, as he was by then a very rich man. He would have had to testify in London, and in a libel trial all manner of evidence is allowed; it would not have been too difficult to prove that he had no reputation to lose, which is to say, good reputation. What was hardly beyond dispute was that he had used drugged-up children to fight in his guerrilla army in his determination to become president. Memories of Liberia returned to me when I read recently an article in the Spectator about Miatta Fahnbulleh, daughter of a Liberian refugee to Britain, Henry Boima Fahnbulleh. She is now secretary of energy security and net zero in the current British government, and as such, as her very title suggests, almost certainly destined to assist and be partly responsible for the further impoverishment of the country. According to the article, not yet and perhaps never to be the subject of an action for defamation, her father: was indeed foreign minister in Liberia in the 1980s, and latterly a national security adviser to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. But he is also a Marxist radical who dedicated himself over a long career to the violent overthrow of those who got in his way. Unsurprisingly, this took me back to the time during a short lull in the civil war back in 1991 when I visited Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. You could reach the city at that time only by sea, for it was besieged by Charles Taylor’s forces. I travelled on the Steel Trader under Captain Monty Jones, an estimable Welsh sea captain and entrepreneur who was almost solely (and heroically) responsible for the revictualling of the city under siege. He died, alas, in 2019, having been a staunch opponent of the pirates who operated in his West African theater of operations. I had the highest admiration for him and found an article about piracy in the area in which he was quoted: “They [pirates] spray the wheelhouse with machine gun fire before trying to board. It is a normal military tactic: intimidate your enemy,” said sea captain Jones, who has been hijacked several times. Many pirates are armed with handguns and long guns, he said, and are often high on drugs. ‘There is no way to reason with them.” The pirates had evidently turned on, tuned in and dropped out, à la Timothy Leary. The destruction of Monrovia was complete and very thorough. This destruction was not merely the consequence of war or bombardment. That could not have explained why the medical records of the Maternity Hospital had been used as lavatory paper, why the books of the library of the University of Liberia had been pulled from the shelves on to the ground and trampled upon, or why the castor wheels had been carefully sawn off every single piece of hospital furniture of the now deserted, dark, and echoing John F. Kennedy Hospital (where open-heart surgery had once been performed), all at a considerable expense of effort. In the Centennial Hall, where national events such as the inauguration of presidents took place, the body of what was possibly the only Steinway grand piano in the country rested on the floor, its legs sawn off, surrounded by a necklace of human faeces. Again, this could hardly be interpreted as destruction wrought by war: There was surely something more to it than that. The destruction was symbolic, as iconoclasm always has been symbolic. Iconoclasm speaks to a hatred of whatever is destroyed, in this case a civilization felt to be both alien and probably superior, or at any rate that regarded itself as superior. This was not what appalled me most, however. It was when I spoke to two young British journalists about what I had seen, recommending that they went to see it for themselves, that I was most shocked. They could not see any symbolic significance in the destruction of the piano, or for that matter of the hospital. Why was I worried about a few, ultimately replaceable inanimate objects when a quarter of a million people, something like a 12th to an eighth of the population, had been slaughtered in the war? What was the destruction of a mere piano to that? Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox They could see no connection between the slaughter and the iconoclasm. This astounded and alarmed me. And I now see this obliviousness as a forerunner of what we now see in Europe, that is to say, a widespread iconoclasm masquerading as political purpose. The love of or respect for civilization is not universal or automatic. Insofar as the achievements of civilization are not equally accessible to all, it is often, and by many, as much hated as it is loved. It confronts people with their own insignificance or nullity, and they seek to take their revenge upon it. Of course, giving vent to their hatred can easily be given a patina of political virtue, such as the desire for equality or social justice, and demagogues are gifted precisely at the provision of this patina to masses of humanity. There are few joys greater than destruction in the name of higher purpose. Man is a destroyer almost as much as he is a creator. The Russian anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, an opponent of Karl Marx, said that the destructive urge is also a creative urge. No: This is not the creative destruction of capitalism as described by Schumpeter. This is destruction for the joy of destruction of what is hated.