Fascist Fantasies Alive and Well in Middle England

The row between Martin Amis and Terry Eagleton certainly has entertainment value, but the remarks which started it are VERY disturbing. What Amis said, last year, was:

"There's a definite urge - don't you have it? - to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan."

He later explained that he "was conversationally describing an urge - an urge that soon wore off."

Now if I heard some twat in the pub blithering on like this I'd either have a big row with him, or on the basis of not throwing pearls before swine, ignore it. But Amis isn't just some-twat-in-the-pub, no matter how much he sounds like one: he's a very gifted author who enjoys considerable stature in the literary life of this country. He should know better than to air his fascist fantasies, even if they are passing urges.

When Terry Eagleton objected to this twattery, Amis' step-mother weighed in with an astonishing remark: 'I have never even heard of this man Eagleton. But he seems to be a rather lethal combination of having been a Roman Catholic and become a Marxist ...' Tut tut. We can't trust anything a commie catholic says, can we? She's never heard of him, but she knows his religion AND his politics.

So Amis and his relation are a pair of crypto-fascist shits. Despite that, I have no urge to strip search or deport them. Scorn will suffice.