The Daily Mail is always a good place to trawl for sensationalism and overblown right-wing crap, but even by their standards today's effort by Richard Littlejohn, everyone's favorite controversy-generating cunt, is spectacular. Once again I feel kind of bad calling this a "journalism" digest, because Dick Littlejohn is not a journalist; I'm not even sure he's human on any significant level. He ekes out a living enraging and stupefying people, basically getting a reaction out of them to build up his fame. And fuck it, just for today, let's indulge him.
The article can be found here, in a cache, so that the Daily Mail don't get additional hits on their website. Hopefully this will stop it from going to Dick's head quite so much. The only thing we want going to his head is an aneurysm (calm down, I'm being extreme for shock value, inkeeping with Dick's style).
Dicky has attempted to pass off the idea that we shouldn't feel sorry for the Japanese people who got earthquaked and then tsunamied, because of World War Two. The article actually puts pictures side-by-side of a the tsunami devastation and some emaciated POWs during WW2. We shouldn't have minutes silences and things for Japan, because we had a scrap with them 66 years ago. Littlejohn starts off by claiming to "know little and understand less" about the Japanese, before swiftly concluding that they are: "militantly racist and in the past have been capable of great cruelty". That just sounds, well, militantly racist. Especially given the context of ignorance that he established literally seconds earlier.
Skipping the obvious "what the hell" factor for a second, let's focus on this historical angle Dick is taking. The second world war, eh? Now, it seems to me it's hilariously ironic that anyone at the Daily Mail gets to tell people off about the second world war. Because the position of the Daily Mail was that the Nazis were pretty awesome, that Hitler was a great man, and that Britain should enter the war on the side of the Germans. "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" was the headline in 1934, praising Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. Hitler actually used some Mail leader columns as propaganda.
So...let's never forgive the Japanese for World War Two, yeah? That's fine, if we can equally never forgive the Daily Mail, the newspaper of fascist propaganda. Which has one of the highest circulations and the most popular website in the country...
Perhaps the worst thing is how badly Dick puts across his argument, though. I can understand that extreme ideologies are out there, and in a way it's good that all points of view are represented, so that there's a challenge of some kind to the mainstream - all very democratic - but why does it have to be so badly presented? Why is this man being paid so much money and given a prominent column when he couldn't win an argument against himself?
This is an actual, real, honest-to-goodness paragraph from the article.
"But why Japan and not, say, those massacred in Rwanda or starved to death by Mugabe in Zimbabwe? I don’t remember a minute’s silence for Haiti, although I may be mistaken. I’m sure we didn’t have a minute’s silence for our earthquake-hit Commonwealth cousins in Christchurch, New Zealand, before the Milan game. Maybe we did.
These days we’d have a minute’s silence if Harry Redknapp’s dog got run over."
Uh...wait, what? So you're pissed that we had a minutes silence for Japan, but not for all these other disasters...but you still think there are too many minutes silences? Do you want more, or less, Richard?
There's also a fantastic assertion at one point that no Tottenham Hotspur fans know where Japan is. He then goes on about how there was wonderfully moving tribute to some dead Spurs players, with "genuine sadness", before launching into a rant about the "sickening streak of sentimentality" in the Premier League. After a while, you just start to suspect that Dick isn't sure what his opinion is, so he's putting out evil twins of all of them, a standard, human opinion, followed very quickly by the complete opposite.
The contradictions keep raining in. In the first par, the intro even, he says: "No one with a shred of humanity can fail to be moved by some of the pictures coming out of Japan". Then, a bit further down, when he's started to warm up to his crazed, spittle-flecked diatribe, he says: "Many surviving members of the Burma Star Association still harbour deep animosity to everyone and all things Japanese, 65 years after VJ Day. They won’t want to be associated with the expressions of sympathy over the earthquake and tsunami. And who can blame them?" Uh...so you're not blaming them, but by your own rules, they are without "a shred of humanity". Or maybe that's just you, eh Dicky?
It's profoundly odd trying to read that article and keep track of the narrative, or indeed the argument behind it. It's like watching a dog chasing its tail, but changing direction to spin the opposite way every four seconds. And shitting itself violently all the way around. It blows my fucking mind that this idiot is one of the most-read newspaper writers in the country. I mean, if his job is literally just to stir up some shit to get people buying papers he's doing it very well, but it irks me just slightly that he's doing it under the flag of journalism. He's not a journalist. He's a dubious kind of salesman, at best, and honestly I feel a bit bad for giving him some free advertising right here. Real journalism should have the capacity to make a difference...Littlejohn by comparison is utterly inconsequential. He doesn't inform, he provokes. Other than the little spike in sales for the Daily Mail based on his controversy, what does he actually contribute to the world? Essentially, it would probably be better for the nation's intelligence if we just locked him in a box somewhere.
