Misunderstanding

I’ve been reading your blog, said Ilona, our cleaning lady, and I absolutely agree with you. It’s become virtually impossible now to tell the truth. Truth is a crime today. Take blacks for example. I mean, Negroes. We all know that in terms of intelligence they lag far behind us. It’s a well established scientific fact that their intellectual capabilities … I mean, you wrote about it, didn’t you? You did. You were brave enough to admit that in your blog and I admire your candour.

Ilona came from Budapest. She is 35, fluent in five European languages and has a degree in art history from her local university.

What? – I said. What? What are you talking about? Who are ‘us’? What kind of nonsense is that? I never wrote about black people. I never wrote about their intellectual capabilities. I never wrote that they are in any way different from ‘us’ whoever ‘we’ may be. Are you mad? All I wrote was that we shouldn’t invest too much meaning into such human characteristics as skin colour or race, or nationality, or religion. It messes up our own capacity for judgement. We should write about people, not about their attributes. All I wrote is that inverted stereotypes are the same old stereotypes. It doesn’t help if you convert a negative stereotype into a positive one. A stereotype is a symptom and we should at the very least try to understand what does such a symptom mean, what is behind this symptom and what kind of a bigger picture does it fit into. Only when we see living people, complex and contradictory, are we able to sort out some of our problems, if we still have any.

This is precisely what I mean, said Ilona. I think we should care more about our racial purity. I met a man once, he was from Latin America. From Chile, I guess. He wanted to marry me. I said no way. You may be good in bed and you may be a good glazier and a good ceramist but I’ll never have children with you because I don’t want my children to be underachievers. We, whites, I said, shouldn’t mix with the people of colour, no matter which part of the world they come from.

And what did he say? – I asked.

He said that he was white, said Ilona, but he wasn’t. I also liked what you wrote about the Jews. They do control the world.

Oh, no, I said. No, they don’t. And I never wrote about ‘the Jews’. All I wrote was that we should at the very least support Israel no less than we support other countries in the Middle East. I mean, what is Israel if not an ultimate success story? I mean, the country and the people deserve our support. If we allowed OPEC to be created and if we trusted all those terrible dictators with trillions of our money, if we launder our regular financial ejaculations through any fixer we could find overseas, I mean, we should, at least, extend at least a part of the same courtesy to a single democratic country in the region, shouldn’t we?

Right, said Ilona, because they control the money. Our money. We make money with our blood, sweat and tears and they control our money and use it to control all the people around the world. They are no better than the Nazis because, you know, the Nazis were just the people who cared about their own country.

What do you think about David Cameron? – I asked.

I think he’s gay, she said. What do you think?

Well, I said, I think that he lacks ideas. This is what I think. I think that he lacks vision. This is why he painted himself into such a dead end. He doesn’t seem to care about anything but a miserable competition with a minor political force. He is obsessed with UKIP. Thanks to this obsession and to this stupid rivalry and to all the limelight it receives the conservatives managed to elevate an obscure fringe party to the position of a major political force. There was nothing strange about UKIP exploiting the national prejudice to their own political gains. Every radical political group does more or less the same, be it about class or ethnic background, or whatever they can put their hands on. What was strange is that a major political party took this bait and pulled those marginal oddballs into a position of great political influence. What is this if not the evidence of total cluelessness? I mean the conservatives have no ideas about economy, about foreign policy, about reforms or about our future. All they seem to care about is immigration because ‘there are too many foreigners in our land’. This is why we should close our borders for European plumbers and keep them open for Rotherham gang rapists. Great thinking, but what else should you expect from a PR man apart from such smoke, mirrors and Potemkin villages? This is why he goes down next year although it’s kind of unfair because the Labour don’t seem to have any ideas either although, to be honest, they don’t even pretend to have any. Which may be not such a bad sign, after all. It may only mean that we as a country are now in such a good form that we can easily and comfortably do without any government at all. I think that many rich countries suffer now from their governments much more than they gain from them. All our governments today are almost uniformly incompetent, pesky, myopic, petty and stupid. You know, Belgium had no government for about three years and it only served them well. I think it wouldn’t hurt much to have some freaks on the top of our system for the next term if only to show us what we have taken for granted all these years.

Absolutely, said Ilona reaching behind the radiator with her duster. Absolutely. This is precisely what I think. We should stop all those barbarians from abroad from coming here. You’ve nailed it.