How an unlikely friendship cured me of Marxism.
One of the closest and most trusted friends I’ve ever had, an old man now, was every inch a genius and a strongly religious Moslem Arab immigrant no less. (But that’s enough about my ‘diverse’ friends ;-) ).
He came to the UK in search of one thing, and one thing only: Free Speech.
Due to being very outspoken against the dictatorial government of his home country, he was facing the risk of arrest and torture. Some of his relatives actually were tortured and imprisoned in horrific conditions just as an attempt to ‘influence’ him, to get him to shut his mouth, which he was incapable of doing. (I am sure this common trait was what led to us being such good friends.)
As a result, he craved nothing more out of life than being able to speak his vibrant and assertive mind without paying such an unimaginable penalty for it. His male relatives paid the price of his escape out of the country after they rushed him onto a plane under false papers bribed out of a corrupt (but morally sound) official.
The parting words of his father were:
“Son, you must promise me that you will never ever set foot on this soil again, no matter what happens. Go to England, get an education, and speak your mind everywhere you go. I can be happy no matter what they do to me here, so long as I know that one of my sons is truly free and can have sons of his own away from this regime.”
The story was one of the most tragic things I have ever heard, and I won’t even mention the treatment they suffered after he left, nor his subsequent years of anguish over whether to return to take his punishment “like a man” and free his family from their tortuous prison sentences, or keep his solemn promise to his father. That’s some dilemma.
He absolutely worshiped the fact that, in England, he could sit and talk to anyone about anything, whenever he wanted. He certainly made the most of it, and it was fascinating for me as a much younger man to see how much that seemingly ‘small’ privelege meant to someone else, someone who had never had it.
My friend would actually seek out overtly racist people quite deliberately just to enjoy the thrill of a good debate. He would have been enraged if someone had forced these people to hide their views of him with threats of arrest for ‘hate speech’. He wanted to hear every word they had to say so he could challenge them himself, proudly, articulately and intelligently, without big-brother denying him the opportunity to argue his position on his own two feet and on his own merits.
Many times I sat listening to him having heated debates with strangers in Manchester’s pubs or streets near his home. I lost count of how many times I witnessed him deftly turn his opponent, skillfully employing analogies and the ‘Socratic method’ to great effect, usually convincing the other party to significantly re-think their position when it failed to withstand scrutiny and vigorous debate. More than a few times it actually ended with hand shakes followed by some friendly banter and drinks. It wasn’t a moral issue for him, not in the slightest, it was a thrilling intellectual challenge, and one he relished. He made several lifelong friends out of some of those people he argued with, one became a close friend of mine too.
I saw him physically attacked on a few occasions, the first incident was what actually ignited our initial discussions, leading to what was to be a great friendship.
I was on my way home with my wife and, seeing what was going on, I gave him a hand when a drunken gang decided to do him some real harm in return for the severe verbal dressing down he gave them after they racially abused him and threatened to become violent. The spitting at him was the point when he turned up his (entirely verbal) retaliation to maximum severity. I couldn’t believe how scathing his comments were in light of what was clearly a dangerous bunch. I wondered why he didn’t appear scared, as I was certainly scared for him, a stranger at that point. But the fact is, these people weren’t a patch on the people and threats he had grown up facing for speaking his mind. His gratitude towards me was immense and never waned even after many years.
What I did wasn’t particularly significant but just the fact that I didn’t stand and watch as others were doing, the fact that I stood shoulder to shoulder with him (on principle) rather than leaving him to defend himself alone against impossible odds, seemed to overwhelm him which was somewhat curious to me.
We had an incredibly strong and instantaneous intellectual connection. We both relished an argument, even very heated ones which frequently took place between us. We would debate the pros and cons of our respective religions, cultures, social conventions and all manner of other interesting subjects from the death penalty to immigration, the Crusades to the Islamic conquests, Cilla Black to Jim Davidson., The Golden Girls to Jerry Springer!
Interestingly he was also the first person to introduce me to the idea that anyone had doubts about the success of multiculturalism. As he, a Moslem immigrant so ironically put it:
“Multiculturalism is an experiment that’s bound to fail”.
Funnily enough I never had him pegged as a Neo-Nazi!
I vehemently disagreed, just as my Marxist teachers would have wanted me to. We interacted extremely well, which further galvanised my strong belief (as it was then) that multiculturalism worked just fine.
But an individual can not represent a culture or a society. I was a bit ‘different’, and I guess he was too. I was young, fairly bright, and I had the desire and the time to explore this alien culture and this intriguing man. He often said to me that I would change significantly when I had children, and that I would then understand why multiculturalism was sure to fail. Once again, he was more right than I could ever have imagined. I actually argued with him about it vigorously but hindsight has taught me how naive and wrong I was, despite being utterly cock sure of myself as all young free-spirits are. #Antifa
Our connection was clearly a rare and special one. He also made great efforts to adjust his cultural habits to suit the new environment of England. He wanted to integrate and adapt to his surroundings, within the bounds of possibility anyway, and those bounds are dictated by eons of very different cultural, religious and biological development, such was his view.
He would have laughed out loud if someone had suggested building a mosque with a call to prayer blasting over the rolling English countryside around his home. In fact he would have been furious at the idea and extremely embarrassed too. He wanted our Christianity to strengthen rather than disappear, and he was deeply troubled by the waning of Christian observance in the UK.
He passionately believed he should fit in with us, not the other way around. Especially after he was given refuge here so “generously” (his words, not mine) by the British State, with the acceptance of many of it's people. Over the years since, I have obviously learned how incredibly rare he was amongst the UK Moslem population, very little of which is Arab of course, and certainly not genius-IQ-level Arab! Another unique difference was the fact that he really did seek refuge from severe oppression and overt threats to his safety, something which can’t be said for probably 99%+ of UK Moslems today.
Watching this man argue with people, some of whom I honestly thought were not worth wasting oxygen on, I couldn’t have wished for a better demonstration of the incredible power of a good argument, especially one put forward in a truly free environment where nobody was silenced or lazily accused of ‘hate speech’ to provide a convenient back door out of a tricky discussion.
Geez, that wasn’t even a catchphrase then! We have no need for stuff like that, and anyone who habitually ‘goes to the pocket’ ready to flash that red card at the earliest opportunity merely demonstrates that their argument is so weak that they daren’t even risk unveiling it in public for fear of the shame!
It’s a mark of incredible feebleness, so nowadays when I see it flashed in my direction, I actually have a reflexive smile. Only on the inside of course, it would be rude to smirk in a debate wouldn’t it, and rudeness just isn’t cricket.
All we need is rational debate, and if possible a touch of mutual respect. There is no guarantee of everything always ending well, but that process is the closest thing we have to it. Good ideas usually win over bad ones. The more discussion that takes place, the more likely that becomes.
This friend of mine once said these very words to me, and I have never forgotten them:
“Despite the massive cultural and religious differences between our two homelands, the biggest difference I see is your right to say what you want without fear of persecution. My country will never improve until that idea is enshrined in law.”
This had a major impact on me, could that really be what he regarded as the biggest difference between an Arab Islamic country, and Britain?! To him, it was, and considering he was the only one of us who had actually seen both countries to compare the two, it was perhaps my first big lesson in the importance of free speech.
As long as we have free speech, we can always restore all other freedoms even if they are somehow lost. We can also construct new freedoms at will, as and when we require them. The root of every single freedom we have today can be traced back to a novel idea expressed through one brave soul’s words, words which were invariably deemed controversial, radical or maybe even ‘dangerous’ when uttered for the first time.
If our right to free speech were to be conceded, or taken from us by force, there would be nothing left to fight for and nothing left worth fighting for. Tragically, there would also be no civilised means with which to fight for anything ever again, leaving only the blood-stained path of armed combat as a route to bringing about change. Sorry, and call me old-fashioned if you like, but that doesn’t sound very ‘progressive’ to me.
We lose free speech at our immense peril.
With the help of a few other trusted free speech advocates, via this Substack and other projects, I hope to add my small voice to this crucial struggle to save freedom, democracy and genuine diversity, including and perhaps most importantly of all: Diversity of Thought.
Please support this effort in any way you can. By just clicking to share this post on social media you can help to spread the word about what is fast becoming a real cultural emergency in the UK and elsewhere.
Thanks for reading.