The Politically Incorrect Show - 24/08/2000

[Music - Die Fledermaus]

Good afternoon, KAYA ORAAAA & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Thursday August 24, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd, the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit & excellence against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.

[Music up, music down]

Today, a tale of two callers, harking back to Tuesday's programme. One caller offered hope for the future, the other engendered despair about the past &, inadvertently, an explanation for the present.

Caller Fin on Tuesday was just thirteen years old. He rang to voice his objection to prayer & Bible readings at his state school. Religion, he argued - any religion - had no place in public school classrooms. He was not arguing against anyone's right to his religious beliefs; he was arguing for a constitutional separation of religion from the state. He was going to organise a petition to have the prayer & Bible readings stopped. Those of you who heard the call will remember how articulate & sincere he was - unlike so many of his peers with minimal vocabulary, already imbued with the snideness of the popular culture around them. To hear one so young garnering such eloquence in a crusade against state-imposed superstition was a joy, & I had great pleasure in bestowing on Fin there & then a Free Radical Award.

The source of despair, by contrast, was caller Harry - a regular, a dyed-in-the-wool socialist who believes literally EVERYTHING should be nationalised - i.e. taken over by the "guvamint" - & operated for the so-called common good. On this occasion it wasn't economics Harry wished to discuss - it was homosexuals. Homosexuals, said Harry, were dirty, & homosexual practices should be banned (actually, Harry, in his ignorance, thought they still were, until I reminded him of the Homosexual Law Reform Bill of 1986, which he then observed must obviously have been promoted by a "poofter"). A subsequent caller, Joel, then rang to say he had heard Harry on a previous occasion on a different show propose that homosexuals should be put to death by lethal injection - which tied in with something else Harry had said to me months earlier: that Hitler had "got some things right." Harry is at least consistent - as a socialist who believes that the "guvamint" should run the economy, he also believes that it should run our sex lives, & eliminate anyone who doesn't toe the party line in this area. Conservatives & modern "liberals" alike lack this consistency. Conservatives favour a free market in economics but state control of sex & morality; the liberals vice versa. Libertarians like myself, by contrast, favour freedom across the board.

It occurred to me after Tuesday's programme that in many ways the battle for the future is the battle between Fin & Harry. One, a free-thinking individualist recognising that others have a right to their opinions but not a right to impose them via the state; the other believing that the state should be supreme in everything, & enforce his own bigoted nostrums on his behalf in wielding that supremacy. Who will win? Fin is young; Harry is old - & it would be fair to say that many of Harry's fellow-socialists would balk at the more fascistic elements of his socialism. But the battle IS one of ideas - & while the notion that the state should be supreme over the individual has ANY currency in ANY form, we liberty-lovers must be not only eternally vigilant, but eternally active & combative. For make no mistake - this IS war.

So let's root for Fin, & stride forward together into the sunlight of freedom.

---

If you enjoyed this, why not subscribe?