Please remove the skin of your toy balloon. April 12, 2010

It is really no coincidence that the majority of my rants on this blog contain some tenuous reference to the work of Kurt Vonnegut – he is, after all, a genius. Today I would like to talk about the granfalloon. According to The Books of Bokonon, a granfalloon describes ‘a proud and meaningless association of human beings’. Vonnegut provides the following examples: ‘the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows — and any nation, anytime, anywhere’. In Bokononism, a granfalloon is a false karass – a karass being a group of people brought together for some common cosmic purpose. The granfalloon, or false karass, is a group of people who believe they have a common cosmic purpose, but in actual fact do not. As is frequently the case, Wikipedia puts it best: ‘it is a group of people who outwardly choose or claim to have a shared identity or purpose, but whose mutual association is actually meaningless.’

At this point I would like to draw the reader’s attention to a recent debate on a B3ta forum, inspired by B3ta’s QoTW – ‘Prejudice’. The full thread can be accessed here, but for those who don’t have an entire free day in which to trawl through it, I’ll summarise the salient points. The OP, Eurosong, is complaining about the prejudice he encounters as an occasional Daily Mail reader when expressing certain opinions – viz.:

Now I’m not talking about all immigrants – no way. I’m talking about the vast numbers of people who come to this country with the intention to take, and not to contribute. The Somali families with ten children, who come here in order to be given free housing and benefits – at the expense of you and me.

To help us complete this beautiful picture, the OP provides a couple more illustrative examples of these so-called ‘problem’ immigrants, and then goes on to say:

I have no problem whatsoever with people who immigrate to this country, and work hard; pay their taxes; contribute to British society; and obey our laws. And to anyone who may have been reading this, and thinking about those lazy and feckless British people who see benefit scrounging as a way of life: yes, I am not saying that all our problems are caused by immigration. I freely admit that there are many immigrants here who do indeed contribute a lot more to society than those British people who scrounge. However, while we may be stuck with the British scroungers – we should not have to be stuck with the non-British scroungers.

The OP’s post meets with a cacophony of opinion from fellow B3tards, most in outrage, the odd few in agreement, that goes on for pages. A number of posters provide links to statistics which have been gathered by a number of independent sources suggesting that the immigration ‘problem’ is not even remotely as grave as the DM would have us believe. One poster quotes the amount of taxpayers’ money that is being frittered away on these immigrants to be 0.7%. The OP states initially that he believes statistics cannot be trusted in this matter because they are all ‘massaged’ (never mind for the time being how exactly one massages a statistic) and utterly fails to acknowledge all subsequent references to such statistics recurring throughout the thread. A fellow B3tard quips, ‘let’s rely on anecdotes instead’ (and is later shot down by the OP for the heinous crime of using sarcasm in a grown-up debate). Anecdotes are precisely what the OP’s responses seem to originate from – he claims to work in a field that allows access to ‘real’ information about immigration, and yet when prompted fails entirely to elaborate on what kind of work this might be.

As each of the OP’s points is torn apart by his critics, his argument appears to grow increasingly narrow and tenuous. He is continually stating that he has no problem with this, no problem with that – so the back-peddling responses given by the OP to attacks from his fellows only work to enforce the impression that the OP does not actually hold many valid opinions of his own at all, but merely a series of hackneyed rhetorics lifted directly from the pages of the tabloid press which are quickly and efficently despatched by the more enlightened of his fellows.

Predictably, the debate turns to the topic of national identity. The OP implies that British citizens are more entitled to sponge off the system than their forrin counterparts (incidentally, a number of B3tards are chastised by the OP for using the term ‘forrin’, as the OP fails to grasp that they use this term because they resent having to use his term, ‘foreign’, because they believe it to be a ridiculous device of discrimination, and they must therefore rely on the parody term in order to prevent the original term thoroughly undermining the spirit of their posts). The OP writes, ‘And if we can eject at least SOME of those people – on the grounds that they are not British – then we should do so’. To which the mighty badger replies, ‘I’d love to see your justification for how “where you were born” is an acceptable reason to choose who you persecute for doing [sic.] and who you don’t’. Of course, the OP is unable or unwilling to oblige. Meanwhile, rampants makes some very excellent points:

The immigration regulations cannot sift the deserving cases from the non-deserving ones on every occasion. If we want to have a fair and reasonable system which allows in deserving cases we have to accept that sometimes this is going to be abused.

This is the principle that stands behind every human rights law, that led to the abolition of the death penalty, and that means we don’t give in to terrorist demands. I’ve said this before elsewhere, and I’ll say it again: if we begin to sacrifice our human rights because they are abused by a small minority, then we are thoroughly undermining the entire premise of the democracy for which many great people have fought and died. The OP’s call for the withdrawal of welfare support to immigrants is akin to demanding the withdrawal of votes for women because a couple of women have voted for the Monster Raving Loony Party. It is the responsibility of the government of this country to provide aid to anyone who needs it, regardless of nationality, skin colour, spoken language, religion, or gender. Regardless of anything. That is what governments are for. The more people advocate that a government exists solely to serve its own country, the faster discrimination, racism and intolerance will increase; it is time to accept that the UK is part of the world and has responsibilities for every citizen of the world. Perhaps the fact that the UK is such a small island makes it easier for people to think of themselves as separate from, and better than, the rest of the globe. But we conquered the seas long ago. This is no excuse. The OP complains that ‘I myself used to be on a housing waiting list, but I was told that as a single, childless male, I was “lowest priority” because all the asylum seekers came before me. Fact.’ I enjoy the way he presents this to as as if we are supposed to be outraged. Fact! When in reality the majority of B3tards confirmed that this is not only completely normal, but completely justifiable, too. It turns out later that the OP

was RENTING a tiny room in a three-bedroom house.
The two reception rooms were being used as bedrooms – meaning that there was no common area apart from the kitchen and bathroom.

(his emphasis). Which provoked much sarcasm and hilarity (‘Imagine not having a reception room. Just IMAGINE. [...] We should definitely put families on the street so your man can watch telly in a different room to the one he sleeps in’). The OP’s much wailing and gnashing of teeth on this point only serves to enhance mine: that our systems are largely designed (or should be) to benefit the whole rather than the few (of course in reality it doesn’t always work out this way, but that’s another story). The OP’s problem seems to be that his selfish desires are being ignored while the (arguably greater) needs of others are being met.

rampants goes on:

As for Commonwealth countries, to forward a very broad and basic argument, it is possible to suggest that part of the economic problems caused to those countries result from the stripping of assets and resources which occurred during the occupation of these countries by the British Empire, and conversely that some of our own prosperity was built on these acquisitions. So if people ARE economic migrants, it’s always worth remembering that the economic conditions which obliged them to try to migrate have a historical basis and can’t simply be considered in isolation.

Which is probably the most intelligent comment in the whole thread. We ought to be able to accept that, as a relatively prosperous, free nation, it is in our power (and best interests) to help those less fortunate than ourselves – we ought to be able to accept this without having to have a reason – but the fact is many UK citizens fail to grasp this concept even when we have a good reason to do so. Many of the immigrants coming to the UK have left their home countries because they are in a terrible state as a direct result of a) British colonisation and/or b) the utter failure of ‘developed’ nations to aid poorer countries, write off debts and encourage development. And the worst part of all this is, not only do we fail to acknowledge our complicity in these events, not only do we fail to give aid, or give it very begrudgingly and moan about it afterwards, but we actually pride ourselves on this state of affairs.

Last winter the EDL marched in Nottingham and the story was covered by The Evening Post. The debate spawned by this story on TEP website is sadly no longer available, but was, for the most part, about 100% more bigoted and narrow-minded than Eurosong’s post on the B3ta forum. The essence of the argument was that Muslims are invading Britain, infiltrating our government, destroying our culture, and trampling all over everything we hold dear. More than a few posters claimed that Muslims are destroying ‘British national identity’. Amid this chorus of madness, one sensible voice could be heard (some guy from Leicester), who claimed in calm, measured prose that there is no such thing as a British national identity. Of course, he met with torrents of abuse from people claiming he was anti-British, a reverse racist, and so on. So the guy from Leicester challenged the other posters to define British national identity. The response was along the lines of: I am British because I can drink tea and go walking in the countryside. I’m not sure if the guy from Leicester ever got the chance to respond to this, but I’ll take the liberty of doing it for him (I tried to post on the thread at the time, but the server went down and I was too angry to write it all again). 1. I’m not entirely happy with the idea that an identity is defined purely by things you do, especially when these things are incredibly mundane. 2. Many thousands of people in many hundreds of countries drink tea and go walking in the countryside. This is not unique to the UK. 3. Drinking tea is considered to be about the most British thing you can do and yet people seem to have conveniently forgotton that tea originally came from India and China and was procured for the most part by colonisation and exploitation of those countries. The fact that tea drinking is now the defining activity of British identity worryingly demonstrates that we have not progressed beyond imperialism; in fact we are proud of it. 4. The guy from Leicester was right; there is no such thing as a British national identity. We are a conglomerate people, none of us ‘indiginous’ (contrary to what Nick Griffin might tell you), none of us possessing a single geist, none of us a single faith or creed or tongue; we do not even share the same interests, hobbies, careers, goals, or political opinions. Where is our identity? What is our identity? It is in our imagination. It is nothing but a granfalloon.

The internet is a double-edged sword. It allows free comment and gives the everyman a public voice. But in doing so it illustrates terrible sides of humanity: these threads bely a troubling trend among UK citizens to voice bigoted, short-sighted and frequently racist opinions. These posters believe they are right and justified in their opinions. They are encouraged to believe this by people of similar opinion, tabloid newspapers and Jeremy Clarkson. They do not even consider themselves particularly radical – they are the norm. When their opinions are challenged they resort to childish insults and pedantic defensiveness. They are inflexible and unable to re-evaluate their world view. They believe that immigrants are destroying Britain, and are blind to the innumerable diverse and fascinating cultural riches those from other parts of the world bring to our insular little backwater. They fail to consider with any sympathy the plights of their fellow human beings – in fact I doubt sometimes that they even consider them as human beings. They believe that they are entitled to certain privileges that others are not, simply because of where they were born. They perceive the value of all people other than themselves as purely economical, and if others do not ‘contribute’ they are not worth bothering about. They claim that they are rational, reasonable people, and yet they seem to be unable to grasp the very basic principles of common sense, justice and human rights. In my mind, these people are way more dangerous than immigrants, way more dangerous than benefit fraudsters, a little more dangerous, even, than journalists. Their dissatisfaction is not a symptom of the illness: it is the cause of the illness. If we allow these opinions to proliferate, we will be taking a very dark path. They may just be irritating and slightly comical now, but a decade in the future we may find ourselves in a frighteningly familiar scenario. The irony is that when we are reminded of our grandfathers who fought and died to defend our nation only for these bloody forriners to come stomping all over it, the people we are listening to are of the same ilk as those our grandfathers were fighting against. We should remember the sacrifices of our grandfathers as those made in the name of freedom, not in the name of Britain. Because Britain does not even exist. Bokonon tells us:

If you wish to study a granfalloon,

Just remove the skin of a toy balloon.