THE UNRAVELLING OF REX MURPHY or A SHORT LESSON IN IRONY
Rex Murphy is a Canadian icon: a Rhodes scholar, an author, a popular voice in newsprint and on national television and radio. But I think Rex has lost his marbles. The first sign of his decline was surely when he came out as one of Canada’s most vocal and irrational climate change deniers. (His reasoning on this topic is fully encapsulated by an argument that tar sands production provides jobs to Newfoundlanders.) In more recent days the man has gone on to pen two defenceless and rather silly rants.
The first came in the National Post and labelled Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and Edward Snowden (yes, all three together) as “morally and intellectually inept stooges.” As Rex insists:
Step back for a second and it’s possible to see all of this – Snowden, Manning, Assange – for what it is: A clutch of jejune and righteous activists, blind to their own real motivations, endowed with that full-blast contempt towards America which is every activist’s birth certificate, who stumbled into the capacity to upend their nation’s secrets and leaped to do so.
(Of course Murphy’s own blast in the National Post cannot be seen, in any way, as a righteous, naïve, contempt-filled or knee-jerk rant by a man blind to his own emotions or motivations. No. Not at all...)
Just imagine for a moment being as wise as Rex. How powerful and comforting it must be to know complete strangers’ minds and motivations, so well as to be essentially a mind-reader, that you can utterly disregard them. Apparently for Rex and his audience all is plain to see. It’s not that billions of people have and continue to be systematically lied to and manipulated by an evermore overt and obtuse oligopoly. It’s not that the entire media apparatus, Mr Murphy included, is either blind or willfully ignorant. It’s not that journalists like Rex are chronically and mysteriously unable to offer any meaningful insights into pressing regional, national, or global events for a reality-starved public. No! But being a little less claircognizant than super-human Rex, we may actually wish to look at the evidence for his claims. Let’s just look at the work of Julian Assange alone. What do we know? We know that Wikileaks has been responsible for exposing corruption, oppression, and violence around the world. From widespread insider trading at JPMorgan to the Kenyan President looting $3 billion from his own country to massive tax fraud by Swiss banks; from releasing suppressed videos of nuclear reactor leaks in Japan to exposing secret gag orders preventing the U.K. media from reporting on toxic waste dumping to publicizing evidence of illegally spying on journalists by German authorities; from unreported executions in East Timor to documentation about how election violence is financed and organized in Africa; from leaks showing Catholic hospitals in violating their own ethics standards to exposing corruption by the Shriners at children’s hospitals throughout North America… And then there are the more well-known revelations of U.S. and coalition war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere (including rendition, torture programs, and drone operations that break U.S. and international law, as well as the murder of civilians – children and journalists and even U.S. citizens among them – and much more...) There's no reason to think we would have heard about any of this without Wikileaks. And if we're willing to overlook the indisputable crimes of these people in power, seeing the good they do as outweighing the vast harms, then it feels ridiculous, to me, to declare the as yet un-demonstrated potential harm from these leaks as overwhelming all of the very easily demonstrable good.
Of course Rex Murphy knows all these details. He would also know the above is just a small list of significant leaks. And of course he’s aware that all of this would be unknown and unreported if it were not for the secure, anonymous online tool created by Julian Assange. He writes this stuff with full knowledge that Wikileaks receives and publishes information predominantly from insiders and conscientious whistleblowers (something we encourage and protect by law.) He also knows that Assange has revealed more about how the world really operates, what’s really going on behind closed doors, than the rest of the world’s media combined. This information, the facts, we know thanks to Assange, are systematically hidden from the voting public – and not for honourable reasons but for public relations, for obfuscation purposes, to cover up illegal activity, and to protect the most powerful from the same norms and laws the rest of us are held to. It’s with this understanding that Murphy labels Wikileaks’ founder a ”righteous activist.” Knowing all this Rex still conjures up words like “jejune” and “blind” and condemns, not praises, the correction and preservation of the historical record and the upholding of human rights and international law that this allows. Murphy would have us all believe that Assange is in fact an evil-doer for having created what is by far the most powerful tool for the expression and expansion of human rights, the rule of law, and democratic values since the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. (Of course Wikileaks is actually a tool – and not just words on a page or an idea in people’s minds, like the others, easily subverted by authority.) Rex would like us to believe that allowing the citizenry to expose corruption and other illegal activity is in fact a kind of hatred for the U.S. and its people and not, very obviously, the best possible way to honour and defend democratic institutions and ideals from those who would undermine them. Rex Murphy would like us to take his unsupported word for it that this man – someone who has revolutionized journalism, shed light on the darkest corners of the globe, outsmarted the world’s corporate elite while outplaying an elaborate, networked, global intelligence apparatus with boundless resources, including science-fiction-level surveillance tools – has stumbled unwittingly into this capacity without any skills, intelligence, or foresight, and all while lacking anything resembling a moral compass. Alright Rex, alright.
In his ramblings Mr Murphy does manage to ask an interesting question, however. He writes:
But who, save those who have given study and time to relations between governments in peace and war, who ideally have had real experience in government at the highest level, is in an intellectually justified position to make the awful call – balancing of rights and risks involved in an exposure of a government’s espionage activities – of exposing a nation’s secrets.
It must be clear to Mr Murphy that no government, military, or secret service ever finds their activities, criminal or otherwise, worthy of reportage. Was it U.S. generals that shared with us the horrors of their usage of chemical warfare in Vietnam? Was it the East German Stasi who made public their own shocking files? Was it the Japanese leadership who forwarded evidence of their conduct in China at Nanking? Was it the government and military rulers of Indonesia that opened came clean about the disappearance and murder of hundreds of thousands of civilians? I don’t think so. And yet how can we claim a voting public to be informed unless it has these kinds of details? Following his line of thinking I imagine Rex would also suggest we leave it to the banking executives – those with sufficient study and experience in the world of finance at its highest level; those in the “intellectually justified position” – to balance the rights and risks of exposing their systemic manipulation and corruption of the global financial system? And I suppose he’d also recommend we enlist the fox to guard the hen house too...
Well, maybe Rex just had a bad day. Maybe he was feeling the pressure to write and didn’t give the article the time he normally would. Maybe we could let it slide? Sure. But only two weeks later he published another sad and defenseless rant.
This time Murphy decided to level an attack against Atheists of all people. He starts his barrage of baseless bombast with a bold attack aimed at the deceased Christopher Hitchens. As in the last piece, here again Rex is unwilling to write with honesty, or even forward an argument. Rex attacks Hitchens for his position against the canonization of Mother Teresa – about which Hitchens wrote a short book. Rex criticizes the work as a “wretched addition to the bloated … ‘look at me’ school of contrarian commentary.” Bizarrely, Rex blasts away as he does no less than eighteen years after the book’s publication and a full two years after the author’s corpse was donated to medical research. Why now Rex? Perhaps he only recently learned of the book? Perhaps. But, equally strange, it seems he only read the title of the book and not its contents (even though it’s a slim book, easily read in one sitting). And it also seems obvious that Rex spent no time investigating or even thinking critically about the life of the “Mother” or her beatification. Rex fails to comment on, nevermind refute, any of the examinations found in the book. And he doesn’t appear aware of Hitchens’ personal connection to Theresa’s beatification either. Weirdly, he attacks Hitchens for being critical of Mother Theresa while ignoring that it was the Vatican who called up Hitchens to provide this very legitimate critique before a panel of senior priests and monsignors, in the role of “Devil’s Advocate” as the sole opposition to Theresa’s canonization as a saint. In this light, with the addition of a single speck of relevant information, I hope you’ll agree, Christopher Hitchens seems slightly less like the contrarian attention seeker Rex paints him as.
Over all, this was an extraordinarily strange and pointless attack by Murphy. It did little more than confirm what we already know: that Hitchens was and is, even in death, Rex’s social, political, cultural, and intellectual superior. It’s clear for all to see, by his own writings, that these attacks are foolish and indefensible. In fact, he is so callous, and his work so devoid of evidence, we might suspect Rex Murphy is himself striving for sainthood.
To make matters worse, the intrepid Murphy doesn’t stop after his baseless bashing of Hitchens. No, that was just his warm-up. He goes on to claim that anger and aggression are common traits among Atheists, like Hitchens, along with an “unseemly infatuation with being regarded as victims.” Apparently it’s not enough for Rex that many vocal, public non-believers and their families receive not just hate mail but credible death threats as well – ones that require them to move, to employ bodyguards, even go into hiding and take other extraordinary security measures – for the crime of questioning orthodoxy. And this (senseless attacks and even threats of violence or death against individuals), he knows, happens within secular nations that preach freedom of expression and freedom of religion. Rex says this stuff while knowing as we all do that many countries around the globe have made Atheism illegal, and even punishable by death; and that merely tweeting the words “there is no God” has resulted in decade-long jail terms and even gotten people murdered at the hands of government thugs. Worse, is there any doubt that if this exact same thing were happening in reverse, churchgoers being victimized by violent non-believers, Rex Murphy would be gifting us with editorials saturated with words like “vilified”, “pogrom”, and “persecution”? No, no doubt at all. He would be using his unjustifiably lofty platform to cry out to his government and appeal to the wider international community for a firm and immediate response in defence of the religious. We can be sure he wouldn’t go out of his way to use his privilege to publicly piss on these people.
Rex follows all this nonsense by then offering Richard Dawkins the journalistic equivalent of a sucker punch while referring to him (renowned scientist, distinguished Oxford professor, Royal Society Fellow, acclaimed author and documentary film-maker, public intellectual, and global champion of science and reason) as a “fanatic toad”. Of course he doesn’t provide us with a thoughtful argument, offer to interview Dawkins, or propose a public debate with him – as Rex could very easily do given his credentials. No, instead he pisses on him, publicly, in print, in a national newspaper.
Now, it doesn’t need to be said but, as someone who might be mistaken for an angry Atheist, I might mention that Rex Murphy (the radio personality who looks something like the love child of Marty Feldman and Danny DeVito, and quite possibly the closest thing we have to a human snapping-turtle hybrid) shouldn’t be making fun of people or calling them names. (Speaking of names, do you think he goes by “Rex” because, like everyone’s favourite dinosaur, he’s a dusty old fossil? Perhaps. Or is it just because, were he not so loud, demanding of respect, and likely to bite your head off, you might laugh his comical personage right out of the room? ...well, “do unto others” Mr Murphy.)
Rex continues his entertaining dis-articulation by asserting that non-believers “claim a near-allergic response to even the least intrusive manifestation of religious belief…” What, I ask, are these “least intrusive” manifestation of religious belief? (Let’s have an example, Rex, or is that below your station?) Does he mean one’s personal thoughts and beliefs? Certainly what someone believes in the privacy of their own mind must be supremely benign. What could possibly be less intrusive? Unless of course said person’s worldview (their orientation and framing, their understanding of the way things work, their beliefs, hopes, and wishes) is cultivated out of and reinforced by assertions that are highly problematic and consequential for all of society. In this case, such a person would be living in a state of confusion and misery (masquerading as wisdom and joy) that they wittingly and unwittingly infect others with, all while misallocating much of their precious and limited time, energy, and resources...
So maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe by “least intrusive” Rex is just talking about the non-consensual, irreversible, mutilation of an infant’s genitals (the ancient, barbaric, needless, and faith-based practise euphemistically known as “circumcision”?) Or perhaps he’s talking about God (something nobody seems capable of consistently or coherently defining) and his “good word” making an appearance in a secular nation’s anthem, imposing itself on virtually all our public institutions, events, and holidays, and influencing much of our legislation. (If any of the above are things a scholar such as Rex would label “least intrusive” it would be very interesting to hear what could earn designations such as “meddlesome” or “domineering”.)
Well, who’s to know what Rex is thinking? As ever, he doesn’t tell us what he actually means, nor does he attempt to validate his proclamations; instead, he just asks us to have blind faith in the all-seeing, all-knowing, sagacious Rex. (Is it surprising that he’s such a vocal defender of the Church?)
It might be fun to imagine for a moment how Rex would respond if our secular government, and its supporting institutions, began imposing “non-intrusive” non-theist ideas and constructions the way it does religious ones. For instance, what if our next Prime Minister paved the way for Atheist monuments to be erected in every neighbourhood, specifically ones that tower above nearly everything and announce their presence weekly, daily, or hourly for all to hear? And what if these monuments and the non-theist organizations behind them were made exempt from paying taxes forever into the future? Then imagine if this same domineering group declared Wednesday to be a day of leisure; ensuring that schools were closed, shops didn’t open, the mail didn’t arrive, public transportation ran less frequently (essentially forcing the young, the old, and the poor to observe their non-religious sabbath regardless of their personal beliefs.) And what if they then imposed a whole range of other impediments that needlessly stood in the way of a devout believer’s ability to conduct their very common and reasonable affairs? What if secular hospitals began to deny believers of the Abrahamic faiths medical services, or their partners visitation rights, because they’d been married in a mosque or church and had not chosen a civil service or common-law status? What if Atheist activists were stationed in these hospitals, encouraging believers to recant their faith? And what if the military only offered mental health services on the battlefield through certified Atheists, and even then only to declared non-believers? What if Atheists were found responsible for systematically keeping education, medical advice, and birth control (the very foundations of wellness) from millions of people in Asia and Africa? Or how would Rex feel if Atheist fanatics came door to door pushing their secular pamphlets and word-games on every person with a front door or a mail slot? And then what if these same people were found occupying public parks and major downtown intersections like “pro-life” protestors, only with giant graphic posters of children being assaulted by priests and nuns? And then what if Atheists started getting together and buying up prime real estate from which to host weekly meetings that, among other things, involved excuses for and directions on how to spread hate-filled bigotry and fear among the wider public, and with special focus on children? What if, with the unconditional support of the state, Atheists and free-thinkers kidnapped the children of the faithful and put them in rural re-education camps? And what if this went on unquestioned for a hundred years? And then what if we learned that Christopher Hitchens had been the head of an Atheist organization, one that Richard Dawkins now runs, that was shown to knowingly enable and provide protection for what amounts to a global network of sexual predators? And what if, despite the best efforts of Christians everywhere, this publicly-funded, tax-exempt, state-supported Atheist institution proved to be above the law and, worse still, unwilling to change?
Is there any doubt that if any of the above were to transpire, given his loud protestations over mere words, dear ol’ Rex would just burst at the seams? None. Though I wonder whether members of the oppressive Atheist majority would then call Rex’s well-warranted refutations “ludicrous”? Would they publicly declare Rex’s simple and humane logic “silly” or “whiny”? Would they insist his cries for a more sane discourse and society to be nothing more than “a schoolyard temper-tantrum”? I hope not; after all, you’d think Atheists and their secularist cousins would understand, better than anyone perhaps, the value of freedom of speech and of the benefit to everyone of protecting the voices of minorities – especially ones you disagree with.
Comentarios