Harry and Norm posted by Richard Seymour

Much as I hate to bore you with my latest wince of disgust, I have to say a word or two about this from Harry's Place , cited approvingly at Normblog :

Well done to animal rights campaigners. Now you can sleep easily at night knowing that foxes can only be shot dead by farmers. Now no longer will dogs allowed to finish them off. Lets hope that all the farmers are a good shot though.

Well done to our liberal media for making a strong defence of parliament and the principles of democracy. Glad to see that this time there is no need to understand the 'desperation that some people are driven to'. No need to concern ourselves with the 'context' or wonder if such a reaction has been 'provoked'. Oh and no need for the government to listen to a 'significent minority' either. Parliament has voted and we all know that when parliament votes that is democracy in action isn't it?

I'm not that bothered about Harry's position on fox-hunting - frankly, if you can support the bombing of Iraqis, I fail to see how tearing up a bit of fox ass is going to move you to tears. However, the obvious reference here is to Chechnya and Beslan (just take my word for it that it is). The Guardian, it seems, was not morally stringent enough in its response to the atrocity in Beslan, because it managed to suggest that there was such a thing as context and that there may indeed have been provocation from the Russian state. None of that relativism when it comes to those bloody toffs, eh?

Hmmm. It is nice to know that Harry places the fox-hunters in the same league of oppression as the Chechens, but he will notice that none of the newspapers to my knowledge has used the words "sick", "hideous" , "depraved" , "horror" , "horrifying" or "atrocity" in relation to the storming of parliament by a few country turnips. Nor has any columnist in The Guardian or elsewhere saw fit to describe it as "an international crying shame" . This isn't a particular defense of The Guardian, whose editorial policy I have many issues with, but it is a rebuke to a particularly stupid point made by a rather dull ex-Stalinist blogger who seems to deal in party-lines, petty-bourgeois deviations and traitors as fervently as he ever did.

Harry has recently shut down the comments boxes on his post (as has a certain banausic, irrelevant gnat ), and one sees why. He seems to get particularly agitated when someone mentions the fact that Russia is murdering the Chechens and that - well, cause and effect and all - this might be in some way connected to the loathsome actions in Beslan. Responding to a bit of teasing from me when he was trolling the MediaLens message board, he announced that "you in particular can stuff your fist right up your filthy arse! It's all a big fucking joke to you!" Suffice to say, that cracked me up for fucking days.

Oh, by the way, in case anyone thinks that understanding that Russian oppression is a causal factor in atrocities by certain Chechen groups somehow implies forgiveness or justification or an attenuation of disgust and outrage and shame at those atrocities - it doesn't. "But, what about...?" No. "But surely...?" Nope.