Lately I have been afflicted by a series of relatively minor but uncomfortable health issues. You need not send me messages of sympathy, sarcastic or otherwise; I mention it by way of explanation. I have done what any mammal would, retreating to lick its wounds (iterally so, in my case, after bouts of oral surgery.) I’ve spent my downtime on the comfort reading that is Beatles lore. That is how I happened across this passage in Peter Doggett's first-rate book You Never Give Me Your Money. It concerns John Lennon, around the time of his political awakening, in 1970:
“Lennon found a fresh hero in Trinidad-born black-power activist Michael Abdul Malik (known professionally as Michael X), founder of a London collective known as the Black Eagles, inspired by the Black Panther Party of California. Malik stumbled upon every radical's dream, a rich and guilt-ridden patron.” Dogget quotes Lennon’s friend Barry Miles: “Michael was a persuasive guy. He became whatever people wanted him to be. He would spin these rich people a yarn, and how could they not write him a cheque? John Lennon was bound to be impressed by him. It was inevitable.” Having bluffed his way into The Beatles’ Apple office, Malik told Lennon: “You have stolen the rhythms of the black people you knew in Liverpool. You might have done it consciously or unconsciously. Anyway, now you owe us a debt.” Lennon duly ponied up a cash advance for a non-existent book.
Certainly, this illustrates why looking to pop stars for moral instruction or sociopolitical insight is seldom a good idea. More than that, it's a perfect encapsulation of how initially valid causes (here, a challenge to the suffocating anti-black racism then deeply engrained in British life) will so often be commandeered and corrupted by chancers, grifters, sociopaths and gangsters. Malik, eventually hanged for murder in his home country of Trinidad and Tobago, was all four at once. He had a great deal in common with Charles Manson, another sometime hypnotist of rock musicians, who found in the hippie movement the vehicle for his charismatic criminality that Malik did in black power.
One of Malik’s victims was the impressionable socialite daughter of a Tory MP. Infatuated with him and his professed cause, she went to live on his commune, where she was murdered, reportedly on his instructions. Lennon helped fund his defence. It is a terrible story in every way, bleakly chronicled by Trinidad’s future Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul both in non-fiction and as the basis of his novel Guerillas. What makes it stand out, paradoxically, is how typical it is. Each character is an archetype. If you want to look at the psychology of such episodes, which repeat themselves over and again, Malik’s is an almost unimprovable case study.
The key factor here is how what used to be called "liberal guilt" dissolves all critical judgement or enquiry. Not all impulses behind "liberal guilt" are contemptible. Among them is empathy, which the illiberal right customarily scorns (until one of them suffers some adversity, whereupon they are quick to demand it for themselves.) But empathy is just that: an impulse. No life, no cause, no movement governed only by impulse can ever steer straight. Empathy tempered with judgement, however… that, we might call compassion, and compassion is a more useful guide.
We owe many of modern life’s boons to such compassion. A desire to improve the world around you is a fine thing, regardless of those who sneer at “do-gooders” as if wanting to do good were in itself so dreadful an idea. Scepticism becomes not only valid but vital at that all too frequent point when good intentions are turned into paving material for the road to hell. The best ideals are readily hijacked by the worst people – self-publicists, fanatics, narcissists, who bully, browbeat or manipulate their way to the forefont. Fantasists are hailed as heroes, demagogues as saviours, despots as idols, bloodthirsty brutes as agents of resistance and liberation. Nor is this gullibility exclusive to the left, although it flourishes there like nowhere else.
When good causes become fashionable, it offers an irresistible opportunity for the unscrupulous and the larcenous to exploit the credulous. Aside from the specific victims of any given incident, over time the worst losers are those in whose name the cause is supposedly advanced – their needs discredited as they suffer the inevitable backlash.
Think of any currently faddish ideology whose adherents manifest as a cross between a fundamentalist parareligious cult and a fandom, ripe for exploitation by whichever firebrands can grasp its levers. (There is one such dogma liable to leap to the mind of any Jewish reader; you might call it the market leader in radical chic, the Google or Amazon of good causes gone rotten.) Look at whose interests that ideology professes to serve. Then look at whose interests it functionally trashes. Note how often they are one and the same.
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