25 August 2011

“I could do you a lot of harm”

extract from Letters from Exile

In some sort of television drama, a wealthy man was represented as saying: ‘I write the rules, I deal out the hands, I decide who wins’.

What is this but Freudian projection? Is this not what goes on in the mind of every socialist agent of the collective, every principal of a college, tutor, educational expert, etc? Never explicitly stated by these persons, but ascribed explicitly to wealthy individuals, who are their most serious threat of opposition.

As cuddly, avuncular, socialist Professor Hardy* put it, ‘I am a very influential man and I could trample your tin-pot organisation underfoot’. Well, he did, pretty well, he and everyone who thought like him. With absolutely no money we were frozen into inactivity. But although we could do nothing, because I had sunk all my savings in a house, they could not force us to leave the house or to leave Oxford.

But they thought that they, as influential agents of the collective, should be able to. When I got my miserable pittance of money from the great and influential socialist Cecil King, Mary Adams of the BBC thought I should be more frightened than I was at receiving even such minimal support from so great a man, and said, ‘He’s very powerful. He could do you a lot of harm if he turns against you. He could get the local council to drive a road through your house.’

* the late Professor Sir Alister Hardy, an eminent zoologist who took to parapsychology in his retirement