Moral corruption courtesy of Bill O’Reilly

There are a few good rules to follow if you plan to make a living from public writing aka journalism.

For one, do not write about people or countries that are not your own unless you acknowledge that fact explicitly. Two, do not write about topics simply because they are controversial, unless you are an expert. And three, do not be sucked into writing in response to someone who makes a living from being controversial.

I am now going to break all three because of what [tag]Bill O’Reilly[/tag] – one of the most objectionable people in the US media at the moment – said on his radio show a few days ago.

I have had a pretty firm policy of ignoring O’Reilly almost as soon as I first saw and heard him. O’Reilly lives solely on a diet of outrage, so the only reasonable way of dealing with him is to ignore him altogether. But it isn’t Bill O’Reilly that I want to draw attention to. Instead, it is the clear example he has provided of why reason should be listened to over inflamed passions – something that is extremely difficult to do in the real world.

This everyday failure of calm rationale when faced with blistering emotion is, in a very fundamental way, the reason why human beings continue to enact insane and bloody acts against one another, never learning the lessons of the past. Everyone agrees that Hitler was a lunatic, a psychopathic madman and yet people rarely consider how it was that he was voted into power. Or how the whole country of Germany was turned into a fighting beast. History tells us that people constantly put violent nutcases into power and every time it is for the same reason: because they are fearful of being hurt. The justification is always that we need to fight against a dangerous power.

It is very difficult to expect people to listen to reason when they fear for their life. But thanks to Mr O’Reilly, we have a very clear example of why you should never listen to people who feed off that fear and use it for their own ends.

A violent blinkered man is a violent blinkered man the world over. In makes no difference what country you are in. In such a man, words are not the means by which logic and reason can be used to arrive at the best conclusion; they are simply tools to create and defend personal attainment and power.

Bill O’Reilly told his audience three days ago that [tag]Iraq[/tag] needs to run the way [tag]Saddam Hussein[/tag] ran it. He said: “See, if I’m president, I got probably another 50, 60 thousand with orders to shoot on sight anybody violating curfews. Shoot them on sight. That’s me, President O’Reilly, curfew in Ramadi, seven o’clock at night. You’re on the street? You’re dead. I shoot you right between the eyes. OK? That’s how I run that country. Just like Saddam ran it. Saddam didn’t have explosions – he didn’t have bombers. Did he? Because if you got out of line, you’re dead.”

O’Reilly then tempers this with: “Now, is that the kind of country I want to have for Iraq? No. But you have to have that for a few months to stabilise the situation so the Iraqi government can get organised, can get security in place and can get the structure going.”

And therein lies the rub. Saddam Hussein didn’t just walk into power one day and start torturing people. No dictator in history has ever done that. Instead, there is always a reason why such controls are necessary. Saddam said he had uncovered a plot against him and had his enemies killed. When there was an attempt to assassinate him, he brought in new laws and powers. The thing is that those laws then never go away because – the “logic” holds – if they did, then the danger would return.

You only have to look at the new terrorism laws in the UK, the Patriot Act in the US. The laws are brought in because of a specific event. But then, you will note, they are never knocked down again. Why? Because you are told that the threat is still out there. If the law is knocked down, the people in power have far less power. Since the reason they are there in the first place is because the acquisition of power is their raison d’etre, it is not too difficult to see that the people with the power may not wish to relinquish it. And so it is necessary to produce fear to justify the laws and the associated power. Welcome to 2006.

What Bill O’Reilly very neatly does in a short clip is demonstrate this timeless moral corruption. Where the very methods railed against in order to get into power are then justified once there.

When all the arguments why the US and UK took over Iraq fell down (WMD, links with Al-Queda, and so on), we were left with a single moral purpose: that Saddam was a violent dictator that had to be disposed of. Even that moral fall-back has now been utterly destroyed by the events of Falluja, Abu Graib, Guatanamo Bay… And now Bill O’Reilly has done his job as a media commentator and reflected that moral corruption in all its horrible intensity.

Have a listen: [https://www.kierenmccarthy.co.uk/mp3s/oreilly-19jun06.mp3]