This habit of raking through other people’s dirty laundry, this prurient interest in the contents of other people’s dustbins, really is abhorrent.
The latest muck-raker, the latest examiner of other people’s dustbins and dirty, shit-stained underwear, was on the radio this morning selling his latest book: it was about the Nazi concentration camps. As they do, the author attempted to disguise his muck-raking by dressing it up as if he was performing a public service: that is, he claimed it is vital to keep these memories alive, otherwise these atrocities will be repeated. (The truth is that keeping memories alive has exactly the opposite effect — writing about them etc, keeping them alive, ensures that such atrocities WILL be repeated.)
Predictably, Anne Applebaum takes the same line when justifying writing her book Gulag, in which she rakes through and exhibits Russia’s dirty laundry, describing, in salacious detail, the “horrors” of the gulags during Russia’s Communist era.
When researching her book Applebaum travelled through modern Russia and sought the opinions of many of the people she encountered. In the last chapter of the book, she bemoans and criticises the disinterested response of Russians to the gulags: they either shrug mutely or they refuse to talk about it saying “It’s all in the past” or they tell her “We’ve already talked about it and now we’re done talking about it”. In other words, they would not allow themselves to be drawn into Applebaum’s prurient world.
When I was at boarding school, Matron was in the habit of going into the dormitories when they were empty i.e. when the pupils were at classes. She too was on the hunt for dirty laundry or any other deviation from her ideal of perfection for young ladies. If she found untidy drawers, the miscreants names would be announced at the evening meal. If she found dirty knickers, the offending items would be displayed to all at the same meal and the offender required to see her later to retrieve them. If she found something worse, for example a pair of bloodied knickers left unattended, then these would be displayed to the school with the demand that the owner “own” up. If the miscreant was too frightened or shamed to own up, then the knickers would be put on permanent display in a prominent position until such times as the offender could work up the bottle to step forward. If a delay of more than a day or two occurred then Matron would threaten the whole school with loss of privileges — there was no escape. Things would just be made to escalate until someone was found guilty. This, on one occasion, turned into a massive witch hunt with Juniors being required to appear singly before the entire Senior School to be interrogated………
……………this is the junior cousin to these larger affairs where it is not just the dirty knickers of school children but the dirty laundry of entire targeted nations or cultures. There can be no pretence that there is anything benign about this sort of thing. Whether it is Matron in her small pond or Applebaum et al in their larger sphere, the intention is purely malign. No matter how they dress it up, no matter what pretence of being of benefit to humanity, this behaviour is sick. It is a form of sadism, but the worst of it is the lengths Applebaum et all are prepared to go to, the nasty nooks and crannies into which they are willing to thrust their fingers, the putrefaction into which they are willing to stick their hands and noses and the filth they will scrape from under their soiled finger nails, to examine for the presence of anything that a person would wish to keep private, to let go of so that it can be cleansed by the natural processes of decay.
I accuse Applebaum et al of malign intention, but I do not accuse them of DELIBERATE malign intention — they do not know what they do, they do not know what they are. The price of their bad behaviour, and the blessing, is that they become so degraded in mind that they live in a sort of happy oblivion where they think themselves righteous while doing evil.