Our true opinion formers are neither politicians nor businessmen nor even pundits, though some of them may have a bit of influence.
But not nearly as much as ‘TV personalities’ and ‘celebrities’. It’s possible to define those in either category as people I’ve never heard of, but this definition isn’t precise. After all, many of those who are unknown to me are also unknown to everyone else, other than their own families, friends and colleagues.
Even though I’m stuck for a tight definition, I can easily discern certain qualities ‘TV personalities’ and ‘celebrities’ have in common. They, with probably some exceptions of which I’m lamentably unaware, are stupid, immoral, photogenic and devoid of any talent or attainment recognised as such throughout the first 5,000 years of recorded history.
Since Katie Hopkins is both a ‘TV personality’ and ‘celebrity’, she possesses all those fine qualities to a hypertrophied extent, a fact she has to keep advertising in order to remain a ‘TV personality’ and ‘celebrity’.
Her latest gem came in a Radio Times interview. When asked what she’d do if she ruled the world, Katie came up with a masterpiece.
She’d solve the world’s most pressing problem, she replied, which is that “We just have far too many old people. It’s ridiculous to be living in a country where we can put dogs to sleep but not people.”
One can accept that Katie’s frank self-assessment has led her to believe that some people are in no way superior to dogs intellectually or morally. What has escaped her attention is that, for old times’ sake if nothing else, human beings do enjoy a special status in the animal world.
So special in fact that some sticks-in-the-mud still believe – and the law still grudgingly accepts – that human life is so valuable as to be sacred, while dogs’ lives aren’t.
Moreover, the memory of two satanic creeds of modernity, Bolshevism and Nazism, still hasn’t been expunged. Some – one hopes most – people may be put off by the prospect of killing 20 million people, which is roughly the number of those who may be classified as ‘old’ in Britain.
No such problems for our TV personality. The solution, she explained, is easy: “Euthanasia vans – just like ice-cream vans – they would come to your home… They might even have a nice little tune they’d play… I’m super-keen on euthanasia vans.”
Alas, Katie’s chosen solution to all our troubles lacks novelty appeal. It was the Bolsheviks who pioneered the use of such vans as a solution to pressing problems, in their case political rather than demographic ones. The design was as simple as all things of genius.
A hose was attached to the exhaust pipe and routed into the back of the van, which was hermetically sealed. The vehicle was then densely packed with political undesirables and locked up.
The driver would start the engine, those inside would begin banging against the van walls. After a few minutes the noise would die down. The driver would wait a while longer to make sure, then the van doors would be opened and the operators would unload the blue corpses, their faces distorted by the kind of grimaces Goya depicted in his Capriccios.
The innovation was so effective yet simple that it found a broader use when the Nazis took over. Cooperation between the NKVD and Gestapo started immediately, long before the world was treated to the spectacle of the Pact.
The SS and Gestapo knew they had a lot to learn. After all, by the time Hitler came to power the Soviets had been practising mass murder for 15 years, and the Germans respected their accumulated know-how.
As part of the friendly exchange, the technologically-minded Germans presented their Russian colleagues with a state-of-the-art machine for pulling fingernails. The Soviets in their turn taught the Germans how to save valuable ammunition by using ‘euthanasia vans’.
The idea caught on, and the Germans put it to wide use in Eastern Europe. In time they abandoned the practice in favour of one that utilised the advances of their chemical industry, and ‘euthanasia vans’ went the way of all outdated gadgets.
But now our own ‘TV personality’ has revived the concept, so far only in theory, as an ideal but alas still unattainable goal towards which we must strive.
It’s comforting to observe how euthanasia fans and birth-control enthusiasts converge in their longing for mass murder. Margaret Sanger, for example, the founder of Planned Parenthood who coined the term ‘birth-control’, was capable of uttering pearls like “Coloured people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated.”
Sanger, who in her day was even more of a celebrity than Katie is now, didn’t mind letting wrinklies die a natural death. But modernity is nothing if not progressive, and it fell upon our own ‘TV personality’ to take Sanger’s idea to the next level.
What kind of society would allow such deranged monsters a public platform and an adulating audience? The single-word answer can be found in Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph: Circumspice.