Charles Moore, who skilfully edited The Spectator, concedes in a foreword to this anthology that its editors are frequently asked why they don’t sack Taki Theodoracopulos, the journal’s long-standing High Life columnist. Taki is to many, Moore admits, “a racist, a snob, a vulgarian, a sex maniac, a cad, a fascist and a drunk”. He says “it is precisely because Taki is indefensible that he should be defended”.
The following are some of Taki’s musings that apparently warrant defending: “OJ Simpson murdered two white people in cold blood and walked free because his shyster lawyers packed the jury with blacks.” New York, or “Noo Yawk”, is “full of Hispanics, blacks, homosexuals, cross-dressers and people on welfare”. We went to war against Slobodan Milosevic to “save Albanian Muslim drug-runners”. General Franco was just “too decent a man” and General Pinochet the “saviour of Chile”. The late, unlamented and fanatically Nazi Diana Mosley was simply “wonderful” and America did not lose its war in south east Asia in the jungles of Vietnam. It lost because of a “reluctance to use its real power”.
Taki was reared in Nazi-occupied Greece and his experience plainly had a profound effect upon him. The opposite, that is, to most normal people. He found the Germans in their uniforms to be dashing and told a colleague how much he admired the Wehrmacht. It was their “professionalism that allowed Germany to fight with astonishing effectiveness against impossible odds”. They were, of course, remarkably effective in eliminating 87 per cent of Greece’s Jewish population that had numbered 77,000 men, women and children.
Taki also holds very strong views about crime. His attention over the past decade has, however, been confined to three miscreants. He raged at the “great draft-dodger” Bill Clinton for pardoning the fraudster Marc Rich. He is scathing at the refusal of the Swiss authorities to prosecute Vincent Meyer (never heard of him? Worry not. Nobody else has either) for the alleged sexual abuse of a child. And he is in his element when inveighing against Bernie Madoff. That all three happen to be Jews is, of course, entirely coincidental. Oddly enough, though, he has little sense of shame when reminding us of his own criminal conviction – and imprisonment – for importing cocaine.
He did recently assure us that his obsessive and pathological hatred of Israel has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It is to do with his concern at the plight of the Palestinians. But how does this human rights façade square with his unrepentant support for apartheid South Africa, Ian Smith’s illegal regime in Rhodesia and right-wing death squads in Latin America?
So what are Taki’s politics? In 2002 he, together with the fuhrer of America’s lunatic right, Pat Buchanan, founded a shmutta called the American Conservative. Their principal adversaries are not to be found on the left, whom they of course loathe. Their targets are the “NeoCons”. Subterranean figures such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz who have subverted America’s foreign policy in favour of Israel. Moreover, the real mentors of the “NeoCons” are exposed as not in fact being legitimate conservative figures, but degenerates like Leon Trotsky, Martin Luther King and that great “warmonger” Franklin Delano Roosevelt. You get the drift…
Is there a cure for Taki? It is tempting to think that, perhaps manacled to two Israeli commandos and dragged, kicking and screaming, through the harrowing corridors of Israel’s anti-racism Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem, might do the ghoul some good. But I doubt it.
Please do not buy this book. It is vile. And Charles Moore is wrong. Even Voltaire would, I think, make an exception and decline to defend Taki. It is saddening that The Spectator has for three decades given this human gargoyle a platform. There are, after all, many publications and websites that cater for skinhead audiences. But if your curiosity overwhelms you, may I suggest that you read it wearing a clove of garlic.
