Bizarre column by Johann Hari

Independent columnist Johann Hari describes Mark Steyn as a racist in this interview with British writer Martin Amis. His comments, like the law students' complaints against Steyn's book America Alone, deliberately distort the book's contents. Steyn corrects Hari's errors here. (Scroll down a bit to find his letter to the editor. It's the second.)

Who is Johann Hari? A while back I came across this bizarre first person column in which he brags about seducing neo-Nazis and Islamic extremists. He despises their ideas, of course, he just finds them sexy....or something. Is this a case of Stockholm Syndrome? or what?

To me, it looks like the incarnation of appeasement. "If only I can make them like me, then they won't be so scary." His actions give new meaning to the old 60s slogans: "Make Love, Not War" and "Free Your Mind and Your Ass will Follow." Hari seems to be too young to be a Boomer. I guess maybe he's one of our Frankenstein spiritual children, carrying those stupid mottoes to extremes even the Flower Power Generation couldn't have dreamed of.

Perhaps his aim is to prove their "hypocrisy," which seems to be the greatest sin someone can practise. Unless you are Al Gore living in a mansion that needs as much electrical power as a small town.

Hari writes:

It sounds much worse if you state it bluntly. But, OK, I'll rip off the plaster here, now, at the start of the article: I slept with a neo-Nazi. And an Islamic fundamentalist. And, yes, technically, they both thought gay people should be killed. There? Happy now? Let me explain. Sometimes, as a journalist, I do undercover work (please, no gags).

How precious. Don't continue to read his true confessions if you are at all squeamish about TMI.

The Hari column reminds me of this great essay in First Things Magazine called The Revenge of the Conscience by J. Budziszewski.

Budziszewski writes:

Guilt, guilty knowledge, and guilty feelings are not the same thing; men and women can have the knowledge without the feelings, and they can have the feelings without the fact. Even when suppressed, however, the knowledge of guilt always produces certain objective needs, which make their own demand for satisfaction irrespective of the state of the feelings. These needs include confession, atonement, reconciliation, and justification.

Now when guilt is acknowledged, the guilty deed can be repented so that these four needs can be genuinely satisfied. But when the guilty knowledge is suppressed, they can only be displaced. That is what generates the impulse to further wrong. Taking the four needs one by one, let’s see how this happens.

The need to confess arises from transgression against what we know, at some level, to be truth. I have already commented on the tendency of accessories to suicide to write about their acts. Besides George Delury, who killed his wife, we may mention Timothy E. Quill, who prescribed lethal pills for his patient, and Andrew Solomon, who participated in the death of his mother. Solomon, for instance, writes in the New Yorker that "the act of speaking or writing about your involvement is, inevitably, a plea for absolution." Many readers will remember the full-page signature advertisements feminists took out in the early days of the abortion movement, telling the world that they had killed their own unborn children. At first it seems baffling that the sacrament of confession can be inverted to serve the ends of advocacy. Only by recognizing the power of suppressed conscience can this paradox be understood.