Ban the US Constitution

America’s founding documents should be banned because their authors sinned against our modern sensibilities.

Most of them were slave owners, prompting Dr Johnson to remark at the time: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

The good doctor himself sinned against a code of later vintage by referring to Afro-Americans [sic!] as negroes, thus showing a lamentable lack of foresight. But his sin was minor compared to, say, the sins of Jefferson, Madison, Washington et al.

Jefferson, for example, not only owned over 600 black slaves, but he also multiplied their number by using the women among them for a bit of how’s-your-founding-father. And when a runaway slave was caught, Jefferson had him whipped to raw meat.

So you must agree that both the Declaration of Independence he wrote and the Constitution he inspired should be declared null and void. You don’t? Then you lack the acute moral sense of British and American distributors who have effectively banned Roman Polanski’s film J’Accuse from our screens.

To a large extent, theirs is a prudently pragmatic decision. In an atmosphere of mass hysteria whipped up by MeToo, cinemas showing Polanski’s award-winning film would be definitely picketed and possibly torched.

For back in 1978 Mr Polanski absconded from the US, having pleaded guilty to the charge of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl. Having chosen Paris over prison, he has since avoided both the US and countries having extradition treaties with it.

The underlying assumption, if this word applies to frenzied demagogues, is that an author’s objectionable personality or acts invalidate his work, rendering it unfit for public consumption.

Accepting that postulate for the sake of argument, the fair man in me demands that it be extended beyond the frisky Mr Polanski. Alas, if we display such laudable consistency, we’d find ourselves on a cultural starvation diet.

Leaving aside politics and concentrating on art alone, one has to observe with some chagrin that creative pursuits require so much self-absorption that an artist is unlikely to conform to the middleclass notions of goodness.

Kind, altruistic, self-abnegating artists must have cropped up here and there in history, but they are hugely outnumbered by an assortment of perverts, cads and bounders.

If you look at the great Russian writers of the 19^th century, you’ll hardly find one who wasn’t an anti-Semite, a pervert or, in the case of Gogol and Dostoyevsky, both.

Dostoyevsky, incidentally, might have committed the same crime as Polanski, and yet so far no one has called for a public burning of Crime and Punishment or The Possessed (where that crime is described with inside knowledge).

Much worse, swarms of great 20^th century artists and thinkers collaborated with the two satanic creeds of modernity. Furtwängler, Strauss, Gieseking, Schwarzkopf, Cortot, Heidegger, Karajan, Céline, Hamsun, Merezhkovsky, Gippius all besmirched themselves with brown blotches, and some, such as Céline and Karajan, did so with deep inner conviction.

Karajan, for example, first joined the Nazi Party in his native Austria, but then chose to reconfirm his commitment after the Anschluss by also joining the German branch. When Hitler attended his concerts, Karajan arranged the audience in the shape of the swastika, pleasing Der Führer no end.

The French film industry not only survived under the Nazis but indeed flourished. Next time you watch one of my favourite films, Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis, remind yourself that it was made under the occupation. Some degree of collaboration or, to be kind, conformism, would have been essential.

As to the list of writers, filmmakers, artists and musicians who actively contaminated the world with the red syphilis, it’s so long that it would be tedious to cite here. One name is worth mentioning though, for Isaac Babel was one of Russia’s most accomplished stylists, worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with Gogol and Chekhov.

Yet during the Civil War, Babel served in the CheKa unit attached to the First Horse Army that cut a swathe through southern Russia and the Ukraine, murdering, raping, torturing and pillaging as it went. That experience produced one of the greatest cycle of short stories in world literature, but Babel glossed over his own role in those crimes.

It’s unclear whether he tortured anyone personally, but he definitely took part in executions. His devotion to Bolshevik brutality stood him in good stead afterwards, when most of his friends were high NKVD officials, including Yezhov himself, with whose wife Babel had an affair. Eventually, the writer came to a sticky end, but that’s a different matter.

Should I deny myself the pleasure of rereading Babel’s Odessa Stories or Red Cavalry out of distaste for his personality? Throw away Furtwängler’s recordings of Beethoven or Gieseking’s of Debussy? More important, should I deny their legacy to others if I were in a position to do so?

Pointless questions, every one of them. For when the fire of ideology enters a man’s belly, it ends up scorching his brain. Ideologues don’t ask themselves probing questions; they just let their knees jerk.

None of this is to say that Polanski should be above the law. Even though his case wasn’t without legal glitches, he deserved punishment. But his films don’t – they live a life of their own and ought to be judged on their own merits.