The Heelers Diaries

the fantasy world of ireland's greatest living poet

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Location: Kilcullen (Phone 087 7790766), County Kildare, Ireland

Sunday, August 21, 2011

meet the frizzles

I met Yvonne Frizell in the kitchen of an old communist friend of mine.
His home is in the dulcet heartland of South Kildare.
He has interesting friends.
Not just me.
This Mrs Frizell would qualify as interesting by anybody's standards.
Very interesting.
I had never met her before but my communist friend had mentioned her.
She runs a self styled charity out of Pakistan and is a personal friend of one of Izzat Khan, a Muslim ruler in a region of that country.
Years ago she adopted the Khan's special needs son and obtained an Irish passport for him.
I was fascinated to be meeting her.
My handsome preraphaelite features veritably glowed when I was shown into the sitting room and introduced.
I sensed good fooling in the offing.
She didn't know me from Adam.
I'd heard of her husband Old Man Frizzle too.
The great Irish painter James Flack who is also a Protestant pastor, once told me about a religious discussion he'd had with Old Man Frizzle, which had ended when Mr Flack remarked ironically: "It is a pleasure to meet a genuine anti Christ."
Old Man Frizzle wasn't here today.
Just the charity running wife and an adult son JJ.
To begin with, when Mrs Frizzle offered, I let her make me a cup of coffee.
It's always good for these fembos to start on the right note.
Let em know who's boss.
Arf arf.
Then I began to ask her the gentlest of questions about Pakistan.
It was a privilege for me to meet someone who knows the country from the ground up.
Even if she was misguided and wrong in her every analysis.
I could see she was enjoying my ever so subtle challenges.
"Well who do you think killled Benazir?" she cried suddenly.
I thought she had been trying to imply that her own husband or President Musharaff might have done it.
I answered gently: "Those who killed her were the people who could never hope to beat her in an election, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Nahwaz Shariff and your friends the Khans."
The conversation became momentarily quite intense.
When the air cleared I tried a new tack.
"What motivates you to run your charity?" I wondered. "Is it love of God? Love of humanity? Love of Karl Marx?"
"Well I'm not a communist," she replied.
"Really?" I grinned.
"I'm a humanist atheist," she insisted.
"Ah, the rebranded communists," I rejoined.
Mrs Frizzle is as British and as left wing as Tony Benn but I'd been told she was Irish.
My debate with her was direct enough but polite enough.
We both talked.
We both listened.
"You don't believe in God?" I said.
"No," she answered.
"You don't believe in anything at all?" I persisted.
"Nothing," she shot back.
I laughed warmly.
She eyed me keenly.
"That's a strange thing to do," she mused. "To laugh when someone tells you there beliefs."
"There's no badness in it," I told her. "I'm only trying to inspire you to greater frankness."
We talked some more about Pakistan.
"How can you an intellectual atheistic communist humanist tolerate the way Muslims treat women?" I probed.
Her turn to laugh.
"You believe too much of what you see on television," she told me. "In Pakistan, the woman comes home, throws off the Burka, and runs the house."
I held the silence for a moment.
"No she doesn't," I said softly.
"Actually she does," replied Mrs Frizell.
"No," I said. "In Pakistan women live in abject slavery to a barbaric and depraved and demeaning Islamic culture. The men there murder thousands of women every year. They murder them rather than divorce them. And the favoured method of murder is burning them alive in accidents staged with heating stoves."
Me and Mrs Frizell were really getting to know each other.
I was becoming more and more fascinated by what she was teaching me.
How could a leftist intellectual consort with Muslims and not see the inherent barbarity of their society?
How could she encounter that society directly yet insist that my criticisms stemmed from misinformation gleaned off some mythical television programme.
If there is anti Muslim reportage on any television station in Ireland, Britain, America, Europe, Russia or China, I've yet to see it.
But my question stands.
How and why have liberal left wing communists, now styling themselves atheistic humanists, how and why, I say, have they been willing to turn a blind eye to the murderous psychoses of Muslim society.
Yes.
I was astonished and privileged to meet Mrs Frizell.
I'd have talked to her for hours.
And though you wouldn't know it from this account, she gave as good as she got.
Our conversation was interrupted by her twenty year old son JJ.
He had witnessed my bearding of his mother in a communist den with growing unease.
Presently I went a tease too far.
I said: "I can never understand how you communists can hold your heads up to sneer at the Catholic Church when you yourselves have been responsible in a few short years for more mass murders than any religion, tribe, culture or ethnicity.in the history of humanity. In the twentieth century alone you gave us Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot. so many hundreds of millions of murders. How on earth do you look at yourselves in the mirror?"
A primeval roar erupted from Mrs Frizell's son.
JJ was on his feet.
"That is the greatest nonsense I have ever heard in my life," he screamed calmly.
It was a Kodak moment.
It didn't end there either.
He kept shouting.
It is not easy to nonplus me gentle readers. But in that moment the noble Heelers looked a tad above mildly nonplussed.
"Hitler was a Catholic," roared JJ somewhere in the midst of his other roars.
Apparently my egotism outweighs any of my other qualities because after weighing up my options for a few moments, I answered him just as loudly.
"At no time in his adult life was Hitler a Catholic," I asserted. "You might as well say Chairman Mao was a Buddhist or Joe Stalin was Eastern Orthodox or that you yourself are some sort of Christian because you happen to have been born in a Christian milieu. Hitler's rise to power took place solely because Stalin was sponsoring a Communist revolution in Germany. Whoever won the civil war was either going to be Communist or more violent than the Communists. That's the social dynamic that created Hitler. A society where two groups are trying to shoot their way to power will tend to generate a rulership from the most ruthless group. Stalin the Communist created the societal dynamic which stampeded the Germans into the arms of Hitler the Nazi. And Hitler's Naziism was a specifically anti Catholic creed. The ideological foundations that inspired Hitler came specifically from Karl Marx and Charlie Darwin. Hitler took Marx's atheism and socialism and Darwin's notion of survival of the fittest, and came up with the cult of the master race."
None of this was audible.
My protagonist was still shouting.
I'd get out a sentence.
He'd shout as though I hadn't spoken.
Still I was eager to let him know he was in a ball game.
"Hitler was Catholic," he insisted again. "He said he was going to throw the serpents out of the temple. It's in Mein Kampf. I read it."
"The phrase throw the serpents out of the temple is not an accepted measure of Catholicity anywhere on the planet earth outside of your head," I thundered back, sounding no doubt like Mini Mouse.
Abruptly the room emptied.
My commie hosts and another leftist who had been silently watching the shenannigans, or discussion as we call it in Ireland, took fright and exited post haste.
It was an elegiac and moving scene.
The hardened communists departed that room like startled fawns bounding up the mountain path.
All that was left was me, Mrs Frizell, and JJ.
I began to feel a bit lonely.
I was wondering why everyone had exited.
More specifically, I was wondering was I in some danger.
I am too good looking to get beaten up by people I don't know over debating points they haven't understood.
JJ was still shouting.
"Hitler was a Catholic," seemed to be the running theme.
Good show old bean.
In truth he had me.
Hitler was indeed born and baptized into the Catholic faith.
In the same way that Chairman Mao was born a Buddhist.
And Joe Stalin was born Eastern Orthodox.
Of course all of them committed their mass murders after rejecting all religious conceptions of reality and converting to various forms of atheistic humanism, whether Nazi, Commie, or Maoist/Nazi/Commie.
No way I could make the kid listen.
Reluctantly, I decided to exit the battlefield.
There was no longer any audience.
No hearts and minds to win.
JJ himself hadn't heard a word I'd said.
Mrs Frizell grabbed my arm as I got up to go.
"What about the crusades?" she said.
She said it gently, almost with regret, as if she too would have liked the conversation to go on longer.
I smiled beatifically.
The crusades would have to wait for another day.
I stepped smartly from the room and from there into the street.
Walking quickly.
I was a bit disappointed that I hadn't landed any intellectual punches on the young man.
He had stopped me in my tracks.
I had indeed quit the field.
Ah yes.
Truly I'm an egotist.
Egotist first.
Seeker after truth second.
I hadn't the slightest concern for JJ's immortal soul.
I only wanted to beat him in the shouting match.
God forgive me.
I walked the streets of old Athy.
Smiling ruefully.
Regrets.
I had a few.
I might have learned some more about Pakistan if I'd been able to extend the conversation with his mother.
But the young man had seen me off.
A thought struck me.
There's greatness there.
Greatness in the young man.
Greatness in JJ Frizell.
Of course there was.
No one else has ever shut me up.
In my whole life.
Seriously folks.
I don't know when I've ever withdrawn from a debate, or even from a shouting match, without at least forcing an honorable draw.
Yet I withdrew from this one.
It means something.
What had the kid done to make me run away?
Nothing much.
A bit of shouting.
Megaphone on broadcast, not on listen.
I'd adjudged there was no point continuing because I had no fanbase in the room.
There had to be more.
Normally I'd have continued for the hell of it.
The suspicion crystallised.
I had the clearest feeling now.
I had just played a walk on part in the life of a great man.
And some part of me had sensed the greatness and  walked away.
A walk on part in the life of a great man while he was still a young unknown.
Hilarious no.
I grinned into the sleety rain of Main Street.
What will he be?
A villain or a saint.
One of these.
Destiny had not yet decided when I crossed swords with him.
Back at the ranch (The Chateau De Healy surely - Ed note) I flicked on the sexevision.
Sky News were sneering about the Muslim President of Egypt who is facing an insurrection from Muslim terrorists at the moment.
I watched bemused.
Not for the first time I wondered why on earth these guys at Sky were rooting for the Jihadi's.
A penny dropped.
I thought of Mrs Frizell insisting women in Pakistan were bosses in their own homes.
I thought of her friendship with a Muslim feudal despot, a despot who derides the elected President of Pakistan while gleefully perpetuating the enslavement of his own people to a 1500 year old barbarism which declares him Khan.
I thought of her lifelong commitment to humanist atheism.
You know what.
She's not so different from the average leftist journalist at Sky News, CNN, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, The Times Of London, The Irish Times. Time Magazine, Newsweek, BBC, Channel Four or any other near bankrupt readerless viewerless media group you care to mention.
They're all card carrying humanist atheists too.
It seems that all these humanist atheists, once they stop believing in God, are still possessed of an innate need to worship something.
Anything.
Most of them spent the Cold War rooting for the Russians.
And when the fascists were in vogue, fascist atheistic humanists all over Europe were worshipping the German superman.
How on earth can their modern successors, all these card carrying leftist atheists in the media and among the pseudo intelligentsia, have switched so smoothly from trying to hand us over to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, to trying to hand us over to the Muslim Caliphate?
I stared at Sky News as realisation dawned.
"My God," I breathed. "They've found a new master race."

4 Comments:

Anonymous MissJean said...

"How could a leftist intellectual consort with Muslims and not see the inherent barbarity of their society?"
It's the same reason that the rude, communist-admiring Christopher Hitchens chose to leave England for a country in which Christianity and other religions are part of daily life and politics. He's become the pet atheist to various Christians in the media, treated with kid gloves as if to prove their open-mindedness. In return, he compliments them on their tolerance while ignoring the "godbags" who wouldn't pay a dime for the dubious privilege of hosting his debate. He can pretend that religion is a throwback to a simple(minded) age which Americans, being mostly unsophisticated, will outgrow.

In the case of Mrs. Frizzle, her charity brings money into her host country, no? So she goes unscathed and untouched, which causes her to pooh-pooh these reports outside her immediate experience. It's not unlike a woman of my acquaintance who told me about Pakistani women wear scandalous attire under their burkas and dancing wildly at parties (without men). But she admits that these are upperclass women of families who travel in England and North America, not women married young for financial reasons.

7:22 PM  
Blogger heelers said...

MJ, what was strange for me was the lady describing herself as a humanist atheist. For years I've been searching for a precise term to describe those whose vision I oppose. Now I've met one. And in the space of a week discovered MArk Steyn using the same terme in his book America Alone. And at the same time realising as Steyn points out that the term had been used first at least sixty years ago by a French philospospher.

4:49 PM  
Anonymous MissJean said...

Which French philosopher? If it's one that this lady or her circles would have admired, perhaps there's the reason.

4:02 AM  
Blogger heelers said...

Hi again MJ.
The French guy is Henry De Lubac and he seems to have been a quite perceptive fellow. According to Steyn he was already warning in the 1940's of a crisis facing Europe arising from atheistic humanism. He suggested that atheistic humanism as an ethos and as an inspiration was supplanting Christianity as the guiding spirit of our societies and our peoples. Either he or Steyn have noted that societies which reject God invariably end up organising themeslves AGAINST man.
James

4:18 PM  

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