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the notion of armed force and violence is integral to the
kind of command-based hierarchies that states have. To
paraphrase Dubya, “anyone who isn’t with us is against
us”, so if you’re against all armed force you’re going to
be necessarily squeezed out of the discourse. It won’t
even be conscious, there will be people who simply
cannot hear what you’re saying because it’s so inimical
to their idea of state authority.
I think this war has rather crystallised my pacifism. I
think in the past I was like a lot of people who said I’ve
got pacifistic inclination but I’m not a pacifist because
what I couldn’t find in my own mind was the answer
to that perennial question: ‘Ah, yes, but what would
you have done when the Nazis were coming?’ And
as someone with Jewish blood I’ve always found that
difficult to answer, but the thing with this war which
makes it so wrong in so many different ways is that it
exposes that argument about the Nazis as a specious
argument, in that it assumes a conditional assumption
i.e. that you are in 1939, because it can be answered
with a similar kind of conditional question: “But hang
on a minute, if everyone had been a pacifist in 1914
then the Nazis would never have come to power”.
So that to me pushes up the argument to let’s just be
pacifists now. Maybe that’s the adequate moral response
to the phenomenon of violence in all the forms – I get
really angry in the street like we all do. I’ve now taken
to bicycling, so I get cut up on my bicycle and I get
BUY Will Self books online from and
absolutely furious because it’s so dangerous. I’m a big
guy and I’m a very aggressive guy and I feel tempted to
rip open cars doors and pull people out and beat them
to a bloody pulp but, hey, I don’t do it. It seems to me
that there comes a point in your life as a moral being in
society where you decide that violence is not the solution
to car incidents so there can be the same kind of
decision at a macro level.
CH: But it’s still your first response though; you’re not
claiming to not have those thoughts?
WS: Well I think that people who say they don’t even
think like that anymore are probably self-deceiving. I
think it says somewhere in How The Dead Live that
there’s no one as angry as an Occidental Buddhist and
there’s nobody less forgiving than a fundamentalist
born-again Christian. You have to acknowledge the
impulse to violence, to say that it’s completely gone is
a dangerous thing.
CH: What would you do with the World Trade
Centre site?
WS: Mmm … I’d be leery of venturing an opinion on
that. It seems to me that’s something for the people of
Manhattan to decide. It’s a grotesque singularity, the
snuffing out of that many lives in one place … it also
seems to me that it’s going to be an inevitable equivocation
between civic pride and something to do with
the symbolism of what has occurred.
CH: Is it true about you doing the new series of Shoot-
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