PETER HITCHENS: Call something a ‘phobia’ and you stifle all debate… that’s why the Left loves it

Why can you have a phobia of some things but not others? Why is ‘Islamophobia’ a word and idea that is used all the time, while ‘Christianophobia’ is not? For there are plenty of people today who regard the Christian religion with bitter, hostile contempt, and its position in our society is diminishing more and more every day, often thanks to official actions by Parliament and the courts.

Why is there ‘homophobia’ but not ‘heterophobia’? The old belief in heterosexual marriage and parenthood is increasingly dismissed as an outdated and potentially oppressive arrangement. Her former privileges have been systematically taken away from her.

I have heard those who still follow this old-fashioned way of life rudely dismissed as “breeders.” But no tribunal will award you damages for this type of discrimination. Mocking the elderly, as if age is an obvious flaw, is becoming more popular by the day. Yet there is no such thing as ‘senophobia’.

A few years ago I felt like the term “anti-Semitism” wasn’t doing its job. Many people who don’t like Jews (and there are quite a few) refuse to consider themselves anti-Semites. They associate the word with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, or with Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists. They don’t think they are like that.

So I tried to introduce the word “judophobia” into the language, to give Jew-hatred the same pariah status as all others. It has never caught on, even though it is probably a truer description of this strange mania than the other uses of ‘phobia’. I’m not even going to try ‘marriage phobia’ or ‘family phobia’ or ‘Britophobia’, even though there are bigoted opinions that deserve those names.

Some Latin or Greek experts could also come up with a nice, medical-sounding word for the contempt our elite classes feel for women who stay home to raise their own children.

The truth is that the invention of all these ‘phobias’ is a brilliant piece of political deception. It works because it’s so hard to fight.

Most people are sad and afraid that their opinions will be classified as some kind of mental illness. Any view or position that the new liberal elite disagrees with is not treated as an opinion. It is treated as a disease of the mind, a terrifying disturbance, to be greeted with contempt and pushed out of the national conversation.

There is no logic as to which opinion is called a phobia and which is not, other than the current opinions of that elite. Take for example ‘Islamophobia’, nowadays a serious accusation that, once leveled, can ruin a person in a day.

My own sad view is that there are people on the political right who hide racist bigotry behind a so-called opposition to Islam. I don’t have time for them. I hate them. Their behavior makes it easier for the left’s rival bigots to prevail. Because Islam is not a race. It is a religion that you can follow or not. It is (like Christianity) a set of political, moral, and historical views with which it is perfectly reasonable for others to disagree.

I have had some very interesting times disagreeing with Muslims (particularly at the Islamic University of Deoband in Northern India, but also in many other places). Classifying such disagreements as a ‘phobia’ means ending the discussion and eroding freedom of expression. But that is what the left in this country has chosen, and what they have been busy doing for at least twenty years now.

During that time, it has become increasingly difficult to say what you think, even if your opinions are free of prejudice and hatred. This is an old leftist technique and I don’t know where it will end up.

Many years ago, as the Cold War was coming to an end, I had the great privilege of meeting one of the bravest people who ever lived. His name is Anatoly Koryagin, a Soviet psychiatrist who protested the misuse of psychiatry to classify opponents of communism as mentally ill. This is a common problem for the left. They think they are so good that they must be right and that anyone who opposes them must be crazy.

Koryagin was imprisoned for writing about the distortions of psychiatry to the British medical journal The Lancet. He protested by going on a hunger strike. He was force-fed, drugged with dangerous ‘anti-psychotic’ chemicals and of course beaten up. At one point his wife managed to visit him, but could not recognize him.

Thank goodness many protests eventually secured his release, but I’ve always thought this event was the slimy nadir of every political opinion, making its holders think they’re too good to oppose.