An Earlier Witch Trial

It is now some 40 years since the scandalous miscarriage of justice in the Lindy Chamberlain case in Australia,  in which an innocent mother was falsely accused and convicted of murdering her own baby. Like the Lucy Letby case, it was a “witch trial”, based on the same toxic mix of dodgy expert evidence and wild press speculation.  In reality, there was no crime at all: the unhappy truth is that the baby was taken from her tent by a dingo while Lindy Chamberlain was at a BBQ a few yards away. The chronology was, in brief:

• In August 1980, the 2 month old daughter of Lindy Chamberlain disappeared at a campsite at Ayers Rock.
• A year after that, police raided Lindy Chamberlain’s home. Lindy Chamberlain was subsequently charged with murder. There was considerable publicity, much of it highly prejudicial.
• In October 1982, Lindy Chamberlain was found guilty following a trial in Darwin, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
• Appeals to the Federal Court and then the High Court were unsuccessful.
• In 1986, following disclosure of further evidence, Lindy Chamberlain was released from jail, and the next year she was offered a pardon.
• In 1987, an Act of Parliament is passed to permit the case to return to court, and in the following year Lindy Chamberlain was declared by the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory to be innocent.

As in the Lucy Letby case, the expert evidence for the prosecution was mere guesswork:

Mosley

In a case of serendipity, I find myself watching an interview of Sir Oswald Mosley by David Frost back in 1967.

The most remarkable feature of the interview is so unusual these days, that it took me a while to work out what was going on. And then it dawned on me. Sir Oswald was actually answering the questions that were put to him. That is not what politicians do these days. They regard questions as mere opportunities to say what they want to say.

And there was something else unusual these days: David Frost was asking questions to which he was interested in the answer. These days, the standard practice for interviewers in the political field is to ask questions designed to make the interviewee look bad.

The net result was, I thought, that Sir Oswald Mosley came out of the interview rather better than I thought he would. Not all of his answers were convincing, of course, but some were persuasive, at least in part. He was asked, for example, about his use of the raised right arm, Nazi style. Sir Oswald’s answer was that, back in those days, this form of salute was recognised as an ancient Roman gesture, and was widely in Europe.

On the whole, hindsight is useful. But history can also play tricks. Things get stigmatised if they become associated with bad actors. Roman salutes would probably be regarded as absolutely fine these days, if it had not been for the German Nazis. In large measure, it seems, the German Nazis were copying the Italian fascists in the matter of the Roman salute, but if it had not been for the Nazis, Mussolini might well have gone down in history as no more evil than, say, General Franco.

On the English political stage, it is probably Nigel Farage who comes closest to a politician who answers the questions that are put to him. The technique has worked very well for him. In the US, it might well be JD Vance. He was asked about Trump’s assertion that Haitian migrants were stealing and then eating people’s cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Not very plausible. In some parts of the world, people do eat dogs. But cats? Surely, a cat would taste terrible? Anyway, JD Vance’s answer was interesting. He said it was a meme. He was not asserting that it was certainly true, but rather intended to direct the attention of the media where he thought it should be. Which is probably geese. It is more likely that the migrants have been tucking into the town’s geese, as reported to the police.

We do not care about the geese as much as the cats and the dogs, of course. But it is still a thing.

Misogyny or feminism? Which is worse?

Clearly, misogyny is unattractive, dumb and unkind to women.  There is no need for me here to expand on this proposition.

But it seems to me that feminism is just as bad, causing damage which is more indirect but equally invidious.

One problem with feminism, of course, is that it typically equates equality of opportunity with equality of outcome.  Some feminists purport to understand this concept in the abstract, but they almost always abandon it in the application. Similarly, feminists will not infrequently acknowledge that there are some material differences between men and women, both in terms of the body and the brain (you might reasonably say here that the brain is part of the body. But that is really another way of making the same point). But again, this acknowledgement tends to evaporate in the application.

Another problem with feminism is its implicit assumption that if a man acknowledges a woman’s attractiveness, then that must necessarily infer that he fails to appreciate her other qualities. In fact, the opposite is true. If a man finds a woman sexually attractive, he is more likely – not less likely – to think her intelligent, witty and good company.  Especially if he is at liberty to acknowledge how he feels, rather than keep those feelings buttoned up as a guilty secret.