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Monday, January 27, 2014

The Ghost Rat Cannibal Ship Will Enrich the UK




Each culture brings with it its own practices and its own way of life that contributes to enriching our own. From the Kebab shops to the other Kebab shops, from that loud music those people who moved in next door play to the muezzin waking up the roosters every morning, we are richer for it in the sense that we have less money, but a deeper spiritual awareness that the world is a very strange place.

While the cannibal rat ghost ship may seem threatening at first, we should remember that each new set of arrivals was viewed similarly with suspicion. The Celts and the Saxons did not get along and no one liked the Normans. And when the Saracens overran London, everyone was really unhappy. But then the media kept talking about how the Saracens are contributing to the culture and their neighbors learned to overlook the honor killings, the beheadings and the Asian sex grooming gangs.

The cannibal rats will be no different. At their first arrival there may be moments of unpleasantness. The rats have been eating each other for so long, when they arrive in London and claim refugee status because they fear being eaten if they return home, will they then begin eating us? We don't know, but it would be nothing less than a sordid betrayal of our values if we were to turn the cannibal rats away out of fear that they will begin gnawing on our tender flesh the very first chance that they get.

It will be vital that we find common ground between our values and those of the cannibal rats. There is no doubt that the cannibal rats will have a great deal to teach us and we mustn't let their horrid appearance or their cannibalism customs interfere with the learning process. The sensationalist tabloid press has emphasized the cannibalism angle so much that it has entirely blinded us to their other virtues, to their close family connections, their rich cultural heritage and their love of music.

Like so many refugees, the ghost ship cannibal rats come to us from a troubled part of the world. We who are privileged to live in safety and comfort cannot even begin to imagine the traumas that have marked them and so we must be understanding if they occasionally forget themselves and bite us. The minor pain we suffer is nothing compared to the agony which these poor souls have endured.

Averting further violence must begin with us. It is our responsibility to show them that there is a better way. And we shall do so by defusing the situation from the start by taking their side.

Animals and people lash out when they feel isolated and oppressed. We shall stand with the cannibal rats and for the cannibal rats to show them that they are truly at home here. If the cannibal rats move into a village and are given a dirty look, we shall have a BBC camera crew there in five minutes and a Guardian blog on it shortly thereafter. These will become the foundation of a documentary that will begin with the arrival of the cannibal rats and end triumphantly with their acceptance by the surviving villagers who have learned the true meaning of community and rabies from these strangers.

The plight of the ghost cannibal rats echoes that of the world's billions fleeing instability, climate change and teeth. Through our acceptance of them and their condition, we accept upon ourselves the condition of the world and fulfill our function as citizens of the world.

While it is easy to look down on the cannibal rats for their cannibalism, isn't cannibalism also the base state of capitalism? Economic competition urges us on to cannibalize each other's jobs and possessions and globally, as we compete for spare resources, we are cannibalizing entire cultures so that we may have the material trinkets that make our meaningless lives worthwhile. If we look closely at the ghost ship of cannibal rats, we will see our own reflection mirrored in their dilemma.

By examining the degeneration of their condition, we can draw meaningful conclusions about our own way of life. For example would a genuinely Socialist economy reduce rats to cannibalism? It might, but the cannibalism would be carefully structured in a way that would serve the greater good rather than merely serving the appetites of the rich and the powerful.

It may be that the cannibal rats did indeed achieve an arrangement that was not rat-eat-rat, but that balanced the appetites of the many against the flesh of the few and that arranged for the working class rat hordes to be fed without regard to gender, class or degree of sexual orientation. It may be that in the throes of their cannibalistic orgies of flesh redistribution, these rats achieved a social structure that can advance us forward by a thousand years.

Like the cannibal rats, that is not an opportunity that we can afford to turn our backs on.

Finally there are the ugly expressions of bigotry. Many citizens who have urged the government to blow up the ghost ship filled with hordes of hungry cannibal rats on sight have referred to them, and I quote, as "vermin",  "a disgusting horrible pestilence" and "the worst thing to hit these shores since Gwyneth Paltrow."

The ugly undertones are not difficult to spot in such defamatory language whose privileged speakers presuppose that their lives are worth more than those of cannibal rats. By accepting the ghost ship of cannibal rats into our bosom, we will win a victory over bigotry and demonstrate that we are a society of acceptance, not of rejection, and for this reason alone, if for no other reason, we should accept the ghost ship, grant its cannibal rats asylum and educate them about the importance of voting Labour.

The future begins with each of us. We must lower our walls, open our doors and welcome our new neighbours to our shores. And one day, as we pass our neighbour, the cannibal rat now running a shop specializing in cannibal rat meat, and the cannibal rat's son who now works in the NHS and the cannibal rat's four grandsons who are all on the dole and his other son who is gnawing on the leg of a dead British soldier, we can be proud of ourselves, our ethics and our humanism.

In this way, the stranger, the cannibal rat, will become our friend, the cannibal rat.

Each step forward that we take, each cannibal rat with a peerage, each cannibal rat who wins a singing competition and each cannibal rat in the school that our sons and daughters attend, is a triumph for our deepest values and ideals. They remind us that our civilization, our cultural heritage and our lives are worth nothing if they are not put at the service of our fellow men and our fellow cannibal rats.

Today a cannibal rat applies for refugee status. Tomorrow a cannibal rat will be Prime Minister.


  1. Jack Dwyer27/1/14

    Oh Mighty Sultan...

    Every Western country clearly has a U.N.-mandated obligation to accept a specified quota of these cute allegedly self-eating furry critters and look after them and their offspring! I find the term "cannibal rat" very judgemental and grossly offensive though, and it should not be used...

  2. Anonymous27/1/14

    Great Britain only exists in the minds of a small number of people now. It's not a practical reality for the majority of the population. It's something that's confined to the history books. The Empire is long gone (the wealth and power along with it), and any notion of an independent identity has been psychologically beaten out of the people in fifty short years by Gramscian marxists; they control the cultural and political levers of the country, no matter who's in power.

    To all intents and purposes, it is now just an island off the NW coast of continental Europe that people from all over the world live on. It happens to be called the UK.But that's as far as it goes...

  3. Anonymous27/1/14

    "...we shall have a BBC camera crew there in five minutes and a Guardian blog on it shortly thereafter...". And why might that be? see below:


  4. Anonymous27/1/14

    Daniel, your point is well taken. However, the "cannibal rat" metaphor, while initially effective at the beginning of the article loses its impact by being dragged out and constantly repeated throughout the entire article from start to finish.

  5. This essay could just as well have substituted the cannibal rats with the zombies of AMC's "The Walking Dead." Singly, or in herds, they, too, could "enrich" a multicultural society by teaching us to tolerate their decrepit and decomposing differences, to offer them a neck or a shin for their continued sustenance (zombies, as ambulatory entities, have rights, too) to demonstrate how open minded we have been taught to be towards those whose appearance and behavior are initially repellant, and to welcome them to our bosoms whether or not they have already begun gnawing on our hearts, muscle tissue and other innards. For the present, the Walking Dead zombies make no music, cannot speak but in guttural wheezes, and are insensate to standard English and flash cards of the West's greatest artistic achievements, but, if we wait long enough, some day they will produce Shakespearean drama, compose great symphonies, and make major life-changing contributions to science and industry. All we need do is be patient, and wait...and somehow survive. We must not fight them in the air, or on the beaches, or on the land as they invade the country. That would be so discriminatory and "racist" and xenophobic.

  6. Harvey27/1/14

    I don't think you understand, cannibalism is beautiful. You must look below the surface. It has contributed to society in many ways. Jodi Foster's career advanced by merely being associated with the concept. She lost no tissue whatsoever. The examples are plentiful. Just think of how difficult it is for a cannibalistic group to increase their numbers unless they migrate to a source of new meat. Give 'em a break.

  7. No one says it better than Daniel.

  8. roger in florida27/1/14

    Mr. Greenfield,
    If you keep writing articles such as this you are a shoe-in to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

  9. Anonymous27/1/14

    I see a heart-warming , family-friendly Pixar movie in the works with Johnny Depp and Colin Firth as the voices of the lead rats.


  10. Anonymous27/1/14

    If they had other food they would not be eating each other.

  11. and why don't the cannibal rats have food? Because they're the 99%

  12. Anonymous27/1/14

    "and why don't the cannibal rats have food? "
    That was my point

  13. My hat is off to you, I have no idea how you can write so well and so often.

  14. I have previously reported on this looming threat at: http://thepeoplescube.com/post173557.html#173557 My fellow rodents and I thank you for further exposing this important societal issue.

  15. Anonymous27/1/14

    Oh, this is rich. An "Animal Farm" for our time! Although the experts say that there may not be any rats, cannibal or other, on the Lyobov Orlova, the urban legend created by Pym De Roodes is much more interesting. One merely has to overlook the fact that the scrap value of the ship's metals alone is about a million dollars and that De Roodes wants to get his hands on it to salvage, and that his story about the rats might keep others away, and pretend it's true. Then it makes for an absolutely wonderful parable.


  16. Outstanding; the 'importance of voting Labour' really ties it all together! Please move to the head of the internet.

  17. Rich W27/1/14

    Daniel you are now tied with Caroline Glick as my favorite writers on the planet. I will never let you surpass her because of all the comfort she's given to me over the last 10 years from what's going on in Israel and in the Middle East. You know that this is the greatest compliment you can get. I'm sure you love her too.
    Your frustrations with human nature and its inability to change the course of history because of the herd mentality is felt by me also. Unfortunately it's going to take a war and a depression to get people thinking right again. But as you know when the good times return people start feeling good again and the same cycle will repeat itself as it has throughout history. It's not something to look forward to no matter how much we want the right values leading us forward.
    When people start getting downright mean and are more interested in protecting what they have we'll see changes.
    The depths of your thinking process is way beyond most humans. I'm sure everyone on here is so grateful that you express those thoughts for us to suck in and share. It is as comforting as CG's brain but more time consuming since every line of yours' is so deep and you produce so frequently!!!!!!
    I think that everyone here who paid attention in School and understands the importance of the principles of the constitution, bible and Torah gets it. Because of this we are the most freedom loving people in the USA and we are systemically incapable of any prejudices because the values in those documents are in our blood. All of us here would just about 100% agree on right and wrong for just about everything.

  18. Kol bo Gary27/1/14

    Rich W, you have exquisite taste! Daniel, thanks as always. How fitting this is on Holocaust Rememberance Day!

  19. Anonymous27/1/14

    Read Raspail's THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS. "It's in there."

  20. Anonymous27/1/14

    It wasn't that long ago that Europe considered Jews to be vermin and did not a multicultural Europe with Jews. Monocultural Europe would not include Jews.

  21. This article is outstanding because it demonstrates the survival of the real, and astounding because it is written by an American Israeli who understands Britain today.
    I need some advice about how you screen out the insane threader fraternity: the kosher cowboy settlers on the one hand, and the peace flotilla adherents on the other.
    In the meantime, you've gone into favourites....but remember another Orwell quote:
    "Journalism is publishing something powerful people don't want to be seen. Everything else is just PR".

  22. Anonymous28/1/14

    Nice story. I get the feeling there is some kind of analogy here.......that you are not really talking about ghost ship cannibal rats, but actually Serbian terrorists.

  23. Wow, such incendiary writing is sure to provoke a ratophobic backlash. Alert the Beeb.

  24. Anonymous28/1/14

    Never have I read such a thorough postmodern rhetorical deconstruction of the tropes of hysteria. I was, to wit, laughing like a hyena from start to finish.

  25. "It wasn't that long ago that Europe considered Jews to be vermin and did not a multicultural Europe with Jews. Monocultural Europe would not include Jews."

    That's an overgeneralization. Jews were more welcome in some places than others. As early as the 13th c., the Statute of Kalisz granted Jews in Poland rights and autonomy. In the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Hebrew was recognized as an official language. People like Thomas Aquinas were not exactly philosemites but did engage seriously with Jewish writers and didn't use terms like "vermin." I think it's possible to strike a balance between xenophobia and cultural masochism.

    The problem is not immigration per se. The real problem is the brainwashing, particularly of the young, into accepting all cultures as equal (and some more "equal" than others...). I don't have a problem with immigrants. I do have a problem with socialists brainwashing children to abandon their traditions at the altar of multiculturalism and relativism. I'd also add that there should be reasonable limits on the number of immigrants admitted, to keep the social fabric intact, and also attention should be paid to political parties buying votes through state benefit programs. Wealthier countries should try to help poorer ones, but that means actually helping them, and not cynically exploiting them for votes.

  26. I think the white male Brit is pretty much dead, he has lost his voice and now its too late to do anything about it. The UK is over run with these rats as you call them and they ain't leaving, instead pushing all the Brits out to Spain, Australia, Malaysia and Thailand.....

  27. This article was outstanding because it demonstrates the survival of the real and great, and astounding amazing, because it is written by an American Israeli who understands Britain today.2049 Waxed Cotton Coat