Chapter 3 from my book “Is cruelty cool?”

Some words can make your spine tingle in a bad way and that association can be hard to lose. Cruelty is one of those words, yet long before I moved to the UK, the Dutch word for cruel (“wreed”) acquired the urban slang meaning of “cool, wicked, awesome”. The word “wicked” (“morally bad”), of course, seems to have undergone a similar evolution, as has the word “sick”.

Where do the words “cruel” and “cruelty” come from? Not surprisingly, as with so many words in English and other Germanic languages, they were derived from old French and Latin. They are related to “crude”, which seems to suggest that cruelty goes hand in hand with a certain lack of sophistication.

Cruelty is a behaviour that causes physical or mental harm to another person.

What about humiliation? What is that?

As I mentioned before, I noticed with surprise that Lucy Miller, the prosecutor in the cowardly attack on Janice Morris, stated that the photo of Ms Morris – the one that I have used for the cover of this book – caused a great deal of humiliation for Ms Morris. Why?

I felt that this was merely Ms Miller’s own view. I suspect that for her too, as it was for me until it happened to me, getting attacked on a bench is something that happens to “other people”. People who are different. People who are “vulnerable” or “disabled” or perhaps “autistic”. It was “humiliating” in Ms Miller’s eyes because being targeted by that kind of thing “confirms” you as a lesser human being, the kind of person who gets targeted by that kind of attack. That’s the basis for the “humiliation”. After all, stuff like the attack on Ms Morris doesn’t happen to people like Lucy Miller, do they? That’s where Lucy Miller went wrong.

According to the media, Ms Morris was concerned about attracting more unwanted attention. So was I after I had been attacked. Being attacked is a really scary experience that thoroughly shakes your confidence. It makes you want to hide. It makes you hesitant to go outside. I can understand that Ms Morris was concerned. Having a photo of you go viral is of little help if you want to draw less attention to yourself. That is a different matter, though. That is not about humiliation.

Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, the Frenchwoman who stepped up in the context of the murder of Lee Rigby and subsequently was on TV a few times, had been bullied as well. Eggs and stones were thrown at her house. The bullying got worse after she had been on TV. Like Ms Morris and like me, she was in her forties and living on her own.

There is a short on YouTube, by JCS Inspired, about an elderly English woman who approaches a young English man who is sitting in a car in front of what appears to be her property. It was posted on 13 November 2023 and has had over a million views. There is an outpouring of hatred, contempt and ridicule for the woman.

Most people who are leaving these comments, however, probably have no idea of the background of the video. I not only recognize the woman’s demeanour, powerlessness and anger, I also only know too well how younger people use phones and CCTV to ridicule older adults and paint them as antisocial problem citizens, sometimes at the request of rogue landlords.

I can almost guarantee you that this woman had already been pestered for a long time. Years. I can certainly guarantee that she was being provoked and that this young man in question had been waiting for her, phone in hand, so that he could shoot his video and “humiliate” her in front of the world. He did not explain the context. He was not accidentally shooting a video. He was shooting a video for the sole purpose of provoking and “humiliating” this woman. It has happened to me too, and more than once. The unbridled hatred for older women knows no bounds in England. I wish that all these women and a few men would team up and learn krav maga. Then they could teach these despicable yobs a lesson and show them who’s boss. Yob is the English term for the driver of that car. There is no reason for young white English males to go pester older English women, yet they do, in droves.

The word “humiliation” is related to the word “humility” but they are strangely opposed. (Remember the word “humility” because I may come back to it at the end of the book.) Humiliation, so the internet tells me, is “to cause a painful loss of pride, self-respect, or dignity”. Is a victim’s perceived humiliation supposed to make up for someone else’s pathological lack of a sense of self-worth?

How is one’s pride, self-respect or dignity supposed to be affected by what someone else does?

The principle of humanity is that every human being has a right to life in dignity, but as I discussed in “We need to talk about this”, dignity is highly personal and can only be defined for oneself and by oneself.

Dignity is often related to a loss of control, however, for example, when needing to be on a ventilator, needing to be fed or needing to be helped with the activities that you and I carry out in our bathrooms several times per day without giving it much thought.

So, humiliation seems to be about taking someone else’s control away?

Was I supposed to feel humiliated when those two dudes emptied that bucket of liquid over me? One other time, in 2019, I came home after having gone for a walk, found the door to my flat not only unlocked but ajar and hairs glued onto the flattened end of the bar of soap in my bathroom. To me, it was an utterly crazy thing to do, but it has the feel of an English “prank”, that unfathomable brand of humour that only English people understand and that, yes, apparently is supposed to make someone feel humiliated or embarrassed. Why on earth is that? To me, it is just as nuts as picking someone’s locks, going into someone’s flat and writing “I am Napoleon” or “My name is Tony Macaroni” on the kitchen wall. It does not even have to be in bat blood or chicken blood for it to be nuts.

In July 2020, someone went into my flat while I was out, took five to ten pairs of colourful dirty socks, dropped what may have been cigarette ash into the laundry basket and damaged two items. Some weeks later, I realized that I had more black socks than I used to have.

Yet protesting against this kind of thing got me stigmatised as “vulnerable”. And it was far from the only thing that went on.

In my eyes, shooting yourself in the foot in a dare with friends is embarrassing and humiliating. Shooting a stranger in the foot in a dare with friends is equally embarrassing and humiliating. For the shooter! Not for the victim.

Lexico.com, an online dictionary powered by Oxford University Press, explains “humiliate” as “make (someone) feel ashamed and foolish by injuring their dignity and self-respect, especially publicly”. It also says that the original meaning was “bring low”. That seems to refer to the sense of hierarchy experienced on the side of the perpetrator.

It seems to indicate that you cannot make someone perceived as a lesser human make much lower than he or she already is and the cruelty to which people perceived as less are subjected is a confirmation of their lowly status. It is something to “put them in their place”.

That certainly seems to have been the case when Janice Morris was attacked. She was being hassled and stood up for herself. The harassers then went into a nearby Spar, bought eggs and flour and returned to attack her. The pattern was the same in my attack. I told them off and they went in search of pals and came back to attack me, equipped with sand, water and stones.

To put someone in their place is to remind someone of his or her position, to bring somebody down or to humble or rebuke. Was it an exercise of retaliation, then? Was it retaliation for not adhering to how one is perceived and hence is supposed to behave, such as not with not too much confidence? It is intended to teach the person a lesson in humility? Perhaps.

In fact, this seems to be confirmed by the fact that others too tend to ridicule and rebuke you when you protest and seek justice and express that you want this kind of shit to stop, insist that you have the right to peace and safety in your home and to be free from harassment, abuse and violence from random others. That happened to Ingrid Loyau-Kennett and it happened to me, repeatedly. It also happened to Bijan Ebrahimi in Bristol.

How is this related to a certain lack of sophistication? How is this “crude”? It is very tempting to write point-blank that any person with a degree of sophistication not only knows that all people have the same rights, but also would never do anything as stupid as to attack a woman who is sitting on a bench or a man who is watering plants in his garden or playing sports with his son.

In spite of this, I dare say that someone like Boris Johnson sees himself as highly sophisticated. I also dare say, however, that many people mistake money for sophistication.

Boris Johnson has a history of verbal abuse towards people who he perceives as lesser human beings, thereby signalling that when you’re a person in power, you can get away with any degree of name-calling that even might get someone else prosecuted. He is crude and “boorish”, the opposite of sophisticated, and has often made people in his company feel terribly embarrassed about his elephant-in-a-porcelain-shop style. (I apologize to the gentle giants. They do not resemble Boris Johnson.)

People like Boris Johnson are negative role models for how to behave, but their position of power and their ample finances make them immune to criticisms similar to how police officers used to get away with abusing and murdering people whose skin isn’t the colour of ivory until black lives finally began to matter. (The battle for the survival of black people is far from over yet, of course.)

The word “boorish” alone seems to confirm that. It appears to come from the 13th-century word for “herdsman” and herdsmen were seen as not having refined manners – and “sophistication”, says the online Oxford dictionary, means “having, revealing, or involving a great deal of worldly experience and knowledge of fashion and culture”. That is a very limited view of the word.

Sophistication also means something much more far-reaching.

“A sophisticated person,” says another website, “is a person who is able to understand the nuances of a wide range of principles, concepts, situations, and vocabulary. Sophisticated people understand the bounds of their own knowledge, but are comfortable speaking with someone who is far more knowledgeable in a given subject than they are.”

Words can have a big impact and very deliberately chosen words are often used when politicians attempt to otherize groups of people. As neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor pointed out in her book “Cruelty”:
“even mild otherization primes people for aggression”.

Did Boris Alexander De Pfeffel Johnson actually know that? Did Priti Patel? Theresa May? Does Rishi Sunak? Does Rishi Sunak realize that he is possibly whipping up aggression against his wife, just like Geert Wilders is potentially whipping up aggression against his wife? These women are both migrants, after all. Akshata is from India and Krisztina is Hungarian. Wilders’ mother is from Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation. Rishi Sunak’s parents are from Kenya and Tanzania. Priti Patel’s parents are from Uganda; her grandparents were immigrants from India. Suella Braverman’s parents are from Mauritius and Kenya.

Donald Trump’s wife is a migrant, too. He expedited her parents’ visas.

Immigrant. Migrant. It’s just a word. Words don’t matter. The words migrant and immigrant do not apply to my parents, my grandparents or my wife. That’s different. They are my parents, my grandparents or my wife. That’s what these politicians are all saying, aren’t they? So what exactly are they saying?

I think I know. It’s very embarrassing but after I became otherized as a migrant in England, I found myself endeavouring to distinguish myself from migrants from countries perceived as very poor such as people from Eastern Europe. There also was a day on which I realized that I’d just selected a specific phone repair shop over another one because the English spoken by the people in the latter was heavily accented. I don’t think that I had ever done anything like that before and it clearly came from being otherized. It’s probably some kind of unconscious protective mechanism that was at work here. I have seen a few times that people who feel unwanted by their parents tend to try very hard to prove themselves, prove their worthiness. This is what many migrants do too.

It all makes it very easy to imagine that those politicians who you’d expect to be arguing for migration were otherized themselves and that this wittingly or unwittingly scarred them so badly that they are still trying to prove themselves as “one of us”. I did it too, within about a year after having moved from Amsterdam to the UK. “I’m one of you. No, no, no, no, I’m not one of them.”

Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Geert Wilders and even Donald Trump with his German heritage present the strongest arguments for migration. Trump’s mother was an immigrant, as was his paternal grandfather. A few British business icons are also either migrants or the children of migrants, from Alex Polizzi to Karren Brady.

Migrants carry diseases and are unclean? Really? Migrants steal and lie and are out to get you? If that is true, then it also goes for the parents, grandparents and wives of the politicians who spout this nonsense. It’s hard to believe that right now, in 2023, we still haven’t gotten rid of this awful drag on society.