One of the more surreal aspects of the unfolding scandal around media split-personality Jimmy Savile is the way British media reports of the disgraced disc jockey and TV presenter sexually assaulting young kids are finally being run so long after they did the rounds elsewhere (including on various nutjob conspiracy blogs). As soon as Savile died a slew of right-wing commentators felt free to put online stuff they’d have feared being sued about earlier. That said, the stories they tell had gone around the music business and elsewhere for years before they appeared in endless copy and paste jobs on web operations run by loonies who are deranged enough to believe that the Illuminati is something more than a very minor secret society that was successful suppressed in the eighteenth-century! However just because these sites manage to grab the wrong end of the stick with regard to virtually everything they cover, that doesn’t mean that very occasionally they don’t get things right. And they may be more or less correct on most of what they have to say about Savile and his colleagues.
So this leaves me wondering whether there is more than a grain of truth in the decades old rumours that Savile volunteered as a hospital porter because it provided him with the opportunity to get it on with corpses (as well as to sexually abuse crippled children). The mainstream media hasn’t picked up on the necrophilia allegations to date but they are now repeating so much of what has been widely available on nutjob conspiracy blogs since Savile’s death a year ago that it seems merely a matter of time before they bite the bullet on this one too. It is less likely – but not impossible – that they will eventually repeat the allegations that former British Prime Minister Edward Heath abused kids at the same Jersey children’s home that Savile trawled for young victims.
Another peculiar aspect of the Savile scandal is that many commentators seem unable to understand why paedophilia is unacceptable. Acceptable sex is consensual sex. It should go without saying that consent is only possible when all those partaking in a sexual act enjoy social equality. Given the power differentials between adults and children, paedophilia can never be consensual and thus it should be condemned as an utterly inappropriate form of behaviour. So regardless of whether it is Savile, or his fellow Radio One DJ John Peel (or pop musicians like Gary Glitter and Jimmy Page), adults having sex with kids in their early teens is always abuse. Some John Peel fanboys seem to think he wasn’t a paedophile when he slept with young girls (and married a 15 year-old when he was 26) because he is their hero. Such posturing is absurd and illustrates a generalised inability to grasp the real issues.
Finally, the Savile scandal is yet another manifestation of the destruction of the status quo – and needs to be connected back to the ongoing scandals around banking, phone hacking and MPs expenses. The establishment is in ruins and Savile shouldn’t be treated as a rogue celebrity but rather as one manifestation of a more general malaise. Saville like John Peel and Alan “Fluff” Freeman (another dead former Radio One DJ about whom there are plenty of child abuse allegations floating around the web) were all recognised by the British honours system (with Savile himself also being close to various members of the British royal family during his life). This starts to create the impression that unless you are a kiddie fiddler you’ll never be offered an honour by Queen Elizabeth II. The class system still stinks something rotten and it is high time we not only stripped all royals of their titles and wealth, but did the same to every last member of the superannuated establishment!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!