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The British Academy of Film and Television Arts is the equivalent to America’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Both organizations perform the same ceremonial functions in handing out their respective awards, the BAFTAs and the Oscars, although their overall duties have increased this century. When race moves center-stage, as it has in the movie business, a lot of people have a lot more work to do, and not just making movies. A better filmologist than I could doubtless tell us the history of the decay of cinematic meritocracy this century in favor of “movies of color,” but the coup happened quickly. It seems only yesterday in Tinseltown that a man was judged on his portrayal of a character rather than the color of his skin. Those days, of course, have gone.

Now, on both sides of the Atlantic, these awards ceremonies are strictly arranged in a league table of protected characteristics with blacks at the top. There follows a caravan train of wimmin, gays, cross-dressers, and cripples. It’s like Maslow’s famous pyramid of needs, only with special needs. And because merit has been driven out of the movies and replaced with the winners of various special-pleading competitions, nothing much happens at these orgies of self-congratulation. Oscars Night and the concomitant BAFTA Awards ceremony rarely have anything of interest to offer for those of us resident in the reality community. I believe a black man slapped another black man onstage in recent memory for disrespecting him in some arbitrary way, but usually it is just anti-white night with the stars. Someone says something about Trump, and you file it with the other things actors have said about Trump. Someone wears a designer dress. Sometimes that person is a woman. Black people congratulate one another for being black, and white people congratulate those people for much the same reason. But, every now and again, someone flips the script, and at February’s BAFTA awards in London, it wasn’t an actor.

The ceremony is in full swing, and black-run culture is doing its thing. Two black actors are onstage congratulating one another and yet showing their humility. One was called Delroy Lindo, and the other was Michael B. Jordan. I have heard of neither man, but then why would I have? Culturally, I don’t really move in those circles. I vaguely thought Michael Jordan played some sort of darkie sportsball. Anyway, there was an actor’s pause between sugary platitudes, and a word was barked out from the audience:

“NIGGER!”

Hard R. This wasn’t some homeboy with low impulse control. No, this was a white, Scottish, middle-aged man. There were a couple of seconds of stunned silence and visible disbelief. The actors’ faces went from the Greek comic to tragic, and then the banks broke and black passive-aggressive rage poured forth and hasn’t stopped pouring yet. But the rage is not directed at the man who yelled the most dreaded word in the English language (for whitey; blacks want it used so they can carry on grieving). No, the reason the black commentariat is big mad is because they can’t blame the guy for what he said. Now, no one tells a black man what he can and can’t do, and particularly who he can and can’t blame. Who is this high authority who can command such a thing? Don’t you know we wuz kangz? The answer is straightforward; the British medical establishment.

For once, this incident (which is being treated more like a crime scene) actually does require context. The man who yelled out the one word no white person may utter is named John Davidson, and he was at the awards ceremony in connection with a film made about his life and, more particularly, about the psychological condition which afflicts him; Tourette Syndrome. Tourette’s, as it is known, is described in DSM V as follows:

The first symptoms of Tourette Syndrome are usually involuntary movements (tics) of the face, arms, limbs or trunk. These tics are frequent, repetitive and rapid [and include] blinking or shrugging the shoulders, and vocal tics (for example, humming, clearing the throat, or yelling out a word or phrase), although they might not always happen at the same time. [Italics added].

The man yelled out the word not through choice but through compulsion. He is therefore, crassly put, mad and not bad. But the black caucus ain’t gone settle for dat. They want him bad. The focus of black rage over this incident has been an old philosophical problem, that of intent. I mean, the mouthy black commentariat won’t know it’s that, but that’s what it is. The nature of Tourette Syndrome means that Mr. Davidson himself is not responsible for his N-bomb. The black caucus want him to be a responsible moral agent—in the eyes of the law—more than they want fried chicken. Blacks, of course, are not usually vexed by considerations of moral agency. If their liberal handlers say they ain’t got it and don’t need it, then they ain’t got it and they don’t need it. But Mr. Davidson has moral agency, he has to have it, he has to have meant what he said, in order to conform to the new black blasphemy laws. Now, intent in legal terms is easy to define although not so easy to prove. It revolves around two key concepts: actus reus (a guilty act) and mens rea (a guilty mind). The guilty act is provable by witness statements, video recording, and other evidence. The guilty mind is usually what is to be proven. But it is possible to commit a guilty act without a guilty mind, in other words, without intent. This key British legal precedent here goes back to Boyle v Boadle (1863). A barrel of flour had fallen from a warehouse, striking and injuring the plaintiff. The defense pled absence of malice and therefore lack of intent, and therefore no actus reus. Not so, said the judge. The very fact that a barrel was allowed to fall out of a warehouse trapdoor is clear proof of negligence. Barrels don’t roll and fall by themselves, and a new legal precedent was born; res ipsa loquitur. “The facts speak for themselves.” Now, the facts in the case of All Black People v Davidson (2026) begin and end with Mr. Davidson’s neurobiological condition, which absolves him of moral agency. And why he have to use dat word!

Mr. Davidson’s condition seems to act for him in his linguistic choices. He will always say something guaranteed to have the most negative impact on his immediate environment. Thus, as portrayed in the movie, when he was being cared for by his sister, she was herself dying of cancer. He keeps informing her of this fact; “YOU’RE DYING OF CANCER!” He said “F— the Queen” while meeting the Queen. Pulled over by the police, the first thing Mr. Davidson yelled out was that he had a bomb. If he were in a synagogue, he would doubtless have yelled “Kike!” The condition has been satirized in both The Simpsons and South Park, and obviously has great comic potential because the verbal outbursts are all engineered by some malevolent goblin of the unconscious (and a racist one) for maximum effect. But not by Mr. Davidson. He is not the responsible moral agent of his own body. Who made the utterance, then, and why? Media blacks had some psychologically interesting perspectives.

Noted psychologist Jamie Foxx was of the opinion that Mr. Davidson “meant that shit.” Grace Randolph, some blondie unaccountably influential in the online cultural menagerie, said that those who defended Mr. Davidson citing his condition were in fact defending his use of the word because “they wanted to say it themselves.” Otherwise black elders taught us that Mr. Davidson was not, in fact, guilty of racism. All that happened is that his condition helped illuminate how unconscious and ingrained white racism is in white people. We are all racist, he just couldn’t keep it in. It’s a sign. Praise be.

This is the joy of inter-sectionalism, that slice of the Venn diagram where all the protected characteristic people play together. But there is a problem. American readers will know that an intersection—which I believe is what the British just call a “crossroads”—is a great system for easing traffic flow. It is also where a lot of accidents happen. There is a prime example of this in the UK at present, where Islamists are using the ever-gullible Green Party to piggy-back their way into Parliament. The Greens, of course, are vigorous promoters of trans rights and homosexuality. They are run by a gay Jew. After a recent by-election win, the Greens must have thought, we really are the party of unity! Now, let’s have a meeting between our trans people and a couple of imams. . . In the case of John Davidson, on one side you have sainted black people, and on the other a disabled person, who may not be criticized. There’s your accident at the intersection.

But now we have finished laughing up our sleeve at black people (best not laugh in the open, at least in the UK), it is refreshing to remember a time when one could laugh, not at black men indulging in victimhood, but something even funnier; white men in blackface, another of the new seven deadly sins. Retrospective blackface has been a big thing throughout the white televisual arts, and comedians are always having their dark—or darkie—pasts revealed as having blacked up for a part in some 1980s TV drama. They go all contrite, and they are allowed to work again. But that never bothered a man who never actually appeared in blackface, but was a great English pioneer of blackvoice. He was a part of the great British satire boom, and although he played a relatively minor role, one of his comic creations deserves a revival. His creation was not actually a fictional character, but a real, live politician, an African dictator, in fact. The despot’s name was Idi Amin, and the man who took him off was John Bird.

There is a tendency in the UK to see the satire boom of the 1960s as just a sub-set of comedy in general, but it was far more than that. It was the only way the public could be offered an alternative political perspective to that peddled by what was, even then, a client press. Fleet Street journalists could be bought with a few good lunches. Satirists could not. The sixties satirists, in the sense of being somewhat samizdat, are not dissimilar to today’s Right-wing British YouTubers, albeit vastly more talented.

John Bird was part of the Private Eye generation of literate, Oxbridge satirists, and these were the first comedians to take aim squarely at the British establishment. There was even an Establishment club where anti-governmental comedy was regularly performed. The fame and influence of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, David Frost, and many more, was a mainstay of post-war British alternative culture. And one of this coterie of cerebral comedians was John Bird. Bird and his partner, John Fortune, had long been known for their political humour, with fictional politicians being interviewed who were in fact real politicians thinly disguised, the amount of disguise relative to the amount of litigation likely if things got too obvious. One of Bird’s characters was a General Mbarppe, an obvious take-off of Zimbabwe’s maniacal President, Robert Mugabe. Bird did not do the role in blackface, but the African voice had audiences roaring with laughter, and the whole thing begged to be recorded. That is where Bird’s journalistic colleague, Alan Coren, came in useful.

Coren had written a regular column for Punch magazine, purporting to be from the desk of Idi Amin, the ruthless dictator who ran Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Bird tried out the column in a voice slightly adapted from his Mbarppe role, and President Idi Amin came to life, greates’ livin’ man de worl’ has evah seen! Sadly, Bird’s performances as Amin are like Fawlty Towers and Father Ted in that there are precious few of them. But The Collected Works of Idi Amin is available here on YouTube. The skits don’t work on the page the way they do in the voice of Bird’s Amin.

Amin was a beast of a man in every sense. Standing 6’ 4” and weighing 250lb, he rose to prominence in the Ugandan Army when the country was still under British rule. Amin may have been a bastard, thought the wily British top brass, but he’s our bastard. Amin shot up through the ranks, catching the attention of the Ugandan military commanders (basically tribal warlords with better uniforms) not for his military acumen but the sheer ability he had to astonish rivals with his violence. In the 1950s, the British sent Amin to Kenya to lead the fight against the insurgent Mau Mau, where he honed both his taste for power over other men, and the barbaric skills necessary to attain that power. When Uganda got its independence in 1962, Amin’s star was in the ascendant, but he would have to wait nine years for its zenith. In 1971, then-President Obote was away on official business, and Amin struck. It was arguably the most efficient military coup in African history, although that bar is set low enough to test any limbo-dancer. Amin’s rise to power, and his ascension to the Presidency, was openly endorsed by Britain, the US, and Israel. Idi Amin would go on to kill up to half a million of his own people.

He started with the supporters of the man he deposed, Obote. Next, he moved on to tribes against which he had a personal grudge. If there is one thing the black man hates even more than the white man, it is the next tribe down the road. In 1972, he expelled all of the so-called “Ugandan Asians,” who were just that, mostly Indians who had been displaced due to problems in their own countries. These were genuine refugees, and capable people. I worked with a very nice—and very intelligent—Asian lady who was one of the forced diaspora under Amin. One person is not a representative, but she was the type of person Amin wanted expelled. Far too high of an IQ.

Amin finally went too far. He sent a telegram to the UN praising Hitler’s actions with regards to the Jews, then he invaded Tanzania on a whim. It was a farcical war, and Kampala fell in 1979. Amin lived out the rest of his life in luxury in Jedda, fully funded by the Saudis. The man who vies with Robert Mugabe for the title of “the Hitler of Africa,” who killed half a million of his own people, who enjoyed killing political opponents with a sledgehammer, and who was endorsed by Britain, the USA, and Israel, died in 2003. Like Stalin, Amin passed away comfortably in his bed.

Amin was an appalling man in a century of appalling men. Figures-wise, he is way off the leader board. Idi was not in the same league as Mao or Stalin, or even the same ballpark as Pol Pot. But he notched up hundreds of thousands killed, tortured, maimed, raped and otherwise abused. He was reputed to have been a cannibal. John Bird makes light of all of this, highlighting a key point about satire; it must not be afraid to go anywhere. Modern British satirists are finding out that there is a definite no-fly zone over the subject of Islam.

Bird’s Amin recordings (on Bootblack Records) are a comic treasure trove, and there is a sense that ridiculing blacks is coming back into fashion as their power wanes. It is trite to say of Bird’s comic creation of Amin that “you’d never get it made nowadays.” Of course you wouldn’t. You would never even get it pitched and, if you did, you would go on a watch-list. Bird and Coren did what would now be unthinkable; they satirized a black man. One thing blacks share with Muslims is a genetic hatred of being ridiculed or mocked. The proude Devile be not mock’d, as Sir Thomas More wrote. As a good friend of mine said to me twenty years ago, the two people who need the piss taking out of them most are blacks and Muslims. And he was and remains correct. They need a cold shower of reality. And we need to explain to them, patiently and slowly, that we are not going to allow them to dictate who we may or may not mock. And if we have a problem, then we very much have a problem. And if you can’t handle one word, spat out as a direct result of a neurological condition, then one wonders how you would have made it back in Africa had you not had your lucky ass saved by whitey.

Ah, the dark continent. The African problem. What to do? Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has a curious connection with the life of Idi Amin. He was born some time between 1925 and 1928 near the small town of Koboko, in the west Nile district. Conrad’s tale was inspired by events which happened nearby, when a Muslim convert (Amin’s father was Muslim) was at the center of an international incident, and apparently rescued from a Mahdist rebellion by journalist and explorer, Henry Stanley. Chinua Achebe would later call Conrad’s novella the “dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination.” This is not so much the case now. There is no need for us to travel with Kurtz into the heart of darkness to get our dominant images. Instead, the heart of darkness is coming to Europe. We can get those dominant images from the shopping mall now. European women can enjoy the African experience just by trying to walk home from work, no novels needed. Perhaps we should bear in mind, when we have finished laughing at the black man, Kurtz’s marginalia to his diary, the answer to the black problem, the whole nightmare of Africa; “Exterminate all the brutes!”