Heretic TOC

Not the dominant narrative

The strange case of the brilliant ‘bimbo’

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I ended last time with a description of how the News of the World had published a misleading photograph, in which I appeared naked with a young boy. My original narrative, written in 2001, continues below. It is not just “more of the same”, I promise you, so do stick with it. If you don’t find this intriguing, then intrigue just isn’t your thing. With photos like this one it could hardly be more apt that “Hannah”, if that was her name, kept referring to her “boyfriend” as “Con”. Con artist he certainly was. But it seems he could also have […]

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When Heretic TOC met the Fake Sheikh

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“The king of the sting reveals all” boasts the subtitle of Confessions of a Fake Sheik (sic), the memoirs of tabloid “investigative journalist” Mazher Mahmood, published in 2008. He certainly did reveal all at a French naturist resort back in 2001, as did two of his colleagues when the three of them stripped naked, posing as nudists in a bid to lay bare my supposed misdeeds at the resort to the readers of the infamous News of the World. What the Fake Sheikh (to give the more usual spelling, with an h) has always kept firmly under wraps, though, is his

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PIE spy, with my tabloid eye…

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The plots thicken. After the story broke a week ago about 114 British government files on “child sexual abuse” mysteriously going missing, the media exploded into an orgy of speculation about politicians, top civil servants and other Establishment figures in alleged paedophile rings, and conspiracies to cover up their dark deeds. Immediately, a panicked government responded, with Home Secretary Theresa May announcing to a packed House of Commons that there would be not one inquiry but two, one to look into the current allegations and also an overarching inquiry into loads of past inquiries that apparently hadn’t inquired enough. A thread

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Can you tell who he is yet?

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Rolf Harris you are 84 years old. You have no previous criminal convictions or cautions recorded against you. You are no longer in the best of health. For well over 50 years you have been a popular entertainer and television personality of international standing – with a speciality in children’s entertainment. You are also an artist of renown. You have been the recipient of a number of honours and awards over the years. You have done many good and charitable works and numerous people have attested to your positive good character. So began the sentencing remarks by Mr Justice Sweeney at

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Holy cow, Ratman, whatever BS next !

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A plague of mutant rats the size of cows threatens Britain. Or so the redtop tabloid Daily Star claimed last week in a front-page splash. It caught my attention on the newsstands not just for its eye-popping improbability but also because it came on the same day as the latest “horrific” and “sickening” revelations about the alleged depravities of the late Jimmy Savile were dominating supposedly more sober and respectable media outlets, including the BBC. Even more eye-poppingly, literally, Savile was said to have stolen glass eyes from corpses to make rings and other pieces of jewellery, and also to have

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Techno-tethering globalises oppression

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David Kennerly, who debuted last year for Heretic TOC  writing about his childhood in the American Midwest, now makes a welcome return. This time his theme journeys to far horizons – places that may soon be closed to us for actual travel if restrictions envisaged by governments worldwide have their way. Yes, it’s a very alarming thought and one that has accordingly prompted David to document in considerable detail what the securocrats and fear-peddling politicians are up to and why we need to wake up to it. In his guest blog today he outlines two essays specially written for Heretic TOC

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Perversion, the erotic form of hatred

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Psychoanalyst Robert Stoller once wrote a book called Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred. For him, perversion was an unconscious revenge-taking for traumas going way back into childhood, in which the Oedipal conflict was a focal concern. Few these days would see this Freudian theme as the single key to unlocking the psyche’s secrets, profoundly important as a child’s early relationships with its parents surely are; but Stoller’s attention to sexual hatred was well placed and should engage us too. Discussion here recently has rightly taken misogyny very seriously. Several commentators have pointed out that women constantly face sexual provocations of

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Even creepier than the creepiest creep

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It is a good bet that anyone described as “creepy” these days has earned the unenviable epithet through suspicions he is a paedo: for lazy reviewers of novels and films it has become the go-to cliché for hinting that the scenario includes a sinister and scary perv. Far more sinister and scary, though, is a rather different kind of creepiness: Mission Creep. In a sexual context, it is everywhere. Feminist analysis that began quite reasonably some decades ago with a long-overdue assault on entrenched “patriarchal” power structures, may have been hostile to adult-child sexual contacts but care was generally taken to

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Silence does not betoken consent

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Well over a year ago, in January 2013, Heretic TOC ran a blog called No wonder women turn against ‘teasing’. A few days ago a carefully argued, information-rich, 1,300-word comment in response, complete with links to numerous scholarly and other references, was sent in for moderation. It seemed a shame to let such a magnificent contribution languish in a place where – because the blog was so long ago – not that many people would notice it. So here it is, below, presented as a guest blog. It is from “A”, which is not the most user-friendly of pennames, being about

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Should we publish and be damned?

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We’ve seen it before, haven’t we? Those who start wars on terror end up behaving like terrorists themselves. The virtual ink dry was barely dry on Heretic TOC’s warning last week that British paedophiles are to be treated as terrorists when news came through that in Germany the police have begun their own reign of terror. For what else can it be called, really, when 150 police officers – that’s right, one hundred and fifty – are deployed in an operation to arrest a handful of people peacefully enjoying a Spring day out, including a trip to a zoo with a

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