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Diana: for a tabloid people, a tabloid idol

Michael A. Hoffman II

Tabloid. It smacks of pestilence. A new disease, a potent toxin. The plague, a new.

The cult of St. Diana incorporates many myths but none so corrosive as the idea that there is a good Establishment media (“the press”) and its wicked alter ego, (the “tabloid press”).

But how did the tabloid press come into power? Has it not gained its power and influence through the support of the masses?Should not the people themselves - now fawning and and wailing over their “Madonna Diana” - be under attack as the ghouls ultimately responsible for the death of the princess?

Was it only tabloid photographers and journalists who “hounded” our poor saint? No stringers from CNN in that milling mob? No Reuters? No AP?No ABC?

What a laugh. The supposedly, non-tabloid “mainstream press” hound and hunt innocents every day. But they have the wit to craft their stories under a patina of statesman-like concerns and objectives. The goals of the mainstream press are “serious” and self-controlled; like for example their coverage of the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Very dignified.

The truth is, the Establishment media today is “tabloid” to the core - obsessed with sensational themes of sex and death to the exclusion of sustained inquiry and thoughtful analysis. They have made political speeches into sound bites. They pack and congregate and howl like the wolves they are at every criminal trial (their assault on Unabomber defendant Ted Kaczynski at his arraignment was a disgrace to journalism and the Constitutional presumption of innocence).

And who sponsors Hard Copy and those other early evening tabloid TV news shows?Who reaps fortunes from “Geraldo” and the other despicable tabloid chat programs? The big networks and corporations do - the same ones who are just now crying crocodile tears over Diana.

There is another myth, even more glaring. It is the pretense that Lady Di was fundamentally a shy, discrete woman who, in the course of shuttling between Compline at chapel and evenings at the hearth with hersons, was battered and abused by tabloid reporters and the papparazzi.

Lost in the decidedly feminine hysteria which has drenched this tawdry episode, is the fact that Diana did absolutely everything she could to inflame and attract the press. She eagerly pursued a “romance” with the son of a notorious British-Arab tycoon which she knew would electrify the press. Earlier, she had said she wanted a role as roving ambassador for Britain, traveling to the world’s hot spots where she would be ogled and photographed and mobbed all the more.

This was a woman who shunned publicity? Yes, it tormented her even as she craved it. But Lady Di was a creature of publicity, a product of the iconography of the age. She had nothing else but her celebrity. She was nothing other than a celebrity.

Diana was a deeply troubled modern woman, a font of confusion. This is her attraction to several hundred million, equally confused modern women who’ve been sold a bill of goods called feminism, which was supposed to bring them happiness and fulfillment and instead has sent them deeper into despair.

Lady Di had to leave her children to “find herself.” She left them to pursue sordid fornication with an Arab playboy, an equally vacuous soul who had once been allied to Hollywood’s supreme schlockmeister, Steven Spielberg.

The less that Diana was, the more fanatical her adulation by a huge throng of equally empty people.

The cult of celebrity is the only level at which the people still have some power; their other rights and avenues of expression are being taken from them. But in their frenzied worship of Lady Di, they have been able to compel Queen Elizabeth II out of her cocoon of hubris. The queen herself was forced to grunt and cavort for a more powerful monarch by far, Queen Mob.

So she too must appear “red-eyed in public” and display the whorish poster soul that the mob equates with compassion.

As Western society becomes ever more brutal, pornographic and desensitized, ever more anti-life and heavily policed, the people - once the repository of a semblance of commonsense and morality - emerge as a force for degraded barbarism.

The cult of Lady Diana, who was obviously mentally ill, will surpass the cults of the other mentally ill celebrity-whores of our time, from Judy Garland to Marilyn Monroe.

One wonders what the faithful mothers, who seldom stray from their children’s sides, who nurture the future generation, who’ve gone a bit broad in the middle and whose faithful husbands bear little resemblance to handsome playboys, think of the Diana thanatology?

Are they as enamored of her as the millions of twenty-somethings, with their abortions and their handbags crammed with toxic birth control chemicals - much the same “tools of the trade” which Diana must have carried?

The goddess Diana of antiquity was the pagan deity of fertility. But her modern namesake is a symbol of death, of the reversal of fertility, of sex without reproduction.

Lady Di is the incarnate expression of the death wish of the white race, of the inversion of which the prophet Isaiah stated, “Woe unto those who put evil for good and darkness for light.”

For a tabloid people a tabloid idol.

Courtesy: Campaign for Radical Truth in History.

Muslimedia: September 16-30, 1997


Article from

Crescent International Vol. 26, No. 14

Jumada' al-Ula' 14, 14181997-09-16


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