Shortly after his death, when I was reading my E-Mails I happened across a message posted to the LA Forum Digest by a certain Mr Taha concerning Chris Tame. We all knew Chris had been extremely ill and was in fact on his last legs; I’d spoken to Sean Gabb at length sometime before about the matter, and I’d even been intending to visit Chris when he had been hospitalised recently, but Sean had told me he was in for observation and was not receiving visitors. All the same, the news of his death, three days before came as a shock, and I was a little annoyed that Taha, who had heard the news from our mutual friend and solicitor Ted Goodman, had not told me at once, but I doubt he realised just how it would affect me. I certainly didn’t.
It took me a while to recover from the news, and it is only this far down the line that I realise what an enormous influence he had on my life. So enormous in fact that if I hadn’t met him, my existence would have amounted to absolutely nothing, instead of the footnote in history that – for better or worse – I will now surely become.
Also, although I was never a member of his inner circle, so to speak, for about two years in the 1990s I was in one sense closer to Chris than any of them, including his (non-political) second wife, and both Sean Gabb and Tim Evans. I would like therefore to give my assessment of both the man and his legacy. If he had affected the people who matter half as much as he affected me, Britain and indeed the world wouldn’t be sleepwalking into disaster as it is now, and has been for some considerable time.
I first met Chris in 1982, I believe it was in the Summer of that year, because I remember it’s being hot. At the time I was living in Leeds, having moved there in 1977 hoping to make a new start after a crisis in my disastrous personal life.
I was then in what might be termed a dead end job, not for everyone, but certainly for me. To say I had made a total mess of things is an understatement, and but for my later moving back to the capital, the city of my birth, and a series of remarkable happenstances, I wouldn’t have made anything of my life at all. As things turned out, Chris was to prove a fairly big stepping stone on that at times bizarre journey.
I grew up in a bog standard working class household, my adoptive parents were totally non-political traditional Labour voting types, and I’d had no interest in politics at all until about 1975 when I was nearly inducted into the Workers Revolutionary Party after being buttonholed by an activist at a Shepherd’s Bush Underground Station. Not a lot of workers in that! To be fair, left wing loonies that they were and are – what is left of them – they wouldn’t allow me to join until I had been thoroughly indoctrinated in their ideology, something that fortunately never happened. Instead, several years later, I went the other way. The trigger for this was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan which turned me into a passionate anti-Communist, and then of all things into a Nazi, and I’d quickly joined the British Movement, which seemed to be the only organisation prepared to name the real enemy of Mankind, World Communism. Does anyone remember Communism?
For a shade over two years I considered myself to be a dedicated National Socialist, although I realise at this distance that part of the allure not only of National Socialism but of all verboten ideologies is not so much what they profess to stand for, but the universal ostracism to which they are subjected. This applies especially to what might broadly be termed the white ethnic movement,but other ideologies, religions and pastimes are at times subjected to the same treatment. When everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet, and parroting the same lies, hysteria, and double standards, it certainly looks like a conspiracy, even if it isn’t one.
Of course, there was more to it than that, and soon after discovering that the Holocaust was a gigantic fraud engineered by the World Zionist Conspiracy I became convinced that National Socialism was the only hope not only for the White Race but for all Mankind. For about a year and a half I became quite fanatical, but fortunately as well as the regular anti-Semitic and loony conspiracy literature I read a number of intelligent books, such as Gary Allen’s None Dare Call It Conspiracy, and the thoroughly documented academic works of Antony C. Sutton. In addition to this I became disillusioned with the street politics of the far right; Leeds was a very active city politically, and the far left, the SWP et al and ad nauseam had a commanding presence.
Eventually I tired of hanging around with at times violent British Movement and National Front supporters, one of whom on one occasion had attacked me, and almost gave up on reading political literature. Almost.
During the early eighties I visited my native London only about three or four times, once for an Al Stewart concert, another time for political purposes. On one occasion, I visited the Free Chinese Centre where I was given a copy of Dr Sun Yat-Sen’s The Three Principles Of The People. And it was almost certainly on the same visit that I met Chris, who was running the Libertarian Bookshop in Covent Garden.
I don’t remember the fine details of our meeting, though we must have had quite an in-depth conversation, because he remembered me when I contacted him in 1986. Although my visit to the Free Chinese Centre was planned, I can’t remember for certain if I had intended to visit the Libertarian Bookshop, or if I did, how I had heard of it. It seems unlikely though that I would have stumbled across it by accident – what was I doing in Covent Garden? – so it is most likely that I saw an advert for it in some political journal or other.
I purchased three publications from Chris, the first was the modestly titled anti-Revisionist tract SIX MILLION DID DIE: the truth shall prevail NEW EDITION WITH FURTHER FACTS. Written by two leading South African Zionists, Arthur Suzman and Denis Diamond, this book is a tissue of distortions, wilful misrepresentations, and outright lies which I have analysed and deconstructed thoroughly in my book Holocaust Affirmers... The other two were less easily disposed of: David Ramsay Steele’s The Case For Free Speech, and Tame’s own Taxation Is Theft, both of them modest publications extending to no more than two pages of A4 apiece, but as with The Ten Commandments, the modest length belies the massive content.
When I first met Chris he was wearing a small gold chained Magan David round his neck, so I assumed not illogically that he was a Jew. It was only in 1990 that he told me he was an English Gentile, born and bred. When we got on to talking about free speech at a later meeting he said that he was a free speech absolutist who favoured no restrictions at all on free speech, even on direct incitements to murder, a position I had found impossible to swallow even when I was an out and out Nazi. I was reminded of a newspaper article about the American Civil Liberties Union and the Skokie case which I had read in my grotty little bedsit room in Ladbroke Grove in the late seventies. I can’t remember the details but it was something along the lines of why do the left always get their own way? Lamenting the banning of a National Front march or some such under pressure from the Anti-Nazi League and the usual suspects, it pointed out that however many people had been murdered by the Nazis, five, ten or a dozen times mohad been murdered by the Communists, yet the Reds were always protesting hypocritically about how dangerous it was to allow “fascists” any free speech at all. The article said that when a Nazi group had demanded the right to march through a largely Jewish area of Chicago, a group of Jewish civil libertarians had fought harder for this right than anyone else.
Probably neither Skokie nor Chicago nor the ACLU were mentioned by name, but after I obtained a reader’s pass for the British Library in 1988, Aryeh Neier’s Defending My Enemy... was one of the first books I read there.
I can’t remember the second time I made contact with Chris, but it was definitely before he took over the top job at FOREST, and almost certainly by mail. I am sure of this because I moved into my Venner Road flat in 1986 and it took me a while to get a telephone put in, and I recall receiving a brief letter/reply from him in which he asked “Are you on the phone yet?”
When eventually we met up in person at FOREST I told him I had thrown away my swastika for good, a claim he took at face value and never once doubted, even after all the mud slinging started, and I in turn started really poking my snout into the trough of Holocaust Revisionism. That being said, when I realised what he was doing it was nearly me who severed contact. Didn’t smoking kill a hundred thousand people a year? How could he defend that? Freedom was one thing, but not this. I was livid for a short while, then like the open-minded individual I like to think I am, I took a second look. It took me a lot longer to come into line with the Libertarian position on recreational drugs, but eventually I saw totally through the sham of Prohibition. It was probably my own experience of another addiction that caused me to see reason. At the age of nineteen I became a compulsive gambler, an affliction that was responsible largely though not exclusively for the aforementioned personal crisis. All the problems I encountered since were traceable directly to this, or if not then they had certainly been exacerbated by it.
A gambler who loses everything – as I nearly did – has in the final analysis no one to blame but himself. It’s not bad luck, it’s not the cards, it’s not the wheel, it’s not even that people have cheated and stolen from him – as happened to me on occasion in low limit poker games. At the end of the day he has only himself to blame; he didn’t have to back the nag, to place the bet, to sit in on the game. By the same token the image of the drug pusher is a total myth. Yeah, the first joint may be free, but you don’t have to accept. You don’t have to hit the bottle. You don’t have to inject.
If a woman doesn’t want to have sex, she can say no. And that’s that. The difference is that sometimes women are forced to have sex against their will, but there is no drug equivalent of rape. True, there are some unfortunates who are declared mentally ill by the state and forcibly injected with all manner of drugs, but that has never been the case with tobacco, cannabis, heroin or cocaine.
There is this wonderful concept called free will which lies at the heart of Libertarian dogma: do what you will to yourself, allow others to do as they will. And take the damned consequences.
In 1990 I endeared myself to Chris in a big way. I had just started freelancing about this time and had some good results selling stories. Although my beginner’s luck was not to last, after selling a story to the Investors Chronicle about Edward Goldsmith, which was published in January, I sweet talked editor Gillian O’Connor into another feature. The Savage World Of Mr Tame was published in the July 13 issue, and Chris was suitably impressed; from that point in our relationship I could do no wrong.
My freelancing took a rather unusual turn when I became involved in a legal campaign on behalf of Britain’s longest serving unconvicted prisoner. This case and the way I was eventually treated by its sponsor has left a bitter taste in my mouth to this day, and it is not something I like talking about, but basically I became the organiser of the (non-existent) Friends Of Lorrain Osman. Lorrain Esme Osman was a Malaysian banker who had become embroiled in the Carrian scandal, a financial scam in Hong Kong. After his arrest in London in December 1985 he spent seven years in Pentonville and Brixton Prisons fighting extradition, mounting one application for Judicial Review and habeas corpus after another.
I first heard about the case from the radio, and wrote to Osman in prison; by this time he’d served over four years unconvicted of any offence, a state of affairs I thought was scandalous, and still do to some extent. Although the book I was commissioned to write was squelched, several good things did come out of this campaign. It was largely on the strength of my role as ad hoc press officer that I managed to get my NUJ card. One of the publications about the case was issued by the LA; Chris wrote the introduction. It was through this campaign that I met two men who were to further change my life: one was a “defrocked” anti-Zionist Rabbi; the other was Mark Taha.
In the early stages of the Osman Campaign, my fellow conspirator and I decided we needed to recruit volunteers, so inter alia I placed an advertisement or two in Loot, London’s self-proclaimed notice board. With one exception, the recruits were a motley shower, but the Rabbi was quite a find. It didn’t take me long to realise that he didn’t want to assist with the campaign but had approached me in search of tea and sympathy. I have no intention of washing his dirty laundry in public, so will not divulge his real name, suffice it to say that he was at that time on bail facing serious criminal charges which resulted later in his conviction and imprisonment. I had no doubt then and have no doubt now that all the allegations made against him were totally baseless, but my own subsequent experiences of the lowlife who control our criminal justice system has proved beyond any doubt that justice is often the last thing doled out to the innocent.
Rich man, poor man, Gentile, atheist, Christian, Moslem or Jew, if these scum have it in for you, you’re dead meat.
Because of the poor quality of the Osman Campaign volunteers (who were paid) I asked Chris one day if he know anyone who could help me hand out leaflets. He gave me the phone number of a certain Mark Taha saying “He’s an idiot” but he’s always desperate for money. Later I discovered that this “idiot” was one IQ point short of MENSA and a graduate of Essex University; when I mentioned this to Chris he said “He’s an intelligent idiot”. I met Taha the day Margaret Thatcher resigned, and Taha remembers the latter on account of the former!
It was Taha who introduced me to the activities of the Searchlight gang (1) in a big way. I’d first come across Searchlight magazine when I lived in Leeds, and was extremely unimpressed with its ad hominem attacks on Holocaust Revisionism. Chris had come across Searchlight too, having been targetted by the rag in the June 1982, and March and October 1983 issues. Chris believed that it was Searchlight that had engineered a phony split in the Libertarian Alliance at this time; I remember him showing me a copy of a small magazine published by the “other LA”, which had quickly and quietly disappeared up its exhaust pipe once it had served its purpose.
Chris hated Searchlight and its controller Gerry Gable. He was incensed at the smear campaign and implications/innuendoes of anti-Semitism. It would be difficult to find a less fitting candidate for the appellation of “Jew-hater” than Mr Tame. After all, he had married one! Although he would sometimes wince at my forthright approach, Chris was one hundred percent behind my exposés of Searchlight, and provided considerable ammunition for me over the years.
Re Taha, early on in our relationship, he did two things which shaped the direction of my/our future researches. He gave me a copy of The Other Face Of Terror to read, and mentioned en passant that the Israel Cohen Racial Program For The Twentieth Century speech – long a favourite of the “Jew-wise” far right – was a fake.
The Other Face Of Terror was the highly imaginative autobiography of Searchlight “mole” read agent provocateur Ray Hill. Taha said he had read the book noting down all the errors and was at some stage going to send them to the author for his comments, a regular pastime of his which occasionally results in praise but usually doesn’t endear him much to authors.
I told him not to do any such thing, and began researching, with his assistance, the definitive refutation of Hill’s tissue of self-serving and Searchlight-serving, lies.
Taha’s comment about the Israel Cohen speech sent me off in the opposite yet similar direction, that of investigating and documenting anti-Jewish canards, and in due course I was to publish a large collection of short but punchy monographs on these and a variety of other subjects. My first forays into exposing anti-Jewish propaganda were published in late 1992 and early 1993, and my first Searchlight exposés were likewise published in 1993.
I was particularly proud of A Goy Pries Into The Talmud..., but my pamphlet on Shechita was a massive hit with Chris; after reading his pre-publication copy he phoned and heaped such gushing praise on it and me that I was frankly embarrassed. Sean Gabb was suitably impressed too, and published a review in the May 1993 issue of Free Life. Later, when I sued Gerry Gable for libel, his lawyers would brand the publication’s cartoons anti-Semitic! (2)
Taha and I were far from the only people taking an interest in the machinations of the Searchlight gang. The left wing academic Larry O’Hara was researching them from a different angle. O’Hara may have started researching just after us, but he had crossed swords with them earlier. We met at an LA conference in November 1993 where he delivered a speech entitled Searchlight Magazine: A Case Study in Secret State Media Manipulation.
At the time I found this idea very persuasive, as did Chris, although later I came to reject it almost totally. O’Hara relied on a number of well documented facts to advance his thesis that Gerry Gable was some sort of latter day Kosher James Bond, among them the notorious Gable Memorandum, which was unearthed by the New Statesman in the early 1980s. While it may be true that Gable has done the odd favour for Special Branch or someone in the Home Office, this hardly makes him a state “asset”, probably most political correspondents have done something similar at some time.
On November 28, 1993, I was attacked on my doorstep by three hammer wielding thugs (3) who had obviously been either hired or put up to it by someone who will remain nameless, but anyone au fait with my researches into the Searchlight Organisation will realise who he is. The attack happened at 8.30 on a Sunday morning, so I suppose I should have been suspicious of the crash helmeted deliveryman, but I really didn’t think the Kosher scumbag responsible would have been so stupid. I was detained in Lewisham Hospital overnight, and Chris was the first person I told when I was able to hobble to the phone the next morning.
It didn’t take me too long to sus the real agenda of the people who control Searchlight, and Chris had more than an inkling. It was he who introduced me to the Hoaxer Project of Laird Wilcox, and his groundbreaking monograph Crying Wolf. Later, he showed me a review or flyer or something for Benjamin Ginsberg’s book The Fatal Embrace, and if I recall, it was Chris who introduced me to Esau’s Tears.
During this time, I also did a lot of printing at FOREST; I was far from the only Libertarian doing so, and at one time we joked about the tragedy of the commons being fulfilled. Although Chris did a lot for me and never demanded anything in return, I did help him out so to speak on two occasions. The second of these – after he had left FOREST – involved researching and writing a report for an overseas political organisation, for which
I was paid. The first was a rather delicate matter I won’t go into here, but there was an individual with whom Chris had crossed paths years before, who was being considered for an academic post; Chris considered him to be most unsuitable, but didn’t want to show his hand. I was given the task of demonstrating to this person’s prospective employer the wisdom of employing someone else, if only on financial grounds. I will say no more than that, but my task was completed successfully, anonymously, and without in any way implicating Chris.
I also had the impression that this was some sort of test for both my personal loyalty and my bona fides; if that was indeed the case,
I passed it with flying colours, and if he had ever been the slightest bit suspicious of me up until then, he wasn’t from that moment on.
Chris was also the first, and for quite a while, the only person I told him about my encounter with David Irving.
In fact at this time, I still had the scars to prove it; he wanted me to go to the police, and said he would back me up if I did, but I decided against it, and although the outcome was not what I had expected, I am convinced I did the right thing. I have to say too that while I was shocked when I discovered the truth, he wasn’t, and had long subscribed not to a conspiracy theory as such but to the belief that the security services ran certain covert operations in order to pander to the perversions of certain powerful people both to reward them and keep them in line. After Sir Allan Green, who was then DPP, was caught kerb crawling and forced to resign, Chris told me he had heard on the grapevine that although he hadn’t been framed, this was payback by the Metropolitan Police for stepping out of line over some matter in the not-too-distant past.
I can’t remember the details, but although Chris monitored all sorts of conspiracy mongering he did not as a rule engage in scurrilous gossip, so whether or not there was any truth in these allegations, I have no doubt that he believed them.
It is a myth that Libertarians are bleeding heart liberals, Chris certainly wasn’t, and at times he could be quite uncharitable. On March 3, 1991, motorist Rodney King was stopped after a car chase in Los Angeles, and given a savage beating by four uniformed thugs. He was struck no less than fifty-six times in eighty-one seconds. True, he was a big man, a convicted felon, and resisting arrest after a fashion, but the ferocity and intensity of the beating he received was stomach-churning. Normally when this sort of thing happens, the police are not brought to book, and this would certainly have been the case here if the incident hadn’t been caught on an amateur video.
To make matters worse, King was black and three of his assailants were white, the fourth, Hispanic. Faced with video footage, the authorities had to bring charges, and the following year, the acquittal of the four in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt led to the LA riots which saw many innocent whites murdered by blacks intent on a totally misguided racial revenge.
Disgusted as I was by the idiots who had made this into a race issue and used it as a pretext for wanton destruction and murder, I was equally disgusted by some people on the so-called right who attempted to justify the beating King had suffered. I expected Chris to come down on my side but to my surprise he replied “Well, they did go over the top but they do it to white people too”. I’m not sure if these were his exact words but they were certainly his sentiments. I said this was the sort of equal opportunities policy I would rather live without.
Another time there was controversy when two men who had been convicted of murder in the Caribbean and sentenced to death were executed after their cases were appealed to the Privy Council but before they could be heard. I can’t remember the details, I think they may have been Jamaicans, and the two cases separate; as the Imperial Power – snigger – Britain still had the last word in capital cases. The two men had obviously been executed with undue haste; when I showed Chris a press cutting of the case his reaction surprised me. It was the single word “Good”.
Also, his commitment to free speech absolutism did not prevent him suing for libel on one occasion, but as he pointed out, this was not really a free speech issue. Some bloke accused him on the radio of peddling cigarettes to young children and being complicit in the mass murder the tobacco companies are said to be inflicting on a gullible and brainwashed population. Really he had to sue over that.
On the subject of children, or rather children’s rights, Chris held a view common among Libertarians, that there should be no age of consent. When I asked him how this would work he said that because children matured at different rates, some would be capable of making decisions at the age of say thirteen, while others would not be fit to do so until sixteen or later. What about a thirteen year old who wanted to have sex, I asked him? His view was that under such circumstances the child concerned should be able to petition the court – a private court of course – and argue his (or more likely her) case. I have to say I found and still find this idea not simply totally impractical but bordering on lunacy, not to mention open to abuse. Also, my Libertarian principles do not extend to the total abolition of the state. At the end of the day there has to be the rule of law, and – again in my view – the only sane way this can be accomplished is to have a limited government which has a legal monopoly of force, one which is to some degree accountable to us plebs with meaningful checks and balances.
On a related subject, Chris was cynical and skeptical in equal measure of moral panics and campaigns, especially when they alluded to children in any way, manner, shape or form. He told me once that when people began making noises about protecting children, what they were really talking about was destroying your rights.
The two subjects on which we disagreed most were Israel and abortion. Remarkably, we managed to agree to disagree with regard to the Zionist entity, but abortion is something I’ve never been able to get my head round. I have always found the semantics of the pro-abortion lobby particularly sickening – a woman’s right to choose, pro-choice, etc. Just as calling homosexuality gay does not elevate a perversion into something desirable, neither does making light of killing an unborn baby turn abortion into anything but a morally repugnant act.
The fact that Chris was both (to some extent) a Zionist apologist, a raving philo-Semite and had at one time been married to a Jewess did stop him being
smeared as an anti-Semite, which was the main reason he hated Searchlight. Gable also used his position on children’s rights to claim that the Libertarian Alliance – and Libertarians generally –
supported the legalisation of sex with young children, (4) but as I have said before,
there is no fathoming the workings of his sick Jewish mind.
Chris was just about the most easing going guy you could ever wish to meet, and although like most of us he didn’t suffer fools gladly, he was both tolerant and understanding of other people’s shortcomings, and understood where they were coming from. I had a conversation with him
one day about a woman who had been on the receiving end of some sort of bureaucratic stitch up, and had taken to muttering about a conspiracy against her.
If I recall, she had approached Chris directly at FOREST for help having heard of him through or in connection with the Libertarian Alliance. He was unable
to do anything meaningful other than offer her some general legal advice, and told me that he’d seen this sort of thing before. A person has a genuine grievance with someone in a position of authority, maybe at the local government level, takes it up through the normal channels as we are always
advised, and is stonewalled, ridiculed, lied to, or simply ignored. Then the victim starts talking about a conspiracy out to get him or her, and can be written off as some sort of head case.
At times we had discussions about such things as conspiracies, be they on a parochial or global scale, and he espoused the view that the conspiracy theory of history was basically
correct but said this was the way societies worked and always had; in particular he recommended a book called Fire In The Minds Of Men. Like every well read Libertarian he was
aware of the true nature of finance capitalism, and that the loony
left hadn’t a clue what was really going on. He was particularly scornful of so-called feminists, not those who simply wanted equal rights in and out of the workplace,
but of the hard core lesbians and men-haters of the likes of the odious Spare Rib Collective. He thought one of the most hilarious articles he had
ever read was a report in Spare Rib that AIDS had been created by the American government. (5) He called it a new blood libel,
and agreed with me that it was on a par with the claptrap that is still peddled to this day about the Protocols Of Zion.
On race, Chris held views that are routinely decried today as racist, so by and large kept them to himself, but this statement needs some
heavy qualification. In the first place, it is difficult to appreciate how widely read he was, he was also a speed reader, and not only took in what he
read but had a very high comprehension rate.
His massive apartment at Southampton Row, Holborn was full of books and magazines, and this spilled over to his office at FOREST; he had books about race, politics, economics, and every conceivable subject;
I have no doubt that he had read them all. He had read especially prolifically on race issues, including Nazi race science and its forerunner, the eugenics movement; I remember him telling me
that there were three competing schools of Nazi thought with regard to the Jewish Question, and that one of them was if anything philo-Semitic.
In the 19th Century it was accepted without question that there was a racial hierarchy, and that whites were at the top of this pyramid with blacks, in particular African Negroes and Australian Aborigines
at the bottom, although we agreed that in view of the way the whites had trashed this once beautiful planet, Negroes in particular may not share this opinion.
You might say we reached a consensus that you don’t have to be dumb to fuck up the world. Having said that, Chris believed that blacks had been let down badly by their own leaders, and lamented
that apart from Walter Williams and our own Kevin McFarlane few had responded favourably to Libertarianism, certainly in the West.
We had a lengthy discussion once about mattoids, and agreed this was what lay at the root of the so-called Jewish Question. Like Gentile whites, Jews
were highly intelligent, often more so, but as with whites, intelligence was a double edged weapon. We had quite a few conversations about this and
related subjects.
It was Chris who pointed out to me that Libertarianism was even more Kosher than Communism supposedly was, so as with sexual differences in intelligence and character, etc,
what you really had was an extended normal curve. Men are both the stronger and the weaker sex; Jews have produced more Nobel prize winners
than other ethnic groups, and more sociopaths, and so on.
When it came to race-mixing however, he didn’t care. I remembered arguing with him vociferously that White Survival, all racial survival was a right; he disagreed;
his view was in line with strict Libertarian principles, that if whites or any other group wanted to promote eugenics or to finance it,
and/or racial purity, or whatever you want to call it, that was their right, but it should be done so purely as a private venture with no
interference or support from the state in any way, manner, shape or form.
Chris had views on homosexuality and prostitution that were likewise politically incorrect. Though he was indifferent not only to race-mixing but to miscegenation, he found homosexuality physically repulsive, and told me so explicitly on one occasion, but for him this was a purely private matter, and when he said he didn’t care what consenting adult homos did to each other, he meant it literally. Likewise, when he said he was in favour of gay rights and gay adoption, he meant it literally, for him this was an ideological position that engendered no compromise: freedom for the thought we hate; freedom for the act that makes our flesh creep, provided it is done by consenting adults.
At that time, there was still much hysteria about AIDS, and the misnamed gay lobby was making great capital out of it. Billions was being poured into AIDS research and related disciplines on both sides of the Atlantic, every cent of it wasted. Chris was firmly of the opinion that AIDS was the product of homosexual filth, and loaned me copies of several books on the subject including Fumento’s The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS.
Nor was Chris any fan of Social Credit; his response the first time I broached the subject was “It wouldn’t work”. Like most Libertarians including Ron Paul, he had an almost childlike faith in hard money – freebanking as well as gold. When I pointed out to him that many people are literally unemployable in a highly technologically advanced society, his response was basically, tough, and when I asked him what these people should do, if he didn’t actually respond get on their bikes, he did say literally, “No one’s entitled to a job”. (6)
Those words would come back to haunt him big time after he was ousted from his well-remunerated post as Director of FOREST. At this point he was the wrong side of fifty, and for ideological reasons more than anything else, virtually unemployable. This struck me as one of the great ironies of Libertarianism and the so-called capitalist system. Chris was literally an enormous intellect; I remember him speaking at length on such enormously diverse subjects as Nazi race science, the Jewish Question, the origins of Libertarianism, the reality of conspiracy, René Guyon, the subversion of the free market by monopoly capitalists, and the medical consequences of homosexuality. Yet what use was any of this if he didn’t tow the company line? (7)
Like me, Chris was unlucky in love; unlike me, he ended up paying through the nose for it. Although his first marriage to fellow Libertarian
Judy ended amicably, and they remained firm friends, his second marriage was
a disaster. When I first met her I thought Maria was quite a find; she was stunningly attractive with personality to match,
and some sixteen years his junior. What more could any man ask? His post as Director of FOREST was very well paid, and the ever generous
Chris whisked her off to Las Vegas where they were married, and honeymooned in Hawaii. Unfortunately,
Maria turned out to be alluring poison. I have to say she was always very nice to me, genuinely so – few women are! – and I was greeted
warmly when I turned up at his place once or twice when she was present. She made me coffee at least once; it’s the little things that really matter.
However, after Chris was forced out of FOREST albeit with a generous settlement, it was clear he would never be a big earner again; for a time he was
out of work, and Maria began to look elsewhere for her entertainment. She ended up running off with her osteopath.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, when the messy divorce began, she tried to get her greedy little paws on half his palatial Southampton Row apartment. Chris was forced to dig into his pocket for litigation, and
although he had some help from a platonic lady barrister friend, he told me that at one point the case had cost him about six grand in legal fees alone.
That experience put him off women for the rest of his life, his legal adviser notwithstanding, and at this time he said a few things to me about the opposite sex which if instead had been directed at
non-whites or Jews would have seen him relegated to the realm of unmentionable extreme racists.
Chris died with many regrets, not the least of which was undoubtedly that although a fitness fanatic he had been diagnosed with a rare
and particularly aggressive form of cancer. I am sure that one of his biggest regrets though was that he died without issue, and I am sure of this
because my endearing memory of him was of an informal function, I can’t remember the time or the venue – somewhere in Central London –
someone had brought along his or more likely her young daughter. She was perhaps two years old this kid, blonde or blondish, and he
was bouncing her up and down on his knee like a proud father.
Afterwards he told me bright-eyed “I wish she was mine”, or words to that effect. Although his genes have died with him, Chris R. Tame has left us a legacy that is in many ways more tangible than mere mortal flesh, although it may be decades before his contribution is properly appreciated.
The last time I saw Chris in the flesh was in the British Library. Although he had lived literally a short walk from the Library when it was based at Bloomsbury, he hadn’t joined until recently. I ran into him in Humanities One where he was researching his bibliography of freedom.
Although I won’t get a credit, I did help him research one or two titbits years before which will undoubtedly have gone into it.
This massive work is being finished or will be finished, hopefully, by his closest friend and successor, Sean Gabb, who is also working
on a biography of the man himself. Although this appears to have taken a back seat for the past few years, Sean has had a full schedule
running the Libertarian Alliance, as Chris directed; he also initiated the annual Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize and Lecture.
I didn’t attend either his funeral or his memorial service, but I did set up a page on Find-A-Grave three and a half year’s after his death. A year after the death of Morris Riley I published a pamphlet about him with particular reference to his victory over Gable and Searchlight. I decided to wait five years before writing about Chris, and began this dissertation late last year, although I’ve been making notes since I heard the news.
After his death, obituaries for Chris were published in several of the heavies. Probably none of these would have appeared but for a bit of wire pulling by his friends and fellow Libertarians. The obituary in the Independent was written by his closest and most loyal friend Sean Gabb, and the Guardian obituary by another Tame and LA loyalist, Marc-Henri Glendening.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Danny Kruger pointed out “Chris Tame is dead. The name is little known even in the world of politics, where Tame worked.” That is very true, but on reading those words I am reminded of Brian Eno’s comment on the Velvet Underground’s debut album; it only sold about four hundred copies, but everybody who bought it started a band.
Alexander Baron
July 12, 2011
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