First, they came for the statues.
Melanie Phillips has written an excoriating analysis of the current crises. 2020 is the real 1984. Eloquent, forensic and deeply insightful.
There is one aspect that needs closer examination though. The question of whether the ‘thuggish’ and ‘far-right” groups who are planning to defend the status quo (monument-wise) are reprehensible for their principles, or merely for their methods.
After all, Tommy Robinson’s Luton-born compatriot (who cut her documentary teeth on “My Hometown’ ("sorry, episode currently unavailable"!!) is currently one of the BBC’s most esteemed luvvies.
The weakness of the Conservative government, the police, the media and the powers that be are leaving an opening - a vacuum - into which ‘Tommy Robinson’ and his motley supporters *thuggish groups around the country” are bound to fall. All this is troubling, but it raises another question.
When highly educated and intellectual voices like Melanie Phillips reflexively condemn Tommy Robinson who, by the way, does an excellent job of discrediting himself, are they aware that he is not exactly the ‘ignorant racist thug’ they dismiss him as?
Or, is it simply that the ‘mob’ who seem to rule the roost these days, would, in turn, condemn her by association, (even more than they do already) should she or anyone like her be caught expressing the slightest smidgeon of sympathy for T.R.
We can’t all be Oxbridge graduates. Personally, I’m full of admiration for the eloquence and perspicacity of figures such as Melanie and writers like Brendan O’Neill and Douglas Murray, (bended knees!) so I would really like to understand whether they are right to dismiss T.R., or are they fearful of the Twitterati mob……. or merely being snobbish?
Genuine question.
"And of course there’s racial prejudice in Britain. But so there is in every single society, in the developing world as well as in the west. Slavery was not invented by the west but has been practised across the world. It was the British and Americans who, having participated in it, eventually abolished it in their societies, while it remains practised in parts of the developing world even today.
The smear that the west is institutionally racist is designed to both facilitate and obscure the real agenda of overturning capitalist society because it is white and therefore deemed intrinsically evil – which of course is itself a racist agenda.
Yet instead of resisting this ignorant and wicked movement, its appeasers have been literally abasing themselves before the mob.
In the past, violent anti-white racism was represented by the black power movement. Despite the support of certain posturing celebrities, black power activists were generally perceived as dangerous, violent, far-left troublemakers. It would have been unthinkable for mainstream British politicians, let alone the police, to give the clenched fist black power salute. That would have been regarded as treasonous insurrection.
Yet an updated version of this is precisely what’s been happening in Britain. The new Labour Party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, and his deputy, Angela Rayner, released a picture of themselves supporting Black Lives Matter, the activist group behind many of these demonstrations, by “taking the knee”, the gesture promoted by certain black American footballers to show their contempt for white society and America.
In similar fashion, no less than the chief constable of Kent “took the knee” along with numerous other police officers – some as the direct result of mass bullying. At Oriel college, Oxford, which for years has been resisting a campaign to remove its statue of Cecil Rhodes, demonstrators renewing their campaign chanted “Kneel, kneel, kneel” – and a police officer duly sank down on one knee.
These people have all been literally kneeling down in submission to an ideology which is anti-white and anti-west – and at the direction of Black Lives Matter, a racist, anti-white, anti-west violent revolutionary movement whose aim is the overthrow of white western society.
These images of the British police symbolically capitulating to the erasure of British history and the defamation of the west have furnished sickening evidence that many of those tasked with protecting society have surrendered instead to cultural terrorism.
Meanwhile, anyone who opposes this dogma of black victimology and points out the defamatory lies at its core will be called a racist and their livelihood placed in jeopardy.
In America, people are losing their jobs for even questioning any of this. The prominent footballer Drew Brees, who despite publicly opposing racism also opposed taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem on the grounds that he would “never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag of the United States of America”, was forced to apologise in a display of ritual humiliation.
On Twitter, the malevolent, the moronic and the mentally unhinged are out in force similarly seeking to intimidate, smear and ruin any who stand up to this cultural totalitarianism.
And then there’s the deeply sinister Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm set up by London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, to consider the appropriateness of the capitals’ statues, murals, street names and other memorials.
Channelling Mao, the Taleban and the French revolutionary terror, Mayor Khan can surely leave no-one in any doubt that this committee will reduce diversity by aiming selectively to erase those bits of British history of which it disapproves. In Khan’s words: “…our statues, road names and public spaces reflect a bygone era. It is an uncomfortable truth that our nation and city owes a large part of its wealth to its role in the slave trade…”
So the Mayor of London now stands revealed as someone who hates his nation. For if it was indeed created, as he so misleadingly claims, by a great evil then how can it be anything other than evil itself? Feeling at last the wind in his sails supplied by the rage and contempt of the mob on the streets, he intends to abolish the nation’s birthright to the evidence of its own past and construct its future in the image he will determine.
So will this commission erase memorials to all historic British figures with an obnoxious side to their achievements? Will its destroy the statues of the Labour politicians Keir Hardie or Ernest Bevin, or Karl Marx, who were all antisemites?
Or the playwright George Bernard Shaw who promoted eugenics? Or the parliamentary titan Oliver Cromwell who massacred the Irish? Or Britain’s greatest Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone, whose family, like so many prominent people in previous, very different era was involved in slavery?
That last question already has an answer. Liverpool university has agreed yesterday to rename its Gladstone Hall, which houses student accommodation. Bim Afolami, the Tory MP for Hitchin and Harpenden, tweeted in response: “This is all going completely nuts. When will this stop??”
When indeed. As George Orwell wrote in 1984 about a state under totalitarian tyranny: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Or as the future US president Ronald Reagan said even more pertinently in 1975: ‘If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism”.
Well, here it is, on both sides of the pond.
Bad things happen not just because bad people do them but because otherwise decent people lack the courage to stop them; or because they indulge in fantasies that the agenda is basically good but has been “hijacked” by a few thugs; or that they agree with the ends but purse their lips at the violent means; or because of a myriad other excuses that the spineless and the misguided always provide for “taking a knee” to the destroyers of worlds.
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