Silence speaks louder than words. Nonchalantly, Peter Hitchens strolled through the cobbled streets of Oxford University, pursued by a baying mob. Dozens of students, a multicultural mix, were led by a young black woman hollering with menace through a megaphone. A cinematic production would have looked down from high, showing the honey-stone quads and dreaming spires, and the man who walked between them without wasting a breath on his taunting assailants. Someone on Twitter set his strut to the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin Alive’ from Saturday Night Fever.
The video has been viewed nearly a million times, by people on either side of the culture war. Those with the students perceive a bigoted old white male being swept away by the tide of progressivism. Salisbury Review readers, no doubt, would see Hitchens as the hero of this scene, a titan of independent mindedness who withstands oppressive group-think. He is like an anthropologist of a hundred years ago in a remote tribal village, ignoring the risks to himself in his detached enquiry; certainly Hitchens was gathering good material for his Mail on Sunday column.
The context for this near lynch-mobbing was the Black Lives Matter campaign, which suddenly came to the fore following an instance of police brutality in the USA. Look closely at the video and you will see that among some of the shrillest students are white. The large demonstrations across the UK have attracted a large contingent of white middle-class sympathisers, who have taken the opportunity for zealous virtue-signalling.
Scratch the surface of Black Lives Matter and you will find the same radical agenda filling the comment pages of the Guardian: climate change alarmism, gender fluidity and singling out of Israel as an Apartheid state. For middle-class activists, BLM is a natural extension of their pro-Palestinian stance, but the latter borders on anti-Semitism. Thugs on BLM marches have let their masks slip, alternating between ‘f*** da police’ and ‘kill the Jews’.
A pioneer of the British chapter of BLM is ex-Guardian writer Ewa Josiewicz, who notoriously daubed ‘Free Gaza’ on the Jewish ghetto wall in Warsaw. She was among a group who blocked the road access to Heathrow Airport in 2016. In a similar stunt at London City Airport, the nine demonstrators, who were all white, claimed that climate change was disproportionately affecting blameless black people.
Black Lives Matter gets an astonishingly free pass in the mainstream media, given its declared aims of ending capitalism, abolishing the police and prisons and dismantling the supposedly white patriarchal structure of the family. That’s quite a leap from protesting against the death of an unarmed suspect in Minneapolis. BLM is just the latest incarnation of cultural Marxism, which has been preying on young minds since the 1960s.
Decades of postmodern subversive ideology has created a political and cultural establishment that despises its own country and its rich heritage. Tony Blair wanted 50% of school-leavers in university not to develop their intellectual talents but to nurture foot-soldiers against the forces of conservatism. From the Russell Group to former polytechnics, universities became madrassas of progressive dogma. Previous generations have bucked against their teachers and parents, but current students and graduates of progressive education have taken the baton onwards. They are uncompromising in their emancipatory zeal, and seem enraged by the alleged systemic racism in society.
Anger by proxy is a distinctly intense emotion. It is not tempered by the corrective of reality, because the angered-by-proxies’ view of injustice lacks the more complicated experience of those who they claim to represent. While many black people have encountered discrimination, they won’t overlook the mostly harmonious relations they have with white Britons. The frequency of mixed-race couples refutes pervasive racism.
For the fieriest of white anti-racist campaigners, it is too awkward to consider this complexity. Instead, they throw themselves into battle, defacing monuments, toppling statues and denouncing conservatives on social media. Their anger is not easily traced to their own upbringing, typically of relative privilege with liberal parents. Gripped by delusion, they fan the flames of moral panic. Hitchens is immune to their hysteria.
Niall McCrae is co-author, with Robert Oulds, of Moralitis: a Cultural Virus http://www.brugesgroup.com/shop/books/moralitis-a-cultural-virus
You ain’t seen nothing yet.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1274506430553427977
I am actually surprised by the rather open coverage given to the identity of the stabber in Reading yesterday. He was a Libyan national; full name was given with clear indications as to his racial/religious identity; with full photo. Was this a slip-up? Given the lengths to which attempts were made to cover up the Usman Khan stabbings in London, I wonder – what has changed?
Whatever can you be trying to suggest? As we now know, he had mental health problems exacerbated by the lockdown and anything his victims (“true gentlemen”) may have had in common is purely coincidental. Because obviously if it looked in the least like being the UK’s worst homophobic hate crime in 21 years we’d be hearing from Stonewall, Pride and all the other taxpayer-funded advocates, wouldn’t we? Trust Auntie to tell it like it is.
Dear Niall, dead on as ever.
Some of the wealthy young find the extremes in politics very attractive. They used to be remarkably fond of PIRA, yet were always rather uninterested if informed about what a bomb in a pub did to bodies of ordinary folk, or how a punishment beating was carried out, or what life for a young man who didn’t agree with the Provo’s, but was unfortunate enough to have to live alongside them was like.
As well as the young there is always a tendency on the left to view the extremist in the room, as rather more authentic, than the thoughtful pragmatist, never mind the (small C) conservative. Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote with great insight about this in ‘Ancestral Voices’.
We need the moral courage of the few people in public life like Peter Hitchens, now more than ever. For as a good friend of mine says those young women howling that the police should be defunded, and that ‘white silence equals violence’, would have been cheering just as wildly for The Fuhrer should they have lived in Germany in the thirties.
R
The sooner the media in all its forms stopped giving the BLM idiots the ‘oxygen of publicity’, the sooner they would tire of their antics. The trouble is that as with terrorists, they feed off the media and the media feeds off of them. So, its win win for both sides with us poor idiots (the public) standing on the periphery watching both sides and neither taking a blind bit of notice of the publics feelings.
Excellent material for Reactionary Bullshit Bingo. All the buzz words and phrases you’ll ever need. Good effort.
Thank you Werdna you are too kind. Have you got any more statues to add to the list?
And a non sequitur thrown in for good measure.
Werdna (Andrew) ? I suspect somebody who sees himself as intellectually superior to the herd. Probably thinks he is an intellectual. Defined as “Somebody whose politics have exceeded the capacity of their brains to process.” Contempt oozing from every line. Never answers requests to explain his position.
Niall McCrae: Why have no statues of Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher been vandalised? The obvious answer to that question shows that the BLM problem isn’t a new problem.
Niall McCrae has held up a beautifully polished mirror, and like Caliban you have see yourself reflected in it. I think this explains your anger. We understand.
Reactionary Bullshit Bingo, as recommended by Werdna, is indeed good fun. Another old favourite is Chauvinist Nativist Draughts (CND). People in duffle-coats used to march around promoting it.
Werdna: Thank you for “reactionary” and “buzz words”. I’ve just won a small prize for completing a line in my Cultural Marxist Bingo game. If you can be so kind as to use “dog whistle” and “institutional racism” in your next comment, I’ll complete my card and win a dirty weekend in Mablethorpe!
I get the impression that ‘institutional racism’ has been superseded by ‘systemic racism’ – the latter being more inclusive, because, remember: WE ARE ALL GUILTY.
Institutional racism is a concept too precise to defend with the takeover of institutions by “anti-racists” so the term “systemic” has to be introduced to attack and destroy the residual vestiges of English cultural identity. As old Trotsky used to say, “It is no accident”.