Winston Churchill was a ‘racist’. Or so the Black Lives Matter graffiti says on the plinth of his statue in London’s Parliament Square which is bound to be pulled down by hard-left activists sooner or later because the police don’t seem to have that much of an appetite to save it.
Part of the problem is that the police — or at least their right-on superiors with their crappy sociology degrees from second rate universities and their Common Purpose leadership training certificates — no longer see it as their job to combat actual crime.
They now prefer to think of themselves more like glorified social workers, there to heal the wounds of a broken society by showing off their skateboarding skills at Extinction Rebellion protests and putting on makeup and rainbow lanyards to prance embarrassingly at Gay Pride festivals.
Typical of this new breed was the senior policeman we saw in Bristol, explaining why he hadn’t intervened when a bronze statue of Edward Colston, a slave trader but also one of the city’s main historic benefactors, was pulled down in broad daylight by a masked thugs.
“We made a decision. The right thing to do was to allow it to happen – because what we did not want is tension.”
But what could be more tense than a mob tearing down part of a city’s historical fabric with total impunity?
How is it a recipe for reducing tension if Bristol police are now signalling to the city’s law-abiding population that they now think it’s ‘the right thing to do’ not to intervene when criminal acts take place right under their noses?
Intervening to stop violent crime in flagrante always and inevitably involves ‘tension.’ So what the police officer — Superintendent Andy Bennett — appears to be saying here is that he no longer it considers it his job to do what most of us would consider actual policing.
Here is Superintendent Bennett caught in happier times:
And here is an unconfirmed report — from a retired Metropolitan Police officer — that rank-and-file police in Bristol wanted to intervene but were overruled by their woke superiors.
Another part of the problem is that the police have been brainwashed into imagining that the main threat to law and order and stability comes from the (largely mythical) far right — when it fact, for years, the far more significant threat comes from the hard left.
This is not, of course, a delusion unique to the police. It’s rife in academe, in the entertainment industry and across much of the mainstream media – especially in the shamelessly leftist broadcasters the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky News. This, in turn, is the result of decades of infiltration — Gramsci’s ‘Long March through the Institutions’ — by the radical left which has relentlessly pushed the propaganda message that Britain is ‘inward-looking, xenophobic and nostalgic for empire’. The left’s purpose is to ‘defame the nation and demoralise its citizens’.
Anyone who wants to understand the real motivation behind the rights should read this superb commentary by the irascible but occasionally on-point Pete North.
He writes:
A country that no longer believes in its founding values and has no sense of self-worth will cave into virtually any passing political fad. If the nation is attacked politically or militarily, you then have a public that will stand aside and allow it.
This is the oldest trick in the book. The Soviets knew it, the modern left knows it too. The communists played on the imperialism schtick then and now, while the modern left has long sought to associate nationalism of any kind with fascism and racism.
Anti-racism, then, is a veneer for leftists who oppose the very idea of the nation state.
North is rightly scathing about the Establishment’s complete failure to address the growing problem of this enemy within.
Successive centrist administrations have failed to stand up to an increasingly feral activist media and a worryingly censorious academic establishment. Safe spaces, trigger warnings, de-platforming etc is nothing to do with progressive values and everything to do with delegitimising even moderate voices of disagreement. That’s the truly terrifying authoritarianism in the West. It goes against the fundamental values it was built on… freedom of speech and association, and equality under the law.
Everything in the progressive agenda is aimed at dismantling nationhood, hence the creation of strains of victimhood according to gender and ethnicity.
Nor — again correctly — does he have much time for the gullible white middle-class kids willingly conspiring in their civilisation’s destruction.
The useful idiot white liberal youth who see themselves as righteous crusaders for the downtrodden minorities are doing the dirty work of communist agitators in what has become the largest global brainwashing operation of the 21st century.
Once you’ve grasped these points, the true significance of those hard-left activists’ assault on those statues becomes clear. By destroying — or trying to destroy — those statues, what they are really trying to destroy is Britain’s sense of history and, by extension, its cohesive national identity.
Sure, Winston Churchill said things about Islam and foreign races which probably wouldn’t pass muster at a contemporary Islington dinner party. But he did do one or two impressive things too, including helping to defeat Hitler.
Sure, Edward Colston profited from the slave trade but he also — as many rich men do to compensate for their guilt — donated lavishly to the port city of Bristol and helped lay the foundations for its prosperity and (at least till recently) its claim to greatness.
But the radical left doesn’t want you to know that history is nuanced and complex; all they want is to use it as an excuse for promoting guilt, division, self-hatred.
One of the reasons I have vowed never again to have any truck with the BBC is its relentless promotion of this left-wing propaganda message. I’ll never forget the episode of BBC Sunday Morning Live, a few years ago, when I had to go on to defend British history against an Islamist, a woke female historian and, of course, the presenter who shared their left-wing politics.
The only bit of British history that the Islamist seemed to know was an event called the Bengal famine. That’s because the Bengal famine is one of the radical left’s favourite historical talking points: apparently — so all good leftists and Islamists are taught — it shows Winston Churchill to have been an uncaring racist who, in 1943-44, deliberately allowed 1.5 million Bengalis to starve in an act of ‘genocide’.
This misreading of history involves an awful lot of cherry-picking. In fact, Churchill did his best to help the victims of what was initially a natural disaster (caused by a cyclone which destroyed the rice crop) exacerbated by local administrative incompetence, but there was a war on and it wasn’t easy: the Japanese occupied all the neighbouring countries which, hitherto, would have made up the shortfall; cargo shipping was in short supply and Japanese submarines made its journeys more perilous and uncertain.
Afterwards, I felt tainted by having participated in this charade. Britain has one of the world’s most extraordinary histories, which include some of Western civilisation’s greatest achievements. Yet here was the BBC promoting a chippy Islamist nobody who was perfectly frank about hating the country, and enabling his toxic views to be backed up by one of its battery of woke female historians who knew perfectly well that her job was to witter on about how important it was that British children should be taught about the more shameful episodes in their country’s past.
It amazes me that even intelligent people – including one or two politicians and commentators on the right who really should know better – are taking these disgusting Black Lives Matter/Antifa protests at face value, by applauding the demonstrators’ motives or even daringly admitting that they too feel sufficiently strongly about the evils of slavery to agree that the Colston statue should have been pulled down.
This violence has nothing to do with George Floyd; everything to do with the hard left’s relentless war on Western Civilisation. And thanks to the naivety, weakness and cowardice of the Establishment, the hard left is currently winning.
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