TRUE PATRIOTS SHOULD
SUPPORT ANYONE VICTIMISED BY POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
Douglas Murray, who is a commentator who writes much good sense recently
wrote the article below which is entitled “Will no one resist the new
totalitarianism?” in which he quite rightly pointed out that we do need to stick up for
all those being victimised as a result of politically correct witch-hunts.
One of the grave weaknesses on the “Right” of politics is the cowardly
tendency to try and propitiate the Left by making all sorts of Politically
Correct noises and generally attacking others on the right i.e. “punching
right”.
There is also the absurdity of people on the Right saying that our
side’s campaigners, lawyers, politicians, etc. should do all that they do for
the love of country, free and unpaid.
The interesting thing here is of course that nobody on the Left seems to
suggest that left-wing politics should be conducted free and unpaid. Far from it they make sure that even turning
up to demonstrations gets you paid. The
great financial engines for the Left are of course the established Trade
Unions. More recently they have
increased their reach by their takeover of most of the big charities.
These attitudes have left the Right of politics mostly bitterly divided
and short of money. The only exception
to this being the liberal globalists in the faux “Conservative” Party who focus
any money received on their personal careers and self-interests rather than on
anything that might help conservatism or patriotism.
I think what we need is more focus on creating organisations which can
redress the balance. Suggestions anyone?
Here Douglas Murray’s very interesting and sensible article:-
Will no one resist
the new totalitarianism?
Some of Alastair Stewart’s friends will fight for him — but too many of
us will let him simply disappear
I’ve been thinking a lot about totalitarianism recently. It’s
unsettling, for as I do so, I notice its seedlings in every day life. And these
are the same seedlings which, in the past, grew into horrible, magnified
obscenities in totalitarian societies.
In particular, I’ve been considering two haunting observations made by
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the outset of The Gulag Archipelago. The
first is the question of why people did not resist more when they were taken
away in the night. Why did they not scream, tear up the earth, scratch the eyes
of the men who had come to take them? And — if they had to leave their home –
why didn’t they make sure that the people who had come into their home bore the
scars of having done so for the rest of their days? Why did the captured even
tip-toe down the stairs, as they were asked to do by their captors, in order
not to disturb their neighbours?
The answer to this lies in a question. As Solzhenitsyn puts it: “At what
exact point, then, should one resist? When one’s belt is taken away? When one
is ordered to face into a corner?” In part, the reason nobody resists is the
same one we learned from Communism’s evil twin: if people have no conception of
what is about to happen to them, then they will do whatever they think is
needed to keep themselves alive to the next stage.
When people were rounded up, they still hoped that this was the
beginning of a process which would be resolved or righted at some point: that
the misunderstanding would cleared up, or that the indignities could not get
any worse. Until the whole world knew about what could happen, almost nobody
imagined the end they would endure.
Solzhenitsyn relates the tale of one woman in the Twenties, early in the
reign of communism in Russia, who was supposed to have been seized in a Moscow
street. But she started screaming and fighting, and such was the commotion in
the middle of a crowd, that the men assigned to take her away abandoned their
task. But even her imagination of what was possible turned out to be limited.
For she returned home that evening — which allowed the men to take her away
privately, in the middle of the night, and send her to Lubyanka.
Solzhenitsyn’s second question-observation is even more haunting:
why did people not intervene more to stop their friends, family or simply
fellow-citizens from being taken away? In some ways, this is the more
disturbing observation. We may grant that people have the best perspective on
their own fate and will know best what might save themselves. But when people
see women being plucked off the pavement by agents of the state, why do they
continue walking?
Solzhenitsyn approaches this question through a bitter counterfactual.
“How we burned in the camps later”, he says, thinking how different things
might have been if the security operative who went out in the night to make
arrests hadn’t known he would ever return to his family again. What if he
hadn’t known whether he would return alive. What if, during the mass arrests in
Leningrad, when one quarter of the city was arrested, people had lain in wait
and attacked the people who had come to arrest them and their neighbours? What
if they had waited on the staircase with “axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever
else was at hand”?
You might say that not everybody is given to physical violence or
physical courage. Why, then – and in some ways this is the worse question
– weren’t the tires of all those Black Maria sitting with a solitary driver
(waiting for the human cargo to be brought out of the building, into the
vehicle and from there away) spiked? How is it that a whole public with such a
cause (their relatives and friends being taken away in front of their eyes)
couldn’t do what hoodlums easily manage with no motivation whatsoever?
It was, says Solzhenitsyn, because the people “didn’t love freedom
enough. And even more — we had no awareness of the real situation.”
It may seem strange, and even slightly obscene, to make a leap from the
worst days of the 20th century to the seemingly incomparable situation in
developed democracies today. But the behaviour of people under totalitarianism
is, I think, recognisable today in the normal behaviour of normal people in our
supposedly normal times.
In a culture which is often described as a ‘cancel culture’ — one in
which people are liable to be rendered at least unemployable at any given
moment — these behaviours manifest themselves still. Anyone who doubts this
should read this piece by Mike Tunison
on Medium. As Tunison says, he was one of the men whose name was — wholly
wrongly — put on a list published online in October 2017 purporting to list
around 70 men in the media described by the author as ‘Shitty Media Men’. The
document was an anonymous list of unvetted, unchecked claims about dozens of
men in the media in America whom the author or authors claimed to have a
reputation for being sinister or violent towards women.
The list did the feverish rounds of the internet in the same way that
similar lists did in the UK and elsewhere. The media was high on the octane of
exposes. Having been silent about cases of real abuse, nobody had time or
interest in questioning documents like the list that Tunison was on. And so,
with no apparent justification, other than the misfortune of his having crossed
the path of someone with a grudge, Tunison’s life was turned upside down. He
was made unemployable in the career to which he had chosen to dedicate his
life. Jobs he did apply to could see the claims made against him online and
step silently away. Finally, last year, he landed a job as a janitor. Is no one
interested in this or the injustice it screams?
A similar scenario will doubtless emerge in the UK, with the dismissal of the broadcaster Alastair Stewart after
decades of work for ITV. On the basis of a quotation
from Shakespeare, which one person online claimed was clear, cloaked racism, a
career of decades is over.
Some of Stewart’s friends will fight for him, perhaps. Others will look
away, sufficiently worried about the implications of even being ‘adjacent’ to
someone accused of racism. But is nobody interested in the means by which this
was done? Consider the implications of the phrase I wrote above. A case
of clear, cloaked racism. So clear as to deserve the end of somebody’s
career. Yet done ‘with the cover’ of a quotation. Meaning that the crime which
is so clear, so blazing and so self-evident is also only in the eye of the
beholder, only discernible to a particular eye. In other words, not remotely
clear.
The people who suffer these injustices tend not to come out fighting,
screaming and scratching their way back to safety. They tend — like Tunison –
to submit to the madness which has washed over them, partly in the hope that
they will some day claw their way back. It’s hard to grasp, at the time, that
this is it and that they need to fight for everything. Who would believe that a
life could be destroyed, every personal relationship shaken or ended, because
of an anonymous list published online?
In the same way, when a nationally famous figure is accused of the great
crime of the age, they rarely believe that the people for whom they have worked
for for decades — the people they gave up their weekends for, their spare
evenings, the times they could have been with their family for — would drop
them in a matter of hours for a crime which cannot be explained and whose
nature is wholly subjective. For that would mean everybody in the world would
be able to take out anybody else, if they had sufficient desire to do so. And
surely that world would be unworkable.
Well it would be, and it is. But it is possible not only because the
victims do not quell and shake and scream enough but because we – the public –
allow them to disappear one by one. We do not slash the virtual tires of those
who take them away. We do not pick up whatever cudgels we have to hand to beat
back their accusers. We just sit, as the anonymous lists and the unprovable
complaints pile up and up, simply hoping all the time that the dishonest players
and anonymous accusers will never come for us.
If people want to understand why totalitarianism works, the seedlings
are all around us.
