It starts with a statue.

By Pete North - June 10, 2020

Over the last five years I’ve largely sought to tune out the culture war. It continues to rage but participating in it can be all consuming. I’ve instead dedicated my time to blogging and understanding Brexit. The culture war aspect is not divorced from Brexit but I preferred to focus on the core substance. The problem, though, is you can choose to ignore the culture war but that doesn’t mean it will leave you alone. Sooner or later it’s coming after you and yours.

It starts with a statue. Give them one and they’ll take them all. Give them that and they’ll have a popular comedy series pulled from Netflix. Then they’re banning books, having them withdrawn from sale. If you have an opinion counter to their orthodoxy and you work in academia, the public sector or education, you best keep it buried. Your livelihood and reputation depends on it.

When the left go further to the left they take the media and civil society institutions with them. Just by standing still and minding our own business we all become “far right” and suddenly any pedestrian opinion is beyond the pale. Things you’ve always thought and always expressed become no go zones. Even basic biological truths have somehow come into question.

Whether we realise it or not the left have declared war on us all. It’s the mantra of “you’re with us or against us”. In this instance if you’re not in favour of destroying capitalism or abolishing the police, or erasing our heritage, you’re now a racist or in favour of slavery. This is pernicious bigotry designed to cast neighbours, friends and family as the enemy. This is a far left cultural Blitzkrieg.

Your working class struggle means nothing. You’re an oppressor because you’re white. You’re not a woman, you’re a “person who menstruates”. Your history is offensive and must be erased. Your identity is what we say it is. Your past is what we tell you. Your opinion, unless you’re us, is born of “privilege” thus you have no right to speak. Oh you’re black? And don’t agree with us? You’ve internalised the oppression (they mean Uncle Tom).

Everything the left does is an attack on your rights as a person to subordinate you to their narrative. This isn’t about liberating minorities. This is about controlling what you say and what you think.

You can’t sit this one out sadly. Sooner or later they’re coming for you to negate you, your identity, history and accomplishments. Right now they demand “with us or against us?” Seeking to divide us. If we fight back we’re “far right” and therefore a legitimate target of violence. They have a mass grave with your name on it. Conform or die is always their final ultimatum.

The problem with this well meaning “move the statue to a museum” schtick is that once they’ve taken all of them they’ll come after the museums. It starts with something small like editing a plaque, then they demand certain objects removed because of their potential to “trigger”.

When they realise they have that power they’ll want museums renamed. Won’t be long before they’re demanding the Imperial War Museum changes its name claiming it glorifies the empire and glorifies war. They’ll go after holocaust memorials too. Whatever absurd pretext you can imagine, it doesn’t need to withstand any serious scrutiny because it always comes with an implied threat. It starts with marble and bronze but it ends with flesh and blood.

It strikes me that I have seen this before. I think it was the 80’s, when some people who decided something was offensive. They said if you don’t agree with us then you’re wrong and evil and must be unpersoned and silenced. If memory serves we caved into that too. Though not formally banned, it was withdrawn from sale for the protection of retailers and the mob was seen burning that book in public protests. Labour MP Keith Vaz led a march through Leicester shortly after he was elected in 1989 calling for the book to be banned and the author needed round the clock police protection.

This week I’ve seen a similar strain of zealots on Facebook. They said the statue had to come down and anyone who thinks otherwise is racist and they will cut off any further debate and unperson them if they dare say so. It’s a conformity ultimatum, just like the Islamic fundamentalists who wanted to ban The Satanic Verses.

Of course it’s a bit of a stretch to compare social justice posers with radical jihadists but a little bit of power is a gateway drug. Give them this and they’ll take more. How long before they’re demanding Harry Potter is withdrawn from sale until JK Rowling recants her views on gender reassignment? What will the next social contagion demand of us?

It’s frightening because these mob actions are never rational. The average Islamist grunter in Leicester never read The Satanic Verses and probably had no idea what was in it. But they were told it was offensive. It isn’t about whether it was actually offensive or whether any real harm was done by it, rather it was testing the water to see what they could get away with and whether we would fold. The same was true this week. And we did fold. We surrendered the streets to the feral mob and we rolled over and allowed vandals to trash a public monument.

Every time we fold we are setting a new moral precedent. And there’s no predicting what comes next. It’s entirely arbitrary. This week it’s a statue, next week it could be a brand of ice cream. Once you’ve established that people have a right to impose their will because they’re offended on behalf of someone else, virtually anything is fair game. You might agree that the Colston statue needed to come down but what happens when they come for something you value?

What’s sad about this is the yound minds it claims. When I lived in Bristol I came to know a young man through a friend. He was great lad. I really liked him. Good humoured and gentle. And then he fell in with the Antifa bunch. Let us forego the ridiculousness of building an antifascist movement in Bristol. It’s about as much use as a Cambridgeshire Fens mountain rescue team. Never once did I see aggressive gangs of skinheads patrolling the harbourside looking for darkies to pummel. This kid, though, he had it in his head that he was going to punch a Nazi. Which Nazis though? What qualifies? It’s such an arbitrary thing now. Is it people who want to control immigration, people who want to leave the EU, people who think girls don’t have penises?

What I saw that afternoon worried me. He’d set himself on a path to self-radicalisation. I’ve seen it before in myself but I’ve always had a handle on my own dark side. I think it’s because I’m lazy. Being a violent extremist looks too much like effort. Looking back I wish I’d pulled him up on it but he wasn’t going to listen, especially not to me. You can’t reason a man out of something he was never reasoned into.

Much like Islamist terrorists the profile fits. A lonely angry young man in search of a moral purpose. Unlike the social justice twats, this wasn’t just an Instagram pose. He was all in. I don’t know how that panned out for him and I sincerely hope he grows out of it but there’s a chilling zealotry about these types and if given a channel like Black Lives Matter then it has dangerous potential. There’s no real difference between Islamists, AFA, Antifa and the militant end of Extinction Rebellion. All the same communist ballpark.

The people pushing BLM couldn’t give a tinker’s toss about racism. This is just about destabilising the country in the hope of fomenting revolution. This is where the state can’t afford to cede even an inch to them. I’m all for a liberal and tolerant society but we can’t afford a supine and cowardly government which doesn’t even recognise the threat. That we caved into the mob this week is worrying. If the government won’t defend the country from agitators then voters will look to someone they think will. And that doesn’t end well either.