What's Left?

It’s 2017 but the prowling malcontents of the fantastically diverse and disparate bundles of hypocrisy and hatred are still banging on about what happened in 2016. The feminists are teaming up with apologists for the religion of women second, the vegans are as one with the carnivore and wee Owen Jones will go to any lengths to remain as relevant as he ever was. There is no interview from which he is not prepared to stamp out at a moment’s notice over the slenderest imagined slight. These days I can’t think of Owen without picturing him being breast-fed by Polly Toynbee, after one of his little episodes.

What’s got them so wound up? Not a peep when Anjem Choudary’s goons declared death to the West. No great outcry when despots and dictators have been entertained by the British state in all its pomp. Faced with the horrific and public crimes of islamic extremism they even blamed it on climate change, rather than confront the brutal truth. Actual genocides brought about by left-wing ideologues have been excused, so what could have possibly happened for them to now unleash their fury? They don’t like Donald Trump.

Scratch that. They hate Donald Trump. They hate him in a way so vicious an ISIS jihadi would be left queasy. The left say, repeatedly, that the right will deny basic human rights, yet there is no evidence that any such thing has happened under Tory or Republican governments. Yes, in the UK governments have placed restrictions on things such as wildcat strikes and on a handful of troublemakers being able to cripple an entire industry by calling out the workers at the drop of a hat and a dozen votes. But that’s the job of government – to protect its citizens from the harm such selfish actions can cause; it’s hardly a hate crime.

And in order to better provide for those in need, access to easy welfare has been tightened and the excesses of socialism curbed where possible, with the general approval of those who pay for it all. But the confused and uneasy bedfellows of the anti-Trumpers scream and ululate whenever a vaguely right-wing politico even opens his mouth. And when Donald Trump doesn’t enact a total muslim ban, which he perhaps should do, but instead puts Obama’s watch list to use, they go apoplectic. How... DARE he? In their head he is personally barbecuing brown babies and putting their parents to the sword. He is, in their fevered imagination, committing bloody atrocities with the complicity of the ‘literal Nazis’ of the right wing press.

But look at the left hand side of the balance sheet. Whenever Labour get into power – and thankfully, that’s the only form of left we’ll ever see in the big chair this side of the revolution they keep promising – they immediately set out to spend, spend, spend and stir up the hornet’s nest of division. They set taxpayers against everybody else and force misery on every sector of society dependent on the state’s intervention. Schools, healthcare, law and order, all are bent out of shape and rendered unfit for purpose under the stewardship of the left. They can’t stand the idea that they have any culpability but it’s always the right who have to wrest the nation’s consciousness back from the embrace of socialist Soma and get them back out to work again.

Elsewhere left wing, big state administrations have brought disaster, prosecuting policies which have generated poverty and misery for millions. But that is ignored; here in the still relatively free west the left rally their assembly of misanthropes with all their bigotries into a unified hate fest directed at one brash man. They will deny him a platform. They will shout him down. They will disrupt others in order to pursue their agenda. They will encourage violence and civil unrest – all freedoms they enjoy because bigger men, stronger men, proud, patriotic men fought for their right to do so. The sheer hypocrisy of the mob would be staggering, were it not in our faces every day.

In the name of multiculturalism and in the face of its failure they embrace every form of diversity except diversity of thought. And as for the supposed hatred of the right, let people be judged by their actions, not by the fevered imaginations of a bunch of stupid, cosseted children.

Kumbaya

It’s a phenomenon I have been observing for some years now, the propensity of a good and growing number of the population of this sceptred isle to seize upon victimhood, rally round a cause – any cause will do – then convince themselves of the veracity of their intelligence, as opposed to the clear evidence of their own eyes. The Tory Party is secretly engaged in a war against the little people, selling off parcels of the country’s infrastructure to private enterprise for the reward of holidaying on Branson’s island, or partying on some billionaire’s private jet. They are the conductors and guards on the gravy train, packing in ever more paying passengers and stealing their luggage. Yes, Tories will do anything for money and they, literally, skewer babies for sport. We know this because people like Owen Jones tell us it is so.

Did you ever tell ghost stories round a campfire? If you didn’t you missed out on a vital developmental experience in understanding the separation of fact from fiction. A ring of glowing faces lit by firelight and beyond them, the impenetrable dark. Open-mouthed and barely breathing you listen to the tale-teller, seeing nothing beyond your closed circle of sameness; all part of the same Scout troop, identi-kit proto humans. The narrator intones the sacred passages, passed from teller to teller over the years, until you get to the part about the lunatic escaped from the asylum and in your mind you all see the severed head as it is gently tapped on the roof of the courting couple’s car.

But then, in a moment of climactic horror, your heart leaps into your mouth as the assistant scoutmaster leaps into the circle with a blood curdling scream. The jolt both intensifies the horror then brings relief as adrenalin floods then leaves your system. It was just a story, no matter how much you were bound up in it; just a story. The bogey man has left the scene and normal life resumes, the only bit of fiction left, a vestigial fear to instil the occasional blurred nightmare.

But imagine if you weren’t in a story. Imagine if your town changed its character in a single generation and the incomers began to oppress and threaten its citizens. Imagine if the traffic was stopped by people reciting the memorised but dimly understood passages from an ancient manual of supremacy while sticking their arses in the air. Imagine the early morning peace being shattered by the garbled and distorted wailing from tinny loudspeakers. And imagine areas that are de facto off limits to whites, women and homosexuals, enforced by the threat of violence. See then, the leering faces of ugly old men in beards appearing all over your television channels to tell us that islam intends to dominate and then subjugate the country. Imagine all that but not being able to wake up, because it's not a story, it's not a dream, it's real.

If you were to sit around Owen Jones’ righteous campfire you wouldn’t see any of that. As they told each other stories of their goodness and light – the true fictions of today – you could look in but they couldn’t see out. You watch as they enact their own rituals, each signalling to one another until this virtuosity comes full circle. Trapped in this self-affirming cycle, this ‘universe of me’, they invent their own demons, secure in the knowledge that as long as they stay in the bubble they can believe.

But there’s good news for the rest of us, awake in the real world. While the counter-Trump demonstrators are self-flagellating in the cold winter rain today they might like to reflect that decades after the ban-the-bomb marches we still have the bomb. Following the never-ending referendum rejection protests the UK is still on course to leave the European Union. And tomorrow morning Donald Trump will still be the most powerful man on earth... 

Show, don't tell...

There is an adage in screenwriting that is as easy to say as it is hard to do; show, don’t tell. Many a budding scriptwriter has found it impossible to avoid jarring exposition in their dialogue: “Oh hey, Marjorie, who was that you were talking to just now?” Marjorie replies “That was my brother. He’s just returned from an expedition in Borneo, where he contracted malaria...” As you reach for the remote control any interest in the story has faded away; the audience has to do its part and having the plot handed over on a plate is of little use to anybody other than teenagers and devotees of the one-dimensional Fast and Furious franchise. What you don’t have to work for, at least a little, is often worthless.

Shouting about your ‘rights’ and demanding that your first-world grievances be heard isn’t showing, it is telling, only louder. And it’s not very endearing. At the #WomensMarch in Washington Madonna declared (screeched would be more appropriate) a ‘revolution of love’ and then went on to say “Fuck you!” to all the people whose cooperation the women’s movements will need in order to get anywhere, namely men. Even while appropriating and monopolising loving and caring as the exclusive preserve of womenkind she was encouraging the sisters to disrupt, disobey and disavow the democratic process.

So, a mixed message then? It seemed so. For one thing, what was it they were really marching about? Women in the first world already have pretty much all the rights that are going. Granted, the abortion thing is a difficulty in the US but you have religion to blame for that. Cure yourselves of those irrational beliefs and you’re sorted, to which end eliminating islamic extremism would rather seem like a bloody good idea. Oh, but no, some of you donned impromptu hijabs to show how very little you understand about the modern feminism you claim to espouse.

But really, what is their beef? As Katie Hopkins wrote: “... a shared sense of victimhood is not sufficient to make change happen. And at its most fundamental the unifying cause for these collected individuals is that they are not men.” And that really did seem to be all there was to it, an opportunity to utter some primal screams, dress up as vaginas and generally make the place untidy; which is a tad ironic, when you think of it. As for those glass ceilings, they’re not going to smash themselves and there’s no point in expecting the men to do it for you. But we still don’t know what they were really protesting about, or why.

The almost entirely left-leaning fanatics seemed to be incandescent with rage about inequality and division and every other imaginary slight they could shoehorn into the proceedings. But would they have been protesting if all the things they demand were already in place? Surely if the ill-defined equality they seek, if they were already safe and secure, there would be no mob offensive. Surely, if after eight years of the Lord God Obama all their prayers had been heard and answered, they would be content? Show, don’t tell, ladies; who really let you down?

Wall of vaginas? Or queue of cunts?

For all the rhetoric, when you look beyond the hotch-potch of hypocrisy and imagined hurt what you see is a mob that appears to be protesting about the impotence of their own anger. They were showing that, no matter what, they will demand more and if they ever get their hands on all that is tangible, they will further demand the nebulous. Whatever they imagined they were telling us, the message was lost as we just saw a parade of angry, mostly privileged women protesting for the sake of protesting. Never mind bringing down Trump, the only thing destroyed here is their own credibility.