Taking a knee to the destroyers of worlds

By Melanie Phillips, JUNE 10, 2020

Over the years, I have repeatedly warned in these columns that the refusal of the political establishment to defend the integrity of the western nation and its culture has opened the way for noxious forces to occupy the vacuum.

We’ve seen this in both the spread through the west of jihadi Islam and the rise across Europe of political parties and groups with racist or fascist backgrounds and antecedents.

In the current convulsions triggered by the violent death of George Floyd in American police custody, this baleful development has reached a crisis point.

As The Times reports today, thuggish groups across the country have begun organising to “protect” monuments and war memorials after statues of Winston Churchill and Queen Victoria were defaced, the Cenotaph in London attacked and other statues, including the one of Sir Francis Drake in Plymouth, vandalised.

This isn’t remotely surprising. The establishment is effectively standing back from, or even condoning or actively assisting, a sustained and organised onslaught which is taking place against not just a number of stone images but a culture’s historic memory.

The stage is therefore set for a confrontation in which violent thugs from the right pitch themselves against violent thugs from the left – with the political establishment having fled the cultural battleground in order to cower, wringing its hands, at a distance.

Following the toppling and dumping in Bristol harbour of the statue of slave trader and philanthropist Edward Colston, an act of vandalism and criminal damage with which the area’s police superintendent sympathised and about which he said the police were right to do nothing, an activist group called “Topple the Racists” has drawn up a list of about 60 memorials associated with slavery or colonialism which it wants destroyed. Falling meekly or even enthusiastically into line, 130 local councils run by the Labour party are to consider which ones they think should be removed on the grounds of “inappropriateness”.

In 2001 in Afghanistan, the Taliban pulled down ancient statues including the world’s tallest standing Buddhas. This was greeted with utter horror in the west. It rightly described the outrage as a crime against historical memory, an attempt to destroy a culture by erasing the evidence of its history and replacing that culture by a fanatical dogma that brooked no challenge.

Yet now the British establishment is kow-towing to a movement which is behaving like the Taliban, pulling down statues and other artefacts in order to erase aspects of British history as the product of a rotten society that’s institutionally racist and so must be supplanted by another.

The death of Floyd, under the the knee of a police officer who pressed down on his neck for almost nine minutes, was shocking and it’s right that this officer and three others involved in this death are being brought to justice.

And of course there’s racial prejudice in Britain. But so there is in every single society, in the developing world as well as in the west. Slavery was not invented by the west but has been practised across the world. It was the British and Americans who, having participated in it, eventually abolished it in their societies, while it remains practised in parts of the developing world even today.

The smear that the west is institutionally racist is designed to both facilitate and obscure the real agenda of overturning capitalist society because it is white and therefore deemed intrinsically evil – which of course is itself a racist agenda.

Yet instead of resisting this ignorant and wicked movement, its appeasers have been literally abasing themselves before the mob.

In the past, violent anti-white racism was represented by the black power movement. Despite the support of certain posturing celebrities, black power activists were generally perceived as dangerous, violent, far-left troublemakers. It would have been unthinkable for mainstream British politicians, let alone the police, to give the clenched fist black power salute. That would have been regarded as treasonous insurrection.

Yet an updated version of this is precisely what’s been happening in Britain. The new Labour Party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, and his deputy, Angela Rayner, released a picture of themselves supporting Black Lives Matter, the activist group behind many of these demonstrations, by “taking the knee”, the gesture promoted by certain black American footballers to show their contempt for white society and America.

In similar fashion, no less than the chief constable of Kent “took the knee” along with numerous other police officers – some as the direct result of mass bullying. At Oriel college, Oxford, which for years has been resisting a campaign to remove its statue of Cecil Rhodes, demonstrators renewing their campaign chanted “Kneel, kneel, kneel” – and a police officer duly sank down on one knee.

These people have all been literally kneeling down in submission to an ideology which is anti-white and anti-west – and at the direction of Black Lives Matter, a racist, anti-white, anti-west violent revolutionary movement whose aim is the overthrow of white western society.

These images of the British police symbolically capitulating to the erasure of British history and the defamation of the west have furnished sickening evidence that many of those tasked with protecting society have surrendered instead to cultural terrorism.

Meanwhile, anyone who opposes this dogma of black victimology and points out the defamatory lies at its core will be called a racist and their livelihood placed in jeopardy.

In America, people are losing their jobs for even questioning any of this. The prominent footballer Drew Brees, who despite publicly opposing racism also opposed taking a knee during the playing of the national anthem on the grounds that he would “never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag of the United States of America”, was forced to apologise in a display of ritual humiliation.

On Twitter, the malevolent, the moronic and the mentally unhinged are out in force similarly seeking to intimidate, smear and ruin any who stand up to this cultural totalitarianism.

And then there’s the deeply sinister Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm set up by London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, to consider the appropriateness of the capitals’ statues, murals, street names and other memorials.

Channelling Mao, the Taleban and the French revolutionary terror, Mayor Khan can surely leave no-one in any doubt that this committee will reduce diversity by aiming selectively to erase those bits of British history of which it disapproves. In Khan’s words: “…our statues, road names and public spaces reflect a bygone era. It is an uncomfortable truth that our nation and city owes a large part of its wealth to its role in the slave trade…”

So the Mayor of London now stands revealed as someone who hates his nation. For if it was indeed created, as he so misleadingly claims, by a great evil then how can it be anything other than evil itself? Feeling at last the wind in his sails supplied by the rage and contempt of the mob on the streets, he intends to abolish the nation’s birthright to the evidence of its own past and construct its future in the image he will determine.

So will this commission erase memorials to all historic British figures with an obnoxious side to their achievements? Will its destroy the statues of the Labour politicians Keir Hardie or Ernest Bevin, or Karl Marx, who were all antisemites?

Or the playwright George Bernard Shaw who promoted eugenics? Or the parliamentary titan Oliver Cromwell who massacred the Irish? Or Britain’s greatest Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone, whose family, like so many prominent people in previous, very different era was involved in slavery?

That last question already has an answer. Liverpool university has agreed yesterday to rename its Gladstone Hall, which houses student accommodation. Bim Afolami, the Tory MP for Hitchin and Harpenden, tweeted in response: “This is all going completely nuts. When will this stop??”

When indeed. As George Orwell wrote in 1984 about a state under totalitarian tyranny: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

Or as the future US president Ronald Reagan said even more pertinently in 1975: ‘If fascism ever comes to America, it will come in the name of liberalism”.

Well, here it is, on both sides of the pond.

Bad things happen not just because bad people do them but because otherwise decent people lack the courage to stop them; or because they indulge in fantasies that the agenda is basically good but has been “hijacked” by a few thugs; or that they agree with the ends but purse their lips at the violent means; or because of a myriad other excuses that the spineless and the misguided always provide for “taking a knee” to the destroyers of worlds.