I just read a piece by Scott McConnell in the American Conservative, a magazine we co-founded 18 years ago. He writes about how the victims of communism are less commemorated than those of fascism. The death toll under communism was 100 million (see the Black Book of Communism). And as the mass murders continued, your Cambridge Joseph Needhams and his fellow apologists insisted that Maoism represented mankind’s best hope.
Maoism never received the moral obloquy that Nazism did. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which documents the horrific enormity of the Nazi project, has had 40 million visitors since 1993; the victims of communism are marked by a ten-foot statue in a tiny park near Union Station, tended by private donations. While Bernie Sanders praised the Bolsheviks and came close to being president, that motley crew — intellectuals and newspapers such as the New York Times — knowingly covered up the truth until they no longer could.
Now America itself is being challenged — as is Britain — by Orwellian methods of truth reversal. A nation is made up of social groups with a powerful sense of solidarity. It has sacred borders, a sense of shared history, a distinct culture and a common language. The nation, needless to say, precedes the identity of a single individual. Not so says the New York Times. Everything that Uncle Sam has achieved has been based on slavery. (A recent catty profile of The Spectator by a couple of NY Times clowns failed to mention some of our best writers of recent times such as Auberon Waugh or Paul Johnson.)
Never mind. While America and Britain are under attack by anarchists and thugs, media pimps and opportunistic politicians are excusing the mobs. Worse, the media is in cahoots with those who say that words are a form of violence that has to be regulated. Who would have thought it would come to this? The First Amendment, our most precious freedom of speech, challenged by smear artists who lust after power and control. In wartime Berlin — unlike the Hollywood depiction of it — Germans bitched to high heaven over the bombing and lack of food, as did the Russians during Stalin’s time. But those who refuse to take the knee nowadays risk seeing their career fly out the window. Is this what we fought the wars for? To be unable to say out loud what we believe? To be silenced by unelected street thugs, dandruff-covered academics and spittle-flecked media leftists? (And Meghan Markle and Prince Harry?)
Big foundations, tech behemoths, media giants, prestigious universities and embedded elites are united in transforming a nation. I agree with Sohrab Ahmari’s piece last week in these here pages which said that what is taking place is not a revolution but a reactionary putsch — a counter-revolution of the neoliberal classes against Trump. Except that it had begun before he came to power when political correctness became the prevailing orthodoxy among the elites. PC became the new means by which the left sought to dominate culture once the Bolshies had gone down the drain in 1990.
Then, when social networks became the goût du jour, fear, hate, disinformation, threats and vengeance were meted out in order to ruin the lives of those who were not sufficiently PC. Lefty elites were sitting pretty, even after the chaos and bloodshed of Uncle Sam’s venture into Iraq. The neocons who were behind the Iraq disaster managed to avoid responsibility by adhering to a strictly PC line.
And as I write the elites are getting away with murder all over again. ‘We don’t want white people,’ screams a Black Lives Matter leader by the name of Hawk Newsome, speaking in the Bronx to the New York Post. ‘If this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it,’ he told Fox News. This was ignored by the Times, a paper that also ignored the 25 per cent rise in murders and 205 shootings last weekend in New York alone. In response Mayor de Blasio cuts the police budget by a billion and a half to appease the mob. Mostly white thugs scream, spit and insult the police in downtown New York while TV networks give them the publicity they crave.
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