The progressive and idealistic left will never admit that they are wrong. That’s because, possessed with a sense of mission and unshakable righteousness, they will always believe that they are right. No matter the murder in America last week of a family man by a reputed, self-styled anti-fascist, and no matter the mostly calm and dignified conduct of those at the Unite the Kingdom march in London on Saturday, they will always smear and demonise those of a conservative persuasion with hysterical, slanderous words.
By all accounts, despite the 25 arrests made from a crowd of up to 150,000, it was a mostly civilised and peaceful affair. Perhaps the most eloquent testimony came from someone who has become one of the most honest observers and commentators on the state of multi-ethnic Britain today, Trevor Phillips. As he told viewers of Sky News on his Sunday morning show:
The most alarming aspect of the event was just how normal the vast majority of the marchers were. I spent an hour or two amongst them and my own impression was that they were mostly the sort of people you’d meet in a country pub, or in half time queue for the loo at football or at a concert. There was a sprinkling of black and brown faces, and the event was brought to a close by a Gospel group singing Jerusalem.
Yet no matter the reality of the rally, still the progressive and far left resort to demeaning cliches and preposterous slurs. ‘It’s very important to stand up to fascism’, pronounced Diane Abbott on Saturday. ‘These are racist demonstrations.’ John McDonnell added the next day: ‘Yesterday in London was a wake up call. Progressives in all our political parties… need urgently to start talking together about the campaign needed to tackle the rise of the far right’.
For added theatricality and fearmongering, and with a dose of old-fashioned left-wing snobbery, the journalist Paul Mason opined from the ground: ‘The far right rally in London has attracted large numbers of football types, many already on their third can of lager. There is a heavy police presence, but with my long experience of fascist public order situations I am 100 per cent certain this will kick off.’ And of course there was the predictable presence of the sloganeering ‘anti-fascist’ protesters from Stand Up To Racism, reciting from their ‘stop the far right’ hymn book.
You’d think seasoned politicians, in the immediate wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, an act that has had unexpected reverberations in this country – and indeed a rousing resonance among conservatives – would have refrained from employing such inflammatory, alarmist language. It’s this constant drip of demagogical, Manichean politics and absolutist rhetoric that has landed America in such a precipitous position today.
But this is typical of the idealistic left. You seldom hear secular conservatives – as opposed to actual fascists, who are of the same idealistic, revolutionary and utopian cast as Marxists and other visionaries detached from the real world – denouncing their opponents as evil or even unworthy of life, as was a widespread, gleeful, ghoulish response among hyper-progressives after Kirk’s slaying. Conservatives accept that this world is imperfect and that man is imperfectible. Dividing all of fallen mankind into good and evil makes no sense to them.
Conservatives don’t believe that the end justifies the means – a central tenet of idealists who don’t respect individuals and who are prone instead to view people as parts of a whole that can be shaped and moulded. This, combined with a sense of righteousness that can’t be gainsaid, is why they feel little compunction in resorting to violence and thuggery, as has been the norm among masked Antifa campaigners in the US for years, or to murder, such as in the case of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing an executive health boss in New York last year, a murder that garnered so much popular support among America’s youth who portrayed him as a modern-day Robin Hood.
Many have been surprised by an ostensible paradox evident in recent years, of a belligerent, bullying and intolerant progressive left who simultaneously declare that they are merely being caring and want to ‘be kind’ (a paradox most glaring among the radical trans movement). But this behaviour is the logical outcome of a leftist mindset, one that grows ever-more extreme as it becomes further degraded by the dehumanising effects of social media, and a mindset that nurtures the belief any uncivilised behaviour or loose, unreasonable and bellicose insults can be justified as long as it’s for a good cause.
This is why no matter how people behaved on Saturday, and no matter how similarly un-fascist they deport themselves in the future, they will always be dehumanised as ‘fascists’ by those with an unshakable belief that they have righteousness on their side.
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