See what you’ve done?

The permissive society exploded into the world’s consciousness in the swinging sixties. Anything goes. Make love, not war. Charles Manson. Okay, scratch that last, but nevertheless the great ills of the modern world have their roots in the way the world changed after the middle of the twentieth century. The wars to end all the wars - I, II, Korea, Vietnam, Cold – ended, and we entered the world of mass communication, the rise and rise of the consumer generations, nebulous but unrealisable notions of equality and something called social justice.

There came about a refusal to judge people for their actions; people were products of their circumstance only the class-cursed establishment would think punishment was just. Post-modernism challenged objective reality, morality became relative and even the very nature of truth was brought into question. If stabbing and raping and stealing and vandalism are a part of your cultural inclinations, who are we to say what’s right or wrong? After all, everything bad in the world is because of western imperialism. Please, formerly oppressed people, come here, enlighten us, have our stuff.

The counter-cultural revolutionaries said stick it to ‘the man’. The educators threw away generations of proven methods and adopted ideologies instead. And who says the shiny-faced, happy, well-fed nuclear family is the right model for humanity; why shouldn’t a child have two daddies, three... if the daddies want it that way? Then, possibly the greatest shackle of all, along came the human rights movement; a movement so wedded to the principles it invents on an almost daily basis that it will brook no dissent in its quest for ‘fairness’ and consider no absurdity invalid.

And where did we end up? Divided. Not into many generally tolerant little tribes, but into two massive blocs loosely described as left and the rest. If you are not of the left you are far-right, by their definition and your only purpose is to be the Eloi, to provide sustenance on which the Morlocks gorge. The majority of ordinary people go about their business, frustrated by but shrugging off the weird excesses of the latest cause célèbre. Meanwhile soviet-style show trials are held on television and across social media.

But the accused isn’t judged by a judge, instead by a self-selected international jury of partisans schooled in the mantras of ‘progressive’ dogma. Now we judge the judge himself – and of course we should – but the court of leftist opinion holds Judge Kavanaugh to be guilty until proved innocent. Better yet that he should be allowed no protestation of innocence because the new orthodoxy of victimhood decrees that the accuser (provided they are the right type of victim) must always be believed, feted even, and held above the normal standards of evidence.

Glorious socialism!

All of this hasn’t just happened; it is not a phenomenon conjured up from nothing. This now regular debacle of ludicrous moral grandstanding is the almost inevitable outcome of postmodern thought. The cultural Marxism which pervaded universities in the 1970s has trickled down into schools and the wolves in sheep’s clothing have occupied positions of power in western governments. The feedback loop created means that the tyranny of many minorities now holds sway over those who can legitimately be called normal.

But it has gone too far. The leftists have been tolerated, like over-indulged children. It’s time to put the toys away and they really don’t like it. Brexit, Trump, AfD, Sebastian Kurz, the Five Star movement are not the extremists the left insist on portraying them as, but the ordinary working people pushing back against the follies of youthful fancy given too much credence. It is not too much to call them spoilt, because this is what they are and this is what they have done. 

Poison

I have long suspected that the trope ‘a glass of red wine a night is good for you’ was a product of the vintners’ public relations operation, but it didn’t exactly come as a total surprise to learn that the gubmint's Chief Medical Officer now says there is no safe level of imbibition of a deadly, if socially acceptable, poison. Cue the outrage. What, you have to say, you lied to us all those years? And as you say it you must adopt a posture of indignant incredulity, as if you are entitled by some natural law – human right, if you will – never to be misled.

Millions of mostly muslim immigrants are dangerous, or they aren’t, depending on what agenda you wish to pursue. And the moon is made of cheese, the earth is flat and your chances of winning that roll-over lottery were less than your chances of dating a supermodel, apparently. Actually, all most men need to date a supermodel is to win the lottery, or at the very least their chances of doing so are increased immeasurably. The non-sequitur as argument is rife and probably always has been; a popular Owen Jones question used to be “So, the immigrants take your jobs, or they live on benefits... which is it?” He used to trot this conundrum out as regularly as clockwork, as if it killed the debate and won the day.

Of course the answer is both, either or neither, but any answer is an unhappy one if you are the homeless ex-squaddie watching refugees being housed while your potential wages are too low to afford rent and you can’t access benefits from the system you’ve paid into without an actual address. Is it the immigrants’ fault? Almost certainly not. Does the system appear to be skewed in their favour and against yours? Absolutely. Is this a fair appraisal? It depends. It depends whose over-zealous hands hold the facts and how they choose to air them.

The entire leftist cultural attack on the greater majority of the population relies heavily on impressing a sense of guilt on their otherwise uneventful and fairly blameless existence. You get up in the morning, go out to work, feed your family and bring up your kids to follow in your footsteps and then one day it turns out you are an over-privileged, xenophobic little Englander with hatred in your soul for anybody not like you. You are a far right, racist, sexist, islamophobe because seeing muslims behead non- muslims prompts you to question whether we should be more careful who we allow into the UK.

“All refugees are not terrorists” does not mean that some refugees are not terrorists. And even one terrorist can terrorise, can kill, a lot of innocent people. The nonsense argument that more Americans die at the hands of white, gun-toting Americans is utterly irrelevant to the discussion of the sagacity of importing sworn adversaries with a divine mission to slaughter the infidel. The world over, you are statistically more likely to suffer harm at the hands of people you know than otherwise and often for good – or at least comprehensible - reasons. Why would you deliberately compound your chances of coming to harm by adding a barbarous ideology to the risk cocktail?

Yes, there is hatred and fear and yes there is even an element of ‘hate speech’ but the cultural Marxists have time on their hands, a misguided missile of an agenda and a far larger PR machine to mobilise pop-up protest and suppress dissent by labelling normal as Nazi. Nobody with an ounce of normality could look on Europe’s self-inflicted migrant invasion and not feel trepidation and a sense of anger and helplessness, but calling that reaction xenophobic is to wantonly miss the point for unhelpful political purposes.

Poison... but whose is it?

But there is an answer. Next time you hear a lazy attack on your natural concerns, sticking an unfriendly label on your sensible objections, or shouting you down with spurious statistics, let them have their say. Let them rant and rave and foam and froth and hold their protest placards up aloft. Let them state their case whereby they turn the aggressors into saints and the victims into criminals. And when they’ve exhausted their repertoire of well-rehearsed but ultimately meaningless string of unconnected slogans, calmly look them in the eye and ask, “Or is that just bollocks?”