“Black lives matter.” Had someone said this to you 10 years ago, you would have felt genuine concern for the chap’s mental health.
What a stupid thing to say. Of course they do. And grass is green, ice is cold and water is wet. Why state the bleeding obvious? What do you expect me to reply, that black lives don’t matter? Any human life is invaluable and inviolable. Surely that goes without saying?
However, this statement would today elicit a different reaction because connotation has triumphed over denotation. Whoever utters that phrase now means something other than what he says.
Chances are that same chap has never uttered a word of protest when some ten million black lives have been lost in assorted Central African genocides over the past few decades. The deadliest massacres have been perpetrated in the Congo, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda – and one is currently under way in Sudan. Yet not a peep from any ‘community leaders’ and their rent-a-mob flock.
However, in 2020 thousands of rioters slashed and burned their way through American cities when a drug-addled criminal, George Floyd, was accidentally killed by a white policeman trying to arrest him. And no riots break out in America when thousands of blacks are killed every year by other blacks.
In other words, black lives don’t really matter in any absolute sense. They only begin to matter when taken by whites, especially those popularly seen as lackeys to the establishment. Thus concern for black lives is only a smokescreen laid to conceal the real meaning underneath.
Or look at net zero, another issue that excites certain swaths of public opinion. I’ve seen chaps with degrees from venerable universities sputter spittle over the issue. Yet there is not a shred of evidence supporting the underlying popular myth of global warming.
Any disinterested climatologist will tell you that 1) CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere, and the anthropogenic part of it is a trace gas within a trace gas, 2) the Earth goes through regular cycles of warming and cooling, while for 85 per cent of its lifetime the temperatures were higher than they are now, 3) the cycles are mostly caused by solar, volcanic and marine activity, with anthropogenic CO2 playing a role so negligible that it can be safely disregarded.
And so on ad infinitum, pile upon pile of scientific data. But no rational arguments will ever make a dent in the resolve of those who are prepared to destroy Western economies for the sake of a scientific fallacy.
One can respond rationally only to the face value of a statement, not to the sub-cortical animus behind it. Yet this subtext is all that matters. Saving ‘our planet’ is another puff of the same smokescreen laid to hide some nefarious designs taking shape behind it.
If you need any more examples, take your pick. Any cause cherished by our vociferous classes will do, such as the pro-Hamas campaign gathering momentum throughout the West, especially on campuses and in major cities.
You can argue until the sacred cows come home that this whole issue is ridiculous. After all, millions of people became displaced after the Second World War, including those hundreds of thousands of Jews who built the State of Israel. Tens of millions of refugees have been forced to migrate since, mostly from the downmarket parts of the world.
Yet the Palestinian Arabs, those who refused to live in Israel, are the only group still claiming refugee status decades later.
Israel, the tiny oasis of the West, is surrounded by populous Muslim states, most of them wealthy and all of them capable of accommodating their co-religionists. They don’t though, do they? Instead they are happy to see that enclave of wild-eyed deracinated Jew-haters drumming up support all over the West.
Every time ‘Palestinians’ commit yet another terrorist atrocity, either in Israel or elsewhere in the West, there’s a gasp of indignation lasting about two days. This is followed by months of incessant riotous protests against the victims trying to defend themselves.
Again, it ought to be obvious to any unbiased observer that the real issue has nothing to do with the protesters’ declared ends. Many of the idiots chanting “From the river to the sea” don’t even know which river and which sea. Their mouths may be screaming “Free Palestine”, but an unrelated message thunders in their viscera.
More examples? Thought you’d never ask. This one is more specifically British than generally Western. It has to do with the EU, a contrivance that still commands affection within certain tiers of the population, especially those in government, the media and, again, on campuses.
Spearheaded by Starmer’s cabinet, they are trying to override the greatest democratic mandate in British history and push the country back into the EU by stealth. Again, what’s so special about a single European state that’s worth sacrificing Britain’s sovereignty for?
Economy? But Britain on her own is doing better than most EU members, even though the full benefits of economic independence have been squandered by a succession of our awful governments.
Defence? One of the most pernicious arguments is that Britain should join forces with the EU to resist Russian aggression. Yet we already have one military bloc, NATO, to which both Britain and all EU countries, other than Austria, Ireland, Malta and Cyprus, belong. It has its structure, lines of communication, allocation of resources, well-rehearsed procedures.
Granted, the US is at the hub of that ganglion and lately she has been quite fickle. Still, it’s easier to refashion some of the systems within the old and trusted bloc than to create a new one, which may or may not prove viable.
Yet our membership in this superfluous concoction will entail many concessions to EU laws and regulations. So many that one is tempted to think this is the real purpose of membership, another desideratum covered up by a billowing smokescreen.
It’s impossible to put forth a sensible argument in the hope of persuading anyone to abandon all those silly notions. For one can argue only against arguments, not the subcutaneous animus lurking underneath.
All those slogans may be inscribed on the flags of modernity, but carrying them into battle are people who don’t care about the face value of any slogans. They care only about their own hatred of our whole civilisation – not just of what it has become but of what it has always been over the past two millennia. None of it deserves to survive, as far as they are concerned.
They’ll happily expunge millions of lives, black, white, yellow or polka dot, as long as the object of their loathing is destroyed too.
They’ll dance on the ruins of every Western economy destroyed not by CO2 but by that net zero madness, provided the ‘capitalism’ they detest is buried under the rubble.
They’ll champion the Palestinian cause and then abandon it sharpish, once the only oasis of Western civility in the Middle East has been wiped off the map.
They’ll drag Britain back into the EU not because they think Britain will be better off, but because the great British institutions lovingly nurtured over centuries will bite the dust as a result.
Such is the order of the ongoing battle, and if we continue to attack the giant slogans everyone can see and hear, we’ll only be charging meaningless windmills. Our enemy isn’t the smokescreen, but the militant malcontents who hate everything we love.
P.S. Both world markets and US courts abhor Trump’s tariffs. Yesterday the latter ruled them illegal, while the former responded to the ruling with an exuberant surge.
Displaying a touching concern for democracy, the White House appealed the decision, saying, or rather screaming, that “unelected judges” have no right to curb Trump’s attempts to alleviate what he calls a “national emergency”.
I have a solution. If Trump refuses to recognise any other than an electoral mandate, he should put the tariffs to congressional vote, as the US Constitution demands. If the two Houses vote in favour of the tariffs, that’s it, job done. Yet if they vote against, it may be difficult to argue that they aren’t elected either.