Red or brown is no choice at all

Yesterday in London the English went in Dutch. Just as the BLM mob was getting in full swing, another mob arrived, this one made up of Tommy Robinson’s lookalikes.

The two mobs, the Marxists and the yobs, fought each other and, when the police tried to pull them apart, both mobs fought the police. That proved that it’s violence, not silence, that’s violence.

The Marxists were chanting “BLM”, which still sounds like some kind of sandwich to me. The yobs were screaming “In-ger-land”, a battle cry normally heard in the football terraces, where it tends to be accompanied by “if it wasn’t for Ingerland, you’d all be krauts” and “the ref is a wanker”.

At least, unlike a concurrent event happening in Paris’s Place de la République, no anti-Semitic slogans were heard, yet. There the noble campaigners against racism were screaming, inter alia, “sales juifs”. Clearly, their notion of racial solidarity involves blacks, whites and Muslims closing ranks and marching off together to kill Jews.

Commenting on the melee in central London, the papers reserved their most scathing opprobrium for the Tommy Robinson mob, whose patriotic slogans didn’t go down as well as those of the other lot.

Headlines featuring words like ‘racists’, ‘extremists’ and ‘right-wing thugs’ are screaming off newspaper pages, whereas one has to read the body text to find laments that those fighting against white privilege sometimes go too far, although their cause is just.

‘White privilege’ is a buzz phrase that keeps on buzzing. This is yet another example of the semantic larceny of modernity. The hacks don’t know, or at least pretend they don’t know, the difference between privilege and advantage.

Yet the distinction is vital. Advantage is a confluence of favourable factors, while privilege is advantage institutionalised.

Thus a white youngster born to two well-to-do university graduates and growing up surrounded by good books undoubtedly has an advantage over a black youngster born to a single mother and growing up in a council estate surrounded by crushed beer cans and discarded syringes.

But the former has no privileges compared to the latter. They both can rise to the same position in society, although this particular black chap will have a steeper hill to climb.

Now, if white privilege indeed existed, which it doesn’t, trying to get rid of it would be perfectly just. However, trying to get rid of white advantages is tantamount to a Marxist revolution, typologically close to those in Russia, China or Cambodia.

That whites do enjoy some advantages over blacks in most countries is a demonstrable fact. However, lamentable though this may be to some, doing something about it would involve overturning our whole civilisation, what’s left of it. That is precisely what the BLM mob is after, egged on by the likes of Daniel Finkelstein and other critics of white privilege who ought to know better.

Another pilfered and perverted word is justice, which is routinely modified by the adjective social. Justice means giving people their due. Again, in most countries the whites enjoy higher incomes than the blacks. That would only by unjust if the blacks were blocked from remunerative professions, which isn’t the case anywhere in the West. The disparity of incomes may be unfair, but it’s certainly not unjust.

Alas, such nuances are lost not only on the baying BLM mob, but also on its Oxbridge-educated inciters. And anyone who talks about white privilege is in effect inciting riots.

We are in deep trouble, but the trouble becomes abysmal if the only counterforce to the Marxists is provided not by the state and its law enforcement extension, but by jingoistic, quasi-fascist thugs.

Now, historical parallels vindicate Euclid by never quite converging. Hence one has to be careful drawing them. However, given due care and attention, some events of the past do indeed elucidate the present.

In this case, a parallel with the Weimar Republic seems to defy Euclid and vindicate Lobachevsky by getting very close to our time. There the order of battle involved the red mob on one side and the brown mob on the other. Conservatives, who despised both extremes, were silenced, crushed between two jaws of the same vice.

(Their cri de coeur was at its most piercing in the book Diary of a Man in Despair, by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen. Having written his moving account, that conservative aristocrat was murdered by the Nazis in February, 1945.)

Many decent, if not excessively bright, Germans became either communists or Nazis because they felt that was the only choice on the table. The socialist government was impotent, while the predominantly conservative industrialists pinched their nostrils and sided with the Nazis. At least, unlike the communists, the Nazis weren’t threatening to dispossess them.

Our situation is eerily similar. I for one wouldn’t like to live in a country run by either the BLM lot or their quasi-fascist opposition.

Looking at the two clashing mobs, all I could think of was: “A plague o’ both your houses!” If that’s the only choice we have, it’s too stark by half. Where is a valid, effective conservative opposition? Who will provide it? Certainly not our so-called conservative government.