Those vegans take a good punch

Imagine you take your family for a relaxed lunch at Pizza Express. Then, just as you’re about to tuck into your anchovies-and-pepperoni, a gang of scrofulous youngsters burst in.

They wave pictures of pigs and cows adorned with captions “I want to live”. How do they know, you wonder, that those particular animals aren’t tired of life and just want to end it all? Are the youngsters fluent in pig?

Then, most incongruously, they scream: “It’s not food, it’s violence”. That only deepens your consternation. You’re convinced that your pepperoni is food, no matter what the obviously deranged youngsters claim. A pig might have been turned into pepperoni by a violent method, but that doesn’t make your pizza taste any worse.

Dismay may then give way to fear. You realise your restaurant has been taken over by animal rights activists, who are ideologically twinned with anti-fur gangs that have been known to kill people while saving minks.

How do you know they won’t produce weapons more tangible than pictures? Say, homemade nail bombs? Or bottles of battery acid? The answer is, you don’t. So what will you do?

I suppose that depends on what kind of person you are. Anyway, the situation in question isn’t hypothetical: this is what actually happened in Brighton yesterday.

One of the customers was a big man sporting a shaven head and the kind of feral scowl one often sees these days on the faces of our permanently enraged masses.

He shouted at the cretinous fanatics: “You’re scaring these people, f*** off now.” Yet they showed no intention to comply. One girl, about half his size, confronted the man with courage worthy of a better cause.

At that point Shaven Head punched her in the face, putting a fair amount of pow into the blow. Nice shoulder rotation and decent weight transfer, although he didn’t screw his fist in at impact to add even more wallop.

Still, the cross was decent, and it’s testimony to the benefits of the vegan diet and also to the amount of adrenaline coursing through the girl’s veins that she didn’t go down, nor even took a standing eight count.

The pugnacious man clearly had more punches left in him, but he was restrained by other customers and the restaurant staff. Some customers even tried to reason with the youngsters, which was like trying to talk a rabid dog out of biting you.

Hence they continued their demonstration, this time complete with posters advocating Rose’s Law, designed to create an animal bill of rights. Having had their fun, they walked out, chanting: “What do we want? Animal liberation. When do we want it? Now.”

Anyway, would you have got physical with those fanatics? Would I? Now, my pugnacious days are behind me, and even when they weren’t I was economical with my punches, saving them for special occasions, mainly involving self-defence.

Also, at the risk of sounding unfashionably snobbish, I suspect I’m a more civilised man than Shaved Head. In fact, his face showed few of the benefits accrued by mankind over the past few millennia.

However, I admit I would have been sorely tempted to let my fists do the talking in that situation. I might not have done it, but I would have been tempted. And if the red mist in front of my eyes hadn’t dissipated, I might have yielded to that temptation.

Of course, if police got involved, they’d take the fanatics’ side. After all, I would have acted in a violent manner, while they were only signalling virtue, if perhaps over-enthusiastically.

My objection would have been that they were committing murderous violence against our civilisation, but I’m sure it would have fallen on deaf ears. Such arguments cut no ice with today’s lot, even if they wear blue uniforms.

The loathsome youngsters were primed by the subversive group called Direct Action Everywhere (DxE). I’d relax somewhat if ‘Direct’ were preceded by ‘Non-Violent’, but it isn’t – they want to keep their options open.

A DxE spokesman explained that: “We must stand together against speciesism, but some are not ready to hear our message of equality and justice… This kind of response will not deter us, we will not back down in the face of repression; not by the public, not by the police, nor the industries they protect…”   

Speciesism, in case you’re wondering, is insistence that man is inherently superior to animals, and that only humans are moral agents entitled to rights and justice.

I for one am a confirmed speciesist, although these people diminish my belief in the inherent superiority of humans to beasts. Perhaps my specesism ought to be qualified: most people are superior to animals, though some, such as DxE members, aren’t.

Perhaps they hold their views because they detect kinship between themselves and pigs. Their protests may well be caused not by political activism but by honest self-assessment.

At this point, a more conscientious writer than I would put together a cogent argument against that nonsense, complete with copious biblical references, appeals to history, tradition, physiology and whatnot.

I must admit to having done so myself in the past, on a few occasions. But any such arguments would be useless: a right cross is the only possible remedy against murderous fanaticism.

Those Pizza Express invaders and their ilk are rabid rebels in search of a cause. They doubtless see themselves as intrepid fighters, whereas in fact they are deracinated pygmies driven by hatred of our civilisation.

That animus is primary; the cause isn’t so much secondary as tertiary. It can be animal rights today, anti-nuke tomorrow, climate change the day after, anti-capitalism the day after that. Their bile will always find a vessel to flow in.

They must be stopped, and you know the authorities won’t do it. Not the government, not the police – no one. Those whose remit is to protect our civilisation feel compelled to sympathise with any cause prejudicial to it.

That’s why, much as it pains me to say so, Shaven Head has shown the way. I haven’t conducted a private poll, but there still must be more sane people about than incensed fanatics.

Perhaps, if each of us were to punch in the face anyone who as much as hints at the possibility that a pig must have equal rights with people, or suggests that both global warming and AIDS come from an establishment cabal, or even uses the words ‘our planet’, this violence against everything we hold dear will stop.

And even if it doesn’t, we’d know we did the right thing.