Culture wars Archives | Page 2 of 16

Groupthink in the moral maze

July 2, 2020 Melanie"cancel culture", groupthink, Moral Maze

On BBC Radio’s Moral Maze this week, we discussed “groupthink”, the term for opinions enforced by condign social pressure towards conformity. Those who don’t subscribe to this coerced consensus are being subjected to public denunciation, ostracism and dismissal from their jobs. As the Maze website puts it: “Those accused of this kind of ‘groupthink’ reject that criticism and believe that all public figures should be held accountable for their views. Once made public, they argue, those views can have a direct and adverse impact on people’s lives, so they become…

Culture wars

Keir Starmer’s magical thinking

June 30, 2020June 30, 2020 MelanieBlack Lives Matter, brexit, Keir Starmer, Palestinians

We have now been treated to the absurd spectacle of the Labour party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, trying to wriggle out of supporting Black Lives Matter. Astonishingly, he and his deputy, Angela Rayner, were pictured “taking the knee” in support of the BLM demonstrators, regardless of the fact that their protests had given rise to violence against the police and attacks on the statues of historical figures in an attempt to erase Britain’s history and cultural identity. Tweeting this picture, Starmer wrote: “We kneel with all those opposing anti-black racism”.…

Culture wars Israel

Junking the Jews is behind our current Hobbesian nightmare

June 26, 2020 Melanieinternational law, racism, sovereignty, utopianism

International pressure on Israel not to extend its sovereignty over parts of the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria is increasing. More than 1,000 European parliamentarians have signed a letter asserting that this proposal, which they term “annexation,” would “encourage other states with territorial claims to disregard basic principles of international law.” Following the brutal death in police custody of George Floyd, racial anarchy in America is increasing. In Seattle and Washington, D.C., there have been attempts to set up “autonomous zones” that exclude the police. Statues and other artworks…

Culture wars Israel Jewish people

Jews’ lives matter

June 25, 2020June 25, 2020 Melanieantisemitism, Labour party, Maxine Peake, Rebecca Long-Bailey

The Labour Party leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has sacked the party’s shadow education secretary, Rebecca Long-Bailey, for tweeting a link to an interview in which actress Maxine Peake gave vent to an antisemitic conspiracy theory. Peake repeated the baseless claim that has been bouncing round the internet that the tactics used by American police on George Floyd, who died under the knee of a police officer pinning him down, were “learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services”. This is a malevolent falsehood. As the Israeli police have said: “There is…

Culture wars USA

Obama hails anarchy and mob rule as “a great awakening”

June 25, 2020June 26, 2020 MelanieBarack Obama, Black Lives Matter, Saul Alinsky

Former US president Barack Obama has expressed satisfaction at what he described as “a great awakening going on around the country”. Let’s see what this “great awakening” has involved. Black Lives Matter, the group behind it, is a far left, anti-white, anti-capitalist, anti-family revolutionary movement with openly expressed aims of destroying western culture and society. In the insurrection it has led, statues commemorating great people in American history have been torn down in acts of mass vandalism and criminal damage on the basis that they represent “white colonialism” or “white…

Culture wars

The purposeless anomie behind today’s anarchy, violence and chaos

June 24, 2020June 24, 2020 Melanieanti-racism, millenarianism, progressive mind, purposelessness

Want to understand why so much of the western world seems to have lost its collective mind and descended into anarchy, violence and chaos? What follows below is what I wrote in my book The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God,Truth and Power. It was published in 2010, and I believe it describes precisely what has now erupted in America, Britain and elsewhere. The very condition of the modern world provides emotional rocket-fuel for the belief that it can and must be transformed. Anomie, that state of…

Britain Culture wars Jewish people USA

Why even black and brown-skinned Jews are “white imperialists”

June 19, 2020June 19, 2020 Melanie"white guilt", colonialism, critical theory, Edward Said

The experience of being an immigrant group and living as a minority in an often hostile culture is, of course, one that diaspora Jews know only too well. There are obviously huge differences, though, between the Jewish and black experience. Yet one of the most important is overlooked. In Britain and America, as we have seen over the past few weeks, a movement is under way to rewrite American and British history with the aim of changing the culture. The charge is that white society is endemically racist. This is…

Culture wars

The barbarians inside the gates

June 16, 2020 MelanieIdentity politics, relativism, universities, western civilisation

For the past three decades, some of us have been warning that the inevitable outcome of what the universities have been pumping out under the misnomer of “education” would be what we are indeed seeing today – a shocking and violent onslaught against the core western and civilised values that they have so systematically undermined. It was university-based dogma that abolished objectivity and replaced it by the authority of subjective feelings. All values became relative. No-one had the right to say that the way anyone lived, or the principles or…

Britain Culture wars Israel USA

The unmistakeable echoes in the culture war against the west

June 12, 2020 Melanie

In Britain, statues of historical figures associated with colonialism or slavery are being pulled down or slated for removal. This is to appease the Black Lives Matters activists and their supporters, both black and white, who have seized upon the appalling death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody to claim that western society is fundamentally racist. The destruction of these statues and other similar artifacts, which are part of the cultural memory of a civilization, inescapably calls to mind another act of cultural extermination — the Nazi regime’s burning…

Britain Culture wars USA

“Taking a knee” to the destroyers of worlds

June 10, 2020June 10, 2020 Melanieracism, slavery, Statues, western civilisation

Over the years, I have repeatedly warned in these columns that the refusal of the political establishment to defend the integrity of the western nation and its culture has opened the way for noxious forces to occupy the vacuum. We’ve seen this in both the spread through the west of jihadi Islam and the rise across Europe of political parties and groups with racist or fascist backgrounds and antecedents. In the current convulsions triggered by the violent death of George Floyd in American police custody, this baleful development has reached…