Of the left, their tendency to authoritarianism. Their lack of self-awareness is amusing to see. In this case, Hadley Freeman.
Which leads us, inexorably, to the Trump era. Only a year and a half in, and something has emerged that is so clearly the zeitgeist made real, the mood made into matter. It’s not a movie, nor a book, nor a play. No, it’s a medium far more fitting for our ADHD, 280 characters or fewer, “I only read the headlines” era: it’s the 12-year-old “Are We The Baddies?” meme from That Mitchell And Webb Look.
This comes from a sketch in which Robert Webb and David Mitchell play SS officers, fighting loyally on the field. Except Mitchell suddenly has an epiphany: “Hans,” he asks Webb, “are we the baddies?” Despite its age, this meme has had an online resurgence in the past two years, so clearly does it relate to the present day.
Well, yes, it does. But it is the left that is using thuggery and intimidation as it attempts to stifle dissenting voices, it is the left that is using identity politics to kill free speech with the truly evil hate speech laws, it is the left that is cozying up to a radical, extremist, hard-line fascistic ideology that is intolerant of women and homosexuals, not to mention liberty, it is the left that are the baddies here and Freeman’s complete lack of self-awareness is pitiable.
What an utterly stupid woman, Hadley Freeman is. One (two for Blair) example of art from their period supposedly defines leaders, though she’s not far off with Blair, phoney Beatles and a cow sum him up quite nicely.
The only way Obama was sui generis was that he was a black president, in every other way he was the classic, modern professional politician; shallow, lacking any guiding principles or beliefs other than that they should have the top job, uncaring who gets hurt in their pursuit of power, and completely incompetent.
She says: Everyone in the UK and US today has grown up with the certainty that, whatever our countries’ flaws, we are, broadly speaking, the good guys. We are the ones who fought the Nazis, who bring democracy to fascism, light to darkness.
Note how she ignores fighting the evils of communism which illustrates the simple truth that those on the left have rarely, if ever, been certain that western democracies are the good guys, in some cases having a greater loyalty to an evil, brutal, authoritarian power than their own country.
I have an opinion as to who are the good guys and bad guys (very very few politicians are the former), and I suspect there wouldn’t be much agreement between Hadley and me on the matter.
Yeah, funny that isn’t it? Conveniently the evil, murderous regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro and Pol Pot never get a mention. Curiously, the Nazis were also socialists, and declared as such frequently. In fact the only real difference between the Nazi version of socialism and the Soviet version of socialism was that the former discriminated on the basis of race and the latter on the basis of class. The end result is the same – death.
I strongly suspect there wouldn’t be much agreement between Hadley and me on the matter either.
Amen to that. You nailed it!
Freeman is too dim/blinkered to realize that the meme only works if Mitchell and Webb’s Nazis equate to people who have been propagandized into blindly believing that they are virtuous, against all objective evidence.
In the UK all the propaganda for decades, including from the state broadcaster and Freeman’s very own newspaper, has been to the effect that the left is virtuous and everyone else who questions that virtue, even slightly, is at least flirting with evil if not an outright Nazi.
The joke wouldn’t make sense if the people having the sudden realization that they were evil knew perfectly well that they had already, publicly and hysterically, been tarred as evil day and night for decades.
An updated contemporary version of the sketch could only work if it was a pair of knee-jerk Liberal Left types realizing to their horror that all their virtue signalling has had awful real-world consequences.
Of course it’s not a sketch I expect to see on the BBC, least of all starring Mitchell and Webb.
They always were the baddies as fascists were always men of the left. Ask Mussolini. Ask Hitler.