Those of us who remember the cold war with the Soviet Union and the cultural revolution in China will recognise this.
The banjo player from folk rock group Mumford & Sons announced today he is ‘taking time away from the band’ to ‘examine my blindspots’ after a Twitter pile-on for praising a controversial right-wing writer.
Winston Marshall was attacked on social media after tweeting support for US journalist Andy Ngo over the weekend, calling him a ‘brave man’ and hailing his ‘important’ book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan To Destroy Democracy.
After a barrage of tweets accusing him of ‘endorsing fascism’, the band held crisis talks on Sunday, after which bandmates Marcus Mumford, Ben Lovett and Ted Dwane, along with their management, reportedly asked Marshall to leave the group.
This is straight out of Mao’s playbook. For the record, Andy Ngo is not particularly right wing, he is certainly conservative and he does that rare thing, journalism. His comments on Antifa are spot on. He is, indeed, a brave man who has been assaulted by these mostly peaceful rioters in the name of anti fascism – you know, the modern brown-shirts.
Marshall’s pitiful confession and apology is something we would expect to see exposed in an Orwell novel and we would comfortably tell ourselves that such behaviour couldn’t happen here.
Well, welcome to communist China or the Soviet Union. Take your pick.
A source claimed that Marshall’s staunchly right-wing views had been causing ‘tension’ in the band for some time, and that the decision was made to let him go in order to protect the band’s ‘image’ in the traditionally left-leaning world of folk music.
This is why it is best to keep politics out of the arts. If his band mates couldn’t hack his having a different opinion, they are the problem here, not him.
Marshall, 33, said in a statement posted on Twitter: ‘Over the past few days I have come to better understand the pain caused by the book I endorsed.
‘I have offended not only a lot of people I don’t know, but also those closest to me, including my bandmates and for that I am truly sorry.
Shit band, shit music anyway – rich kids playing at being revolutionary arse clowns.
I can’t comment on that as they had passed me by.
Endorsing a book that is critical of a fascist organisation is endorsing fascism?
As for Mumford and Sons, the banjo is the only thing that makes their sound distinctive isn’t it.
Churchill was absolutely right about “The fascists of the future calling themselves anti-fascists”.
And the more their spineless victims cringe and slither like this, the more the Maoist keyboard warriors will continue . . . .
Quite. The only appropriate response is a robust refusal to concede. This pathetic apology is straight out of Maoist China where prisoners had to publicly recount their sins and confess. It’s embarrassing.
In such a case as this, if it were me I would go it alone and double down. He isn’t alone in his views.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t86ClLM3ZGY
Oh, absolutely. They’ve smelled blood now.
If nothing else Trump has taught us that. Never apologise, never explain. Like all bullies the Left don’t like when someone stands up to them. Squirming around and asking for forgiveness is the very worst thing you can do. State your principles and stand by them come hell or high water.
There has recently been a kerfuffle about Burger King using the phrase “Women belong in the kitchen” as a tagline for a campaign to encourage more women to become chefs. Leaving aside the notion that one sex or another being under represented in this or that trade being a problem at all. Burger King have been flamed for using an obviously sexist trope. Of course, with depressing predictability, they have backed down and issued a predictable grovelling apology. Why oh why couldn’t they have said something like ‘It’s not our fault that you are too stupid to understand irony’? This, as I see it, is the nub of the problem. We are dealing with stupid people who think themselves so clever. We need to let them know, in no uncertain terms, how stupid they are.
Andy Ngo, a south east asian gay independent journalist is now ‘right wing’? How the Overton window has shifted.
Shifted is putting it mildly. Uncle Joe Stalin is now to the right of it.
Burger King should use music from the band in their next ad. Campaign. ??
I saw that ‘examine my blindspots’ aka ‘re-educate’ yesterday – deeply worrying
Society of Editors executive director Ian Murray has resigned and said similar after a statement which said it was “not acceptable” for the couple to make claims of racism in the press “without supporting evidence”
“…More than 160 journalists of colour and the editors of the Guardian, Financial Times and HuffPost UK previously issued statements saying they did not agree with the Society of Editor’s position…”