Ideological crash-test dummies on collision course with reality
THE sight of far-right thugs descending on central London last weekend to “protect” statues from Black Lives Matter protesters was hilarious.
After years of not lifting their fingers for anything but TV remotes, turnstiles and Blue WKD, these selfless and principled “activists” took to the streets in their…*checks notes*…hundreds, to defend their God-given right to remain ignorant.
You know how it is, folks. You’re just going about your daily life in a post-industrial community that has been failed by successive generations of politicians, globalisation, ravaged by unemployment and poor health and educational outcomes, corporate exploitation and austerity, when news images of black young people protesting the extrajudicial killing of African Americans by white police officers inspires you to… do a racism.
There are two conditions that must be met before someone becomes willing to make a public exhibition of their stupidity in this way.
The first is that there has to be at least 100 years of whitewashed, airbrushed, propagandic national history rolling around in their head like a discarded beer bottle on the top deck of an empty bus. This includes the iconography of monarchs they’ll never meet. The melodies of national anthems they cannot reliably recite. And the false, intoxicating sense of personal pride derived from all the wars they never fought.
Because these unfortunates have been failed educationally and economically and will therefore always to some extent exist on sociocultural margins, hapless political leaders must re-spin the wonderful yarns of old by rebooting Britain’s longest-running franchise – the glory days of Empire – to pacify them.
These unwieldy historical fabrications are encoded with, among other things, subtle and notso-subtle forms of white supremacy.
For as long as these unfortunates believe that their political exclusion and economic exploitation is either in service of a greater national cause, or the fault of Johnny Foreigner, the real looters can make off with the spoils – like they’ve always done.
The second condition is that a person hoping to successfully do a racism must acquire at some point a certain emotional attitude. Do you know any racist yoga instructors? Have you ever attended a racist meditation class?
Racism and resentment are synonymous. To perform a racism effectively one must see the world around them in the lowest possible resolution, through a lens of chronic stress.
With their identities rooted in abstracts and their threat sensitivity spiked due to the excess cortisol, the only option available to them on seeing people of colour protesting against statues of white supremacists is to wrongly conclude that their ascribed white British identities are being personally attacked.
When you have become deeply invested in the contradictory notions that you are both superior to and threatened by people with a different colour of skin, it’s game over.
A lot of these guys are just the local bullies who make life miserable on an estate. Adrenalised beta males with high blood pressure and small penises.
They’ve been abandoned. Stories of nationhood give their lives meaning. They believe history chose them, despite the fact they’ll never make the footnotes. They’ve been lied to.
It’s quite sad, watching these poor souls grasping at their fractured selves, their entire essence dwindling between their fingers like grains of soft sand, as they act out deleted scenes from 28 Days Later on the streets of UK city centres.
Despite the aggressive behaviour of these ideological crash-test dummies, caught in the headlamps of historical fact, the most violent and disorientating aspect of their collective experience is yet to come – a head-on collision with the truth of Britain’s central role in the systemisation of racial injustice.