Stalin, Lenin and Kalikhin shortly after being asked if they knew of transgenderism
These used to be the times that tried men’s souls. Now, of course, with a whole Woolworth’s pick ‘n ‘mix sweetie counter of genders to choose from, I suppose we must resign ourselves to the fact that these are the times that try the souls of not only cis-binaries, but gender-fluid, LGBTQ… (+ x, where x = ∞) non-binary otherkin. Everything changes, everything stays the same.
Of course, some members of the community are under extra pressure. Theodore Dalrymple makes the sound point that the increasingly manic applause for NHS workers from the general public is beginning to resemble a presidential rally in a Communist country, with everyone trying to out-clap their neighbor and no one wishing to be the first to stop. We will, however, shelve our cynicism and doff our rather fetching baker-boy hats to NHS staff on the front line of a war against an enemy both invisible – the coronavirus – and visible – their overpaid management.
And the NHS are not the only battalions facing the foe. The delivery chain, the transport network, utilities and grids, other emergency services; all of these vital areas must be staffed, what though the bullets fly and the enemy charge.
And, in many ways, the future of the country is at stake at its most vital level, those who make up its future, those without whom there may be no more Britain, no more sense of community, no more of the fighting spirit that won two world wars. For it is for this reason, gentle reader, that I have gathered you here today. To speak of the student body.
It is a truth universally recognised that with no students a country has no future. That said, when the current crop hits the jobs market, and some burrow their way up in the public sector, local government, the media, academia, NGOs and all the other boondoggle non-jobs that attract these types, the future that we are assured may make you wish the virus had got you.
Let’s turn to the representative body, the National Union of Students (NUS). We cannot, sadly, call it a ‘professional body’ as none of its members will have done an honest day’s toil in their coddled and self-esteemed lives. Well, the NUS has a new president, a black lady, would you believe. This from the Times of London;
‘An activist who claims that black lives are not treated as a priority in modern Britain has been elected president of the National Union of Students.’
Note the curious phrasing, and the moral weight it imparts on this opening sentence. The new prez is not concerned that black lives are not seen as of equal value to, say, white lives, but that they are not ‘a priority’. Soon this demand will go from a priority to a priori. We are going to be paying very close attention to Ms. Larissa Kennedy on this weblog (is a Kennedy as president wise?). She seems to represent everything that is wrong both with student politics and race relations in Britain.
The Times embroiders her ‘career’, citing that she ‘has served on the union’s national executive council and is part of the black students’ campaign’ as though those were real things with a range of effects useful to anyone but themselves. Her CV is the same anaemic inventory of non-roles and bothersome hobbies. We’ll have a closer look at that another time.
Once again, we see the warped and befuddled hypocrisy of the Alt. Left. When you look at the world and then you read the transcription of the Alt. Left looking at the world, you are entitled to think; just what, exactly, is it that they are seeing? As onlookers used to say of football referees who have given inexplicable decisions, what game is he watching?
The Alt. Left see a world of conflict, lifted straight from the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, lines which you suspect may be the limit-points of any readings of this trouble-making document the Left might have found the time to make;
‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in conscious opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes’ [Italics added].
The Alt. Left have prised out the Antique divisions and flown in their own, oh-so-very 21st-century equivalents: race, gender – with all its attendant turf wars – Islam, climate change, White supremacy. As one of Proust’s elderly ladies says when confronted by the excesses of youth, I’m sure that’s very clever and very modern.
Race is the flagship project, of course. If you haven’t tried the Google race experiment, you really must. Google ‘black couple’. All the images that come up are black couples. Now Google ‘white couple’ and tell me, who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes? Around 50% of the images are of mixed-race couples. What does this mean? We are entitled – for once, we actually are – to ask, no?
Electing a race-baiter as President of the NUS is an absolutely representative vignette of the Alt. Left. The optics – a terribly modern concept torn from a rich classical tradition – are perfect and conform to Leftist dogme et haute rituel. In reality, however, that threatened commune where some of us seek shelter from the storm, this is yet another antagonistic, race-baiting, divisive, regressive power-play by the Alt. Left to keep picking away at white people and their countries. This woman is on Team Ash Sarkar. (Sometimes, you feel that white nationalism comes to you, rather than vice versa).
And, in the end, this is to do with power, control and dysfunction. The Left are doing to us what the Japanese did to the Chinese at Nanking, creating havoc and then telling the enemy that you are now required to police things. The likes of Larissa Kennedy are still, just, laughing stocks. But there is a phrase – amazingly, this comes from anodyne ex-PM John Major – about the Englishman. Step on my foot once, and I’ll apologise. Step on my foot twice, and I’ll apologise. Step on my foot a third time and I’ll knock you down. There are always tall poppies.