Conservatives should not meet the woke mob half way

Stockholm Syndrome is the phenomenon that is sapping Western conservatism and facilitating the erosion of civilisation by the cultural Marxist aggression known as “wokeism”. While the fanatical, numerically negligible promoters of the woke dictatorship have no doubts regarding the merits of their cause, adopt a posture of moral superiority and devote every moment of their waking lives to imposing their demented theories on society, those who ought to be resisting their encroachments equally determinedly are, in many cases, bereft of a coherent creed, lack moral conviction and cherish the delusion that it is possible to meet the dark forces of Marxist totalitarianism half-way.

We have seen some highly illustrative examples of this fatal weakness recently. First, consider the question of “taking the knee” in sport. This divisive gesture emerged as part of the culture wars in America when it was first adopted by UFL player Colin Kaepernick in 2016; thereafter, in the wake of the death of George Floyd, it became a public expression of support for Black Lives Matter (BLM). Its importation into Britain signalled the intrusion of politics – fundamentally, American politics – into British sport.

For the majority of sports fans, any contamination of sport by politics is deeply repugnant. It has always been a principle in this country that, when attending a football match, or rugby, or cricket – or, if you like, croquet – the only conscious rivalry should be between the opposing teams. People go to events such as football matches to find sanctuary from the preoccupations of the outside world, including ever more intrusive political pressures. For 90 minutes, they want to forget other issues and antagonisms.

So, when the England team in the Euro 2020 tournament “took the knee”, many supporters were angry. Some of them, as the sole means available to them to express dissent from a piece of political theatre imposed on them, booed this grandstanding gesture – as they had every right to do. They regarded any political demonstration – left, right, or centre – as alien to a sporting event, especially when the gesture in question signalled support for a violent leftist movement and was being performed in front of the whole world by a team representing England.

For this legitimate dissent they were pilloried as “racists”. The morally and intellectually bankrupt Labour Party, notoriously mired in anti-Semitism, tried to force the Prime Minister in Parliament to condemn this expression of opinion by football fans. When louts on social media directed racist abuse at the three England players who had missed penalties in the final, the two quite separate issues were deliberately conflated by woke bullies. By refusing to condemn fans for voicing their disagreement with the intrusion of political controversy into sport, Conservative politicians had encouraged racist abuse online, ran the weasel narrative.  

It was not without effect on people whose instincts are conservative and pluralist, but who have been marinated for years in the pervasive propaganda of woke. “I admit I was opposed to taking the knee initially,” ran the surrender monkey apologia, “but I now realise the depth of the problem of racism.” This is a reflection of how, like water dripping on stone, a relentless torrent of propaganda has infused weak-minded conservatives with a kind of moral inferiority complex: under constant brainwashing and with an inadequate worldview themselves, they have come to half believe the moral pretensions of an intrinsically immoral creed, dressed up as social reformism.

The most extreme example of this Stockholm Syndrome was manifested on, of all platforms, GB News, the channel that promised viewers freedom from woke haranguing. Presenter Guto Harri, in reaction to the online abuse, announced his conversion to taking the knee. Not content with stating the fact, he went on, with the extravagant contrition of a self-denouncing defendant at a Stalinist show trial, to say: “I actually now get it and so much so that I think we should all take the knee. In fact, why not take the knee now…” And he proceeded to do so, live on air.

When the response from viewers was to turn off en masse, endangering the continued viability of GB News, resulting in Harri’s departure, he invoked free speech. Of course, he is entitled to make a fool of himself in public, but not on GB News, for a very simple reason: when people tune into a television channel on the promise of no woke nonsense and the first thing they see is a presenter executing a leftist gesture that has never been seen even on the BBC or Channel 4, then their legitimate expectations as consumers have been betrayed. There are plenty of other media hosting woke content; it cannot be allowed also to swamp the one medium dedicated to ignoring it.

The alibi advanced on behalf of “taking the knee” is that it is not an endorsement of the extreme programme of BLM, which includes defunding the police and abolishing the nuclear family, just a protest against racism. But how much credibility would those same woke apologists accord to someone who snapped a Nazi salute, shouted “Heil Hitler!” then explained he was not endorsing the death camps or aggressive war, but just wanted nice broad autobahns built and the trains made to run on time?

The left must be made to take ownership of the realities of BLM: the violence, the city of Portland in flames, widespread riots across America, the concerted effort to cripple the police and replace them with Marxist militias. If leftist gesture politicians truly disown that baggage, then why have they not chosen a different means of signalling anti-racist aspirations? Like the Nazi salute, this tainted gesture is morally compromised beyond all credibility.

From the beginning, however, those who should have resisted its importation into Britain, with a few honourable exceptions such as Priti Patel, caved in to the spurious moral authority of this crusade. The England football team, it is argued, chose the gesture themselves; in that case, they were ill-advised. The supreme irony is that the composition of their talented line-up on the pitch supplied the complete refutation of the notion that this country is “systemically racist”, as extreme leftists claim.

What is important to realise is that the knee, football, the whole of sport, all are just segments of the woke aggression. One by one, every area of society has been colonised by woke activists: universities, churches, schools, local government, the police, the corporate world, the media, entertainment – no sphere of life has been left in freedom. When, in any particular area, resistance is provoked, all the resources of the woke cult are temporarily concentrated on that one sector, like an artillery zone call, with all the useful idiots on social media deployed to intimidate any opposition.

When that pocket of resistance has been overcome, woke activists move on to the next target. By all the well-tried devices of Trotskyite “dysphoria”, the Frankfurt School “reputational cascade” destroying opponents’ reputations, above all the imposition of a synthetic moral superiority and a bogus consensus, control is relentlessly extended. Already, every area of life in this country and North America lies under a suffocating layer of volcanic ash, where the woke lava streams have stifled freedom.

Britons whose grandparents and great-grandparents fought two world wars in defence of freedom have lost their livelihoods for refusing to subscribe to the scientifically illiterate fable that human beings can change sex. We live under a Conservative government with a large parliamentary majority, but every detail of everyday life is experienced as it would have been in a Corbynista Britain. Most major institutions and most large corporations operate on culturally Marxist premises. It no longer makes any difference which party is voted into government, Parliament is no longer in control.

Yet even quite recently, many somnambulists dismissed the concept of the Deep State as a conspiracy theory. If it is an unfounded myth, why does woke tyranny continue to expand regardless of election results? This disaster originated in America. There, however, a new political climate is emerging as discontent rises in Cuba. Colin Kaepernick, founder of “the knee”, has been criticised for praising Fidel Castro. Americans notice that their flag, insulted by woke athletes as a symbol of oppression, is being displayed as an emblem of freedom by desperate Cubans confronting ruthless Marxist security forces.

Cuba is a domino overdue for toppling; likewise Venezuela. The spectacular collapse of two Marxist states, possibly in the not-too-distant future, would be a considerable embarrassment to those woke campaigners trying to impose Marxism on Britain and America. If Cubans can risk their lives in pursuit of freedom, it will be shameful if Britons do not bestir themselves, as they did over Brexit, to overthrow the woke commissars in every area of public and private activity. If just two toxic monosyllables – “race” and “trans” – were excised from public discourse, how much calmer, more harmonious and saner society would be. It is time to return the lunatics to the asylum.