Britain’s Great Self-Loathing Crusade
From the BBC, in a story about the murder of college student Henry Nowak by 22-year-old Sikh Vickrum Digwa:
Under UK law, it is illegal to carry most knives in public… But the law does provide exemptions for religious reasons as potential lawful defenses… The CPS said Digwa chose to carry two ceremonial knives and that the judge’s finding of fact made clear he agreed with its assessment that the weapon used was a kirpan.
The crazy Nowak story is a reverse-George Floyd moment for the U.K., but coverage here, when there’s been any, has been a dull “Republicans pounce” caricature. A Sunday BBC headline centered on Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy criticizing J.D. Vance for blaming the murder on the “politics of self-hatred,” which is exactly what it was. The bodycam footage alone came off as tasteless sketch comedy, with British cops genuflecting before a murderer whose brother told them had been “racially abused by some white person,” while handcuffing and ignoring Nowak, the person actually bleeding to death. When Nowak gasped, “I can’t breathe, call an ambulance,” and said he’d been stabbed, an officer said, “I don’t think you have, mate.”
Making things worse were two bizarre distortions. British citizens are generally barred from carrying knives, but Sikhs can carry ceremonial blades for religious reasons. Digwa was carrying two sheathed blades, one being the murder weapon. Second, British police under an insane “Anti-Racism Commitment” guidance not only directed officers to be “sorry for the damage racism has caused and continues to cause” and to pledge that “it is not enough for us to not be racist,” but told them their “commitment to racial equity” does “not mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being ‘colour blind’ (racial equality).” In England, justice is no longer allowed to be blind!
This dictum to do policing as historical apology had to be a factor in Nowak’s death, as police appeared more concerned with combating theoretical racism than real murder. This is the great Illiberal Bait-and-Switch in action, with “equity” fully, lethally substituted for “equality.” The British went so far in the direction of redefining fairness that they not only achieved unfairness, they’re still defending the suicidal policy, calling any criticism of it “right-wing” and “ethnonationalist.”
Western countries have been building to this moment for a long time. A decisive turn came with the 2015 terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, when erstwhile defenders of natural rights suddenly announced Je ne suis pas Charlie, saying Western ideas about civil society shouldn’t trump Islamic religious beliefs. When I wrote something mild in objection in Rolling Stone, a distressingly high number of colleagues told me in private it was “too much” to expect Muslims to keep their guns stowed in the face of a provocation like a cartoon of the Prophet, and that Hebdo and its staff weren’t the right “hill to die on.”
I remember the shock I felt at this. Either I had a lot of racist friends who believed Muslims mentally incapable of comprehending the basics of French citizenship, or those same friends were joined in a suicide pact, having decided Western civilization is so fundamentally corrupt, it wasn’t worth defending even against mass murder. I’m now convinced they believed both things in earnest, and had for a while. Even I was taught the setup forty years ago, via a cartography lesson:
In 1986 the U.S. History teacher for my fancy Massachusetts prep school, a young black man I revered for a variety of reasons (he was also my basketball coach), opened class by showing the famed Mercator projection, a 2-D map that exaggerates the size of land masses away from the equator. Greenland looked almost as big as Africa, the Soviet land mass dwarfed continents, and in our map the United States was dead center. He showed a 1973 projection that accurately represented square mileage, then in all caps covered the blackboard with a huge word: ETHNOCENTRISM.
I still have fondness for that teacher, but his lesson was off. It turns out any effort to make a flat rendering of a 3-D globe will involve distortions, but no matter: the “Eurocentric” Mercator projection has since been dropped in many places as organizations like UNESCO, Oxfam, the National Council of Churches and others called for it to be replaced by a more historically “fair” one, advanced by German filmmaker Arno Peters. The Boston school system in 2017 followed many British schools in dropping Mercator “to amend 500 years of distortion,” as The Guardian put it. That was sixteen years after an episode of West Wing briefly made the issue famous, in a scene that denounced the Mercator map for having “fostered European imperialist attitudes for centuries”:
It’s true the Mercator map misrepresents area, while the Peters map distorts shapes. Use whichever you like, but decades of assertions that a Flemish cartographer from the 16th century was somehow interested in subordinating nonwhite cultures or exaggerating European awesomeness are absurd. Mercator’s famed “projection” was mainly an attempt to solve a technical problem of navigation, a way to make a ship traveling a constant course appear to be moving in a straight line on a chart, when it isn’t really (think about it). His map’s Latin title was, “A new and more complete representation of the terrestrial globe properly adapted for use in navigation.”
It’s silly that insinuations about imperialism and race are still foisted atop this technical fix, but it would have been ridiculous to charge Mercator with “centering” Europe even if that had been his aim, for the obvious reason that Europe was the center of the world for someone like him. The notion that all cultures are ethnocentric was an argument made in The Closing of the American Mind, a book hugely popular with conservatives when it came out in 1987. Author Allan Bloom said ethnocentrism was inherent everywhere for obvious reasons of self-preservation, that all cultures naturally believe their way of life is best, that its people worship the true God, etc. “Men must love and be loyal to their own families and their peoples in order to preserve them,” was his phrasing. A country whose citizens didn’t think like this couldn’t survive, which is why this approach has really never been seen before now, with the increasingly ridiculous example of modern Europe and upper-class America.
I didn’t agree with Bloom forty years ago, but I never foresaw a situation where entire countries would fall below even the minimal level of patriotism needed to survive and lose all sense of self except for apology and self-flagellation. Justice here and in Britain is increasingly a calculation that wallows in self-flagellating historical considerations and discriminates against any belief, unless it’s one that falls outside national traditions. It’s common now to see Western activists fetishizing foreign religious movements (usually, ones they barely have any knowledge of) while vilifying their own family’s religious traditions as dangerous, at best stupid.
This had to happen after decades of campaigns ridiculing religion, some of which I participated in, often using framing that wasn’t as clearly righteous as I thought at the time. For instance, when the intelligent design case hit Dover, Pennsylvania in 2005, reporters like me mocked the locals with the same fury H.L. Mencken brought to the Scopes Monkey trial in 1925, even though the plot elements by then were reversed. Instead of a de facto small town theocracy punishing one teacher for trying to introduce the secular theory of evolution, this time a federal judge in a big city courtroom slammed a small town for trying to introduce a book called Of Pandas and People as a religion-friendly alternative to mandated scientific teaching.
Which is fine, as far as it goes — I don’t think anyone’s tax dollars should go to teaching Christian doctrine — but it’s hard to imagine an uproar today from the same media sector about a book like I Say Bismillah or Under My Hijab. There wasn’t exactly a liberal backlash when a public school in Virginia introduced a “practicing calligraphy” lesson that had students tracing “There is no God but Allah” in Arabic, or when a Georgia middle school taught the five pillars of Islam. The American version of this, though, still lags far behind the British pathology. A society that trains police to behave as they did in the Nowak case is already in the “preparing for hara-kiri” phase of nationhood.
We’re not nearly that bad, thank God, but we’re getting there, having taken many of the same steps the British did, like working to cure ourselves of ethnocentrism while encouraging it everywhere else. Then there’s the other weird thing — the media almost completely ignoring the British “I can’t breathe” case, which had far more directly crazy and discriminatory policy causes, when we spent a year losing our minds over the Floyd tragedy. As the author of a book titled I Can’t Breathe because the phrase once struck such a chord here, I can’t explain it except to say America and its cousins across the pond have gone soft in the head, and aren’t even interested in asking why anymore. Does no one see an emergency when whole populations can’t agree on a reason to keep existing?
https://www.racket.news/p/britains-great-self-loathing-crusade