Apologise and retract? Not bloody likely

Several weeks ago I wrote a newspaper column that was republished on this blog under the heading The self-righteous rage of the Left. I referred to anti-G20 riots in Hamburg and a violent pro-government mob that attacked opposition MPs in Venezuela and I asked why, when political violence had so often been associated in the past with the extreme Right, it was now commonly perpetrated by the Left.

I didn’t just use overseas examples. I pointed out that in New Zealand, although we rarely experience overt political violence, it’s the Left that assumes a moral right to disrupt events that they don’t approve of or to howl down opinions they don’t like. Occasional direct assaults on politicians (thankfully rarely harmful) are also invariably perpetrated by leftists.

Since I wrote that column there’s been a furore over a couple of protest marches by white supremacists and other far-Right agitators in the United States. In one shocking incident in Charlottesville, Virginia, one of these angry white misfits struck out at counter-protesters by driving his car at them, killing a woman and injuring others.

Perhaps predictably, someone on Facebook has now challenged me to retract what I wrote about acts of intolerance by the angry Left, and to apologise. Presumably he reasons that the incident in Charlottesville negated everything I said. But there is nothing to retract and still less to apologise for. What I wrote stands. In fact you could even say my point has been reinforced.

First, and most obvious, what happened in Charlottesville doesn’t alter the fact that here in New Zealand, it’s the angry Left, not those on the conservative side of politics, that repeatedly asserts the right to stage protests which interfere with other people’s right to say or hear things that the Left disagrees with.

Second, whatever you might think about the people in Charlottesville who marched in protest against the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate hero Robert E Lee, they have a right of free speech. And no matter how much we might disapprove of their beliefs, they are as entitled to exercise that right as the Left is. The moment free speech is circumscribed by limitations on what sort of speech is permissible, it ceases to exist.

In any case, obnoxious opinions aren’t defeated or magically made to vanish by trying to force them underground. What’s far more likely, as we saw in Charlottesville, is that those who hold them will strike back in defiance.  

So here’s a novel suggestion. Let the morons march. Allow them the same right to protest that the Left insists on, but ignore them. Pay them no attention. Deny them the oxygen of media exposure.

Staging large, boisterous counter-protests plays into their hands. First, it fuels their martyrdom complex. It encourages their perception of themselves as a heroic minority defending traditional white American values against degenerate liberalism.

And of course journalists and camera crews turn up, expecting a stoush. The tension gets ramped up, people start shouting taunts and insults at each other and before long they’re brawling. It’s all over the TV news bulletins that night and the white supremacists have got more exposure than they probably dreamed of.

Imagine how things might play out if these sad, pathetic Neanderthals were left to parade down empty streets watched only by a handful of cops and a stray dog or two. But the Left is incapable of restraining its own overwhelming self-righteousness. By insisting on confrontation, it becomes part of the problem.

In fact it seems clear that in the second of the recent violent American protests, in Boston, most of the trouble was caused by the Left. It was the supposedly liberal counter-protesters who screamed abuse, burned Confederate flags (a gratuitously provocative act), menaced marchers, threw things and assaulted cops. And for what reason? The organisers had promoted the event as a Free Speech Rally. They had distanced themselves from the neo-Nazis and white supremacists of Charlottesville.  But the Left was so pumped-up with rage that what should have been a peaceful event turned into a riot. You have to ask, who was the bigger threat here?

So in answer to the person on Facebook who thinks I should retract and apologise because of what happened in Charlottesville (the Left loves nothing more than intimidating people into giving craven apologies), I say: no chance. Not only was the Charlottesville incident an isolated occurrence, but it wouldn’t have happened at all if the Left hadn’t felt compelled to put on a big display of virtuous opposition.

In fact I’d go further and say that while I loathe and detest the cave-dwellers of the ultra-Right, there’s something almost fascistic in the overwhelming shows of force that the American Left seems determined to muster against what is generally puny and pathetic opposition.