Tom Hunter
No Minister
Over in Europe, Britain and the US, the end of the World War I, November 11, has been marked by the usual commemoration ceremonies. Not in Australia and New Zealand of course since we have ANZAC day and one day of remembrance of that slaughter is enough to be going on with.
But in Britain, the days leading up to the date were dominated by this video going viral, where a 100-year-old WWII veteran, Alec Penstone, looking at what Britain is today, said that the sacrifice he and his mates made wasn’t worth it. Watch.
My message is, I can see in my mind’s eye those rows and rows of white stones and all the hundreds of my friends who gave their lives, for what? The country of today?
It exploded across the internet and the reason was less to do with what he said (although polls indicate he’s well in the majority) than the reactions of the hosts. It’s rather like the BudLight meltdown where the reaction was less to the trans-gender advertisement than the deep thoughts of the marketing VP who enabled it.
At first shocked by the unexpected response, they recovered quickly (live TV demands it).
The female host, Kate Garraway, pulled the usual, condescending tone of a woman dealing with a little boy who’s missed out on his ice cream. It was the response of an AWFL confronted by something she disagrees with but held back from counter-argument by her own frame of reference, in this case that one can’t be seen dumping on an elderly war veteran’s opinions live on TV when you’ve invited him to celebrate what he and his mates did.
The response of the second host also got people’s attention for different reasons, as he directly asked the old man, in the best Mehdi Hasan imitation, “What do you mean by that though?”, aiming for the usual result of dismissing an opinion by revealing the “racism and bigotry” of it. The reason for this response is that, unlike his AWFL co-host, Adil Ray is a Muslim who recently celebrated Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral election win and has no time for simpering passive-aggressiveness:
Given the ratio he got, he rowed this back a couple of days later:
To clarify, I am not actually suggesting Mamdani would implement Sharia law. But many of the issues he campaigned for are also some of the positive values of Sharia that Muslims try to live by. Something many of us would agree on.
Would we? This sounds like a Motte and Bailey argument where the mask gets ripped off once power is obtained, as Britain is learning…
Or here from 2024:
Also I doubt Ms Garraway is at all sorry that Mr Penstone feels this way about his nation and his sacrifices, because she is the inheritor of the Boomer Counter-Culture warriors of the 1960s who castigated men like Penstone and mocked the square, reactionary, conservative society (1066 And All That) that they first saved from destruction and then built upon. The Culture Warriors who swore to radically change that to something new and cool and groovy with lots of sex, drugs and rock and roll, and racial diversity. Thirty years ago she likely voted for the 1990’s update of this, “Cool Britannia”, courtesy of Tony Blair:
The main aim of allowing in millions of people was to make the country ‘see the benefit of a multicultural society’. The Blair government did not see its job as being to ‘control immigration’.
…
The revelations follow previous suggestions that Britain’s borders had been thrown open for ideological reasons. Former Labour speech writer Andrew Neather said the aim was to ‘rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.
The results are what Alec Penstone sees trashed, “What we fought for, our freedom”:
A schoolgirl was put into isolation for wearing a Union Jack dress to celebrate being British at her school’s culture day. ‘Straight A’ student Courtney Wright, 12, wore the Spice Girls-esque dress and wrote a speech about history and traditions as part of the celebrations on Friday. But the year-seven pupil was told the dress was ‘unacceptable’ before being hauled out of lessons and made to sit in reception until her father collected her.
Our freedom, and our freedom, and our freedom, and our freedom, and more freedom – and then a civil war.
This article was originally published by No Minister.
