The BFD | The Lynching of History

Welcome to the Lynching of History, I hope you’re enjoying the spurious spectacle.

In the current episode, we’ve seen the super-sanctimonious eye of contemporary woke-think focused on some of the peculiarities particular to several past-performers of assumed cultural iconology.

True it is that some were never deserving; our own Mr ‘King Dick’ Seddon was a misogynist anti-Suffragette until he saw the light of expedience after years spent opposing the movement. Just as Mr Obama was anti-gay-marriage until the shouty-people got to him and he saw, as a result of their immense pressure, a rainbow emerging from the moral light of inclusiveness — one of the more paradoxical of lefty virtues since it doesn’t include anybody that may disagree with them.

Judge Charles Lynch, famous for summary justice; confiscations, floggings, and, unfortunately, the hangings that would memorialise his name, would be proud of the mobocracy the world has witnessed these past days. His own target was predominantly ‘Tories’, those people suspected of not supporting the cultural and violent revolution sweeping the Virginia landscape at the time, while Abraham Lincoln, speaking later, of the contagion of such vigilantism and the many consequences thereof, said:

“By this influence, the jealousy, envy, and avarice, incident to our nature, and so common to a state of peace, prosperity, and conscious strength, were, for the time, in a great measure smothered and rendered inactive; while the deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of revenge, instead of being turned against each other, were directed exclusively against the British nation.”

Lincoln warned 180 years ago of the real danger of mob-justice – the growing numbness to its effects and willingness to use it against an ever-widening array of ‘deserving’ targets:

“Such are the effects of mob law; and such as the scenes, becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order; and the stories of which have even now grown too familiar, to attract any thing more than an idle remark.”

The truth is that statue-Lynching is so yesterday, so boring, the woke warriors are so plenty behind the times. Where were the iconoclast clowns when controversy swirled around the man “who referred to black South Africans as “kaffirs” — a highly offensive racist slur? He also said that Indians were “infinitely superior” to black people.”

So ridiculous, so inane it is, so tiresome to destroy the likeness of a person so influential in Indian self-determination and with such close connection to Africa that they will remove his noble memory because of one single ill-considered sentence he uttered as a young man in his twenties.

Thank the good Lord the Gandhi statue outside Wellington Railway Station, erected only in 2009, survived statue-Lynching after the very recent and large BLM tantrum-fest here, gathering not 200 metres from his likeness. Could this be a sign of a more tolerant attitude towards the occasionally crestfallen cultural folk-hero in our capital city? Alternatively, perhaps it’s simply an illustration of the ‘woke’ ignorance of actual and complex history.

Surely a group of 20,000 of our own ‘outraged’ BLM finest couldn’t be so selectively anti-racist, only myopically, artificially, morally excited while high-handedly chanting, marching, pounding the streets ready to mete mob social-justice and slanders upon the several statues they find offensive, all in the name of justice, could they? Please, tell me it ain’t so…are we witnessing a contemporary re-run of Abe Lincoln’s observation of “the deep-rooted principles of hate, and the powerful motive of revenge…directed exclusively against the British”?

That may be justice to some, but it’s rough justice of the type made notorious by Lynch; and our baying mobs should not be proud of such irony.