In the story Bridge to Terabithia, outsider protagonist Leslie details her strategy for dealing with being teased for being ‘weird’: I told her just to pretend that she had no idea what anyone was talking about, and in a few weeks’ time, everybody would just forget about it.
Indeed, it turns out that just ignoring them is the best way to deal with bullies. Even grown-up (or at least, over-18) left-wing bullies.
Don’t take my word for it: here’s lefty bible the Guardian, grumbling that calling people ‘Nazis’ just doesn’t work any more.
Earlier this month, I helped organise a protest to defend the refugees holed up at the Thistle City Barbican hotel in London […]
Seeing and hearing our opponents, the anti-racists responded with a spontaneous chant of “Nazi scum, off our streets”, which our side was able to sustain for more than an hour.
I’m sure it was ‘spontaneous’.
But, imagine the ‘spontaneous’ lefties’ disappointment when, after an hour of parroting their silly little chant… no one cared.
The chant didn’t strike me as effective when I heard it, and the more I have thought about it since, the more convinced I am that it was the wrong strategy.
Because, to quote The Lord of the Rings movies: ‘You have no power here’. In fact, they never did, unless you let them. In fact, the left never really believed their own insults, either: it was all only ever a gambit to try and shame you into shutting up.
There were fascists present at the demonstration – one banner advertised a small hard-right group – but they were not the organisers; they hung back, mute, at the edge of the protest. The crowd did chant in support of Tommy Robinson […] But Robinson, unlike the fascists of the 1970s, doesn’t leaven his speeches with reworked passages from Mein Kampf. He isn’t a “Hitler admirer”, nor is he perceived as such by the movement. He used to boast of having a Churchill quote tattooed on his arm.
That’s really interesting because this is a a wonderful admission that it’s not that you thought they were fascists. You just thought the word fascist had power and would shut people up and make them go on the defensive and say, “Oh, no, no, honestly, I’m not.” Because for some reason, you thought these people still wanted your approval.
But that’s not the case now, is it?
In fact, as former Formula 1 boss Max Mosley (ironically, the son of an actual Fascist) showed, they can’t shame you if you’re not ashamed.
Calling them Nazis – even when there were fascists present at the edges of their event – has done little to undermine them. They don’t believe they are fascists; they don’t have organised fascists in their leading circles. The term seems to them exaggerated, laughable.
They ‘don’t believe they are fascists’, because they aren’t. And you just look silly, the louder you scream it.
They know that the people they’re calling fascists are not fascists. They use the word fascist as magic power of a way of literally stigmatizing you and nothing else. They’re not doing anything descriptive. They’re doing something proscriptive. They’re just saying, “No, you are bad people and we are going to call you bad people for daring to want the safety of your children to come before the human rights of a bunch of foreign men.”
Even when they know we know they’re talking bollocks, though, the left just can’t help themselves. The Guardian writer, who frankly looks like the most insufferably woke twat imaginable, still rattles off the ‘far right’ slur in quick succession, just a few paragraphs after admitting that it’s nothing more than meaningless name-calling.
Which is totally not something an NPC would do.
