He who stares too long into the abyss (and/or joins the local council...)

As regular readers know, I have been busy establishing myself as my local council’s most reviled resident, by continually writing to them and asking them to do their job.

I am pleased to report that my most recent missive has actually (shock, horror, summon the fainting couch etc.), elicited some responses, as opposed to the usual wall of surly silence I have come to expect when I contact my local “representatives”.

Six councillors thus far have replied (not including any of my own ward councillors, who continue to vigorously ignore me), and the responses have largely been positive, assuring me an investigation of my concerns will be carried out.

(I am even somewhat hopeful it won’t be a case of “we have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing to have occurred”, although I am well aware that may be wildly naive and over-optimistic. We will see…)

Whilst I was researching my most recent correspondence, I visited the Twitter feed of one of my ward councillors to gauge what kind of person I was writing to, and what his general political focuses were.

Despite scrolling through many dozens of his Tweets, I found not one that related to the locality of Huddersfield (apart from the promotion of the town’s riot-that-wasn’t), nor any that pertained to the primary concerns of the people who live here - such as education, health care, local business, etc. - but rather, every single Tweet was about “racism” and “the far right”, including a lot of graphic coverage of the atrocities in Gaza.

Whilst I obviously understand why people are so horrified by the genocide in Gaza - which I condemned from the start, exposing the 7th October attacks as effectively orchestrated by Israel to give them an excuse to intensify their ethnic cleansing campaign - the fact remains that, if you are an elected representative for Huddersfield in the UK, then you do need to primarily professionally concern yourself with what is going on in Huddersfield in the UK.

Much as war and death are deeply disturbing and tragic, life nevertheless goes on, and life for the people of Huddersfield is going on. People are struggling to pay their bills and keep their businesses open, there are problems with access to health care and with homelessness and addiction, the full gamut of social struggle continues to exist and life hasn’t been put on hold for any of us because of what is happening abroad.

You will note that of the examples I included above, I didn’t mention people in Huddersfield combating severe racial abuse and violence, because they are not. There have been no violent racial incidents whatsoever in Huddersfield since the media started hysterically promoting “far-right extremism”; there were no racially-motivated protests (much less far-right riots) here, and the community continues to be widely tolerant and well-integrated.

These being irrefutable, evidence-based facts, why would one of Huddersfield’s local councillors be so obsessively focused on racism and extremism at the expense of all the other very real struggles and difficulties people in Huddersfield are actually facing?

The answer may lie in the fact that this councillor claims to believe that Britain has no culture.

He shared a Tweet written by the footballer Stan Collymore alleging that British culture no longer exists as it has been eradicated and subsumed by gaudy American imports.

This, I would say (in characteristically British mild-mannered understatement) is inaccurate.

So perhaps - as someone who is, like this councillor, also from an immigrant background myself (two of my four grandparents were born outside of the UK) - I can provide a primer on the culture in which my local councillor chooses to live and politically represent, and that has nevertheless somehow eluded him for forty-odd years.

First and foremost, British culture is polite (that’s precisely why you can publicly declare the country to be full of dangerous extremists with no culture and expect no particularly vehement reaction). Britons apologise when someone else bumps into them and say ‘thank you’ to the cash machine (that’s not just me, right?).

British culture is the rolling hills of Huddersfield and the dreaming spires of Oxford; it’s Canterbury Tales and Robin Hood; it’s country pubs, seaside towns, live music venues, historic theatres, and world-class sports (forgive me if I’m slightly channelling Hugh Grant from Love Actually here, but there’s another quintessentially British tradition: Richard Curtis films! Because, whatever you may think of Mr. Curtis, there’s no way he could be an American…).

Overall, this is a country steeped in many glittering artistic, historical, and cultural traditions, that millions of people around the world flock to visit every year.

Well, why do they bother? Why don’t they just go to the USA instead, as apparently (according to that great cultural luminary, Stan Collymore) we are just a cheap CC’d version?

(For readers who have never heard of him, former footballer Collymore is most famous for publicly assaulting his girlfriend.)

Well, as someone who has actually lived in the USA - I studied for a year in upstate New York between 2013 and 2014 - I can verify that, beyond superficial similarities such as the ubiquity of Starbucks (which has somehow become a global phenomenon despite providing the world’s worst coffee) - the cultures are completely different to each other.

If it wasn’t for the fact that both countries speak English, we would never be considered to be particularly similar, let alone indistinguishable.

Yes, we in the UK have imported a few American films and restaurants.

We’ve also imported these things from a multiplicity of other countries, to the extent that - famously - the British national dish is now curry. However, as yet, no cultural critic has used this fact to dismiss the UK as a cheap knock-off of India.

What is really being implied about the UK by someone who constantly vastly inflates incidences of racism (or flat-out invents them), whilst ignoring real social issues, and simultaneously dismissing the British isles as being a vapid cultural vacuum, is that the UK (and therefore its indigenous populace) are ultimately worthless, and so it is of no great consequence if they are eradicated.

After all, why would anyone wish to preserve a violently racist hellhole with no discernible culture?

As those who oppose what is happening in Gaza should know all too well, one of the necessary preliminary stages of genocide is dehumanisation: that is, the process of depicting a people as being so brutal, so savage, so ineffably “less than” that they no longer qualify for consideration as fellow human beings.

There is a coordinated attempt by the establishment to depict many ordinary people this way, which social controllers starkly admit by acknowledging the existence of a “useless class”.

When people are relentlessly depicted through media and political channels as being “useless” and/or “racist” and/or “culture-less”, they have, essentially, been stripped of most of their defining qualities as human beings.

After all, think of the media caricature of a “far-right extremist” (the label carelessly applied to vast swathes of the population simply for opposing the establishment narrative) - the image that comes to mind is of a lawless thug, a snarling beast rampaging violently, threatening all in his path - not really a human being at all, simply a dangerous menace that must be eliminated.

History has shown us again and again what happens once this dehumanisation process has begun.

So, local councillors who claim to oppose dehumanisation and genocide when it is happening abroad: please reflect upon the fact that you may have far more in common with those orchestrating these atrocities than you might like to think. You may simply be less far along in the process than they are. Remember that there are ten stages of genocide, and dehumanisation is only stage four.

As the well-worn phrase goes: Whoever fights monsters should see in the process that he does not become a monster.

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