Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Wilberforce, Sayat and the Left

Unlike Laban, I do blame the BBC. We’re talking about a bunch of folks who can’t make a cup of coffee without lauding their own anti-establishment credentials, but whenever the received wisdom tilts Left, they’ll gobble it up with a shovel.

It’s true enough though that the commemoration of Britain outlawing the slave trade was always going to degenerate into a Hate-Britannia fest. If you claimed there were echoes from the Nazi era in modern Germany, Liberals would want you jailed for hate speech, but events 200 years ago ? Practically yesterday!

Needless to say, the Left’s position is absurd. The Anglosphere was involved in the slave trade. Fine. So was everyone else. Liberals objecting to slavery in the Anglosphere, and only the Anglosphere, is as transparent as a guy claiming to be worried by mugging, who only writes about cases involving black offenders – and deserves exactly that much respect.

Still, the bile directed at Wilberforce surprised me. There's the fruit of the poison tree thing, of course. After all, no one contaminated with British blood could ever truly be considered innocent, but still, some of the Leftist rhetoric has been truly unhinged. What's that all about ?

The Left does love their crusading heroes, but here’s a real-life Atticus Finch getting slimed. Wilberforce sure sounds like he should be a Lefty hero, a man who really did take on 'the system' and defeat a great evil. Ah, but that's the thing of course. For all that Liberals like to rant about the 'evil' of particular opponents, the thought of any kind of consistent moral framework brings them out in a rash. Au contrair, as Evan Sayat shows in a brilliant speech, large parts of the Left are at war with the very concept of morality:
It’s hard to really accept; there is no criteria for truth, beauty, justice or anything else for the modern liberal. Indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because rational moral thought is an act of bigotry. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. But at the very minimum, in order to be called a freedom fighter, wouldn’t you have to be fighting for….freedom? Quite literally, being indiscriminate leaves them unable to tell the difference between freedom and having your head hacked off.
Far from being a Liberal pin-up, Wilberforce was the antonym of modern Liberalism. There was nothing tactical about Wilberforce's loathing of slavery, he saw it as an offence against both God and man. Even worse, he insisted on dragging morals into a whole range of issues, even to the point of being an early advocate of 'zero tolerance'.

To Wilberforce, good and evil were as real as north and south. He opposed slavery because that was the position his moral compass took him to, and so it was with the rest of his life. That's why the Left hates him, he's further proof of an embarassing truth for them. For all Liberals like to indulge in Utopian pretensions, hysteria and outright violence, when it comes to actually making the world a better place, the Right beats them hands down.

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