I’ve only just seen this video which appears to have been shot in February 2017 in Dalston, East London outside the ‘LD50′ art gallery’. But I wanted very much to comment on it because it shows the violence of the Left when confronted with ideas, bad ideas I grant you, that they oppose. The gallery, which has had a reputation for hosting exhibitions by avant garde artists such as Turner prize nominees Jake and Dinos Chapman, put on a conference and an exhibition that attracted the ire of the censorious and violent Left.
The conference and exhibition, called ‘Neoreaction’ that had taken place some months before the demonstration in February 2017 was one that featured speakers from White Nationalist political currents along with artwork featuring Nazi and neo-Nazi imagery. I must say at this point that this is not an event that I would ever be likely to attend and thankfully I’m not likely to be forced to attend either.
Even going by the descriptions of the speakers and the artwork given by the Guardian newspaper, I find myself having a sense of revulsion. I find the politics on display and the use of Nazi imagery offensive and upsetting, but neither the artwork nor the speakers is being forcibly piped into my home. I have the power to choose to go to the gallery or not. I can go and mingle with a bunch of privileged members of the art establishment and watch them enjoying the shock factor of the transgressive, or I can stay home and quietly say ‘what a bunch of wankers and shite’ about both the speakers and the artwork.
But, and this is the core point, if it’s a self funded private gallery, then the gallery should have the right to put this event on, host the speakers and display the artwork. Anything else is a type of tyranny and a prime example of censorship of ideas. Of course there are some things that involve speech that should be or remain illegal such as issuing a credible threat to kill someone but these exceptions should be very few. Holding or expressing racist views might be nasty and disreputable but this should not be an offence, punishable either by the state or by the sort of Leftist goon squad that you can see in the video below. The way to counter the sort of bad and hateful speech of the sort attributed to the speakers at the LD50 gallery is not speech restrictions but more free speech so these bad ideas can be countered with better ones. I’m a great believer in giving freedom of speech to dickheads for it is only by letting dickheads speak and challenging their ideas with better ones, that these dickheads are in fact revealed to be dickheads.
The exhibition and conference sounded to me like it was a case of the gallery playing the ‘outrage game’ for possibly cynical commercial reasons. This is where something transgressive or awful is said or displayed by an art institution which whips up the usual easily outraged suspects and thereby ensures a large amount of publicity for the gallery’s future less outrageous offerings. This may or may not be the case, but what is undeniable is that the violent Left turned up demanding that the gallery be shut down because of the nature of the artwork and speakers.
As you can see from the video, the Leftist demonstrators are of the usual Socialist Workers Party, Unite Against Fascism variety along with a few black clad thugs who as Sargon of Akkad accurately describes are those who are ‘LARP-ing at being revolutionaries’. The bulk of the demonstrators seemed to be similar to those who often turn out to these types of demonstrations, The participants included shrieking harridans mechanically screaming out ‘fascist’ or other slogans and blokes pumped up with testosterone who are itching for violence. In other words the face of the modern far left.
These Leftist thugs, who have about as much in common with the sort of decent open minded democratic Leftism, that used to be common political currency in East London, as a Trabant has with a Bentley, decided to attack a lone man holding a hand written sign defending the concept of free speech. They harangued and manhandled a person who was calling for open discussion on everything and met every point he made with chants of ‘no debate with nazis’ or more worryingly threats of violence to the gallery.
Fair play to the free speech defender who made the very valid point that speaking to someone doesn’t mean that you agree with them and he said he was standing up for the free discussion of ideas. He did very well to stand up to some very frightening thuggish leftists one of whom appeared to be claiming to be from a group called ‘Red As Fuck’. The free speech defender asked some questions about the ‘Red As Fuck’ group of this man and was told ‘well you are going to find out arn’t you cos you’re a Nazi’ adding in for extra threat ‘who’s going to vouch for you that you are not a Nazi?’.
The arrogance of these Leftists is astounding, they truly believe that they have the right to control not only what happens and what is said in the streets of Dalston, but also what is said and displayed on private property. Having viewed the video I’m in no doubt who the ‘fascists’ are in this display. It’s not the man standing up for free speech who’s the fascist, it’s the band of red banner carrying thugs who are trying to control what is and is not said. There’s a deep and almost laughable irony about these censorious and violent leftists. They obviously wish to stop images associated with regimes of horror and hatred from being on display in a private gallery, but I wonder how many of them have in their own homes images from or inspired by the Soviet period or from other Communist sources? Quite a few I would guess based on my experience of having met a lot of similar ‘plastic revolutionary’ Lefties when I was younger.
They are decrying images with their roots in horrific ideologies of the Right, but are probably quite happy to live with images with their roots in equally or even more horrific, at least in terms of body count, Leftist politics. It’s a monstrous hypocrisy, but one the Left are very experienced at.
For example the art establishment, which can be left-leaning, quite rightly criticises cultural figures or groups which colluded with the regime of Nazi Germany, such as the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra but doesn’t level the same level of criticism at the likes of the dramatist Bertolt Brecht. Brecht was an avowed Communist and although he could have chosen to stay in the USA, where he was in exile from Nazi Germany, chose instead to live out the rest of his life in Stalinist East Germany. Both of these cultural icons were heavily influenced by bad ideas on the one side by Nazism and on the other side Communism. Whilst I completely understand that bad people such as the sculptor Eric Gill or Wagner can produce great art, it’s wrong to ignore the malign politics that artists may hold, whether those politics be of the Right or of the Left. I very much doubt that any of these Antifa / SWP /UAF or Black Lives Matter clowns would ever turn up to protest a retrospective of Soviet propaganda art or would even be triggered by a portrait of a mass murderer like Josef Stalin. They are highly selective in their violent outrage. We’ve see this sort of thing in European politics before, following World War One, when thugs of opposite political stripes engaged in street battles in order to silence the other side. Because these antifa thugs resemble the thugs of the past then they are the real fascists because they cannot comprehend that the expression of ideas other than their own should be permissible.
This attitude shown by the Antifa protesters is little different in my view from the activities long ago of the Communists and proto-Fascists who turned some European cities into bloodbaths in the post World War One period. Both wanted to destroy the other group’s right to speak just as Antifa are trying to do today. Do you really want these Antifa thugs to censor what you have to say? I know I do not. Antifa are today’s jackbooted book burners and cultural political officers and that is a damn good reason why they should be opposed.
