Tuesday 19 November 2013

The Edinburgh Golliwog: the silliest “hate crime” of the century from the city that gave us the Enlightenment

Police are investigating a recently restored 1936 mural at a primary school in Edinburgh which depicts scenes from Alice in Wonderland. The central panel of the mural - whose restoration was funded by a Heritage Lottery Fund grant - features a golliwog in the top right-hand corner (full story here). One blister has complained about the golliwog:

“It’s an inappropriate image for a primary school gymnasium and assembly hall. It’s one thing if it was a museum piece or an exhibition, where you might explain what a swastika was or Ku Klux Klan outfit. It goes back to the American black sambo, the blacked-up face. It’s offensive to me: I find it racially offensive.”
Do you? Oh dear!

In response to this ridiculous, self-obsessed nonsense, Edinburgh City Council produced this little puddle of clichéd drool:
"Our equalities policies and approaches are robustly multi-cultural and anti-racist, promoting diversity and good relationships among pupils."
I’ve read several reports of the Edinburgh outrage, and none of them contain any suggestion that the Golly in question has led to any worsening of "relationships" between pupils. One female adult – whom one presumes reads the Guardian or has been on some public sector racial diversity awareness course – has complained. She doesn’t even have a child at the school: she was just thinking of sending her offspring there. Not one parent with a child at the school has complained, let alone a pupil.

But of course there’s nothing like a lone outraged liberal to stir the cops into action:
"Police Scotland treats all reports relating to hate incidents extremely seriously and will thoroughly investigate whenever a report of this nature is made." 
Hate incident? HATE INCIDENT? What fucking “hate incident”?

Just down the road from Edinburgh, there’s a city called Glasgow which boasts the second highest murder rate in Europe (just behind robustly multicultural Amsterdam). The Scottish crime clear-up rate for 2012-2013 was 51%. The number of reported rapes for Edinburgh – the scene of the devastating Golliwog horror – increased by 40% between 2011 and 2012. These statistics might suggest to anyone who hadn’t passed through the looking-glass into a world of liberal make-believe that Police Scotland might have better things to do with tax-payers’ money than pander to the ludicrously tender sensitivities of every goofy swivel-eyed left-wing air-head eagerly scouring the horizon for things to be mortally offended by.

18th Century Edinburgh – a small, chilly, stinking little town - practically created the Scottish Enlightment thanks to geniuses such as David Hume, Adam Smith and James Watt. One of the results (if not a specific aim) of this great intellectual movement was to banish what it saw as superstitious beliefs, including, unfortunately, Christianity – to a large extent it can be seen as the primary cause of what Matthew Arnold described as the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith. Having finished what the Enlightenment started by practically polishing off Christianity in this country (the way things are going, Christian schools will soon be forbidden from offering places to Christian pupils), and having pretty much outlawed the religious concept of the Sacred, modern liberals have now set about sacrilising the concept of racial identity. Words and images which deliberately denigrate the figure of Christ were once banned because of the offence they might cause to believers: now words and images which might be interpreted by adherents of liberalism as denigrating Blacks (or Asians or… well, anyone but Jews or White Britons, really) – even when there was demonstrably no intention to cause any offence – routinely lead to outbreaks of superstitious hysteria on the part of our achingly PC authorities.

Unless someone can actually demonstrate that the presence of the image of a golliwog on a 77-year old mural in a school in Edinburgh has lead to an increase in racial tensions between pupils, the authorities should sit the complainant down and tell her to start acting like a parent rather than a brattish toddler.

Meanwhile, the rest of us should try to figure out how to permanently trap those who’ve entered the Wonderland of liberalism in the mad, irrational, fantasy world they've created.


1 comment:

  1. I used to love those golliwogs. I thought it was a real pity Robertson's jam had to stop issuing them. I remember as a kid saving them up till I had enough to get the coveted broach. They were such cheerful, happy, lovable characters. There was certainly nothing racist about them in my mind. If anything they were a good ad for our Afro-American friends.

    ReplyDelete