‘OUT of hand’ Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the futility of toppling a few statues and the desperate need for an escape were the topics debated by columnists and contributors in the newspapers.
The Daily Mail
Richard Littlejohn said we have reached a Monty Python-esque moment in the Black Lives Matter protests, akin to where Graham Chapman would march on set, dressed as a British Army Colonel, complete with swagger stick, and announce: ‘Stop this, it’s getting silly.’
“For the fourth weekend running, we’ve had to put up with gobby, showboating protesters cluttering up the streets of our towns and cities,” he said. “Television and radio falsely, yet deliberately, portray modern Britain as a remake of Mississippi Burning, in full Technicolor and Cinemascope. Rolling news channels give unlimited airtime to malcontents seeking their 15 minutes of fame.”
He said police officers were ‘abandoning any semblance of impartiality as they ‘take the knee’ to abase themselves before the mob.’ In Hertfordshire, officers are told they must comply.
“This Black Lives Matters business is a blot on the landscape. It’s completely out of hand,” he added. “Yes, we still have work to do here. But, as former equalities commission chairman Trevor Phillips states categorically, this is the best country in Europe in which to be black.”
He said those behind the BLM protests had tapped into genuine feelings of remorse and anger at a killing 4,500 miles away ‘to advance their sinister agenda of smashing our tolerant, civilised society and replacing it with their own, rigidly enforced, Left-wing, revisionist, historically illiterate, bigoted totalitarianism.’
“The Black Lives Matters sketch has run its course. Joke’s over. Cue Colonel Chapman.”
The Guardian
Géraldine Schwarz, author of Those Who Forget: My Family’s Story in Nazi Europe – a Memoir, a History, a Warning, said Britain had trouble understanding that ‘in order to transform the weight of the past into wealth, it must confront history’s shadows – not ignore them.’
She lives in Berlin, she said, and she sees daily how coming to terms with the past has shaped modern Germany.
“For the past to help us make our present better, it is not enough to name a few culprits from history and to tear down their statues,” she said. “The men honoured in statues were able to do what they did because entire societies in Europe, in the Americas, as well as in the Arab world and the Ottoman empire, thought like them.”
She said people didn’t have to serve an unfair system to be complicit with it. One merely had to be indifferent to follow the crowd.
“In Germany, those who follow the crowd are called Mitläufer,”she said, adding that her grandfather was one of them and took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a Jewish business cheaply.
“Coming to terms with the past is impossible without an essential step: taking the perspective of the victim, the oppressed, the occupied, the humiliated. And being able to apologise,” she said.
She said Britain’s refusal to apologise for ‘clearly identified massacres’, coupled with a lack of education about them in schools, ‘reveals a profound misunderstanding of how important coming to terms with the past is for the democratic maturation of a country.’
The Daily Express
Vanessa Feltz said we are all desperate to roam.
“Many of us haven’t felt this anxious for an exeat since our freedom depended on parental permission,” she said. “Daily we scour the headlines wondering if the moment to pack our buckets and spades and dig out the bikinis and budgie smugglers has finally arrived.”
She said we would promise to wear masks, visors - even hairnets if necessary - and stick to any social distancing deemed necessary to escape our four walls.
“If this yearning is colouring our dreams, peppering our conversations and escalating beyond endurance, only imagine what the tourism industry is suffering,” she said.
“Just think of the disinfecting and dusting, the airing and staff re-training, the livelihoods hanging in the balance and the difficulty of communicating an atmosphere of hedonism in the throes of a global pandemic spread by human contact.
“May the Lord rain blessings on the hoteliers and restaurateurs, ice-cream vendors and innkeepers. They need every guest and every penny.”
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