That environmentalist murder movie
(Note: the original title of this entry was, “That environmentalist snuff movie.” That was incorrect. In a “snuff” movie, so I’ve heard, an actual murder is filmed. This movie portrays people being blown up when they decline to sign on to the radical environmentalist program, but of course the murders are fictional portrayals.)
Philip M. writes from England:
Take a look at the four minute video in this article, if you care to.
It is by smug leftie British film and sitcom writer Richard Curtis, and is supposed to be a humorous call to get involved in a campaign to reduce your carbon footprint by 10 percent. As you will see, it tries to achieve this by showing children and adults alike being gorily blown up for not agreeing to take part in the initiative. It has obviously been a spectacular own-goal by the environmentalists, making them look like despotic-fundamentalist nutters. Which of course, they are.
But there is another element to this that I don’t think has been mentioned, namely that this attitude is a direct consequence of the influence of Islamic terrorism on Western discourse. Islam has brought into our society a dynamic in our cultural and political life that we hoped we had outgrown, a dynamic which rejects reason and asserts that You Will Do As We Say, backed up with threats of brutality, savagery and violence.
Because most Brits are still not fully spiritually liberal, they still view Muslims as “the Other” and do not fully appreciate that it is our minds and land they are after, quaintly thinking instead that it’s all about “Muslim issues” in distant sandy places that don’t really concern us. Nor have we understood that when a civilised and a barbarous people are living in the same space and vying for power, the civilised folk must of necessity devolve to the lowest common denominator, because the barbarous will never raise their ethical code and fight on your traditional, restrained terms. Why would they? Shame? Shame, like comedy, is an in-group thing. So that won’t work on them. We have retained our moral codes only to the extent that we reject Muslims as the Other.
But of course, liberals have no such issues in this regard. They have embraced “the Other” as themselves, which first means surrendering your right to a unique cultural/moral framework (if they are not “the other” then “their” morality is not “their other” either), and then internalising and tacitly incorporating these new moral frameworks and boundaries as if they were your own—which they now are.
In fact, if they were to hold Muslims and themselves to different standards, that would be racist, and seeing as Muslims are not going to raise their standards and reject the use of violence to achieve political aims,, this means a good liberal has to accept the new reality of the violent standards Muslims are forcing on us. And if Muslims can use them…. why shouldn’t a morally egalitarian consistent liberal?
LA replies:
I’ve just watched it, I can’t process it. If he’s pro the anti-warming campaign, why would he show it as a murderous terrorist movement? And even apart from the nay-sayers to carbon reduction being blown up by bombs, the drift of the movie seems anti-liberal (anti-left). For example, in the opening scene, the teacher is a messy and creepy, the students seem like robots, and the whole scene has a totalitarian flavor. How would this make the audience identify with carbon reduction?
The video seems the product of an intensely depraved England which, as I’ve said many times, hates itself and seeks its own destruction.
- end of initial entry -
Philip M. replies:
“the teacher is messy and creepy, the students seem like robots”
Interesting you felt that way. I think most people (over here anyway) would react very favourably to a teacher like that. She looks the very epitome of a middle-class primary school teacher. She is very English-acting, her dress is more an ‘arty’ look than messy, the kind of Laura Ashley type clothing a woman who went to art school as a youth might wear when she was a bit older. Not that I’m defending the thing, of course. And if you could understand the fear that the Youth Of Today generate here, you would understand that the classroon scene is a kind of liberal wish fulfilment. It was chaotic enough in my day … not many people want to be teachers any more. People are scared of children, and understandably so.
LA replies:
What about her hideous, low-class accent? That’s the way teachers talk in England today? And her dress looks like a nighty for Pete’s sake. And her message is bureaucratic tyranny. She’s a slovenly, disgusting, ominous left-winger. And you’re telling me that most people in England would react favorably to her? England is deader than I thought …
Philip M. replies:
She just has flat northern vowels, same as ME, my entire family and everyone I know!!!
What’s so great about the Noo Yawk accent, then?!!!!
LA replies:
There are many New York accents, just as there are many British accents, and some of them are quite ugly and low-class sounding. There are some British accents that are ugly and low class sounding, as this woman’s accent is. For a teacher, who is supposed to be a model to her pupils, who is teaching young people, among other things, how to speak, it is completely unacceptable. Fifty years ago a woman with such an accent would not have been a teacher in a British school.
When Margaret Thatcher, who grew up over her family’s grocery store, was ten years old in 1936, do you think her teacher spoke like this? If he or she had, the Margaret Thatcher we know would not have existed. Think what you are saying when you say that this teacher’s accent is unobjectionable.
Philip M. replies:
No, a teacher would not have spoken like that in 1936, I don’t think her accent would even have existed then. It is a composite accent, with elements of working and middle class, regional and probably popular culture. But Margaret Thatcher obviously couldn’t have cared too much herself, or she would have reversed the decision to shut the grammar schools (in fact even more were closed down under Thatcher)—it is probably the influence of the Comprehensive system as much as anything that has caused the change (apart from telly). Nor would she have caused, to a large extent, the dumbing-down of the education system by replacing O Levels with the obviously inferior and target-driven GCSE’s.
The kind of cut-glass accent you are talking about exist for me only in black-and-white films. They sound amusing to most modern British people. Dated. Dead. They will never come back, even if Britain does find itself again.If we had had a teacher with such an accent at our school, he would have been mocked mercilessly. No one outside the upper-classes speaks like that in modern Britain, possibly not even them. If they did have such an accent, they would probably try and get rid of it if they were in the public eye, because it would be a liability. Cameron went to Eton, and comes from a well posh background (excuse the hideous slang, but the cap obviously fits!) but he does not sound too posh.
I suppose there has been a ‘levelling down’ of accents. Even the Queen sounds noticeably less posh than she used to. The girl in the film has a pretty standard lower-middle class accent from somewhere in the midlands, or the North East. You are asking me to find it objectionable, when it is all I have ever known. I can’t.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 04, 2010 11:34 AM | Send