I wondered how long it would take before the precious souls of Liberalmiddleclassland would start whining about the response to the obscenity that was delivered to Paris on Friday night. It took until Monday before the Independent decided that grieving over almost 150 dead was too much and decided to put it all into context, courtesy of one Lulu Nunn, pictured left.
Lulu's line is that people who place the French tricolour over their Facebook profile photos are guilty of all sorts of waycist things:
It’s a dismaying and damaging truth that Westerners care about and empathise with images of white-skinned women grieving in Topshop bobble hats far more than brown-skinned women grieving in niqabs and, when you lend your voice to Euro-centric campaigns such as Facebook’s flag filter, you exacerbate this. When we buy into such easy corporate public mourning, we uphold white supremacy. We’re essentially saying that white, Western lives matter more than others.
I know, stunningly inane, isn't it? To think that Europeans should have a Eurocentric view, and feel kinship with those of their own civilisation who suffered from the Paris atrocity.
If you are a Westerner then it really does not matter if you are an admirer of Fred Engels or Fred Hayek, because at root you are a product of the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Age of Reason, the French Revolution and then the Russian Revolution.
Those epochs were all steps on the road to societies that are based on rationality and reason, not inbred superstition. It is therefore quite logical for us to feel more for those who share our civilisation than for those who do not. I might add that we almost expect the more primitive parts of the world to behave savagely as they have not yet gone through the historical processes necessary to reach our level of civilisation.
I do not want to be too cruel to Lulu Nunn, as I prefer to leave that to the political right. She is a part of British society that George Orwell speared very nicely in many of his works: the self-loathing, white, middle class who enjoy all the benefits that a modern, developed economy offers to people of that ilk, and feels guilty about it all. I accept that she is also a product of the London Metropolitan "University," formerly known as North London Poly, so is hardly likely to be the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Lulu will not like this, but what her background means is that she is no closer culturally or ideologically to a third world goat herder or water carrier than anyone else who is a product of the civilised, advanced world. In fact, she has more in common with elderly, semi-crippled, benefit claiming me than she does with anyone from the primitive parts of the world.
As a good Westerner I will defend to the death the right of Lulu Nunn to write whatever she wishes, as well as flash her admittedly rather nice tits around to all and sundry without fear or favour.
We Westerners are like that.
Looks like a nice big, pair of tits though from her over wise deranged photo (of course, if it is actually her and Uncle Ken isn't winding us up)
ReplyDeleteIt is her, taken from the website that is linked to in the first paragraph. Just click on her name...
ReplyDeleteWhat pisses me off is the sanctimony of those posting passive-aggressive posts that go something like "well I'm thinking of attacks other than Paris and you're not proving to me that you're aware of what else is happening." It's a hierarchy of grief, which is just as distasteful as the hierarchy attached to poppy-wearing just last week.
ReplyDeleteIt's not up to anyone else what individuals choose to mark or to put on their pages. Each to their own, many for a wide range of different reasons. I'm sure some haven't thought about it, and I'm sure some have - who's to decide who is right or wrong. And surely, any point to be made can be made without pointing fingers and belittling others for how they're dealing with the massacre in Paris.