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Why can’t our public spaces remain ideologically neutral?
Regular readers of my work here on Mercator may recall my extreme distress at a recent run-in with a gay British Gas van, a form of mental trauma so severe I seriously considered fleeing to Russia over it. I have also just written elsewhere about my even greater alarm and fear at encountering a local “Gay Bus” with a giant rainbow-haired transexual painted prominently upon the side, no doubt at considerable taxpayer expense.
My local public transport and gas utilities companies are not the only ones out there to be very visibly trafficking in sin these days, however. Just look at these pathetic “gay-friendly” pedestrian crossing lights from Vienna, first installed in 2015 to celebrate the annual glitter-filled gay-fest of Eurovision being hosted there:
Ironically, such amenities actually appear to contravene the terms of the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals, which mandates crossing signs should show only simple “walking man” images so as to be immediately understandable even to very small children, but evidently actual public road safety is now of secondary importance compared with the far higher policy goal of encouraging shared acts of sodomy amongst the pedestrian populace.
Road crossing lights in London’s Trafalgar Square, meanwhile, were similarly altered to bear wholly needless gay, lesbian and transsexual gender-symbols like these shown below back in 2016. They were initially supposed to be just temporary features, introduced to celebrate Pride Month 2016; but, as per usual, once Pride Month had ended, the lights remained, just like the gays themselves always do.
Trafalgar trannies
In fact, this September Trafalgar Square has just been queered yet further into infinity by virtue of its empty plinth, originally intended to host a harmlessly heterosexual equestrian statue of William IV, suddenly having a new temporary “artwork“ foisted upon it, intended to honour the sacred memory of dead transgender “sex-workers” (or “prostitutes”, in old money). According to a write-up in The Times of London, A Thousand Times an Instant, by the Mexican agitprop ace Teresa Margolles, is “a composite memorial made up of plaster casts of the faces of 726 trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people – 363 from Mexico, the same number again from London. It is a tribute to one of the artists’ friends in particular – Karla La Borrada, a transgender singer and former sex-worker [prostitute] who was murdered in Juarez, Mexico, in 2015 – and a beacon to draw attention to the rights of trans people worldwide. It takes its form from a tzompantli, a Mesoamerican skull rack used to display the remains of war captives or sacrifice victims.”
Still, at least they didn’t stick them all up on the side of my local bus this time, I suppose.
As a conservative, I find all this greatly annoying – which is, of course, the true point of it all, not to make minority groups feel “welcome”, as the advocates of such visual pollution claim, but to make all dissenters like me feel profoundly unwelcome when walking about the streets and quietly going about their everyday non-gay business. Such rainbow vandalism is a very visible and inescapable sign, like the swastika in Germany, or the hammer and sickle in Russia, of who really owns and runs our societies across the West now: i.e., anyone but us poor, marginalised normtards.
If I ran society, just for one single day of Anti-Red Terror, I’d like to see how the arrogantly overreaching Lefties liked it if traffic lights showed explicit images of late-stage aborted foetuses together with the commanding word “STOP!”, or buses carried large idealised images of heterosexual nuclear families on the side of them, female mother, male father, XY son and XX daughter … except, really, I wouldn’t actually like to do any of that at all, because I’m not such an ideological sadist. If I ever did manage to become a mayfly dictator, I’d just make traffic lights and buses resemble ordinary, non-politicised traffic lights and buses, like they always used to do in the West until about five minutes ago, that’s all. Is this really so much to ask?
Talking out of his aerosol
Another reputed artist who has recently been in the British newspapers for once again repeatedly defacing the public sphere is Banksy, a graffiti artist who is famous over here as a supposed “anti-establishment figure”, even though his best-known work slavishly reflects and reproduces the Left-wing values of the current woke Establishment ruling-caste, and sells for millions at auction, including to such noted penniless proles as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Although he takes his nome de aérosol from his earlier “street tag” moniker of “Robin Banx”, it is believed the secretive spray-painter is in fact a former upper-middle-class public schoolboy named Robin Gunningham.
Most of Banksy’s political pieces express incredibly predictable stances upon such key Left-wing shibboleths as climate-change, Israel-Palestine, Brexit, and the purported ills of capitalism (except when said evil economic system involves selling overpriced wall-cartoons to rich idiots for overly fantastic sums). One of his most famous stencilled-in scribbles depicts two gay policemen kissing and touching helmets.
That kind of thing is generally portrayed by an admiring media as being “edgy”, but such classic student politics sentiments are actually as safe as safe could be, in the current prevailing moral climate. Kissing Coppers, the 2004 piece in question, appeared in Brighton, known as being the gay capital of the UK, not on the side of Finsbury Park Mosque.
Streets of Rage
Most recently, Banksy has been busily daubing harmless animal-related images all across London, transforming a telephone booth into an aquarium, or a roof-mounted satellite dish into a full moon being howled at by a wolf. I don’t really think these are genuine “art”, but they may reasonably provoke a smile amongst passing children or the mentally infirm. Local councils, businesses or householders afflicted with such doodles can often have them removed, brick by brick (occasionally by thieves) and then sell them on to galleries for thousands apiece, so they are probably quite happy about it all. He’s more than welcome to come and scrawl a marmoset on the front of my wheely bin, if I can then flog it to Bonham’s for £25,000.
However, alongside his harmless visual gags, Banksy also specialises in what are essentially very public pieces of political cartoonage, thereby transforming innocent items of public infrastructure like walls, fences and bridges into advertising billboards promoting not a consumer product, as is traditional, but his own personal set of adolescent political ideas and worldviews out towards the public at large – something that is often not even allowed to take place upon actual billboards within the UK, for risk of causing needless public offence.
In 2018, a feminist activist paid £700 to have a large billboard erected in the English city of Liverpool, providing the dictionary definition of the word “woman”, i.e. “adult human female”, in order to protest various transgender madnesses then ongoing. Following subsequent complaints that people who saw it could feel offended or (sigh) “unsafe”, the poster was taken down.
Whilst doubting an advert could really make someone feel “unsafe”, unless it happened to be for Murder Incorporated and featured a large image of their own screaming face with a rifle-sight directly superimposed over it, I agree with the authorities’ stance here, actually. Although I likewise 100 percent agree with the billboard’s actual content, I think the true space to advertise such admirable opinions upon is within speeches, books, op-eds, videos or lectures, not in gigantic letters emblazoned loudly upon random walls. That way, those members of the public who either disagree, or are simply not remotely interested, don’t have their day needlessly interfered with by inescapable public propaganda, like I recently did when confronted with a horrible weird Gay Bus. The problem is, it would appear that these same perfectly sensible standards of public decorum and discretion do not apply to all viewpoints equally.
The writing’s on the wall
Liverpool was also home to George Staunton, a then-78-year-old WWII veteran, who was arrested for painting the words “DON’T FORGET THE 1945 WAR” and “FREE SPEECH FOR ENGLAND” upon the wall of a derelict property prior to European elections in 1999; the building was due to be demolished, hence George not unreasonably did not think anyone would really mind. Indeed, the cost of repairing such “damage” was estimated at only £80; and who bothers repairing a soon-to-be knocked down wall anyway? The morons then in charge of running Liverpool, sadly.
For this exceedingly trivial misdemeanour, Staunton was charged with the offence of “racially aggravated criminal damage” under Section 30 of the newly-introduced Crime and Disorder Act 1998, facing a potential maximum penalty of 14 years imprisonment and an unlimited fine: there went George’s pension, although at least Her Majesty’s Prison Service would have been paying for all his meals and a roof over his head until he reached the ripe old age of 92. His graffiti was considered “racially aggravated”, you see, because it was thought to be anti-EU and thus pro-English. He was also a supporter of UKIP, later Nigel Farage’s party – and we all know what a dangerous crypto-fascist Nazi Nigel is supposed to be!
Thankfully, the overblown charges were later dropped, leaving poor George to see out his final days wondering just why he had bothered ever wasting his time fighting fascism in the first place. The real problem the authorities had with Mr. Staunton here was not truly that he was defacing public property with a political message, but that he was defacing it with the wrong political message. After all, Banksy has pumped out some far more prominent pro-EU graffiti, post-Brexit, but, as far as I am aware, has never faced any potential 14 years behind bars for doing so himself. Why not? Well, do I really have to spell it out to you in 10-foot high letters on the side of the nearest tall building here?
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Volley of abuse
There was a similar interesting case in Italy recently, when, following the nation’s Olympic gold medal in female volleyball, a graffiti artist created a celebratory image of one of the victorious athletes, a black woman of Nigerian parentage named Paola Egonu, across the road from the Italian Olympic Committee HQ in Rome, to much Establishment applause. Beneath it stood the caption “Italianness”, implying that to be a black Italian citizen was now somehow to be more Italian than to be a white Italian citizen. Some rival politically-minded Italian graffiti artist disagreed, though, and recoloured Egonu’s black skin all over with bright pink spray-paint, thus rendering her fluorescently Caucasian.
This made front-page headlines in Italy, causing politicians to spew forth fiery right-on quotes like Vesuvius in human form. “I want to express solidarity with Paola Egonu and the most total disgust for this serious gesture of vulgar racism,” fulminated Italy’s Foreign Minister, Antonio Tajani. Several other public figures followed suit, as “every form of racism must be denounced and fought,” as Italy’s Tourism Minister put it.
No mainstream politicians appear to have come out and condemned the initial piece of publicly painted racial provocation, though: even though that is, explicitly, precisely what it was. The female graffiti artist responsible for the first, black-skinned, painting, who goes by the tag-name “Laika” (not the 1960s Soviet space-dog, but a Roman fan of Banksy) told leading Italian newspaper La Stampa that her mural was intended specifically as “a slap in the face for all racists who talk of Italian-ness based on skin colour. That’s dangerous – we are not a race.” Anyone who disagreed with her, Laika barked, was “simply racist, xenophobic and ignorant”. And she’s surprised someone defaced her sad little scribble?
Well, who would have thought it? If you deliberately set out to insult people who you clearly hate and give them “a slap in the face” in public, quite often some of them will feel motivated to turn around and slap you right back in your own. But surely, as an admitted Banksy super-fan, Laika should not object to her original image being defaced? After all, on his website, Banksy himself explicitly recommends doing this very kind of counter-vandalism, calling it “Brandalism”:
For once, I quite agree with Banksy’s viewpoint here. Before this whole unnecessary slap-fest in Italy began, we just had a wall. An empty, blank wall. Now, we have yet another theatre of operations for our present state of never-ending culture war. Can’t we just go back to having walls being walls, buses being buses, and traffic lights being traffic lights again, please? Otherwise, some fine day soon, we might wake up one morning to find some idiot has transformed all the lampposts into gallows to hang their enemies from.
Furniture that actively sets out to make people feel uncomfortable is not very good furniture, in my opinion: and that goes for street furniture, too.
What’s your take on political graffiti? Art or vandalism?
Steven Tucker is a UK-based writer with over ten books to his name. His latest, “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science”, comparing the woke pseudoscience of today to the totalitarian pseudoscience of the past, was released in 2023.
Image credit: Banksy Rage Flower Thrower
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Julian Farrows commented 2024-10-09 10:31:14 +1100Anon Mouse: “We’re all God’s children, Jurgen, so yes. That was the point of the verse. Jesus regularly hung out with sinners and those on the margins of society.”
Yes, he did consort with sinners, but to heal, not to affirm. Vacuous tolerance of sin is not an expression of love, but of apathy. -
Rob McKilliam commented 2024-10-03 09:26:31 +1000An excellent point Mr Mouse. As a recent convert to Christianity I have thought carefully about it.
I specifically and deliberately said “ . . belief in God AND FOLLOWING CHRIST reduces cruelty.” Maybe I should have said “ . . following THE TEACHING of Christ reduces cruelty.”
This is now easy to do since we are mostly pretty literate and the Gospel is readily and freely available to all. In our illiterate past we had to rely on the teachings of church leaders, some (many?) of whom were powerful money hungry autocrats who abused their power by twisting the Bible meaning to suit their narrative.
Unfortunately these people still exist today, particularly in Islam. I believe it is still the cause of much distress. -
Anon Emouse commented 2024-10-03 06:18:23 +1000Rob – the Crusades and Spanish Inquisition would like to have words with you. As well as all of the homeless LGBT youth kicked out of their religious parents’ households.
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Rob McKilliam commented 2024-10-01 10:33:03 +1000David: Ok thanks. I am simply suggesting that belief in God and following Christ reduces cruelty.
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David Page commented 2024-09-30 23:23:44 +1000Rob, how is that different from what I said? The Enlightenment did spell the end of religious hegemony. As an aside, the US might very well be the most religious of the secular democracies precisely because of that separation of church and state.
Nietzsche’s statement, “God is dead”, is completely misunderstood. First of all it was a lament, and now I am quoting from memory (never a good thing. Nietzsche, “You will not know loneliness until you experience life without a personal god”. The other thing is that the phrase predates Nietzsche’s usage by about 2 decades. “Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; The Wrong shall fail, The Right prevail, With peace on earth, good-will to men.”. Longfellow, “Christmas Bells”, Christmas, 1863. Nietzsche’s quote appeared in “The Gay Science” in 1882. It must have been in use long before that or Longfellow would not have responded to it.
We will have to disagree about cruelty in the Dark Ages. Although it didn’t reach a crescendo until the Reformation, when the Church was threatened. -
Rob McKilliam commented 2024-09-29 15:22:59 +1000David, I think you might be misguided on all three points:
1. I don’t think cruelty was a particularly defining feature of the period we misleadingly describe as ’The Dark Ages’. Wikipedia says: “The majority of modern scholars avoid the term altogether because of its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate.”
2. The Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement. It did not spell the end of Christianity, despite Nietzsche’s “oft-misunderstood statement”: “God is Dead”. However people did start questioning the absolute authority of the church and thereby its influence on governments.
3. As you suggested, before The Enlightenment “everyone believed in God”. Questioning the authority of the church allowed for genuine Christian tolerance towards non-believers in a democratic government, even though the collective at the time was strongly Christian.
Unfortunately, as our society replaces worshipping God with worshipping power and money, Christian influence in government dies, so too does tolerance. Hence the increasing attacks on Christianity today..
Nietzsche predicted this and was rightfully concerned by it. -
David Page commented 2024-09-29 00:06:01 +1000Michael, the charges against George Staunton were dropped (probably with some embarrassment), and his legal expenses were paid by the government. I doubt if his case was indicative of anything. Hell, it’s hard to get arrested in England for actual crimes, as I found out when a hit and run did over 2 thosand pounds damage to a rental I was driving. I had film, but was told by the constabulary that no one was injured and they didn’t have the manpower to do anything about it. The police there are so starved of cash. Someone had it in for Staunton.
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David Page commented 2024-09-28 23:47:38 +1000Rob, in the Dark Ages, when everyone believed in god, cruelty was the norm. The Enlightenment spelled the end of that time. Christianity is tolerable precisely because it has learned to coexist with secular democracy.
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Rob McKilliam commented 2024-09-28 18:44:24 +1000David. I don’t think “I" can “be" anything collectively. So “we” can’t be cruel as a collective. Individual members of a collective can be cruel; or kind; or apathetic; or whatever.
If many members of a collective believe in God and follow the teachings of Jesus (as many members of our collective used to) their society becomes a good and productive one. Outsiders naturally want to join it.
I fear we in the west are now experiencing the end of that era. -
Michael Cook commented 2024-09-28 17:56:47 +1000I don’t know anything about George Staunton either, but a couple of minutes googling yielded some information
https://www.politico.eu/article/ukips-smooth-operator/
http://libertarian.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/polin157.pdf
In short, he might be obscure, but not a figment of the author’s imagination. -
David Page commented 2024-09-28 17:41:02 +1000I could find no reference to George Staunton, except in Mercatornet. Why is that?
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David Page commented 2024-09-28 17:39:23 +1000Nice Dodge, Rob. So collectively we can be as cruel as we like?
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Rob McKilliam commented 2024-09-28 12:18:40 +1000Mr Mouse:
I think Jesus is talking to us as individuals when he teaches us to "clothe the naked, feed the starving and house the homeless”. Supporters of unrestricted immigration should perhaps bear this in mind. -
mrscracker commented 2024-09-26 00:42:48 +1000“Consider God’s charity. Where else have we ever seen someone who has been offended voluntarily paying out his life for those who have offended him?”
— St. Catherine of Siena -
Jürgen Siemer commented 2024-09-25 15:47:53 +1000Cologne, last night, 2:45 am. A bomb exploded in a recently opened cafe, the fire destroyed it completely.
Yes, Jesus regularly hung out with sinners and those on the margins of society. I am a sinner myself, and I need to repent regularly. I try to find Jesus and I try to better understand his words. I therefore hope that he hangs out with me, too.
But I doubt that Jesus hung out with those sinners that had rejected his call to turn around and repent. After all, they themselves would not stay with him. Am I cynical?
As long as one is alive, there is opportunity to turn around. But that move needs to start with facing and accepting what one, what we have done.
Until that process towards real peace among us human beings is not completed we need to protect our neighbors, such as those who operate and own a cafe in Cologne. If necessary, with harsh measures. -
Anon Emouse commented 2024-09-25 08:47:22 +1000We’re all God’s children, Jurgen, so yes. That was the point of the verse. Jesus regularly hung out with sinners and those on the margins of society.
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mrscracker commented 2024-09-25 04:25:41 +1000We have the same sorts of troubles with organized criminal gangs Mr. Jurgen but we can’t read anyone’s heart as far as repentance & as Christians we should be neither naive nor cynical.
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Jürgen Siemer commented 2024-09-25 03:57:29 +1000Dear Mrscracker, do not be naive: they, I should rather say the most of them, probably do not repent.
And most of them are not behind bars and do not get deported.
A few years back there was a court case, that shows, what our country has turned into. It is an extreme exception but unthinkable 20 years earlier: a Lebanese clan member from a Mafia family headquartered in Berlin and with family members living in various cities in northern Germany, was cought by the police. The case looked vlear. When he faced the judge, who was a woman in the 40s with a husband and one child, there were around 20 Lebanese watching the court procedure, all dangerous looking men.
They then told the judge that they knew where she lived with her family.
She then decided that the accused man was not guilty.
Happened in a city a few kilometers from my home town. -
mrscracker commented 2024-09-25 00:31:47 +1000Criminals of that sort certainly don’t behave as Christ instructed us Mr. Jurgen & they should be behind bars or deported. Or both, but as Christians we do believe in repentance & redemption. Our Lord spoke in Matthew 25 of visiting those in prison & what the consequences will be if we do not heed that.
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Jürgen Siemer commented 2024-09-24 23:11:02 +1000Are drug dealers and rapists Christ’s brothers?
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Anon Emouse commented 2024-09-24 22:12:58 +1000“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
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Jürgen Siemer commented 2024-09-24 20:45:15 +1000Anon,
Refugees? I have my doubts.
Mrs Merkel and the successor woke German government allowed appr. 1.5 – 2 Mio “refugees” in. Almost all claimed to be Syrian refugees, but they couldn’t prove it, because they had no passports. They had smartphones, but had “lost” their passports. Many looked more Nigerian than Syrian, many came by ship via the Mediterrarian from North Africa, Germany has nevertheless accepted them.
Many of these “refugees” do not want to work, but know how to apply for and get the social security funds available. Costs to the German taxpayers: appr 15 bln Euro a year.
Trading drugs is more profitable for these “refugees”, plus from time to time harassing or even raping blond girls.
Since June this year there have been more than a dozen bombings of shops and night clubs in Cologne and the region around Cologne. Main suspect: the Morroco-mafia.
Josef and Mary would be offended if you associated them with these refugee-gangs.
Do do not misunderstand me: not all “refugees” are bad people, in spite of the obvious fact that they came to Germany with a lie. But too many refugees are bad people, and they have no legal right to be here. -
Emberson Fedders commented 2024-09-24 15:29:04 +1000I’m just finding it hard to get worked up about anything in this article. When did conservative/religious people become such snowflakes?
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Roger Symes commented 2024-09-24 11:56:45 +1000How could you possibly know that, Anon?
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Anon Emouse commented 2024-09-24 10:31:33 +1000It’s okay, mrscracker – the vast majority of commentators on this site would have turned away Jesus, Mary, and Joseph because of “immigration” despite their refugee status.
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mrscracker commented 2024-09-24 09:49:05 +1000It depends Mr. Mouse. Each situation is different.
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David Page commented 2024-09-24 08:52:09 +1000Anon, in the conservative mindset, some folks are more equal than others.
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Anon Emouse commented 2024-09-24 08:45:02 +1000mrscracker, what do you think the vast majorities of immigrants who are escaping horrible conditions in central and South America qualify as?
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mrscracker commented 2024-09-24 05:00:27 +1000The Holy Family were more refugees than immigrants I think.
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Anon Emouse commented 2024-09-24 04:53:51 +1000Jurgen probably objects to liberal Jesus teaching l us to clothe the naked, feed the starving, and house the homeless. Forgets that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were immigrants, too.
Also – Jurgen (German name?) – makes me super uncomfortable, talking about losing the land of his ancestors. Feel like his rhetoric would have fit in nice less alongside a famous Austrian