Suella Braverman, the Conservative MP for Fareham, said yesterday that the radical left is increasingly hostile to open debate and is now obsessed with ‘snuffing out’ freedom of speech. And how did the radical left respond to her comments? By trying to snuff out her freedom of speech. It was almost too perfect: a politician says lefties are easily offended and determined to shut down opinions they don’t like, and lefties respond by stamping their feet and saying, ‘I’m offended! Shut her down!’ Self-awareness isn’t the new left’s strong suit.
The Corbynista left’s main beef with Braverman’s comments, which she made during a discussion about Brexit organised by the Bruges Group, is that she used the term ‘cultural Marxism’. She said, ‘Yes, I do believe we are in a battle against cultural Marxism’. She described ‘cultural Marxism’ as a ‘culture evolving from the far left which has allowed the snuffing out of freedom of speech, freedom of thought. No one can get offended any more.’
And naturally, because they are nothing if not predictable, the left got offended. Loudly, melodramatically. ‘Cultural Marxism’ is an anti-Semitic trope, they said. It’s a sly term used by alt-right types to imply that Jews are taking over western institutions and destroying them from within, they insisted. The Guardian and New Statesman even pointed out that it was used by Anders Breivik, the racist mass murderer who slaughtered 77 of his fellow Norwegians in 2011. The nasty nod-and-winks came fast: Braverman had unwittingly revealed her loathing of minority groups and the fascist tendencies of certain Tories.
What a load of nonsense. Lumping Braverman in with Breivik just because they both use the words ‘cultural Marxism’ is like saying Corbynistas are of a piece with the two Islamist killers who slaughtered the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo: after all, don’t the Corbynista left and the Charlie Hebdo murderers share the censorious, medieval belief that it is really wicked — ‘punching down’ — to mock Muhammad and offend Muslims?
More to the point, ‘cultural Marxism’, historically at least, is not a term that has only been used by far-right idiots.
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