First they came for Georgy Pyatakov and then it was Peter Rabbit. Admittedly there have been 81 years between the Soviet purging of Pyatakov and the cultural Marxists’ denunciation of Beatrix Potter’s mischievous bunny, but there are similarities. Pyatakov faced his accusers in January 1937, a broken and wretched shell of a man, telling the court:
‘I stand before you in filth, crushed by own crimes, bereft of everything through my own fault.’
Peter Rabbit also feels crushed by his crime, which in his case entailed throwing blackberries at Thomas (Mr McGregor’s nephew) in the hope it might trigger a food allergy. Nathalie Newman, writing in the Guardian, accused him of ‘allergy bullying’:
To me, this scene sounds tantamount to allergy-bullying, which can be very serious. Last year, there was an awful story of a child who died after he was exposed to cheese at school. Allergies can be fatal.
Social media was outraged at the subversiveness of the scene, so too, the pressure group, Kids with Food Allergies, which issued a statement on Facebook, declaring:
‘It is unnecessary for a film to show the characters intentionally attacking another with his food allergen to trigger anaphylaxis’.
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