Programming note: Please join Steyn this evening circa 7pm North American Eastern/12 midnight British Summer Time for another nightly episode of his latest Tale for Our Time, The Flying Inn by G K Chesterton.
~LITERAL DIVERSITY STABBING OF THE DAY: On Friday a "knifeman", as they now say, fatally stabbed three people and badly wounded eight others in the German town of Solingen. The police have arrested a - go on, take a wild guess - yes, a 26-year-old Muslim from Syria who is reported to have yelled - time for another wild guess - bingo, "Allahu Akbar!"
Just to add to the black comedy of civilisational implosion, he killed his victims at a "Festival of Diversity" - a Festival der Vielfalt - yeah, that's the actual stupid name they gave it, as if it's still cool rather than suicidal. Happily, the European media have been doing their best to airbrush it out of the record. The original Guardian headline referred to three dead "at diversity festival" ...but it was quickly revised to three dead merely at a "festival".
As we always say at this shingle, diversity is where nations go to die. But, if you can't wait that long, individual citizens can now go to a "diversity festival" to die. As has become traditional, the dead had insult added to fatal injury by the usual limpid, passive response - candles, flowers and, as you can see in the photograph above, the fatuous bromides of a people anaesthetised Eloi-style even to their own slaughter:
Wir wollten doch nur Feiern
dann kam der Tod
Which means:
We just wanted to celebrate
then came death
Yeah, funny how that works. It's almost as if to celebrate your fetishisation of "diversity" - a delusion, indeed a kind of mass psychosis - is to invite death.
And, of course, the real danger is that articulated by former LBC political editor Theo Usherwood - that it "could be used by those on the far right to stir up hatred":
I am actually fucking disgusted.
— Dan Wootton (@danwootton) August 24, 2024
Rather than expressing horror about the stabbing of three innocent Germans by a likely ISIS terrorist, Sly News decided the most important aspect of the story is that it might empower the horrid so-called "far right".
This is why the MSM is DEAD pic.twitter.com/XiiFb3zT6j
So, as always, the hypothetical hatred that could be stirred up by the "far right" any day now, just you wait, worries conventional wisdom far more than the actual hatred of a "knifeman" who deliberately targets victims many decades older than him and makes a point of stabbing them in the neck.
~BONUS DIVERSITY STABBING! The Dudley Road in Birmingham, England. Theo Usherwood needs to get out there and ensure the "far right" doesn't seize on the opportunity to "stir up hatred" in these diverse and hate-free zones:
Mann mit Frau & Kind bei einer Messerstecherei in Birmingham von Migranten schwer verletzt.
Die Polizei wurde Samstagnacht "kurz danach" zur Dudley & Bellefield Road in Winson Green gerufen
Das Opfer, 1 junger Familienvater 42 J.
👇Sie lachen dabei 🤢🤮 #Remigration ✈️ 👋🖕 pic.twitter.com/ONjbgB4nzr
— CW Junior ⬛🟥🟨 💙 (@CWjunior3) August 25, 2024
Were you thinking of writing about the above on "social media"? Careful: Under Sir Keir's Starmtroopers, you'll get longer behind bars for tweeting about the stabbing than the stabber will for the stabbing.
Further caution: I have never, so far as I'm aware, been on "Telegram" in my life, but its founder, Pavel Durov, has been arrested in France for the novel crime of "insufficient moderation" of Telegram content creators:
Pavel Durov left Russia when the government tried to control his social media company, Telegram. But in the end, it wasn't Putin who arrested him for allowing the public to exercise free speech. It was a western country, a Biden administration ally and enthusiastic NATO member,... https://t.co/F83E9GbNHC
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 24, 2024
As you know, I am not a "platform" kind of guy - because, to cut to the chase, there are two kinds of platform:
a) platforms that do the state's bidding - Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc - and share your data with the commissars (how do you think Sir Keir Stürmer was able to round up all those "far right" types so quickly?); and
b) those platforms that decline to do the state's bidding and have to be punished and eventually closed down.
So, by order of the state, Rumble is not available in France, and Telegram's founder sits in a gaol cell facing twenty years in prison. It is no coincidence that the consolidation of the once decentralised Internet into "platforms" has led to the death of free speech:
🇬🇧 UK mass arrests citizens for memes
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) August 25, 2024
🇫🇷 France arrests founder of Telegram
🇮🇪 Ireland tries to ban "mean memes"
🇧🇷 Brazil forces 𝕏 to flee the country
🇦🇺 Australia tries to censor 𝕏 posts
🇪🇺 EU tries to blackmail Elon Musk
🇺🇸 DOJ jails someone for a meme
🇻🇪 Maduro blocks all...
I don't think a genuine culture of free speech will be restored in America, the British Isles, Canada, Australia or Europe any time soon. Too many people on too many issues think that there is a correct line, and dissenting views cannot be permitted. Besides, as you discern from the desiccated reaction to Germany's diversity stabbings, the majority of the citizenry have no desire to use such free speech as they still have, and would rather remain trapped within the confines of the approved diversity-bollocks:
Aw, we just wanted to celebrate; and then some unspecified person showed up to harsh our mellow. But we'll put on our tilty-headed saddy-sadcake faces and hold up our candles and clutch our teddy bears and issue our bottom-line demand: Why can't we just be left alone to sing in the sunshine?
To judge from that ghastly DNC fakefest last week, the right to warble garbage machine-made pseudo-music is the only sliver of our cultural inheritance the west's oblivious Eloi care about: we'll concede everything but that. Unfortunately, it's your crappy songs the Diversity set really don't like.
Not so long ago, when I used to go to Europe to speak with my Danish Motoon pals and other Continental freespeechers we had to be guarded by state security police because the usual types wanted to firebomb the event. But the years drift by and Islam pretty much won that one: Cameron, Hollande, Merkel et al droned #JeSuisCharlie for the cameras and then sold the pass on free speech.
So the excitable Mohammedans moved on to bigger fish: the Bataclan... Ariana Grande... Taylor Swift... a peace festival in Israel... a diversity festival in Germany... Beginning to get the picture? Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator:
In December last year an extensive survey about French Muslims and their relationship with religion and secularism found that 49 percent of Muslim pupils in French schools absented themselves from music lessons on religious grounds...
Austrian police may have averted a catastrophe this month but in a sense the Islamic State can still celebrate a victory; [Taylor] Swift's three concerts in Vienna were cancelled so they silenced the music.
Pitiful court eunuchs like John Legend and Sheila E may still be willing to suck up to Kamala and the Dems, but, when push comes to shove, will Harris-Walz, Sir Keir Stürmer, Macron, Trudeau et al stand up for freedom of sung words any more than they have for freedom of spoken words? Breaking news from Kabul:
Taliban bans the sound of women's voices singing
Those silenced Afghan chantoozies and those three cancelled Taylor Swift gigs are merely different points on the same continuum - and a glimpse of your tomorrow. In the interests of managing inter-tribal relations, the state will not be shy about regulating public performance - even of "Imagine" because lines like "Imagine there's no heaven" and "no religion too" are insensitive to the replacement population. Not to mention "nothing to kill or die for". Lines like that could easily "stir up hatred", couldn't they?
Many years ago, I liked to quote Oscar van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay humanist (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool). "I am not a warrior, but who is?" he shrugged. "I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."
Well, they're telling you they're not going to let you enjoy it:
We just wanted to celebrate. Then came death.
So maybe it's time to "learn to fight".
In 2016 a German lady who had been on the receiving end of "diversity" told me that, although she had sung carols with a group at Yuletide markets for years, she would do so no longer because she had concluded that "Christmas is a target". The diversity-fetishists do not yet seem aware that diversity is a target - because diversity-fetishism is a bleeding-heart/bleeding-neck paleface's game. To the beneficiaries of "diversity", it is merely a transitional stage ...to the New Homogeneity.
As I wrote almost two decades ago in my international bestseller America Alone:
Contemporary multiculturalism absolves one from knowing anything about other cultures as long as one feels warm and fluffy toward them... 'Celebrate diversity' with a uniformity of ignorance.
If you are still willing to attend a "diversity festival" in 2024, you are an irredeemable rube and a sap. You don't deserve to die for being a patsy and a fall-guy, but you shouldn't be surprised if you do.
We shall meet next week at the Last Photocopier in the Woods.
~We had a very lively weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on the remarkably timely sinking of the ill-named Bayesian. Later, Steyn revisited his full-length interview with presidential candidate turned Trump-endorser Robert F Kennedy Jr. Mark's Saturday music show was a cavalcade of songs for swingin' superheroes and songs for Neapolitan sewage systems, plus Frank Sinatra sings the Sacroiliac Songbook. For his weekend movie date Rick McGinnis picked Godzilla's recurring devastation of Tokyo, while Steyn's Song of the Week opted for a "happy accident". Our marquee presentation was Mark's brand new and very timely Tale for Our Time, The Flying Inn by G K Chesterton, which is proving very popular with listeners. Click for Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten. Part Eleven airs tonight.
If you were too busy spending the weekend lighting a candle and laying a teddy bear for diversity, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.
~We thank you for all your kind comments these last grisly few months - and thank you especially to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club, and those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
