Joe Hildebrand: Activists who attack Van Gogh, Picasso artworks show their true colours
In the new Wild West, apparently those who attack art and culture in the name of their deranged ideology are called “progressives”, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
When I heard that political agitators had attacked Vincent van Gogh’s priceless Sunflower painting at the UK National Gallery, my first response was the same as everybody else’s: “Looks like those no-good fascists are at it again!”
After all, who burns books and attacks art? Fascists.
Who has no qualms about destroying anything in the name of their deranged ideology? Fascists.
And who would target the innocent legacy of a struggling artist who lived in abject poverty and battled mental illness all his life?
Surely only a fascist would demonise and dehumanise the memory of such a vulnerable figure.
But then I remembered that I was living in the 21st Century, not the 20th Century, and in these enlightened times such people aren’t called fascists anymore.
They’re called “progressives”. Indeed, the word “fascist” is now exclusively reserved for anyone who dares to disagree with them.
Welcome to the new Wild West.
As it happens, I have seen Sunflowers at the National Gallery – or more to the point, it saw me. Working in London 20 years ago, I had ducked in to escape the rain and checked out some of the world’s greatest masterpieces.
This was something made possible by Tony Blair’s incredible democratisation of world history by allowing free entry to these great institutions. No wonder the hard left hate him too.
Glancing around I felt a golden glowing presence over my shoulder, and this time it wasn’t my halo. I turned around and had my breath literally taken away.
I gasped. It was as close to God or heaven or humanity or whatever that thing is as I have ever felt in my life.
I will never ever forget that moment. Even seeing pictures of that image today instantly elevates me.
And given its unquantifiably precious status it appears that much of the world shares that view.
To deliberately attack such a celestial object speaks to a level of pig ignorance or furious malice usually found in, say, a third-rate Austrian water colourist.
But of course the hard left will reject any such comparisons with their acts of destruction. Yes, they might try to ban books but they’re not actually burning them like the Nazis did.
Er, actually they are. Extreme trans activists have burnt copies of Harry Potter books not even because of their content but because they disagree with the views of author JK Rowling – a craze that spread all over the internet like, well, you know …
That was just in 2020. This year Harry Potter books were being burned again, but this time by a fundamentalist Tennessee pastor who declared: “Witchcraft and accursed things must go.”
Still, at least he’s engaging with the source material.
Yet again the crazy right and the crazy left are doing the exact same thing and getting the exact same result, just like Greens senator Lidia Thorpe’s now infamous plea to Pauline Hanson to block Indigenous constitutional recognition.
Indeed, this alignment of extreme left and right is becoming so uncanny that if you wrote a book about it, it would probably be worthy of burning. The facts are so brutally plain and farcical that they would be unbelievable in any work of fiction.
But the lunar left might then argue: “Hey, OK, so we’re banning and burning books like the Nazis did but we only target ones that cause harm.”
Okey dokey. This then raises the question of how many real-world deaths the Harry Potter series is responsible for compared to those caused by, say, The Communist Manifesto.
Just tallying up the communist experiment of the USSR and you get to about 800,000 direct executions, 1.7 million in the gulags, another almost 800,000 due to deportation and forced resettlement and another six million due to starvation — and that’s just under Uncle Joe Stalin.
That’s a pretty tough act for an imaginary boy wizard to follow. Even Hitler himself struggled to be as genocidal as his communist co-conspirator.
Throw in Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot and poor Harry doesn’t stand a chance.
But then the hard left might say: “OK, OK, so we’re burning books like the Nazis but at least we’re not hurting anybody …”
In fact, the left’s revered New York Times wrote that members of the extreme-left Antifa movement “believe that using violence is justified”.
Antifa proponent Mark Bray – a US university lecturer – told the masthead: “The argument is that militant anti-fascism is inherently self-defence because of the historically documented violence that fascists pose, especially to marginalised people.”
That’s funny. You know what other movement rose up claiming self-defence against a perceived external threat – this time Jewish Bolshevism?
Here’s a clue: It begins with an “N” and rhymes with “Yahtzee”.
Or they might say: “OK, OK, so we’re burning books like the Nazis but at least we’re not anti-Semitic …”
OK, to be fair this one’s too easy. I might leave it for Jeremy Corbyn to answer.
Again and again, at every moment in history and in every corner of the globe, extremists beget extremists and all of them end up the same.
Fortunately for them, the liberal democratic institutions that they rail against protect them from the same immolation they wish upon others.
But the God-fearing among them might find they are not so lucky in the afterlife and the godless will find their earthly legacies similarly torched.
And no one will need so much as a match.
More Coverage
Maiden: Poll guru returns for yet another Voice
If you thought something sounded familiar when the ex-Labor Senator unveiled her new party, you weren’t alone, writes Samantha Maiden.
The real reason why Harry and William will reconcile
Striking similarities between Charles and his younger son at the mid-life crisis points of their lives suggest Harry will eventually mature and find happiness — and make up with William, argues Angela Mollard.