Ferocious self-righteousness
Dalrymple writes that British venting of pseudo-virtue over the killing of George Floyd
had a strong flavour of humbug, that is to say the desire of protesters to make themselves look and feel good without having to go to the trouble of behaving well.
London alive with the sound of baloney
The menace of their poppycock lay, he says, in this: that if you did not participate in expressions of outrage, you were in some sense responsible for what happened. One of the demonstrators held aloft a placard saying ‘White silence is complience [sic]’.
By this token, the demonstrator’s silence on the Chinese occupation of Tibet, or on the war in the eastern Congo, was complicity with horrors far greater in extent than the death of Floyd.
But
silence is not even approval, let alone complicity, and to imply that everyone must express equal outrage about what one is outraged about oneself is self-righteousness carried to the level of megalomania.
‘No justice, no peace’ read another placard,
as if to justify anticipated looting and burning, perhaps even killing.
The pleasures of righteous indignation, he says,
are among the greatest enemies of clear thought.
