Helter Skelter 2.0
How Intersectionality May Succeed Where The Manson Family Failed
This week, The Commonwealth of Virginia elected to remove a statue of Confederate Civil War General, Robert E Lee, on the grounds that it represents a centrepiece of injustice. Germany does not have a statue of Hitler therefore Virginia should not have a statue of Robert E Lee, is the argument. Lee’s army indeed fought for the side most closely associated with slavery; however, unlike the leadership of the Third Reich, Lee was not vilified, tried and sentenced to death by the vanquishing Abraham Lincoln but was rather made President of Washington College, and, almost a century later, commemorated in two stained glass windows at the National Cathedral in Washington DC.
That Lee’s legacy falls where Lincoln’s remains exalted supports the adage that history is written by the victors. Except, the victors, in this case, gave their verdict on Lee in 1865. It is a new generation that has fought for nothing, that now seeks to appropriate the spoils from a war about which it is supremely ignorant. To this generation, Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davies are a shackle loving triumvirate, whereas Abraham Lincoln is a cross between William Wilberforce and Moses.
Simplistic emancipation stories are easier to swallow than morally complex and pragmatic reality. To Lincoln, emancipation was a nineteenth-century neocon justification for a war in which the slave population were pawns on a chessboard. Here’s Lincoln:
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save this Union.
Ouch. Reality is hard as concrete.
According to a 2020 FBI report, US Hate Crime is on the rise. This, despite Lee’s statue being removed from New Orleans in 2017, Colonel Reb being removed from Ol’ Mis University in 2003, Civil War iconography removed from the flag of the State of Mississippi in 2020, and The Dixie Chicks becoming simply, The Chicks.
On this side of the Atlantic, Chris Pennant, a black former football hooligan turned Spectator writer, notes that the negative reaction to footballers taking the knee tends to emanate from middle-aged, working-class blokes—in other words, those most closely identified as requiring equality training. Already sick to the back teeth of being called racist, is it not at least possible that the micro-bigot will react by saying, "Fuck it. I’m going home to put on Chubby Brown"?
Peter Senge, the author of The Fifth Discipline, explains this type of social counteraction. He calls it compensating feedback and it occurs when a well-intentioned intervention generates a response from the system that is greater than the sought-after benefit. In this respect, it differs from Newton’s third law of motion in that intervention moves the problem in entirely the wrong direction. In Britain, figures show that an 82% rise in Hate Crime coincides with measures taken by The College of Policing to reduce it. A professional body worth its salt would hypothesise whether its measures were, in fact, inadvertently escalating the problem.
Charles Manson cottoned onto the principle in 1969 when he orchestrated the Tate-LaBianca slayings. According to the chief prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, it was Manson’s wish that the murders would spark an escalating back and forth of white on black violence, with the ultimate end of the toxic feedback loop being an all-out race war. “Helter Skelter,” he called it, after the song on The Beatles White Album.
In Britain, at least, the prospect of white-hooded men dragging black boys into the woods in the hope of bringing Mississippi Burning to Middlesex is long gone, meaning those intent on class warfare have had to queer the battle lines: Biology versus identity, sex versus gender, Leave versus Remain, #BeKind versus #BeReal, historical conservatism versus historical revisionism, electric versus combustion, lockdown zealots versus lockdown sceptics, the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated… It’s a LEGO box of oppression and hostility capable of endless reconfiguration by the intersectional belligerent intent on maintaining war.
Just like the arms trade, a sudden outbreak of tolerance is bad for business, which is why, in 2015, Stonewall raised a new battle flag, joined the intersectional alliance of post-modern neocons, and declared endless war on itself. Fresh oppressions were imagined. Instead of Pride being a flamboyant celebration of success, it became a muster point for an LGB community redrafted to a battle it thought it had won. Hats off—Helter Skelter 2.0 provides a sustainable business model.
Topping the list of powerful allies recruited to battle, the police have embraced intersectional warfare with a dizzying mixture of the deranged and the absurd. So, whilst Leicestershire Police add rainbow wings to its uniform, Police Scotland charge Marion Millar with hanging a suffragette ribbon in a tree, and Cheshire Police deploy a fleet of Toy Town evangelicars expecting us to believe that they will prompt a Damascene conversion in the bigot on the prowl for some transphobic action in Wilmslow. The likely reaction to happening upon a constable wearing multi-coloured fairy wings is not to fall on one’s knees and denounce “cis privilege” but to experience something altogether more visceral. The police know it. Which is why they do it.
Take the unhinged decision by Leicestershire Police to parade a tactical support unit riot shield bearing the colours of the trans flag through the streets of Leicester. This is not an act of naive incompetence; it is an act of provocation, designed to super-charge a compensating feedback loop.
The previous College of Policing’s Hate Crime Operational Guidance (2014, Section 11.3.1) confirms as much: “Targets that see success as reducing hate crime are not appropriate.” They literally tell us what they have set out to achieve is unachievable. Hate statistics increase because apparently this was the goal all along.
Stephen Pinker notes that we live in a society that is marked by a higher degree of tolerance than ever before. Nevertheless, this truth does not serve the agenda of the social neocons who are hell-bent on highlighting and weaponising difference in the cause of wholesale fragmentation. Every raised eyebrow, tut, boo and sigh are reframed as proof positive that society is a wasteland of transphobes, racists, white supremacists, worshippers of an evil colonial past, and rampaging pillagers of Mother Earth. Where hatred does not naturally exist, it is manufactured. To Build Back Better, there must first be a solid case for destruction.
Fifty years on from Tate-LaBianca, the catalyst is more subtle than the ritualistic killing on Cielo Drive. In place of brutal murder, there is a series of nudges, from the crass removal of statues to the name purge of a country band to the previously unimaginable battle line of Pronoun Warfare. This week, following the example of The Dixie Chicks, The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust trolled the public by removing the Winston part from its name, whilst retaining the Churchill bit, as if this sleight of hand will bamboozle us into believing that the name refers to an insurance company whose mascot is a talking dog and not the cigar-chomping racist (sic) who saved us all from literal Hitler.
When ordinary, decent people are subject to infantile warnings before being permitted to watch an episode of Dad’s Army, even the sanguinely tolerant pacifist will be tempted to pick up a projectile and launch it at the TV screen. Nudge, troll, nudge, nudge, troll. By such stealth, the current identity belligerents may succeed where the Manson family failed.
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As good and as strong as ever... Thank you.