March 13, 2024

JAMES LILEKS’ WEDNESDAY REVIEW OF MODERN THOUGHT:

It had to advance to the next step: actual destruction. In this case, an “activist” hacked and painted the portrait of Balfour, because, well, Balfour.

* * * * * * * *

You’re also certain that if someone had seen what she was about to do, and given her a stiff body check, and knocked the camera from the hand of the other Activist, that person would be taken into custody and charged, since a civilized society does not condone vigilanteism. A civilized society permits the barbarity to run its course while the bobbies are summoned. The price of letting the barbarians wreck what they wish is considered fair, when the alternative is people just knocking people down. We can’t have that. It’s not your job to interrupt the vandals.

Except, of course, that it is everyone’s job. It is the duty of every Englishman worth the name to see someone attempting to destroy a work of art, and knock her on her ass.

But what if she got a concussion? What if she really hurt her head on the hard marble floor?

(Whispering) I don’t particularly care.

It’s just a painting! There’s a genocide going on and you’re worried about a painting!

Yes, because this is the rationale that permits driving a truck bomb into St. Peter’s for, oh, fill-in-the-blank. This is the rationale that permits taking a sledgehammer to the Pieta because it reinforced the gender binary. This is the rationale for shooting an artist who drew a blasphemous picture. This is the rationale of the mad and impatient, the lunatics who attend a bedside with a skeleton on the sheets and tell themselves they are midwifing the future.

And as we saw in 2020, the “historians” who support their acts of destruction: Professor of ‘art crime’ instructs protesters on better way to topple statues that offend them.

Congratulations — you went full Taliban! Never go full Taliban: Taliban blow apart 2,000 years of Buddhist history.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll