Notflix

So the book burning begins. Streaming service Netflix has started to remove movies. Time to rename it Notflix.

Stranger things have happened. Though perhaps Stranger Things has crossed some imaginary line that will see it pulled soon enough.  And I don’t know how they’ll go with that adult cartoon wonder, Bojack Horseman which pretty much schools every hubristic woke shibboleth. Although the fact there is cross-species sexual relationships in it probably keeps it safe for the moment.

And none of this from the hard Right. No, this is from those cuddly doe-eyed creative types who just want self-expression from everyone all of the time. Who decided right and wrong according to “the feels”.

I’m still old enough to remember when Piss Christ, Andres Serrano’s artistic piece of dubious quality (a crucifix in a jar of his urine), was defended by the artists against all accusations of blasphemy. There they were, serious eyed, standing around the exhibit, guarding the sanctuary, fending off the Barbarians.

Back then it was the conservatives always threatening the art, always seeking to quash opposing ideas, and airbrush history to suit its tastes.

Now? The shoe is on the other foot.

“You know, is it really all that bad? I mean it killed millions of people, cos in the end NO lives matter when there’s a utopia to found, but you know, those guys got things done.”

The university cancel culture – all so high brow and never likely to make it to mainstream of course – has now made it to streaming services. Why? Because of course every highbrow disastrous idea makes it downstream. We ignored those loopy lecturers at university and the awakening (soon to be woke) students who now occupy the cultural halls of the world.

The senseless and brutal events in the US, where George Floyd was killed, have created a vacuum. A righteous protest has left a vacuum behind it and it is being filled by activists who have been biding their time for other causes. All in the name of virtue of course.  Zealotry is always virtuous.

Gone With the Wind has been retitled to “Gone”.

Little Britain has been pulled by the BBC. Yes, by the BBC, which itself has sought for some time now to make Britain not merely little, but minuscule, by refusing any level of diversity in its own ranks that is more than skin deep. Oh the irony.

We see Churchill’s statue defaced in London. If you know nothing about history, you’ll do that of course.  Or, more to the point, if you learned history at a second rate modern university in the West in the past twenty years you actually don’t know any history.

I hope Gary Oldman, who played Churchill so brilliantly in The Darkest Hour voices his absolute displeasure at the defacing. He won’t of course. He’s an actor and therefore caught in a bind. He won’t act again if he does. He’ll be Lawrence Foxed. Outfoxed, as it will become known. And he’ll be doused by a blitzkrieg from the Twitter Nazis in the meantime.

Maybe he’s lining up for a part in The Darkest Hour II, when he gets to play JK Rowling in her final stoush with Daniel Radcliffe, over what does or does not constitute a woman. I’m only half kidding. The current post-liberal mish-mash of hard Left ideas has no safety net to stop it descending into the abyss.

I see it now: Oldman (now there’s a double-barrelled trigger warning name. “old” and a “man”!) playing Rowling in the final instalment Harry Potter and the Goblet of Menstrual Blood.

When we’ve got to the place where a man schools a woman on what a woman is, then no fiction Rowling ever wrote was stranger than the truth she is now living.

At least in her novels the truth triumphs. She will have to console herself with that. And the fact she’s got enough “up yours” money to keep her safe from the ghouls.

Statues, books, movies. The purge will continue. One day in the future when Notflix is streaming its high quality services straight to our cerebral cortex we’ll be obedient little proles.

Before that happens, and before a streaming service pulls it down or movie studio burns the original copy, go watch the stunning and sobering Burnt By the Sun. It’s a masterpiece of Russian filmmaking by Nikita Mikhalkov, in which a hero of the Russian Revolution finds himself on the wrong end of the Stalinist Purge. And we all know what the wrong end of that looked like.

It’s heartbreaking and tender and beautiful. And it won Best Foreign Film in 1995 at the Oscars. Well the Oscar archives still say it did.

Watch it now. Before it gets pulled. I know 1995 is a long, long time ago for you youngsters, and there’s not an action hero in tights in sight, and the only sex in it is between a husband and wife, but watch it nonetheless.

Watch what happens when the heroes of the revolution discover to their horror that the revolution has come for them. Because that’s what is happening to the likes of Rowling.

And not just Rowling. How must David Walliams and Matt Lucas of Little Britain be feeling? Lucas, whose gay wedding was a celebrity event, and Walliams who writes best selling books about cross dressing students. They dare not even raise a peep about the dumping of their show or they will be dumped on themselves from above.

The revolution has indeed come for this pair of comedic geniuses and it demands their craven obedience and silence. There they were thinking they were on the right side of history, but actually, no they weren’t, “And can you put this blindfold on and stand against that wall for a moment?”

It will increasingly happen to many others who just won’t be able to be stomach where this thing will end up. There’s no safety net at the bottom of this, just remember that. No universal values framework as a safety brake. This is a return to the pagan Rome so many desperately craved, never realising that Rome ruled by brute power alone.

The only consolation is that the banshees have turned their attention from mainstream Christianity for the moment and are busily devouring their former allies. Maybe it’s time to get the popcorn and watch the horror movie unfold in front of us.