THE PREVENT PROGRAMME AND THE INQUISITION

In the UK, there has been some attention this last week about the attempt by the so-called Stop Funding Hate group to bully business corporations into not advertising on a new television news channel, GB News. GB News has taken an anti-woke stance.

Several corporations immediately capitulated, including Ikea, Nivea, The Open University (needless to say), Grolsch, Octopus Energy, Pinterest and Kopperberg. A spokesman for Grolsch said they would not wish to be associated with those opposed to ‘inclusion and openness’ and expressed determination not to advertise in GB News. An Ikea spokesman said: ‘We have safeguards in place to prevent our advertising from appearing on platforms that are not in line with our humanistic values and vision to side with the many.’ Consequently, Ikea had suspended all advertising on GB News.

The founder of Octopus Energy tweeted: ‘We will monitor it [GB News], and only advertise if it proves to be genuinely balanced.’ He further pointed out that the firm had spent only around £1,000 on GB News advertising, compared to donation of £108,000 to a BLM fund.

Meanwhile, under the radar, Derby City Council, in response to BLM, had conducted an audit of primary and secondary schools in its area via the supposed anti-terrorist Prevent programme. The outcome was a report that advised that the teaching of history should ‘give [a] rounded view of history’ to combat Right-wing extremism. Presently, it was alleged, some of the teaching of UK history might have ‘biases and misconceptions that may underpin far-Right extremism’.

The Department for Education said: ‘It is inappropriate to use Prevent as a pretext for pursuing reforms to the wider curriculum.’ Sir John Hayes, a former security minister, told The Telegraph: ‘Prevent in no way should be used to interfere with the school curriculum, that can never be justified, it does raise questions … History cannot be bent to fit with popular prejudices. You cannot reinvent history.’

In actual fact, communists do rewrite history. It is a key part of their agenda, as is the targeting of children.

Derby City Council said the audit was undertaken as part of Black History Month last year after a BLM manifesto was submitted to it drawing attention to the school manifesto. It called for ‘focus on adopting inclusive school policies and tackling different rates of exclusions, opportunities and outcomes by ethnicity’. BLM and its supporters have been demanding a so-called ‘decolonisation’ of curriculums.

The audit revealed that teachers wanted a ‘more realistic version of history’ and had taught pupils about the toppling of the Edward Coulson statue in Bristol, the crusades and Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood speech – or at least a version of all this. In other words, the teaching of history had become anti-White.

The politically correct have hijacked the Prevent programme and have twisted it into being a vehicle for their own agenda.

Elsewhere, under the radar, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority banned an advert for an electric cleaning device, claiming it ‘perpetuated the stereotype that it was a woman’s responsibility to take pride in the appearance and cleanliness of their home, and to clean up after other people’. The manufacturers pointed out that the advertisements had been running since 2017 without a problem.

The Advertising Standards Authority was not created in order to impose political correctness upon society. Yet that it what it is doing.

This is all an exercise in brainwashing – be it under or over the radar. It is further consistent with the Frankfurt School’s Marcuse’s Repressive Tolerance essay, in which he argued that only Left-wing and radical minority views should be allowed, with Right-wing views being banned. This is political correctness in practice.

Meanwhile, the USA has its own problems. In a report released on Tuesday, the White House described the Capitol invasion of the 6 January a ‘domestic terrorist attack’, and backed a ‘purge’ of extremist content online. In response, there is to be a strategy that includes $100 million for the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security for analysts, prosecutors and investigators. ‘In addition, the Department of Defense is incorporating training for servicemembers separating retirements in the military, who may potentially be targeted by those who seek to radicalise them’, according to an administration official. A disproportionate number of people arrested during the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol were active military personnel or veterans – ie, they were not Democrat voters and were more patriotic.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the response to popular discontent and politically-incorrect views in general, is more brainwashing and an increased prosecution of the Inquisition.

GB News will no doubt continue to report on woke issues, and others will campaign with varying degrees of assertiveness. There has been some determined resistance in 2021. In the USA, the Texans are showing some mettle and are even girding themselves to build a border wall with Mexico themselves. In the UK, the National Trust, after years of increasing anti-British political correctness, has experienced a determined rebellion, with the chairman standing down following the tabling of a motion on no confidence for the AGM by Restore Trust, a grassroots group.

Elsewhere politically correctness marches on, and its opponents need to be wary of the sniggering complacency of Conservatives towards the Loony Left of the 1980s. The Loony Left are in control now.

As Wayne Mapp ( New Zealand’s former ‘Political Correctness Eradicator’) pointed out, political correctness is ‘embedded in public institutions, which have a legislative base’ and ‘have coercive powers’, and that ‘It is this third aspect that gives political correctness its authority’. Consequently:

‘Simply railing against political correctness will not do. There needs to be a clear political programme to reverse it; to remove the viewpoints and language of the politically correct from the institutions of government. Unless there is such a programme, the public who are intensely irritated about political correctness, are unlikely to believe anything will materially change, other than the most obvious examples of government silliness. There needs to be a commonsense strategy that deals with the central issue; what to do about those state institutions that foster the ideas of political correctness.’