You may think it a ridiculous question. I do. The people who should celebrate religious festivals are the people who want to celebrate them. The people who should not celebrate religious festivals are people who do not want to celebrate them. We’re all individuals with different values, different religious beliefs, different desires. So what we do with religious festivals is entirely our own concern and we’ll do it with those who share the celebration. Cut and dry. Right?
SO WHAT THE HELL IS THIS, THEN? The geniuses at the Institute for Public Policy Research in the United Kingdom (IPPR) – Labour’s Leftist Laboratory – have a different opinion. In a report due to be published within the next few weeks, they seem to be advocating that we all celebrate everything, or nothing at all. Now, before you allege that I’m misrepresenting their position, let’s look at the excerpts we have:
“Even-handedness dictates that we provide public recognition to minority cultures and traditions.”
What exactly this means hinges on the concept of “recognition” being advanced. When IPPR, well-known for the most collectivist of policy ideas, speak about “public recognition”, they don’t mean adding the Chinese New Year to calendars on the walls of city council buildings. That much is bourne out by this:
“If we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas…”
Hold on. Are we taking a vote or something? I didn’t know there was any talk of everyone abandoning Christmas. Who will decide whether we are going to continue to mark Christmas? I wasn’t aware this was a collective decision. (My point exactly.)
“If we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas … then our public organisations should mark other major religious festivals too.”
Note the language. For those on the Left, everything is done “as a nation”. There are no individuals; the only concept of society they have is that of a huge, heaving collective, doing everything as one and shifting slowly in this direction or that. It’s a moronic, asinine worldview. And it’s completely unrealistic: in the real United Kingdom, there are around 61 million individuals, some of whom happen to be Muslims who celebrate Eid, Hindus who celebrate Diwali, Jews who celebrate the Passover, and a majority of whom happen to be of Christian heritage and therefore celebrate Christmas. There’s no ambiguity as to why this is the case.
You want to know, IPPR, why Christmas is so prevalent on the High Street and in the stores and in offices and homes around the country every December? It’s because most individuals in the United Kingdom happen to inherit the Christian tradition. (You might want to take a second to process that startling new information.) And why do so many people celebrate the New Year? Because most of us read from the same calendar and it has become customary to do so.
Can you imagine, friends, a scenario in which these same people would be prompting the government of (say) the United Arab Emirates – in which British people are immigrants – that they should “provide public recognition” to Christmas alongside Ramadan for the sake of equality? The short answer: it wouldn’t happen. Stephen Graham recently made the remark that “…the current wisdom is that only blacks can suffer racism, and only whites can be guilty of it.” And this self-loathing prejudice extends itself to all issues wherein the majority interact with the minority: it is the practical conviction of liberals today that the status of Christians (or whites or the West or the middle class or other defining majority) needs to be challenged and redressed somehow to create ‘equality’. It’s an arrogant sentiment that fails to engage the populace as individuals, with rights at the personal level, due to which they and their families and the companies they own can choose to celebrate whichever religious festival they want to.
These people are control freaks; cretins, pure and simple, who hate to watch Christmas occurring so blatantly, so enthusiastically, with such gusto, all around them each and every year. It’s not the way things should be! It’s got to be hurting somebody, doesn’t it? After all, no activity of white, Western, English-speaking people occurs without destroying and maiming and killing in equal measure some minority somewhere, isn’t that right? Christmas: it’s an ideological gorefest! And these ideologically impeded souls are its political Scrooges.
This all amounts to a couple of core beliefs: first, that Christmas shouldn’t be as big as it is. And people are already buying that message: last year it emerged that three out of four employers were not putting up Christmas decorations in the workplace – not because they didn’t celebrate Christmas – but because they were afraid to offend staff of other cultures. Congratulations, IPPR. Your plan to dilute British culture into a hollow, futile soup of nothingness and everythingness is well under way.
And second is the belief that we should all celebrate everything, or nothing at all. Is that what IPPR believes? Maybe not explicitly, but, in essence. That’s certainly the way The Guardian seems to understand it in the preamble to an ‘Open Thread’ on its online comments section:
“Has IPPR “lost the plot”, as the Conservatives said when the idea was floated, or would marking all religious festivities improve race relations?”
Again note the language: it’s clear they’re addressing the collective. Wouldn’t it be great? Everyone celebrating “all religious festivities”? It would be so inclusive, wouldn’t it? Perhaps we’d get back to the free love days. Just so long as we minimise Christmas a little bit while we’re at it. If I’m wrong, then I’m not exactly sure what point IPPR is trying to make. Perhaps all they want is an inclusive calendar hung on the wall of every public building? I guess we’ll find out, when the IPPR report is published in full.
I look forward to tearing it apart.