The Pedagogy Of Medusa

Caravaggio, ‘Severed Head of Medusa’

(Note: Some of you are still telling me that you aren’t getting your daily mailing. I can do nothing about it from this end, I’m sorry to tell you. I’ve written Substack about it, and it’s not working out. Go to the Substack help section to see what you can do. In the meantime, you can read my daily dispatches on the Rod Dreher’s Diary website. I’m sending half of today’s post to the entire list, because the software doesn’t seem to filter out things sent to everybody. — RD)

You’re wondering now, what to do

Now you know this is the end

— The Specials, ‘You’re Wondering Now’

Though I am a writer who makes a living predicting bad things to come, and advising readers how to prepare for them, there is always a part of me that thinks, and hopes, that somehow, we will swerve at the last second, and avoid going off the cliff. Those hopes are being dashed this summer. Watch closely what happens in the UK right now. Something like it is coming to us Americans as well — not in quite the same way, because we have a First Amendment, but an American version is certain, especially if the Democrats hold the White House.

Look at the news from England:

A FIFTY-one-year-old Egremont man has become the latest person in the county to be jailed for posting racially aggravated online social media posts linked to national civil unrest.

Sellafield worker Lee Joseph Dunn, of Church Street, appeared at Carlisle Magistrates’ Court this afternoon (Monday).

Dunn pleaded guilty to one offence. He admitted sending, by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character.

His crime occurred on July 30 and 31 and involved three shared Facebook posts.

Prosecutor George Shelley said Dunn had posted three separate images. The first one showed a group of men, Asian in appearance, at Egremont crab fair 2025, with the caption: “Coming to a town near you.”

The second also showed a group of men, Asian in appearance leaving a boat on to Whitehaven beach. This, said Mr Shelley, had the caption: “When it’s on your turf, then what?”

A final image showed a group of men, again Asian in appearance, wielding knives in front of the Palace of Westminster. There was also a crying white child in a Union flag T-shirt. This was also captioned, said Mr Shelley, with the wording: “Coming to a town near you.”

“Asian,” to remind you, is Britspeak for Pakistani or Bangladeshi. The newspaper didn’t show the images — you can show grotesque pornography in Great Britain, but not cartoons like this — but if these were indeed racist, they seem like the faintest kind of racism. Is it racist to notice, critically, that Pakistani men coming to live in your area could be threatening? This, despite the grooming gangs, and despite the “Asian” mobs on the streets lately chanting “Allahu akbar,” and stomping around looking for white Britons to pummel?

Yes, yes it is. And the British regime will send you to jail for it. Jail! That man, Dunn, is going to be behind bars for two months. Of course his life will be ruined now. Who wants to hire or do business with a convicted criminal?

Thank goodness this doesn’t happen in America. Well, hang on:

Prosecutors have demanded 12 months in jail and 100 hours of community service for a University of Kentucky student who assaulted staff and police officers during a prolonged tirade of racist abuse.

Former business and marketing major Sophia Rosing, 23, called a young female desk clerk the N-word 200 times as she stumbled drunkenly towards her dorm in November 2022.

She was still yelling it as she was led away by police officers she had bitten, kicked and informed of her ‘wealth’ as they tried to restrain her.

Sophia Rosing sounds like a truly terrible person. But a year in jail, for … words?! In 2001, when I was working as a journalist in New York, I received multiple death threats from black men, left on my voice mail at work; they were angry because of an ill-advised column I wrote about a black celebrity. I remember one in particular: the guy said that he knows which exit I use to leave the building where I work. He said he would be waiting and watching, and I would never see him coming when he approached from behind and slit my throat.

This really happened. And yet, had police arrested this guy, or any of those who threatened to kill me, I would have objected had they faced even a day in jail. Jail! It’s a big thing. And yet, this dumb rich kid might face a year of it for her rude, racist words. The working-class white man in England is going to jail for two months because he posted cartoons objecting mildly to the presence in his country of dark-skinned foreigners who cause mayhem.

The regime in Britain is showing its teeth. I want to commend to you with my strongest blessing this stunning essay by Joshua Treviño, who just returned from England. I shared this with some of my smartest English friends. One just wrote me back to say she just finished it, and is weeping. She said this is the first commentary on Britain’s crisis by a foreigner that she’s read, that really gets it. I’ve you love England, it will break your heart. Excerpts:

Partly too it is a consequence of the proximate cause of the civic violence that swept the United Kingdom across the past two weeks: its regime’s determination that the people of England be subjected and subsumed by the importation of millions of foreigners with whom no philia is possible. 

There is a regime narrative undergirding this iron fixation. You see it in the outlets for elite-approved materials at their expositions of history and its interpretations. The regime functionaries administering the British Museum, for example — arguably the single greatest museum of any kind in the world, with only Madrid’s extraordinary El Prado standing in real rivalry — make known their interpretive preferences in the capacious gift shop. There we find shelves upon shelves of books on offer detailing the evils that England has inflicted upon the world. There is Shashi Tharoor on the harm done by Britain to India. (Take that, Chaudhuri.) There is David Veevers on how the world fought Britain’s predations. There is Kris Manjapra on how British emancipation — the world’s first consequential mass emancipation in the entire history of mankind — was bad, actually. There is Barnaby Phillips with a helpful tome describing Museum holdings as “loot.” Over and over and over. The median visitor gets the message: about his country, about his ancestors, about himself. The National Maritime Museum, a comparatively unheralded but excellent expository space on British seafaring adventure and exploration — it has Nelson’s jacket with the fatal bullet hole, which spurred real emotion upon encounter — also in its shop foregrounds works by which the visitor is to understand that what he has just seen and admired is in fact deeply wrong and immoral. It is a total inversion of the scale of values and virtues to which every society across all history has adhered, and this is a regime choice. 

Treviño goes on to list manifestations of this national self-hatred that the ruling class has forced onto the English people. More:

The end of Christian iconography in the old sites and realm of English Catholicism does not mean the end of iconography. Quite the opposite: the new religion clambers upon the ruined edifice of the old and apes its forms. Among the American misapprehensions of Britain is that it is becoming Islamic. That is in fact happening — it is notable that a mosque is the only religious structure seen on the train from London to Oxford — but it is consequence rather than cause. Islam did not eradicate Christian England: that was the work of the English themselves, who at some point in the twentieth century decided to adopt wholesale American-style propositionalism as the basis of the nation — even unto their own ruin — and thereby cut themselves off from all they had been and meant. Surrendering the past is surrendering the future for which past is prerequisite. 

Yet there is still iconography. The Anglo-Saxon England of one thousand years ago in which the small parish of St Benedict was erected, stone tower and all, was replete with iconography. Men and women alike encountered imagery of the saints, of the faith, of Christ as a matter of routine in their lives. Today the images remain, and today they are encountered daily, but they are of something else entirely. We walked through an Underground station whose long dirty white corridors were decorated with easily hundreds of images of London’s “queer” population. Each icon — let us use the word, for this was the intent — contained a headshot of some sort, with explanatory text below. One of them struck me and exemplified the rest: a man named Fotis, whose pronouns are Ve / Vir. Elsewhere in a train station, we encountered an image of two African women in passionate embrace: its caption reminded the passer-by that “loving who you choose” is what makes Britain Britain. Of course it does not, but it is a purposeful substitution of the new and confected nation for the old and rooted one. The new religion clambers upon the ruined edifice of the old and apes its forms

All this is tutelage, of course. The images of Fotis the Ve / Vir and the like pervade the public square in London for instructional purposes. They teach the English their new narrative, their new understanding of self, and their new permitted ambit of thought and belief.

The English, he writes, have been dissolved as a people, and the agents of their dissolution are their own ruling class — those who have run the institutions for at least two generations. This is not just in the UK, you see:

Like the Canadian state ruthlessly prevailing against the protesting truckers of 2022, and like the American state hunting down the its own dissidents — for example California Attorney General Kamala Harris persecuting the enemies of Planned Parenthood — the British state will relentlessly crush its opposition now. Its functionaries have already persuaded themselves that they are victims of a conspiracy — this too was widely discussed on U.K. regime media — and though Americans have lately mocked their pretensions to reach into the United States and extradite the purported instigators of the recent unrest, our own countrymen ought to consider that a left-leaning regime in Washington, D.C., has every reason to cooperate in that process. This is where the Anglosphere is now, each of its great nations gripped by two-tier and dual-track law and justice. Arsonists who burn Catholic churches are unpursued in Canada; rioters who terrorize communities in the name of racial equity are let go in America; and Muslims wielding weapons are unmolested by the British state. The commonalities are not coincidental. 

Regimes have philia too. 

Read the whole thing. I promise you, it is worth it. If there’s any Anglophilia in you at all, you too may shed a tear at the ending.

Again, what has been done to the British — especially to the English nation within Britain — is what is being done to us Americans, and to Canadians too. In the US, because we have the First Amendment (and, let’s be honest, the Second), they haven’t gotten as far as they have elsewhere in the Anglosphere. But it may be only a matter of time.

Events in the UK these past two weeks have struck with the force of apocalypse (unveiling), but we must understand that all they have done is revealed a condition that was already present, but many Britons have not wanted to see. I was speaking yesterday to an English friend who is baffled to the point of grief over why his people have put up with the grooming gangs atrocities for so long. It’s as if the Other — non-white Muslims — has become a Medusa that has turned the British to stone. They dare not react, and dare not even talk about it. Now, anyway, their own government may jail them for noticing.

These are a conquered people. But as Joshua Treviño points out, it wasn’t the Muslims and the foreigners who did the conquering. It was the British ruling class who hated its own, and all that they stood for.

I can’t say this strongly enough: we have the same thing in America!

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