LETTER TO THE EDITOR (OF STROUD NEWS AND JOURNAL)
Dear All
As a witness to the 'window-smashing' at the Star Inn Whiteshill (Stroud News, 12 January) I should like to offer a couple of corrections. Firstly it was a strong double glazed door, and a good thing too as people inside might have been seriously injured by flying glass had the rock weighing several pounds come through one of the windows.
Secondly, your writer says 'There is no suggestion that the damage was linked to the protesters who gathered beforehand.' Allow me to make that suggestion. This was not the early hours suburban bus shelter vandalism common where I live, but an attack carried out before 10 p.m. when the room was still full of people facing the speaker at the end of her talk. I can hardly say the perpetrator was actually from the well-policed crowd of protestors gathered on the other side of the road, but it is not likely pure coincidence that someone came round the back of the property to do this to a crowded room. The febrile atmosphere generated by campaigners was bound to inspire a thuggish moron.
History is repeating itself. My mother grew up in East Prussia when the National Socialists took over and as with all extremist organisations the first target was dissidents: everybody must think the same way. All the teachers joined the Party and tried to browbeat my mother into doing the same, but her father forbade it. She had to fight classmates in the playground but was strong enough to beat them. The school library suddenly had big gaps on the shelves where books by socialists and Jews had been removed. The history teacher was sacked and replaced by the caretaker - who needs nuance when you know the right answer to everything?
So now I am the son of a war refugee, born abroad in a country that no longer exists, and I am seeing another lot of Puritans take over (as though we learned nothing from Cromwell's joyless 1650s Protectorate, but then what history do they teach in British schools today?) Go round Cirencester's Parish church of St John the Baptist as we did yesterday and see how the black-clad right-thinkers vandalised its frescoes during Henry's Dissolution. You cannot say you are inclusive if you claim a hotline to God and use a mailed fist to impose unanimity on the people. It begins with Kristallnacht in well-heeled Whiteshill and among the 97.9% White population of Stroud District, but where will it end?
Secondly, your writer says 'There is no suggestion that the damage was linked to the protesters who gathered beforehand.' Allow me to make that suggestion. This was not the early hours suburban bus shelter vandalism common where I live, but an attack carried out before 10 p.m. when the room was still full of people facing the speaker at the end of her talk. I can hardly say the perpetrator was actually from the well-policed crowd of protestors gathered on the other side of the road, but it is not likely pure coincidence that someone came round the back of the property to do this to a crowded room. The febrile atmosphere generated by campaigners was bound to inspire a thuggish moron.
History is repeating itself. My mother grew up in East Prussia when the National Socialists took over and as with all extremist organisations the first target was dissidents: everybody must think the same way. All the teachers joined the Party and tried to browbeat my mother into doing the same, but her father forbade it. She had to fight classmates in the playground but was strong enough to beat them. The school library suddenly had big gaps on the shelves where books by socialists and Jews had been removed. The history teacher was sacked and replaced by the caretaker - who needs nuance when you know the right answer to everything?
So now I am the son of a war refugee, born abroad in a country that no longer exists, and I am seeing another lot of Puritans take over (as though we learned nothing from Cromwell's joyless 1650s Protectorate, but then what history do they teach in British schools today?) Go round Cirencester's Parish church of St John the Baptist as we did yesterday and see how the black-clad right-thinkers vandalised its frescoes during Henry's Dissolution. You cannot say you are inclusive if you claim a hotline to God and use a mailed fist to impose unanimity on the people. It begins with Kristallnacht in well-heeled Whiteshill and among the 97.9% White population of Stroud District, but where will it end?
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