Allo allo! Where is the Resistance?

Dec 10, 2020 by Jill

by Gavin Ashenden:

Our ‘cancel culture’ sacrifices individuality and free speech – all in the name of safety.

Once in a blue moon, one of ‘those’ books falls into your lap. Living as I do partly in Normandy, and with an eye to the times we live in, I have started to read more about the SOE and the French resistance.

Not that the danger to our freedom comes from the Right any more. It comes from the Left (leaving aside whether or not Hitler’s National Socialism was or wasn’t socialism).

I came across a book called Gardens of Stone, ghost written exquisitely by/for Stephen Grady.

Stephen was a 15-year-old boy when France was invaded in 1939. His mum was French and his dad was English. His dad had been a Tommy in the First World War and settled to raise a family working as a gardener for the War Graves Commission, tending the graves of his erstwhile comrades.

The book is about how Stephen gets drawn into resisting the brutal fascism of the Germans in northern France. It’s written with captivating subtlety and frightening insight into the period. Time and time again through its pages the question is raised, why did so few people actually resist?

I find myself asking the same question today. Not that we are fighting the last war; we are fighting a very different enemy that is slowly strangling our freedom of speech. It’s hard to give a name to this enemy. We know them more by what they do than what they are called.

This elusive enemy gets people thrown out of their jobs, and out of the public square, for the flimsiest of reasons that defy all common sense and most peoples’ values.

Read here

See also: Faced with occupation, does the church resist or collaborate? By Andrew Symes, Anglican Mainstream (from 2016)

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