Forgiveness, not anger – Sir Roger’s example to us all

Apr 28, 2019 by Jill

by Will Jones, The Conservative Woman:

ROGER Scruton is not the Messiah. But contrary to the media outrage mob and the government who have rushed to portray him as an unreconstructed bigot who gives respectability to racism (as claimed by that authoritarian arbiter of modern thought, Jonathan Portes) following George Eaton’s New Statesman hit job, he is an awful lot nearer to sanctity than they are.

His reaction – forgiveness, not anger – gives us new insight into the power of Christ to overcome evil with good. Sir Roger is, unsurprisingly, profoundly Christian (albeit somewhat unconventional in some of his beliefs).

Christ was an innocent teacher of truth who willingly submitted himself to the powers of darkness in order to confound and disarm them and emerge victorious. This is also a metaphor for 75-year-old Sir Roger’s own life even before his disgraceful treatment by the New Statesman, into which Friday’s interview by Justin Webb, one of the BBC bullies of the Today programme, offered a glimpse. I am talking about the deep power of good to triumph in unexpected ways over evil by reversing apparent defeat into at least a moral victory.

This is not Sir Roger’s first brush with the forces of the Left. He was slowly but surely hounded out of academia (he became Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College in the 1980s) for openly professing that supreme intellectual heresy: traditionalism. A book he wrote called The Meaning of Conservatism ‘blighted what remained of my academic career’, he later explained in an interview. He was so vilified by his colleagues at Birkbeck and elsewhere that he concluded that a ‘socialist conscience was the one requirement for success in the only spheres where I could aspire to it’.

Read here

Also from TCW: Pity the BBC didn’t listen to Scruton’s wise words on witch-hunts by Kathy Gyngell

Lost in Twitter space – sense, civility and free speech by Matt Archer

Today programme continues Sir Roger Scruton witch hunt – full transcript

Zoe Williams wheeled out to complete the hatchet job on Sir Roger – full transcript

Scruton still stands proud – Reader’s comment

Read also: Leftie gets a taste of his own medicine by Peter Hitchens, Mailonline (scroll down)