If you were told that a man had said to a magazine interviewer, “Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing,” you might assume the man was a racist. That was certainly the impression New Statesman Deputy Editor George Eaton intended to create when he blared that quote on Twitter under the description “Roger Scruton on the Chinese.”
Except that the famous British philosopher, whom Eaton interviewed for the April 12 issue of his magazine, wasn’t talking about the Chinese people. He was talking about their Communist government. Anyone who bothered to click through to the full interview would find a longer version of the quotation, which makes that clear in the preceding sentence: “They’re creating robots out of their own people by so constraining what can be done.”
A full transcript of the interview has not been released, so we don’t know what the sentence preceding that was. The British government did not bother to wait for the facts to come in. It announced within four hours that Scruton had been sacked from his position as an unpaid adviser to the architectural Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. Prime Minister Theresa May’s office called his comments “deeply offensive.”
The noteworthy thing about Scruton’s sacking is that this is the second time the online mob has tried to have him fired. Last November, BuzzFeed UK dragged up old statements of his from as early as 2007 opposing adoption by same-sex couples and calling “Islamophobia” a manipulative word. Their efforts failed then, despite a concerted effort to pressure the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, which is in charge of the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission. The fact that the housing minister sacked Scruton this time around proves a disturbing thing about left-wing internet mobs: If at first they don’t succeed, they will try again.
