When Noticing Becomes the Crime

Once again, the guardians of acceptable opinion have trained their fire on Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante. Todd Gilchrist in Variety and others of his stripe denounce the film as morally bankrupt; a crude piece of exploitation that dares to show migrant crime, official leniency, and the rage of ordinary people abandoned by the state. They attack the messenger and the medium rather than confront the reality the film dramatises. We are attacked, yet again, simply for noticing.

I wrote last week about the long assault on the working class by the meritocracy; that self-regarding cultural elite who imagine themselves above the consequences of their grand experiments. Nowhere is this intellectual snobbery more evident than in the failure of mass migration into Europe. For decades the authorities have tiptoed around the conduct of certain migrant populations with a racism of low expectations. They created a two-tier justice system that manages mobs of Muslim men assembling outside police stations or marching through Whitechapel and Paris, while treating native concerns as the true threat. Everything must be done to preserve the narrative. The indigenous populations, and their integrated migrant allies, have now noticed. They are no longer willing to entertain the charade.

There’s nothing new to the premise of Citizen Vigilante: an ordinary man pushed beyond endurance when the justice system fails to punish the criminals destroying his community. What begins as a private act of revenge becomes a public phenomenon as his anonymous interventions expose the weakness, hypocrisy and moral confusion of modern Britain. Hailed by some as a hero and hunted by others as a dangerous criminal, he is forced to confront the central question of the story: when the state abandons its duty to protect the innocent, does one citizen have the right to take justice into his own hands, or does that decision merely create another kind of tyranny? The Plot is that of the Dirty Harry movies or perhaps closer to the Death Wish series. The reason why Germany has banned the film and it’s being universally attacked by the MSM across the west is that the baddies are a migrant rape gang.

And the response to Citizen Vigilante proves tonce again that ehn faced with the uncomfortable consequences of what their policies have created, the establishment shoots the messenger, in this case Böll who has chosen a controversial and sensitive but extremely relevant topic for his plot line. Censorship attempts and mainstream media attacks have and are, of course backfiring spectacularly. In this age of the VPN, such efforts are not only fruitless but counterproductive. They merely ensure that everyone will now seek the film out. The state treats its own citizens as the problem rather than the people it exists to serve. This is the heart of the matter. If the authorities truly wish to minimise the impact of a provocative film, they should address the issues it highlights and demonstrate, urgently and transparently, what they are doing now to reverse the damage and restore the social contract.

Instead they double down. They bully the native population while appeasing those whose integration has failed. This is a fatal miscalculation. The United Kingdom has a long and bloody history of civil war and rebellion; from 1381, to Jack Kade, from the Pilgrimage of Grace to Jacobitism and the Troubles, indeed, one would have thought that with the last one ending barely thirty years ago in Northern Ireland they might have remembered that managing these Kingdoms has always been a delicate balancing act. Yet they ignored the lessons of history. Now here we are. The sectarian violence we have seen this week will sadly get worse, and the attacks on those who warned of precisely this outcome will intensify rather than diminish as those in charge do anything but address the root causes which will continue to remain unaddressed which will lead to more violence. In the old days of the Troubles, this was known as the ‘cycle of violence’. Back then the product of cultural and demographic tensions building up over 400 years. Today, entirely self inflicted here as it is across the nations of Europe.

And indeed, that is the real tragedy: all of this has been inflicted upon us by those who have ruled us for forty years and repeatedly ignored the wishes of the electorate to end it. European governments, including our own in Britain, sacrificed the safety of their people; disgustingly, our most vulnerable children; for political ends and ideological comfort. They broke the fundamental agreement that the state will protect the citizen. When that contract shatters, people will eventually seek justice elsewhere. Don’t believe the spin, read the Rape Gang Inquiry Report in full and then ask yourself if you will ever, ever vote for these people, including Andrew Burnham, expected to be the next British Prime Minister, again.

Citizen Vigilante may be imperfect cinema, raw and uncomfortable as it is. But it is not morally bankrupt. The moral bankruptcy belongs to the elites who opened the floodgates, looked away from the consequences, and now condemn any artistic or public expression of the anger they themselves created. The noticing will not cease. The question is whether our rulers possess the wisdom, or the humility, to change course before the balancing act collapses entirely. From here in the hills of Northumberland, the evidence of our violent past is everywhere, from Hadrian’s Wall, an exercise in population control to the bleak fortress homes of the Riever clans, and where the old echoes of the Pilgrimage of Grace and Jacobitism still remind us of lost causes and hard reckonings, it looks increasingly late.

Pray for the nation.