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The death of Henry Nowak was a terrible crime. A young man was stabbed to death. The police response appears to have been grossly inadequate. His killer, Vickrum Digwa, was arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Nothing that follows should obscure these facts. Nor should anything that follows diminish the grief of Henry Nowak’s family, whose dignity in bereavement has been evident throughout.
At the same time, there are events that refuse to remain private. They illuminate wider truths about the society in which they occur. They reveal assumptions and habits of thought that extend far beyond the immediate circumstances. The reaction to Henry Nowak’s death has become one of those events.
Particularly revealing has been the response of the left-wing blogging collective Sodium Haze. Their statement deserves careful attention, not because it is especially unusual, but because it is representative. It expresses with unusual clarity a habit of thought that has become hegemonic throughout much of the contemporary left.
They write:
The murder of Henry Nowak was a heinous act and the police involved after his stabbing behaved appallingly.
His murderer Vickrum Digwa was arrested, tried, convicted and jailed for life. Henry’s family must be devastated but had the grace to plead that their son’s death not be exploited to stoke racial hatred, it has been exploited anyway.
There are over 500 homicides in the UK annually, of which 81% of the suspects are white, but THIS murder fits the narrative of oppressed victimhood that the far right delights in stoking for their own ends, they don’t give a damn about Henry or his family they merely sense an opportunity.
That Nigel Farage seized the opportunity is no surprise, he has no morals and cared not about the pain nor wishes of the victims family either. Farage wants a Trumpian world divided along lines of ethno-religious hatred for in such a world (and only that kind of world) he can gather power to himself.
We can expect the rest of the mainstream political / media complex to jostle for what political advantage they can scratch from this tragedy, they don’t seem to care where these dangerous dynamics can lead, or perhaps they are counting on them.
The argument deserves a serious response. Not because it is persuasive, but because it reveals so much about how large parts of the modern left now understand morality, politics, and race.
The first thing to notice is that the Sodium Haze writers are not obviously bad people. Indeed, I have often found myself agreeing with them. Their opposition to aggressive war is admirable. Their hostility to the Gaza holocaust is admirable. They appear genuinely disturbed by mass killing and by the abuse of power. This makes their reaction to the Nowak case all the more interesting.
