Winston Marshall: the musician who plays and sings them to mainstream thinking
Winston Marshall and Andy Ngo don't have much in common. The first is a British musician, known for playing the banjo in the band Mumford & Sons ; the second is a conservative US investigative journalist who at the beginning of the year published "Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy" , a work in which he criticizes the American left movement, which in turn has been heavily criticized for information deceptive and manipulated. The two are linked by a tweet from Marshall last March addressed to the writer: “Congratulations Andy Ngo. I finally found the time to read your book. You are a brave man ” . Since then, the British artist's career has changed: first he took a break, then in June he decided to leave Mumford & Sons entirely after being hit by a shower of criticism and personal attacks from the Twitter bubble.
He told it himself with a post in which he expresses thoughts and perplexities and explaining that the choice to call himself out is dictated by the awareness of not wanting to drag the other members of the group into the chaos. In his speech, Marshall first quotes Churchill (" Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak . Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen ") and then the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solženicyn ( "And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul – don't let him be proud of his 'progressive' views (…). Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward "). So he clears himself from the accusations of being a right-wing extremist, calling himself a centrist tending liberal and remembering above all that his family knows what fascism is: “Thirteen members of my family were killed in concentration camps during the Holocaust. Calling me a fascist is unbelievable ” .
Marshall unveiled the "behind the scenes" effect of his speech with an article published for the Specator entitled "A quiet revolution" . Colleagues, musicians, doctors, public administration officials, actors, politicians, thinkers, religious, students, professors, volunteers, activists, journalists, entrepreneurs and many others have confessed to him via message that they have censored themselves on several occasions for fear that their opinions cost too much to their careers and personal lives. Reason why "people stay quiet" , people remain silent. For his part, the artist, re-proposing the thought of the Czechoslovakian opponent Václav Havel, is confident that the restoration of an honest and common sense dialogue between the parties and the admission that they are all fallible would help to restore freedom of thought and speech. .
Marshall also appears among the co-founders of Hong Kong Link Up , a non-profit organization to equate the inhabitants of the city controlled by the Beijing government with British residents, thus granting them a status that protects them from the interference of the Chinese Communist regime and to achieve the United Kingdom: his testimony was collected in the latest episode of the Speaking Up podcast edited by the Somali-born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on which the condemnation of Islamic extremism – and woke circles hangs. A chat between contemporary dissidents.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/winston-marshall-il-musicista-che-le-suona-e-le-canta-al-pensiero-mainstream/ on Fri, 16 Jul 2021 03:51:00 +0000.