Henry Nowak and the savagery of state wokeness

So this is where wokeness has dragged us. Into a moral abyss where a boy is handcuffed by cops as he bleeds to death. Into a wasteland of virtue where an 18-year-old lad, stabbed five times, is treated as a speechcriminal as he gasps his final breaths. Into a sorry, dystopic excuse for a society where the last words a youngster hears are the defamatory cries of the man who killed him. ‘He was racist’, his murderer said. ‘I can’t breathe’, the boy begged.

The case of Henry Nowak has shocked the nation. He was a Polish-Briton in his first year at university. During a night out in Southampton in England in December last year, he had a fatal encounter with a Sikh man named Vickrum Digwa. Some kind of altercation took place. Digwa then stabbed Nowak five times with his kirpan, the ceremonial curved sword that Sikhs carry. Nowak was gored in his chest, his face and his legs. He scrambled over a fence, leaving a blood trail in his wake. ‘I’m dying’, local residents heard him say. He was right.

As savage as the knifing was, it was what happened next that has shaken Britain’s soul. Digwa’s mother arrived and spirited away the murder weapon – it was later found hidden in the family home with 20 other Sikh swords and knives. Digwa then accused Nowak of having racially abused him. He said Nowak used a racist slur against him, punched him and knocked off his turban. These were ‘wicked lies’, the court heard during his murder trial. Yet there was a group of people on the scene of this atrocity who believed Digwa’s vile libels against the youth he had just fatally lacerated: the police.

The police’s behaviour that night defies all logic and humanity. They bowed to Digwa’s defamatory slurs and arrested and handcuffed young Henry. The Telegraph’s report captures the barbarism of the police’s credulous ineptitude that grim evening: ‘As the teenager lay there, unable to breathe as his lungs filled with blood, begging officers for help, they ignored his pleas and placed him under arrest. He died less than an hour later.’ If anything will cause decent Britons to lose faith in the police, it’s this: the haunting vision of a boy being manhandled by the state as he drowned in his own blood.

This week Digwa was found guilty of murder. His mother was found guilty of assisting an offender. And the police have apologised for the fact that Nowak was ‘arrested in the moments before he lost consciousness’. But this isn’t the end of this story. It can’t be. This cruellest of deaths, this humiliation by the state of a boy who was dying, will surely force a reckoning with the social poison of political correctness. For it exposes the extent to which the cult of wokeness has chased truth and virtue from our societies.

We all know why Digwa’s evil lie was believed and why wounded, gasping Henry’s pleas for help went unheeded – it’s because the word ‘racism’ acts like a magic spell on our ruling class. It’s like a rhetorical narcotic. The minute they hear it, they morph, like woke Manchurian candidates, into wide-eyed searchers for the merest hint of that greatest sin in our morally deracinated times: white privilege, and prejudicial speech. Their aim becomes not the discovery of truth but the demonstration of virtue. On that street in Southampton, once the word ‘racism’ had been uttered, the role of the state’s representatives suddenly and radically changed: it was no longer to investigate a potential crime but to obsequiously act out a moral script.

Having prostrated themselves so fully before the new regime religion that falsely calls itself ‘anti-racism’, the police were virtually programmed to believe the ‘brown man’ and be sceptical of the ‘white man’. No doubt the critical race theory that pumps like a toxin in the veins of the establishment kicked in, meaning that the Sikh who had so ruthlessly wielded his sword instantly became the victim, while the target of his red-mist knifing – the white boy – became the oppressor. The state’s intoxication with the hyper-racialised politics of victimhood has driven it ever further into a quagmire of dogma where cool moral judgment is all but impossible.

It’s important to say that this handcuffing of a dying boy was not ‘a failing’ by individual police officers. The police forces of the United Kingdom are expressly instructed to believe, without question, every accusation of hate crime. They are told that even things perceived to be racist are probably racist. They are trained to see ‘racism’ everywhere – in every slight, in every tussle between whites and non-whites. The police’s cruel subduing of a stabbed teen was not an aberration – it was the horrific logical conclusion of the new ruling-class ideology that sees us less as citizens with rights than as racial creatures in need of micro-management. The demeaning of young Henry was the woke state in action.

The state turned a blind eye to the rape of vulnerable girls by mostly Muslim gangs out of a fear of being thought ‘Islamophobic’. The very same wilful blindness born of cowardice led those officers to see a stabbed boy as a tyrant and his stabber as a victim. The questions pile up. For how much longer can we suffer under such a two-tier ideology that allows Sikhs to do what the rest of us are forbidden from doing: carry lethal weapons? Why did Keir Starmer take the knee for George Floyd when he died 4,000 miles away but not for young Henry murdered and failed down in Southampton? And most pressingly, what are we going to do about a state that arrests a boy as he chokes on his own blood and as his killer gloats and maligns him? We have to do something.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.