The west’s revolutionary chickens coming home to roost Melanie Phillips
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/
We need more people to fight back against coerced cultural conformity
Why is so much of the political, cultural and business establishment meekly going along with the onslaught against normative western values and the repudiation of rationality itself?
As I wrote in today’s Times (£), institutions are going down like ninepins in the face of this coerced cultural conformity.
Companies are turning their human resources departments into witch-hunts, imposing “unconscious bias” training and requiring Soviet-style confessions of thought and identity crime. Universities and schools are rewriting history and turning education into anti-British and anti-American propaganda.
Through “cancel culture,” people in Britain and America are being turned into social and professional pariahs for resisting any of these orthodoxies which are hijacking language itself and turning it inside out. They find themselves demonised and delegitimised for the crime of pointing out demonstrable realities. Truth-telling has become “hate”, while hatred of those who dissent from this Newspeak is called “social justice’.
How can so many have buckled to this agenda for refashioning British and western culture through a process that, back in the 1950s, the historian Jacob Talmon dubbed “cultural totalitarianism”?
How can the storied Tavistock psychiatric clinic in London be subjecting children confused about their sexual identity — usually part of some wider psychological disorder — to irreversible changes when they are too immature to know what they are or what they imagine they want to be? Since when did doctors treat mental disorder by endorsing the fantasies of the disordered patient and — unconscionably worse still — by subjecting them to often irreversible alterations to their bodies in accordance with those fantasies?
How can so many distinguished scholars running universities in America and Britain be acquiescing — whether actively or passively — in the transformation of these erstwhile crucibles of knowledge and open-minded inquiry into cauldrons of hateful propaganda and falsehoods designed to destroy their country and its culture and seal their students’ minds tightly shut?
How can so many companies and businesses, normally hard-headed critics of the ruinous ideological fantasies beloved of the hyper-educated classes, now be trying to turn their employees into compliant automatons more reminiscent of the workplace practices of the Chinese Communist Party?
The main reason is surely terror of the consequences for anyone who dares resist this agenda. Some may also think there’s money to be made from it, or that it isn’t really very important. Some, though, actively subscribe to it. How can all these people be so shallow?
The answer lies in what’s been happening to the west over the past half century. The current culture wars reflect decades of cultural Marxist chickens coming home to roost.
As some of us have long warned, there’s been a revolutionary long march through the institutions aimed at subverting western nations and destroying their culture. Setting out to undermine the traditional family, the education system and the concept of the nation-state itself, the signature motif of this ideology is the repudiation of reason itself.
Holding there is no such thing as objective truth, such dogma has made it intrinsically impossible to acknowledge when something is a lie. Propaganda falsehoods are thus rebranded as “my truth” or “what’s true for me”.
Reality has become whatever you decide it should be. Reason and evidence have been junked for the rule of emotion. The claim of “victimhood” has become a passport to impunity for misdeeds and a weapon of blame against the innocent. Victim groups have thus gained power over groups deemed to be oppressive, even when this charge is the precise opposite of the truth.
Which is why a transgender New Zealand weightlifter who claims to be a woman but has a man’s build and strength is about to destroy women’s weightlifting at the Olympics by taking part in the women’s super-heavyweight category, an act of brazen and outrageous injustice to women competitors and a death-sentence to the core sporting ideal of fair competition.
Which is why anti-men feminists maintain that all women who claim to be victims of rape are axiomatically victims and all accused men are axiomatically guilty — even though there have been numerous miscarriages of justice where the man convicted of rape or sexual assault has subsequently been found not guilty after his life has been ruined.
On this issue — over which even British Conservative politicians genuflect to the man-bashing lobby by agreeing that not enough men are being found guilty of rape, having been accused by women who are assumed to be their “victims” simply because they have made this complaint — rule by emotion is so strong that the presumption of innocence, the very core of criminal justice, has been junked and replaced by the presumption of male guilt.
And which is why proponents of a racially bigoted agenda that demonises all white people on the basis of the colour of their skin claim with a straight face to be “anti-racists”.
Some of this is quite comically asinine. London’s prestigious St Paul’s Girls’ School — hitherto a feminist academic powerhouse — has ditched the term “head girl” as “too binary” and replaced it by “head of school”. This despite the fact that it remains by name a girls’ school, and its head teacher is called the “high mistress”. How can anyone respect people who are supposedly at the very top of the educational pyramid but who produce such knee-jerk idiocies?
Elsewhere, careers and reputations are being shredded. The artist Jess de Wahls has become the latest in a long line of victims of the transgender inquisition. The Royal Academy of Arts removed her work from its gift shop after she was denounced for “transphobia”. Her crime was saying she couldn’t accept people’s “unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born”.
The only chance of halting this madness is by standing up to it. The reason it’s made so much headway is that its proponents are treated with kid gloves. Cultural degradation happens when it comes to be seen as inevitable. Those bringing it about need to be made aware that they will pay a personal price for doing so. As the American writer John Ringo quipped: “Get woke, go broke.”
Some have begun to fight back accordingly. Oriel College, Oxford, hastily abandoned its consultation on pulling down its statue of Cecil Rhodes after furious alumni cancelled £1.5 million in donations and threatened to withdraw even more.
When the National Trust started transforming its role from honouring the past to trashing it by hectoring visitors about properties said to be associated with colonialism and slavery, it started haemorrhaging members and its chairman was forced to resign.
Cambridge University’s vice-chancellor Professor Stephen Toope, who approved a website where students could anonymously report “micro-aggressions” by dons, was forced to retreat after tutors accused him of creating a “police state”.
In Manhattan, several parents at exclusive schools teaching their children to hate America and all white people have now removed their children in fury and disgust.
In similar vein, why should parents of pupils at St Paul’s Girls’ School want to pay it £26,000 a year in fees to have their daughters de-sexed, disempowered and taught by teachers who were themselves instructed at a school seminar that there are at least 150 gender identities?
In Britain, the fledgling TV station GB News, whose mission is to provide an alternative to brainwashed British broadcasting, was hit last week by a campaign of intimidation designed to shut it down as soon as it was launched.
Under the impetus of a social injustice group called Stop Funding Hate, which targeted GB News with instant character assassination, various companies and institutions threatened to pull their ads on the network or were persuaded to hesitate before committing themselves to advertising there.
They got more than they were bargaining for, however, when the station’s bullish founder, Andrew Neil, used his new network to issue a blistering denunciation and threatened to turn the tables by boycotting them. Faced with the fury of consumers, some of these companies immediately backed down or said with hand on heart that they had never intended a boycott anyway, perish the thought.
People are very influenced by the cultural mood music. If everyone seems to be going along with a pernicious point of view, those who recoil from it either think there must be something wrong with them or, if they realise there really is something terribly wrong with it, are understandably terrified of being picked off if they oppose it.
If public figures make such a stand, however, people get braver. Which is why politicians and other high-profile cultural leaders should denounce this agenda. They should show they won’t tolerate it in their own organisations and will stand against those that do.
They are, however, all-too silent, terrified of provoking the inevitable titanic rows and name-calling which they believe would court electoral disaster. What such people fail to grasp, because all they can hear is the cacophonous media screeching about unstoppable cultural change, is that millions are appalled by these developments and will flock to the banner of those who oppose them.
Even now, even after the Brexit vote and the election as US president of Donald Trump — two seismic events that shocked the media and political establishment to the core because in their hermetically sealed bubble they didn’t have a clue that millions of sensible people despised and feared everything they stood for — the west’s cultural titans still don’t realise that those millions of voters yearn for leaders who will actually stop western society from rolling off the edge of the cultural cliff.
But is it all too late? Will any fightback be swamped by the stampede to cultural suicide?
After all, western society is currently being run into the ground by people whose level of knowledge and ability to think have been emasculated by decades of educational subversion. Many of them have been appointed to positions of power and influence — in schools and universities and the media, in the law and the police and political parties and the civil service — not because of their ability but because they tick the various boxes of identity politics.
The result is that many who now wield cultural power have no idea that anything is wrong with this degraded intellectual and moral landscape because it’s how they were taught and brought up and are currently indulged —and it’s all they have ever known.
So it’s hard to see how the west can pull back from this cultural disintegration. But who knows? Britain was on the way to being defeated by Hitler until Churchill suddenly arrived to take charge after years in the political wilderness. It’s darkest before the dawn, and all that.
There are millions who understand what’s at stake, after all. The more people step up to the plate over this, the braver our leaders will be forced to become; and the braver they are, the more people will step up to the plate.
Will it work? Wrong question. What will become of the west if this doesn’t happen? Well, we surely know the answer to that one.
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