(Part 2 of a two-part series)
In a euphemism-laden statement in mid-March 2022, a coalition of 20 ‘civil society organisations and healthcare providers’ led by the National Women’s Council of Ireland demanded the removal of the 12-week gestational limit to enable abortion on request up to ‘viability,’ to ensure ‘people’ do not have to travel abroad for the ‘procedure.’ This group also demanded an end to the three-day wait period enshrined in Irish legislation to provide mothers time to reconsider.
In a related event at the end of April, Orla O’Connor, Director of the National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI), a body claiming to be ‘mandated to represent the views of our members across Ireland to achieve true equality for women and girls,’ similarly reprimanded the Oireachtas (Irish parliament) Joint Committee on Health that it was ‘completely unacceptable’ that ‘just over half of maternity hospitals’ were providing abortion ‘services.’ Abortion, she said, should be available on request up to ‘viability,’ to ensure that no woman or ‘pregnant person’ is forced to travel abroad for essential reproductive healthcare.’
So, not just a misspeak, a slip of the tongue, an accidental formulation. Delivered from a carefully-constructed script: i.e., premeditated, probably funding-related, and non-negotiable.
No woman or pregnant person: While they butcher the future of Western civilisation, the angels of the abattoir engage in a macabre burlesque of words, which is also, of course, part of the death protocol: the belittling of life in every conceivable way.
I had a personal as well as an ethical and linguistic interest in this statement, having many years ago strayed unwittingly into the NWCI’s crosshairs. More than 20 years ago now, I wrote intermittently about the reality of what is called ‘domestic violence,’ pointing out that all the reliable independent research on the subject indicated that women were just as violent as men. The NWCI participated in a press conference in which I was denounced for ‘endangering the lives of women and children.’ The Irish Times, the newspaper for which I had written the articles, published a defamatory account of this press conference without seeking a response from me in accordance with its own ethical guidelines.
Now, it seems, the NWCI no longer represents just women with or without children, but also ‘pregnant persons,’ whom these two statements appear to suggest constitute a separate category to women, which reason suggests must therefore be . . . . men. In fact, what the NWCI and other ‘feminist’ bodies have in mind, in using terms like ‘pregnant persons’ and ‘pregnant people,’ are women pretending or claiming to be men, or, in the argot of transgenderism, ‘identifying as men.’
Many of the same feminist bodies justifiably object to the converse phenomenon of men identifying as women and claiming Olympic medals and the like by virtue of their all but invariable superior strength. But, in this instance, they appear to have either accepted that women identifying as men are no longer women, or have slipped into some twilight zone between the sexes. Alternatively — the NWCI may have unilaterally decided that the NWCI is no longer a ‘women’s council,’ or indeed a women’s anything, and now represents also certain categories of ‘men,’ for the moment to be filed under the evasive heading, ‘people.’ How, if this is the explanation, can the NWCI still be seen as representing ‘the views of our members across Ireland to achieve true equality for women and girls’? Is it conceding defeat and admitting that the best way for women to achieve ‘equality’ with men is to act like and pretend to be . . . men? That would be an odd kind of ‘feminist’ manoeuvre.
Happily, there is a much less head-wrecking explanation as to the meaning of the NWCI and its Director’s statements: It is that the NWCI is not, and never has been, a ‘feminist’ body in the sense that its ultimate objective was to make the world a better place for women; it is now, and always has been a Cultural Marxist organisation, the chief aim and purpose of which was and is to destroy the anthropological basis of human civilisation and replace it with chaos. The purpose of the ‘pregnant people’ trope, as we have seen with other forms of confusion-making, is to demoralise whole populations by forcing them to accept and adopt dissonant and mutually contradictory concepts. This revolution has in recent times crossed a line, beyond which ‘feminism’ is no longer to be regarded as a useful ‘product,’ and, as with other ‘feminist’ oganisations, much of the NWCI’s funding now depends on it abandoning its previous masquerade.
The ‘feminist’ phase of the ‘women’s movement’ mission was simply that — a phase. The NWCI Director’s reference to ‘pregnant persons’ signals that this phase is now over. Adult males of a certain category i.e. women (but whisper it), can now — at least according to the National Women’s Council of Ireland — become pregnant and have abortions, albeit for the moment in their capacity as ‘people’ rather than as ‘men.’ This is a loose end to be tidied up later.
This is an important development in many ways, not least in that it announces that the charade of feminist activism is now coming to an end, and that the ‘women’s libber’ is now to take her/his/their/its place in the chorus line of radical Marxist saboteurs for the final number.
What was called ‘feminism’ was actually the first wave — the advance guard — of Cultural Marxism, the late 20th century reset of the communist agenda designed to convert the ideology of Karl Marx from the economic to the personal realm of human existence. The context of this nomenclature was the urgency— arising from the failure of the working classes of capitalist societies to embrace their historical destinies by following the call of communism — that a Marxist revolution confined to economics would not succeed. Rather than exhibiting a passion for the victory of the proletariat, the working class wanted merely to gain a higher standard of living, and showed little interest in tearing down the system and taking control of the means of production in accordance with Karl Marx’s formulation of their historical role. Hence, ‘Cultural Marxism’, which begat what we now recognise as modern feminism, multiculturalism, the ‘gay rights’ movement and, latterly, the initiatives seeking to legitimise a multiplicity of gender types and cast doubts on the very validity of the concepts of masculinity and femininity.
Cultural Marxism, then, a mutated version of the original, is directed at changing fundamentally the way Western societies conduct their everyday operation in the most private areas of their domestic and community lives. Adopting and co-opting ‘minorities’ — blacks, gays, women (although not exactly a minority!) — it seeks to tap the cultural power of these respective victimologies to bludgeon down the edifices of Western civilisation, in particular marriage, parenthood, family, nationhood and religion. When you rinse it right down, the Cultural Marxist/PC political correctness/Woke revolution has as its objective the emasculation of the white male and the eradication of all values and power systems which are laid at his door, including religion, tradition and the ‘heteronormative’ nuclear family.
It is strange how, in seeking to raise issues concerning the suppression of the truth, you almost invariably end up discovering what the truth is, even though, at the time, you may have started out with only the foggiest idea of what you are dealing with. An example is what happened to me in the 1990s, when I first started to write about fatherhood, parenthood, the systemic and systematic brutalisation of fathers and father-children relationships in family law courts, and also the tangential issues like domestic violence law, suicide patterns, the social and political indifference to men’s health, and eventually the precise nature of feminism and its strange responses to what I was attempting to articulate.
The central issue — the one I returned to again and again — was family law and family courts, which had already insinuated themselves as the Inquisitions of the modern era. The ‘crimes’ unearthed in these courts can include a father contacting his own children without permission of the mother or the court, or visiting a house he built with his own hands, or failing to meet a child support order that is far beyond his ability to pay, or disagreeing with the policies of mother or school concerning sex education, or one of a thousand other contrived misdemeanours that, in the hidden realm of the family court system, invite punishments capable of destroying the very existence of the ‘accused.’
The word ‘Kafkaesque’ has been so overused, misused and abused that its meaning has become both clichéd and confused. Varying definitions refer to menacing complexity, the bureaucratic labyrinth of illogical authority, the unnecessary complication of what ought to be straightforward, the terrors of endless interrogation, forms of quasi-omnipotence slightly out of emotional focus, the surrealism of senseless power, a persistent nightmare of (un)reason, the collapse into hopelessness of trust in justice or systems, the actualisation of paranoia, and so forth.
But almost all definitions of the Kafkaesque overlook what is probably its most potent and emblematic characteristic: the state’s arrogation to itself of a right to intrude impertinently into the most personal and private realms of the human without evidence of actual wrongdoing. The most disturbing moments of the opening section of Kafka’s best-known novel, The Trial, relate not to the official mission or intentions of the warders who come to arrest K., but the way they deliberate over the quality of his nightshirt — telling him that he will have to wear ‘a less fancy one now’ — and going on to devour his breakfast.
This is a precise and resonant encapsulation of the totalitarian impulse. Totalitarianism is not political; it is always personal, a thought that may present an appropriate moment to remember an early feminist slogan: ‘The personal is political,’ a central plank of the Cultural Marxist platform. In this phrase we can perceive, too, an early iteration of the value system that became ubiquitous in the Covid period, whereby the state assumed the right to intervene in the innermost havens of human existence, turning the family home into a makeshift prison and assuming an entitlement to count and regulate the number of persons present at any given moment in our living rooms. The word ‘arbitrary’ is inadequate to describe this, just as it is inadequate to descibing the subterranean nature of family law in modern Western societies, in which the husband/father has been all but invariably the target of the emerging nouveau tyranny.
It is no accident that family law courts have become forums for the plunder and criminalisation of fathers, and unsurprising that men are increasingly wary of a concept of marriage that could mean that, one fine morning, they could awake to find that they have been arrested, lost their homes, wealth, property and children and face a battle to stay out of jail.
When I first tackled this topic as a journalist, I thought that what I was writing about was simply a neglected element of the kind of justice deficit that journalism existed to ventilate. I was simply trying to give voice to questions that almost no one else appeared to be asking — certainly no one in Ireland, the country where I had grown up with no sense at all that it might one day present as one of the most loathsome tyrannies in the former free world. I had no idea that I had stumbled into the future — that the grotesque injustices I was describing were not random or accidental, but part of a malign agenda to destroy families, parenthood, marriage and even romance, undermine manhood and so eliminate chivalry, heroism and other great virtues of the human, claim children for the state as the overarching societal super-parent, and sow seeds of antagonism between men and women that would one day lead to a harvest of sexual alienation and incomprehension that could be weaponised to imprison the human race.
When I began this mission to understand and explicate, I was essentially a soft-leftist, which is to say I liked the idea of being kind and generous to people who had less opportunities than I had. Before that, I was by inclination a rock ‘n’ roller. That’s where I started my life in journalism: writing about U2 and Elvis, Dylan, Hendrix and Lennon, all the icons of a liberal youth culture faith that assumed its own righteousness and irrefutability and was implicitly on the side of all kinds of emerging freedoms. Where my generation came in, back in the 1960s (actually the 1970s, which was when the Sixties arrived in Ireland), it all seemed easy: we just overturned the stalls of the grey-bearded patriarchs and denounced them. The headline issues were clear-cut and objectively irrefutable: universal civil rights, ending apartheid, nuclear disarmament, and, of course, equality for women.
My interest and involvement in the territory signposted ‘Feminism’ came about because, aside from the fact that I was, many years ago, involved in a relatively public struggle to defend my own parental rights in respect of my daughter (now in her mid-twenties), I had, as a writer and journalist, been addressing the situation of the father in culture and law in my work going back to the early 1990s. In 1994, a play of mine, Long Black Coat, which dealt with the cultural marginalisation of fatherhood, was staged in the Irish cities of Kilkenny and Dublin, receiving some awards and reasonably intelligent press coverage. Oddly, it was set in the future — in 2020, as it happens — and overlaid the apocalypse of fatherhood on the metaphor of a nuclear crisis.
For a long time, I saw the pattern of discrimination against fathers as an expression of deep prejudice and bias. I analysed the extensive brutalisation and ostracisation of fathers as problematic on grounds of injustice, and was mystified as to why I was the only one who had noticed these drifts. I have more recently come to realise that I was observing the early stages of a sinister wave of social engineering, now rapidly moving up through the gears. Gradually, over the past 30 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the attacks on fatherhood were really not down to simple prejudice, but represented the advance march of an ideology we can now observe entering its full stride. The point was not hatred of fathers but the early stages of a concerted attack on normative ideas of family, parenting and marriage.
By marginalising fathers, the system was creating a culture of vulnerable mothers, highly dependent on state largesse, women who, with their children, would be more likely to become vulnerable to the reconstructive designs of the regime. The last thing the ideologues wanted was the emergence of a cooperative post-divorce version of the fractured family: fathers and mothers, albeit living separately, raising their children in relative harmony. That is why governments almost everywhere have resisted introducing a serious, legally recognised mediation option for family disputes, and refused point blank to permit any enhanced rights for unmarried fathers while promoting infinitely more tenuous ‘family rights’ claims from other quarters. Thus, when the push came on from the powerful LGBT lobby to have gay marriage installed in the Irish Constitution as a body of ‘rights ’ equivalent to those confered on heterosexual couples, the feminists and feminists’ groups who had two decades earlier opposed parental equality with all their might and main, were all on the front line to give equal parenting rights to homosexuals of both sexes.
What was really going on was a reconstruction of cultural understandings not to favour either women or men but to promote new and radical models of family as remote as may be imagined from the normative, natural model. The biases I noted with growing incredulity and consternation back in the 1990s were just an early symptom of a dispensation that would before long contrive to speak and treat of gay couples (male or female) as being better parents than lone mothers or lone fathers, with biology an irrelevant factor. What I was recording was never simply an attack on fathers, it was always directed at the endgame of so-called ‘marriage equality’ — with the ultimate destination being the state’s assumption of the right to decide the conditions and fates of all children and all families.
The final objective was the redefinition of parenthood from biological to political concept, with the state enabling a variety of eccentric ‘family’ types while continuing to demolish the core kind. This means that, in substance and effect, the state becomes the ultimate ‘parent’ of every child. Susan Shell, in her book The Liberal Case Against Gay Marriage writes: ‘The right to one’s own children . . . is perhaps the most basic individual right — so basic we hardly think of it.’ But, Shell, like me, was aware that, under the terms of the emerging dispensation, we would very soon find ourselves in our liberal democracies in a generalised context whereby children would become something akin to commodities to be redistributed at the whim of judges and officials. A parent would be someone appointed or rubber-stamped by the state, his or her ‘parenthood’ the diktat not of biological fact but of legal definitions. Shell writes: ‘No known government, however brutal or tyrannical, has ever denied . . . . the fundamental claims of parents to their children. . . . . A government that distributed children randomly . . . . could not be other than tyrannical. . . . A government that paid no regard to the claims of biological parenthood would be unacceptable to all but the most fanatical of egalitarian or communitarian zealots.’ This, however, was the endgame of the ‘feminist’ revolution, funded by taxpayers money and protected by state institutions funded by the same mechanism.
There was a time when most people reacted to such pronouncements with dismissiveness and scorn. Why would the state contrive to do such a thing? At first, I too resisted the idea that such a monumental inversion of public understandings of nature could ever become possible. It has taken me most of the past three decades to comprehend that this is possible — not as a naturalistic phenomenon, but precisely as the outcome of fantastically effective propagandas, educational capture and covert coercion. Bulwarked by the utterances of celebrities, the acquiescence of cowardly politicians, the push of vested interests and latterly the intimidatory spleneticism of cyberanonymous ‘social-justice warriors,’ these industrialised lies have consolidated themselves as the core of the official belief systems of our societies. Now, with the onset of phases q to z — queer fascism, transgenderism, ‘Parents 1 & 2′,’ and Drag Queen Story Hour — to be followed hard by polyamory and even the attempted legitimisation of previously taboo matters like ephebophilia, hebephilia, and eventually paedophila — the totalitarian ambition of these destructive ideologies enters its late phases.
For a long time, delving into this morass of toxicity and venom, I had no idea. When I first came into conflict with what was called feminism in the mid-1990s, part of me was very confused by the apparent hypocrisy of the responses I was getting, and part of me was reacting with a form of what I can only describe as an inchoate and irrational guilt, because the area towards which I was being drawn was increasingly at odds with what I had hitherto regarded as my natural way of thinking.
And yet, all the time, there were these incongruencies, hypocrisies and contradictions. On the one hand, feminists claimed they wanted men to take a larger share of childrearing; on the other, when I proposed that we formalise this by placing it on a legal footing, they attacked me and tried to have me cancelled. I wrote and published thousands of words in the course of my attempts to get my head around this, much of them in an attempt to enter the minds of those who were attacking me. Was there some area of legitimate offence-taking that I was missing? I could not identify any. After all, if the goals and ideals of first-generation feminism were genuine expressions of its ambitions for humanity, feminists ought to be finding common cause with me. Surely by enabling men to share the role of chldminding, feminists could accelerate their own ambitions for ‘equality’?
When I stumbled across some of these seemingly contradictory tendencies, close on 30 years ago, my first thought was that I had run into some kind of overlooked vein of the human rights agenda that my fellow enthusiasts for freedom and justice had simply not gotten around to pointing out. But then, as I began writing tentatively out of my observations of family law injustice and the overwhelming preponderance of males among suicides, I couldn’t help noticing that those advocating rights for women, gays and other minorities, far from seeking to join my campaigns, seemed anxious to shut my mouth, regularly denouncing me publicly and forming delegations to demand that my editor relieve me of my position. I had, it appeared, made the naïve error of assuming that concepts like ‘justice’ and ‘human rights’ were indivisible and continued to have more or less the same meanings as in the dictionary. Something else was at play, but I could not put my finger on what it was. It took me a long time to find a frame capable of containing anything like the full picture. Sometimes, in the early days, driven by anger, I made statements that subsequently I felt had been over the top. But as time passed and I discovered more of the connections between various phenomena, it became clear to me that nothing I had said before had been in the least disproportionate: This ideology was far more poisonous than any capacity of mine to describe it.
The feminist writer Mary Daly, in her 1973 book Beyond God the Father, wrote that men are ‘an ontological evil in the universe.’ To write such a thing today about any sub-group of human society, other than adult male Caucasians, would be to court a jail sentence. Hate-speech by feminists has no such consequences. Indeed, this mode of expression is co-opted by authority figures and celebrities as an instrument of virtue-signalling, with men often the worst offenders. At the core of the propaganda is that any act of any man is the responsibility of all males, even the sons of the accusers from the moment they are old enough to be no longer protected by the designation ‘children.’
Vacillating between my inherited assumptions and my lived experience in reality, I was almost equally shocked when first I started to come across critical evaluations of feminism like that of the Harvard Professor of Yiddish literature, Ruth Wisse: ‘Women’s liberation, if not the most extreme then certainly the most influential neo-Marxist movement in America, has done to the American home what communism did to the Russian economy, and most of the ruin is irreversible. By defining relations between men and women in terms of power and competition instead of reciprocity and cooperation, the movement tore apart the most basic and fragile contract in human society, the unit from which all other social institutions draw their strength.’ Likewise the verdicts of men like Robert Bork in his book Slouching towards Gomorrah: ‘Radical feminism is the most destructive and fanatical movement to come down to us from the sixties. This is a revolutionary, not a reformist, movement. . . . Totalitarian in spirit, it is deeply antagonistic to traditional Western culture and proposes the complete restructuring of society, morality and human nature.’
Gradually I came to understand that feminists had functioned as one half of a pincer-movement honey-trap that had weaponised the Sexual Revolution to draw men into their web with the promise of uncomplicated and inconsequential sex, to be followed by a stiff invoice in the currencies of pain and dispossession. In tandem with the orchestrated Sixties revolution and its Flower Children, feminism helped to weaponise sexual desire, particularly male sexual desire, in the manner of a judo foot sweep, yielding to the opponent’s energy so as to use his own force against him. But each short ejaculation contributed its share to the growth of feminist power and in the end the consequences of free sex became very complicated indeed. By buying into the promise of free love, men left themselves open to losing their reputations, wealth, property, jobs and even their freedom, creating the greatest threat to civil liberties to occur in Western societies up to two years ago, when, as I say, the methodologies road-tested in the domestic arena were catapulted into the total public realm.
Among the things I was forced to accept was that virtually everything about the relations between the sexes that the vast majority of men and women had been led by constant propaganda to lazily accept — that women are in grave danger of violence by men at all times; that fathers are at best secondary parents’; that the most dangerous place for a child is the nuclear family — is completely, monstrously wrong. That so many people have come to believe these assertions is a tribute to the strategic disbursement of vast amounts of public money, most of it diverted from taxation of the citizens of all Western countries.
Back at the beginning of this ‘interesting’ voyage, I rather prematurely announced that we had arrived to the Age of the Omnipotent Victim. Kafka in The Trial, I wrote a quarter of a century ago, had made visible the phenomenon of absolute and arbitrary power exercised anonymously, perhaps the great tyranny of the age then just departed. In the age about to unfold, I postulated, the greatest tyranny would be the spectre of absolute power in the hands of the apparently defenceless victim: ‘We stand on the threshold of an era when, by virtue of being black, female, or the claimed sufferer of abuse or deprivation, the Omnipotent Victim will be set beyond justice, morality, fairness and the law, and anyone she accuses will be automatically convicted. In this future, if you come into conflict with someone whom our various ideologies designate as victim, by virtue of sex, race or origin, you had better have your affairs in order in advance of the hearing. Victims are never guilty of anything, and those they accuse never innocent.’
I have but relatively recently come to realise that, way back then, I had stumbled across perhaps the most rapidly metastasising and insidious of the terminal cancers by then radically afflicting modern society: the stripping out of the rights of ordinary citizens, without presumption of innocence, without due process, often without evidence, sometimes without the accused being told what he is accused of, with the intention and effect of invading that person’s life to the very core, stripping him of dignity and protections, reducing him to the status of latter-day serf — all under cover of secret courts claiming to protect mothers and children from the bogeyman called Father. I had tripped across something that led me inexorably to a conclusion that, however implausible it seemed even to me, the greatest impositions on human rights in our societies were bearing down not upon any of the trumpeted minorities of quotidian media insinuation, but against the very category implicitly indicted by these propagandas: men. As the Soviet system targeted the political and economic structures, these latter-day tyrants wanted control of intimate and family relationships; And this was occurring under pressure of the attrition of feminist propaganda in culture. The alleged cause of female equality was being used to dismantle human civilisation as it stood.
For what may not be immediately obvious reasons, the modern family court has come to represent the most telling and irrefutable microcosm of this destructive initiative. The explanation is actually straightforward: This is the arena in which the truth about power relations in the modern world emerges most starkly — in which the interests of women predominate, not merely at the behest of feminism, but also, by dint of the female hold over men, because one of the last remaining essentially ‘male-dominated’ systems sees this as a ‘correct’ state of affairs that holds no threat of loss to themselves. It is also the frontier of the civil war feminism has fomented between the sexes, being the locus where female domination of the intimate sphere is policed, even while, inch by inch, women are incrementally facilitated in moving towards domination of the public sphere also. Here, women are permitted to have it both ways, if only, in each individual case, as a token concession by — in the majority of instances — the most powerful men.
Divorce, the chief sanction of the family law system — which largely came about as a result of feminist agitation — resulted in the opening of the family home to the full and secretly exercised powers of the state. The mechanisms that developed out of ‘no-fault’ divorce — secret hearings, summary justice, the suspension of normal evidential requirements and pseudo principles like ‘the best interests of the child’ — created a contagious mentality among legislators, administrators of justice, and law enforcement, whereby it becomes increasingly acceptable to suspend due process in favour of vague, subjective and selective criteria, invariably enforced with extreme prejudice by ideologically-motivated activists posing as neutral administrators — what the great American scholar and writer Stephen Baskerville calls the ‘feminist gendarmerie’ of social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists, child protection experts and enforcers, counsellors, mediators, divorce planners, forensic accountants, and so forth. From the persistent agitation of feminists, and more recently homosexualists piggy-backing on the feminist revolution, the legal procedures relating to family life have been cut apart from the mainstream of law and justice, and enabled to expand exponentially without significant political objection. The list of areas into which the new culture of quasi-legality has spread includes domestic violence, rape and sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, child abuse, bullying, hate crimes, hate speech and sundry others. In each of these areas, guilt is established on the basis of accusation only: the subjective feelings of the accuser are the principle determining factor. If the accused pleads innocence, well, he would, wouldn’t he?
What happens in a family court is not so much that the system straightforwardly crushes the father/man, but that the system conspires to persuade all those with power to decide that it is the duty of the man to acquiesce in the idea of his being crushed (because the alternative seems to be the unthinkable crushing of a woman), with the two sets of lawyers (essentially — or at least usually) operating apparently to a chivalrous male notion of ‘gender’ roles rather than to an expressly feminist agenda. Thus, in the very engine rooms of the social reconstruction project, feminism conceals even its own existence behind a subterfuge of protecting the interests of children and ‘vulnerable’ women, having ultimately subverted the man-created culture of justice to drape a cloak of justification on the ultimate subversion of human reality at the most intimate level of human existence. All this is grounded in a foundational bed of anti-male, anti-father propaganda that has been pouring into the trenches of our culture for decades.
An ‘interesting’ aspect that has manifested in the past two years is the manner in which the methodologies first tested in the family law system — the arbitrary breaching of fundamental family rights, the effective suspension of due process, the brutalisation of the human person in the most private realms of existence and being — have now, in the Covid cult, being extended to entire populations. Little did we know that we fathers were lab rats for the New World Order’s designs to destroy not merely fatherhood, but also family, parenting, motherhood, marriage, the economic lives of the able classes, and finally the very humanity of the core populations of Western civilisation, thus destroying the civilisation itself. With Covid, Cultural Marxism entered its most ‘inclusive’ and possibly final phase — a new epoch in which all humans would be invited to volunteer to be victims, albeit a sub-category of such constructed to be relatively devoid of omnipotence, since it aspired to include everyone but the ‘elites’ in a new slave class. Covid enabled state regimes, on behalf of higher authorities, to issue an open invitation to all: agree to your own absolute vulnerability and we shall protect you, while also removing your freedoms, which only get you into trouble. Convinced that life as it stood was far too risky to be approached in the reckless manner of the past, the vast majority of the world’s populations agreed to this Faustian pact. Like many a beleaguered, hopeless father in the long night before a family court hearing, the human being, worn down by conflict and anxiety, agreed to surrender his soul and become a vassal of the Regime. In the future, there would no longer be men nor women, nor children, but merely slaves — the many slaves of the few, on whose bountiful mercy everyone would henceforth depend.
To understand what has happened in the past half-century or so, and how all this has converged and entered a new orbit since April 2020, we need — each of us in our own memories of our lives — to go back in time and reconsider many things we took for granted as they happened. If we do so, we may find that phenomena we had taken at face value have now acquired entirely different shapes and meanings — meanings that are, on deeper examination, nothing like as organic or innocent as we may have imagined.
For example, we might begin to examine the nature of the ‘freedoms’ that have been rolled out — or shoved down the throats of the majorities of our populations — over the past 50 years or so: the ‘freedom’ to kill nascent human beings as a means of securing immunity from sexual consequences; the ‘freedom’ to burlesque the idea of marriage; the ‘freedom’ to surrender fundamental rights and freedoms in the name of ‘solidarity’; the ‘freedom’ to engage in Pavlovian attacks on dissenters from the dominant narratives and ideologies. Soon — perhaps too late — we may begin to consider the connections between these ‘freedoms’ and the loosing of restraint and self-control they have engendered throughout our societies, a symbiosis that has now enabled the political class to ramp up political coercion and control on the grounds that the world’s appetite for ‘freedom’ has gotten out of hand.
We have been grievously misled. For most of all of our lives we imagined we were aboard some kind of freedom-and-progress project potentially implicating the entirety of the human species. At its core, this project appeared to be directed at persuading each and all of us that, by being kinder to our ‘minorities,’ we might participate in the elevation of the human species to a new level of civilisation. By rescuing women from the kitchen sink and the maternity ward, by giving homosexuals whatever they demanded in recompense for past slights and injuries, by opening our borders — and our wallets — to the denizens of less ‘privileged’ economies, we would make our world gentler, kinder and therefore better. ‘Equality’ would be the watchword of this revolution of improvement — albeit, as we could hardly help noticing, a strangely distorted equality, from which one party — the Omnipotent Victim — would always stand to gain and the other — the sucker at the table — always to lose.
In reality, we have been engaged not in a kind of velvet revolution but an undeclared war. A superficial reading of this war might conclude that it was a war by the world’s governments on their own peoples, and in a sense that is what it amounts to. But, deeper down, it is — like all wars — a war about resources. For now, the point is to dispossess those among the world’s population who fall into the middle range of economic existence, transferring their wealth in an upward direction, an exotic variation on the family law practice of asset-stripping men in the interests of ‘equality.’
The beneficiaries of this mammoth global heist are largely anonymous and out of sight. They are the richest of the rich; they already own more between them than the rest of the world’s population put together, but the focus of their concern is that they do not yet own everything. There are many names used to summon up this collective spectre of greed and viciousness; some people call them the ‘illuminati’; others talk about a ‘cult’ or ‘cabal’; others refer to the ‘secret unknowns’ or the ‘predator class.’ I call them The Combine, a term I have borrowed from Chief Bromden, the protagonist of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, subsequently made into a movie by Michael Cimino, featuring a different protagonist, R.P. McMurphy, played by Jack Nicholson. The Combine is the term Chief Bromden used to describe the body, agency or force — a kind of evil syndicate, is how he characterised it — bearing down upon humanity, seeking to oppress it and re-set its behaviour. The Combine runs everything using technological and human agents like Nurse Ratched and her vicious orderlies, rendering that half-century old book and movie among the most prophetic works in the history of popular culture.
Over the last thirty or forty years, we have invested an enormous amount of thought, resources, feeling, passion, sweat and blood in what we might call the superstructure of human dignity — human values, rights, freedoms, the defense of human dignity and individual autonomy. And it is perhaps not coincidental that, over the same period as the human race was constructing this edifice of rights and freedoms, its scientists and philosophers were working overtime to dismantle our most fundamental understanding of the limits of the human edifice, preparing for a time when human beings would in effect declare themselves deities by acquiring the capacity to generate new human life by artificial means, terminate human life at the point just beyond initiation or before its natural end, and put in place the detailed plans for a posthumanist future when human beings would be absorbed into the machine, leaving their souls and their free wills behind.
Most of the political battles of the past half century have — ostensibly, at least — been waged around questions of extending human rights to previously disenfranchised groups, such as women, gays, minorities, the disabled, and so on, theoretically adding to (though in reality aspiring to supplant) the pre-existing universal rights entitlements arising under the headings of Fundamental and Personal. The ‘new rights’ were the Cultural Marxist-sponsored rights, the additional entitlements extended to ‘minorities,’ though, as we have seen, not as cost-free as they were presented. These campaigns, though appearing to pursue various agendas — ‘women’s liberation’, ‘gay rights,’ ‘anti-racism,’ et cetera — had really just one purpose: to sow the seeds of the chaos and demoralisation which would make it easier to effect these purposes. This chaos has being rampant now for close on a decade, and is approaching its apogee — the moment when the secret unknowns/predator class/Combine will finally have its way with the world, or else the world will awaken as one man and face the tyrants and their messengers down.
In the Time of Covid, we shredded pretty much all of this catalogue of rights, apart from the Cultural Marxist elements — to the total silence and apparent indifference of the normatively understood primary defenders of freedom. April 2020 may yet go down in history — if there is a history — as the month that liberalism died.
It was, shall we say, interesting to observe that, in the Time of Covid, abortions continued uninterrupted, even though most other ‘medical procedures’ were suspended, and anti-racism demonstrators were given the run of streets from which the everyday populace had been as though surgically removed. This provided the merest flash of the deeper-down nature of the Cultural Marxist agenda, which all the time had not been about extending rights, but taking them away. By creating discrete sets of rights for defined groups and entities, the attendant ideological process implicitly opened up the possibility that ‘rights’ might exist for named categories, and not for the unnamed, which is to say any category listed by the Cultural Marxists as bearing responsibility for indictable historical wrongs. Broadly, as we have noted, these beneficiaries fell into three categories: gay, black and female. And yet, these categories were as radically circumscribed as anyone in the general context, by virtue of the withdrawal of fundamental rights. Thus, a homosexual man could adopt someone else’s child and speak therefore of his ‘family,’ but his entitlement to go into a shop without a humiliating face covering was just as circumscribed as that of the most devout Christian greybearded Caucasian. A black lesbian had every protection for her homosexuality, ‘gender’ and colour, but had no greater right to travel more than two kilometres from her home than the straight, ‘white’ Christian father of a nuclear family with three children.
There were multiple reasons for the liberal silence about what was emerging from the spring of 2020, but the primary one was that liberals, having become convinced that the most important freedoms were the more recently-minted ones — for abortion, homosexual rights and open borders — and that the old varieties were somehow, being in conflict, as was suggested, with ‘the common good’ — were henceforth to be regarded as suspect. This syndrome played out during the Covid subterfuge to the great benefit of the orchestrators, who became spectacularly richer in the two years of Covid’s First Act.
Conservatives, because of their almost universal immersion in religious ideas — some due to a profound grounding in Christian anthropology, others simply recalling the church doctrines on sodomy, the right to life and the Thomist treatise on migration — had automatically recoiled from these claimed new rights. Now, they rose to defend the more fundamental kind, as these came under severe threat to the apparent indifference of the ‘liberal’ left.
Liberals, observing this reaction, doubled down on their defence of the Cultural Marxist-sponsored rights, but reacted against the conservative defence of fundamental liberties. This, and a little judicious state and corporate nudging and tweaking, ensured that defending the most fundamental rights of human beings came in short order to be seen as a reactionary activity.
This established a precedent by which the very definition of ‘rights’ underwent the final stage of a phased rewriting. By this redefinition, rights are no longer rights, but concessions by the Regime on the basis of victim-points, though these are to be regarded not as automatic entitlements but ideological gifts that may be withdrawn or amended for any reason or none. In this staged procedure, without a word being spoken to say what was actually happening, the age-old guarantor-words of fundamental/personal rights — ‘inalienable,’ ‘imprescriptible,’ ‘indefeasible,’ ‘antecedent,’ ‘anterior,’ and ‘inviolable’ — were silently dissolved. It was no longer forbidden to extend or withhold ‘rights’ on a selective basis — for what had the ‘majority’ been doing for ‘minorities’ for dozens of years? It was no longer reasonable to say that individual rights might be absolute, for the ‘common good’ (seen, in this context, as the surrendering of each individual’s rights to a community whole that was by definition incapable of exercising them) so demands. The moment when the collective rights of robots might be invoked to justify the total withdrawal of rights from humans seemed to take a few jerky steps forward.
These objectives had been in the works for decades, and were always the endgame purpose of those troubling and anomalous phenomena to which we ascribed entirely different meanings. So it was with feminism. There was no women’s revolution, but rather a paid-for colour revolution purchased by rich oligarchs with sinister agendas.
Feminism has been the Trojan horse of Cultural Marxism. It was also the first wave of what we have experienced for the past two years, for all this is of a piece. ‘Women’s liberation’ was only marginally about ‘equality of the sexes’ — a sweetener/camouflage to obscure its true nature. It was really about the destruction of the normative world and its core institutions, including family, nation and faith, as well as the even more fundamental understandings of the structure of the edifice of human civilisation itself. The family was firstly attacked via the father (though this was to be a preliminary manoeuvre, to be followed up in due course by the undermining of the mother). The nation was, similarly, destabilised by the emasculation of males, so that ultimately there would be no one left to defend it. Abortion was the central plank of the attacks on faith, religion and spirituality, as it forced people to choose between the understandings of their religious upbringing and the call for ‘compassion’ for women wishing to rid themselves of unwanted children. Feminist crusading, with its mixture of ingenuous complaint and breezy menace made for a well-adapted battering ram — under all three headings.
What made feminism so adaptable for this purpose was its initial surface unexceptionability, its appeals to justice and equality; its attraction to ‘enlightened’ men as a means of signaling their ‘virtue.’ The symbiotic dynamics of sexuality and chivalry ensured that the ‘revolution’ would not be resisted no matter how ugly its methodologies or the price it inflicted on innumerable men. Such men were treated as casualties in a war that had already been decided as to its outcome. For these and other reasons, it appealed, superficially at least, to a working majority of women.
Academia and the media were the nurseries in which the ideologies designed to push and disseminate the cultural changes necessary for this revolution were developed. It was important that these institutions were almost entirely sedentary in their cultures, allowing for little or no distinction as between the functioning or operation of men as against women. Many of the men who worked in these institutions would have been the first in the male lines of their families to do non-physical work, or ‘women’s work’ as it had once been designated in more robust circles. In order to justify this and abide with it, they needed to create a sense among themselves that they were, in fact, superior to men who worked and existed by sweat and muscle. For such ‘transitioning’ men, it created a distorted sense of identification with women, as well as an enmity towards men who, by virtue of their muscularity and loud voices, seemed to be refugees from a pre-modern age and therefore at once threatening and a little repulsive. Of course, all this was contorted by the fact that, sexually speaking, women often made no distinction between the two categories, or, when they did, tended to go for the sub-modern model. This effect was counterbalanced by the influence of rock ‘n’ roll, which, through the promotion of androgynous images and ideas, created a new sexual currency which served to devalue the older, muscle-based model and allowed the emasculated weaklings to inherit the Earth. And all this seemed to go swimmingly for most men until the moment when the reality of feminist power loomed suddenly large in their lives — perhaps by the loss of their homes and children — and in the unassailable nature of the emerging new facts: women now ‘shared’ power in the exterior world, but had surrendered none of their power in the domestic realm, and were therefore at least three-quarters of the way to the feminist goal of total female supremacy. If this seems a stretch, the truth is perhaps a little more extreme: When you consider the various statistics to do with male health and mortality, the rates of suicide by young men, the escalating educational evisceration of boys and young men, and latterly the #MeToo movement, which threatened the final emasculating of sexually active men, it becomes clear that, in the war against men, it is already much later than even the more alert among us have been thinking.
Now that the velvet gloves have been removed, we are beginning to see the final destination a little more clearly. Among the many feminist canards that have been rumbled in the recent months is the idea that a world run by women would be a gentler, kinder place. The authoritatian behaviours of such as Jacinda Ardern, Nicola Sturgeon and Ursula von der Leyen — as well as the bloodthirstiness of Victoria Nuland and Liz Truss in the context of the conflict in Ukraine — have surely put paid to such ideas for whatever remains of human history.
Female leaders have been at least as zealous in their implementation of Covid tyranny as almost any of the male figures on the geopolitical stage. In fact, by dint of sheer literalism in their presentation of the ‘facts’ and ‘measures,’ the women leaders have mostly far outstripped their male counterparts, combining nannyish scoldings with a kind of take-it-or-lose-everything shrug of indifference to the suffering and consternation of those they had rapidly come to see as their ‘subjects.’ It is as though their former feminine diffidence had concealed a monarchical fantasising that can now be given free rein — the sham of their female tenderness evaporating like dew in the sun when the cosh was placed in their manicured hands.
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Author John Waters
