“A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good, just because it’s accepted by a majority.”
Booker T. Washington was a black/African-American/person of colour* (delete as applicable for the latest politically correct terminology) from the last generation in the United States to experience slavery. Washington was head of the Tuskegee Institute where he stressed the importance of technical education and self-help for ex-slaves and their descendants. He thought black Americans should not challenge the racist Jim Crow laws of the post-Civil War South and was less popular with northern blacks who opted to set up the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP).
The word ‘totalitarian’ was first used to describe Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy. The key to understanding a totalitarian regime is that it is not content with mere passive acquiescence but demands individuals fully accept all the tenets of the ruling ideology and have an emotional attachment to the goals of the ruling elite. As Mussolini himself said…
“Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
The contrast between the Roman imperial cult and the second of the Abrahamic religions that eventually replaced it is instructive. Emperors were content with individuals occasionally sprinkling a bit of incense to acknowledge their divinity; the monstrous deity of the Bible and the Koran will sentence you to an eternity of torture for even thinking against one of his petty rules.
Some of the worst totalitarians in world history didn’t just expect people to believe in their ideology but to acknowledge ‘truths’ that were, at best, unproveable, and, at worse, simply false. The deranged Roman emperor Caligula (ruled 37-41AD) demanded his subjects believe in his divinity and regularly appeared in the guise of his favourite god or goddess (an early sufferer from gender dysphoria?). At one festival Caligula asked the future emperor Vitellius whether he had seen the moon goddess coming to visit him; Vitellius probably saved his neck with the reply “only you gods can see each other.” In the Byzantine Empire, blood was shed over arcane disputes about the nature of Christ and whether he had one or two natures. During the Reformation, people were burned to death because of arguments over matters to do with Catholic and Protestant theology. And coming into modern times, Stalin’s Russia saw a personality cult that stressed the omniscience of the party and its leader; everyone was expected to cheer along to announcements about tractor production and the fulfilment of the Five Year Plans that had little or nothing to do with reality.
In George Orwell’s brilliant dystopian novel 1984, the main character Winston Smith asserts that…
“Freedom is the freedom to say that 2+2=4. If that is granted, all else follows.”
After he falls into the hands of the enigmatic O’Brien, a senior Party figure who takes an interest in him and his heretical views, Smith is subjected to brutal physical and psychological torture. During one of the many conversations that take place during his imprisonment, O’Brien tells Smith that…
“I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”
O’Brien even goes so far as to suggest to Smith that 2+2 can equal 5, if the Party so wished.
The religious zealots and Toytown O’Briens of 2020 demand people believe that 2+2=5 in a similar way. Two months after their fourth successive election defeat, a defeat that saw their party slump to its lowest total of seats since 1935, the UK Labour Party has chosen to spend the past week or more arguing about transgenderism. That will help them win back working class voters in the Midlands, the North of England and Scotland! People discuss nothing else in the backstreet pubs of Stoke, Newcastle and Glasgow. But the totalitarian cry of ‘transwomen are women’ has become something of a purity test for Labour and there has even been calls to expel ‘transphobes’ from the party – although they are quite happy with anti-Semites.
There is not one single demonstrable fact that backs up transgender ideology. The most ardent of the ‘transwomen are women’ brigade simply assert their ideology and scream at anyone who disagrees. Four centuries ago these folks who have been screaming ‘witch’ at anyone who didn’t conform. Despite what the ‘woke’ misanthropes believe, I think most people are fundamentally decent and will treat transgender people with respect; what they will not do is believe that someone with a penis or a Y-chromosome is female. They are more John Cleese than Michael Palin.
I’d like to end with a thought from my elderly mother. Posterboy (snigger) for transgenderism Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner has suggested that the hardest thing about being a woman is deciding what to wear in the morning. My mother said she wishes “some of these blokes could go through women actually have to go through” by which she meant teenage periods, childbirth and the menopause. Bit more difficult than choosing a frock eh Brucie?
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