Newspeak is fundamentally misanthropic

I had a friend at medical school who was an old-school communist, of the “Come the revolution…” variety. He was actually a very nice bloke, and paradoxically his doctrinaire Marxism sat comfortably with a devotion to the Rolling Stones – hardly a icons of pure socialist egalitarianism.

I remember in one lecture looking over his notes and seeing that he was compiling a list of those who would need to be eliminated in the new order. It was headed by “hospital consultants,” presumably prompted by the perceived quality of the lecturer, and then went through what one would think of as the usual suspects for Bolshevik animus, such as capitalists, priests, and so on.

When I pointed out that, as a Christian (at that time planning to be a medical missionary) I would appear on his death-list, he very generously said that, once the revolution came, I would no doubt be one of those who saw the error of my former ways and embrace the new.

He was wrong, of course – but also wrong in thinking that repentance would have made any difference whatsoever to a Soviet or Maoist style government. A class enemy is born, not made. And the chilling thing is that my, essentially, gentle-natured friend (who went on to be a good GP), if he had actually found himself as part of a governing communist power, would almost certainly have been persuaded that his good-will towards an old, but incorrect, friend must be suppressed, and the eggs broken to make the utopian omelette.

One day I went into the cafetaria for coffee, and found him sitting alone and rather glum. “You look a bit down,” I said.

“I’m the only socialist amongst 600 fascists,” he replied. This was not strictly true, as there was a small coterie of “new left” type cultural Marxists planning to subvert the institutions rather than arouse the workers (which may be why they’re now professors, and he became a mere GP), but he was right to observe that a London medical school was scarcely the most left-wing of institutions, largely consisting of the privately educated children of other doctors, and having a rugby team cheerfully touring Apartheid South Africa when that was verboten.

Even so, when everyone is a fascist, what word do you reserve for Mussolini’s crowd? Woody Guthrie’s guitar was labelled “This Machine Kills Fascists.” But what if everyone is a fascist? If anyone ever put such thinking into practice, entire populations would perish… oh, they actually did, at the very time my friend made his remark, under Paris-trained Pol Pot, in Cambodia. Fortunately for my friend’s career, nobody influential ever associates Western Communists with the killing fields, even though they share not only the same ideology, but the same political manifesto.

Nowadays, under our cultural form of Marxism, the penalties for “fascism” are less severe than death – loss of job and reputation, or depersoning on social media, deplatforming, editing out of Wikipedia and so on, are the fate of the unbeliever. It’s more Alexander Dubček than Tsar Nicholas. But the extent of those to being condemned has become quite similar to those under Pol Pot or Comrade Stalin.

Take, for example, the term that started my last post – “climate change denial,” a term derived from “holocaust denial” specifically to link it subliminally with fascism. My biologist interlocuter on Peaceful Science quite explicitly bracketed any view except enthusiastic affirmation of “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming” as “climate change denialism.”

Yet recent US polls (as is well known) show that 75% of “Republican leaners” and 25% of “Democrat leaners” do not accept anthpogenic warming as a serious threat. Given the politically divided state of the US, with the parties roughly equal, that renders around half the American population to be “denialists.” Surely they can’t all be liars funded by the oil companies and deliberately producing fake science? But that’s what the term seems to entail.

Meanwhile, in a whole range of other areas, similar percentages of populations are labelled, by association, or by support, or even by their gender or genes, as “white supremacists,” “racists,” “homophobes,” “far right,” “Islamophobes,” “antisemites” (when convenient – antisemitism is trumped by Islamophobia much of the time) and so on. And it’s done by government and the courts as well as by the press, commerce, and so on.

One recent example in this country. Last year a magistrate, working on adoption matters, was heard in a private setting to say that children generally do best with one father and one mother. Indeed there is an overwhelming body of sociological literature that shows this to be true. Like all human matters, it is not a universal rule, but then courts are intended to apply general truths wisely to specific situations.

Children of single parents, and those with multiple step parents, statistically do far less well on a whole series of metrics from income to criminality. Studies on same-sex parenting not only suffer from its being a very recent if widespread experiment (the first UK gay couple to adopt children, only twenty years ago, lived literally five doors down from my house at the time), but from the fact that almost certainly any such research will never get funding or ethical approval.

But in any case, where the evidence does exist, ie in large studies of two-parent familes versus alternatives, one would hope that adoption courts should take such science into account when dealing with the welfare of children. But somebody made the solicitor’s remarks public, and he was sacked by the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord Chancellor, no less, on the grounds that his position was intrinsically discriminatory.

You would have thought that the task of adoption is about nothing but discriminating the best options for a child, lest the child suffer “discrimination” by being put at an avoidable disadvantage. Our laws, however, do not seem to work that way.

But not long afterwards the expelled magistrate was also suspended from his 20-year role as a finance director of an NHS Trust, on the grounds that (unnamed) staff, especially LGBT staff, might lose confidence in his suitability. Now, when I worked in the NHS nobody gave a toss about my confidence in the moral suitability of Trust finance officers. Certainly I’d have complained loudly if some employer sacked someone in my name, without actually asking my views. But this was 2018, folks, not the Dark Ages.

Note that accepting the science on parenting is said to make you unfit for a financial role: “This Machine Kills Fascists.” Note also that he never made any public comment whatsoever on same-sex couples: the social and press accusations of “homophobia” were based on his defence of positive established science regarding traditional parenting. He was fired from two positions for what he did not say. Not like the bad old illiberal days, when silence was a defence.

But there’s more. The Employment Tribunal appeal against his dismissal as a magistrate was supported by the lawyers from Christian Concern, a group set up to defend Christians suffering discrimination for such activities as street-preaching, wearing crosses at work, or offering to pray with clients or colleagues. Their ethical stance is simply what Christianity has taught for two millennia, and which formed the entire society in which we live in Britain until just recently.

In his tribunal case, counsel for the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord Chancellor used against him the fact that by association, he was linked to “Christian Concern, an extremist pressure group.” Now, “extremism” here was allowed to be used in this court, on behalf of the highest authorities of the legal system, to describe what, a few decades ago, was almost universally assumed. As Andrea Williams, Director of Christian Concern, points out, it was the legally constrained marriage of a man and a woman on which the whole of British family law was built, as she was taught in her legal training only 30 years ago.

This is the worldview foundation of most people brought up before somebody changed the rules for us. Overturn it in this way, and you’ve just created a nation consisting largely of “extremists.” In the last census, 60% of the population still self-identified as “Christian,” despite the triumph of secularism and the ascendancy of Islam. The extremists are in a majority, it seems. “The People has failed us – we will elect a new People.”

It sounds like we need another Pol Pot if this country is ever going to become as moderate as the Powers want us to be.