Month: May 2024

While Ukrainians fight for their independence and Israelis for their survival, we are manning the verbal ramparts of wokery.

Yet another Christian teacher has been led up to the employment gibbet and strung up for ‘misgendering’ a pupil. Last year, Joshua Sutcliffe was drummed out of his profession by a TRA (Teaching Regulation Agency) panel for failing to treat a trans pupil “with dignity and respect”, meaning forgetting to use the pronouns said pupil preferred at the time.

At that point Mr Sutcliffe let the side down by apologising profusely. That abject surrender had no effect on his prosecutors, predictably.

Now, I turned my own back on an academic career some 50 years ago precisely because I sensed which way the wind was blowing. Following the Delphic maxim of “Know thyself”, I realised I was too bloody-minded to be told what to say and what not to say. So why kill oneself trying to get a job one knows one won’t be able to keep? And that time offered only a vague hint at things to come in the 21^st century.

Now I can afford the luxury of smirking smugly at Mr Sutcliffe’s ordeal and saying that, if I were him, I wouldn’t have apologised under any circumstances. I might have even asked whether I was supposed to bark at a pupil identifying as a dog or neigh at one identifying as a horse. However, the point is that I displayed the same weakness as Mr Sutcliffe but, unlike him, I did that pre-emptively, by refusing ever to put myself in his position.

Now he is appealing to the High Court, citing his Christian faith and referring to freedom of speech and religion, a freedom that’s now defunct or at least severely limited. This is especially noticeable when it finds itself on the wrong side of the pronoun war.

Hence Mr Sutcliffe was deemed to be “unprofessional” because he jeopardised his pupils’ spiritual wellbeing. His transgression was dire: this reprobate praised the work turned in by a group of pupils by saying: “Well done, girls.”

That was ignoring the supposedly obvious fact that one of the ‘girls’ had decided she really wasn’t one any longer. Moreover, even though this nuance didn’t come up at the hearing, the word ‘girls’ can anyway be easily construed as demeaning and traumatising.

Such shamefully binary words must be replaced with open-ended salutations. I’d recommend something like “Well done, persons”, “Well done, beings” or perhaps “Well done, individuals”. These may sound less mellifluous, but hey, we aren’t after sonorities here, are we? We are after protecting young souls from the life-long wounds that words like ‘girls’ can inflict.

The prospects of the court overturning the TRA verdict strike me as dim, especially in light of the defence put up by Mr Sutcliffe’s lawyers. They claim that there is “no legal requirement to use preferred pronouns” and, tautologically, that Mr Sutcliffe had a right “not to believe gender identity belief”.

By the same logic, I have a right to relieve myself in my own lavatory, but I’d be nicked if I did so on Piccadilly Circus in broad daylight. Also, as a Christian, Mr Sutcliffe ought to know that there exists a higher law that transcends the casuistry written into human codes.

In this case, this higher law comes down from the god of wokery, and he is athirst. His commandments, shining from up high, supersede any laws passed by Parliament. Thus, talking about “legal requirements” is futile.

The Department for Education knows this. That’s why it opposes his appeal, saying that the teacher failed “to distinguish between his role as a teacher and his activities as a preacher”.

I often say that the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim. A bad Muslim can easily adapt to life in any Western country, which a good Muslim, meaning one who follows all the commandments of his religion, can’t. The former can be a valuable member of society; the latter, at best a nuisance.

The D of E seems to apply the same logic to Christianity. The only good Christian under its aegis is a bad Christian.

A teacher is welcome to espouse that outdated cult at home, but he dare not act as a good Christian at work. Specifically, he must ignore the unequivocal commandments to proselytise: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…” or “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

The logic may be the same, but the religions aren’t. We aren’t a Muslim nation yet, although we are doing our utmost to inch in that direction. Hence, whenever a Muslim tries to trump our laws and traditions with the Koran, we have every historical, moral and legal right to tell him where to go and where to put that book.

The British nation has been Christian longer than it has been the British nation. Moreover, we are one of the few Western countries that have an established church and no laws separating church and state (such as France’s laïcité). I realise that Britain is Christian only nominally these days, but the weight of 14 Christian centuries can’t be shifted easily and quickly.

Therefore punishing a man simply for being guided by his faith is… I almost wrote ‘unconscionable’, but then realised that ‘only natural nowadays’ would be more appropriate.

We should have more teachers like Mr Sutcliffe in our schools. Instead, before long we shan’t have any. I do hope he’ll get his (their? ze’s?) job back. But I fear he (they? ze?) won’t.

P.S. Speaking of France, TV comedian Guillaume Meurice has caused a bit of a furore there by describing Benjamin Netanyahu as “a sort of Nazi without a foreskin”. His employer subsequently defended Mr Meurice’s right to l’outrance (over-the-top outrageousness).

I agree. Insulting the Holy Spirit apart, jokes are either funny or unfunny. C’est tout, as they say in those parts. If someone is offended by a joke, it’s his (their? ze’s?) problem, not the comedian’s. Yet I doubt that even Mr Meurice’s mother would describe that little quip as a funny joke.

It was an expression of a moronic political opinion tinged with anti-Semitism. Hence I wonder whether the comedian speaks English. If he does, he should tour the tent encampments on our campuses. He’d find a receptive audience there.

Civility. Intuitive politeness (outside New York, that is). Self-reliance. Enterprise. And lots of other good things I haven’t mentioned.

Yet we never learn such good things. We only ever learn bad ones, such as crudeness, egalitarian familiarity, parochialism, ‘body art’, bad grammar – and no such list would be complete without political correctness.

I first heard the term from my son, then a schoolboy in California, where the term might have been, and certainly should have been, invented. I used the word ‘negro’ in his presence, which to me was a stylistically neutral term with no pejorative connotations whatsoever.

That’s when my son taught me that new term, and at first I couldn’t understand why my incorrectness was political. Moral or social perhaps, but what does politics have to do with anything? Another few seconds of contemplation, and I remembered that these days politics has something to do with everything.

I even recalled Thomas Mann’s saying, “All intellectual attitudes are latently political”, and thought he had a point. Anyway, though the term ‘political correctness’ was new to me, the underlying attitude wasn’t. My first job in the US was at NASA, and government outfits race ahead of the rest of the country towards what is now called wokery.

The personnel manager told me in no uncertain terms that my female colleagues were neither ‘women’ nor, especially, ‘girls’. They were ‘persons’, and if I called them anything less I’d get in trouble. I protested that, if I identified a woman in the next room as a ‘person’, my interlocutor wouldn’t know if was talking about a man or a woman.

The apparatchik explained that this wasn’t the point, although he fell short of telling me what the point was. Anyway, I learned how to circumvent that injunction by reserving the word ‘person’ for women only and referring to men as strictly ‘guys’ or ‘fellows’, thereby divesting them of their personhood but finding myself on safer grounds.

Then, some 15 years later, I emigrated to Britain and gratefully inhaled lungfuls of fresh air. By then (circa 1988) political correctness had got out of hand in the US, and some locutions in common British parlance would have been grounds for prosecution there.

Finally, I thought, a spot of sanity unsullied with the miasma of mandated verbal lunacy. Well, that didn’t last long.

Since I like to analyse social phenomena dynamically rather than statically, I’m usually more interested in trends than in the here and now. And the general trend I spotted was that all American perversions migrate to Britain sooner or later. This observation is ironclad, but it raises a question: sooner or later?

How long does it take the British to lap up the perverse crumbs falling off America’s table? (The tasty American bits find little demand here, as I’ve mentioned earlier.)

At that time, it took somewhere between ten and five years, with the lag steadily shifting towards the latter duration. Thus Britain gradually caught up with America in the wokery stakes, and then began to pull ahead, slowly. But then the Internet kicked in, and things began to accelerate exponentially.

Whatever gaps in lunacy existed between the two countries got to be filled within a year or two, then within a month or two, then within a couple of weeks – and now I’m happy to report that we don’t have to wait longer than several days if not hours for the shockwaves of American explosions to reach our shores.

The latest vindication of this observation comes from the scores of tents being pitched on university campuses across Britain, as they have been in America for some time. These encampments are tastefully decorated with Palestinian flags and all the usual placards. Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle, Warwick have all been taken over by pro-Hamas fanatics spewing hate.

Students at an academically awful Leeds University are refusing to say how long they are going to continue to occupy land around the university buildings. They pledge to remain “indefinitely”, until the university is “no longer complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people and crimes against humanity”.

What they mean by such criminal complicity is their university accepting donations from firms even tangentially involved in arms manufacturing. After all, there’s no guarantee that those weapons won’t fall into the blood-stained hands of Israeli genocide mongers.

Of course, if universities no longer accept funding from technology firms, tuition fees may go up, which will be reason enough to stage more protests. One wonders how students find any time to study their subjects, even if these are conveniently fractured into moronic modules precluding any education worthy of the name.

No student protests would be complete without the accompaniment of death threats to Jews on campus, such as those that forced a Jewish chaplain at Leeds University into hiding, together with his whole family.

Jewish students are complaining about being “harassed and excluded”, which shows how little they understand the newly, if implicitly, amended British constitution. It proscribes racial or ethnic discrimination, except against Jews. It guarantees freedom of any religion, except Christianity. And it stipulates equality before the law, with favourable exemptions for members of putatively oppressed minorities.

I detect a direct link between these student camps and concentration camps, but I realise I’m in a distinct minority there. My only hope is that, having borrowed the idea of pro-Hamas encampments from their American counterparts, our students won’t also borrow the attendant violence.

Some such activities in the US have resulted in battles between pro-Hamas and pro-Israeli groups, but at least the American police still have the guts to do something about the tents. Hundreds of arrests have been made at Columbia, UCLA and elsewhere, with policemen clearing encampments and occupied buildings.

Our police are so far inert, looking at the tents with indifference and, if past such events are anything to go by, barely concealed sympathy. Who said police have to be immune to brainwashing? Not me.

If push comes to shove in Britain, the copycat situation could turn even worse than in the American original because of the much higher proportion of Muslim students here. I’ve once met a young Muslim who wasn’t sympathetic to the idea of murdering every Israeli (from the river to the sea). His name was Asif.

This is to say that their participation in riotous protests has to gravitate to 100 per cent. Relatively speaking, there are fewer Muslims on American campuses, although exponents of other religions or mostly none are doing their level best to take up the slack.

The upshot of this is obvious: follow American current events with attention, ladies and gentlemen. If there’s something you hate, brace yourself: a few days later it’ll come here.

This isn’t much of an advanced warning, but some. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick… but I’d better not develop this metaphor.

This question used to drive me potty in the days I still spoke at conservative conferences. I knew that even in such august circles, connotation meant more than denotation.

In effect, my listeners were telling me to stop theorising and philosophising. For the English soul, and especially its conservative subdivision, is innately pragmatic. If no itemised plan for action is presented quickly, that soul begins to fidget and yawn.

However, as that founding book of our civilisation tells us, it was the Word and not the Deed that was in the beginning. Translated into quotidian realities, this means that thought, first conceived and then enunciated, should precede action. If the thought goes awry, so will the resulting acts.

This applies to every issue staring us in the face. Just look at the two conflicts endangering the world at the moment, Gaza and the Ukraine. Neither our governments nor most people have grasped the nature of those conflicts and their interconnection.

The title of Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilisations, is an accurate description of the situation. (I haven’t advanced beyond the title: the book is set solid in such microscopic type that I can’t read it even with glasses.)

It’s not just Israel and the Ukraine that are under threat, but our whole civilisation. It lies exposed to barbarian attacks, and much of it is its own fault.

If a fish rots from its head, civilisations rot from their intellectual and moral innards. And once the decay has set in, even a slight push from outside may suffice to bring the structure down.

True enough, over the past few centuries we’ve been busily trying to raze the edifice of our civilisation, mendaciously passing off demolition as innovation. But though it’s tottering, the house still stands, nurturing hope that it may in time become sturdy again.

And the only way to buy it time is to resist the swinging wrecking ball, otherwise known as Russia, Iran, China and so forth. In order to survive we must kick against the BRICS, if you’ll forgive this bowdlerisation of another scriptural quote.

The BRICS countries, led by Russia overtly and China covertly, with the other members in for the ride, are neither reticent in their words nor ambiguous in their actions. They have stated their intention to destroy the West’s standing in the world, relegating it to the status of a playground for barbarians to get their various jollies, a sort of a Ye Olde West theme park.

They seek to replace our civilisation with something else, a world they call multipolar but which will end up as bipolar, a world of oppressed, suppressed and depressed people bowing their heads to evil.

This isn’t to say that our civilisation is unequivocally good, far from it. In this life we aren’t blessed with perfect civilisations, and ours is at present further away from any such ideal than it ever has been. Still, it’s infinitely better than anything that can be conceivably ushered in by BRICS.

We’ve abused the good core of the West, but it’s still there, and so is the hope that one day its rotten periphery will be peeled away. Such a hope doesn’t apply to any BRICS alternative – its very core is rotten, whatever its periphery may look like to an outside observer.

At the moment, BRICS’s assault on the West is spearheaded by Russia and Iran, with China providing tacit and underhanded support. They correctly see the Ukraine and Israel as the flesh of the West’s flesh, whereas we see both as at best our bothersome allies and at worst as drains on our resources.

Unless we change this understanding, we are heading for defeat, capitulation and, for all civilisational purposes, annihilation… Here we are, 700 words in, and not a single one of them has provided a practical reply to the question in the title. However, in the absence of this protracted introduction, no practical reply would make sense.

Once we’ve established the framework of this overarching understanding, then – and only then – can we start talking about specific steps to take. What can we do to ward off this aggression against our civilisation, our liberties, our very essence?

Once the question is worded in this way, only one answer is possible: ANYTHING IT TAKES. This may include committing our troops to battle, but mercifully we don’t have to do that yet. Ukrainians and Israelis are happy to do our fighting for us, while we pretend not to realise that their fight is also ours.

When someone you love would die without an expensive treatment, you wouldn’t be counting the cost. The categories of costs and benefits or debits and credits no longer apply in emergencies. When the survival of a beloved child, wife or mother is at stake, no decent person would hesitate to take out that second mortgage or sell assets even at a loss.

So the question is: Do we love our civilisation? One can have doubts on that score, when observing the horse-trading in Western parliaments, the attempts of Western governments to limit aid to a barely sufficient trickle, or the approving nods of so many Westerners listening to Trump’s pronouncements along the lines of “Putin can do whatever the hell he wants” to any NATO member that doesn’t pull its fiscal weight.

Of course, all Western countries must do their fair share (or “pay up” in Trump’s customary bean-counting parlance). Most of them are beginning to realise this, although their actions are still trailing behind their words. But Trump’s rhetoric is like that of a son refusing to pay for his father’s lung-cancer chemo because “Dad shouldn’t have smoked”.

The looming global problem shouldn’t be fractured into small pieces, be that of silver, gold or any other monetary equivalent. Let’s solve it first and then count the cost.

This doesn’t seem to be the thinking of our powers that be. Either they don’t realise that the Ukraine and Israel are fighting our battle for us, in which case they are mind-numbingly, bone-crushingly ignorant, or they are too impotent to act, in which case they should get some moral Viagra.

The West must repel the on-going and accelerating threat, and I hope we have enough military experts and technology boffins to figure out the specifics of what that will take. In fact, I’m sure such experts exist.

But before generals bend over their maps and engineers over their drawing boards, they must be pointed in the right direction. There have to be some minds in positions of power who understand that it’s not only the Ukraine and Israel but also the West in general that’s fighting for survival.

This is what scares me: those who understand have no power, and those who have power don’t seem to understand. Unless that situation changes, the question in the title won’t have a satisfatory answer.