Totalitarianism isn’t TB

By the time tuberculosis symptoms appear, it’s already too late to treat the disease, went the medical opinion in the pre-antibiotic era.

Totalitarianism isn’t like that: even its early symptoms are there for all to see. However, it’s a distinction without a difference, for people either fail to recognise inchoate totalitarianism for what it is, or else ignore it altogether.

Hence there’s a distinct danger that totalitarianism will triumph with the deadly effect of tuberculosis in the pre-antibiotic era. And when it does, it will indeed be too late to do anything about it.

Totalitarianism escalates; given an inch, it’ll gradually claim a yard and then a mile. But then everything about modernity, including its congenital totalitarianism, is progressive.

That the rights of Englishmen are beginning to cough up blood is undeniable. The latest incidence involves Kristie Higgs, a Gloucestershire school assistant sacked for daring to oppose creeping woke fascism.

As a Christian, she regards education in the fine points of homosexuality as “brainwashing our children” and doesn’t “believe in the modern ideas of gender fluidity and transgenderism”.

Moreover, in her Facebook posts Mrs Higgs correctly described compulsory classes in sex education as “a vicious form of totalitarianism aimed at suppressing Christianity”.

This led to the following exchange between her and the school’s barrister at the subsequent tribunal hearing:

“Do you believe that because of your religious views you can post anything you like, no matter how reactionary?”

“I believe that if it goes against the word of God, people need to know about it. I love God but I also have to follow the law of the land, but it doesn’t mean I can’t disagree.”

So you could, Mrs Higgs, when Britain was still a free country. But you no longer can disagree, our incipient totalitarians won’t allow it. So far (the operative words) they’re unable to take your life, but they can certainly ruin it.

This is far from being the first case of British Christians suffering persecution for refusing to repudiate their beliefs and proselytise them, just as Christ told them to (“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations…”). The severity of punishment doesn’t yet match the experience of Christians in the Soviet Union, but such things have a natural accelerator built in.

What Mrs Higgs said about the propaganda of gender-bending applies to modernity at large. It too is, potentially at least, “a vicious form of totalitarianism aimed at suppressing Christianity”.

In fact, if there is a discernible animus all modern revolutions share, it’s a revolt against Christianity in general and its apostolic confessions in particular.

That’s why Catholicism was banned on pain of death in 12 of the first 13 American colonies; why the American revolutionaries, most of them deists at best, were so keen to separate church and state, with the Founders competing against one another in the stridency of their attacks on traditional denominations; why the French revolutionaries committed unspeakable atrocities under the banner of secularism; why the Soviets and the Nazis set out to exterminate or at least suppress Christianity.

However, as we are finding out, the bathwater of religion is impossible to throw out without also losing the baby of culture, civility and morality. And those are the only restraints able to keep totalitarianism in check, preventing its seed, planted in every modern state, from growing to luxuriant maturity.

The war on Christianity has been won on the secular background, but iconoclasm doesn’t stop even after the icons have been smashed. That’s why modern savages, such as those running that Gloucestershire school, react so violently to any recalcitrant holdouts.

And that’s why Miss Higgs’s appeal to the Bible and Christian moral teaching, while noble and correct, is unlikely to save any souls other than her own. Yet her argument can be made just as effectively without a single reference to Scripture.

I’m not saying it could be won, but it certainly could satisfy the strictest logician. Specifically on the issue of gender-bending, one can invoke reams of scientific evidence showing it’s impossible for a man to become a woman and vice versa. They can only succeed in becoming freakish sideshows, adding new arrows to the ideological quiver of modernity.

An argument from freedom can also be made on purely secular grounds. Parents must be free to withdraw their children from sex-education classes if they feel such ‘education’ is damaging to the child morally, intellectually and psychologically. Similarly, school employees have a right to oppose such classes without suffering repercussions.

I hope Mrs Higgs wins her tribunal case, but I’m not holding my breath. Appeals to real, as opposed to bogus, civil rights ring as hollow to our totalitarians as do quotations from the Bible.

However, it’s critical that the few holdouts among us heed the warning signs better than our typological precursors did in Russia and Germany. We should stand fast, refusing to cede those inches in the knowledge that they can ineluctably add up to miles. Totalitarianism must be fought everywhere its symptoms appear, even if they seem trivial.

We should refuse to succumb to totalitarian usages shoved down our throats; we should continue to appeal to basic human liberties; we should quarrel with school administrations promoting totalitarian takeover; we should march, non-violently, in defence of liberty; we should uphold real education based on real books, real music, real science; we should insist on the freedom of religion guaranteed yet assaulted by all Western governments; we should spring to the defence of Kristie Higgs and other victims of neo-totalitarianism.

And, all else failing, we should remember the old saying: even if none of it can be resisted, all of it can be despised.