How do people make themselves, for want of a better word, stupid? People are normally rational beings (maybe I’m too optimistic), so how do they end up … stupid? One possible answer is that they believe in fictions. Turning an untruth into truth is quite a feat, and the source of much misery when it is pronounced by people with a media bullhorn. One fount of “stupid”with a patina of academic glamour is identity politics and its conferring of “wokeness” on its adherents.
I define “identity politics” as the attempt to assign virtue and vice to people according to immutable qualities such as melanin count and genitalia. A subsidiary precept is the dualism of oppressor/oppressed for which all people must descend, as based on the aforementioned unchangeable personal characteristics – something any dyed-in-the-wool Marxist would find familiar. The result is a profusion of baloney. But woe be to those caught in the snares of the woke cadres, as Laurence Fox soon discovered.
An example of a dolt on parade was broadcast to the world in the BBC’s Question Time when a supposed “academic”, Rachel Boyle, leveled the banality of “racism” at Laurence Fox for his skepticism about sending all criticism of the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, into the “racism” black hole (“black” being no attempt at cultural appropriation).
Take a look.
Boyle has all the academic credentials of wokeness, she being a lecturer and researcher in race and ethnicity at Edge Hill University in Lancashire. The amazing thing about her is the seriousness and self-confidence in her batty denunciations of Fox. She strings together pejorative epithets like a latter-day Muhammed Ali at one of his prefight weighing-ins. Or more accurately, she spouts the nonsense with all the gravity of a lab-coated functionary in the NSDAP Racial Policy Office with calipers measuring the width of noses to peg a person into the official racial hierarchy. Completely absent is any sense of humility. You know, the lack of any self-awareness that she could be wrong.
One of the ramifications for believing in the unbelievable is the potential for human slaughter. People lose their individuality as they are subsumed into artificially differentiated groups. It’s easy to condemn thousands in a single stroke.
I came across the phenomena of genocidal females – to go along with their more numerous alternatively gendered soul-mates – while reading Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s second volume of his The Red Wheel. In exile in Switzerland with Lenin were Rosalia Zemlyachka and Yevgenia Bosch, both having key posts in the Bolsheviks’ Red Terror from 1917 to 1921.
Zemlyachka, a Marxist of longstanding, was instrumental with Bela Kun of bringing the Bolshevik butchery to the Crimea in 1920-21. Bosch similarly has blood all over her hands.
She became the head of the Ministry of the Interior in the Ukraine when the Bolshevik Red Army seized control of the country. Say “Ministry of the Interior” and you may as well be saying “secret police”, “more blood of the bourgeoisie”, and “Red Terror”. Her body count came to around 400,000-600,000 murdered Cossacks, Jews, and assorted “enemies of the people”.
How can normally decent people become mass killers? It’s highly unlikely without some animating belief system overwhelming all considerations, ideas like those of our would-be totalitarian interlocutor from the woke departments of Edge Hill University, Rachel Boyle. Reducing human beings to categories of goodness and badness as based on biological traits is dangerous business, very dangerous business.
RogerG