Postmodernism made simple

The failure of Soviet communism was beginning to become obvious in the 1960s, as the slaughter and repression of the preceding decades slowly became more widely known in the West. This led Socialists and Communists in the West into a crisis of confidence which steadily deepened during the 1970s and 1980s. By 1989, the atrocities of the Soviet era were exposed to all as the Berlin Wall came down and the velvet revolution spread across the former Soviet empire. It became obvious that the Left would either have to admit that Liberal Capitalism had won the argument, or they would have to reinvent themselves and Socialism. They chose to do the latter [1].

This reinvention began in the 1960s. From thence, the Left launched a continuous and growing assault upon all the values which the majority of us hold dear. These are things like family, community, traditions, culture, Christianity, the rule of law and so on. All the things which glue the country together and allows us to call ourselves Brits or Scots or Welsh or Irish, male or female, have come under a growing assault.

The source of this attack lies in the Left’s espousal of the philosophies of a number of third-rate French philosophers, all of whom are now dead, but whose ideas have spread beyond France, crossed the Atlantic to North America and then swum back again across the ocean to land upon the shores of our sceptre’d isle.

The name given to this strand of thought is Postmodernism. It has evolved and taken differing forms over time as different ideologies have dovetailed themselves into it. Neo-Marxism is one such. Cultural Marxism is another. More recently, it has taken the form of identity politics which is responsible for the insanity of political correctness and  multiculturalism (these two things are closely related and work together). Except for those who believe in this set of ideologies (and will argue to the death about the finer distinctions of each) the rest of us can assume that they are all one and the same thing.

Any layman who bothers to read Foucault, Derrida, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lyotard and others will usually be left mystified by the dense prose and opaque language used. Everything is deconstructed. Hardly a single word in a single sentence goes unquestioned. Meaning and certainty are lost in a welter of argument and counter-argument. This explains why these philosophers themselves are rarely read, but books about them are a little more popular. Most of us have to go a stage further and revert to using Wikipedia – because it avoids having to wallow in pointless and opaque arguments.

At the bottom of Postmodernism are two basic ideas: The first is that nothing is absolute or certain, that everything is relative to another thing. The second is that all the world’s ills are rooted in the phallogocentrism of the white male patriarchy, and that this needs to be destroyed. In very round numbers, this means that the whole basis for the Enlightenment values of logic and rationality are to be destroyed. The methods of thinking that have brought us huge technological advances, prosperity, better and more abundant food, clothing, housing and all the things that are essential for modern living are ignored, diminished or reviled by the Postmodernists. But the ire of these philosophers and their acolytes goes much deeper than the material benefits of modern life. They attack the very principles of democracy which are founded upon the agency and conscience of the individual – a way of thinking that stems from the Early Christian Church and its departure from the hierarchical structure of Rome and ancient Greece [2].

It is not just the Enlightenment rationality and logic which are under attack from Postmodernism. Everywhere it has sought moves to break up the nuclear family – the very thing which gives us shape as individuals and places us into a society from which we derive our own identity. The sense that we have of belonging to a family, a community, a team, a nationality or race – any group which gives us identity and the positive will to contribute as individuals to the purpose of the group – is diminished, ridiculed and hated under the onslaught of Postmodernism.

However, postmodernism is also a technique of gradualism; of latter-day Fabianism. The institution of marriage, of rearing and educating children is weakened by stages – by such things as the encouragment of easy divorce and abortion on demand. Under Postmodern thinking, the subdivision of gender into a seemingly infinite array of possibilities is a consequence of the loss of basic certainties. This in turn leads to the earlier and earlier teaching of children about sex – and the accompanying idea that a child should consider itself a boy, or a girl, or something in between. The rare decision, which should only be made in adulthood, about changing gender is now used to confuse and distress young minds which are scarcely formed. As result, transgenderism is on the increase. This doubt – of shifting gender and sexuality at a very early age – is a precursor to the normalisation of paedophilia. Children, whose minds are only partly formed, are left confused and stressed – and so become vulnerable to being abused by predatory adults. The objective is to weaken and then destroy masculinity – particularly amongst white men.

Everything is viewed through the distorting prism of dividing the world into victims and oppressors. And so, if you are a white male this is all your fault. You are to be marginalised, diminished and victimised at every available opportunity, because you and your kind are responsible for oppressing the rest of the world. For example, this is the thought process behind Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s attitudes to white people and particularly white men, which are overtly racist. When asked in a TV interview what she thought of white people, she responded: “I don’t like them. I want them to be a lost species in a hundred years.”  Her racism is considered legitimate because Alibhai-Brown is a Ugandan Asian in origin, and therefore a member of a victim group. By contrast, white men are the oppressors and so it it is perfectly OK to hate them simply because they are white and male. Thus certain forms of racism are deemed acceptable; and Alibhai-Brown’s blatant hypocrisy is not just ignored, it is applauded.

Thus it is that objective meaning is turned on its head. The rule of law which once applied to everyone regardless of race, colour, creed or sex is now corrupted into an exercise of subjective judgement about identity – and which now allows different treatments for different groups. Language is corrupted. Hypocrisy is exalted. Truth is inverted into lies.

If you are puzzled as to why, for example, modern feminism is not just about raising the status of women, but has become antagonistic towards men; then here is your reason. If you wish to know why the Left (and modern feminists) who are predominantly atheist, should ally themselves with Islamists (who regard women as second class citizens, and as slaves, are property to be bought and sold) then Postmodernism provides the justification. If you cannot understand why it is that a group of people – predominantly but not exclusively Muslims of Pakistani origin – have got away for so long with the industrial scale grooming and rape of young white working class girls, with the apparent aquiescence of the authorities; then here is the cause. If you are at all curious about the reasons why ancient universities (which have for centuries championed logic and rationality) are now in the process of removing statues of great thinkers and searching for any evidence at all of associations with slavery, then you need look no further than Postmodernism for the stimulae.

The humanities in the education establishments embraced the ideas behind postmodernism enthusiastically and so the long march of shape-shifting Leftist ideology continued in our universities with renewed vigour. Whole generations have been trained in the principle ideas of postmodernism. This continues today, resulting in most of our political and administrative establishments being inculcated with truth as a relative concept, white males as the oppressors, western civilisation as a source of destruction, everyone else as the victim, and that education is a device for social revolution.

That these ideas should enter the establishment milieu may be thought to be trivial by some. But they have lasting and very damaging effects upon real people. Whilst racism is accepted by most people as being repugnant, the postmodern idea is that racism flows only in one direction. That is, if a white man expresses dislike of another because that other person is black, that is racism. But under postmodern thinking, if a black man expresses dislike for another because he is white, then that is not racism. The charge of racism being levelled at any white person is an extremely toxic one. A white person expressing racist views in an official capacity is normally deemed to be a career ending move. However, no-one is surprised if Yasmin Alihbai-Brown makes a racist comment against white men. This has certainly not done her career any harm at all. Indeed, she seems to thrive on it.

For those who wish to understand how modern identity politics works and achieves its aims, then Ben Cobley’s The Tribe [3] is an excellent and detailed read.

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One way to examine the methods the Left use to go about their pursuit of these ideals, is to examine their patterns of behaviour in a case study. One such case is their embrace of paedophilia over the decades.

During the 1970s, the National Council for Civil Liberties (now called Liberty and formerly headed by Shami Chakrabarti) embraced the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). The NCCL vigorously made the case that paedophiles were misunderstood and wrongly maligned. See here and here for more details. At that time, the NCCL employed Harriet Harman as legal officer; her husband Jack Dromey, who sat on the executive committee; and Patricia Hewitt who was General Secretary. All three have been prominent MPs within the Labour Party since the 1980s. Harman and Dromey are still MPs, Harman being a former minister and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. Hewitt was another former minister under Tony Blair.

Meanwhile in France in 1977, attempts were made to repeal the law concerning age of consent. In France this is fifteen. A petition was signed by sixty-nine French intellectuals including the proponents of Post-Modernism – Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jaques Derrida and others. Whilst they were ostensibly pointing out some of the inconsistencies in French law, there is no doubt that this was an attempt to destroy the current legal and moral position and thence open the floodgates to widespread paedophilia. Foucault in particular had studied the history of sexuality and concluded that attitudes to sex with young children (he discusses specifically the love of boys) had varied considerably over history and were a construct of the prevailing culture. He concluded that changes in attitudes towards sex with children would once again become acceptable [4].

Broadly speaking we can divide paedophiles into two main groups. The first group is what we might call the ‘white paedophiles’. This group has always been with us in our Anglo-Saxon society in one form or another. These paedophiles are usually (but not always) men and come from all socio-economic classes. Much of their activity has traditionally been centred around local authority care homes, as these contain a large number of vulnerable children who are easy prey for the paedophile. Although this practice is spread across the class divide, there appear to be a number of paedophiles in postions of authority or prominent within the public domain. This gives them a level of protection from public exposure because the prominent members of the group are able to exercise power to shut down prosecutions. However, most of the ‘white paedophiles’ who have been apprehended and sentenced are not prominent individuals who are able to call upon influence with the police and prosecutors. In other words, the ones who have been caught and taken the rap are those at the bottom of the socio-economic heap.

Jimmy Saville was an example of how, as a television celebrity, he was able to flourish within the system and even use it to further his insatiable demand for sex with young girls. His celebrity status granted him sufficient power to remain unprosecuted during his lifetime. That he managed this within the BBC – at that time an institution of national pride and moral rectitude – is a source of wonder. Only after his death has the full extent of his depravity become public knowledge. And after his death, investigations revealed that the problem was endemic throughout the BBC. What is becoming ever clearer is that the BBC has been morally degenerate for a very long time, as it slid steadily down the slippery slope of Leftist hegemony. There was a brief period of investigations which involved a small number of other television and radio personalities, but then it went quiet. No non-celebrities were investigated. As the celebs rarely operated on their own, and their activities were widely known amongst the staff of the BBC, there is the lingering suspicion that there is much more information that has been buried.

Whilst this kind of paedophilia has been with us for a very long time, within the last 20 years or so, a similar problem has manifested itself in the form of gangs of predominantly (but not exclusively) Muslims of Pakistani origin. These gangs have groomed, trafficked and raped thousands of young Sikh and white working class girls. It is now clear that this has been happening in large cities all across the UK, wherever there are large concentrations of Muslims. Now, this is not to say that all Muslims are paedophiles, because they are not. But there is clearly a widespread problem amongst that community which should have been addressed with considerable vigour, but public knowledge was instead buried and actively suppressed.

This particular aspect of the paedophile problem has a number of specific characteristics:

• There is undoubtedly a religious element, where Islam is used to justify this behaviour. That is, that the girls are ‘white sluts’ or ‘white trash’ in the eyes of the perpetrators; and that because they are non-muslims, they can be used in this way.
• This activity was deliberately ignored and covered up by the authorities – the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and local social services – for at least two decades and probably longer. The excuse for their inaction was based around variants upon the theme of political correctness and a terror of being called racist – a career ending epithet.
• There is little doubt that the gangs responsible for the organisation of this industrial scale rape, are all part of organised gangs of criminals with an ethno-religious flavour.  Drugs and prostitution in organised crime always seem to go together. And this is no exception.
• Only in the last three or four years has the problem begun to be systematically addressed with various inquiries and investigations. A large number of police officers have been suspended or are being investigated for their part in acquiescing or even facilitating this disgraceful lapse of the rule of law. Arrests are now being made and gangs are being broken up and prosecuted. However, the grooming and rape continues on a large scale.

But it has taken twenty years to even begin to do anything about this aspect of organised crime. The reasons for this unconscionable delay are rooted in the Postmodern inversion of all that is rational – that the white working class don’t matter as long as politically correct procedure continues to be observed. Another factor is the nexus between white and Muslim paedophiles. It is reasonable to propose that one obstacle to investigation (aside from the possibility of accusations of racism) of the Muslim element, has been the existence of white paedophiles in positions of influence – who can bring pressure to bear against senior police officers and thus prevent investigation. In this regard, senior politicians of all persuasions have been involved, both as participants and as apologists.

Initially, according to some sources, the first victims were young Sikh girls. However, the Sikh community reacted rapidly to the threat by confronting the men concerned. On one occasion, Sikhs invaded a mosque and there was a standoff involving swords. As a result, the grooming gangs shifted their attention to working class white girls. The parents hoped and expected the police to take action. But for years, they did not. A compelling response from the Sikh community to the recent conviction of some of the Rotherham grooming gangs in February 2018 is here.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, this aspect of paedophilia remained below the radar of the media. However the police and social services were well aware of it and that it was increasing. By 2011, Nazir Afzal, then Crown Prosecution Service Chief Prosecutor for the North West of England (and himself a Muslim of Pakistani ethnic origin) overturned a CPS decision and set out to prosecute the Rochdale gang responsible for the grooming of forty-seven underaged white girls. The gang were tried, found guilty and sentenced in 2012.

Afzal said on BBC Radio 4: “You may not know this, but back in 2008 the Home office sent a circular to all police forces in the country saying ‘as far as these young girls who are being exploited in towns and cities, we believe they have made an informed choice about their sexual behaviour and therefore it is not for you police officers to get involved in.’” In a later article, he stated that the Home Office circular that the Home Office circular used the term “child prostitute”. At the time of that circular, Jacqui Smith was Home Secretary in the early days of Gordon Brown’s Labour government. It is clear that the Home Office knew about the problem, were aware of the scale of it, and deliberately instituted a policy to reverse culpability onto the victims and suppress public awareness. The Home Office and its current Secretary of State, Sajid Javid, are still attempting to bury the issue under a welter of inaction and dishonesty about the ethnicity and motives of these gangs.

This story of paedophilia follows a pattern set out by the philosophies of postmodernism which have seeped inexorably into the consciousness of the liberal elites via the universities. But it is important that we recognise that this is part of a much wider culture of moral crisis in which norms are being broken down by a determined attack from the intellectual Left.

Lest you imagine that paedophilia is an isolated example, and that the postmodern trend is just a bunch of intellectuals dreaming up a wish-list, consider this article by Andrew Marr in the Observer on Sunday 28th February 1999, almost two years after Tony Blair’s landslide Labour victory. It was written after the publication of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. Stephen Lawrence was a black boy who was horrifically murdered by a white gang for racist reasons. In his article, Marr rails against what he descibes as the tribal racism of the white lower classes from whence the murderers sprang. Whilst he concedes that these same “tribes” have cause for complaint, his solution to the problem is thus:

“What then can be done? (Apart, of course, from widespread and vigorous miscegenation [race mixing], which is the best answer, but perhaps tricky to arrange as public policy.) First, we need to raise still more taxes to help regenerate inner-city ghettos and to employ more young people, white and black.”

If you don’t like the word “miscegenation”, then substitute the word “multiculturalism” and the sentence means the same. Marr goes on to agree with Doreen Lawrence who says that a solution lies in the education system; but notice that he takes it a stage further and demands that education should become a form of political indoctrination:

“The next answer was given by Doreen Lawrence, welcoming the report’s emphasis on education: ‘I truly believe in education our history, our background, is what separates us.’ But, though teachers are the most effective anti-racist campaigners in the country, this means more than education in other religions it means a form of political education. Only people who understand the economic forces changing their world, threatening them but also creating new opportunities, have a chance of being immune to the old tribal chants.”

Once again, he refers to the “tribal” attitudes of the white working class. And so his final solution is this:

“And the final answer, frankly, is the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress. It may be my Presbyterian background, but I firmly believe that repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good. Stamp hard on certain ‘natural’ beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off.”

And here we have it, the three stages of the revolutionary destruction of the white male patriarchy as set out by the postmodernists: race mixing; educational indoctrination for social change; and wholesale state coercion and repression. Andrew Marr’s postmodernist wet dream.

At the time, I have no doubt readers of the Observer sympathised with Marr’s solutions, but would likely have dismissed them as fanciful. However, we can test his ideas against what has actually happened in the UK since he wrote that article in 1999.

In 1997, Tony Blair’s Labour government came to power after a landslide victory over the Conservatives who lost 171 seats and granted Labour a Parliamentary majority of 179 seats in the House of Commons – the largest majority any UK government has enjoyed. This granted Blair carte blanche to do almost as he pleased, whilst the Conservatives were at their weakest. The new Labour government immediately set about increasing immigration on a massive scale. In 1997, net immigration into the UK was 48,000. The following year, this was trebled to 140,000. It rose from this figure to 185,000 in 2003 and then jumped again to 268,000 in 2004. From 2004 to 2017, immigration has averaged 250,000 per year. In total since 1997, net immigration has reached 4.5 million people.

Screenshot from ONS via Migration Watch

It is now clear that the decision to open up the UK to mass immigration was a deliberate policy by Blair’s government; and which was kept secret from the public for fear that knowledge of it would upset Labour’s core working class voters.

The intention was to introduce multiculturalism into the UK by stealth. There was no consultation about this. It was not part of any manifesto declaration. There were no votes on the policy and so there was not one shred of consent granted by the British people. Blair’s government just went ahead and did it. There is no conspiracy theory about this. It really was a conspiracy against the British people – and particularly against the white working classes. The effect is to keep wages depressed, economic measures of productivity low and maintain social security dependency. Other effects have become apparent as time went on: overcrowded schools with children from many ethnic backgrounds, most of whom are non-English speaking or where English is not their first language; hospitals and maternity facilities are stretched and housing is in short supply. The new immigrants have settled in the big cities and the locals have moved out to the countryside and into new housing. This is the “white flight” writ large. The victims of this policy are the very people who provide Labour with their core voters.

But this was not enough for the progressives in the Labour Party (or postmodernists or cultural Marxists – call them whatever you like, it means the same thing). Having brought in 4.5 million people of all ethnic and religious backgrounds whose views and habits differ markedly from the native “tribes”, it was then deemed necessary to mix them up a bit more (“miscegenation”). A clue to this lies in a recent advert for internships for the BBC: These were advertised by an agency called Creative Access, and said: “All roles advertised through Creative Access are open only to UK nationals who are from a black, Asian or non-white ethnic minority”. In other words, if you are a white Brit, even one who is really well qualified, you need not bother to apply. Whichever way you look at it, this looks like out and out racism. It is reminiscent of those infamous signs once hung up in seaside Bed and Breakfast establishments which said “No dogs, tinkers, blacks or Irish” except that the situation has now been completely reversed into “positive” discrimination.

All those years that my generation spent having it drummed into us that we should be “colour blind” in our dealings with our fellow citizens of whatever cast, creed or race, are thrown to the four winds. It seems that it is now perfectly acceptable to discriminate between our fellow citizens, based upon their identity, but only in one direction. In other words, if you are a white Brit, you can expect to be discriminated against. On the other hand, if you are a black or Asian Brit, you can expect to get the job.

And yet it would seem that this is legal. The justification lies in the Equality Act 2010, sections 158 and 159, which was introduced by Harriet Harman in the dying days of Gordon Brown’s Labour government, and passed into law by David Cameron’s unthinking, unwitting and oh-so-progressive Conservative government. The Equality Act says that it is against the law to discriminate against someone because of:

Essentially, this means that it is OK for an organisation such as the BBC to have quotas of ethnic minorities, and then to fill those quotas by selective recruitment. There are fine details to distinguish between “positive action” which is legal, and “positive discrimination” which is not. But when we stand back from the fog of legal obfuscation, we see that there is justification for selecting against white Brits.

References/Further Reading

[1] Hicks SRC, (2018) – Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. Ockham’s Razor Publishing. United States.

[2] Siedentop L, (2015) – Inventing the Individual. Penguin Books, London.

[3] Cobley B, (2018) – The Tribe – The Liberal Left and the System of Diversity. Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK.

[4] Foucault, Michel (1986) – The History of Sexuality, Volume III, The Care of the Self. Penguin Books translation.