BY DAVID EYLES

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.

At the source 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 vanquished. 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 encouragement 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 increasingly 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 a 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 by some.

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 acquiescence 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.

(This examination of Postmodernism and its effects shall continue tomorrow in Part II.)

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.

David Eyles spent the first twenty years of his career as a quantity surveyor in civil engineering. He started work on the Thames Barrier Project in the mid 1970s and from there moved on to building hardened aircraft shelters in East Anglia – those being the days of a rather warm Cold War. On RAF Lakenheath, he was once observed nearly slithering his mini under the wheels of a taxiing F111 loaded up with tactical nuclear weapons. If nothing else, it would have been one helluva motor insurance claim and a sense of humour loss by the US Air Force. Later, he went to Nigeria for two years to build roads and see first hand what corruption can do to bring down an intrinsically prosperous country. There he had his first experience of seeing British overseas aid being wasted. He returned to the UK and attempted to write a novel, but was instead diverted into bird ringing and spent far too many nights chasing radio tagged Nightjars around Wareham Forest at dangerously high speed. By a mysterious route, then fell into farming via six worn out commercial hens; and wound up with a flock of 350 Dorset Down ewes and forty Traditional Hereford cattle. He then divorced, changed his life and arrived in Cornwall to find solace in the pedantry of hard data, wonderful pubs, good people and writing. His other interest include walking; some very poor quality photography; the philosophy of consciousness as it pertains to animals and humans; and a certain amount of politics. David’s writing can be found here.