The Left Everywhere: RIP

ER Editor:  the excerpt below comes from a longer, recent blog post by Paul Craig Roberts titled “The American Left: RIP”.  This excerpt has been singled out for its value in understanding how The Left in most developed countries has been subverted to create division and chaos within its own ranks. Some of his references are drawn from the British media.

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Paul Craig Roberts

The American leftwing has been transmogrified. The left, which formerly stood for “peace and bread,” today stands for Identity Politics and war. The working class has been redefined as “the Trump deplorables” (Brexit voters – ER) and splintered into separate “victim groups”—women, racial minorities, homosexuals, transgendered. The oppressors are no longer oligarchs who own the means of production. The oppressor is the sexist, misogynist, homophobic, heterosexual, fascist, white supremacist male working class.

The rise of Identity Politics has brought with it politically controlled speech. Primarily white people, especially heterosexual white males, are subject to this control. The limits on their free speech are growing ever more severe, and no one has to be concerned about white heterosexual males being offended by offensive or threatening speech. White males can be called anything and they are.

By splintering the working class into victim groups, Identity Politics has made opposition to war and income inequality impossible. In place of unity, Identity Politics has dismembered the working class and directed its energies into internal disputes. We now have fistfights in London’s Hyde Park between radical feminists and transgendered activists. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4891484/Fists-fly-politically-correct-rally.html

Diana Johnstone has shown how Antifa, the violent arm of Identity Politics, has turned the leftwing into a suppressor of free speech and a supporter of war. See https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/09/antifa-in-theory-and-in-practice/ and https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/10/23/harmful-effects-antifa-diana-johnstone/ .

A splintered society cannot recognize or resist its oppression by a ruling elite. Feminism turns wives and husbands from complements into rivals. Indeed, Sarah Knapton, science editor for the London Telegraph, reports on the rise of “bromance,” strong emotional relationships between heterosexual men. Feminist attacks on men and political correctness have reduced millennial heterosexual males’ relationships with women to sex only. Their emotional commitments are to their male friends. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/10/12/rise-bromance-threatens-heterosexual-relationships-warn-social/ This doesn’t seem like a victory for women.

The cultivated hyper-sensitivity of political correctness, which arises from Identity Politics, is destroying language, history, and free speech. The UK government opposes the term “pregnant woman” because it excludes and offends transgender people. https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/uk-government-opposes-phrase-pregnant-woman-to-include-transgenders-1765718

The British Medical Association has issued guidelines that doctors should not use the word “mother” to refer to a pregnant woman as the term could offend transgender people. Instead, the term “pregnant people” should be used. https://www.redflagnews.com/headlines-2017/uk-doctors-now-banned-from-calling-pregnant-women-mothers-in-case-its-offensive  This has led to more conflict between feminists and the transgendered. Feminists see it as a plot to make “women” unmentionable. https://newsline.com/moms-to-be-are-not-pregnant-women-but-people-uk-to-un/ British National Health Service doctors are no longer to use the term “expectant mother” because it is “non-inclusive.” https://www.redstate.com/kiradavis/2017/01/30/british-health-service-bans-term-expectant-mother-non-inclusive/

Identity Politics, together with the rising American police state, have just about destroyed the First Amendment. A professor at one of America’s research universities told me that he was dressed down by a dean because he used the word “girls” in class and a woman was offended. Google fired one of its senior software engineers because he wrote a memo that men and women have different traits that make them suitable for different kinds of jobs. This statement of ordinary common sense got the engineer fired for “gender stereotyping.” https://www.rt.com/usa/398766-google-memo-viral-women/

Economic commentator Marc Faber was removed from the board of the investment company, Sprott, and banned from CNBC and the Fox Business Network for expressing his views against monument removal and that white Americans have done a better job of building an economy than black Zimbabwe. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-17/sprott-demand-marc-fabers-resignation-after-racist-diatribe

Free speech is not supposed to be limited to words that give no offense to anyone. What this definition of free speech does is to eliminate all criticism of wrong or criminal activity and all dissent against war, police brutality, and political, social, and economic programs. In other words, political correctness silences a population. Silencing is permitted regardless of whether the “offensive” statement is true or false. Just expressing a truth, as the Google engineer did, can destroy a person’s career. There is no freedom in such a system. As George Orwell said, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Universities themselves, traditionally dependent on free speech, are now themselves banning free speech. Controversial speakers likely to offend some “victim group” are simply prevented from speaking at universities. For example, speakers in favor of multiculturalism are welcomed even though the speech might offend those who believe the US is a white Christian society, but a white supremacist, whose speech at the University of Florida could not be blocked, caused the Florida governor to declare a state of emergency. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/17/florida-governor-state-of-emergency-richard-spencer-white-nationalist-speech

It seems simple enough that if a person doesn’t want to be offended by a speaker, don’t go to the speech. On the other hand, if a person wants to learn what the opposition is up to, why miss the chance? In the end, political correctness is about regulating what can be said and controlling explanations, not about protecting the hyper-sensitive from hurtful words.

What Identity Politics and political correctness are doing is demonizing white people and heterosexual males. Only white people are racists. Only heterosexual males—essentially white gentile ones except for Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein—commit sexual violence. As David Rosen writes in CounterPunch, “Male sexual violence: as American as cherry pie.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/20/male-sexual-violence-as-american-as-cherry-pie/

Rosen defines sexual abuse as “a form of sexual terror, an all-American male sport” that is “as old as the country.” In other words, all or most American males practice sexual terror on women. We have reached the point where a wife who gets angry at her husband can accuse him of rape and have him imprisoned, a far departure from the days when husband and wife were legally regarded as one and neither could testify against the other. When the most intimate personal relationship is subject to outside intervention, how does marriage prosper?

It doesn’t. According to the American Psychological Association, “about 40 to 50 percent of married couples in the United States divorce. The divorce rate for subsequent marriages is even higher.”

If husband and wife, mother and father, can’t stay together, how does society stay together?

How does society stay together when Identity Politics teaches hate and inflames social divisiveness?

How does society stay together when thugs claiming to be offended offend others by destroying historical monuments that are associated with the memory or identity of others?

How does society stay together when its history is erased, its schools, streets, and public buildings are renamed? As George Orwell said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” The next monuments to be removed are those of the Founding Fathers, racists all who adopted a Constitution that permitted slavery, an inherited institution that they had no power to reform.

In the United States history is being rewritten and language corrupted in order to foster hatred of white “oppressors,” especially white heterosexual males.

Little wonder Russia responds diplomatically to Washington’s aggression. No need to reply in kind when an enemy is destroying itself.

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Original article

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