Saving our civilisation demands zero tolerance of wokeness

In the early months of the Second World War, newspapers in Allied and neutral countries carried reports that the Nazi occupation forces in Poland had imposed the death penalty for a number of apparently trivial offences, including the wearing of felt hats. Was this true? Or was it crude Allied propaganda, or mistaken reporting through the fog of war? Did the Germans really enforce such an insane prohibition?

No doubt scholars could establish the truth if they were to engage in some rather profitless research; but the fact is it does not matter. The most significant aspect of the case is that it was credible, in view of the Nazis’ past record in micro-control. Totalitarianism means exactly that: total control over every area of life, even the most trivial – especially the most trivial. When caprice can impose Draconian regulations upon the smallest details of existence, then power is absolute.

That is the totalitarian phenomenon we are experiencing today at the hands of the “woke” insurgency. The latest claim is that certain print fonts are “racist”. In the climate of neurosis generated by the Marxist organisation Black Lives Matter and allied pressure groups, there are no limits to the hysteria over “race”, rivalled only by the “gender” madness, to which most institutions of society are cravenly succumbing on both sides of the Atlantic.

In Britain, victor in two world wars allegedly waged to guarantee freedom, it is now commonplace to see people, long known for their articulacy, hesitating and groping for politically correct vocabulary before expressing an opinion. That is the litmus test of liberty. Unfree speech signals an unfree society. George Orwell knew that. To control language is to control expression; when a man can no longer articulate his beliefs, totalitarianism is in control.

The woke agenda is to enlarge this climate of fear – fear of reputational damage, of ostracism, of losing employment, even, in extreme cases, going to prison – until every bastion of governance, of culture, of learning, of social intercourse has been subjugated. In that context, the woke denunciation of “racist fonts” resembles the Nazis’ ban on felt hats. If people are afraid of offending even in imaginary ways, there is no need for the advancing totalitarians to fear meeting resistance.

That is the core of the matter: the capitulation of all those in charge of our institutions, beginning with Parliament, is the real cause of the problem, not the Marxist adventurists (in their own jargon) audaciously trying to impose their will. It is this trahison des clercs that has enabled the revolution. For that is what it is, let us make no mistake – a full-blooded cultural revolution, on the Maoist model.

Older people will remember seeing nightly on their television screens the grotesque images of mobs of adolescents, aggressive, violent and ignorant of everything except the nonsense contained in the little red book they brandished, mocking and tormenting their seniors and destroying artefacts and records thousands of years old that can never be replaced. It was the classic deployment by Marxism – despite its false pretensions to intellectual respectability, actually a murderous combination of economic illiteracy with social tyranny and brute force – of raw youth to eradicate existing culture and create a tabula rasa for ideological utopian experimentation.

Today, the heirs of those brain-dead Red Guards are the woke snowflakes on British campuses – still a minority, thankfully. They exhibit the same ignorance of real life, the same arrogant sense of enlightenment, the same contempt for the past and its monumental achievements. They will not allow themselves, or even fellow undergraduates, to be exposed to any ideas that contradict cultural Marxism. That, however, is not surprising or shocking in itself: from 1848 to 1968, student idiots established their claim to ownership of every upheaval and revolution that offered an alternative to uncongenial study.

What is different today is the authorities’ craven surrender to them. Occasional mild resistance to campus censorship, forced on university authorities by the government, cannot conceal the culture of submission to wokeness that is now endemic in British academe. Why? Of course, particularly in the Russell Group universities, many dons are complicit, or even leaders of this anti-intellectual movement. Yet the fact is that these fatuous undergraduate dictators are more vulnerable than any preceding student generation to sanctions by the authorities.

All revolutions, since and including 1789, are bourgeois revolutions. Not since the last peasant revolts in the early sixteenth century have horny-handed sons of toil raised their scythes against the established order. Robespierre was a caricature of bourgeois gentility; Marx was middle class, Engels the son of an industrialist; Lenin’s family had almost transcended bourgeois status, since his father had been awarded minor nobility. The proletarians might occasionally be put to work, as in the September 1793 prison massacres in Paris, or the 1917 storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd, but the leaders who controlled the carnage were strictly white-collar.

Campus snowflakes are often the product of spoiled-brat upbringing in well-off families and independent schools. If university authorities made it plain that any trouble-making in the woke interest would result in their being sent down, thus negating years of parental investment in school fees, that would be a very effective sanction. “You want to no-platform speakers, to remove college statues, to teach your teachers instead of learning from them? Off you go, there are plenty of applicants eager to take your place.”

The only reason that is not happening is the cowardice or complicity of the academic authorities. The same applies throughout most major institutions, at the climax of cultural Marxism’s long march. The BBC, the National Trust, the British Library and a host of other once totemic institutions: we need a massive clear-out of the infiltrators and a return of all institutions to non-political control respectful of British history and culture.

Oxford University is not planning to abolish sheet music as “racist”, though one fanatic demanded that, but its apparent plans to sideline Beethhoven, Mozart and the great canon of classical music, because it was composed by white men who were contemporary with, but not complicit in, slave economies is a further diminishing of the great culture created by Christendom over two millennia. Leonardo and Michelangelo, Palestrina and Victoria, Shakespeare and Tolstoy: only a philistine would disparage that heritage as the product of “dead white men”, in favour of some alternative provision.

The hysteria over “race” is contrived, but corrosive of good community relations. When sanity departs, everything is racist: from musical notation, to trees (already denounced) and print fonts. Then books published in an offensive font will have to be pulped, and so on, into dystopian nightmare. We need to get a grip on this madness and stop it in its tracks. A culture of surrender must be replaced by one of resistance. Since this revolution is Marxist, it is wholly evil: no accommodations should be made with it. Zero tolerance of woke is the only way to save civilisation.

It is no longer just Christianity that is the chief target of woke aggression: science has to be discredited because the establishment of any objective truth is a barrier to an ideology that arrogates to itself prescriptive rights in every area of human existence. That is why the “transgender” delusion is so fiercely espoused by the woke cult.

Science says that sex is determined by biology, by XX or XY chromosomes, by hormones and DNA. The woke claim it is determined by the whim of the individual. Increasingly, the law gives comfort, support and authority to the gender dysphoria delusion. How far will this go? If the woke cult renounces the heliocentric theory, will we be compelled to believe the sun orbits the earth? Ideology over science: think Nazis and felt hats.

The universal feature of the revolution – every revolution – is hypocrisy. One of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter – a self-proclaimed Marxist – is being investigated by her own movement after purchasing four houses in recent years. According to the New York Post, Patrisse Khan-Cullors bought a house in Inglewood, California in 2016 for $510,000 that is now worth $800,000; a home in South Los Angeles in 2018 for $590,000, now worth $720,000; a property in rural Georgia with its own facilities for private aircraft; and a $1.4m property in Topanga Canyon.

A betrayal of Marxism and the revolution? Not at all. Engels, who enjoyed fox-hunting and hosting lavish dinners, left the equivalent of £3m in today’s money when he died. The impact of such a sum, if disbursed among the needy of 19th-century Manchester, would have been considerable; but that is not the responsibility of the Marxist, his duty is to secure power by subverting the culture of target societies, then to impose equality from the objective perspective of a sleek chauffeur-driven saloon, cruising along a Zil lane exclusive to the nomenklatura, en route to a privileged Party dacha at Peredelkino.

We must defeat and disperse the useful idiots, mostly narcissistic bourgeois flâneurs with no moral or cultural compass, promoting woke nonsense. This is the most urgent priority facing us today. We must eliminate the woke virus before it destroys our culture, civilisation and liberty. Those calling for ever more tyrannical and invasive hate laws are the most hate-filled people in public discourse today. We must sweep the statute book clean of every ill-considered restriction on freedom that pollutes it. We need zero tolerance of wokeness.