Trans-Canada

Carnival in Berlin by Jeanne Mammen, c. 1930 [MOMA, NY]

One is left speechless by some government legislation. That would be its intention, for it is designed to prevent, or gravely discourage, persons with views other than the Zeitgeist’s from expressing themselves.

The Zeitgeist demands. And what it demands, Courts and Parliaments deliver.

It began as a malicious game among liberals and progressives, to tar their political opponents through a mechanism we call “political correctness,” on college campuses and in other environments over which they were able to wrest control.

It was a “trend” of the late twentieth century. The Berlin Wall came down, to much celebration; but new psychic walls were erected to advance the old project of human engineering, towards the New Soviet Man, placidly obedient to the revolutionary authorities.

Then it launched, like Sputnik, into outer space. For while the bright lights in French, then American, intellectual circles remained instinctively loyal to the old Party Line, their ambitions went beyond it. They did not wish to stop at “worker’s control of the means of production,” or anything so humble. They wanted everything changed.

The Leninists, and their politburos through three generations, did not question so many of the old bourgeois assumptions, inherited from centuries of Christian civilization. To them, for instance, a man was still a man, a woman still a woman, the child was still their child. They made “advances” on such fronts as divorce, and abortion, declared the sexes “equal” – but there were still two sexes, and in Communist societies quite old-fashioned, normative attitudes were maintained.

In many ways, the Communists were among the most “conservative” of rulers. Their movement went back before Marx, to the invention of “workers” in the Industrial Revolution, and to the French bloodbath of Robespierre, in which “the masses” were first organized as a kind of battering ram against the anciently established institutions of Church and State.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Ho, Pol Pot, were caught in a European time capsule. All of their adaptations assumed a conventional anthropology (“a man was a man for all that”). You could shoot him, or otherwise twist him to turn against the interests of his own person or family, but you still subconsciously knew what you were twisting.

Click here to read the rest of David Warren’s column . . .

ABOUT DAVID WARREN

David Warren is a former editor of the Idler magazine and columnist with the Ottawa Citizen. He has extensive experience in the Near and Far East. His blog, Essays in Idleness, is now to be found at: davidwarrenonline.com.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau waving a LGBT flag with a new trans rights bill today. Photo by Justin Ling.

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