” … out from the door of the farmhouse came a long file of pigs …”
Revolutions are ultimately about power not ideology.
By Gary Scarrabelotti
On 7 September The Spectator carried an article by David Sergeant entitled “What’s changed in Britain since same-sex marriage?” It’s a chilling piece which doesn’t deserve to be summarized. It simply must be read for its own sake and absorbed down to the last word. Take your time and we’ll resume here later …
Stunning, wasn’t it? The way in Britain the anti-marriage revolutionary agenda has converged with the power of government, with the coercive apparatus of the state and the authority of the courts.
Surely, though, there should be no surprise at this? We’ve seen it all before.
“Really?”
Indeed, we have.
Sergeant simply described a Britain whose portrait was originally executed, brilliantly, back in 1945 with the publication of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
The Britain of Orwell and that of Sergeant differ only in appearances. Whereas Orwell’s animals were enslaved to serve an economic theory which defied social reality, Sergeant’s ’animals’ are being enslaved to serve theories about sex and gender that defy biology.
It didn’t end well for Orwell’s animals and it won’t end well for Sergeant’s either.
Remember Boxer, the draught horse?
Party pigs
He was the most committed, most faithful, most dutiful and compliant creature on Animal Farm and its hardest worker. In the end, his zeal for ‘animalist’ labour led to physical collapse. Instead, however, of being pensioned off honourably onto the special retirement pasture, Boxer met with a horrible end. He was sold to the local knackery and reduced to hide and glue.
It was part of a secret diplomacy pursued by the Farm’s party bosses — the pigs — with its leading enemies, the ‘humanist’ bigwigs of the nearby town and countryside. The pigs converted Boxer to hard currency and purchased from the town a crate of fine food and whiskey for themselves.
This ‘opening’ marked a turning point. The pigs had abandoned the idea of liberating the farm animals of England in favour of pursuing a policy of ‘animalism in one farm’ and of ‘normalising’ relations with farmers and townsmen hostile to the animal revolution. It was about defusing external threats which menaced, as much as the revolution itself, the political supremacy of the pigs over their former comrades. Eventually, the term “comrade” was officially abolished and the pigs began strutting about on their hind legs dressed as human farmers armed with whips and surrounded by guard dogs. As for the worker animals, they ended up enduring a serfdom more cruel than they had suffered under Farmer Jones before they threw him off old Manor Farm.
The point of Orwell’s tale is that revolutions are ultimately about power not ideology. Ideology is the servant of power. It will be modified, downplayed, suspended and even discarded according as the calculus of power demands. This is what the SSM movement is all about: it’s a power grab by a revolutionary élite.
I am not suggesting that the leading revolutionaries are not sincere in their advocacy of SSM. They are furiously so. Just as Karl Marx was relentlessly sincere about his economic theories and much else besides.
Marx, however, was a revolutionary before he was a socialist and the same goes for the SSMists. They are revolutionaries before they are advocates of same-sex marriage or gender reassignment. Just as with the old Marxists for whom socialism was the form of the revolution not its substance, so also for the new Marxists and their sexual politics.
Just as with the old Marxists for whom socialism was the form of the revolution not its substance, so also for the new Marxists and their sexual politics.
Class enemies
One of the great preoccupations linking old with new Marxists is their common detestation of the traditional family. The problem for Marxists is that families form so many little kingdoms, each one prizing independence, even if so many of them should lack it.
Marx himself was a sexual revolutionary. He advocated in the Manifesto a “legalized community of women”[1] – by which he meant unfettered sexual concourse among men and women — in place of the married state. It was an obsession with him. Unlike his economics, Marx’s visceral, doctrinaire animosity toward the family survived intact the failure of old Marxism — signalized by the collapse of the Soviet Union — metastasized and spread (via the new Marxism) throughout the social classes and institutions of Western society. His most radical ideas have proved, in fact, to be his most enduring.
Old Marxism focused on attacking the ideological and economic foundations of family independence from the Party and the state: religion (because it provided families with an “ideology” at odds with that of the Party) and private property (because it offered the prospect of economic independence from the state). Stalin’s anti-kulak and collectivization campaigns prosecuted from 1929 – 1932, and followed by the “terror-famine” of 1932 – 33, were designed, chiefly, to destroy the identity and emerging economic independence of the 80 percent of Russians and Ukrainians who lived in peasant families.
The new Marxist agenda is different. It aims to create aggressively rival models of family and to destroy remaining traditional families by unleashing within them “ideological” conflict over the nature of the family itself and of the relationships within it. The most revolutionary act conceivable is to blow up the family. If you want to demolish society and rebuild on new foundations, then the family is the place to lay your charges. Blast open the protections of its walls, and the individual faces alone the irresistible power of the revolutionary state.
Fellow travellers
In Animal Farm the one time enemies of the animal revolution eventually became admirers and imitators. And so it is in Sergeant’s Britain where the Conservative Party has become a willing accomplice of The Revolution. It speaks to the intellectual exhaustion and resulting collapse of conservatism in Britain and its retreat – for political rather than intellectual reasons – to a trend-following liberalism. From the Marxist perspective, this is a political establishment well qualified to supply “fellow travelers” without which any revolution would be impossible.
Here’s the point: just because people of different political persuasions might support, for a wide variety of reasons and motives, a re-definition of marriage, it does not follow that the issue has ceased to be a key objective of a militant minority determined to prosecute, from its secure base camps within our public institutions and big corporations, goals more far reaching than the re-definition itself. The revolutionary maxim is “form broad fronts.” Without them, agitate though they might, the militants go without power. With them, the revolutionaries get to reinvent society, invariably, along totalitarian lines.
That’s why all those Libs and Nats who have signed up to the Yes case are as great a menace to the Common Good as the sociopathic Marxist theorizing, scribbling and preaching on his university campus reservation. They are, in fact, handing the Marxist his revolution on a platter.
Great work, Team! Not forgetting their leaders, Prime Minister Turnbull and NSW Premier Berejiklian, let’s remember them all (in a footnote)[2] before, like Boxer, they end up at the knackery.
That, Friends, is how revolutions are made.
Recessional
“It was also found that the stupider animals, such as the sheep, hens and ducks, were unable to understand the Seven Commandments [of Animal Farm] by heart. After much thought Snowball declared that the Seven Commandments could in effect be reduced to a single maxim, namely: ‘Four legs good, two legs bad.’ This, he said, contained the essential principle of Animalism … The birds at first objected, since it seemed to them that they also had two legs, but Snowball proved to them that this was not so.
“ ‘A bird’s wing, comrades,’ he said, ‘is an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation. It should therefore be regarded as a leg. The distinguishing mark of Man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.’
“The birds did not understand Snowball’s long words, but they accepted his explanation, and all the humbler animals set to work to learn the new maxim by heart. FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BAD, was inscribed on the end wall of the barn, above the Seven Commandments and in bigger letters. When they had once got it by heart, the sheep developed a great liking for this maxim, and often as they lay in the field they would all start bleating ‘Four legs good, two legs bad! Four legs good, two legs bad!’ and keep it up for hours on end, never growing tired of it.”[3]