Name-Calling and the Fall of the West

The cultural commentator Konstantin Kisin said recently in a podcast that the left had destroyed language. For instance, the lazy use of the words “nazi” and “fascist” to condemn someone who holds differing views has only succeeded in draining those words of meaning. If everyone is a fascist then no one is; and what then do we call an actual fascist?

But the distortion of language by the left goes far deeper than this and is, paradoxically, far simpler. Its roots appear to be in simple name-calling, a favourite weapon of both young girls and perhaps not surprisingly, radical feminists who gave us terms like male chauvinist “pigs”, casually de-humanising men while charging them with a “crime” of sorts. When I was a young man a favourite feminist darling of the left in Ireland was Nell McCafferty, a whiskey swigging ladette who made jokes about house-training men and so on, cheered on by her lesbian and misandrist supporters.

By the way, the word “misandrist” is one that gets downplayed a lot in the culture. I once had a windows spell-checker that didn’t recognize the word. For those unfamiliar with the term, a misandrist is a woman who despises men, the dark sister of misogynist. A prime example was that loon Valerie Solanas who shot Andy Warhol, she a CEO for the Society for Cutting Up Men or SCUM. We don’t hear a whole lot about her in the culture, and yet, there she is, as large as life, living proof that even feminists can be toxic.

SCUM

It was Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and recipient of oodles of leftist insult and yet still standing, though admittedly prone to bursting into tears every now and then, who explained the difference between male and female aggression and how it is expressed. Feminist propagandists have gone a long way in persuading the culture that the female is devoid of aggression, that violence is strictly a male preserve, except for the occasional regrettable anomaly like the CEO of SCUM, who, feminists would argue, was so hurt by men that she was kind of infected by their innate violence, and so, the shooting of Andy Warhol and all violence of women against men is actually men’s fault, the women in question being “victims” of male violence responding in like for like form, the only language men understand.

Jordan Peterson explained that while male aggression is generally expressed overtly, female aggression is more indirect, expressing itself in the form of relational aggression: speaking badly of someone, destroying their social links, setting out to inflict reputational damage and destruction, achieved for the most part through simple name-calling.

“If you don’t vote me on to the board I’ll tell everyone you’re a nazi.”

“Okay, I’ll vote for you, but just this once. And please, tell everyone I’m ‘nice’.”

“I might. If you pretend really hard to be nice. You being an aggressive man an’ all.”

Homo Placidus

There tends to be a more placid kind of man occupying the faculties of universities and they were a pushover for the aggressive feminists seeking power in the academy, the very workshop of language and thought. We all know what happened next, they took lots of seats of power in the academy and in publishing and in the media and, with postmodernism, succeeding in drenching reality in endless question marks: did it even exist, or is it just something some selfish man made to please himself? Which brings us more or less to today… except, that is, for one important factor which is often overlooked. Because in faraway places, people with an interest in taking power in the west noted that name-calling worked as a weapon for seizing power. It was a peculiar, almost comical Achilles heel of the western male. He could be toppled by calling him a pejorative name. How very interesting…

The late Christoper Hitchens was probably the first to notice the danger. In 2011 he warned of a term that had been deliberately created to take advantage of this western weakness. A term that would have the effect of silencing dissent while delivering power to gleeful enemies of the west. The term was “Islamophobia”, a brilliant construction with in-built gaslighting. “There’s nothing wrong with Islam, you simply have a phobia.”

Barbarians

Hitchens said at the time “…this is very urgent business ladies and gentlemen. I beseech you, resist it while you still can, before the right to complain is taken away from you, which will be the next thing. You will be told you can’t complain because you’re Islamophobic. The term is already being introduced into the culture as if it was an accusation of race hatred or bigotry, whereas it’s only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion …”

Hitchens went on to show how the use of the term will open the way to power by silencing objections. And it works like a charm. But even so, it still needs help, and this help comes from those already holding cultural power and influence. Hitchens, finishing with a plea, describes how the power of the west will be taken:

“…the barbarians never take a city till someone holds the gates open for them and it’s your own preachers who will do it for you and your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you. Resist. Resist it while you can.”

It’s difficult not to believe sometimes now, especially when some girl is raped or some man gets his head lopped off, that our own elites and the liberal left, as well-intentioned as they may be, have inadvertently fallen into the role of gate-openers for the barbarian hordes, to put our current civilisational situation in a Romanesque context.

What an ironic historical twist this could turn out to be. That the men of the west, helpfully agreeable in the feminist cause, inadvertently created the conditions for the takeover of the west by men whose main power gesture is the subjugation of women.

Feature Image: Ipanemah Corella