… the Wilson government wasn’t an aberration, for political history is littered with examples of people being found out, often in the most embarrassing possible circumstances. Now that he’s remembered as a byword for complacent failure, it’s easy to forget that David Cameron was a straight-A student who won an exhibition to Brasenose College, Oxford and was described by his tutor, Professor Vernon Bogdanor, as “one of the ablest” students he’d ever taught. (By now you should have spotted a theme.) An even more glaring example, however, comes from across the Atlantic.
Google “Michael Ignatieff” and you wonder if it was really legal for one man to have enjoyed so many blessings. Everything the Canadian intellectual touched turned to gold. At boarding school in Toronto in the Sixties he was captain of the soccer team and editor of the yearbook. He taught at Oxford and the London School of Economics. He presented The Late Show for the BBC and wrote columns for the Observer. His documentaries won awards; his biography of Isaiah Berlin was shortlisted for some of the world’s most prestigious non-fiction prizes; his novel was even shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He was awarded a professorial chair at Harvard, then another at Toronto. And when his friends in the Canadian Liberal Party invited him to make a bid for the leadership, further glory seemed inevitable.
What happened next, however, makes Kwarteng’s stewardship of the Treasury look like a triumph. In 2011 Ignatieff led the Liberals to the worst defeat in their history, finishing third with just 34 seats. What was worse, he even lost his own seat in Etobicoke–Lakeshore, the first Canadian opposition leader to do so since 1900. His staff were in tears, the world was watching, and all those book prizes must have seemed an awfully long way away. In the cruellest twist imaginable, the man who always came top in exams had failed the most public exam of all.
Dominic Sandbrook, “Kwasi Kwarteng was the wrong sort of clever”, UnHerd, 2022-10-17.
January 20, 2023
QotD: Michael Ignatieff
January 19, 2023
“Sir, was everyone in history a racist?”
At The Critic, Fred Skulthorp explains how British history is being taught in schools these days:
Sir John Hawkins (1532-1595), Sir Francis Drake (1540?-1596), and Thomas Cavendish (1560-1592).
Probably a copy of Daniel Myten’s’ painting of the same subject, now part of the Royal Museums Greenwich collection via Wikimedia Commons.
“Sir, was everyone in history a racist?” said Daniel one slow Thursday afternoon at my old school in North London. Daniel hadn’t put up his hand, so of course, I had to tell him off. Even worse, being in my usual teacherly bad mood, I wasn’t exactly Mr Chips with my response. What a silly question, I snapped, before going back to trying to teach a set of pandemic weary teenagers about the Reformation.
Daniel deserved a better answer than that. Not least because some version of his question has now worked its way onto the lips of the certain adults who run schools. The latest “yes” in a primary school in Lewisham saw an “overwhelming” majority vote to remove the stain of Sir Francis Drake’s name from the school. Who knows what arguments went into the decision, but one can only hope they delved a little bit more into his career than the BBC who initially served him up as a “16th century slave trader”.
The decision didn’t surprise me. I had briefly taught in another secondary school just down the road, and another in North London, where making the curriculum inclusive, diverse, decolonised, equal etc was all the rage. For me, Drake was a fascinating target. I had actually taught the man to a class of Year 8s. Funnily enough then, Drake was one of the few old white men of British history deemed more accessible — largely given his relationship with an escaped slave called Diego. According to Miranda Kaufman, whose book Black Tudors was gleefully worked into our history curriculum, Diego became Drake’s “right-hand man” in his various endeavours across the high seas.
This wasn’t enough to exonerate him in Lewisham. When it comes to slavery and being a dead white man, even flirt with it and you’re out. Beyond the expected uproar, the bigger issue here is the increasingly strange way we feel compelled to serve up our history to make it accessible for “minorities” in the name of “diversity, equality and inclusivity”.
Both schools I taught in during my short-lived career were some of the most diverse in London. This isn’t something that particularly interested me, but it certainly played on the conscience of some of my colleagues. One of the most cringe-inducing conversations I have ever had was with a fellow teacher, who on discussing changes to the curriculum in the name of “diversity” recalled something along the lines of: that they had looked down the register, seen the names and wondered how we might better tell their story. Presumably, this meant anything other than the usual fare of boring old “white” British history
What exactly is their story? As British citizens, their story is our story; our history, their history and vice versa. The attempts to presume exactly what these teenagers found relatable end up pretty disingenuous. Roman Britain? Ever heard of Ivory Bangle Lady? The Tudors? All old dead white guys, huh? Nope, check out this cool black trumpeter who was in the court of Henry VII! These are interesting curios, but sprinkling them throughout the curriculum all too often seemed to advance the misconception that Britain has always been a multiracial, multicultural society — something not only historically inaccurate but incredibly patronising to the children of second, third, even fourth generation immigrants.
This all came to a head during a unit on World War One, which our head of department insisted be based on the book The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire by David Olusoga. The book is an interesting piece of revisionism about the role of colonial soldiers in WW1. In obsessing over race and teaching the Western Front, it does at some point have to contend with the fact that the vast majority who died there were, err … white men. In one particularly painful lesson, I ended up having to teach the Battle of the Somme by asking the class: what does the story of Chinese labourers reveal about World War One? Funnily enough, as it turns out, not that much! I’m sure being subjected to racial slurs whilst doing manual labour behind the front wasn’t much fun. But I felt something fundamentally dishonest, even borderline offensive, in prioritising their story over those of the Pals Battalions who went over the top that morning.
The Partisan War Behind the Frontlines – WW2 Documentary Special
World War Two
Published 18 Jan 2023There is a second war raging on the Eastern Front. From the huge expanses of no man’s land behind the German lines, Moscow’s battle-hardened and well-armed partisan bands are waging a Rail War in support of Red Army offensives. But every successful mission brings down the wrath of the genocidal Axis war machine.
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You must be protected from coworkers who threaten your health … by bringing in cake?
Christopher Snowden knows a slippery slope when the media pushes another nanny state health concern as serious as cake in the workplace:
If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them.
Who is this co-worker from hell? Who is this whining, snivelling infant demanding that the rest of the world forfeits their small pleasures because she has no self-control?
It is none other than the head of the Food Standards Agency, Susan Jebb, who is in The Times tomorrow comparing cakes to passive smoking.
The full quote reads:
“We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time and we undervalue the impact of the environment”, she said. “If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them. Now, OK, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”
Indeed they were, Susan, before people like you took that choice away to such an extent that even a pub that put up a sign saying “SMOKERS ONLY” on the door and employed no one but smokers would still forbidden from accommodating them.
I’ve made a few slippery slope arguments in my time — contrary to midwit opinion, they are often valid — but even I never imagined that a workplace smoking ban would evolve into a workplace cupcake ban. Talk about the thin end of the wedge!
While saying the two issues were not identical, Jebb argued that passive smoking inflicted harm on others “and exactly the same is true of food”.
To inflict something on someone implies that it is done without their consent. In that sense — and leaving aside the question of whether wisps of secondhand smoke are actually harmful — passive smoking doesn’t inflict harm on a person who knowingly goes to a smoky pub. The same is obviously true of someone who offers you a cake. If they held you down and physically shoved it down your throat, that would be a different matter, but surely that is already illegal under some law or other?
Meanwhile, Canadian nanny state enablers are trying to do battlespace prep to get the government to mandate new warning labels to containers of alcoholic beverages and to significantly cut the already low maximum “recommended consumption”:
… a report on the new drinking guidance released Tuesday by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction says the warning labels could inform consumers about serious health risks including cancer, the number of standard drinks in a container and the benefits of limiting consumption to two drinks a week.
“Consuming more than two standard drinks per drinking occasion is associated with an increased risk of harms to self and others, including injuries and violence,” the report says.
The guidance is based on the findings of a panel of 23 experts who reviewed nearly 6,000 peer-reviewed studies as part of a two-year process that also considered feedback from 4,845 people during an online public consultation process in spring 2021.
The most recent available data show that alcohol causes nearly 7,000 cancer deaths each year in Canada, with most cases being breast or colon cancer, followed by cancers of the rectum, mouth and throat, liver, esophagus and larynx. Liver disease and most types of cardiovascular diseases are also linked to alcohol use.
The guidance updates Canada’s Low-Risk Drinking Guidelines set in 2011, when two drinks a day were considered low risk and it was believed that women could safely consume up to 10 drinks a week and men could have 15 drinks.
Tanks Chats #164 | M-50 Sherman | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 23 Sep 2022In this episode of Tank Chats, David Willey discusses the history of the M-50 version of the Sherman.
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QotD: Did Sparta achieve its strategic objectives?
And yet Sparta’s failure here was perhaps the most complete of all. The collapse of the Spartiate class did not abate after Leuktra; by the 230s, there were hardly any Spartiates left. Meanwhile, the transition of Messenia from a group of subject communities supporting Sparta economically to an active and hostile power on Sparta’s border essentially represented the end of the Spartan social order as established in the seventh century with the reduction of Messenia to helotry in the first place.
So, does Sparta achieve its strategic objectives? By and large, I think the answer here has to be “no”. Sparta – the supposed enemy of tyrants – by mismanaging its own leadership invited one foreign oppressor (Macedon) into Greece after another (Persia). As a state that seems – to me at least – to have considered itself the natural and rightful leader of all of the Greek states, Sparta, routinely and comprehensively proved itself unworthy of the position.
The one thing we may say for Spartan foreign and military policy is that it seems to have made the world safe for helotry – it preserved the brutal system of oppression which was foundational to the Spartan state. But consider just how weak an achievement that is – we might, after all, make the same claim about North Korea: it has managed only to successfully preserve its own internal systems of oppression.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
January 18, 2023
Our western gerontocracy
In The Free Press, Katherine Boyle outlines the death-grip that elderly boomers retain on so many of the levers of our shared society, from government to business to (of course) the legacy media:
“Millennials” by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The tens of millions of Americans that are, like me, millennials or members of the generation just younger, Gen Z, have been treated as hapless children our entire lives. We have been coded as “young” in business, in politics, and in culture. All of which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that millennials are the most childless and least home-owning generation in modern American history. One can’t play house with a spouse or have their own children when they’ve moved back into mom’s, as 17 percent of millennials have.
Aside from the technology sector — which prizes outliers, disagreeableness, creativity and encourages people in their twenties to take on the founder title and to build things that they own — most other sectors of American life are geriatric.
The question is why.
There are many theories — and many would-be culprits. Some believe it’s the fault of the Boomers, who have relentlessly coddled their children, perhaps subconsciously, because they don’t want to pass the baton. Others put the blame on the young, who are either too lazy, too demoralized or too neurotic to have beaten down the doors of power to demand their turn.
Then again, life expectancy is growing among the healthy and elite in industrialized nations, so perhaps this is all just progress and 70 is the new 40. But one can take little solace in the growing life expectancy of the last 200 years when comparing ourselves to more productive generations that didn’t waste decades on extended adolescence.
Every Independence Day, we’re reminded that on July 4, 1776, the most famous founders of this country were in their early 20s (Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr) and early 30s (Thomas Jefferson). Even grandfatherly George Washington was a mere 44. These days much of our political class, from Bill Clinton (elected president 30 years ago at age 46) to financial leaders like Warren Buffett (92), and Bill Gates (67) who launched Microsoft 48 years ago, are still dominant three and four decades after seizing the reins of power. CEOs of companies listed on the S&P 500 are getting older and staying in their jobs longer, with the average CEO now 58 years old and staying in his or her role 10.8 years versus 7.2 a decade ago. And our political culture looks even more gray: Twenty-five percent of Congress is now over the age of 70 giving us the oldest Congress of any in American history.
The Boomer ascendancy in America and industrialized nations has left us with a global gerontocracy and a languishing generation waiting in the wings. Not only does extended adolescence — what psychologist Erik Erikson first referred to as a “psychosocial moratorium” or the interim years between childhood and adulthood — affect the public life of younger generations, but their private lives as well.
In 1990, the average age of first marriage in the U.S. was 23 for women and 26 for men, up from 20 for women and 22 for men in 1960. By 2021, that number had risen to 28.6 years for women and 30.4 years for men, according to the Census Bureau, with 44 percent of U.S. women between the ages of 25 and 44 expected to be single in 2030. Delayed adulthood has had disastrous consequences for procreation in industrialized nations and is at the root of declining fertility and all-but-certain population collapse in dozens of countries, many of which expect the halving of their populations by the end of the century.
“Twenty-five is the new 18,” said The Scientific American in 2017, pointing to research that extended adolescence is a byproduct of affluence and progress in society. Which is why the finiteness of a mid-thirties half-life is such a surprise to those in their 20s and 30s. It runs counter to every meme and piece of advice young people receive about building a career, a family, a company and in turn, a country.
The prevailing wisdom in Western nations is that the ages of 18-29 are a time for extreme exploration — the collecting of memories, friends, partners and most importantly, self-identity. A full twelve years of you! Self-discovery aided by platforms built for broadcasting photos of artisanal cocktails and brunch. And with no expectation for leadership because there will be time for that, a generation can absolve oneself of responsibility for their actions. (Tragically, that was never true for half of the population, which is why we have a generation of extremely accomplished older women, who weren’t really aware how difficult it is to become pregnant at 39.)
The Roman Army, With Adrian Goldsworthy
Well That Aged Well
Published 12 May 2021In this episode we take a look at the Roman Army, and its comanders. What made the Roman Army so efficent? Was it the practice? The motivation? Their courrage? Or was it more to it? Find out in this week’s episode of “Well That Aged Well”, With Erlend Hedegart.
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L’affaire Dreyfus
Robert Zaretsky on an espionage scandal that convulsed the French Third Republic and still has resonance down to today:
Front page of L’Aurore for 13 January, 1898 with Zola’s J’Accuse headline.
Wikimedia Commons.
On January 13, 1898, Parisians awoke to the chorus of hundreds of news criers who, striding along the grand boulevards and brandishing copies of the newspaper L’Aurore, were shouting passages from the article that sprawled across the front page. It had originally been titled by its author, the novelist Émile Zola, “A Letter to M. Félix Faure, President of the Republique”. But with a flair for the sensational, the newspaper’s editor, Georges Clemenceau, slapped on a punchier headline. Stepping out of a department store or stepping down from a carriage, sitting at a café or standing at an intersection, pedestrians were greeted by two words that continue to resonate 125 years to the day after their first publication: “J’Accuse!”
With this exclamation, Zola’s letter transformed une affaire judiciare into l’affaire Dreyfus or, more simply, the Dreyfus Affair. It catapulted the French novelist onto the world stage at a critical moment in the history of his country, which was reeling from the forces of globalisation and industrialisation and riven by opposing understandings of its revolutionary heritage. It is thus hardly surprising that Zola’s fame rests more heavily on the letter than on his sweeping 20-volume masterpiece of literary realism, the Rougon-Macquart. It took a novelist to heave the facts of this affair into a narrative which, more than a century later, thrums with equal urgency. Moreover, as with the novels of the Rougon-Macquart, the letter thrusts onto centre-stage a lone individual swept up, and all too often swept under, the political and social, irrational and ideological forces of the modern age.
It all began with the contents of a rubbish bin. In September 1894, a cleaning woman at the German Embassy, in the pay of France’s military intelligence service, delivered her nightly harvest to her employers. Buried in the mound of discarded papers was a memorandum, known as the bordereau or note, revealing top secret advances in French artillery technology and tactics. In a frantic scramble to find its author, the war ministry’s suspicion settled on Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an officer in the High Command who stood out for his standoffishness and Jewishness.
Upon being arrested and charged, a bewildered Dreyfus denied the charges, pointing out several things mentioned in the bordereau he could not possibly have known. The seven members of the military tribunal, ignoring these inconsistencies as well as the insistence of their own graphologist that Dreyfus’s handwriting did not match the bordereau‘s, unanimously found him guilty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, a malarial rock off the coast of French Guyana.
But first came a remarkable ritual of public humiliation. Dreyfus was marched into the courtyard of the École militaire, the renowned military academy a short distance from the recently erected Eiffel Tower. In the shadow of that monument to modernity, an officer preceded to snap Dreyfus’s sword — broken and soldered back together with tin the night before, to make the gesture seem effortless — and tear off his insignia — whose threads were already loosened — while a dense crowd howled with calls for the death of the “Jewish traitor!”
Two years later, as Dreyfus wasted away in solitary confinement, Colonel Georges Picquart, the newly appointed head of military intelligence, found that another missive about French military plans had ended up in the rubbish bin at the German Embassy. Moreover, the handwriting on this new document, which matched that of the bordereau, also matched the hand of Ferdinand Esterhazy, an officer notorious for his womanising and gambling.
Picquart disliked Jews as much as his many of his fellow officers did. But when his commanding officer asked him why it mattered if “this Jew remains on Devil’s Island”, Picquart replied: “Because he is innocent!” The answer earned Picquart a rapid transfer to a desert outpost in North Africa. Before he was packed off, though, Picquart vowed that he would not “carry this secret to my grave”. He then shared what he knew with Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, the leader of Dreyfusards, a small but growing coterie of politicians and writers seeking a retrial for Dreyfus.
In late 1897, Zola met with Scheurer-Kestner, who told him about Picquart’s discovery. As the mesmerised novelist listened, he glimpsed the theatrical as well as moral dimensions of the affair. “It’s thrilling!” he gasped. “It’s frightful! But it is also drama on the grand scale!” It took Zola to scale it to greatness by flipping Oscar Wilde’s sly quip that anyone could make history, but only a great man could write it. Instead, Zola showed, a man becomes truly great only by, in every sense of the word, making history.
Ask Ian: Why No German WW2 50-Cal Machine Guns? (feat. Nick Moran)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Sep 2022From Nathaniel on Patreon:
“Why didn’t Germany or Axis powers have a machine gun similar to the American M2?”Basically, because everyone faced the choice of a .50 caliber machine gun or 20mm (or larger) cannons for anti-aircraft use, and most people chose the cannons — including Germany. There were some .50 caliber machine guns adopted by Axis powers, most notably the Hotchkiss 1930, a magazine-fed 13.2mm gun that was used by both Italy and Japan (among others). However, the use of the .50 caliber M2 by the US was really a logistical holdover form the interwar period. The M2 remained in production because it was adopted by US Coastal Artillery as a water-cooled anti-aircraft gun, and commercial sales by Colt were slim but sufficient to keep the gun in development through the 20s and 30s. It was used as a main armament in early American armor, but obsolete in this role when the war broke out.
However, with the gun in production and no obvious domestic 20mm design, the US chose to simply make an astounding number of M2s and just dump them everywhere, from Jeeps to trucks to halftracks to tanks to self-propelled guns. And that’s not considering the 75% of production that went to coaxial and aircraft versions …
Anyway, back to the question. The German choice for antiaircraft use was the 20mm and 37mm Flak systems, and not a .50 MG on every tank turret. And so, there was really no motive to develop such a gun. The Soviets did choose to go the US route, though, and developed the DShK-38 for the same role as the US M2 — although it was made in only a tiny fraction of the quantity of the M2.
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QotD: Tanks for Ukraine?
It looks like the inhibition on sending tanks is finally cracking, though. While Germany is still dithering over letting Poland send some of its Leopard 2’s, Britain has announced it’s sending 14 Challenger 2 main battle tanks.
I found that particular number interesting. Late Cold War and post-Cold War Russian armored units use three-tank platoons and three platoons plus a commander’s tank make a ten tank company.
The British Army, from whose stores the Challengers will be pulled, uses some archaic TO&E, possibly left over from the Wars of the Roses or Cromwell’s New Model Army, wherein four tanks equal a Bonnet*, and four Bonnets plus two more tanks in a headquarters Bonnet equal an eighteen-tank Spanner†.
Fourteen tanks, however, is enough for three four-tank platoons plus two tanks for an HQ platoon, equalling a fourteen tank US-style armored company. Apparently the Ukies are using a US/(most of)NATO TO&E for their armored units. So the Ukrainians will have at least one company of Western MBTs.
* Bonnet = Troop
† Spanner = SquadronTamara Keel, “Clank Clank Goes the Tank”, View From The Porch, 2023-01-15.
January 17, 2023
“Karl Marx was one hollow and rotten tree, inside and out, from beginning to end”
To mark the passing of Paul Johnson, the Foundation for Economic Education reposted an appreciation of Johnson’s Intellectuals by Lawrence W. Reed praising his essay on Karl Marx:
None of Johnson’s subjects can match Karl Marx for sheer loathsomeness and shameless fakery. He was a virulent racist and anti-Semite with a vicious temper (“Jewish n****r” was one of his favorite epithets). On a good day, he enjoyed threatening those who disagreed with him by blurting, “I will annihilate you!” His personal hygiene was, well, suffice it to say he had none. He was heartlessly cruel to his family and anyone who crossed him. This is the same man who postured as a thinker whose ideas would save humanity.
We learn in Intellectuals that the chef who cooked up communism professed to be “scientific”. In reality, Johnson argues, “there was nothing scientific about him; indeed, in all that matters he was anti-scientific”. His most famous lines — including “religion is the opiate of the masses” and workers “have nothing to lose but their chains” — were flagrantly ripped off from other authors. He “never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life”, steadfastly abjured invitations to do so, and denounced fellow revolutionaries who did. He never let a fact or a glimmer of reality stem the flow of poison from his pen. He had no money because he refused to work for it, then cursed those who had it and didn’t share it with him. His own mother said she wished her son “would accumulate some capital instead of just writing about it”.
And that’s for starters. Read Johnson’s chapter on Marx, and you’ll begin to understand the connection between the evil within the man and the evil his gibberish wrought. The Black Book of Communism estimates the death toll from attempts to put the rantings of this detestable lunatic into practice at minimally 100 million.
“What emerges from a reading of Capital is Marx’s fundamental failure to understand capitalism”, writes Johnson.
He failed precisely because he was unscientific: he would not investigate the facts himself, or use objectively the facts investigated by others. From start to finish, not just Capital but all his work reflects a disregard for truth which at times amounts to contempt. That is the primary reason why Marxism, as a system, cannot produce the results claimed for it; and to call it “scientific” is preposterous.
Many people who don’t know better, and an awful lot of those in “intellectual” circles who should, still think Karl Marx was some sort of prescient genius motivated by compassion for workers. Some even disgrace themselves with T-shirts bearing his unkempt image. They really ought to thank Paul Johnson for doing the thinking they themselves never made time for.
Actually, we were warned about people like Marx 2,000 years before Johnson. Matthew 7:16 wisely counsels:
Beware of false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. By their fruit you will know them. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.
Karl Marx was one hollow and rotten tree, inside and out, from beginning to end.
The Early Emperors, Part 11 – The Flavian Reconstruction
seangabb
Published 29 Dec 2022This is a video record of a lecture given by Sean Gabb, in which he discusses the three Flavian Emperors who ruled between 69 and 98 AD — Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian. He also discusses the Jewish Revolt and the eruption of Vesuvius.
The Roman Empire was the last and the greatest of the ancient empires. It is the origin from which springs the history of Western Europe and those nations that descend from Western Europe.
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How ideological programming in British schools make men like Andrew Tate inevitable
To be honest, I don’t think I’d ever heard of Andrew Tate before his legal troubles in Romania hit the headlines, and I’m not well-versed on his achievements (such as they might be). Janice Fiamengo also admits that Tate wasn’t on her radar before then, but she’s done some work to try to put him into perspective:
What has Tate got to do with UK education, except perhaps as a telling symbol of its unintended consequences? Why not just model and enforce ideals such as courtesy, self-restraint, and hard work, while upholding high academic standards? The article demonstrates how deeply committed schools have become to ideological programming. Some schools have drawn up “entire lessons focused on Tate” (!!!) while others deal more generally with “misogyny and gender stereotypes”. Whatever the particulars, the general message is unvarying: “We’ve all got to work collaboratively and collectively to support young men to reframe masculinity—away from this toxic ideology that’s presented by the likes of Tate.”
No one who’s been following the feminist narrative over the past decade or two will be surprised by the dogmatic reference to “toxic ideology,” now standard in any discussion of “reframing” boyhood. There is just one problem for the concerned teachers: Tate is five steps ahead of them, having already made clear to his millions of followers why injunctions about “reframing masculinity” are just code for the continual marginalization that most boys naturally want nothing to do with. The moment Tate and his allies expressed their scorn for the project, it lost its power overs the millions of boys forced to sit in feminist classrooms across the UK. Tate confirmed what boys intuitively knew: having their masculinity “reframed” will prevent them from pursuing masculine dreams, from being proud of themselves as male, admired by their male peers, and able to attract the interest of pretty girls. Teachers can keep on telling boys that peer approval through masculine moxy isn’t important, but that won’t make it true.
The point is not whether Tate’s (“I’ve got 33 cars“) program is an unalloyedly good one; the point is that it is manifestly better than the recipe for self-loathing and irrelevance being offered by the schools. The school’s program is the same that has been tried for years without any enthusiastic uptake because it offers nothing affirmatively male for young men to be and do (see especially White Ribbon UK, which has been trying for years to turn boys into handmaidens of feminism). All the normal things that centuries of boys in every major civilization on earth have cared about—competitiveness, status, toughness, mastery, knowledge, self-reliance, stoicism, high-jinks, displays of ability, and male bonding—are now frowned upon and must be replaced by feminine traits like empathy, egalitarianism, conformity, verbal display, and tone-policing. It doesn’t take a gender studies specialist to see that the life being offered these boys is one of deference, self-suppression, and self-contempt. No boy should want that.
In case you doubt my characterization, take a look at the Global Boyhood Initiative’s report on The State of UK Boys: Understanding and Transforming Gender in the Lives of UK Boys, published in 2022. The report was written for “teachers, youth workers, early-years practitioners and other professionals” to achieve “gender equity and social justice”.
Incidentally, the report includes a section attacking an alleged “overemphasis” on research showing boys and men as victims of intimate partner violence by women. While the report enthusiastically promotes the end of “gender” through transgenderism and social constructivism, it emphatically does not support the end of gendered norms about which sex is violent. On this front, the report laments that “even young boys” now believe that male persons can be victimized by female persons, citing the case of Johnny Depp’s abuse by Amber Heard. Nothing could more clearly signal the report authors’ chagrined awareness of the difficulty of controlling boys’ thoughts in the internet age.
The rest of the report explores pathways to weaken masculinity. On a number of occasions, it takes aim at “simplistic notions that boys require male ‘role models'” because such notions “frame women as inadequate to parent and teach boys”. Taking for granted that “gender is not tied to sex organs, hormones, or biological traits” (one wonders, then, why trans persons elect to take hormones and to change their sex organs), the emphasis throughout the report is on “realigning” masculinity to highlight gender fluidity, transgenderism, and inclusion of girls. The document has absolutely nothing good to say about masculinity, which it describes, variously, as “a seductive form of power”, “hegemonic”, and “oppressive”. It even uses the derogatory term “boysplaining” to stigmatize boys’ alleged way of talking.
Even such seemingly benign behaviors as “laughter, banter, and entertaining one another” are said to be “laddish” and linked to the exclusion of women and homosexuals. Taking pleasure in being good at sport is also given a negative valence by being associated with bullying.
As in all such feminist propaganda, the report seeks the evacuation of all positive content from masculinity. “Realigned” boys are to anchor their sense of self mainly in not being what boys have always been. They are to shun the allegedly “hegemonic” characteristics of “physical, sexual, and mental prowess; being action-oriented; ‘knowing’; having autonomy […]; and being emotionally tough.” It is surely no coincidence that modern boys and young men have fallen well behind their female peers in educational attainment, economic status, and performance on the job market. “Prowess” is out, knowing is out, being active is out, toughness is out. No wonder so many boys feel lost, disaffected, and resentful, and no wonder some see Andrew Tate as a hero.
Growing an Ancient Roman Garden
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 23 Aug 2022
