Yahoo News Western civilisation is being destroyed from within by forces we can’t control
For years now, those of us who warned of the devastating threat posed by the takeover of our institutions by woke ideologues were relentlessly attacked and ridiculed. There is no such thing as “woke”, we were assured by patronising Left-wingers, just “kind” people who “care” about others and who believe in “social justice”, fighting “prejudice”, “clarifying” history, embracing sexual “self-realisation”, “saving the planet” and promoting the fundamental “equality” of all human beings.
We were right, it turns out, and the centrist dads were spectacularly wrong. Voters now widely understand that the rise of extreme trans advocacy has led to the mutilation of many children and the erosion of women’s rights. Yet this is only one small part of the destructive ideological tsunami unleashed by woke fanatics. Our warnings, if anything, understated the scale of the problem, and in particular the authoritarian, even fascistic, nature of “critical race theory” and “postcolonial theory”, other key components of this demented way of thinking.
Take the West’s best universities, home of what used to be called political correctness. When questioned by a US Congressional committee, the heads of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology all but refused to confirm that calling for the genocide of Jews would violate the universities’ code of conduct. It would “depend on the context”, they argued.
Remember, these are paranoid places obsessed with “microagressions”, where “truth” is subjective, where strict speech codes are imposed to prevent “offence”, where academics or students can be hounded out for “misgendering” somebody, and where conservative views are often equated with racism. But when it comes to Jew-hate – and only then – they pretend to believe in free speech. Racism is banned, but not if it is directed at Jews, or white people, or members of any group not deemed worthy of protection.
The double-standards are shocking, but they are not accidental, and they have also corrupted British universities. The woke ideology divides the world into oppressors and oppressed. Jewish people are classified as “white” or “white adjacent”, and therefore oppressors, and this supposedly gives protesters a green light to chant slogans any objective observer should deem to be supportive of genocide.
In the Middle East, “Intifada revolution” and “from the river to the sea” are unambiguously seen as calls for terrorism and the wiping of Israel from the map, so why do ordinarily ultra-cautious institutions suddenly claim that there might be a more benign meaning? And why have universities in Britain and America, always so ready to enter the public debate, been so quiet about the horrific rapes of Israeli women? Is it because they are the “wrong kind” of victims? It’s a disgusting betrayal, a normalisation of racism with a whiff of the 1930s about it. Universities’ net impact on society is increasingly negative. The woke mind virus has turned once great centres of learning into indoctrination camps, vehicles to “manufacture consent” for nihilistic ideas and a new obscurantism.
Their absurd hierarchy of victimhood is also why many intelligent people still look up to the morally bankrupt United Nations. Iran’s envoy has been chairing a UN human rights council meeting, even though the Islamic Republic is a leading human rights violator. Never mind, the woke extremists argue: it’s a member of the “global south”, fighting against “imperialism”.
Or take the UNRWA for Palestine Refugees: it’s turned its charges into a perpetual refugee class, robbing them of agency and labelling their towns as permanent “refugee camps”. Palestinians are the only people for whom refugee status is automatically passed down through the generations, ensuring that their grievances can never be resolved and the UN bureaucracy can keep its gravy train on the road. This is a tragedy for the Palestinians and makes peace almost impossible.
It is not just the universities that are spreading woke ideas. Greta Thunberg’s environmentalism now appears to be a mere plank of a broader revolutionary movement. Among other attacks on Israel, she was filmed chanting “crush Zionism” at a rally in Stockholm in November, and has since co-authored an oped for The Guardian claiming Israel has committed “war crimes” and “genocide”, a classic case of moral inversion and victim blaming.
Zionism is the principle that Jews should have their own independent nation state; in practice, those who oppose Zionism today would bring about the violent end of Jewish life in the Middle East. In just 50 years during the 20th century, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretched back 3,000 years, were ethnically cleansed from nine Arab countries and Iran; far more Jews were expelled than Arabs.
What has Thunberg’s Israelophobia got to do with tackling a technical problem such as global warming? The answer is everything and nothing: the more extreme green zealots are woke authoritarians who want to wage war on meritocracy, individualism, rationality, capitalism and even modern democracy. Climate change is just a pretext to foment a broader upheaval. This is why so many hardcore greens aren’t interested in technological solutions to decarbonisation.
Israel is successful and pro-America: it is thus a “colonialist”, an “oppressor” state that must be destroyed. Hamas, despite being misogynists, racists, homophobes and murderers, are seen by many woke useful idiots as belonging to the “oppressed” coalition and thus not to be criticised.
Thunberg’s allies believe that “there is no climate justice without human rights”. Thus “climate justice” is not about reducing the growth in average temperatures: it is about destroying Israel, fighting against the American dream, eliminating free speech and so on. “Climate justice” is neither really about climate nor about justice, just as “social justice” is anti-social and unjust.
It can be no coincidence that the rise of wokeism has gone hand in hand with rampant Holocaust denialism among America’s youth. A YouGov poll reveals that a fifth of young Americans aged 18-29 believe the Holocaust to be a myth, more than twice the number aged 30-44 who suffer from the same delusion. In the 18-29 demographic, an additional 30 per cent said they did not know if the Holocaust really happened.
Terrifying doesn’t begin to describe it: the woke stormtroopers have unleashed a monster they cannot control.
