Pamela Bone to Germaine Greer in Melbourne last week:I then asked why it was that Western feminists seemed so reluctant to speak out against things such as honour killings.
Greer: "It's very tricky. I am constantly being asked to go to Darfur to interview rape victims. I can talk to rape victims here. Why should I go to Darfur to talk to rape victims?"
Questioner (me): "Because it's so much worse there."
Greer: "Who says it is?"
Questioner: "I do, because I've been there."
Greer: "Well, it is just very tricky to try to change another culture. We let down the victims of rape here. We haven't got it right in our own courts. What good would it do for me to go over there and try to tell them what to do? I am just part of decadent Western culture and they think we're all going to hell fast and maybe we are all going to hell fast."
The left is too deeply invested in the narrative of self-hatred to ever hear danger approaching from without. They're stuck in an ultimate conflict of interest between their ideology and the survival of their ideology; between their freedom to destroy their culture and the freedoms that culture guarantees. That's why in Europe it is often only people like the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, who can take up the cudgels for women being hunted down like animals in through the green fields of England by their Islamic relatives, even though theoretically a British Imam's daughter condemned for having converted to Christianity could have gone to Greer, not to Nazi-Ali, for help. Dr. Nazir-Ali doesn't have to protect a circle of leftist supporters nor a public record of foolish utterance from the danger of sudden common sense.
If the Left wants to be free to think again, it must first of all divest itself, in the way it encourages everyone to divest itself from Israel, of its own fascist ideology. Oops. I repeat myself. I already observed they're stuck in an ultimate conflict of interest between their ideology and the survival of their ideology. Reboot and try again.
Comment by Aslan:
As to the snippet itself, it is a showcase in how to be deftly manipulative.
1. The interviewer asked about GG's reticence in speaking up against honor killings. GG replies by converting this into a discussion about rape. That allows GG to introduce the false sense of equivalanece (i.e. we have rape, they have rape, who's to say who has it better?). But honor killings are almost unheard of in western cultures and that's where the topic should have been brought back. GG 1, Interviewer 0.
2. GG tries to score a second goal by confirming the moral equivalence. Interviewer naively reacts and blocks it and says, "It is worse there, I saw it." She thinks she has scored a point. Wrong. The fact is that by allowing the interviewer to win this "nice blocking move" GG has now established the legitimacy of the first premise i.e. that the discussion of honor killings is the same as that about rape. Notice that this has now gone uncontested. The two are now, sadly, interchangeable and no further discussion of honor killings re-enters the snippet.
3. GG then volunteers that there's no point "going there and telling them off". The second and crucial dirty trick that Interviewer falls victim to. See, the issue was never about going to Darfur and telling the authorities off. The issue was about speaking up against "honor" killings in Darfur and against these horrific medieval practices and doing so RIGHT HERE on Western campuses alongside other protests that go "stop the genocide" and other such sentiments. Interviewer was not asking GG to go THERE and tell anybody anything. GG transformed the proper accusation of deafening silence HERE into a rebuttal about why it made no sense for her to go THERE and tell anybody anything. As if that was ever on the cards.
Interviewer stood there unable to see or react to the manipulation. GG 2, Interviewer 0.
My point is: Don't think of the GGs of the world as unable to see the truth. They see the truth, have seen it for a long time, and dismissed it because it does not conform to their larger agenda. They will abide any evil if it is in service of the larger agenda. And they have come to believe that because they can run circles around lesser truth seekers, that they are smarter. And that that makes them right.
Wretchard said:
Do the Left really have a positive goal? Even a destructive goal? Or is it just some kind of post-modern pseudocode you must on no account ever try to compile?
Maybe it's a kind of vaporware or some kind of recursive function that ultimately resolves to a null; and hence doesn't work. It operates on the principle of promising a result and in the meantime requires inputs. But at every so-called runtime it gives you report with a fancy header and a demand for more inputs.
At the end of the trail practically every leftist descriptor is the exact opposite of its eventual output. When you see something described as a "peace loving country" you can be certain it is bankrupting itself from military expenditure. Anything described as a "Democratic People's Republic of Something" is probably a slave state run by hereditary apparatchiks.
That's why such phrases like "human rights", "women's liberation", "environmental protection" etc are terms of irony rather than actual descriptors.
The charade goes on so long as the Left is in a revolutionary condition; that is, surviving on the energy of the system is bringing down. Lenin promised to hang his enemies by their own rope. He forgot to add that after he had taken over they would no longer know how to make rope. When the parasite has finally finished feasting on its host, it too dies of starvation.
People like Germaine Greer require their "Western oppressor" to keep their gigs going. Where would they get the free energy otherwise. Once the vaporware company stops getting payments from its dupes to write nonexistent software, it too goes out of business.
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