Category Archives: Culture war

The Ruling Elites Create an Orwellian Reinterpretation of Human Rights

Article by Wanjiru Njoya:

Ludwig von Mises depicts the aim of revolutionary socialism as: “to clear the ground for building up a new civilization by liquidating the old one.” One of the main strategies in liquidating a civilization involves dismantling its legal and philosophical foundations. This role is fulfilled by activists who embark upon “sabotage and revolution” by subverting the meaning of words: “The socialists have engineered a semantic revolution in converting the meaning of terms into their opposite.”

George Orwell famously called this subversive language “Newspeak.” Peter Foster describes Newspeak as “a sort of totalitarian Esperanto that sought gradually to diminish the range of what was thinkable by eliminating, contracting, and manufacturing words.”

Mises explains that dictators express their ideas in Newspeak precisely because, if they did not, nobody would support their schemes:1984 (Signet Classics)George OrwellBest Price: $1.49Buy New $3.58(as of 10:53 UTC – Details)

This reversal of the traditional connotation of all words of the political terminology is not merely a peculiarity of the language of the Russian Communists and their Fascist and Nazi disciples. The social order that in abolishing private property deprives the consumers of their autonomy and independence, and thereby subjects every man to the arbitrary discretion of the central planning board, could not win the support of the masses if they were not to camouflage its main character. The socialists would have never duped the voters if they had openly told them that their ultimate end is to cast them into bondage. (emphasis added)

In the proliferation of Newspeak, the reinterpretation of “human rights” has proved to be one of the most powerful weapons of sabotage and revolution. Activists have seized control of a vast empire of international law, NGOs, and human rights charities with a global network of staff who monitor respect for “human rights.” They wield their significant influence in the human rights industry to undermine human liberty by redefining the meaning of “human rights” to denote the antidiscrimination principle. Under the banner of equality and nondiscrimination, they restrict free speech and other human liberties. In other words, the doctrine of “human rights” now denotes the precise opposite: the destruction of human liberty.

The “human right” to non-discrimination

Human rights no longer mean what many might suppose: the right to life, liberty, and property. The vast corpus of human rights in international law has been categorized by Karel Vašák into three: civil-political, socio-economic, and collective-developmental. These categories are said to encompass negative rights (things the state must not do, such interfering with life, liberty, or property), positive rights (things the state must do, for example, provide citizens with food, shelter, education, healthcare, etc.), and rights of solidarity between citizens such as wealth redistribution through social welfare schemes and equal participation in economic progress through measures such as the minimum wage or equal pay.

Human rights organizations monitor progress against these categories and ensure that the legal system works in favor of socialist goals and against liberty. For example, the United Nations human rights program educates the public on the need to eradicate “hate speech” and interprets “equal protection” of the law, as a fundamental human right, to mean protection from hate speech. The UN says:

Addressing hate speech does not mean limiting or prohibiting freedom of speech. It means keeping hate speech from escalating into more something more dangerous, particularly incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence, which is prohibited under international law.

From that description, it can be seen that the UN takes a concept which is well-established in the criminal law, namely, prohibiting incitement to violence, and links it to notions of incitement to discrimination and incitement to hostility, which have never before been recognized as crimes. They annex discrimination and hostility to the charge of inciting violence because, if they did not, it would be immediately clear to everyone that criminalizing “discrimination” or “hostility” amounts to nothing less than Newspeakian crimethink.

The meaning of human rights

In his article, “There’s no such thing as Human Rights,” the British journalist Peter Hitchens argues that,

Human rights do not exist. They are an invention, made out of pure wind. If you are seriously interested in staying free, you should not rely on these flatulent, vague phrases to help you.

They are in fact a weapon in the hands of those who wish to remove your liberty and transform society, though this is probably an accident. It is only in the past 50 years or so that radical judges have realised these baseless declarations can be used (for example) to abolish national frontiers or give criminals the right to vote.

In that context, Hitchens is referring not to the ancient liberties protected by Magna Carta, but to the Newspeakian rights now enshrined in human rights instruments, such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights. Human rights have been transformed into wooly concepts which merely reflect political and partisan demands.

Murray Rothbard avoids the ambiguity surrounding the meaning of human rights by defining them as property rights. In the Ethics of Liberty, he explains:

…the concept of “rights” only makes sense as property rights. For not only are there no human rights which are not also property rights, but the former rights lose their absoluteness and clarity and become fuzzy and vulnerable when property rights are not used as the standard.

In the first place, there are two senses in which property rights are identical with human rights: one, that property can only accrue to humans, so that their rights to property are rights that belong to human beings; and two, that the person’s right to his own body, his personal liberty, is a property right in his own person as well as a “human right.” But more importantly for our discussion, human rights, when not put in terms of property rights, turn out to be vague and contradictory, causing liberals to weaken those rights on behalf of “public policy” or the “public good.”

Thus, the Rothbardian interpretation of human rights denotes the universal right to self-ownership and private property that vests in all human beings.

Bureaucratic reinterpretation

In practice, the meaning of human rights is subject to interpretation by courts or other law enforcement officials. Therefore, human rights ultimately mean only what they are interpreted to mean by law enforcement, not what they may theoretically, politically, or philosophically. Lowell B. Mason, an attorney and former chair of the Federal Trade Commission explains the significance of bureaucratic interpretation by observing wryly that:

When in private practice I never told clients what the law was; I always told them what the bureaucrats thought the law was… The legality or illegality of what you do often depends not on the words of a statute enacted by your elected representatives, but on the state of the collective liver of a dozen anonymous bureaucrats.

Being well aware of this, the goal of activists is to ensure that “human rights” are interpreted so as to advance their goals. This explains the concerted efforts to depict “hate speech” as a human rights violation. In this way the commitment of states to protecting “human rights” is transformed, through the prism of the antidiscrimination principle, into an edict to prohibit hate speech. The word “hate” is interpreted to mean having the temerity to disagree with socialists, and similarly, the word “equality” is interpreted to mean wealth redistribution to achieve equality of material conditions.

Mason explains how it is possible for bureaucrats, charged with law enforcement, to reinterpret the Constitution to suit whatever they think the law ought to achieve. No matter how carefully a law is drafted, it will always require interpretation, and this is where the bureaucrats strike as they purport to be applying the “evolving” meaning of the Constitution. Mason explains:

“Of course,” he will reassure you, “the Constitution still stands as a bulwark to liberty but it is a growing instrument that adapts itself to the times, and while it has not been repealed or amended, it has necessarily been reinterpreted so that due process (as it was known in the past) no longer unduly encumbers the administration of the law.”

Through Newspeak, the Constitution itself has been reinterpreted, enabling socialists to claim that they support free speech and also support the prohibition of “hate speech.” Mises explains that this subverts the concept of freedom into its very opposite: “Freedom implies the right to choose between assent and dissent. But in Newspeak it means the duty to assent unconditionally and strict interdiction of dissent.” In that sense, the concept of “hate speech” is not compatible with free speech. In denoting any dissent as “hate,” it is the very negation of free speech and freedom of thought. Through Orwellian Newspeak, ordinary words like “liberty,” “justice,” and “equality”—values that most people would support—have been subverted and harnessed to promote socialism.

Where did wokeness come from?

Article by Patrick West, a review of a new book (Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution), by Eric Kaufmann.

Excerpts:

Important, too, was the language and thinking of psychology and therapy. These helped shape the idea that minorities need protection from hurtful words that might cause trauma and damage to people’s self-esteem. Kaufmann calls this shift in the mid-1960s, from cultural liberalism to cultural socialism, ‘the big bang of our moral universe, from which taboos around sexism, homophobia, and transphobia were to later spring’. He continues: ‘While radical ideas like critical race theory or gender ideology have gained ground, they only succeeded because they resonated with an established left-liberal hypersensitivity around identity issues.’

It’s here to stay, too, he says. As I write these words, two news stories suggest Kaufmann is right. In one, a British university is decolonising its course on Medieval history to excise the word ‘Anglo-Saxon’; in the other, the Bank of England is telling its staff to use ‘gender neutral’ pronouns when addressing colleagues.

There may have been some pushback against this ideology in recent years, especially when it comes to trans. But Kaufmann is not persuaded that we are approaching the ‘end of woke’. He believes woke tenets are now firmly entrenched in our society, particularly in the minds of tomorrow’s rulers, educators, policymakers, advertising executives and so on. As a middle-aged man, Kaufmann seeks to put it as delicately as possible, but he cannot refrain ultimately from calling out those who he deemed to be the most fervent custodians of our new morality: namely, young, middle-class, highly educated women.

Some might see a contradiction here: is woke imposed on people, or do converts embrace it willingly? Yet it needn’t be an ‘either / or’ matter. Undoubtedly, it spreads through both force and people’s own volition. Those who embrace it think they are being virtuous. Those who would resist often acquiesce, fearing the consequences of doing or saying the wrong thing.

That’s why overcoming woke will take far more than a few laws or a change of government. It will involve rethinking what we mean by ‘caring’ and ‘uncaring’. It will involve daring to be regarded in public as ‘bad people’. It will mean we cannot shy away from the culture war.

The Unholy Essence of Qu**r

Jordan Peterson speaks with Logan Lancing.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with author, speaker, and founder of ItsNotinSchools.com, Logan Lancing. They discuss the deceptive terminology of the postmodern Left and how the linguistic game hides a severe lack of substance, the true heart of Marxism as a theology, the indoctrination of our children at the institutional level, and the sacrifices it will take to truly right the ship.

Logan Lancing is an author, speaker, and the founder of ItsNotinSchools dot com. He is best known for his public lectures on critical race theory, culturally relevant pedagogy, and queer theory. Lancing’s website explains what these “woke” theories are, identifies where they come from, and exposes how they show up in children’s classrooms nationwide.

This episode was recorded on July 30th, 2024

Snippets:

The Left have the social and emotional levers. We have kittle defence against these, and they are rusty and dusty.

Resentful, hedonistic and power-mad against everyone else.

What Ludwig von Mises Meant by “Democracy”

Article by Ryan McMaken.

Excerpt:

“Democracy” is one of those terms that is essentially useless unless the one using the word first defines his terms. After all, the term “democratic” can mean anything from small-scale direct democracy to the mega-elections we see in today’s huge constitutional states. Among the modern social-democratic Left, the term often just means “something I like.”

The meaning of the term can also vary significantly from time to time and from place to place. During the Jacksonian period, the Democratic party—which at the time was the decentralist, free-market, Jeffersonian party—was called “the Democracy.” By the mid twentieth century, the term meant something else entirely. In Europe, the term came to take on a variety of different meanings from place to place.

For our purposes here, I want to focus on how one particular European—Ludwig von Mises—used the term.

Although many modern students of Mises are often highly skeptical of democracy of various types, it is clear that Mises himself used the term with approval. But, Mises used the word in a way that was quite different from how most use it today. The Misesian view contrasts with modern conceptions of a “democracy” in which majority rule is forcibly imposed upon the whole population. Because modern democratic states exercise monopolistic power over their populations, there is then no escape from this “will of the majority.”

Misesian democracy is something else altogether.

Mises’s vision of democracy must be understood in light of his support for unlimited secession as a tool against majoritarian rule. For Mises, “democracy” means the free exercise of a right of exit, by which the alleged “will of the majority” is rendered unenforceable against those who seek to leave.

Continue reading here.

Reappropriating Feminism, Maternity, and the Woman’s Role

In this video, “Dr. Jordan Peterson sits down with author and columnist Mary Harrington. They discuss how women contributed to civil society before joining the workforce, the fatal flaw of a male-dominated system, the two fundamental reproductive strategies, the commodification of female sexuality, and the utility of radical loyalty and solidarity between partners.

Mary Harrington is an editor for UnHerd and the author of “Feminism Against Progress.” Harrington also runs a weekly Substack, “Reactionary Feminist.”

This episode was recorded on July 3rd, 2024.”