The Marxist Revival (6): the Queen of Rage & Ludicrous Equation

~ Continued from Part 5: Political Justifcation to Violence ~

Genuine or functional hatred and hysteria, the rage, rage, rage as cultivated by the Left brings us to an author of the finest in the tradition of the surreal equation, in which she excels and possibly even might claim original authorship of: Virginia Woolf.

Theodore Dalrymple decries the icon of women's literature Three Guineas as the locus classicus of self-pity and victimhood and suggests an alternative title: "How to be Privileged and Yet Feel Extremely Aggrieved". It is well known that the proletariat doesn't cause revolutions: that's the prerequisite of the middle class scions: the spoiled brats of the elite, the Osama bin Ladens, the Mohammed Attas and the Virginia Woolfs of this world.

Privileged she undoubtedly was, daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, an eminent essayist, editor and critic, founder of the Dictionary of National Biography and publisher of Thomas Hardy. Her uncle, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen was an eminent legal scholar, historian, judge and political philosopher.

Dalrymple: "As a female member of the British upper middle class and one of what she called "the daughters of educated men" she felt both socially superior to the rest of the world and peculiarly, indeed uniquely, put upon". Throughout she laments her position, in so close proximity of learned men, with whom she couldn't compete. She attributed this to English society, unable as she was - like most very stupid people - to detect her own naturally diminished mental capacity.

Current Postmoderns (Pomos) must have taken several leaves out of the Woolf book, as she is no doubt the uncrowned queen of the ludicrous equation and false analogy; of logic so bent it could put the kitchen plumbing to shame.

Be that as may, she did discover single-handedly the secret to world peace! Get this: Throughout the ages warfare has been a male activity, during which time men have suppressed women. Were men to see the error of their ways and consider women their equals (you see what feats of logic can be accomplished once you set your mind to it), the will to war would vanish as by miracle.

Woolf's contribution to education foresaw in the establishment of a college building that was to be erected out of cheap, easily combustible material, that wouldn't tend to hoard dust, needlessly perpetuating despised traditions. That would lead only to vice, folly, cruelty and the suppression of women. The pictures and books would be new and always changing: a living testimony that the new is always better than the old by mere virtue of its novelty.

The university of Wordsworth, Milton and Wittgenstein was to teach only the arts that can be taught cheaply and practiced by 'poor people': medicine, mathematics, music, painting and literature, human intercourse and empathy (the latter perhaps a forerunner of multicultural theory, that no doubt shall become a compulsory subject taught in elementary schools in the very near future).

The little arts of talk, dress and cookery would be taught to lift women out of their limited domestic environments! The college would of course prevent wars, and not be elitist, competitive or judgmental in the slightest. One would perpetually immerse oneself in the tepid bath of self-esteem, mutual congrats and benevolence.

This self-indulgence stands in marked and familiar contrast to the habitual Marxist intolerance towards The White Patriarch. Monetary contributions toward the old system would be earmarked "rags, petrol, matches" with the message "... burn the college to the ground ... set fire to the old hypocrisies ... let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance around the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows (presumably to be rescued at a later stage by invisible cloned pet proletarians, reminiscent of Lady Chatterley's lover) and cry "Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this education!".

Unrestrained emotions and high strung aesthetics notwithstanding, Woolf leaves our contemporary Pomos far behind in the use of false analogies and the inability to distinguish metaphor from literal truth. Dalrymple: She "... collapse[s] all relevant moral distinctions, a technique vital to all schools of resentment ...

- Both the British policeman and the Nazi stormtrooper wore a uniform", rendering them both brutes;
- English society - so unfair to daughters of educated men - was proto Nazi, if not worse;
- A commentator who blamed the employment of women for the mass unemployment among men, was called the embryo of a Dictator, with a reference to Mussolini and Hitler: "Where is the difference? Are they not saying the same thing?"
- Discussing the struggle of women's emancipation: "It is true that the combatants did not inflict flesh wounds; chivalry forebad; but you will agree that a battle that wastes time is as deadly as a battle that wastes blood";
- Topped up with equating the Church of England with the German Nazi Party;
- If England doesn't know what it wants, the only alternative is fascism;
- There is no real difference between a university degree convocation and a Nuremberg rally;
- The dictatorship against Jews and women coming from Oxford, Cambridge, Whitehall and Downing Street is 'the same' as current in Germany, Italy and Spain.
- A club not admitting women members is the same as Nazi death camp Treblinka.

It goes on and on, unremittingly! Dalrymple: "It is one of the chief characteristics of [post]modern (my editing) rhetoric, designed not so much to find the truth as (in the words of former Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam) to 'maintain the rage'."

"One would hardly guess from reading Three Guineas that it was written at a uniquely dangerous historical juncture, in the shadow of a barbaric threat", in 1938. The same can be said of present Pomos: their fallacies and destructive instincts are eating away at the West's self-defense at a time when it is under threat from a number of sides, least of which not the pressures of mass immigration and the overt menace emanating from Radical Islam.

If worst comes to worst we can rely on Pomo to act as Mrs Woolf advises all women to do, should it come to war with Germany: "Since it was evidently a matter of indifference if the Nazis won (every British male being already a virtual Nazi), the answer was obvious to Mrs Woolf: they should do nothing ... not to fight with arms ... refuse to make munitions or nurse the wounded (the prospect of which would only be a perverse incentive to fight!) ... to maintain an attitude of complete indifference" and echoing a speech by the mayoress of Woolwich: "... would not even so much as darn a sock to help in a war."

Dalrymple: "Had Mrs Woolf survived to our time, however, she would at least have had the satisfaction of observing that her cast of mind - shallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine, and ultimately brutal - had triumphed among the elites of the Western world."

~ To be continued: Part 7: Reversed Sophistry & Mythical Creatures ~