The New Barbarians

The Cloak of Woke Covers an Old Enemy

Jo Phoenix, academic, resigned last year from Open University and is taking the institution to an employment tribunal, telling the Daily Mail, “I’ve been publicly vilified by hundreds of colleagues. I’ve been called transphobic. Violent and profane posters have been directed against me.”

I ordered a vodka martini at a city bar a last week and was surprised to have the timid young bartender show me the familiar branded bottle and ask me if it was okay. I once owned a bar, if a customer orders a cocktail, they get a “basic spirit” unless otherwise specified. The bar chooses the basic spirit, and it is normally decent quality but designed to keep the drinks affordable for the customer and profitable for the business.  

When I looked confused, the young woman brought the bottle closer to me to inspect, then looked back at the shelf where there was a popular French brand of vodka. I knew the French brand; it retails for twice the price of the one I was being offered, and I had already paid. I then realised what was happening, and I nodded to indicate the Russian vodka will be fine, but it made me a little sad. (I have since discovered Smirnoff is British owned)

The young woman at the bar had obviously been getting some pushback from city dwelling wokesters who demand Grey Goose for a Smirnoff price, as a noble protest against Putin. Along with the banishing of Russian vodka, other ways people have shown useless protest against Putin has been the removal of Tchaikovsky form the upcoming programme of the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra and a shoddy attempt to cancel Dostoyevsky. 

The endeavour by the Università Bicocca di Milano to cancel Dostoyevsky made me think of a word we need to bring back for the uncivilised dolts who try to cancel those of whom they are unworthy to speak the name; “barbarians." I remember the moment when I was barely twenty and my Czech friend handed me his copy of Crime and Punishment and told me that I had to read it. I can still see the book from where I write, he gave it to me as a gift when I said it had a profound impact on me.

Czech refugees, such as they were, were no fans of Russia, but they knew what was civilised and what was barbarous, and how society goes from one to the other. “Barbarian” originally meant people who were not Greek, not of a civilised nation. It has come to mean that tendency in all humans to savagery and lawlessness. It is hard to argue that liberal democracy and the rule of law has not been a successful alternative to totalitarianism in subduing barbarous tendencies in populations. 

It was another Russian literary genius, Tolstoy, who’s character in Anna Karenina resonates for me in the city dwelling martini swilling barbarian I imagined had been harassing the young bartender. The character, Prince Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky, was a member of a fading Russian royalty. In the classic novel, Oblonsky is a weak privileged man who adopts popular political, or more likely, cultural liberalism, to shield his own weakness and hypocrisy. Tolstoy writes:

Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. And in spite of the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the majority changed them. (Anna Karenina, 1878)

Oblonksy is shielding his fading and despised social power and wealth, not in conservatism or liberal conviction, but in a faux progressivism. Tolstoy tells us that Stepan did not choose his political opinions “just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn.” Stepan is what we would now call “woke.” A weak-natured appeaser to the cultural power that hangs off the virtue claims of liberalism without any real commitment to the principles of a liberal democracy.  

We all know how it turned out for Russia, most of the 12 odd million people who died in the Russian revolution were civilians and then we can add Stalin’s 20 million to the human cost of a barbaric form of experimental applied political science. Of course, all applied political science is initially experimental, but the 20th century gives us no excuse not to continue to pursue applied classic liberalism with all its faults as a buffer from the barbarism that can be found in crowds, in individuals, and most brutally, in the state. 

Applied democratic liberalism needs active participation to work. When we hand our political opinions to fashion, we empower a system where political fashion becomes a high-level and a hotly contested commodity of authoritarian power. Political fashion is now managed in the way Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada managed couture. The couture that trickled down to the “cerulean blue” jumper that the protagonist Andy had “chosen.”  

High level American consultancy firms like “Lake Research Partners” and legacy activist groups like Stonewall, craft “narratives” for political parties, press and government and develop language guideless that are used to shame and attack dissidents and reward the Stepans of our world. The moderate liberals of Tolstoy’s time, and the woke of today, wear opinions that avoid the wrath of the barbarians. It won’t end well. 

What we used to call the left has developed over a long time into a powerful cultural elite with a suite of opinions that are almost indistinguishable from the religious cultural hegemony that once dominated the west. In the name of secularism we have allowed an engineering of beliefs that Tolstoy shows us is not new. 

The left in the west, seem to have almost complete control of the executive arms of our government without any electoral responsibility. We have seen women completely redefined without so much as a bi-election, a referendum or a plebiscite. It has unleashed misogyny so blatant, obvious, and cruel that even right-wing religious conservatives are repelled.

To turn our liberal democracies into authoritarian governments the new barbarians must continue to enact cultural control with fashionable narratives and targeted savagery. Woke opinions are not just a way to hide institutional power in plain sight, but they serve to point barbarians to where they might exercise their muscles without serious cultural or legal recourse. 

For a live action example of barbarian apology, you can see this tweet of a woke insignificant “journalist” boasting about protesting a feminist meeting of Women’s place UK, were women were meeting to discuss women’s spaces and male violence against women. The protesters were at one point chanting "Fuck TERFs" much to the delight of our modern day Oblonksy who called it a "Protest Against Transphobia." 

How do you know if you too are a barbarian? If you hound women out of university positions for saying males don’t belong in women’s prisons you are a barbarian; if you silence an Indigenous woman while she is speaking about male violence in her own community, you are a barbarian, If you throw a milkshake at a politician or a lesbian protesting violence, you are a barbarian; if you call for crowd rather than legislative justice, you are a barbarian; if you attempt to corrupt our liberal democracy, you are a barbarian; if you are making a small business give you a more expensive brand of vodka for the same price as a basic spirit, you are a barbarian. Okay, maybe the last one is hyperbole.

To avoid the empowerment of those who use barbarism as cultural discipline, don’t choose your opinions like a coat—read widely from all sides, even if it offends you, contest the political ground and speak out at injustice in your workplace. The barbarians are not at the gates, they are sitting on committees, they are at universities, they are in press offices, they walk among us wearing the opinions distributed by our national broadcaster to cloak the power they hold and the responsibilities they skirt.