Vive la Résistance!
Terror as a Tool of Virtuous Revolution
There is a corny song by Mike and the Mechanics called “The Living Years.” It is one of those songs that would make my eyes roll and my fingers press the buttons for another station. Even so, it reminds me of my father. It reminds me that he and my mother died while I was pregnant with my youngest daughter, and that there are things I still wish I could tell him now.
My father was born in 1927 in London, within earshot of the Bow Bells. When he was 12, WW2 broke out and he, along with all the children in London, was sent away to be billeted in the country as they waited for Hitler to bomb London. Dad then contracted tuberculosis, spending much of the war in a children’s hospital in Wales.
All my father’s war and depression stories were happy and funny. As a left-wing revolutionary teenager, I longed to hear the tortured suffering of the working class. I actually complained to him about this once, “Dad, surely you have some sad memories of those London streets, of that hospital.” “No, darlin’,” he said misty-eyed, “Only good memories, only good memories.”
Somehow, I took Dad’s jolly stories of the darkest moments in the 20th century as a passive compliance. I am not sure why I viewed my father as part of the power that ran the world, rather than with the class of people who had always been used for brute labour and cannon fodder by capital and government. Probably because, along with his lighthearted optimism about his poverty, he had always believed that he held power. He spoke as if he owned the authority of the state, that he had wrestled it from the kings and queens, he, along with the unions he was always a member of, wielded the powerful ruling mandate of “the worker.” In the collective of “the worker” he possessed the cultural capital that his poverty, labour and forced sacrifice for the war had purchased.
When I remember my dad’s sun-damaged face, his calloused hands, his old worker’s hat, my heart has pangs of regret that he never lived long enough for me to apologise for taking on the arrogant beliefs of those who usurped the mandate he held—not in his race or his sex—but in his class.
My middle-class teachers at university led me to believe that they were the new left, that they represented the worker and more broadly “the people.” In reality they were presuming to hold the cultural capital that my parents’ generation had earned, and they were to go on in my lifetime, to wield this capital against the workers they had stolen it from.
The French Revolution sits at a turning point in history, where the ruling mandate was taken from “divine right” and seized by the people. The revolutionaries sought to reorder society, to beckon in a new age of enlightenment of “liberty, equality and fraternity.” These famous and noble words were penned by the orator and lawyer Maximillian Robespierre, in what is a perfect study in the way solid grassroots principles of liberalism turned to terror as a tool of virtuous revolution. It’s also a tale of how the middle class took the ruling mandate from the “divine” in the name of the “people” only to place it squarely on their own shoulders under the mantle “purity” of the people’s revolution.
Initially, Robespierre was a devotee of Rousseau, against the death penalty and slavery and in favour of universal male suffrage. He was part of a movement that was fuelled by disgust with the excesses of royalty and the desire to return bread to the tables of the poor. Somehow, in the fever of revolution he became lost, transformed into something entirely different such that today his name is now synonymous with the infamous “Reign of Terror.”
Under the “Committee of Public Safety,” the Reign of Terror, saw the revolution take a familiar path. It wasn’t the enemies of the people, or the state, but the enemies of the new ruling classes whose blood ran through the streets of France. Revolutionaries desired to completely recast society, removing not just monarchy but the anchors people held to Catholicism and tradition—anchors many were loath to release.
The basis of liberalism is the observation that just as animals will return to a watering hole, so too will the state return to tyranny. For this reason, liberal democracies include checks and balances—not to protect the people from each other, but to protect the people from the state. The Committee of Public Safety became just another state mechanism of terror, turned against the people who enthroned it.
The belief that we can recast society by gender rather than sex is another version of puritanical nonsense by middle-class revolutionaries, or what I like to call “petit revolutionaries.” The “petit bourgeoisie” came to mean a class of merchants, who adopted the ideology of the capitalist classes, mainly to solidify their position in the market. Petit revolutionaries, on the other hand, steal the cultural capital from the working class, gained from the last hundred years of grassroots revolutions of, women, gays and secularists, to inject a form of ideological purity into ruling structures. In the absence of a popular mandate gender ideologues again rest on purity principles for the good of those they terrorise.
Robespierre claimed that “Virtue without terror is fatal; terror without virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice: prompt, severe, inflexible. It is therefore. an emanation of virtue.” (Robespierre’s speech given to the National Convention in February 1794) The French wanted to wrestle their baguettes back from the excesses of Versailles, but there is no evidence that they were willing to lose their head for calling their neighbour “Monsieur” instead of the revolutionary address of “Citizen.” The ordinary realities of “the people” are endlessly disappointing to middle-class ideologues.
Women, gay men, evolutionary biologists and religious devotees all know their lives are ordered by the realities of sex, sex roles and sexual attractions, and they have become the counter-revolutionaries. We have made the modest claim that the adoption of “gender identity” in legislation denies reality and makes us vulnerable to violence, discrimination, and tyranny. Having appropriated the purity mandate from “the people” the puritans paint us with the scorn of non-believers—ergo we are “transphobes,” homophobes and far-right Nazis.
The counter revolution however is disjointed and is trying to combat “fire with fire,” when what we really need to quench fire, is water. So many “thought leaders” of the “intellectual dark web” (IDW) are determined to find overarching philosophical rationale that flows seamlessly from the scientific to the personal into the political. In the face of the “woke,” and to separate themselves from the religious and the right, they use atheism and rationality as a shield. But as they do, it becomes another kind of virtue.
I am currently reading Steve Pinker’s Rationality wherein he argues, “No logical argument can establish a moral claim,” only to later usher forth a series of moral principles from logical arguments. One of his arguments is that religious people, like me, cannot be taken seriously in political and cultural debate because we are unable to think rationally.
Similarly, Claire Lehmann, the founder of what many consider to be a principle publication of the IDW, Quillete, recently tweeted her reaction to the founding of a new free thought university, the University of Austin: “I gotta be honest. A university devoted to truth sounds wonderful. But please please please put scientific truth at the Apex, and hire some decent scientists, not just anti-vaxxers.”
The new atheists separate the wheat from the chaff on the basis of their own interpretation of rationality and liberal humanism. But it is in the subjecting of people rather than ideas to the ideological processes that separate the wheat from the chaff that is the core problem. Winnowing is a purification process; when we subject people of any kind to it, we inevitably use filters that seek compliance. Sifting working classes with a different filter will not return them to the democratic processes they were mandated with.
I entered gender-critical Twitter about the time Sarah Phillimore had been banned from Twitter for a series of innocuous tweets. In this debate I met David Paisley, the Scottish actor and petit revolutionary, with whom I discussed hate crime legislation. I was, I admit, very naïve and told him the legislation would busy the police with middle-class Twitter using women, and that these women were not a risk to “big beardy blokes” like him. Paisley told me that “Hate crime against ‘big beardy blokes’ like me is terrifying and real.” He then went on to say he was spat at for holding hands and the offender was a “middle-aged middle class woman” He also claimed he had been “physically assaulted by a man, being egged on by his girlfriend.” The conversation was a turning point for me because I realised that middle aged women were a key target of the petit gender revolutionaries because we are intelligent, well resourced, certain in the knowledge that sex has been a defining influence in our life, and willing to protect our children with our blood. Paisley has since revealed himself as a dumb, misogynistic and pathetic Robespierre, targeting woman after woman in his campaign to cast himself in the role of the virtuous revolutionary.
The weapons of people like Paisley are being developed by those who have taken the mantle of the working class in the “new left” but bear no resemblance working class of my own parents or those who now do the manual labour that my father used to. The weapons of terror include legislation against speech, like hate crime legislation, censorship on tech platforms, cultural censure and economic punishment.
Not long after our interaction, Paisley made a complaint to the police under the Malicious Communications Act against a 50-year-old accountant Marion Millar, who was charged for having created four tweets that were allegedly homophobic and transphobic. The tweets remained on Twitter until Millar de-activated her account after a campaign of harassment.
Millar is a mother of six, her youngest twin boys have autism. She is also a feminist and active in the campaigns in Scotland for single-sex spaces and against “self-ID” laws (that allows any person to identify as female). In a nightmare that continues for Ms Millar, she has seen court dates changed at the last minute from month to month as well as ongoing vicious social censure. She was even publicly ejected from an Edinburgh bar with her husband and friends for the crime of being a “TERF.”
Like Phillimore, she has raised thousands of pounds from ordinary people to protect her human rights, or rather what used to be considered “human rights.” The case against Millar has now been “discontinued” by the Crown after Johanna Cherry QC insisted that her case be tested against international human rights charters. There is an important significance in the discontinuing rather than the dropping of the charges. The threat remains that the charges can be taken up at the Crown’s leisure.
This ambiguous and precarious suspension of rights, the possibility that our words may hang us, the fluid nature of the boundaries by which we are defined, together serve an important function of the mechanism of the modern revolutionary’s guillotine. The guillotine of the petit revolutionaries is not the threat of removal of the head from the body but the person from their source of income, social connection, cultural capital and the anchor that connects our sex to our rights and protections.
The list of women who are now enemies of the gender revolution is growing. Before Phillimore and Millar, we had Maya Forstater, a 47-year-old tax specialist, whose contract with a think tank was not renewed for stating that women are a sex. With public funding and support, mostly from women, Forstater has made massive inroads to secure legal rights in the UK for women to speak about themselves as a sex.
The mistake petit revolutionaries made with Forsater was that they pushed too early for their objectives to be tested against the law. In so doing, women were able to throw money, reason and resources at the issue, ultimately strengthening their right to say that biological sex is real in addition to being an important political, legal and social category.
The Scottish government hasn’t made the same mistake with Millar. Because the charges were to be tested against human rights the heavily captured Scottish state withdrew. A victory in court for Millar could have had far-reaching consequences for the legality of hate crime legislation itself, impacting the ability of the state to threaten and terrorise dissident women.
David Paisley has now made complaints to the police about tweets of Ceri Black, a feminist lesbian, child protection advocate and co-founder of LGB Alliance Ireland. Black has been contacted by police and threatened with arrest over tweets she made regarding the problems inherent in gender ideology for child protection.
I have talked to Black on Twitter, as we share similar views on this and other matters. We have both survived child sexual abuse, we are both mothers, and we have both studied the cultural theories that form the foundation of gender identity ideology. Like me, Black is a counter-revolutionary. We understand what it means to need specific words to talk about our sexual vulnerability. We know that the ability to establish boundaries around ourselves and our children is vital to the safety of women and children.
Execution by the guillotine was performed publicly for a reason. It is more than a single death—it is also a humiliation that sends a strong message. Survivors of sexual abuse understand shame better than most, and we didn’t recover from it by hiding and lying about reality, or by reverting to cowardice. However, there is only so much sustained abuse people can cope with.
Recently, feminist academic, philosopher, and author Kathleen Stock has been harassed out of her job at the University of Sussex. In her subsequent appearance on the BBC’s “Woman’s Hour” she looked gaunt and exhausted. While the IDW and radical feminists apply purity tests to the leadership of the counter-revolutionary movements, it is the bodies and lives of ordinary women that must stand between those that seek to re-engineer us and the girls and women of the next generation.
In western democracies, the people authorise the state to wield violence by the police and armed forces. This violence is specifically mandated to protect the rights, dignity, and safety of the people against those that seek to harm them. The way the violence of the state has been turned against women and counter revolutionaries is incremental, measured, and strategic. It is the ordinary men and women who have to take back their mandate, forthwith from the over enthusiastic gender revolutionaries and the elites who oppose them.
Just as the masses in the French Revolution wanted to put food on their tables, the desire for sexual equality and the removal of legal and social censure for homosexuals was the point where the great majority of people were happy to depart from this particular revolution, having seen it satisfy its aims. The overwhelming majority of people have no desire for the state to force people to celebrate homosexuality with the wearing of rainbow lanyards, to pretend that men can be women, to stop lesbians from having rights to single-sex dating spaces, or to re-design public toilets to include men all because this lobby’s ethos commands that everyone affirm people’s inner feelings. Like the more extreme objectives of the French revolutionaries, these are not objectives that can rest on the mandate of the people but must instead rest on the mandate of virtue. Virtue that can only be enacted with terror. In the end, the terror in France was quenched with the removal of Robespierre’s head from his body. Neither the Committee of Public Safety nor the people had the stomach for the ongoing bloodshed that state mandated virtue required.
Long after Robespierre and the French Revolution, we developed a word for the kind of power, that is justified with virtue embedded in the state. We call it Fascism. It is neither virtuous nor revolutionary. Students of the 20th Century politics will tell you that you won’t find the political will to persecute such dissidents as Millar, Forstater, Stock or Black in the general population. To enact Fascism you have to take the voice and the mandate from the people and place it in the state as some form of virtue. The water to the fire of revolution has to come from the people, not from academics or self-proclaimed great thought leaders.
We need to expose the petit revolutionaries for what they are. I hate to return to Marx, but the petit revolutionaries of whom I speak, are the beneficiaries of the surplus value, protecting the surplus value, in the interests of those who live off the surplus value. As they move further away from “the people” they have to rely more and more on “purity” and terror as Robespierre did. Had my father lived longer I would have liked to tell him about my regret of my own youthful arrogance. I am ashamed that I ever associated myself with those who now turn the cultural capital of the working class against them.
 | A guest post by
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At the moment there, is no such thing as a liberal democracy. To me this is the most important issue of the current time, the attempted coups around the world in the name of a virus. I too was caught up in the gender wars but they're a distraction right now, when lives are actually at stake and are being lost. I've seen a lot of gender warriors on the right side of the virus tyranny argument but most of us are gender critical. Nevertheless I am unwilling to see divisions right now, we need everyone on board.