“”Take care, sir,” cried Sancho. “Those over there are not giants but windmills.” Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
According to legend, they once hanged a monkey in Hartlepool. The story goes that the local populace, fearful of the Napoleonic menace, and primed to be on the lookout for nefarious enemy spies, found a very small and hairy ‘Frenchman’ washed up on the shore from the nearby wreck of a warship. Despite his inability to understand English they gave him a summary sea-shore trial and hanged him from the mast of a fishing-boat. With much cheering, drinking and singing no doubt. They had visited personal judgement on a feared and hated enemy. Whether he was indeed a Frenchman or no didn’t trouble them much I’m sure. He seemed French enough for their purposes.
I’m sure a rousing chorus of “Bash the Fash,”a 1993 song by anarcho-punk band Oi Polloi, would have tripped happily from the sea-side lynch-mob’s lips. It quotes Hitler as saying that the only way the Nazi party could have been stopped was if it had been “smashed in its infancy with utmost force.” Well of course he would say that, he was a genocidal fascist dictator – his solution to every problem was to use murderous violence. I wouldn’t suggest taking Hitler’s advice on anything, unless you are happy to risk becoming like him. Bash the Fash became a popular term on the internet in 2017 following the American white-nationalist Richard Spencer getting a smack in the mouth live on television and the ensuing debate on whether violence was now an acceptable form of political protest. It seems that for a growing number bashing the fashes is indeed acceptable. But who exactly are these “fashes” that they now feel justified in bashing?
“I wanna fuck some terfs up, they are no better than fash.” The words of Tara Flik-Wood. That statement formed part of the evidence presented at Flik-Woods prosecution for the beating of 61-yr-old Maria MacLachlan, Facebook-ed as it was just a few hours before that attack at Speaker’s Corner. Despite the matter being conclusively decided against her assailant in open court (and before a rather unsympathetic judge) to this day, MacLachlan has to contend with a campaign of disinformation that tries to present her as the aggressor. How can this lunatic claim (that a slight 5’5” grandmother with osteoporosis overpowered a 6’tall male-bodied person in their twenties and shook them like a “rag doll”) be taken seriously by any intelligent human being and in spite of all the abundant freely-available video evidence to the contrary? MacLachlan is undoubtedly a feisty female but Wonder Woman she ain’t. So what peculiar mental process is at work here?
Time for another song; “Terfs Are Trash” by the Bo String Duo, a pair of modern-day monkey-hangers. This gleeful slice of sadly-broke woke-bloke folk contains lyrics telling “terfs” that they “deserve a brick in the teeth” and a “sidewalk curbstomp.” They are not alone in expressing these sentiments; Their compatriots the Degenderettes held an exhibition of rainbow-coloured weaponry at the San Francisco Public Library along with a blood-stained t-shirt bearing the logo “I Punch Terfs”. “We must be radically and transformatively violent..Violence against terfs is always self-defence..Fascism must be smashed with the greatest violence.” These words were tweeted by Edinburgh Action for Trans Health the day after Maria MacLachlan was assaulted and in defence of her attacker. “Imagine being a TERF and sticking razor blades under your stickers, inspired by Nazis doing that” just one of many tweeted in support of a ridiculous claim about the ‘Sticker Woman’ phenomenon that, despite investigations by police found absolutely nothing, undertaken while their attentions were sorely needed elsewhere.
Who are these terrible terfs, these supposed ‘crypto-fascists’, that such violence should be visited upon them? Women who recognise that sex-based oppression cannot be challenged if it is hidden. Lesbians who defend their boundaries against male encroachment. Parents who do not want their children to suffer surgical or chemical treatment for psychological problems. Even men who do not agree they have to identify as female if they don’t behave in a stereotypically ‘masculine’ way. Terf was coined as a vaguely disparaging term to describe a subset of feminists (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) but it has since become an umbrella term of abuse to slur anyone who dares question any part of the increasingly extremist trans-activist ideology. There is nothing “radical” or necessarily “feminist” about asserting the biological fact that a male-bodied person with a penis is a man and an empirical fact is exclusionary by its nature.
Ironically for proponents of a non-binary society, the label TERF is used to enforce an exclusively binary “us-and-them” mentality. The slogan ‘transwomen are women’, in the absence of any non-circular definition of ‘women’ by its proponents, is offered as a statement of political allegiance rather than as any sort of testable proposition. It is mainly used as a test for heretical terf-ery, always accompanied by the statement that there can be ‘no debate’ about it. If you do not accept it completely and unquestioningly, then you are a “terf,” and, they would have you now believe, automatically by extension some variety of “neo-Nazi”.
One of the marks of a civilised society is that it promotes the protection of the weak from the strong as a reflexive moral response. The twisted genius of the post-modern left is that is has found a form of words to turn the oppressed into the oppressors for the purposes of no-cost public displays of moral virtue. Why go to all the danger and discomfort of hunting out the scarce crop of actual, possibly violent, neo-nazis in the UK when they can conjure up softer and more plentiful targets closer to hand, even if they are in reality concerned parents or older feminists? The Disney-fied, quixotic left are desperate for a fight with someone(anyone)to earn their spurs and fill their on-line hours with glory. Dress up a “thought-criminal” in Nazi garb and then, mob-handed and anonymously, you can lynch them at your leisure to the approving roar of the crowd. Yes, much easier and safer for these social justice “warriors” to tilt at “terf” windmills. How brave, I leave for you to decide.
Fly Ointment 