Prompted once again by the controversy over the politically tainted foster-care scandal in Rotherham, our English correspondent Seneca III muses on his own past experiences with the machinations of the cultural Left.
The Rotherham Syndrome and the Depredations of an Elf
by Seneca III
“No Socialist system can be established without a political police. No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo — no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. This would nip opinion in the bud”.
— Winston S. Churchill, General Election speech, June 1945
Foreword
In an earlier post I attempted to demonstrate how Cultural Marxists and their fellow travellers use and abuse language to advance their agenda and establish their perverted vision of reality in the minds of the body politic. Yet always behind this vision, behind the talking heads and poison pens of those who dominate the mainstream narrative, are the rarely seen prime proselytisers, the malignant social engineers who inject their deconstructionist vomitus into the public domain through the mouths of a butterfly horde of useful idiots and who themselves prefer to operate from the shadows, rarely appearing in the public eye.
Occasionally however one of these bottom-feeders accidently surfaces and displays its entrails for all to see and in so doing presents us with an opportunity to examine it in some detail.
Now, in Rotherham, as the full extent of the establishment’s complicity in the decades-long campaign to bring about the ethnic cleansing of the native British begins to emerge, such an opportunity is at hand and I will try to illustrate, through means of an abridged, single-strand personal (warts and all) story, as to how a particular doctrine has infiltrated the heart and mind of our way of life and in so doing made a seminal contribution towards its destruction.
I shall speak here of a pseudo-science that has burrowed deep into the cultural consciousness of the West, of who and what I have found its proponents and offspring to be and why they have come to be so deeply embedded and influential within the media, the arts and the executive branch of our Civil Service.
Finally, if you do manage to wade through it, I thank you and ask for your forbearance. My only excuse for my incessant use of the first person singular is that it is invariably the stick with which autobiographers tend to beat their readers.
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The absurdity, the absurdity! Is your mind the same one as you had yesterday?
Sociology ► noun 1 (mass noun) the study of the development, structure and functioning of human society. (OED)
2 the covert manipulation of the ‘mea-culpa syndrome’ so that it becomes a Marxist-Socialist revolutionary tool. (S III)
Hypocrisy ► noun 1 (mass noun) the practice of claiming to have higher standards or beliefs than is the case. (OED)
2 a personal philosophy which is perfectly acceptable provided one is a leftard and believes in it. (S III)
Almost forty years ago, then in my early thirties, I was on an enforced sabbatical as the result of a work-related incident. Apart from a daily session of physiotherapy I had a lot of free time on my hands and had been granted leave of absence to return to school and complete the A levels (Maths, Physics & Chemistry) that I had left halfway through just after my seventeenth birthday in order to enter into military service.
To this end I enrolled at what was known in those days as a College of Further Education, which catered predominantly to those young eighteen to nineteen year olds who were resitting their examinations following a first time failure, and to apprentices from the technical and engineering sectors who attended under a scheme known as Day Release whereby they completed the theoretical side of their training. Also amongst the student body, and there in significant numbers, were we who were euphemistically referred to as ‘mature students’, and who were continuing our education for a variety of different reasons, mostly in order to enhance our employment/promotion prospects.
It was to prove an interesting time for me, a real-eye opener for someone who had spent the best part of a decade and a half up to his eyeballs in mud, blood, beer, free-range thinking and seriously dedicated multicultural totty-chasing, and who had missed the ’60s in their entirety.
During ‘Freshers’, or Induction as it was known then, I came across a small table where the College was touting for students to sign up for a new discipline. The course subject was ‘Sociology’, a new one on me as well and one I recall the faculty member manning the table had a certain difficulty in defining. I cannot remember the precise circumlocutions she used but I can remember that the context was liberally larded with words and phrases such as ‘social responsibility’, ‘understanding’, ‘developing awareness of needs’ etc., etc., etc. At the end of this rather vague, disjointed and strangely passionate presentation I was really none the wiser but I signed up anyway as the course seemed to be attracting several quite attractive members of the opposite gender (as well as the reverse). Well, old habits do die hard and the phrase ‘ambition exceeding ability’ had not yet entered my vocabulary so I dived in head first.
However, as it eventuated, this little excursion turned out to be yet another demonstration of my penchant for doing the wrong thing for all of the right reasons (or vice versa) and was to provide me with an insight into the hidden, subversive shadow world that was developing behind the back of those of us who were labouring at the pointy end of the Cold War. The same shadowy enterprise would one day mutate into that totalitarian monstrosity Common Purpose and, to a lesser extent, into so called ‘Media Studies’ and the generally leftward inclination of the liberal and performing arts world. In the end I found the whole exercise wearying, and in the end my penetration into the underbelly of this subtle treason only lasted for a few months before I kicked the whole pointless exercise into touch, and I only lasted that long more out of a sense of morbid fascination than anything else. I did, however, learn a lot that would serve my perceptions well in the years ahead as institutionalised guerrilla social engineering came gradually to prominence and acceptance, and began to exert significant influence on the docile minds of a certain class of otherwise non-achievers.
To begin. On the back wall of one of my memory rooms are nailed a couple of vignettes that have held firm there down all the days and are, I feel, worth mentioning: The first because the paths of the other party and I crossed obliquely twenty odd years later and the second because it illustrates the beginning of the end of academic rigour and integrity and the implementation of a policy of reducing everyone to the level of the lowest, common, never to be failed denominator.
In the case of the first example I must stick my hands up and say that I lay no claim to being a picture of sartorial elegance myself at that time, as I was enjoying a respite from the rigid requirements of Queen’s Regulations with regard to dress and deportment. In fact, to be honest, I was pretty damn scruffy by my normal standards, or at least I thought I was until I entered the college refectory on the second day of the first semester. The person standing in front of me in the queue, a young woman in her early twenties, appeared to have just come straight from an amateur dramatic society dress rehearsal for the performance of a drama scripted and directed by Hieronymus Bosch. I will describe this apparition for you from the ground up as I can see still visualise it in its full three dimensions and lurid Technicolor.
Planted firmly on the floor and bearing not insubstantial weight were a pair of ex-Army boots. Stretching upward from them, and outward I must add, were a pair of jeans through the many holes in which gobbets of pale-fleshed adipose tissue were desperately attempting to escape. Next up was a pullover that appeared to have been hand-knitted out of pampas grass by a demented Vegan, and had obviously spent the better part of its lifespan providing considerable sustenance to a large family of Lepidoptera. Crowning this monumental structure was an impressively large nest of dank looking hair within which were residing a dozen or so feathers that collectively gave the impression of an Indian war bonnet assembled by someone in the terminal stages of delirium tremens.
I had of course seen similar creatures, deep in mountainous jungles on the Indonesian border, either carrying a stone hand axe and a primitive bow or under an arm a suckling piglet. There it did not jar because it was obvious that their millennia of isolation from the mainstream of our species’ topography, plus the climate and lack of hybrid vigour, had deprived them of any opportunity to develop further. Never before, however, had I seen such in the land of my birth.
Perhaps to those of you who were there on the ground and lived through the flower power-revolution and the embryonic days of the corruption of that and the following generations in real time, such a sight may have become a norm, but for me, having been out in the boondocks for the best part of seven years, this alternative reality was something of a seismic moment, to say the least, and it is possible that it triggered a state of mild xenoshock. Whatever the case, there is a nasty, ruthless little Elf residing between my ears that occasionally emerges from its hole in times of stress (my foot was hurting particularly badly that day) and seizes control of the neural pathways which carry instructions to my mouth. Allegedly, that is.
And so it was that Elf popped out of its hole, tapped her on the shoulder, smiled and asked her ‘Are you O.K., my dear?’
She turned, quizzically: “Wotchamean? Whyayaskin?”
‘Well, it’s just that it looks as if you have been in fight with a chicken — and lost’ the Elf replied
This did not go down well with the perambulating human train wreck, and she looked towards what appeared to be her boyfriend (if I can use the first syllable of that word with any degree of certitude) for support or comfort, but neither was forthcoming for some reason or other. And so did we all shuffle slowly and in mutual silence towards the trough.
Not my best contribution to peace and understanding, I will admit, but a thing of its time and place and one which must remain anchored there. As fate would have it the chicken fighter, the Elf and I henceforth had to share a classroom for two double periods a week, and therein participate in many abrasive discussions on the meaning of life or similar — such as my pointing out to her that people who dressed and decorated themselves as she did were merely trying to draw attention to their own inadequacies, their self-inflicted appearance being the non-verbal equivalent of “Look at me, I’m special and you must pay attention to me.” But that was yet another epic FAIL by the Elf, I must admit, for nothing changed, at least during our brief acquaintance — but more on that later.
Secondly, whilst on the subject of the Sociology lectures and the debates that took place within and around them, it would be pointless to continue without mentioning the Ringmaster, the tutor, she who had sat at the recruiting table drawing in the innocent. She now ruthlessly orchestrated the circus such that the majority of the performers were constrained to perform only within the limiting parameters of the newspeak she was inculcating in these receptive young minds. Indeed, such was the insistence on the given orthodoxy that it would have been quite appropriate to mount a sign on the lecture room door stating ‘Original Dialectic Strictly Forbidden Here’.
Needless to say it was not long before she and I coexisted in a state of deep and abiding loathing, an atmosphere of antipathy so thick that it could almost be cut with a knife. Henceforth whenever I was able to stick, or should I say force, my oar into the round table discussions it always had to be against the determined resistance of this high priest of change. Mind you, a few of the bright-eyes may have eventually escaped Dronedom, as they seemed to appreciate Elf’s contribution even though they chose not to speak likewise.
Halcyon days, those were, particularly when I learned that despite her pretentious, indirect allusions to Oxbridge qualifications, all that she had was a minor (a 3rd, I checked!) degree in Philosophy from a red brick institution of little note situated (but not in Rotherham) in the Peoples’ Republic of South Yorkshire. When this information was gently let out in the local pub where the bright-eyes and I used to meet for the odd drink or so, it was well received and I like to think it may have saved a few of them from falling into the pit the moral re-educators were digging for them. Indeed, salvation can come in many guises, even in that of a grumpy, limping, beer-guzzling stormy petrel.
As for the chicken fighter, I watched as she sank her roots and then blossomed in the semantic swamp of Sociology. The chicken became a parrot, so to speak, and a very accomplished one to boot. Whereas previously she had had difficulty parsing even the simplest of sentences she took to the discordant mantras of Sociology with alacrity. To use the phrase ‘teacher’s pet’, which is what she rapidly became, may be rather juvenile, but it is appropriate nonetheless, and I felt at the time that she indeed had some sort of future in this new milieu. (This supposition was to prove correct, as the future would demonstrate to me in due course.)
Finally, after a couple of months of indoctrination came the time for our first assignment, an essay of a maximum, we were told, of 750 words! I suspect that the proctor didn’t want to actually encourage any attempt at lengthy analysis or a leaning towards detailed exposition thereof in the minds of the Eloi who were now at least partially conditioned through the rote learning of the ideological clichés and revelations of the new gospel.
The subject of this pathetically short essay was to be ‘My Ethics and Their Place in Modern Society’. After so many classroom hours listening to and the afterhours reading of what was essentially nothing more than a cunningly camouflaged Frankfurt School and Gramsci-inspired agenda, basically a ’60s variation on Orwell’s ‘four legs good, two legs bad’ meme where any alternative opinions were treated as simply degenerate or evil, or both, I was well primed to take the bait, and with good reason. I had lived my adult life, and survived, within that ‘modern society’, red in tooth and claw as it was and is and always will be, and for the tutor to cast this exquisite opportunity before me was the academic equivalent of throwing raw meat to a starving wolf and expecting it to display some table manners.
Ignition time, so to speak.
Not that, I must emphasise, there was an immediate explosion. I am not one to waste an opportunity by charging up the guts with lots of smoke; rather I prefer to use the tactics of mistake to create an opportunity to slip the blade in from a flank and thus I spent a lot of time carefully creating a semantic and ideological rabbit trap precisely 775 words long. Its intended function was to present the assessor with only two options in terms of marks — either a very low percentile approaching zero or a very high percentile approaching one hundred and, guess what?…the trap failed. When the marked assignment turned up in my pigeon hole there on the top, written in green ink, not the red that was making my work in other subjects look like traffic lights stuck on red, was ‘50/100’ and nothing else, no comment, critique, explanation or even an observation as to the extended length of the assignment.
Fortunately, the tactics of mistake can often be self-inflicted, and shortly thereafter the Ringmaster organised a group discussion where she offered her critiques on the assignments submitted. Well, on all but one, that is, an omission that was not to be allowed to pass without comment from the renegade contingent, including the Elf. I will not, dear reader, go into the sordid details here, simply suffice to say that the Elf and I thus ended our formal immersion in the new religion and we went our separate way.
This did not of course bother us a material whit. Life went on and I happily immersed myself in my other subjects and joined the local rifle and pistol club in order to keep my hand in. All in all, it was a very satisfying year. But, alas, all things come to pass and eventually I returned to full duty, taking with me both some new psychological scars and several parchments signifying success both at examination and at expertise in arms, the physical rewards of this my latest but far from last venture into the hallowed halls of academia, and also of my preparations for the more serious practical social work of my trade.
In the years that followed I watched from the sidelines as higher education establishments began to scatter sociology degrees around like confetti at a wedding, as this quiet tsunami of disinformation swept through our culture. Many of these degrees landed on fallow ground, of course — on those who for moral or intellectual reasons could neither sustain nor justify the dichotomies underlying such a fallacious construct, and could no longer bring themselves to parrot the mantras and the certitudes, and who went on to find something useful to do with their lives.
Others, mostly those who lacked the innate skills and energy necessary to become real net contributors, therefore had only a few options open to them, either in the uncertain worlds of arts or the media or to establish sinecures in the public services. I, now no longer in the profession of arms, began to stumble across them with increasing frequency.
I met them in the Police Service where they or their descendants would later become senior officers or would slither into the role of diversity coordinators/trainers and various other deconstructionist incarnations. I met them in the Health Service and in what was then Personnel Management, that which has now become, in newspeak, ‘Human Resources’. I went on to meet their ideological doppelgängers in the legal professions and at dinner parties and in pubs across the whole spectrum of society, including in Industry and Commerce where, amongst other things, their underlying precepts became the germinators of the Health and Safety plague that has infected and virtually crippled risk and reward, personal freedom and choice, in every aspect of our daily lives.
Here I must pause for a moment to take a deep breath before I hasten to add that I never perceived these people, overall, to be inherently evil, merely ignorant and prejudiced by their environment, and that the majority were both good hearted and well-intentioned, but that their minds were no longer their own, the consequence of decades of overt and covert indoctrination. However, the few diametric opposites to this majority, the select amongst them, those consumed by absolute belief, burning ambition and beset by moral turpitude went much further and slowly climbed the greasy ladder to bureaucratic power. We have all recently been able to observe the destructive machinations of one such example in Rotherham, and in my case this incident took my mind back full and part circle to my first exposure to this phenomenon in general and, later on, to one incident in particular.
Recently a dear friend and I, he a Latin master of the old school of much the same age as myself, were discussing our predilection to have what is known in polite circles as ‘senior moments’. In the course of this rueful but amusing conversation he pointed out that “…it’s always the nouns that go first” and he was correct, at least in my case. The nouns do indeed slip away with increasing frequency these days which leads me to say subliminal thanks for a small, winning hand I drew early in the poker game of life. I perhaps have been luckier than most in that I have what can best be described as a form of eidetic memory for faces, voices and mannerisms. This, coupled with an ability to place them quite accurately, has served the Elf and I well and did so at one particular moment in time about fifteen years ago.
Half a dozen of us ex-military dinosaurs had decamped to a watering hole in my county town, having just paid our last respects to an old comrade. It was one of those cavernous modern establishments in the city centre where, around the central auditorium with its scattered tables lay a ring of booths backed onto the walls, each with a semi-circular wooden partition which was solid up to seated head height then topped with a latticework trellis. It was there, in the adjoining booth, that I heard a voice from the past, one more rounded and less shrill than I recalled but still that same voice it was, pontificating now and belabouring a group of what were obviously its minions with the same recidivist drivel I had kicked into touch twenty-five years previously.
Yes, it was the chicken-fighting parrot without a doubt and a surreptitious glance in the course of my next visit to the bar confirmed this. Its corpus remained relatively unchanged, perhaps expanded a little further in the wrong direction, but now it was draped in expensive looking couture, not Prada by any means, but not too far off. As I sat and listened to this Queen Bee holding court, the memories came flooding back. The mantras were still issuing forth but they were somehow more refined and uttered with even greater certitude than in the past, coming now as they obviously were from someone in a position of power.
Older and wiser myself, and perhaps a little tired and emotional, I just sat and listened, and the Elf too must have felt the same way, for it remained quiescent in its hole. Later, after the Grande Dame had made her stately exit, I engaged one of the sycophants in conversation and via a circuitous route finally elicited that she was now Head of Social Services at County Hall.
So there it was then, game, set and match for the deconstructionist. I thought to myself how unfortunate it is that in our society the wages of sin cannot be death, no matter how well deserved such would be for those who pollute and pervert eager young minds and turn them upon themselves and their own.
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Afterword
During my last and most recent passage through the hallowed halls an incident occurred that both reminded me of that previous tentative journey and in a strange way confirmed and qualified several of the gratuitous conclusions I have belaboured you with above.
I was a mature (serious understatement there) student again, this time at university attempting to complete a degree that I had been pursuing sporadically over the years. It was yet again the second day of the first semester, and I was heading for my first lecture, unfamiliar with the premises and not at all helped by inadequate signage. When I entered the lecture theatre I wondered how on earth I was going to find a place to rest my bones for it was simply packed to capacity with students everywhere, on the benches, on the floor and some it appeared even stuck to the wall with BlueTac. Fortunately, I quickly realised that I was in the wrong place and that this was in fact the Sociology lecture theatre and so to my great relief I was able to beat a hasty retreat.
When I did eventually find the correct room I was both relieved and to a certain extent appalled by the fact that there were only six of us budding mathematicians present and we were the lot for that year, so to speak. In retrospect this disparity was one hell of a demonstration of the drawing power of an easily regurgitated, emotive political doctrine, as opposed to the hard graft of separating fact from wishful thinking on the long road to reality.
I thought afterwards of how destructive a philosophy becomes when it is grounded in induced ideology rather than in logic and precise definition, and I thought of the Ringmaster of yesteryear with her mediocre mental abilities. It occurred to me that she certainly had not followed in the footsteps of the likes of Aristotle, Boethius, Newton, Russell, McLuhan et al, steeped as they were in the pragmatic world of definitives and indefinites, and she was nothing more nor less than a creation of the Marxist-Socialist mindset and its eternal crusade against freedom.
And, as I look out now on a landscape littered with but a few last remnants of my once pleasant, functional, reasonably homogenous culture, I cannot find in myself either pity or any feeling of mercy towards her and her ilk. The Elf does live on, nastier and more ruthless than ever, and it no longer spends much time in its hole as we both have a great deal to do in those years left to us.
— Seneca III, December 2012
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