Atlantic Liberty Forum

World Without Men: The Forgotten Novel of Totalitarian Lesbiocracy by Charles Eric Maine

Editor — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:12:17 +0000

The blurb on the thirty-five cent Ace paperback likens Charles Eric Maine’s 1958 novel World without Men to George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’sBrave New World. Ordinarily – and in consideration of the genre and the lurid cover – one would regard such a comparison skeptically. Nevertheless, while not rising to the artistic level of the Orwell and Huxley masterpieces, World without Men merits being rescued from the large catalogue of 1950s paperback throwaways, not least because of Maine’s vision of an ideological dystopia is based on criticism, not of socialism or communism per se nor of technocracy per se, but rather of feminism. Maine saw in the nascent feminism of his day (the immediate postwar period) a dehumanizing and destructive force, tending towards totalitarianism, which had the potential to deform society in radical, unnatural ways. Maine grasped that feminism – the dogmatic delusion that women are morally and intellectually superior to men – derived its fundamental premises from hatred of, not respect for, the natural order; he grasped also that feminism entailed a fantastic rebellion against sexual dimorphism, which therefore also entailed a total rejection of inherited morality.

In World without Men, Maine asserts that the encouragement of sexual hedonism, the spread of pornography into the mainstream of public culture, and the proscription of masculinity are inevitable consequences of the feminist program, once established. The fifty years since the novel’s publication – as a thirty-five cent paperback – have vindicated Maine’s notable prescience as a social commentator.

Although World without Men might not measure up fully to 1984 or Brave New World, Maine, a talented storyteller, worked on a higher level than most of the genre writers represented in the Ace catalogue. Indeed, in its narrative structure, World without Men trades in at least one formally modernistic gesture. It gives glimpses out of chronological order of a progressive biological and cultural catastrophe so that the reader must reshuffle events into their actual, causal sequence. Part one or “The Man” takes place in the Seventieth Century, and part two or “The Monkey” late in the Twentieth. Part three or “The Girl” takes place perhaps seventy-five or a hundred years after part two. Part four or “The Patriarch” takes place sometime in the indefinite far future, but before 7000 AD. (References to Christ as having been born “seven thousand years ago” permit specification of the date.) Part five or “The Child” recurs to 7000 AD and shares certain personae with “The Man.” Thus “The Man,” “The Patriarch,” “The Girl,” and “The Child” are long-term sequels to “The Monkey,” which chronicles the development of a birth-control drug called Sterilin, while probing the consciences of the pharmaceutical researcher, a man, who creates it and the corporate mogul, a woman, who aggressively markets it.

I. “The Man” immediately places the reader in a world of disturbing oddity, doubly disgruntling because its exclusively female denizens take it dogmatically for granted. To the normal sensibility of 1958, Maine’s fictional future would have constituted a shocking prospect even though its hedonism and conformism reflect forecasts of an coming inversion of morality going back as far as Charles Baudelaire’s “Femmes damnées” and renewed in the critical discourse of Oswald Spengler and José Ortega y Gassett. In “The Child,” in a Khrushchev-like secret speech, a dogmatic authority figure called by the moniker of “the Mistress” refers to monosexual society candidly as having the form of a “perversion neurosis” that has achieved “equilibrium.” That which the doctrine calls “equilibrium,” and which the authorities wish to preserve, corresponds in an objective analysis, however, only to static malaise. The gynocracy maintains itself in status quo partly through the psychological-political conditioning of its citizenry not to notice the society’s unnaturalness and partly through constant police-state surveillance of nonconformity including the arrest and liquidation of dissidents; the polity also mandates births and implements euthanasia under the euphemism of “mortic revenue.” That the world of “the Man” and “The Child” shocks the perceptive mentality of 2010 less than it probably shocked its original readers attests powerfully to Maine’s prescience – and to our own jaded sensibility.

“The Man” concerns the discovery at the North Pole of a rocketship, frozen in the ice for thousands of years, that contains the cryogenically preserved body of a male person. The state has recovered the body to a research facility in “Lon” (London) for dissection and analysis. Maine’s point-of-view character, Aubretia Two Seventeen, works as a “press policy and administration officer” in “The Department of the Written Word.” Essentially a functionary, Aubretia lives a materially comfortable, but thoroughly regulated and insipidly routine life in a system dominated by a strict hierarchy of managerial elites. The administrators, Aubretia thinks to herself while preparing for work, “keep an alert eye on the plans and schedules of the vast labor organization” of what amounts to a centrally planned world-society. Ubiquitous, constant surveillance is indeed a component of Maine’s dystopia. Maine offers Aubretia as a specimen mid-level type of this totalitarian lesbiocracy: “She was handsome enough in the tradition of the day,” with “skin… smooth and burnished to a roseate bronze sheen [and] the whites of her eyes… stained green to contrast with the limpid brown of the pupils.”

Additional details increase the impression of doll-like preciosity and mirror-gazing narcissism: “The silver lacquer on her flat, atrophied breasts had worn thin in parts, but… later in the day she could visit the Beauty center and have fresh lacquer applied.” Aubretia thinks to herself, “silver was clean, but there were times when it resembled armor.”

Aubretia’s work vetting news for public distribution permits Maine to offer readers further glimpses into the socio-political order. During Aubretia’s morning she redirects various official announcements. One concerns “an increase in two and half per cent in live parthenogenetic births during the next two years as a preliminary to a statistical revision of the personal mortic tax assessment figure in light of improving economic conditions.” She fails to note the brutality that the neutral-sounding bureaucratese implies. Next from “Femina Entertainment News,” Aubretia gleans the information that “state actress Butterfly II will star tonight in a video dramatic feature concerning the love of two adult women for a young albino girl.” Aubretia herself sustains liaison with an albino lover, Aquilegia. The emphasis on albinism in entertainment stems from the sexual lopsidedness of the society. Other differences than the dimorphic sexual difference now form the only basis of perceptible although etiolated erotic interest. Arousal depends more on a “comprehensive fund of erotic knowledge” and on “physical… captivation” than on actual “emotional contact.” The implied lack of genuine emotion in personal pairings accords with the metaphor of “armor,” used by Maine in the description of Aubretia’s cosmetic mien.

Aubretia receives a summons to go to the “Department of Physiology,” in whose laboratory “research into the physiological basis of parthenogenesis was carried out.” This research does not exclude “the dissection of women… who during life had shown symptoms of aberration from the parthenogenetic norm.” In the laboratory Senior Cytologist Gallardia reveals to Aubretia the body of the man recovered from the arctic spaceship. “Aubretia was only conscious of a certain grotesque detail,” whereupon “her stomach seemed to contract and her abdomen to twist up inside herself,” while “her rational mind rejected the obvious explanation” of what she was seeing. The mere appearance of the male form induces swooning disequilibrium in the brainwashed subject. Thus, “The vaguely horrific image of the man stayed in Aubretia’s mind for the remainder of the day.” Yet despite striking Aubretia as “alien and remote,” and despite portending “a certain indefinable fear,” the masculine corpse nevertheless persistently implicates for Aubretia “something… fundamental… that had to do with herself and Aquilegia… and all the women of the world.”

Now men being supposed extinct for five thousand years, Aubretia judges the discovery, disquieting though it is, as eminently newsworthy. Aubretia’s superior, the Mistress of Information, disagrees. She embargos the story but offers Aubretia justification, seeming even to disclose a secret or two, as if to take the subordinate into confidence. Although a carefully fostered myth asserts otherwise, the disappearance of men “wasn’t sudden.” Rather, says the Mistress, “it was a slow process” stemming from the two facts, as she purports them, (1) that “evolution had ceased in the human species” and (2) that this cessation, rendering “sexual variation no longer necessary,” provoked nature such that she “introduced an economy and eliminated the male sex.” With a pseudo-logic that takes its pattern in the Marxist view of history, the Mistress claims that, “obviously… woman is the end product of nature,” man having been “merely an interim stage.” Nevertheless, while “a sex may disappear according to the dictates of nature,” yet despite that, “the endocrine structure of the female body remains the same.” One notes that the Mistress has used the term “nature” in a contradictory way. In the abeyance of a male presence, women, remaining naturally oriented to the male, had to be “modified” artificially to fixate on the female.

Aubretia’s lover, Aquilegia, notices her partner’s disequilibrium. Probing the cause of Aubretia’s distress, Aquilegia reveals herself as a clandestine foe of the regime. “Quilly” can tell Aubretia, for example, that parthenogenesis was not a timely evolutionary novelty (as the Mistress claimed) but rather a desperate technical innovation. All official pronouncements to the contrary, every known birth owes itself to “induced parthenogenesis,” in which “the ovum is persuaded to divide and subdivide by artificial means.” Quilly corrects Aubretia when the latter refers to “a woman named Christ” rumored to have been an early instance of spontaneous virgin pregnancy: “Christ was a man.” Quilly insists that theirs is not an open but a closed society: “In point of fact, we haven’t any personal liberty” and “we are ‘free’ only insofar as we comply with the adaptation syndrome.” When Aubretia returns to work in the morning, Quilly predicts, Senior Cytologist Gallardia will have disappeared – reassigned to a posting unknown – and the male corpse, while accounted for as destroyed, will have been relocated to a secret facility somewhere else in the world.

The predictions come to pass. The truth of them increases Aubretia’s sense of resentful disequilibrium. When, in a spasm of conscience that makes her a dissident, Aubretia tries to disseminate knowledge of the recovered man against policy, automatic circuits block her broadcast, and the secret police immediately arrest her. They send her away for mental reconditioning.

II. Readers will next encounter Aubretia, nagged by amnesiac gaps, in “Birm” (Birmingham), employed in “the collating and filing of governmental statistical records.” She now has a “new friend,” that is to say, a new erotic liaison, whom readers swiftly and correctly identify as a police minder assigned by the state. The statistical records with which Aubretia works have to do with “the regulating machinery of society” and, ominously, “the balancing of productivity against needs.” She inclines to regard her previous job as having been stressful and she therefore finds the lesser demands of the new job welcome. In solitary meditation in her new apartment Maine has her rehearse for herself “the clear, logical, and satisfactory picture” in which, as the formula puts it, man “became an obstacle to the wise and peaceful exploitation of natural power for the benefit of his species” and so “cease to exist… and nature provided parthenogenesis to replace the outmoded reproduction system that had vanished with the male sex.” Yet one or two aspects of the “scientific democracy” bother Aubretia. “The Department of Mortic Revenue was a name that chilled her mind and heart whenever she heard it mentioned” because the phrase mortic revenue “was another way of saying compulsory euthanasia.”

In essence, “all individuals at birth have a certain monetary value to the state,” or, more brutally, everyone has “a price on her head.” By rendering “service” to the state, every individual must make good her “value.” Thus everyone’s longevity “is proportional to [her] productive capacity.”

Aubretia’s lover-minder, Valinia, justifies the arrangement. “Those who fail,” Valinia tells Aubretia, “are those who are least useful to us and to society as a whole: the idle and lazy people, the criminals, the subversive types, the political intriguers.” The argument cleverly identifies usefulness with orthodoxy, as in all syllogisms concocted by dictatorships to justify liquidating dissenters. Valinia cynically distracts Aubretia by seducing her. In the physical détente that follows the climax, Aubretia convinces herself of Valinia’s case: “She realized that control of death was just as logical as the control of birth; indeed, the two were an intimately related function of the balanced state.” Yet on a deeper level, the disquiet remains. The advent of Aquilegia’s twin (at first representing herself as Aquilegia) during one of Valinia’s regular three-day absences provokes the doubts into renewed vigor, forcing Aubretia into a struggle with her own inner division.

The twin, who never reveals her own name, arrives disheveled; she confesses to Aubretia that she belongs to the subversive underground and that the secret police actively seek her. She appeals to Aubretia for temporary asylum, telling her that the actual Aquilegia has been “passed to the Department of Mortic Revenue,” where “she paid the tax in full.” Maine gives to Aubretia’s visitor the role of explicating for her reluctant host that part of the truth about the social order that the dictatorial polity actively and ceaselessly suppresses.

Aquilegia’s twin reiterates that the story about the natural extinction of men is “a lie.” Men died off, but as the result of artificial tampering with the natural order, not by some unavoidable and morally neutral catastrophe with an origin external to human intention. In a phrase, “he was destroyed.” The twin discloses the destiny of the masculine cadavers that occasionally turn up in remote places: The state uses them in a project to create an artificial male gamete, the point of which would be to restore sexual dimorphism to the species; but lately the official attitude has inclined toward suppressing that effort so as not to alter the monosexual dispensation, now become an inviolable dogma. The truth-speaker says: “We are creatures of sex living by force and unnaturally in a sexless society… The government tries to tell us it’s normal, but in fact it’s abnormal. We’ve become a race of Lesbians.” The subversives, in the twin’s words, “believe in truth for its own sake”; they “hold that perversion is evil, whatever the motive might be, and that the modern structure of society… based as it is on statistical birth and murder and on a homosexual morality, is wrong and corrupt throughout.”

An additional disclosure – that the ruling authorities defer in their decisions to a global network of electronic brains – belongs to the genre-vocabulary of science fiction and perhaps exceeds the necessity of the story. Yet the detail is not without metaphorical justification in Maine’s narrative. The twin tells Aubretia that, should the present arrangement continue, “the result will be a world of robots, assembly line creatures all alike, cast in a limited number of patterns, and working blindly under the dictates of an impersonal governing authority.” The twin remarks that already the government treats citizens “as integers in an… equation.” That would be the “equation,” of course, of mandatory artificial quickening on the one hand and enforced euthanasia on the other.

Thus sane living requires morality and morality requires “emotional balance between men and women.” It is the case, Aubretia’s colloquist argues, that “the great majority of women… live their lives in organized peace and harmony, never enquiring beyond the erotic boundary of their own sex hormones… accepting mortic laws without question.” It is also the case, she argues, that, “morality is more vital than peace and stability based on lies and lesbianism.” These statements accord with Maine’s indirect affirmation of a fixed natural order in the Mistress’s duplicitous usage of the word nature earlier in the story.

The world of five thousand years hence, in Maine’s forecast, is also a stunted, inward-turning world that has renounced dynamism and creativity, just as it has renounced sexually dimorphic procreation. When Aubretia first learns of the crashed rocketship at the North Pole, Maine inserts the historical tidbit that, “no rocket had been launched or even made on earth for four thousand years” because “it seemed more logical to womankind to devote worldly wealth on the development of the Earth and its inhabitants and the feminine mind saw neither sense nor sanity in space travel.” When the Mistress discusses the situation with Aubretia, she argues that spaceflight was a male aberration, a mere “sublimation of unexpended masculine drive,” such that “the cosmos itself became a mons Veneris at which mankind as a whole set its cap.” The little speech sums up feminist discourse – which denigrates all specifically male activities and derives all social problems, perceived or real, from male toxicity – quintessentially. It shows once more the cultural perceptivity of the author, who, I remind my readers, was writing more than fifty years ago.

III. I have treated World Without Men, Part One, at length because it represents the logical and material – and spiritual – consequence of events about which Maine tells in Parts Two and Three. Moreover, Part Five of the novel revisits the identical milieu of Part One and brings back the character of Aubretia, permitting readers to witness the final consequence of the chain of causality underlying Maine’s plot. The title of Part Two, “The Monkey,” rich with connotations, implicates the irrationality and destructiveness of hedonism-pragmatism as a ruling ethos and places that false creed in the context of a managerial-bureaucratic order. Such an order inevitably dehumanizes men and women while justifying its actions by appeals to public opinion. In Maine’s view, however, public opinion is a chimera, created in the first place by managerial techniques such as advertising and propaganda. The pattern is self-serving and circular. The characters in “The Monkey” are – to Maine’s end of demonstrating the shallowness of modern Western civilization – depthless people either fixated on their mere function as though it were the whole of life, or hedonistically oriented, or pathologically domineering.

Gorste, the middle-aged central persona, works as a chief research chemist for Biochemix Incorporated, a large pharmaceutical concern. E. J. Wasserman, a woman in her fifties, inherited Biochemix from its founder, her husband, who died ten years before the events in “The Monkey.” Gorste’s wife Anne plays a sinister role, one that reaches from Gorste’s domestic milieu into his business affairs in a complicated and fatal way. Anne had formerly been married to Drewin, now deceased, apparently by suicide. In the workplace Gorste sustained a testy rivalry with Drewin, exacerbated when Drewin discovered that Gorste and Anne trifled with one another behind his back. There are others – Slade, Rhinehart, and Ingram – equally cipher-like. In “The Man,” as we recall, the characters have no family names, only given names with a numerical suffix. In “The Monkey,” only Anne has a given name, Maine referring to everyone else by his surname and reducing Wasserman’s given names to their initials. (That Gorste is “Phil” to Anne readers learn only at the end of the tale.)

Maine stresses the compartmentalized impersonality of the industrial concern, forecasting the functionary-status of the personae in “The Man” in the manner in which Gorste and the others willingly relinquish identity – and so also conscience – to merge with the collectivity.

The titular monkey is the subject of Gorste’s current project. The Biochemix board has directed Gorste, on Wasserman’s orders, to develop a drug for the suppression of fertility. “They had kept the monkey for two years, during which time they injected some two gallons of estrogen derivative into it,” after which, “they killed it and cut it open.” Examining the ovaries under the microscope, the researchers detect “no sign of fertility… None whatever.” Rhinehart, who mediates between the scientist Gorste and the board, tells Gorste that this development is good because “the board keep pressing for results.” Gorste wonders to Slade, “How can you exploit sterility as a commercial proposition,” adding that, “it’s going to take a great deal of hard selling” to induce women to embrace the suppression of their most sexually defining trait. Now Maine so arranges his story that a supreme irony complicates Gorste’s relation to his own work. When Drewin discovered Gorste’s adultery, he took revenge by attaching a piece of unshielded uranium underneath the lab-counter where Gorste habitually stands while working; by the time Gorste discovered the deed, the radiation had rendered him sterile, or so he believes.

After Drewin “gassed himself,” Gorste omitted to file a police report although he later divulges the incident to his doctor; he has also guiltily withheld the truth from Anne because “she wants a child,” or so he believes. The cold marriage is not sexless, but sex has become routine and mechanical, a matter of bodies without spirit.

In their crassness, the deliberations concerning Sterilin resemble a symposium of absolute cynics. Gorste, listening to Wasserman’s peremptory declarations, thinks, “It seemed strange to hear a woman discussing sterility so candidly and impersonally.” One of Wasserman’s marketers says, “A product of this type must have a dignified name [that] suggests its function yet at the same time is in no way salacious or capable of misinterpretation.” The marketer adds that, “Birth-control is only half of the sales story,” the product having the “more positive selling angle” of soliciting the “uninhibited enjoyment of the pleasures of life.” Wasserman tells Gorste, “The tablets… must be pleasant to take, with nothing medicinal about them… With fizz, perhaps.” The substance should be packaged attractively, in something like “a [lady’s] compact… pretty, perfumed, even heart-shaped and gilded.”

In Wasserman’s summation, which resembles a Gnostic outburst: “Sterilin is going to influence the whole moral climate of our society… Sterilin will set women free from the subconscious fear of pregnancy that has always inhibited their relationships with men.” Wasserman’s phrase, “will set women free,” turns out, in Maine’s story, to be opposite to the actual consequence.

Maine is putting together the elements of an enormity, the liquidation of men. He thus makes the biochemical innovation of Sterilin inseparable from Gorste’s moral-practical division, his unwillingness to act on the promptings of conscience, or to act against the organization-mentality of his co-workers, or against Wasserman’s manipulative will-to-power. Gorste has timidly criticized aspects of the Sterilin program; he subsequently feels “that he had erred – sinned against the company’s policy – in some indefinable way.” Perceiving Gorste’s essential weakness, Wasserman (she of “quick masculine movements”) cajoles and seduces her employee all at once. Maine endows on her the discourse of devilish sophism. “The moral climate of society is changing quickly,” she tells Gorste, “and Sterilin will play an important part in stimulating the evolution of a more liberal morality.”

When Gorste speaks of “conscience,” Wasserman tells him that, “conscience… is simply a matter of conditioning.” In a voice “that was becoming husky,” as Gorste thinks, Wasserman extols Sterilin for its power to “dissociate sex from pregnancy.” Consummation occurs. Gorste knows that, “he [has] been exploited.” He grasps suddenly that, “in the microtome sections of a simian ovary,” there lies the “point of origin” of “world-wide mass sterility… a rapidly falling birth rate… an irrevocable plunge into moral agnosticism.”

Anne stuns Gorste on his agonized return home with news of her pregnancy. Protesting his presumed sterility, he voices suspicion of Anne. “You don’t imagine,” she asks, meaning that she has betrayed him. “Nor did your first husband,” he retorts. Anne then lets slip out that she killed Drewin to be with Gorste. She “doped his coffee, then pushed his head in a gas oven.” In the escalation of emotions and charges, Gorste experiences a spasm of anger and kills Anne. At that moment he receives word from his doctor that he is not, in fact, sterile. “The Monkey” concludes with Gorste, having telephoned the police, waiting for them to arrive. It is a scene of complete moral sterility.

IV. “The Girl” fills in the details of the actuality that Gorste belatedly foresees in “The Monkey”: The rise of what might be described as a regime of mandatory promiscuity; the rise of an accompanying police-state whose first function is to conceal the actual situation, as much as possible; the fall of the birth rate generally and the cessation of male births. Maine sets the tale once again in “Lon” or London. In the first, establishing paragraph “the big flame-colored letters of [a] neon sign” flash out ceaselessly the product name of Sterilin. This sign, writes Maine, “dominated Piccadilly Circus, swamping all the other lights in its vicinity.” There is also a large, brightly illuminated “statue of Eros,” whose dart “was aimed accurately at the gigantic Sterilin sign.” The Circus has become the prime pick-up location for women on the prowl for increasingly scarce men. It is an age of “applied happiness,” as the point-of-view character Brad Somer thinks to himself. A reporter, Somer has uncovered part of the truth; he seeks to break through censorship to find the rest. Somer briefs a government official in an attempt to gain cooperation: “Ten years after the first Sterilin advertisement appeared… in all countries where Sterilin had been intensively marketed… birth rates had fallen alarmingly”; moreover, “there had been a snowballing deterioration in the moral standards of civilized society.”

Governments impose mandatory maternity on women, marshaling mothers-to-be in induced-birth centers, and raising the children in crèches. Finally, Somer has discovered that, “ninety-eight out of every hundred births are female, and… we shall soon reach the stage where all births are female.” Somer’s contact turns out to be a police agent. She arranges for his arrest and execution.

“The Patriarch” tells the pathetic story of the last man alive on earth – and his death, when he escapes from the Antarctic laboratory where the state holds him for experimental purposes. In “The Child,” Maine revisits the year 7000 AD. In its concluding section, he reintroduces the character of Aubretia. Maine first acquaints us, however, with Cordelia, a cytologist, and Koralin, a laboratory assistant. Aged seventy-two, Cordelia “had made full use of modern cosmetic techniques”; she thus possesses “the superficial appearance of an adolescent female.” Cordelia signifies once again the narcissism and false consciousness of Maine’s speculative lesbiocracy. While Cordelia’s body boasts youthful plasticity, nevertheless “her mind was wrinkled and leathery, impregnated with specialized science and technology, and twisted in the accepted lesbian fashion of the contemporary society.” Hence Cordelia’s initial attitude toward “the thing in the incubator,” an artificially produced male child, related genetically to the cadaver of “The Man.” In respect of the word thing, we recall Aubretia’s reaction to the male cadaver as something alien and remote.

When the Mistress of Applied Cytology and other scientists inspect the infant coldly, however, Cordelia’s emotions begin to take hold: She detects “an acrid quality in her superior’s voice,” she sees the researchers as “impassive in their attitude,” and she thinks that for them “the baby might as well have been a stained specimen on a microscope slide for all the human interest that was apparent in their eyes.” In respect of the word specimen, recall the ovarian tissue-sections in “The Monkey.”

At the end of a long address – the Khrushchev-like secret speech to which I have already alluded – the Mistress informs her subordinates that, “test four-six-five must be destroyed.” The Mistress insists that the infant in the incubator amounts to no more than “the result of a successful experiment in micro-cytology” in respect of which “there is no question of human status.” She offers that the male child’s mere existence threatens an outbreak of “hysteria” in the society; she uses the allegation of this threat to justify destroying the child. Cordelia bursts out in an uncontrolled, spontaneous defense of the child, but she quickly interprets her own outrage as precisely the “hysteria” that the Mistress has invoked. She retracts her defense, but the deed itself falls to her subalterns. One of these, Koralin, undertakes to fulfill the responsibility.

Koralin’s willingness is in fact a ruse. She boldly removes “test four-six-five” from the premises. On intelligence gleaned through her connection with the underground, Koralin conveys the baby to “Birm” (Birmingham), where she comes, a suppliant, to Aubretia.

Koralin argues to Aubretia that killing the baby “would have meant the end of all hope for the perverted and neurotic society in which we live.” She invokes the “parthenogenetic adaptation syndrome,” saying, “it sounds like a disease, and that’s exactly what it is.” The disease will prove fatal, she continues, “unless we reintroduce the male sex and revert to a normal way of living.” Thus, “this baby… could be the savior of womankind.” Maine selects the term “savior” carefully, pointing back by means of it to the Gospel references in “The Man.” Koralin likens the lesbiocracy to something inhuman and moribund and death-obsessed – “laboratories, experiments in human embryology, fertility centers, induced parthenogenesis, cultivated lesbianism” – that sacrificially seeks the destruction of a mere baby. “There was another parthenogenetic male,” she tells Aubretia, “a miracle child that was referred to as the savior of mankind,” whom “the state set out systematically to destroy.”

Sharpening the parallelism, Koralin says: “For thousands of years the world has awaited a second Messiah. And now he has arrived, Aubretia, and authority will attempt to destroy him before he destroys it.”

One notes that Maine has not identified the child as a supernatural Messiah; he has merely defined a child, in this case a male child, as supremely sacred. On this child’s survival depends the restoration of the natural, the true, order. The entirety of World Without Men pleads for the natural, the true, order and pleads for it unapologetically.

The crumbling Ace paperback of Maine’s novel from which I quote contains a Publisher’s Postscript. It reads in part as follows: “While the manuscript of WORLD WITHOUT MEN was being prepared for publication, the staff of Ace books were startled to see… a story in the New York Times, for Oct. 16, 1957. This told of the announcement at a meeting of a ‘planned parenthood’ society of advanced work on a ‘synthetic steroid tablet’ to be taken orally to create a limited period of sterility.” According to the Postscript, this story and one other “unexpectedly underline the credibility of Charles Eric Maine’s novel.” About Maine himself, information remains scarce. Charles Eric Maine was the penname of David McIlwain (1921 – 1981), who served in the Royal Air Force in World War Two and became a writer after the war. He seems to have published fourteen novels, most of them, to judge by their titles, in the science fiction genre. (Apart from World Without Men I have read none of them.) An early effort, Spaceways (1953) became a film under the same name the year after its publication.

John Clute and Peter Nichols, writing in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993), dismiss Maine as “determinedly the author of middle-of-the-road Genre SF,” who, “as such, was successful.” The entry is short and supplies no specifics. Of secondary literature, I can find none, in which case the present essay is the first.

GHTime Code(s): 191b5

In Obama’s Fascist America

Editor — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 17:56:24 +0000

By J. D. Longstreet.

Is Obama a fascist?

Ok — so what is a fascist? According to The Urban Dictionary a fascist is “someone who believes in a totalitarian state rule by a supreme leader (dictator) who controls everything possible and treats people harshly — to gain the leader’s own success….” (SOURCE)

Sound familiar? In a piece by John Griffing, published at American Thinker, Mr. Griffing says the following: “At its core, fascism is really just a system where government, through agreements with the private sector, controls virtually all property and income indirectly and Obama has embraced this template.”

Mr. Griffing goes on to say: “Fascism is correctly associated with tyranny since nations that employ the tenets of fascism almost always transition from a republican or parliamentary form of government to some sort of personality cult usually centered on an economic “savior.” Fascism requires extensive state control, and if this control is not centralized in a singular personality, the results will be muddied and plagued with excessive overlap. All of Obama’s actions have highly fascist overtones.” Read the entire article here (SOURCE)

It is gratifying, to say the least, to find someone who agrees with our viewpoint of Obama and his regime. It is truly frightening to see America being fundamentally changed from a constitutional republic into a fascist dictatorship under Obama. But, that is what we have in America today.

What? You say it can’t happen in America? Well, I hate to disagree with your assessment, but dear reader, it already has happened. The task of freedom loving Americans now — IS TO CHANGE IT BACK! That goal is becoming ever more difficult, with every passing day, as the line between the private sector and the public sector is being systematically and intentionally blurred by the Obama Regime. You may not wish to admit it, even to yourself, but, as Mr. Griffing says in his article at American Thinker, “individual liberty can often be conditioned on complicity with state aims, as manifested in the private sector sphere.” He is spot on!

Look, we Americans are being “conditioned” by the Obama Regime to jump through any hoop Obama should hold up in front of us.

Many weeks ago we warned of an avalanche of taxes on the horizon for America. That avalanche is about to come rumbling down to crush the last remnant of resistance to the Obama fascist agenda.

Obama and the democrats have bankrupted America. We are broke. There is no more money available within the government budget to stave of the insolvency of America.

So what must happen? Huge tax increases. As Charles Krauthammer has warned us: “There just isn’t enough to cut elsewhere to prevent national insolvency. That will require massive tax increases, most likely a European-style value-added tax.” Read the entire article here (SOURCE)

Americans who have already been mentally “conditioned” will simply lie down and allow the Obama taxes, such as the VAT tax, to wash over them. Those of us who are not “conditioned” will fight it every step of the way. Even the Vat tax is the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. It cannot cover the shortfall of funds America faces in the future.

Only a strong fascist leader could “condition” Americans to accept what is coming next — the looting of the individual American.

In an article at the American thinker written by Kyle Anne Shiver and entitled: “Barack Obama, the Quintessential liberal fascist” Shiver says: “Neither did Barack Obama invent the political “ideology of change,” nor design its carefully crafted propaganda. While media folks talked of the tingles up their legs and the brilliant rhetoric of Barack Obama, they were heralding the speaker only, not the creator of the movement and its slogans. That would have been Saul Alinsky, the man who took fascism and cunningly made it appear to casual observers every bit as American as apple pie.

Barack Obama is merely the movement’s closer, the quintessential liberal fascist with a teleprompter.” Read the entire article here

(SOURCE)

As much as I dislike admitting it, we HAVE become conditioned “not to see the forest for the trees.” We inhabit Obama’s fascist America, yet we don’t seem able to see it for what it is. Today we Americans seem to lack what the military refers to as “situational awareness.” Just as on the battlefield where lack of situational awareness can easily lead to the demise of the individual, it can also lead the people of a country into placidly standing by as their nation is hi-jacked and “fundamentally changed,” from a nation where the government serves the people — to a nation where the people serve the government.

That has already happened. The question now is — can we change it back to its rightful condition. We have a chance this November to begin that renewal. Lets not allow the chance to save America pass us by. It MAY be our last chance.

J. D. Longstreet blogs daily at INSIGHT on Freedom at: http://www.csadispatch.blogspot.com/

E-Mail: longstreet1862@gmail.com

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Ban Islam

Editor — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 22:36:42 +0000

By Dajjal

We curse & condemn Islam, exposing its evil core at every opportunity. The reality is Islam’s nature: pure, unmitigated evil; mercenary & martial.

We do not call for killing. We demand the eradication of Islam. Islam can be eradicated by killing Allah’s slaves, but no western government is willing to undertake that mission, which is the less humane alternative.

Islam can be eradicated by emancipating those of Allah’s slaves who are not perfect zombies, who still retain some vestigial morality combined with killing the recalcitrant remnant of Mujahid zombies. Unfortunately, no western government has the requisite balls & spine to accept that mission. We are educating our fellow citizens in the hope that they will recognize the real, proximate & persistent existential threat posed by Islam and join us in demanding effective national defense against it.

We disrespectfully demand the deportation of all Muslims and closing our borders to Muslims.

We disrespectfully demand recognition of the fatal fact that Islam is not a ‘religion of peace’; Islam is a war cult. Islam’s mission is total world conquest, its tactics are genocide & terrorism. The ‘original religion’ of Islam is Jihad. We disrespectfully demand recognition of the fatal fact that Islam declared and is prosecuting war against us.

We disrespectfully demand recognition of the fatal fact that Islam is inimical to liberty: Islam is slavery; Muslims are Allah’s slaves, purchased tokill and be killed fighting to make his word dominant. We disrespectfully demand recognition of the fatal fact that Islam denys human equality, assigning women to the status of chattel and Jews & Christians to dhimmitude, less than second class citizenship; to be humiliated,tormented and subjugated. We disrespectfully demand recognition of the fatal fact that Islam denys the sanctity of our lives.

We disrespectfully demand recognition of the fatal fact that Islam is tyrannical; inimical to representative government.

We disrespectfully demand recognition of the fatal fact that every Muslim is a threat to our lives & liberties because he is Allah’s slave, purchased to conquer us, commanded to kill, terrify, torment, humiliate, subjugate & enslave us. Allah’s commands are clear, contained in clear verses, which are to be believed and implemented.

In Ibn Kathir’s Tafsir, you can see Allah’s damnable commands, together with hadith which confirm them & the Qadi’s confirmation of their obvious meaning. Ibn Kathir spent his entire adult life studying and teaching that excrement so we don’t need to. Read them and curse Islam.

In Umdat as-Salik, you can see the codification of Allah’s damnable imperatives in Islamic law O9.1 tells Muslims that offensive Jihad is a communal obligation binding upon them, to be carried out at least once in every year. O9.8 tells Muslims that the Caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians and cites the ayeh bearing the curse worthy command upon which it is founded. O9.9 tells Muslims that the Caliph makes war on all other peoples until they become Muslim. There is a search engine in the upper document frame. Enter the letter & number in the search window and read the applicable law in context, then you will curse Islam if you have a soul.

If you think those commands are apocryphal, metaphorical, or limited chronologically or geographically, then you are an ignorant damn fool. The Qur’an is Allah’s perfected, immutable law which never expires. It is timeless, and Jihad continues until Judgment Day!

If you think that those commands do not mean exactly what they say, read the books of Jihad & Expedition in the various hadith collections; see what Moe did and said relative to Jihad; then, if you have a soul, you will curse Islam.

Sahih Bukhari: Jihad.
- Khumus
- Expedition
Sahih Muslim: Jihad
Abu Dawud: Jihad
Malik’s Muwatta: Jihad

Besides being literalistic & absolutist, Islam is supremacist & triumphalist. Once again, Ibn Kathir is my witness.

You and Ali Ben Ali Mohammad Abdul allow your unnatural fear and hatred of others to turn you into deeply soul-less individuals. You have no faith, no beliefs.

Aversion to bloodthirsty barbarians is not unnatural. Hatred of Moe’s War Cult is well warranted by the facts of history as well as the cult’s damnable doctrines & practices. Our own faith, beliefs & practices or lack thereof is completely irrelevant to any debate about Moe’s War Cult.

You follow of an extremely warped interpretation of the writings of Islam. You will not lie yourself to the truth.

You are the one who follows Moe, we reject his doctrines & practices, recognizing Satan’s deceptions. Moe, as the Qur’an’s reciter, is the only person empowered to interpret it. Moe’s actions on the battlefield and related sayings, recorded in Islam’s oral tradition (hadith) confirm the obvious. Allah’s damnable imperatives are clear, requiring no interpretation. Ibn Kathir confirms the obvious. Maududi ignores Jihad, detailing Jizya. Yusuf Ali emulates Maududi, Jalalayn & Ibn Abbas only translate the verse, offering no exegeses because the meaning is obvious. I do not interpret Islam, I rely on the face of the text, as confirmed by Islam’s own experts.

“Get a clue, for Chrissake!” again with this blasphemy. Nothing you call for is for the sake of Jesus. Stop using JC’s name. Your murderous cries to kill people are insane and come from your fear, not faith.

Once again, Ema erects and kicks a straw man. It would be better if she did not defecate on the straw, the stench is horrible. Who blasphemes Jesus? Your beloved al-insal al-kamil, the perfect man.
Who is Jesus Christ? Is he the son of God?

23:91. No son (or offspring or children) did Allâh beget, nor is there any ilâh (god) along with Him; (if there had been many gods), behold, each god would have taken away what he had created, and some would have tried to overcome others! Glorified be Allâh above all that they attribute to Him!

Is Jesus divine?

3:61. Then whoever disputes with you concerning him ['Iesa (Jesus)] after (all this) knowledge that has come to you, [i.e. 'Iesa (Jesus)]being a slave of Allâh, and having no share in Divinity) say: (O Muhammad ) “Come, let us call our sons and your sons, our women and your women, ourselves and yourselves – then we pray and invoke (sincerely) the Curse of Allâh upon those who lie.”

Was Jesus crucified, did he die; was he resurrected?

4:157. And because of their saying (in boast), “We killed Messiah ‘Iesa (Jesus), son of Maryam (Mary), the Messenger of Allâh,” – but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but the resemblance of ‘Iesa (Jesus) was put over another man (and they killed that man), and those who differ therein are full of doubts. They have no (certain) knowledge, they follow nothing but conjecture. For surely; they killed him not [i.e. 'Iesa (Jesus), son of Maryam (Mary) ]:
4:158. But Allâh raised him ['Iesa (Jesus)] up (with his body and soul) unto Himself (and he is in the heavens). And Allâh is Ever AllPowerful, All Wise.

Was Jesus a pacifist or a warmonger?

61:14. O you who believe! Be you helpers (in the Cause) of Allâh as said ‘Iesa (Jesus), son of Maryam (Mary), to Al Hawârîûn (the disciples): “Who are my helpers (in the Cause) of Allâh?” Al Hawârîeen (the disciples) said: “We are Allâh’s helpers” (i.e. we will strive in His Cause!). Then a group of the Children of Israel believed and a group disbelieved. So We gave power to those who believed against their enemies, and they became the uppermost.

Is Jesus benign & beneficent or a genocidal warmonger?

Abu Dawud Book 37, Number 4310:

Narrated AbuHurayrah:

The Prophet (peace_be_upon_him) said: There is no prophet between me and him, that is, Jesus (peace_be_upon_him). He will descent (to the earth). When you see him, recognise him: a man of medium height, reddish fair, wearing two light yellow garments, looking as if drops were falling down from his head though it will not be wet. He will fight the people for the cause of Islam. He will break the cross, kill swine, and abolish jizyah. Allah will perish all religions except Islam. He will destroy the Antichrist and will live on the earth for forty years and then he will die. The Muslims will pray over him.
In the future, the Jews will support the Dajjal (False Messiah); and the Muslims, along with `Isa, son of Mary, will kill the Jews. This will occur just before the end of this world. Eternal Humiliation placed on the Jews

Who is superior, with the closest relationship to & influence with God, Jesus or Moe?

Go to Moses, the slave to whom Allah spoke (directly) and gave him the Torah .’ So they will go to him and he will say, ‘I am not fit for this undertaking.’ and he will mention (his) killing a person who was not a killer, and so he will feel ashamed thereof before his Lord, and he will say, ‘Go to Jesus, Allah’s Slave, His Apostle and Allah’s Word and a Spirit coming from Him. Jesus will say, ‘I am not fit for this undertaking, go to Muhammad the Slave of Allah whose past and future sins were forgiven by Allah.’ So they will come to me and I will proceed till I will ask my Lord’s Permission and I will be given permission. When I see my Lord, I will fall down in Prostration and He will let me remain in that state as long as He wishes and then I will be addressed.’ (Muhammad!) Raise your head. Ask, and your request will be granted; say, and your saying will be listened to; intercede, and your intercession will be accepted.’ Sahih Bukhari Volume 6, Book 60, Number 3

Your murderous cries to kill people are insane and come from your fear, not faith.

I make no cries to kill, Moe did enough of that. I call for the extinction of Moe’s War Cult. Usher the Imams, Mullahs, Sheikhs, Mujahideen and others who will cling blindly to the damnable doctrines of Islam into Hell. Emancipate those of Allah’s slaves who are not complete zombies.

I make this call because of the fatal fact, which I have proved with ample evidence from Islam’s own canon, that Islam is perpetually violent, a real, proximate & persistent threat to life & liberty.

Q.E.D.
Throughout this document, I have quoted the Hilali & Khan translation of the Noble Qur’an, linking each ayeh to a non-Muslim site which displays ten translations in parallel so that you can compare them and examine the context. www.quranbrowser.com also has a search engine so that you can search the various Qur’an translations. I have quoted various hadith, in each case linking to one of the hadith collections at USC-MSA, an Islamic site, which is the source for most of the on line hadith sites. I have quoted Ibn Kathir’s Tafsir, linking each quote to www.tafsir.com, an Islamic site so that you may verify the quote and examine the context. If you desire to search Ibn Kathir’s Tafsir, go to Qtafsir, which features the same text plus a search engine. If you need to search the hadith, go to Islaamnet.

Throughout this document, bold blue underlined text is linked to an authentic source. Clicking the link will open the source document in a new tab or window.

This blog post is placed in the public domain. Quote, cross post & email it to your heart’s content, but keep it in context and leave the links intact so that readers can verify everything.

Originally posted at Ben’s Blog © Dajjal

Published at Westernfront America on Feb. 18 2009

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Race In The Third Millennium

Editor — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 03:44:59 +0000

By Selwyn Duke

Although the show was propaganda produced by leftist Norman Lear, no one could accuse “All in the Family” of not being funny. Its protagonist, blue-collar bigot Archie Bunker, is one of those legendary television characters, and one of his uproarious lines is apropos here. It was uttered during a scene in which his daughter, Gloria, passionately asked him, “Daddy, did you know that 65 percent of the people murdered in the last ten years were killed by handguns?” The curmudgeonly patriarch’s reply was classic: “Would it make you feel any better, little girl, if they was pushed outta’ windas’?”

While what follows isn’t the conclusion Lear wanted us to draw, the truth is that many Americans would feel better. People tend to fixate on the boogeyman of their ideology, and they often don’t trouble much about evil when it’s not committed in his name.

We see examples of this phenomenon today, and this brings me to a couple of questions of my own. Can tyranny be visited in the name of only one particular lie? And would it make you feel any better if millions were oppressed or murdered to promote a fashionable lie? The truth is, sadly, millions would feel better.

Archie’s characteristic fault, bigotry, is today a very unfashionable lie. It’s also a very exaggerated one. Up until just recently, millions of Americans were absolutely certain a black man could never be elected president. I had pointed out on numerous occasions, both at private gatherings and in print (here, here and here, for instance), that America is the least “racist” country on Earth and that a black person could very easily ascend to the White House. So, before we proceed, let’s make something crystal clear.

I and my philosophical soul mates were right, and the other side was wrong.

Very wrong.

Completely, irrefutably, unambiguously wrong.

How they could be so wrong? The answer is, they’re in the grip of a false ideology that is emotionally pleasing to them. And the cool regions of the head are easily trumped by the raging fires of the heart.

People have always been raised with certain dogmas. In our time, the three r’s of education are revisionism, relativism, and racism, and we are instilled with the notion that the last thing is the end-all and be-all, the source of all our woes. In fact, the modern version of that old biblical admonition would have to be “Racism is the root of all evil.”

This is evident in our culture. In textbooks and documentaries we are bombarded with gratuitous treatments of slavery and discrimination in America (not elsewhere, where the former is extant and the latter generally far worse), and the media report every detectable bigoted word uttered or racial act committed by white people, no matter how statistically rare it might be, for the purposes of portraying our nation as ridden with racism and in need of “the fix” (this is partially why we’ve been fixed like a dog). Then there is the matter of how communism is viewed kindly relative to National Socialism (which partially explains why “big C” communism is again on the rise). We are outraged that 11 million were killed because of a racial agenda, as we should be, yet it seems that it would make modern man’s inner little girl feel better if they had been exterminated in the name of an atheistic/economic one. After all, while the communists killed about ten times as many – 100 million worldwide during the 20^th century – its defenders are never lowered to where they belong, the nadir of pariah status occupied by a neo-Nazi. But, of course, godlessness and economic egalitarianism are all the rage in these enlightened times.

Many will justify such bias, claiming that the demon of discrimination cannot be exorcised without constant prayer to the god of government; there must be a bit of over-compensation in much that same way that a crooked wire cannot be made right unless it’s bent beyond straight in the other direction. But it is also true that if you keep bending it in the fashionable direction, it becomes more crooked than it was before. The yoke of tyranny isn’t less burdensome just because it’s born of an unfashionable lie’s opposite.

This is why it’s so dangerous when we deceive ourselves about a problem. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis’ in The Screwtape Letters , the demon bent on civilization’s demise reasons that he must convince people to exaggerate their faults. Thus, we dark angels must tell the militarist that he is too pacifistic and the pacifist that he is too militaristic. In light of this, consider that certain forces in our thoroughly politically-correct society, where cultural affirmative action carries the day, continually tell us that we’re too racist.

When you understand this phenomenon whereby man swings from one extreme to the other and consider what we regard to be our greatest mistakes of the past, it becomes clear why we are in our current social state and what dangers may lie on the horizon. I will elaborate.

Barack Obama’s infamous ex-pastor, friend and confidant, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, subscribes to “Black Liberation Theology.” He expressed one of its tenets during a fiery sermon, saying:

“Jesus was a poor black man who lived in a country and who lived in a culture that was controlled by rich white people.”

Such rhetoric is tolerated by much of society. But not by those, such as authentic Christians, who understand that Jesus should not be reduced to a racial symbol. After all, such a characterization is as ridiculous as claiming Jesus was a member of the Nordic race and did battle with Jews.

Oh, by the way, the latter was claimed – by the National Socialists – in 1930s Germany. It was called “positive Christianity,” and it was tolerated by much of society. But not by people, such as authentic Christians, who understood that Jesus should not be reduced to a racial symbol.

As for citizens who disagreed with National Socialist doctrine, they were often silenced; I suppose it was very unfashionable to claim that your Aryan race didn’t enjoy superiority. We have risen beyond this today, of course. So much so, in fact, that we have speech codes in colleges and corporations and hate-speech laws in many countries which ensure that people who disagree with the doctrine of racial equivalency along every conceivable dimension will often be silenced. It’s a totally different thing.

The National Socialists (and many others) were wrong not just because they believed in differences among groups that didn’t exist, but, far more significantly, because they also assumed that a group’s worth was determined by its characteristic abilities and overall intelligence. They didn’t understand that everyone is deserving of dignity because he is a child of God; this is an easy mistake to make when your ideology becomes your god and its tenets your truth. This is why it may be comforting to certain people that our faith is so strong.

And something happens when your agenda and its truth supplant God, the Truth. When its tenets conflict with the Truth, instead of discarding the former, you rationalize away the latter. Thus, when fleet-footed Jesse Owens prevailed in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and Joe Louis pummeled German Max Schmeling in their second heavyweight bout, it did nothing to disabuse the National Socialists of their ideas. The doctrine that they occupied the highest rung of a racial hierarchy determined by genetics could not be questioned.

We’re not like that at all. Instead, we’re diligent enough to ostracize people such as Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder and renowned scientists William Shockley and James Watson for suggesting that some group differences could have a genetic basis. The doctrine of comprehensive absolute genetic racial equivalency cannot be questioned.

In reality, the balanced view of the matter is very simple: While there are differences among groups, there are also differences within groups. The latter is why we must judge everyone as an individual, and the former is why we must judge every individual group as an individual group.

The National Socialists had a problem with this, as they were bent on believing that a person’s group identity is destiny; it was a doctrine that justified discrimination. We’re not like that at all. We insist that a group’s group identity is meaningless. Ashkenazi Jews have the highest I.Q. of any group, blacks tolerate heat better and tend to be more muscular, and I’m sure every group possesses genetically-based advantages of some kind. Yet this mustn’t be acknowledged, as it contradicts our doctrine that performance differences among groups must be attributed to discrimination.

The National Socialists were also gung-ho nationalistic; it helped greatly to rally Josef Six-pack. We’re not like that at all. In fact, we go so far as to criticize flag-wavers and, as Bill Ayers and Ward Churchill can attest, preach anti-Americanism in academia, the media and Hollywood. We have moved beyond tribal loyalties. We are internationalists.

Yes, we are nothing like those racial dogmatists of bygone days. We can truthfully say, as writer Ace Walker once pointed out, “We’re not National Socialists, you bloody fool. We’re international socialists!”

Another characteristic of the National Socialists is that before they gained the power to impose their agenda through the law, they did so through the lawless; they used brown-shirted thugs to intimidate and silence opposition.

We’re not like that at all.

Our mobs don’t wear brown shirts. They just storm stages (Columbia and other attacks on traditionalists at colleges), intimidate voters, steal conservative newspapers, attack conservative students and vandalize their homes, and force-feed students politically-correct ideas in academia.

Then there are the aspirations, which are sometimes expressed by readers of left-wing news sites. For instance, at a very popular site I came across a post to the effect of (I’m paraphrasing):

“Racists should be beaten and then put in re-education camps until their thinking is changed.”

This was not an uncommon sentiment at this site and was unchallenged by the other respondents.

To place this in perspective, remember that things such as condemning Islamist beliefs, speaking frankly about crime statistics, criticizing Obama and even opposing welfare have been labeled racist. Why, even Bill Clinton, the former and now completely white “first black president,” was labeled a racist during the primary campaign. “Racist” has become synonymous with “bad guy,” and bad guy has come to mean “someone who disagrees with our doctrine.” And, you see, the remedy for doctrinal incorrectness is a re-education camp.

So we exhibit that dreaded pattern, that tendency to go from one extreme to another. No matter how far we bend that wire, we’re continually told we’re too racist. We’re ever on the watch for closet National Socialists, inheritors of a philosophy whose adherents murdered millions under the banner of racial superiority. But what will be the result of an ever-intensifying obsession to enforce a racial-equivalency doctrine whose adherents see enemies around every corner?

Well, whatever. I’m sure modern man’s inner little girl will feel better as long as people are only pushed out of windows.

“Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.”

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Politics And The English Language

Editor — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 02:29:59 +0000

by George Orwell

(Published in Horizon, April 1946; Modern British Writing ed. Denys Val Baker, 1947.)

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language — so the arguments runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influences of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

have not been picked out because they are especially bad — I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so I can refer back to them when necessary:

. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien (sic) to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.—Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression

. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder.—Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa).

. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity? —Essay on psychology in Politics (New York).

. All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen’s clubs, and all the frantic Fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror of the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction to proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervour on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis. —Communist pamphlet.

. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion’s roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream — as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes, or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school ma’amish arch braying of blameless, bashful mewing maidens! —Letter in Tribune.

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery: the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, rift within the lute, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would be aware of this, and would avoid perverting the original phrase.

Operators, or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable, make contact with, be subject to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc.etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purposes verb such asprove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining) . The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de-formations, and banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved from anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.

Pretentious diction.. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilise, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid processes of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien régime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, Gleichschaltung, Weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, sub-aqueous and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon opposite numbers. The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc) consists largely of words and phrases translated from Russian, German or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

Meaningless words.. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding features of Mr X’s work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr X’s work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference of opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are:class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit 3, above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations — race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrase ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing — no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective consideration of contemporary phenomena’ — would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyse these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have the habit — to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry — when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is natural to fall into a pretentious, latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mindor a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting-pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski usesfive negatives in 53 words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip alien for akin, making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to lookegregious up in the dictionary and see what it means, (3) if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4) the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink. In (5) words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning — they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connexion between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance towards turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is calledelimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt impelled’ to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence that I see:

‘(The Allies) have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’

You see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write —feels, presumably, that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.

I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, ant that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of fly-blown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defence of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.

To begin with, it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting-up of a ‘standard English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good prose style’. On the other hand it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one’s meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing, you probably hunt about till you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meanings as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

V. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don’t know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. .If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language —and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — somejackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin where it belongs.

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