They Heart Fascism

When the fascists take over in Britain there won’t be a swastika in sight. Instead we’ll all be surrounded by emoticons, smiley faces and love hearts.

Check this out.

 

This is the slogan for a campaign against campus rape and sexual assault. The activists behind it are organizing workshops in universities across Britain to “change perceptions”. After a trigger warning for the more sensitive, the students learn what consent actually means (nothing like as simple as you might think). 

More complicated than you'd think

After that the facilitator moves on to the need to respect other people’s choices, warning about rape culture, and busting rape myths. After one and a half hours of this the workshops wrap up with the rather creepy suggestion that the participants write pledges to their future virtue. The basic aim overall is for the workshop facilitators is to “challenge prejudices” and even “confront” the more recalcitrant naysayers.

Numpty with pledge

          

What’s not to like? Who could possibly object to an invitation to such a session accompanied as it is by the above slogan in a friendly typeface ─ with a big red heart in the middle?

One miscreant who did was Warwick University politics and sociology student, George Lawlor. He was insulted by the implication of his summons to a consent workshop, because as he put it in a piece he submitted to his student newspaper “I already know what is and what isn’t consent”. And further to that he made the very reasonable observation that no rapist would attend their workshop, which meant that it would be just “an echo chamber of people pointing out the obvious and others nodding along, the whole time thinking that they’ve saved the world.”

New face of fascism?

You can see of course that such a view might upset the people who organise these gatherings. But if the friendly typeface with the big red heart is anything to go by, then surely they would understand and wouldn’t take Lawlor’s lack of consent to heart.

Strangely enough though, the cuddly logo wasn’t a particularly good predictor for their response and that of their like-minded supporters at Lawlor’s uni.

Since he wrote his piece he’s had the vile accusation of “rapist” continually spat at him in lecture halls, bars, and on Twitter and Facebook. He’s been shunned by many and even had threats of violence. In one incident he relates how, ‘These six guys just crowded round me and started shouting at me … calling me a rapist, a misogynist, and threatening me … I had to get out of there.’

In fact because of the absence of any safe space on campus for George Lawlor, he’s currently staying away from lectures and also wonders whether he has now wrecked his life chances as future Google searches of his name will turn up pages of accusations of his being a rapist, a bigot, a misogynist and even a racist!

All because he didn’t consent to attend a boring and pointless gab fest.

         

What the hell are they so angry for?

            

The rage of Consent’s supporters reveals the true nature of what they’re up to. Behind the cuddly logo and the endless verbiage about caring and victims the reality is that they’re in the re-education game. And re-education being an unpleasant process to anybody with a modicum of independence of mind, must always be compulsory.

Now to that you might counter that the Consent workshops are not in fact compulsory. Not yet they aren’t at least at Warwick, but mandating attendance is the explicit goal of the women’s groups behind them. And considering that Lawlor’s experience shows that it is already compulsory to approve of the workshops, how long can it be before attendance is also obligatory?

To understand the zeitgeist that makes that inevitable imagine for one moment an eminent university lecturer using his authority to speak out against the workshops in the name of freedom. No, neither can I. They all know what the result would be: a firestorm of demented protest followed by the bum’s rush out of the faculty so fast that it could result in the first professor in space.

And an attack on freedom is what they most certainly are. Far from "challenging prejudices" the whole point of the workshops is to instill toxic feminist prejudices into anyone dumb enough to attend. Among these are: that all men are potential rapists; that there is a patriarchal conspiracy to keep women down; that attempting to chat a woman up is harassment; that any straight white males who dare stray from the orthodoxies must "check their privilege," etc, etc... The certain result of this ideological rubbish will be to poison the relations between the sexes at university still further and thereby destroy one of the formerly greatest pleasures of university life: light-hearted, casual, sexually charged, fun interaction between men and women. What greater attack on the freedom of young people could there be?

And the imposition of Consent workshops is a case study in fascistic modus operandi. The iron fist in the velvet glove. The heart symbols and the endless rhetoric about caring on the one hand, coupled with the terror of the thugs waiting in the background for any dissenters. A powerful psychological combination. The only effective counter is a people aware of the value of freedom. We had that in the 1930s which is why fascistic ideology, so popular in continental Europe, held little attraction for the British.

One very revealing comment from Lawlor was that lots of his fellow students told him they agreed with his article, but were afraid to support him publically. This is the truly frightening aspect of the story. Reality-immune fascistic lefties have never been in short supply on campus, but there were always enough people with the courage to push back against the disrupters. Now though nobody among the faculty or students appears to understand what they are losing or why it is worth fighting for.

The lunatics are now in control and consequently our universities are now asylums.