The Subjugation Endgame
The Current Thing is not about Sex or Gender or Science or Putin, it’s about Power
“You won’t get it, buddy.” These simple words, recently spoken on German prime time news by Robert Habeck, the current Vice Chancellor, came in response to a question whether the government would support citizens freezing in their apartments in the upcoming winter because of the gas crisis.[1] The celebratory smugness of the remark – “if someone says, I’ll only help if I get 50 Euros, I say, you won’t get it, buddy” – is typical for the current political class. For after all, resistance against Putin is about S.O.L.I.D.A.R.I.T.Y., and if the poor prefer eating heated food to fighting the Muscovite despot, they should get a taste for their selfish and antisocial behaviour by having their peas directly from the can. In that sense, the inhabitants of the Saxon town of Dippoldiswalde were able to experience the fight for democracy in Ukraine in such a way that from now on the municipal gasworks will cut off hot water supply for several hours a day.[2]
Never since the days before the French Revolution has a ruling class been fuller of disdain for poor people, civil rights, and decency. The German Greens and their Tik Tok dances performing MPs despise anything remotely democratic in character with a vengeance that became the default mode of how especially left-wing governments have treated their citizens in the last years. The smug disdain for ordinary people who have the audacity to insist on their democratic rights and hold their leaders (elected and unelected) accountable, has yet again reached levels of insanity that no political parody screen writer could have imagined. At a union-led protest by health care workers for better working conditions in June, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, shouted at a group of “unvaccinated” doctors and nurses protesting the newly ordered institution-related vaccine mandate: “You have no right to be here. You made no contribution. Your work doesn’t count.”[3]
First as tragedy, then as farce. The current political class of Social Democrats and Greens – and remember that even Boris Johnson’s formally conservative government was de-facto centre left, not only indicated by complete endorsement of whatever was the Current Thing, but by the direct dismissal of traditional conservative values – is enacting what no one in their right mind could view as anything else but the remake of historical despotism. This had been clear since, at least, the NATO intervention of 1999 – only the Greens and Social Democrats were able to pull through a war of aggression in defiance of international law against the federal state of Yugoslavia, elegantly taking over the relativization of Auschwitz and the moral fairy tale of “oppressed ethnic groups” from the Right. But this tragedy was followed by the tragedy-farce of the fascist transformation that was Covid, the stage for which was yet again prepared by the Good People of the Left.
But let us stay with the Current Thing. Governmental propaganda, as we know, is not limited to the “safety and efficacy” of the mRNA vaccines, the mass uptake of which is seen as both a chance for the reconfiguration of capital accumulation towards the Tech Sector, and as a chance for simply, um, getting rid of a lot of future pensioner mouths to feed. Take the trans “debate”, which as we know isn’t really a debate, but a contest in self-debasement on the side of trans activists. Open calls to manslaughter at the officially sponsored[4] Pride Parade (“Kill TERFs”) are just the tip of the iceberg of insane threats and celebrated hatred of anyone dissenting to teenage mutilation, among other things. I am not even particularly invested in “dissecting” the so-called argument for “trans rights”, because I am not a feminist, but as an observer on the side lines, I am baffled by the level of self-degradation trans activists go through in order to, I guess, make a point. Some time ago, a video of an obviously deranged man in a dress made the rounds who performed the symbolic slaughter of “TERFs” for which several watermelons were slayed, in a celebratory slow-motion mass murder – without sparing the viewer a “blood” (i.e., juice) bath. This gore spectacle was to name but one, of what in saner times would be a John Waters movie clip, and therefore confined to the art world, act of “serious activism”. The point being that, no, this isn’t a Matthew Barney performance act, but the essence of an ideology Ivy League-educated and very neatly dressed men and women with PhDs, table manners, and seats in Parliament want you to subscribe to.
Now, even if I had no stakes in the intellectually corrupt confrontation about the meaning of sex and gender, the sheer level of reference (men in rainbow coloured jock straps calling for public execution of non-complying women), for which new policies for gender are enacted in official institutions such as Universities and Schools is disturbing, to say the least. But, as it happens, this is the locus of power now. And it has little to do with talking “biology” or ”X/Y chromosomes” on a theoretical level. It is like playing chess with a pigeon: you move the knight from G1 to F3, the pigeon craps on the chess board and flaps its wings.[5]
This was quite the reaction to Berlin’s Humboldt University’s PhD candidate in biology, Marie-Luise Vollbrecht, who was scheduled to give a talk on her dissertation and the primary school basic knowledge of two genders. Trans activists organised, among other things, within the “Working Group of Critical Lawyers” in the student body, raised an alarm: they would do anything to stop the talk and called for protest, which they pre-emptively held at the University entrance. A banner saying “This is not a space for anti-feminism (sic), transphobia, right wing ideology [using an incorrect grammatical case], unscientificness (sic)” was displayed, as well as the remarkable “Respect Existence or Expect Resistance” which shows you that if the Left does not know any grammar, it is at least capable of thinking in suboptimally catchy slogans. The University folded; the talk was cancelled.[6]
As much as I admire the seemingly endless efforts by gender critical feminists to confront the self-contradictory “arguments” of gender ideology, their reasoning is beside the point.
Pigeons don’t play chess, and it is futile to engage them on that level. What is at stake in our current climate that has demolished all rational standards to resurrect levels of Doublethink that would make George Orwell blush is power. As Twitter mutual Mikhail recently put it: “Anyone in their right mind knows how many genders there are. This is not about scientific questions, but about power, about commodification, about the re-alignment of ideological state apparatuses and [the elimination of] child protection.”[7] And Athina, another long-time mutual, observed that “the rationale behind the current discursive ‘war on the binary’, which is a constitutive and structuring principle in nature and society, is to ultimately negate that there is such a thing as an irreconcilable opposition between capital and labour: ‘Dude, it’s a SPECTRUM. So chill.’[8]
Perhaps even worse, the war for interpretive sovereignty is no longer about the content of a proposition. Content, substance and the three basic rules of logic (the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, and the law of tertium non datur) used to be hallmarks of debates in democratic societies, even if one fundamentally disagreed with one’s opponent. With the Covid regime’s denunciation of civil rights, this is no longer the case. Perhaps no other fact more clearly delineates the relation between a sound argument and anti-authoritarianism, or vice-versa, the dive into despotism that follows the relinquishment of the rules of logic. Richard Feynman’s insight that “science is the systematically organised questioning of authority” has never been more thoroughly botched than today. Which is why what is now called “Science” bears the marks of State Religion that we have seen in theocratic societies from mid-19th century Japanese State Shintō to the near- and Middle Eastern mullah states today.
So, what is the current discursive war about? It is about political elites making sure that anyone contesting the user’s manual of the Current Thing, if they cannot be subjugated, must be demonized and declared the filth of the earth, the well-rehearsed catalogue of slanders always ready at hand (“racist”, “transphobe”, “conspiracy theorist”, “Trumper”). Today, Cancel Culture has become self-serving. Not “gender ideology”, but Schmittianism is the ideology of the day. Power serving power.
But it goes further, for the denunciation of the rules of logic and the pre-emptive slander of the sound argument as somewhat dingy or outright “transphobic” is not ephemeral to the disenfranchisement of the legal civil subject. After all, turning off the hot water for the poorer inhabitants of Dippoldiswalde serves democracy, and the promise that the abolition of general elections will do the same already lingers on the horizon.
Power is an end-in-itself. It does not look for logical coherence, it does not aspire to make a sound argument, it does not justify its existence by means of a syllogism. It is, to use the cruellest of all mindfulness mantras, what it is. The more unhinged the message, the stronger the insistence on compliance. The clever remark that Marx did not foresee the fact that 200 years later no one will know how to define what a woman is fails to consider that the definition of “woman” is not about truth, but power, or rather power’s incessant attempt to undermine logical truth. And the story of power is as old as time and very much integral to Marx’s work. The task of dismantling it existed then and now. It is a different constellation that exemplifies the intellectual poverty of our time: namely the fact that the demand for logical consistency has itself become a revolutionary act.
Video Still: Cameo, “She’s Strange” (1984).
[1] https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/habeck-gas-alarmstufe-interview-100.html.
[2] Conforming to the established power discourse, not the political move of disenfranchisement, but the questioning of disenfranchisement is branded as “right-wing extremist”: https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/politik/energiekosten-rechtsextreme-freie-sachsen-dippoldiswalde-ukraine-krieg-100.html
[4] Blackrock, Vanguard, Goldman Sachs, Google, Novartis and many other global corporations of similar scale were sponsors of the worldwide Pride parades in June 22.
[5] Thanks to Matthias Matuschek for the analogy, taken from a different context:
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[6] It is now scheduled for repetition within a smaller circle, to be followed by a round of discussion. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/nach-absage-wegen-sicherheitsbedenken-humboldt-uni-laesst-gender-vortrag-nachholen-mit-diskussionsrunde/28478166.html
[7] Follow him @phanomenbereich
[8] Follow her @AthinaPsyopped
Where I come from, the gender critical fems call themselves Radical, and the others who support gender ideology are liberal feminists. Both groups in my former city of Brisbane support abortion, of course, but never engage with any criticism about the abortion industry and the selling of these babies organs, stem cells, tissue, or if it is being done humanely, which in order to sell the 'parts' must be done while the baby is alive and without anything for pain. They never even talk about the corruption of this industry, or the fact that is now being privatised with corporates stepping in and paying for their employees to have abortions, privately. Are they now the owners/sellers of the babies remains? Knowing something of the ways in which these technocrats work, I think it would be safe to assume that this issue is just another example of how they see their public/private partnerships (WEF) working. But as usual the fems will react to what they will perceive as another attack from the patriarchy without looking at the deeper reasons behind what is happening in this mad world. Thank you for your reply. I look forward to reading more from you. To see some of my thoughts expressed in a way I never could by someone with skill, talent and intelligence is wonderful to behold.
Absolutely brilliant stuff. I have so often thought that the Radical Fems missed the point. They think it is about misogyny. The rest of this article was great as well. All of it. Thank you.