This weekend I find myself more interested in following the fortunes of the British Labour Party than I ever have been before. While I would have my reservations about Mr Corbyn as a potential leader, I follow his story with interest for the simple reason that he appears honest and largely, in his attitude to the Syrian war, correct. He currently appears to be fighting for his political life. I expect he will lose it, but that only increases my sympathy for him.
I'm going to paste below a piece that I have just written for the Brandsma Review. I found myself giving the controversy about all the forgoing a rather novel twist, setting it in the context of another cultural war....
Yours etc, Offended!
and why Jeremy Corbyn should be attended to.
I know a grandmother who got into trouble with her daughter-in-law lately for trying to tell her grandchild that he had been made by God. ‘Nonsense, don’t ever mention that stuff to him again. Jim and I made him!’
Some people are going one better, and insisting that they make themselves. The media seem to reckon that their consumers are getting bored with photos of homosexuals getting ‘married’; they’ve moved on to holding up transexuals for our admiration. I used to take transvestites in my stride, not without sympathy for the poor confused individuals, but something has changed with the ‘transexual’ variety; they insist we all buy into their self-mutilating fantasy-life, along with the media, the UN, and all the great and good of the enlightened democracies.
That old killjoy Technology may be spoiling the fun with its sex-prediction, but up until very lately the first Word that was said about us, the moment when we entered human society, was either ‘it’s a boy’ or ‘it’s a girl’. A sane voice like that of Dale O’Leary in The Gender Agenda may add that ‘biological sex is not determined by external organs, but by genetic structure. Every cell of the human body is clearly marked male or female.’ That only confirms, should it really be necessary, that our sex is an objective fact, bestowing a particular kind of orientation which in a coherent person follows through our whole personality.
We got the Gender Agenda - it’s all only a ‘social construct’- stuff trotted out with depressing predictability from our own grand-daughter, just down from reading psychology at UCD. “Is that what they’ve been teaching you?” “Oh no, it’s just what I think.” Well I say, when such facts as those of our sex are dismissed as mere ‘social constructs’ which a person may change at will, then language loses its meaning, along with everything else; it is hard to find any basis for conversation within our own culture, and we are confronted with the death of a civilisation; if we value it, being offended may be rather too mild a reaction.
Martine Delaney, a transgender Green Party candidate in Tasmania’s Federal Election, has lodged an official complaint to the Anti-Discrimination Commission about a booklet produced by Australia’s Catholic bishops entitled Don’t Mess with Marriage. He claims it is ‘offensive, humiliating and insulting’. They’re all off to a ‘conciliation conference’. Da-di-da; it’s sad to see even the Aussies flailing about in such mire. Maybe Germaine Greer hit the appropriate response over in Melbourne, where she ruffled a lot of the politically correct feathers by remarking that “I don’t believe a woman is a man without a cock!”
But there is a lot more to the fantasy-life that we are expected to buy into than such matters as transexuals and homosexual marriage. I might mention the notion that the USA and western democracy embodies all that is good, and has some divine right to decide who shall be permitted to exist and who not. It’s not immediately obvious to me why a Mr Trump promising to “bomb the Hell out of Isis” should not be labelled a terrorist; actually he frightens me rather more than the Jihadis.
In point of fact it is neither easy to find an appropriate response to homosexuals, transexuals and their pc friends, nor to Jihadis intent on destroying Western civilisation in a different way. Hard enough as it is for the likes of us Brandsma readers, I imagine it is just about impossible to do so if one happens to be a young Moslem in the West, constantly exposed to put-downs of his religion while struggling with serious issues of identity; and if we ‘Christians’ in the West have lost the ability to communicate with each other, what possible hope is there for dialogue with them?
When one is comfortable and affluent, with all the props for one’s ego that could be desired, it is very difficult to realise how important even warped religion can be to a person who has nothing else going for them. One is threatening to deprive them of their very operating system. It is not at all surprising when their anger and confusion spills over way beyond taking offence and into terrorism, and if we want to see an end to it, we had better start by getting the planks out of our own eyes. We might make some kind of a start by distancing ourselves from the overgrown adolescents who thought it was clever to lampoon the Prophet Mohammed. In Ireland, we of all people should understand the dynamics of ‘terrorism’. Suppose the RAF had been sent to bomb the Bogside in order to get rid of the IRA? We might recall what it was like being Irish in England, when the Provos were on the go. Pcdom is in danger of forbidding that we should recognise any reason or humanity in Moslems.
Presidents Hollande and Obama’s rhetoric about ‘destroying Isis’ is pretty much on a par with Mr Trump’s. I find myself again going where I might expect only opposition, to the left-wing of the British Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn, to find a sane voice on the matter. As he said in his response to Mr Cameron’s call to arms: ‘The PM did not set out a coherent strategy, coordinated through the UN, for the defeat of ISIS. Nor has he been able to explain what credible and acceptable ground forces could retake and hold territory freed from ISIS control by an intensified air campaign. In my view, the PM has been unable to explain the contribution of additional UK bombing to a comprehensive negotiated political settlement of the Syrian civil war, or its likely impact on the threat of terrorist attacks in the UK.’
That the political/media elite do their best to rubbish Mr Corbyn only confirms the impression that he is someone who is really trying to see the truth of the matter. Almost alone among Western statesmen, he puts his priority where it belongs, on putting an end to the crucifixion of Syria. What more jets there are supposed to contribute to security in Paris or London is beyond me. The only justification for military force is to secure the Peace, and the question to be asked about any proposed use of it is this:- Is it primarily going to secure the Peace or amplify the Chaos? The more remote and depersonalised the force involved, the more likely it is to do the latter.
One immediate responsibility of us Catholics is to give the lie to those seeking to promote a populist agenda of the ‘clash of civilisations’ and war between Christians and Moslems. As I tried to indicate at the beginning of this article, ‘the West’ has anyway just about lost its credibility as the bearer of Christian civilisation. The future is there to be secured by building dialogue and trust, and the less bombers of all kinds have to do with it, the better, as indeed our Popes have ceaselessly tried to make clear.
The ground is clearly shifting under our feet, and if we are to build a new civilisation on the ashes of the old, there’s no knowing where we will find allies. I would suggest the first move is to use language carefully, recognising that words mean something beyond what we would like them to mean; but if people insist on using them purely on their own terms, and interpret life only in terms of their own interests or obsessions, it is impossible for others to relate to them, and it is I’m afraid too bad if they choose to take offence. They might possibly learn a thing or two from Catholics - we are only too accustomed to being insulted, and worse!
Such misuse of language is the beginning of the process of dehumanisation that enables evil, which is so little understood in our contemporary Western world, to flourish in all its many forms. It is vital that our words should represent, not what we may think politically expedient or to our own advantage, as indeed most have been schooled to do, but rather our best effort at speaking truth. In the beginning was the Word. The good news is that the little flowers of truth pop up in all kinds of unlikely places, and it is not that difficult to recognise them. Forgetful of themselves, they are orientated to the sun! And the Word was with God.
Joe Aston,
27.11.2015
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