Invasion of the body-snatchers

Picture the massed crowds turning out for Hitler at Nuremburg, vast, faceless, more like a geometrical object than a gathering of human beings. Ditto the parades for Mao and for the Great Leader in North Korea. It is the trademark of totalitarianism and its aim is the obliteration of personality and individuality. A people ceases to be a people and degenerates into “the masses” – something like a machine in which every cog is an identical, interchangeable unit. Nazism and Communism are what might be called “totalitarianism-heavy.” What we have in secular Britain and throughout the officially atheist EU is “totalitarianism-lite” I mean, citizens of this politically-correct hell-hole are not (or not yet) arrested without trial, thrown into prison and tortured for expressing a dissenting view. But be patient, we’re getting there. Commit the thought crime of “racism” or “sexism” or “homophobia” and you will be punished by denunciation and your opinions condemned by the politically-correct unelected elite by which we are governed: you will be excluded from the public realm, the metaphorical equivalent of being sent to the gulag.

Totalitarianism achieves its control by abolishing individuality and differentiation. Notice how “discrimination” is now only a dirty word used to describe a crime, whereas once it was a mark of honour to be thought “discriminating,” for it connoted good taste. Totalitarianism-heavy does this in a big way by arranging the masses in parades of choreographed sameness, by referring to what were once individuals by numbers rather than names, by corrupting ordinary language to make it serve the totalitarian ideology. The results are sometimes hideously laughable: for instance in the totalitarianism imposed by the reign of terror created by the French Revolution, the guillotine which toured the country executing thousands was operated by “the Committee for Public Safety.” Torture or exile in the USSR was described as “re-education.”

Our own totalitarianism-lite is getting good at this and we may be certain that, given time, we shall establish the full glory of totalitarianism-heavy. Only be patient.We can reclassify the murder of an unborn child as just “a termination.” Thus killing becomes, literally, demoralised and the most perfectly obedient member of the corporate state is the dead foetus on the slab: not a human creature at all, only a statistic. We have redefined marriage by compelling acceptance of the fantasy that this can be between two people of the same sex. Only we are further compelled to stop saying “sex” and say “gender” instead. So what were once persons are now only nouns, interchangeable like monads. And don’t think that in the aims of the social engineers it’s a case of job done. There is a long way to go yet and it will not be long before “marriage” will be a word to refer to any sort of shack up that any two – but why stop at two? – people say it is.

We know from the Revolution in France that when we hear the fine-sounding new words, symbolising Enlightenment perfection “liberty, equality and fraternity” that the next sound we shall hear is that of the tumbrels. And so our present totalitarianism-lite has given us “diversity,” “equality,” “rights,” “liberation” and “inclusivity” – words which are meant to suggest an agreeable atmosphere of live-and-let-live, but which only serve to institute a conforming sameness. Deny the validity of those new words in their new context and you are on your way to becoming a non-person. In the interests of “inclusivity,” you will find yourself excluded: like the traditional Christian who cannot accept “gay” “marriage.” You may lose your job for wearing a crucifix. Last week one man was sacked for playing a cheerful popular song composed in 1932 and played thousands of times without earning any disapprobation: until now.

Another tiny step has just been taken along the everlasting path to our perfectly enlightened society. Feminist academics, scenting “sexism,” have declared that pupils should not address their teachers as “sir” and “miss” but employ their first names – or else, as one of these feminist apparatchiks said – “Address both male and female teachers as ‘sir’.” By such little absurdities our fate is settled. Wittgenstein said, “Create a language and you create a world.” Yes, and destroy a language and you destroy a world. An added sweetness has been imparted to this satanic folly by the fact that the academic who made this recommendation is a professor of English!

Did you ever see the 1956 black and white film Invasion of the Body-snatchers. I can vouch for it as the very parable of the way totalitarianism becomes established and progresses until it achieves its final paranoid inertia of utter dehumanised sameness and compliance. In the film, individuals are visited in their sleep by the alien power and their normal bodies and minds are replaced by carbon-copy but perfectly compliant specimens. This doesn’t happen all at once: the process is gradual. But it is ineluctable. Fall asleep and that’s the end of you.

We are all asleep.