One of the fascinating aspects of Leftist ideology in the west, is the manner in which patently absurd notions have become central to that ideology even in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.
The Left prides itself on being the face of “progress,” the adjective of which, progressive, was cynically adopted after 1945 by the Stalinists who were anything but progressive unless the word could be used to describe their industrial capacity to murder vast amounts of people very quickly, cleanly and efficiently. They had that in common with like Stalin’s friend Hitler, except that the Nazis could not have been bothered pretending that their shared end of state absolutism was even remotely pleasant.
Progress, of course, implies improvements and science and health. So, once you have the franchise on all of that you can justify pretty much anything you do, and dismiss anyone who disagrees with you as ‘reactionary.’
The claim that Leftist progressivism has the imprimatur of science is central to the myth. Marxists at one time even referred to their snake oil as “scientific socialism.”
One of the founding fathers, Friedrich Engels, wrote several books, one of them entitled Socialism Utopian and Scientific, which sought to base his Mystic Meg predictions of how the future would inevitably unfold in sometimes crudely comical extrapolations from a range of 19th century scientific theory.
Socialism in power under the monsters unleashed globally by the Bolshevik coup d’etat against the short lived democratic Russian Republic of March 1917, and their murderous imitators from Mao to Mengistu and Pol Pot, had no need for intellectual nuances and proved themselves to be anything but scientific.
One of Lenin’s first acts was to repress the Russian intelligentsia, many of whom had foolishly thought that Lenin’s gang would cherish them and had been partly complicit. (Irish third level institutions please copy ..) Most of them were fortunate just to have their stuff stolen and sent into exile. Stalin was not so kind, nor was he prepared to accept dissent on anything no matter how trivial.
Thus, the Big Bang theory first formalised by Fr. Georges Lemaître and confirmed by the observations of Edwin Hubble, was rejected by Marxists as an attempt to revive “creationism.” Those familiar with our own Eriugena’s Periphyseon written in the 9th century will know that his description of creation as exit and return is allegorically, and indeed, scientifically more valid than the static universe model overturned by Lemaitre/Hubble.
Big Bang theory was rejected by Marxism as anti-materialist and denounced as “astronomical idealism which helps clericalism”. Einstein’s theory of relativity along with quantum physics were similarly denounced as “bourgeois physics.” Interestingly, the Nazis at the same time described them as “Jewish physics.” Riddle that one oh “anti-fascists.”
While one might find this amusing, thousands of people were sent to prison camps and murdered if they took a position contrary to the Communist Party’s “science.” Ironically, Stalin was able to reap the benefits of the military application of all of that research but only through the spy networks of the traitorous Communist Party of the United States of America whose agents stole the blueprints from Los Alamos.
And while much of the contemporary far left affects to reject Stalinism, the Trotskyist cult in which several of the current groups who have TDs here have their roots, continues to deny the Big Bang, preferring instead alternative versions based on serial catastrophes.
The recourse to catastrophism is psychologically interesting as it underlies the hysteria of the far-left which is constantly predicting awfulness that will be happily followed after much blood letting by the righteous by some Nickelodeon cartoon of equality and plenty.
Climate Change catastrophism fits perfectly into all of this, hence the chameleon recourse to “eco-socialism” by the people who brought you Chernobyl and the pea soup smog that hung over eastern and central Europe prior to the overthrow of socialism 40 years ago.
The absurd genetic theories of Trofim Lysenko are the most interesting of the Marxist scientific aberrations as they find echoes in the contemporary Leftist adoption of transgenderism as an ideological core belief and a political hill on which to die.
Lysenkoism was the direct consequence of the application of Marxist nonsense in the real world. Basically stated, Lysenko claimed that environmentally created changes could be inherited.
At its most crude level, there were those who believed that mice bred from parents whose tails had been cut off would eventually give birth to mice with no tails. The appeal of this alchemy to leftists who believe that human nature can be changed by giving people more free stuff or completely controlling their lived environment is obvious. More of which anon.
For the Soviet Union and for China Lysenkoism proved to be disastrous, not only for the thousands of biologists imprisoned and murdered for their failure to support the madness, but for the millions who died when the theory was applied to agriculture and in particular to the planting of new wheat strains that failed and resulted in yet more deaths from starvation along with the theft of land from the peasantry.
While Soviet and Chinese and eastern European scientists had the excuse of physical preservation or cowardice to explain why many of them went along with it, there can be no such defence of our own John Desmond Bernal who was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which for 50 years supervised its ridiculous offspring in Dublin and which defended Lysenkoism even after Stalin’s death.
Bernal had lauded the “proletarian science” of Lysenko and was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1953. He has an Institute named in his honour at the University of Limerick. It is beside the Wagner music conservatory and the Heidegger School of Philosophy… just kidding (about Wagner and Heidegger).
What Lysenkoism and Transgender ideology have in common is not simply the fact that they assert as incontrovertible scientific facts what is known to be biologically impossible, but also that the proponents of transgenderism have garnered the power in many instances to destroy the careers of any anyone who opposes them.
At present, the Transgender Left has to be content with destroying people’s careers and randomly attacking them physically. Be in no doubt, however, that if and when these people gain power through one of the far Left parties then the full force of the state will be deployed.
Indeed, we have already seen instances including in western democracies where some of the traditional parties of the centre right and centre left have surrendered to the extremists and where they have tailored laws and policing methods to enforce the new Lysenkoism.
There is also the shameful kow-towing of others for no other reason than they think it will boost their own careers. Perhaps the most pathetic example is the manner in which the child actors who were transformed into movie stars by J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter books turned on her in a manner that would not have been out of place in a meeting of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
The idea that a man – and it is almost invariably men who engage in this – can just notionally decide that they/him/her can be a woman is obviously preposterous. It is a recognised psychiatric condition known as gender dysphoria. As such those who suffer from it are deserving of sympathy and support.
What they are not entitled to is that entire societies ought to embody that absurdity as a central tenet. Nor, in fairness, is that bizarre surrender by the West their doing. They are a tiny minority who have been adopted as a totem by a dysfunctional elite who have chosen transgenderism for the same reason that the Stalinists chose Lysenko. Not despite its absurdity, but because of its absurdity.
In essence, what they are saying to you is: If you can be brought to believe in this, then you can be brought to believe in anything. That is what this “culture war” is about. And if you want to see where that ends, look at some of the surviving footage of the tortured wrecks of human beings who were paraded before the Stalinist show trials in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Poland in the 1940s and 1950s.
Orwell’s dystopia of forcing people to affirm that 2 + 2 = 5 became a scientific fact if the Party decided this to be so. The old grey men in bad suits dressed as American gangsters have been replaced by bitter wizened old men dressed like your granny on bingo night. Their objective has not.