Saturday 28 April 2018

We could all do with some Korean unity



We are fortunate indeed that yesterday there wasn’t a meeting between North Japan and South Japan, declaring peace and looking forward perhaps to eventual reunification. There is one reason and one reason alone why this didn’t happen. The planned invasion of Japan “Operation Downfall” which was to have taken place in November 1945 was cancelled.


 The Soviet Union also had a plan. They declared war on Japan on August 9th 1945 and in a short time occupied Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, Manchuria and Korea up to the 38th Parallel. The Soviets intended then to invade the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.

If the war had continued there would have been a similar race to that which occurred in Germany. The Soviets careless of casualties would have sought to make as much of Japan communist as possible. The Americans wishing to save as many G.I. lives as possible would have been slow. The result would have been to split Honshu down the middle with a divided Tokyo and eventually a wall round it.

In this case socialist North Japan like everywhere which experiments with trying to achieve equality of outcome would be poor, while South Japan would be one of the richest countries in the world. North Japan would have attempted to achieve unification by force sometime in the 1950s and if the West had been fortunate enough to prevent this, the two Japans would have remained technically at war with each other from then until now.

It would, of course, have been tragic if Japan had been divided. But Japan was not always as united as it appears to be today. The Ryukyuan languages, which are not mutually intelligible with Japanese, although they are part of the same language family, are still spoken by some people in the southern Japanese islands. The Ainu language, unrelated to Japanese, was spoken by the indigenous people of Hokkaido, but is now endangered. This was in part because Hokkaido was gradually incorporated into a united Japan by a process that was completed only in 1858.



Like nearly every country in the world, Japan was once made up of different peoples who owed allegiance to various feudal warlords. They fought wars to gain control over territory. Eventually these wars led to unification. The same can be said about Korea.

The Korean peninsula is now divided. But it has been divided before. It had a North-South States period lasting from 698–926 AD. It also had a period when it was divided in three 57 BC – 668 AD. It has at various times been invaded by Japan and by China and incorporated into the Japanese Empire from 1910 to 1945.

The process of human history the world over is one of conquest, division and unification. There are any number of “countries” that once existed in Japan, which now no longer exist. Korea was once three kingdoms, then two, then one, then two again. There are likewise any number of languages that have died out, sometimes because the people who spoke them have died out or been absorbed into those who conquered them.

Uriah the Hittite would have spoken an ancient Indo-European language native to Anatolia. There are no native Hittite people now and the language is dead. The reason for this is that the Turkic people’s, who don’t speak an Indo-European language, migrated to present day Turkey, at various points between the 6th and 11th centuries. This was no doubt tragic for Uriah’s descendants if indeed he had any prior to being sent into the front line, but there is no more point regretting the loss of the Hittite language than regretting the loss of Pictish or indeed Anglo-Saxon.

In the British Isles nearly all of us speak varieties of English. Prior the Roman conquest nearly all of us spoke various forms of Celtic. We speak English, because like everyone else in the world we have been engaged in various forms of conquest and migration since history began.

The Iceni would have spoken a language similar to Welsh when Boadicea fought the Romans. It is therefore peculiar for people who think of themselves as British to mock those who speak Welsh. It is the child of the ancient language of our island. But it is also peculiar to blame the English for somehow persecuting those who spoke Celtic languages in the British Isles and driving those languages to destruction. It was the migration of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Normans which pushed the Celtic languages westwards. But it isn’t as if Celts didn’t do any pushing or any migrating. The Celts after all did not originate in the British Isles.

The Celts migrated from Central Europe and spread to France, Spain, Britain and elsewhere. They too, no doubt, supplanted the people and languages of those who lived where they settled.

There is no point regretting the history that made us what we are. It is this that makes the hatred that is sometimes met in the British Isles all rather silly. The Celtic people of England were conquered by Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Normans. Migrations went back and forth between mainland Europe and the British Isles. Ancient Britons colonised Brittany and some of them still speak Breton. Next door Normans repaid the compliment. The reason we all speak English is that our ancestors are a mixture of all the people who migrated to our islands. To regret this is to regret who we are.

Ireland apparently suffered centuries of oppression and colonisation by the wicked Brits. But then Britain suffered centuries of oppression and colonisation by the wicked Romans, then the wicked Angles and then the wicked Normans. Perhaps we should all have a chip on our shoulder about William the Conqueror the Vikings. Perhaps we should complain to the Danes that they oppressed us, raped and pillaged us. We could maintain that Britain has suffered two thousand years of being colonised by the Romans and everyone else who persecuted the poor Iceni and their children, but we are both the children of the Iceni and the children of everyone who migrated since the Romans.

Whether they like it or not the Irish are the descendants of those who settled in Ireland due to migration. The Irish are no more pure Celts than anyone else in the British Isles. We are all just a mixture of everyone who came here.

Everywhere in the British Isles, just like Japan and Korea went through a process of conquest and migration. These processes led to the nation states that we have today. They are the reason we are as we are. If Angles and Saxons had not migrated to Ireland they would no doubt all speak Irish, but to regret this migration is like regretting that in Britain we don’t speak the language of the Iceni, or that in Turkey they don’t speak Hittite.

To be Scottish today is almost certainly not to be someone who speaks Gaelic. To regret this is to regret the process of migration that led to the mix of peoples who make up Scotland. It is to regret who we are and who are parents and grandparents were.

Scottish nationalism picks one period of Scottish history, the period when Scotland was a kingdom and prioritises it over every other period. But Scotland was divided when the Romans first called us Caledonia. We were separate tribes. We had migrations from Ireland, we then gradually unified the various peoples in Scotland and then gradually mixed with the Anglo-Saxon peoples who had migrated here from the continent. This didn’t begin in 1707. It didn’t even begin in 1066. People have been speaking a variety of Anglo-Saxon in Scotland originally called Ynglis or Inglis for well over a thousand years.

We speak English because the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants came to dominate the British Isles. I have no idea why these people should have been more successful than the Celts, but they were. The story of the British Isles is how a Celtic speaking people became an English speaking people. Our mothers taught us English and their mothers taught them. To regret the language that you speak and to hate it is to regret who was your mother. It is to regret and hate your own self.

Some Irish, Welsh and Scottish people can’t even bear to think that speaking English as a native speaker provides them with an advantage. All they can think of is that the wicked Brits have repressed them, conquered them and persecuted them for centuries. But this bitterness is peculiarly self-defeating. The language used to express the supposed oppression is the language of the supposed oppressor. It’s the only language most people in Scotland and Ireland know. Instead of embracing who they are, the English speaking people of the British Isles, they hate who they are and delight in blaming someone else for it.

The Korean speaking people of the Korean peninsula and the Japanese people of the Japanese islands either have unity or long for it. It would be the most wonderful historical development if Korea could be united. But while we look on and cheer potential reconciliation in Korea, we find ways to hate each other here. Our history is no different from the history of Japan and Korea. We too are the result of conquests and migrations. We share a common language because of this. But instead of finding unity we continually seek division and blame each other because of the wrongs that were done by our ancestors. But I’m sorry we all have the same ancestors. We are all the descendants of the perpetrators and the persecuted. Each of us was a conqueror and each of us was conquered. We used to speak various Celtic languages, now we are all Anglo-Saxons. To deny this is to mutely try to speak the language of the Iceni, the Picts, or the Scoti. To regret the migrations that led to the people that we are now, is like a Turk regretting that he is not a Hittite. We have just as much unity as the Japanese or the Koreans. Wouldn’t it be as tragic and equally absurd to divide an English speaking island as to divide a Korean speaking peninsular?

Friday 20 April 2018

The Brexit heresy


In the modern world we are all supposed to be empiricists. We determine truth by means of the scientific method and reject as superstition something that is believed despite the evidence.  But we apply this rule selectively. The claims of Christianity may have been rejected because they depended on belief in miracles, but the assumptions of the Left are accepted even when they are contrary to the evidence.


The Left starts from the assumption that people are equal or at least ought to be equal. If they are not equal the task is to make them equal. We find this to be more or less assumed and hardly ever questioned. It is this above all that gives the Left an inherent political advantage. Consciously or unconsciously many people think that inequality is wrong and that any instance of it ought to be addressed. But equality of outcome is fundamentally a Left-wing ideal as it can only occur by means of Government intervention rather than the free interaction of individuals.

If we allow people to act freely and for the free market to determine each person’s material value, we will not end up with equality. Quite the contrary. The Right accepts this, recognises that people are different and does not attempt to manage the end point of human interactions. Small government laissez faire capitalism will give us freedom and prosperity, but will naturally lead to inequality, because the place where someone ends up financially will depend on his own efforts, luck and the help or hindrance of those he knows.

Throughout human history some people have done rather better than others. Some have had more talent, more beauty or strength. Insofar as there is any evidence it would suggest that all men are created unequal. Yet despite this we are supposed to believe the contrary. Why? On what evidence should we believe that everyone is equal or that they ought to be?

One of the methods by which we test the validity of a scientific theory is to see if it fails. Well the theory that people ought to be made equal has been tested rather often in the past century or so. On each occasion that a serious attempt has been made to eradicate inequality, we have seen a loss of prosperity and freedom. Whenever and wherever socialist ideas have been put into practice they have performed worse than free markets. They have frequently led to tyranny and horror on a scale unimaginable before the attempt. Even in those Western countries where socialism has been tried on a more limited scale the price of removing inequality has always been a decrease in prosperity, not merely for the richest members of society, but the poorest too. Socialism has been falsified, but it is still believed, because it is unfalsifiable to those who believe in it. Its assumptions therefore are not scientific but rather quasi-religious.

I have wondered sometimes why some Remain supporters are quite so devoutly opposed to the UK leaving the EU. I don’t at all believe that it is because they think it will make the UK less prosperous, nor that they particularly care about trade relations. I think it is because Brexit is contrary to their ideal of bringing down borders and thereby achieving the equality of all humanity. If the European Union could be made to work, then this would be one more step along the road to eventual World Government, by the UN or some such body. This I think is the ideal that some Remainers can’t bear to lose.

What we find once more is Left-Wing Utopianism coming into contact with actual reality. They are willing to ignore whatever faults the EU has because it points the way to the abolishment of the sovereign nation state. Once more the Left wants to mould and change and equalise human nature rather than accept it. The Right on the contrary realises that it is not accidental that nation states arose in the world.

Thousands of years ago there was a common Indo-European language, which was the ancestor of most European languages and many Asian ones too. All those who spoke it could understand each other. But we did not remain one great mass of equal Indo-Europeans, the Tower of Babel fell and we diverged. It must above all have been because we did not wish to understand each other. We accentuated difference and over the centuries our tribes became so different that it would be hard to guess that a Russian and a Brit speak a language that once was the same and that there was no misunderstanding between us.


Later there was a common Slavic language and a common Germanic language, but we preferred to be different from our neighbours and developed in such a way that we created linguistic borders and then the borders of tribes, then kingdoms and finally nation states. There must be something in human nature that wishes to do this. Naturally there is a tension and a balance between the unifying and the separating tendencies. When they reach equilibrium we have nation states.

The foundation of the sovereign nation state is about difference rather than equality. If equality was inherent in human nature we would still be building the Tower of Babel and we might have reached heaven by now. But this is to be Utopian. The reality is that people prefer to live with those who speak a similar language. Hungarians, for example, prefer to live with Hungarians and make a clear distinction between someone who is a fellow citizen and someone who is not. If that had not been the case then the modern nation state would never have arisen. The Right (apart from those who would trade the profits of globalisation for their country) accepts this fact and therefore sees the nation state as the foundation of international law and diplomacy. The Left would prefer that first there is no distinction between a Hungarian and a Frenchman (the EU) and then that there is no distinction between a Hungarian and anyone else in the world (The UN/World Government).

Hungarians don’t speak an Indo-European language. The reason for this is that their ancestors migrated from somewhere in Central Asia and settled in the Carpathian Basin. Since then they have maintained their identity and their language and for this reason we have a modern sovereign nation state called Hungary.

The Left’s ultimate goal is to eventually abolish places like Hungary. It seeks to achieve this in a number of ways. The first task is for Hungary to lose its sovereignty. Having subsumed its sovereignty in the EU, it will find that there is no real distinction between a Hungarian and any other citizen of the EU. This will provide Hungarians with some advantages. Unlike the UK, they receive a subsidy from the EU.  It will be easier for them to live and work in other European countries. But it will also mean other Europeans will have the right to go to Hungary.

Hungary has a population of around 10 million people. What if over the next century or so 10 million arrived in Hungary from elsewhere. Would these people speak Hungarian? It's a hard language, but they might learn. Still at some point as boundaries collapse and nation states are abolished we will find the distinction between a Hungarian and a German abolished too. This isn’t an accident. It’s the reason for tearing down the borders.

But the Left is not merely intent on removing European borders. "Today [Europe], tomorrow the world." Equality demands that citizens of one nation state should be equal with the citizens of any other nation state. But by definition citizenship means that we have a responsibility towards our fellow countrymen that we don’t have to anyone else. It is this that makes a person a citizen.  It is this above all that prevents equality between citizens of one country and citizens of another. This is what the Left is attacking, for its ultimate aim is to say that there is no distinction between citizens of different states, because there are no longer separate states. But how can this be achieved?

At present in the world Hungarians feel an affinity for each other. They care more for their fellow Hungarians than anyone else besides family.  This is usually called patriotism. This and this alone makes people willing to pay taxes for the welfare of their fellow countrymen.  It is for this reason too that when West and East Germany reunited they immediately felt that they had a special duty towards each other that they didn’t have towards other Europeans or people in general. But so long as people feel this way we will never achieve equality in the world, because the distinction between a German and a person in general is based on difference.

The task of achieving equality and abolishing the nation state can only be achieved by making Germans realise that a German citizen can come from anywhere. At this point the distinction between for instance a German citizen who speaks only French and a French citizen who speaks only French will dissolve. If in time Hungarians merge with other Europeans, the distinction between them will merge as well. Soon even the idea of being Hungarian will cease. If it does we will be one step closer to the Left’s Utopia.

But the goal of creating equality between all people in the world can only be achieved when the Hungarian sees no difference between himself and someone from say Japan or Yemen. But how can that happen if there are only Hungarians in Hungary? It is crucial to the task of abolishing Hungary’s boundaries with the rest of the world that Hungarians should be from everywhere. This is the whole point of abolishing borders. It allows everyone to move where they please. At this point there will be no countries. Imagine. 

All the evidence from history suggests that people prefer to speak their own language and prefer to live with those who are similar and with whom they have a common identity. Nation states arose for this reason. They conform to human nature as it is. We are unequal and the greatest inequality is that we care more for our families and our fellow citizens than anyone else. We are willing to fight for them and die for them. This is human nature as it is. But the Left not content with its failed experiments with socialism is attempting gradually to abolish the nation state. The way to do this is through abolishing sovereignty, which eventually leads to the abandonment of the concept of international borders and a world where there is free movement everywhere from anywhere. There is no reason to suppose that this experiment will end well. History suggests that when people with very different identities and languages mix the result frequently is conflict.  Perhaps this time will be different.

The Left’s goal of achieving equality even when it is contrary to human nature has caused immense historical suffering. The problem is that because this is a semi-religious ideal, no amount of evidence to the contrary will persuade them to give it up. They are angry about Brexit, not because of trade or prosperity. They are angry because we dare to stand up against their attempt to abolish the sovereign nation state and to say that we believe there ought to be borders we can control and a real distinction between our fellow countrymen and the rest of the world.   Brexiteers are heretics rebelling against all that the Left has tried to achieve since 1945.  We have committed the unforgivable sin, by questioning what must not be questioned. Burning at the stake would be too kind a punishment for they can see that their Tower is crumbling. This is why they are so furious and why they are fighting such a continual rearguard action. It is also why we must succeed. 

Friday 13 April 2018

Puttin' on the black shirt


Until relatively recently I thought that antisemitism was more or less dead in Britain. Popular fiction from before 1939 regularly contains the sort of casual unpleasant remarks about Jewish people that are rarely heard in public nowadays. Oswald Mosley and his Fascist thugs lost the Battle of Cable Street because the Left and the Jews united to defend the East End from the Blackshirts. This more or less killed off the Far Right in Britain.


The films that were shown after the war depicting the endpoint of antisemitism made most people realise the consequences of those casual nasty remarks.  Decent people made them less often if at all. A few years ago I would have thought antisemitism in Britain was something you find only in antiquarian books. But a new strain of the old disease has proved contagious, only this time the Anti-Semites don’t wear black shirts. They deny that they have anything against Jews, which is a far cleverer way to be anti-Semitic than to be open about it. It’s not the Far-Right that threatens Jews in Britain. The Far-Left which once joined with Jews to defeat British fascists has now metaphorically put on Mosley’s uniform and resurrected a hatred and perhaps a party which it once helped to bury.


  
There was never that much difference between the Far-Right and the Far-Left. Just like going round the equator, if you go far enough to the left you meet someone who has gone far enough to the right. National Socialism becomes communism by adding the prefix “inter”. Hostility to Jews was common in the Soviet Union and at various times there were purges of Jews just as in the old days there had been pogroms.

Old style casual antisemitism is still common in Russia. It can be quite disconcerting to hear the slurs and the stereotypes about business and bankers controlling the world. But it was in Russia too that new style antisemitism developed. During the Cold War the West supported Israel while the Soviet Union supported the attempts by the Arabs to destroy it. People like Mr Corbyn who grew up supporting, if not helping the Soviet Union and indeed any other of Britain’s enemies would have followed the anti-Israel line simply because that is what fellow travellers did.

The Left also has a hierarchy of victimhood that determines who they support. At the bottom of the heap are white men. These must never ever be supported. At the top of the heap are women, homosexuals, religious minorities who are not Christians, transgender people, and ethnic minorities who look as different as possible from white men. Who is at the top varies. At the moment the transgender card trumps the female card, but the ethnic minority card trumps any other card. It is for this reason that Mr Corbyn and friends will sympathise with groups fighting Israel. After all Israelis have western values. They are successful and are frequently indistinguishable from the average Brit. They just don’t tick Mr Corbyn’s ethnic minority box.   

Hamas may have a poor record with regard to women, transgender rights and homosexuality, but they represent an ethnic and religious minority in Britain. It is this above all that fuels the new style antisemitism of the Left. Sympathy with Israel’s enemies just like sympathising with the Soviet Union means ignoring whatever faults they may have. There may have been Gulags, but at least they wanted to create socialism. Isn’t that model collective farm a wonderful new method of agriculture? Don’t mention the famine.

Arab states may have poor records with regard to religious freedom, or individual rights, but at least they want to destroy the West’s only real ally in the region. This was their virtue for the Soviet Union and it is also there virtue for the Left in general. But just as the Soviet virtue of attempting to create socialism meant that its other faults could be ignored by the Left, e.g. siding with Nazism in 1939, so too the virtues of the Arab world and the fact that they tick the religious minority/ethnic minority boxes means their vices can also be glossed over. It is for this reason that the Left ignores the widespread antisemitism that is a feature of the books published in the Arab world and views with tolerance the frequently expressed intent to destroy all of the Jews living in the region.  But really, if you support someone who wants to kill Jews, what does that make you? You may not use ethnic slurs about Jews, but you still suffer from a new strain of a rather ancient disease.

New style antisemitism crucially involves a double standard. Whatever Israel does, including the fact that Israel exists, is judged less favourably than anywhere else. I used to spend quite a lot of time in Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg in East Prussia. It is now a Russian exclave next to Poland and Lithuania. Until 1945 this city was more or less 100% German. There are almost no Germans left there now. The Germans either ran away or were driven out. What would happen if the descendants of those Germans were living in refugee camps bordering Kaliningrad? What would happen if periodically they engaged in acts of terrorism or lobbed missiles into Russia? The Russians would go crazy and would do whatever it took to stop the Germans from attacking them. No-one would question the justice of their doing so.



Many boundary changes occurred because of the First and the Second World Wars. Poland lost large chunks of territory in the East in 1939 and gained large chunks of territory in the West in 1945. The Ottoman Empire broke up after World War One and the states of the Middle East were created by means of the British and French drawing lines on a map. Such boundaries and boundary changes frequently involved arbitrariness and injustice. Germans and Poles who had been living in certain places for centuries were forcibly removed. They had to accept this fact and get on with their lives. No-one in Britain, least of all Mr Corbyn complains about the rights of Poles and Germans to return to the homes that their ancestors lived in. No-one worries about the injustice of boundary changes involving Poland and Germany, we only ever hear about the supposed injustice of Israel’s borders. Why single out Israel because as a result of two world wars, the decision of the United Nations, its own war of independence and various subsequent wars it has the boundaries that it has. Why is this uniquely of concern?

Since 1945 a large number of people have migrated to Britain. There have been benefits from this and there have been difficulties. But whether you think there has been too much, too little or just enough migration, few British people would say that they oppose all migration. Fewer still of these people are from the Far-Left. I can’t remember Mr Corbyn ever complaining about anyone coming to Britain.

Jewish people in Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century had a well-founded fear of persecution. Some of them decided to migrate to Ottoman Palestine. Subsequent events would demonstrate just how well founded that fear was. Jewish migration continued during the period of British Mandatory Palestine. Some of them arrived illegally. Mr Corbyn has no complaints whatsoever about illegal migration into British territory today. His only complaint and that of others on the Far-Left is when Jews sought asylum in Palestine. People living illegally in the United States, no doubt, get Mr Corbyn’s sympathy. They are called Dreamers. Why can’t the Jews who moved to Palestine be called Dreamers? They too had a dream. It was fulfilled. But what do you call someone who is in favour of all migration except the migration of Jews? Jeremy Corbyn.

Until 1945 there were very few Arabs or indeed Muslims in general living in Europe. Since then there are an estimated 6 million Arabs in Europe and 44 million Muslims. Jeremy Corbyn no doubt considers that every single one of them brings untold benefits to our continent. No doubt many have brought benefits. Anyway they are here and it would be monstrous to attempt to remove 44 million people from their homes.  But in the Middle East and in the Muslim World in general there are more or less only 6 million Jews. The vast majority of them were born in Israel and have lived all their lives there. But on a number of occasions the Arab world has united in order to try to destroy these six million Jews. Many still want to. People like Jeremy Corbyn count some of these people as his friends. What do you call someone who is friends with those who want to kill six million Jews?

The population of the Middle East and the Muslim World in general is almost exclusively Muslim. In the name of tolerance can they not accept that one small chunk should be Jewish? We in Europe have been willing to accept seven times the number of Muslims into Europe as Jews who have migrated to the Middle East. Quite a lot of European territory is home to Muslims, some of it owing to historical invasions from the Muslim world. But we do our best to get on and no sensible person suggests that we attempt to reverse this situation. That would be racist and inhuman. But then what do you call the attempt to reverse the historical situation that gave rise to a Jewish state in the Middle East?

What do you call someone who thinks only Muslims have the right to migrate to another continent, but if Jews dare to do so it is justified to fight a never-ending war in order to remove them?  You call them a new style anti-Semite. This is the double standard that judges Israel and its history in a far harsher way than anywhere else. This antisemitism is indifferent to the horrors that Arabs may inflict on each other, but condemns Israel whenever it attempts to defend itself from attack. Mr Corbyn, no doubt, doesn’t use the words that characterised old style antisemitism, he is even friends with Jews who share his world view, but by supporting and sympathising with those who wish to destroy Israel, new style antisemitism is as dangerous a threat to the lives of Jews as any they have met in history. The Far-Left then meets the Far-Right and embraces itself.


Soviet and German soldiers meet as allies in 1939


Friday 6 April 2018

Playing feminist roulette


There is a contradiction in feminism. Perhaps this extends to modern women in general. Feminism demands equality with men and wishes to minimise the difference between men and women to the greatest extent possible, but it also and at the same time demands special treatment for women. This is fundamentally because of a quality that is inherent in and special only to women.


The reality, of course, is that men and women are very different indeed with natures that are compatible but unalike. These differences are not merely in the external characteristics which allow us nearly always to recognise instantly a stranger as being either a man or a woman, they are also in the way that men and women tend to act and to think. A few examples:

How many women in their forties and fifties do you know with a husband 20 years younger from Thailand?

How many men do you know who on approaching the age of thirty suddenly become obsessed with either getting married or having a baby?

How many men do you know who respond to something bad happening with either going shopping or in eating large amounts of chocolate or ice cream?

Do you think women or men watch more pornography on the Internet?

There are exceptions to every rule and human behaviour is complex, but at the heart of the relationship between men and women is our differing attitude to sex. In general men from their teenage years onward want to have sex as much as possible. A reasonably attractive young woman will have no trouble at all finding someone to have sex with. If anything there will be a queue. Women on the other hand, throughout human history have been more interested in finding a long term husband with whom she can build a family.

It is lucky, or perhaps rather it is by design, that men and women are as they are. If both were like men, then there would be lots more sex, but rather less stability. If both were like women it is unclear there would be any sex at all. Men seek sex and require little more than its being available. An emotional attachment to them is not necessary. For women sex without an emotional attachment has (at least until recently) been considered unattractive and undesirable. Until the past fifty years or so it was most unusual for women to have sex casually with people they just met. It is for this reason above all that women, with few exceptions are uninterested in paying men to sleep with them. Most women would pay to avoid such an experience.

We are as we are. Men and women are different. But we need each other. The highest happiness for humans is to be found in a relationship. Family life and children are the source of the greatest fulfilment to us both. So we must work with our different natures and try to understand each other as best we can. As much great fiction shows, it is difficult. Men and women continually find each other baffling.  Misunderstanding is at the heart of many great novels. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy misunderstand each other, for which reason they have to overcome their pride and also their prejudice. We all do.

Unfortunately misunderstanding is also at the heart of recent developments that have taken the battle of the sexes in a new direction. The battle damages men, but perhaps it damages women still more even if the wound is largely self-inflicted. The legacy is not merely increased misunderstanding, but more importantly increased distrust. But without trust how can men and women form relationships at all?

Few if any men have been prosecuted as a result of the MeToo or Timesup movements. Lots of women have made claims about various forms of sexual assault taking place in Hollywood and elsewhere, but remarkably little evidence has been provided. Certain aging Hollywood actresses have been able to find a new purpose metaphorically knitting as the guillotine falls once more on their next victim. It’s enough just to denounce. No further evidence is required, before the next head is held up before the crowd of knitters. Various careers and lives have been ruined. Some lives have been lost. Each of us may have an opinion about the guilt or innocence of these people, but none of us really know.

This is the essential difficulty about a crime that if it takes place usually takes place in private. It is difficult enough to prove that a sexual assault happened yesterday, it is practically speaking impossible, unless there is a confession or some form of physical evidence, to prove what happened ten or twenty years ago. But that’s ok, for the fundamental aspect of MeToo and Timesup is that we should always believe women.

This is the basic inequality at the heart of feminism. Women are inherently truthful, while men are inherently liars. It is for this reason that when faced with a situation where there is only testimony, the testimony of the woman should always be believed, while the testimony of the man should be treated with suspicion. Do we have any evidence that men are more likely to lie than women? Should it be the case that whenever there is a trial involving a woman that we should automatically believe what she says and disbelieve what any man says? Alternatively we could perhaps argue that the testimony of one woman should be worth that of two men? That sounds familiar. Can't think why. 

The truth however, is that we all have had experience of both men and women telling lies. Which of us has never lied? So on what basis do we assert that women are inherently truthful and should be believed? It looks as if this is an article of faith, indeed blind faith. There is far more evidence for the resurrection of Jesus than that women should always be believed, yet it is considered to be an act of blind faith to believe that He rose again, while it is simply common sense to suppose that whoever says MeToo was in fact assaulted. The claims of the New Testament are based on multiple eyewitness testimony and the sources for these often corroborative witness statements are far better than those for say Hannibal crossing the Alps or the Peloponnesian War. But while faith in Christianity is in continual decline we are supposed to take as proven any unverified or unverifiable claim made by a woman stating that at some point in the past however long ago she was sexually assaulted by a man. The mere assertion that someone assaulted me twenty years ago is proved just by my saying it. This rather looks like a new religion substituting itself for the old.  Are we really supposed to have blind faith in the testimony of women as if women were divine?

What we have had in the past few months is a relentless attack on men for being men. I was assaulted by a man, MeToo, MeToo. With enough MeToos anyone would get the impression that it is in the nature of men to sexually assault and that indeed they  are practically all doing it or thinking about doing it, or intending to do it. What beasts compared to the pure sanctity of the holy blessed woman who only wants to make films unsullied by contact with these animals.

The trouble with these hash tags is that they have real world consequences. There recently was a rape trial in Belfast. The men involved were declared to be “not guilty”. But immediately there were those who thought they knew better than the jury. Trial by Twitter declared “Ibelieveher”. On what basis? Did those who proclaimed injustice sit through the whole of the trial? Are they all law experts? Or is it simply that following on from MeToo they think that women must automatically be believed always, which means that men must always be disbelieved. If that’s not sexism, then I simply don’t understand the word's meaning.

With enough demonstrations, the law will be changed to reflect public opinion. It will amount to this. In any case where there is no evidence whatsoever that a sexual assault has occurred, the woman should be believed. What this will mean is that if a man and a woman go into a room and the next day the woman claims to have been raped, the man will automatically be guilty unless he can prove that he didn’t rape the woman. But under these circumstances I would advise men never to have sex with women. It’s possible after all to rape a long term girlfriend or even a wife. Alternatively every man should install CCTV cameras in his room and should demand that hotels do the same. That way there might be evidence. Do we really want to go down that route?

Until relatively recently in history this wasn’t an issue. No woman would go to the room of a man she had just met that evening after having a few drinks. She wouldn’t do this unless she intended to have sex. Now we have a situation where it is completely normal to meet someone for the first time and have sex with them. But you cannot have a situation where there is permissiveness about sex and the expectation that strangers meet and sleep with each other, but at any point one of these strangers, but not the other, can claim a crime occurred for which the penalty is many years in jail. For a man this amounts to playing феминиская рулетка [feminist roulette].

What do the Ibelieveher believers actually want? I don’t think they want to go back to the time when sex generally did not occur before marriage and where young women had chaperones. Many of them I suspect want to have sex when they please and they rely on the fact that it isn’t difficult to find a willing man. They rely therefore on the nature of men as people who want to have sex. But while wanting permissiveness these Ibelieveher believers want to at any point in time cry foul and send any man they please to jail.  

But it won’t take many instances of men being sent to jail in such circumstances for men to realise that this game is far too risky. They might then begin to find the company of prostitutes more congenial and less stressful than having a girlfriend who wants continually to hold a metaphorical gun to their head. In time we might develop a new way of interacting such that men sleep only with prostitutes until they get married and women apart from prostitutes sleep with no-one. That would begin to look rather like Victorian times. Dresses could get longer, corsets might come back into fashion and it would be like the sexual revolution never happened.

Men and women frequently misunderstand each other, because we have different natures.  This combined with the practice of sleeping with people we have only just met is bound to lead to failures of communication with regard to desire. It is for this reason that traditionally sex was regulated by the Church and by society in rather a strict way. Limiting sex to within marriage meant the couple had to come to an understanding with regard to their desire and had to express their consent publically before witnesses. This is how nearly everyone lived until quite recently. Sexual puritanism limits the opportunity for the sorts of sexual assault that occur in private with no evidence for a crime except the testimony of the participants. But what we can’t have is a combination of permissiveness and puritanism. It is unfair to both the nature of men and women and will eventually cause such distrust that we will have to choose either puritanism or permissiveness.  We can’t have both.

The contradiction inherent in feminism has been exposed. It is overly proud of the virtues of women while overly prejudiced about the vices of men. This is not about equality. It’s about superiority. Feminism’s major achievement will soon be that men and women misunderstand and distrust each other more than ever before. Well done sisters.