Editor’s note: This article is also available in Romanian.
When I heard that Malala Yousafzai had been named as co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, I was filled with a deep sense of unease. I sensed that this innocent young woman, terribly used and abused as she has been, and coming as she does from that crucible of international terrorism, the Swat valley in the Pakistan/Afghanistan border lands, has all the potential of becoming even more dangerous to world peace than Osama Bin Laden ever was in his time operating from that troubled country’s mountainous border with Pakistan.
In Yousafzai, we obviously do not have an international terrorist, but what I see emerging is an international figure—Madonna-like (in the Roman Catholic sense)—who is being groomed by international feminism in furtherance of its angry, hate-filled creed.
In Yousafzai, international feminism has found something far better than a martyr for its cause, it has found a “martyr-survivor”: a concept that plays perfectly into its women-as-victim narrative and that I have no doubt it will use to enormous advantage in furtherance of its work worldwide disadvantaging men, whom it hates with such venomous passion.
Obviously, we acknowledge that this young woman, barely out of childhood, has suffered abominably at the hands of deeply bigoted people, the Taliban, who treated her with disgusting disdain for her rights and, indeed, for human rights in general. She has suffered terribly at their evil hands, of that there is no doubt, and all right-minded people should be filled with disgust at her egregious treatment, as I am.
However, I cannot but think that she is the innocent dupe of another deeply bigoted and socially dangerous ideology, feminism, that will use her elevation as a Nobel Laureate to enormous effect.
This is evident from her speech to the United Nations on July 12, 2014, in which she said:
Today I am focusing on women’s rights and girls’ education because they are suffering the most. There was a time when women activists asked men to stand up for their rights. But this time we will do it by ourselves. I am not telling men to step away from speaking for women’s rights, but I am focusing on women to be independent and fight for themselves. So dear sisters and brothers, now it’s time to speak up. So today, we call upon the world leaders to change their strategic policies in favor of peace and prosperity. We call upon the world leaders that all of these deals must protect women and children’s rights.
Here we have the feminist agenda laid bare: Yousafzai the victim, who survived the acts of evil men and heroically triumphed over their viciousness, morphs into the girl who overcame her oppression by men, then declares that men are no longer relevant to the fight of women for independence, and stands before the very embodiment of male “patriarchy”—the United Nations—challenging it to protect women worldwide. It is all very neat, very political, very feminist.
However, the key to seeing what is coming from this young woman lies in her last words: [The UN] “… must protect women and children’s rights….” The rhetoric of Yousafzai, the female heroine, has subtly changed. Presumably for the purposes of finessing her nomination for the Nobel Prize, it has become Yousafzai the advocate for the “plight of children” (for which, of course, read: girls).
What plight? What is this all about? What are these words implying? Are children now being portrayed as a victimized social group alongside women? Are we seeing here a further extension of international feminism to embrace children as an oppressed group too? What is the picture that is being painted here?
I am deeply struck by the resonance of this theme with George Orwell’s words in Nineteen Eighty-Four, that dark, depressing foresight of future society under totalitarianism, where O’Brien, The Party’s persecutor, headed by Big Brother, says: “We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer.”1
Well, feminism has certainly divided men as either believers in feminism or not. It has succeeded in cutting the links between men and women with its incessant false rhetoric about “The Patriarchy” being the cause of the historical suppression of women.2 It has certainly caused deep distrust between men and women in the twin areas of domestic abuse and rape. It has been enormously successful in fomenting a climate of fear and loathing of men over the last 40 years in our Western societies, resulting in significant numbers of men turning away from marriage, refusing to sire children, and generally going their own way without women.3
I wonder, is feminism now going to make good the schism between men and children? After all, it has already brought about a situation in which men need to tread very carefully in any dealings with children because men as a breed are now under suspicion of being potential rapists and child molesters.
This has resulted in men being unable to touch children with fondness, to console or engage with them if they don’t know them (for example, in the UK, male teachers are unable to embrace an upset child anymore. They must stand back and offer a handkerchief or tissue to the crying child).
Indeed, “teacher trolling” apparently is now a national pastime, and some pubescent girls see capturing incriminating photos of “pervy” male teachers as a sport. (See my post titled “Men live in fear of teenage girls flirting with them.”)
Is this a further outworking of the dystopia foreseen by Orwell5, where he says, “… in the future there will be no wives and friends”?6 Are we seeing the beginning of the process he describes when the central character, Winston Smith, is having his mind reprogrammed in the Ministry of Love (which, in the Newspeak of the dystopia Orwell portrays, really means Hate), and, meeting his former neighbour, Parsons, also incarcerated for thought crimes, the following dialogue ensues?
“Who denounced you?” said Winston. “It was my little daughter,” said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. “She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don’t bear her any grudge for it. In fact I’m proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.”
In the quasi-beatification of Malala Yousafzai by international feminism, are we seeing the beginning of the unfolding of this process? Are children now going to be set against men, as women have been?
We already have fathers being thrown out of their children’s lives in the feminist-dominated family courts system in Britain, Canada, and America, where one in three children lose contact permanently with their fathers.7
We already have a wide gulf of mistrust created between men and children. What is next? Children being indoctrinated into reporting their fathers to the authorities for any form of chastisement that immediately becomes condemned as patriarchy by the authorities?
It seems to me that 1984 is not in the past, but just around the corner.
Sources:
[1] Orwell G. (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four Part III, Chapter III.
[2] We must never lose sight of the fact that “patriarchy” means literally “the rule of the father.”
[3] The so-called MGTOW syndrome: “Men Going Their Own Way”
[5] Orwell G. ibid.
[6] Orwell’s writings, of course, were a prophetic fulfilment of the outcome of Marxism in society, of which feminism is the expression today, that openly declared war on marriage as a bourgeois institution as long ago as 1848 in the Communist Manifesto.
[7] “One in three children whose parents separated or divorced over the last 20 years disclosed that they had lost contact permanently with their father. Almost a tenth of children from broken families said the acrimonious process had left them feeling suicidal while others later sought solace in drink, drugs or crime. They complained of feeling ‘isolated’ and ‘used’ while parents admitted having used children as ‘bargaining tools’ against each other. Lawyers said the study showed that the court system itself was making family break-up more acrimonious with children used as ‘pawns.'”—The Daily Telegraph, November 16, 2009.
Feature image by Southbank Centre
