Making the world perfect always ends badly

Not radical enough: Germaine Greer has been labelled a ‘trans exclusionary radical feminist’ or ‘Terf’.

A few days ago, two women appeared on TV to announce that they had decided never to have any children because they were terrified that the planet was being laid waste by climate change.

The natural world was being wiped out, they said. So how could they possibly give birth to children who would have no future? Some 90 women have now joined this “birth strike” campaign.

Leave to one side whether these poor women have been terrified out of their wits by a theory that is without foundation. Reacting to the claim that human existence is causing unstoppable global catastrophe, they have become so despairing they want to extinguish the possibility of new human existence altogether.

It is therefore perhaps the most literal demonstration of how, as was first said during the French revolutionary terror, the revolution consumes its own. Issue by issue, the cultural revolution that has been perpetrated in the West for the past several decades by the contemporary heirs of Marat, Danton and Robespierre is following the same pattern.

In Britain and America the Labour and Democratic parties, which have enthusiastically embraced identity politics, are each being hoist by their own petard. Committed with every fibre of its being to the cause of anti-racism, the Labour Party is being consumed by antisemitism. Despite evidence of hundreds of examples of grotesque antisemitic comments by its members, such as “Jews murder people and children” or that Joan Ryan, the non-Jewish former chairwoman of Labour Friends of Israel, should be “thrown in the ovens”, the party has been unwilling or unable to confront this, not least because it cannot believe that progressive people can be guilty of bigotry. As a result, Labour is now staring at its moral collapse.

A similar phenomenon is beginning to engulf the US Democrats, who have likewise failed to discipline a new congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, for her egregious anti-Jewish remarks and who have also turned a blind eye to other such incidents in their ranks.

Despite such pusillanimity Linda Sarsour, co-chairwoman of the Women’s March movement, attacked the Democrat Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for promoting a motion feebly condemning antisemitism. “Nancy is a typical white feminist upholding the patriarchy, doing the dirty work of powerful white men,” she said.

Such are the workings of “intersectionality”, the dogma bred by identity politics which ordains that self-professed victim groups, defined as those who are not white, western or male, are all similarly oppressed by those who are and must make common cause against them.

Liberals who wear their feminist credentials on their sleeves, and who campaign for more rape convictions on the grounds that any woman who accuses a man of sexual assault is telling the truth, have been mortified by the number of liberal icons in Hollywood and beyond who have been accused, rightly or wrongly, of sexual harassment or attack.

In Britain Lord Lester of Herne Hill, who pioneered human rights and anti-discrimination laws to protect women and ethnic minorities, was accused last year of sexual harassment. Although a motion to suspend him from the chamber was overturned, he resigned from the Lords while continuing strenuously to insist that he was the victim of false allegations.

Now feminists themselves are being denounced by others who are even more radical. Once, feminists upheld the rights of women and campaigned against activities that discriminated against, demeaned or hurt them. Then along came the transgender campaigners denouncing as a “trans exclusionary radical feminist”, or Terf, any woman who said there was an ineradicable sexual difference between a woman and a man.

Formerly ultra-radical feminists such as Germaine Greer and the domestic violence campaigner Julie Bindel, who insisted that a person with male genitalia was a man, accordingly found themselves shouted down for the crime of Terfdom. The Vagina Monologues, once considered a theatrical outpost on the wilder fringes of radical feminism, has now been banned on several US campuses because, by definition, it excludes “women” who don’t have vaginas.

The latest surreal example has been the ten-month ordeal of Miranda Yardley, a self-identified transsexual who was prosecuted for transphobic harassment. Yardley identifies as a man and insists that individuals can’t change sex, despite his gender reassignment to become a woman ten years ago.

Following a Twitter spat, a trans campaigner complained about Yardley to the police after which he was charged with harassment aggravated by transphobia. Last week, the case was thrown out at Basildon magistrates court.

In the Russian revolution, the Bolsheviks consumed the Mensheviks and Stalinism consumed Leninism, with repeated show trials, executions and purges of dissidents and other “enemies of the people”. A similar terror followed the revolution led by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949.

The crime of the not-radical-enough is somehow to stand in the way of an ideology at the root of which is invariably an idealistic desire to perfect the world. Whether it’s about producing equality, eradicating prejudice and hatred from the human heart or saving the planet from extinction, this impossible pursuit of utopia has resulted in persecution, tyranny and the victimisation of the innocent, an abuse of power that is being replicated all over again today.

- The Times