Tactics of tyrannical regimes and the TRA

[HawkeyeInConfusion]

Timothy Snyder has written an interesting book called ‘On Tyranny’ (I think I first saw it mentioned somewhere on here). It describes how the actions of the populace can either allow or prevent tyrannical regimes taking hold. It’s focus is really the political sphere. But it strikes me that it can also explain how the TRA movement has made such inroads.

It raises 20 points

1. Anticipatory obedience (people voluntarily accepting changes ahead of the law). We have examples ranging from Labour AWS, prison service, Girl Guides, and so on – all changing their policies to allow self-IDed transwomen access to women’s spaces and declaring that they can’t enforce single sex provision
2. Not protecting institutions that can help. Institutions we thought that would stand up against this such as the NSPCC and the unions have already fallen without anyone noticing.
3. Allowing a one-party state. All political parties share the same view on this. There is no one to vote for to escape it (except possibly UKIP but we all have limits)
4. Allowing places to display signs supporting the ideology. Women’s toilets getting gender neutral signs, punch a TERF placards and graffiti.
5. Professional ethics going out the window. The doctors who unquestioningly prescribe puberty blockers to kids, the counsellors who won’t investigate the underlying causes, the safeguarding ‘experts’ in schools, local authorities, guides, gymnastics who completely ignore all their safeguarding training and allow boys into girls spaces
6. Paramilitaries enforcing the new rules. Like those that gather outside WPUK meetings, the mob outside the trial of Maria McLachlan, those facing Julie Bindel and Magdalen Burns on the stairs, the baseball bat wielding ‘die cis scum’ marcher
7. This is about those that enforce laws (e.g. police/army) being complicit in supporting the tyrannical regime. How about West Yorkshire Police and the Twitter mods?
8. Not standing up for your beliefs. Politicians, mainstream media (with a few honourable exceptions) – I’m looking at you
9. Allowing language to change (and disappear). Obviously the new definition of woman/female being pressed for (although no one actually has given a revised definition), enforced use of pronouns, the ‘cis’ word
10. Abandoning facts. I don’t think I need to clarify this. The whole agenda relies on ignoring basic biological facts and repeating fictional mantras.
11. Not investigating. No one (except the members of MN and a handful of reporters) is doing any digging or due diligence. They just unthinkingly parrot the information given to them by the activists.
12. Not keeping in touch with people. Because we are afraid to raise this with others in real life we have struggled to counter the narrative. And those that have concerns have been left demoralised and alone (apart from on MN)
13. Not meeting face-to-face with others to discuss. We are, but see how violently and persistently the TRAs try to stop WPUK meetings. They can see that this is a threat.
14. Using personal data against people. Like when they doxx women on twitter.
15. Shutting down independent organisations and associations. MN targeted to shut FWR. And I’m sure the attempts to demonise WPUK, FPFW, #StandingForWomen, etc is seen as a stepping stone to getting them banned.
16. Not learning from other countries. I think we have, so that has given us an advantage compared with other countries such as Canada.
17. Allowing dangerous words to convey the idea that this is an extraordinary situation and therefore extraordinary measures are permitted. All the ‘literal violence’ and ‘killing children’ messages that get constantly fired out.
18. Allowing exceptional events to justify exceptional actions. Like the above, propagating the idea that people are literally killing themselves over this (it’s not happening, but they are pushing the idea that it is)
19. Not being a patriot. In this context I think it is feminist groups that no longer stand for women, LBGT groups no longer supporting L.
20. People not being courageous. Some people have been. And more and more are (and I recognise why some people can’t). And it is only this courage that has slowed the juggernaut.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. And it may not make sense unless you’ve read the book (and maybe not even then). But in my mind it sort of explains how the strategies used by the TRA have given them so much power.

But now I’m just rambling.

Am I seeing things that are not there?

You're not, this analysis feels exactly correct. The totalitarian nature of this ideology and tyranny used to enforce it is impossible to unsee once you start connecting the dots. Especially when the Antifa/radical far-left affiliation of many holders of this belief system becomes clear.
This is honestly why I think this battle is not just about "gender politics" or "turf wars."
It's about defending the liberty to state the actual truth in the face of an elite cross-party consensus to pretend biological sex does not matter.
As I've stated elsewhere, if we cannot defend the very obvious facts of human reproduction, then how in the fuck will we be able to take on any other battle?

I have rather a bee in my bonnet about the intersection of these issues with the origins of totalitarianism so I agree with the summary you've given.

I am taken by the description of the TRAs as paramilitaries - I've thought of them more in line with the Religious Police of Iran.

Even 19 - absurd as this might seem, Sue Pascoe of C4 claims GC groups like WPUK have been reported to the police Counter Terrorism Unit and are categorised in a manner similar to Britain First...

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3361150-Dr-Nicola-Williams-on-BBC2-at-10-15-Victoria-Live?pg=2&messages=100#prettyPhoto/3/

It's fascinating.

I have always been curious as to how people are persuaded to believe, or say they believe, extreme and ridiculous things. I am fascinated by 16th century English religious politics - like, how on earth do you get people to abandon their lifelong beliefs and become Protestants, then switch back to being Catholics again? Why don't ordinary people stand up for themselves more? I mean, eventually you start burning people and that's quite offputting for the others once it's happening, but how do you get everyone else to go along with that in the first place?

Watching it happen in real life with the TRAs has been fascinating and horrible and I understand a lot better now why there weren't more Thomas Mores.

The book you quote is definitely relevant and that's a great analysis.

I think I need to read that book...

Who'd have thought 2018 would make it essential for us to do a refresher course of reading on Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and books on tyranny?

EldestBunting is doing an A-level project on this topic and is squeezing plenty of AWA rhetoric in.

Good analysis.

There’s a broader context to all this as well. It’s set within a society that’s getting increasingly fractured and individual and where austerity is forcing people to focus just on survival in their precarious financial state.
My own opinion is that this is a part of the alt right backlash against the increasing power of women and minorities. MRA and TRA attack along sex grounds, while the alt right go in on race grounds.
Then on top of that we have an society which is increasingly dominated by corporate interests, in which people are just commodities to be used.

I suspect all this is going in a very unpleasant direction. I hope I’m wrong

Bowlofbabelfish - I've just been reading Liz Kelly about the conducive context of violence against women and girls.

The precariat status of so many people possibly underpins the sense of hopelessness and feeling that it's impossible to engage with what's happening even when our civic rights and freedoms are in jeopardy and it's happening in plain sight.

This analytic lens also clarified that no amount of ‘awareness raising’ would dissuade desperate people from risking their lives and freedom. Rather than focusing, as much anti-trafficking prevention does, on the supposed naivety of individuals and the unscrupulous individuals and networks who are hidden under the concept of ‘organised crime’, it was necessary to analyse and understand the interconnecting social, political and economic conditions within which exploitative operators profit from the misfortunes of others.
...
Feminists have long noted that certain contexts are conducive to VAW: the family; institutions; conflict and transition; public space and more recently online environments. What is less common is exploration, at a theoretical level, of what connects them, what makes these spaces ones in which men are enabled to abuse women and girls.

discoversociety.org/2016/03/01/theorising-violence-against-women-and-girls/

Fuck

arran :(

It also fits the '5 steps to tyranny' identified by Kottke.

kottke.org/16/11/five-steps-to-tyranny

• “us” and “them” (prejudice and the formation of a dominant group)
• obey orders (the tendency to follow orders, especially from those with authority)
• do “them” harm (obeying an authority who commands actions against our conscience)
• “stand up” or “stand by” (standing by as harm occurs)
• exterminate ''them''.

It also has parallels with cultural genocide;

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_genocide

Article 7 of a 1994 draft of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples used the phrase "cultural genocide" but did not define what it meant.

Indigenous peoples have the collective and individual right not to be subjected to ethnocide and cultural genocide, including prevention of and redress for:

(a) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities;
(b) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources;
(c) Any form of population transfer which has the aim or effect of violating or undermining any of their rights;
(d) Any form of assimilation or integration by other cultures or ways of life imposed on them by legislative, administrative or other measures;
(e) Any form of propaganda directed against them.

This wording only appeared in a draft....The concept of "ethnocide" and "cultural genocide" was removed in the version adopted by the General Assembly, but the sub-points noted above from the draft were retained in Article 8 that speaks to "the right not to be subject to forced assimilation".

Countess: "Watching it happen in real life with the TRAs has been fascinating and horrible and I understand a lot better now why there weren't more Thomas Mores."

This is exactly how I feel. I've been astonished to see friends who I previously thought were quite intelligent uncritically swallowing stuff that is utterly nonsensical. People who would have no time for, say, religion, or for astrology or homoeopathy, suddenly falling in line with the mantra of trans women are women. And calling people a bigot if they don't agree.

It takes so little, that's what I've realised. Just a bit of peer pressure and a conducive social climate that tells you that you're a bad person if you don't fall in line, and that's it. People will literally believe anything.

Thanks. I'm pleased that my incoherent musings made some sense. It is reassuring that I'm not losing my marbles. But in a way I wish I was and that all this was just a figment of my imagination.

And thanks for all the extra reading.

UpstartCrow That's spot on. The link between the TRA view of women and the way indigenous people have been treated through history has been clearly visible for a while, upto and including the gulag comments and the constant 're education'. The removal of our kids to boarding schools to remove them from 'our' culture and better indoctrinate theirs is an idea they'd be all for. And as at the time it happened, its all framed in the most sympathetic, 'we know best you backward idiots who can't see what's good for you' tones.

I don't get how any MP couldn't look at that list and see it staring them straight in the face.

Just adding in a couple of reviews of Snyder that both offer useful perspectives:

On Tyranny is less an anatomy of tyranny itself than an essay about how we might stop it from happening. “Do not obey in advance,” he says. “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” After Hitler came to power, many if not most Germans voluntarily offered their obedience to his regime. We should heed this warning and refuse to do so ourselves. And certainly, the millions of state servants who ran Germany did indeed rush to join the Nazi party to save their jobs. Later on, few opposed the growing antisemitism of the regime or its genocidal outcome. But Snyder forgets the degree of coercion to which they were subjected ...

www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/08/on-tyranny-timothy-snyder-review-trump-twenty-lessons-democracy

In the brief chapter that follows the suggestion to “think up your own way of speaking”, Snyder, a professor of history at Yale, dwells on the insights of Victor Klemperer, the great Jewish philologist who studied the ways that the Nazis commandeered language before they commandeered everything else. Klemperer noted how Hitler’s language explicitly undermined all and any opposition. “‘The people’ always meant some people and not others… encounters were always ‘struggles’ and any attempt by free people to understand the world in a different way was ‘defamation’ of the leader.”

www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/20/on-tyranny-twenty-lessons-from-twentieth-century-timothy-snyder-review

I hadn't considered cultural genocide UpstartCrow. But the description does fit.

Excellent summary. Have you seen this article by Jane Clare Jones?

janeclarejones.com/

I hadn't. Thanks.

When all this is over (hopefully, please let it come to an end) there will be lots of scope for PhDs analysing this movement.

Yes yes hawkeye! I've referenced Snyder's book a few times on here in relation to antiwoman/trans issues. I find it quite chilling. When I was reading it, I was forcibly struck by how pretty much all of his conditions are met, in the process of being met, or could plausibly be met by toxic anti-woman activism.

Off to RTFT now, got excited by someone else having read it

Point 13 about meeting people face to face is what got me out from behind a screen and into real life going to meetings and leafletting for FPFW. It's so much more powerful and affirming. And you're right - that's why anti woman activists are so desperately trying to shut off that avenue to us.

Men have always known that women getting together and talking is dangerous.

“One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive”
I was just looking up Hannah Arendt quotes and most applied but this really stood out to me in relation to the billboard debacle.

I may have been one of your posts that originally piqued my interest Sophocles. If so, thanks.

It's a good read, isn't it hawkeye? Concise, focused, straight to the point. If it was one of my posts, then I'm chuffed