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Chapter 11. Another country
Why would a man whose whole long life had been filled with belief in the virtues of competence and achievement collapse so suddenly and completely under this one onslaught? One who believed in standing up to, or finding ways around, adversity, and who put these beliefs to the test, time and time again, even to the extent of lecturing and writing about them? One who through all the remembered parts of his life and certainly throughout his whole working career, had been a doer, his evolving philosophy built upon the concept that healthy and developmental change and fulfillment came only out of good and honest work. The slang for this would be that ‘he was a fixer’. He approached all problems with the attitude that if he could not fix them right away, he would find a way around them. Such action appeared to be the very essence of his being.
Some perhaps may see in these words clear reasons for the complete collapse of men like Derek and so many others under the onslaught of Operation Ore, and we might agree that some intellectual arrogance played its part in it. There is, however, a lesson for all in how swift and complete were these falls, followed by inability, or even any desire, to help oneself, both before and for long after their attempts at self-destructive action. These men did not turn to suicide as a last resort: they rushed to embrace it.
Upon Derek’s arrival at the mental institution, he had his first introduction to psychiatric intervention. A young man interviewed him in a private room, in what appeared to be a most concerned and professional way - 'earnest' might be the correct word. Derek was still highly emotional, finding it impossible to keep back tears. Still shaking with the continuing affects of the pills, he blurted out his story, punctuated by sobbing, and his interviewer appeared to be listening sympathetically. But just before leaving the room, he turned to Derek and said, “By the way, when I first shook your hand, I noticed that it was sweaty. Is it always like that?”
To Derek, it was like receiving a blow while still reeling. Even at that time, in his state, it was hard to accept that he had heard it right. He was a crying, sweating wreck, just delivered by ambulance from casualty into a mental institution, and this guy was commenting on his sweaty palms. Later, Eleanor joked that perhaps he was a patient posing as a psychiatrist, but he was present at all the ensuing meetings amongst the other professionals. Over a week later, a woman social worker came to see Derek to discuss his problems. Before broaching the most delicate part of his story, he paused and asked her, “Do you want me to tell you why I believed that I had to do what I did?” and she replied, almost coldly, “Only if you feel you want to tell me.” It was another cruel blow. Later after recovery, his view of them all was that they were ‘a bunch of phonies’.
But, as with so many other men in this story, Derek needed no psychiatric formulae to remind him of his state. He was in the crisis unit of a mental hospital, not as a psychiatrist, doctor, journalist, writer, or any kind of professional, but as a patient. He was one of the head cases. The windows of the rooms could be opened a few inches only, so that patients could not throw themselves out in new suicide attempts. Now that he had been sent back down from the mountain, he had two problems: first, with the easy suicide option eliminated, he was back to square one with the allegations, and, second, now alarmingly becoming the major problem, he had to find some way to halt the disintegration of his mind.
A new calendar was also unfolding, although he was only vaguely aware of it at this stage. On the second morning of his restored life, once again he awoke about six and, through the window blinds, saw another emerging February dawn. By seven he was in his dressing gown at the window, looking at this beginning of another day in a new life. Two new dawns already.
The euphoria of both mornings had been sustained by the continuing presence of the massive dose of the drug in his system, as had the good chemically-induced sleep of two nights. He was still ‘high’. During that day, as the effects began to subside, the early stages of the horrors to come began. The first new anxiety emerged that morning, and worsened throughout the day. It was that his exhausted wife Eleanor might become ill. He telephoned both her and Debbie asking that she not visit, but stay home and rest instead. Also emerging was a dread that she might die. More demons were to follow. If he was to flee the country, he needed his passport. Supposing a thief broke into their house and stole the passports. He phoned Debbie again. She assured him that she would hide the passports between two named books on a bedroom bookshelf. The claustrophobia began. If only he could walk through the lobby and out through the unit door, across the bridge from the secure unit, and take a short walk downstairs or out in the gardens, all his claustrophobic feelings, his emerging panic, would pass. But it was forbidden to go through that door. For these first few days he was allowed only his pajamas and dressing gown. Although he had signed himself in, he had given an undertaking to give 48 hours notice before any self-discharge. The real requirement by them and his family was that he stay until the professionals felt that he was fit to leave.
Despite his request that she rest, Eleanor came, and he was so agitated that she asked the staff if they could take a short walk outside, but, well used to such requests, they kicked to touch. The panic waves were beginning. It was six days since his trip to the police station, and how all had changed. Appointments were now being made for various medical, psychological and psychiatric tests for him over the next week, while Eleanor herself would have separate meetings with professionals to discuss their future. The first and most important tests would be on his brain and liver to look for any permanent damage. Unknown to him yet, he had some special status. Upon learning that he was a retired professional, accused of child sex abuse, the director of the center had issued instructions that all procedures were to be observed scrupulously in his case. Derek was told that he said, “We don’t want some senior counsel pulling us to bits in court.”
As he descended into a pit of despair that Friday afternoon, with the worst still to come, one human being came and did for him what even his loving and supportive family could not have done, sowing the seeds of his long climb back from the abyss. Bob, his lifelong friend, who had participated in the search for him on Wednesday, arrived in his room. Eleanor left them alone.
After an emotional greeting, he sat down in the armchair opposite Derek and first gave his own version of the Wednesday events, full of praise for Eleanor and Josh and Debbie. Bob was retired from the health sector of the public service, so he had a lot of experience of what was going on in that area. Then he launched into a tirade. He was a large man, six foot three, and emphasized his words with thumps of his closed fist on the arm of the chair.
“First the police totally violated your rights by calling on you on a Saturday night and grilling you for more than two hours at the station.
“The male officer had no right to tell you that the evidence against you was bad, as he was neither authorized nor qualified to do so, nor had he the right to try to bully you into making statements.
“At no stage did they take into account your life, your work, your successes in building up the club, your reputation, your possible support from other young people in the club, as they were intent not on evaluating the accusations against you, but in building a case against you. As for your computer, whatever images were there could have come from anywhere.” Later Derek was to learn that they had one fraudulent credit card transaction only from the Landslide list, no images.
“You were made to feel guilty for having an interest in young people and being prepared to work hard at building up a successful club. This very achievement was taken as proof of dishonorable intentions.”
He then launched into an attack on one of the country’s leading spokesmen against child sex abuse, whom he accused of being a charlatan, using sex abuse for his own political, and possibly financial, ends, claiming that he was a leading agitator in a lynch mob which had already damaged if not killed or imprisoned other innocent people. The very person he attacked was charged some years later for defrauding the charity he represented, and sacked from it in national disgrace.
Bob continued: “There are youth clubs shutting down all over the country, and there are hundreds of sex abuse cases in the pipeline, most of them motivated by compensation expectations. Even the Catholic Church is in crisis over claims made against priests, and while many of them may be true, a much larger number are jumping on the compensation bandwagon. There are a huge number of sex abuse accusations trying to get to the courts, but the country has not yet acknowledged the phenomenon of false accusations for compensation, supported by unscrupulous solicitors and lawyers. And don't think it's just sex abuse - the claims are going on in all areas of life. Unless something happens to stop the epidemic, no one will work for or help anyone else any more. This is an evil cancer, which may be destroying society, assisted by unscrupulous solicitors and lawyers.
“I've been worried about you for years and often wanted to say to you that successful men should not run youth clubs. Especially when the papers reported your success. These politically motivated so called ‘victim protection’ agencies, daily feed the sex abuse witch hunt bonfires in the media for their own ends. Every time I see that - - - (he named him again), on the public media, sounding off, I seethe with rage.”
Despite the comfort of this spirited defense, Derek still had no real grounds for optimism. The very zeal of the police officers, their relish in their apparent findings, backed by the daily barrage of sex abuse cases in the newspapers, and the lack of any assurances from his own legal advisers, were quite enough to inform him about the seriousness of his position, particularly if gossips continued to work and 'copycat' allegations emerged. He already knew how the unfortunate Jews had felt in Hitler's Germany.
This came over in his reply. “Bob, comforting though your words are, and believe me they are, I have neither the heart nor the ability to fight this. If two or three have conspired against me, who else out of such a huge club, operated over so many years, might not now also join them? God knows, I have already met some bitter mothers of some of the teenagers in trouble, who believe that society, or someone, owes them. Why not pick on me now that I am down?”
Upon hearing this, Bob added his first bit of real divine/human intervention. “F the bastards, F them! You will not take this lying down! They are not going to do this to you. We're all financially independent, and all we have at this stage of our lives is time. I am now raring for a fight, and I demand that I be allowed to fight this with you!”
It was a stunning statement, which in time would save his mind. They then began to examine a few options, and for the first time real alternatives emerged. After Bob left, Derek opened his A4 pad log, and wrote down Bob’s fist-thumping statements. It was the beginning of what became known as Plan B.
He made a more sensible telephone call to Debbie and instructed her to authorize Helen to transfer all their property and bank accounts to Eleanor, and to explore the possibility of transferring also all of his income. This now put him into a very strong ‘publish and be dammed’ position, if he found a publisher, as he was no longer a ‘financial mark' for compensation claims from ‘victims’ claiming abuse. Who sues a penniless man? He would embark upon his defense by attacking with the full story. This gave him a sense of purpose. But there was another important element in the emerging revival.
Looking back later, he realized that a significant reason in his decision to kill himself was not to have to tell Debbie about the accusations, as he had found it unbearable that she would have to know. Now that she knew, that element had evaporated. He had never doubted that she would support him, but the shame of having to tell her had been too great for him to bear.
In the mental hospital, because of Eleanor's wise precaution of high medical insurance, he was most fortunate to have a private room with bathroom en suite. That Friday night was the beginning of the real journey into the valley of the shadow of death. For some reason, probably that he had to 'dry out' or go 'cold turkey', no doctor was available to him from his initial admission interview on Thursday until the following Monday morning.
Despite the comforts of the single room and music over his headphones, no real sleep came on Friday night. Instead, he could hear every sound, doors banging, voices, orderlies walking past. During the day he had seen the other patients line up three times for doses of medication, and once at bedtime for sleeping pills, but his name was not called. In bed a heavy anxiety returned. Neither then nor over the next two nights could he describe or understand what he was experiencing, but the emerging valley of despair was changing into a vast plain with no boundaries, nowhere in geography or in time, and only much later did he learn more fully about that dreadful place, compared with which his trip up into the Shropshire hills was an attempt to rush into Paradise.
At five to one, he put on his dressing gown and went down the corridor to the night nurse. “I can't sleep. Is there any chance that I can have a mild sedative?”
“I'll look up your card.” He waited, although with what he had stocked up on nearly three days before, he figured that he might not be on the list.
“Sorry, you're not down for anything. They want to see how you get on over the weekend. Try to relax.” She was sympathetic.
He thanked her and returned to the room, opting for little if any sleep rather than another hour with music over the headphones. Before getting into bed, his mind returned to the emerging Plan B. He must have slept once that night, if only for a few minutes, because he dreamt that he met his accuser, and she approached him saying, “Derek, I am so frightened.” She embraced him, so that he felt her ribs, and, as she pressed thus against him, she put her mouth to his, and spat in between his lips.
Hours passed and around six, when solutions to normal problems usually appear, almost magically, another variation of the plan emerged, the main effects of which would be reduced stress and increased flexibility. Not even then did he dare put it on paper, as it had to be a secret within the family. They were extremely unlikely to search for him to extradite him, so he would go to Spain.
Despite a glorious third dawn on Saturday morning, three days now since his attempt at an appointment with the totality, the anxieties and sense of panic were worsening. The confinement gave him a dreadful example of being locked up in prison, sharing a cell perhaps with two other prisoners, crushing a spirit that had flourished only in the freedom of space and movement. He was now sure that God had not sent him back from the mountain for unjust trial and imprisonment. Eleanor and the children visited him again during the day.
Saturday night was even worse than Friday's, no sleep and the gloomy plains of despair revisited. By Sunday morning he knew that this was now truly the worst point in the ordeal, compared with which Wednesday's was a great rush to final action and deliverance. More panic attacks came during the morning as he longed to get dressed, to go downstairs, to taste the exultation of a walk in the grounds.
Eleanor came again Sunday afternoon, staying from two until dinnertime at six, and they had a long and comforting conversation, gently reviewing the major issues, but most of the discussion was her summary of how well the family was coping. This was the first concrete evidence of another big change – that he could indeed be done without.
After she left, the situation became steadily worse. During the evening he paced the two short corridors outside his room. At ten he longed to be in the line of patients receiving their sleeping pills and even stood nearby hoping his name would be called. This was to be the worst night. At four twenty the night nurse came in to find him once again in the armchair listening to the radio over headphones. She sat on his bed, her knees tucked under her, and in a warm and generous Dublin accent she said, “Ah Jesus, this can't continue! I'll speak to the doctor in the morning.” She didn't care that he might be a sex offender. She was a bright light in a dreadful night, a ministering angel.
Many weeks were to pass before he began to fully comprehend the nature and extent of that place which can be described both as the land of despair and the true valley of the shadow of death. Another writer, quoted in this book, has called it ‘the crucible of misery’. With the help of the writings of the theologian, Thomas Merton, Derek was later to realize that he had experienced the nightmare of knowing selfhood in possible solitude, with the awful prospect of total loss of companionship. The first seeds of this were sown in the thoughts of flight to a far away country where Eleanor would be with him for part only of each year. The beginning of the three day journey into that dreadful valley was marked by his paranoid fear that something would happen to her, and even for much of the time that followed during his long but gradual recovery, and the accompanying setbacks, there was a fear that worse lies would be told about him, which she might eventually believe, and, as a result, abandon him. There was also the simple fear that she would have an accident, or a heart attack. While withdrawal symptoms from the passing of the effects of the overdose contributed significantly to the despair, the memory of that dreadful place, and his awareness of how easily he could return to it were never to leave him, for he was soon to find out what and where it really was.
In the pre-crisis life, most things had been arranged in his methodologies into labeled philosophical and other intellectual concepts. After years of successful work, he had been planning for his major objective, which was to write a philosophical book, embracing science and technology, society and ultimate meaning. The core of this was to be his fundamental belief in a state of process in the cosmos and a divinity, which is ultimate potentiality. He loved the concepts of change, potentiality and spontaneity, and much of what he had been doing in workshops with the young club leaders was an attempt to devise a methodology for triggering off creativity, specifically creating the catalyst which generates spontaneity out of potentiality. This was a project so ambitious as to be naive, and now with a potential to cause him further grief.
In this grand scenario, from which the great book would emerge, God, of course had his place, being both process and potentiality, while his message was that individuals could advance in the process together with an evolving world within an evolving cosmos, where our individual goodness contributed to both the process and to God. It was by no means an original idea, as any one who studies Teilhard de Chardin will be aware, but he did have some new ideas based on his knowledge of the emerging world of high technology, and on the changing relationships of industry, society and the environment. Two elements were missing. Just before the crises, he had completed the second of two monumental systems for managing major industrial plants so that they met all quality, environmental, staff, process and public safety requirements. The first missing element was plain to him in the mental hospital, and he wryly remarked to one doctor, “The last job I did was to design a complete system for the control of chemical plants, and now here I am, a wreck, who cannot control himself.”
While that may have been a commentary on his effectiveness as a social scientist, or on the complexity of a human being compared with that of a simple chemical plant, the second missing element was of far greater importance, although it was to be a couple of weeks more before he began to understand it. The God in his philosophy was an intellectual one, comfortably in place, representing the final piece in his system of intellectual arrogance. He had no personal God. He had parted with him shortly after childhood. The real terrors of the valley of the shadow of death were not a fear of losing his wife, but of losing all loving contact with other people, who were his only link with God.
As he was to remember shortly, as he re-read the work of Merton, it was 'as if I had been emptied by death' and 'advanced beyond all horizons' into 'a country where centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. And everywhere in that centre was one thing only - my self, and only my self, in dreadful selfhood’.
During the first week in the mental hospital, Eleanor called to take him for follow-up medical tests, one of which was a ‘Cat-scan’ at a nearby private clinic. On the way there, he was amazed to hear a passing driver blow his horn at someone, and he marveled at a world where such things still happened. As they waited in the foyer of the unit, an unfortunate businessman in his late Fifties sat next to them in a blue dressing gown and pajamas, waiting his turn. He was in a high state of anxiety. Seven days now since the forest, and two nights of good sleep behind him, Derek had no concerns about what the scan might find. As he lay in the machine, he almost dozed off, and then, upon returning to Eleanor, more black humor emerged. “Supposing the doctor said to me, ‘I’m afraid that we have some bad news for you’, I would reply, ‘Don’t tell me I’m all right’.”
None of the tests revealed any permanent physical damage and ten days later he finally went home to a familiar but strange place where his former life used to be.
He was greeted with the news that Debbie had asked a number of key young leaders to write supporting statements. These were the very best and most trustworthy of the young people in the club. Solicitor, Helen, had urged that these be prepared and personally delivered and signed by each leader at the police station, and had said that this could result in the police not proceeding with the investigation.
An indication of his continuing mental state was that he did not want to hear this. He wanted no more news about his case or the club, as he needed to get away for some peace and recovery. Much later, he knew that Plan B and writing his way out of the mess were illusions, because his actual response from the outset was flight. Every ring of the telephone and every knock on the door filled him with dread. Even calls offering help, which the others were handling, seemed to have a potential for further disaster. Sadly, he did not want to see or hear from these young loyal supporters, as each of them was now a potential source of further bad news.
This incapacity to defend oneself, or want anyone else to do it, and a growing perception of a hostile environment, have very serious implications for anyone who is either falsely accused or who suffers a serious breakdown because of a police charge. Many of us have the belief or illusion that in the end of the day the courts are there to protect and vindicate us, and that truth will come out and justice will prevail. That system of justice we are talking about has been perverted by the very people who are privileged to operate it, by their participation in the maintenance of a system of victimology and commercially-motivated compensation cases, their expertise and support helping people to perjure and corrupt themselves, and to damage or ruin others. This is, in fact, infamy. Later, however, he was to realize that there was a deeper cause.
From the first minutes of the police interrogation, he, who did not do the things that he was being accused of doing, who had never received as much as a parking ticket, was unable either to trust the system or to find the strength to defend himself. Because of his actions that week, and the mental anguish which followed, his ability to fight never improved, other than to try to write about it, or pretend to himself that he would seek alternative justice through the media. Indeed, as he struggled thus, the UK tabloids were operating their ‘name and shame’ incitement to hatred campaign. Homes of some men accused of sex abuse were fire bombed.
Long before any court case might clear his name, the damage had been done, as he was tried and judged in the police station, and then went through an attempt at self-execution. The valley of despair, which followed, was like being in Purgatory or Hell. Had he brought a defamation case against the accusers, he the plaintiff would still have been 'the accused', and he was in no doubt that even a win, whether as plaintiff or defendant, would leave a public believing he was guilty, and a family whose suffering would be greater than his own.
Perhaps at this point we can leave Derek and Eleanor for now and move briefly to Winston.
I became acquainted with Winston during the campaign against Operation Ore, which will shortly be described. He had been through an ordeal similar to Derek’s but unlike him had also experienced the crucible of misery that was a term in prison, all because the police found images of teenaged boys on his computer. He was married with children and, unlike Derek, very vulnerable to further retribution as his youngest son was still in his early teens and thus a target for the SS.
I quickly realized that here was a remarkable man with a doctorate and a brilliant professional career behind him, still only in his early Fifties, whose ruination, mirroring Derek’s in almost all respects, still kept him in a state of fear. Out of the thousands ruined by Operation Ore, less than one hundred finally found the courage to sign up for the initial stage of the fight back, so one of the greatest early challenges was to find individuals with the strength to even join up in an action group. Winston had just reached the stage of finding the courage to talk by email with me, so I found myself being honoured by the opportunity to advise and help him.
The first problem in our emerging relationship was to ensure that our interactions did not come to the attention of his parole officer, who from Winston’s descriptions was all too familiar in our new age of fascism. He was the strutting, cruel minor official, the kind we find with many policemen or social services officers, whose powers go way beyond their intellectual capabilities to handle them wisely. This kind of individual is discussed in the next chapter. I created pseudonyms for Winston and obtained safe access for him to one of the main group action Internet forums, where he could express himself.
There was, however, an important book ready to burst forth from him, to be titled ‘Notes from Another Country: Personal Reflections on a Modern Witch Hunt’, but his post-confinement conditions made it impossible for him to publish it or attempt to publish it as they demanded that he reveal any pseudonyms he might use to the authorities, thus shutting off that possible avenue of publication and effectively silencing him. His parole officer had also warned him that any evidence of involvement with activists or any sign that the sex offending courses he had attended were not having the promised affect would land him back in prison. This was Great Britain in the year 2009.
So, with his permission I produced the book under my name, but stated in the preamble that it had not been written by me. I did this because I believed it to be one of the most important works I have ever read and that it was being suppressed by the state. I also offered the full manuscript to any publisher with the courage to publish it and to act as Winston’s agent. Meanwhile, as the chapters were written I published them on one of my web sites. The book gives a powerful description of the violent transposition that changes some of us from being unexceptionably ordinary people and thrusts us into that ‘other country’ from which we can never return. We are transformed into the modern-day equivalent of the seventeenth century heretic or witch.
Here are extracts from the opening paragraphs.
“To declare at the beginning of a project that one of its principal motivations is a refutation of love, a repudiation of egalitarian moralizing, and that a decidedly anti-nurturing, anti-communitarian, anti-decency spirit animates it from the outset, may be to invite insurmountable hostility before it has even begun. At the very least, such a declaration means that anyone advocating it has got some explaining to do. What follows is an attempt at just that.
“Whilst I will not be relying on statistical data too rigorously - what we make of facts, and in whose interests they are fashioned and promulgated, are often far more interesting than the numbers themselves – I will be attempting to advance a moral argument, and basing that argument on a mélange of different influences which have, both contingently and by my own deliberations, found their way into my experience. These influences include literary, academic, clinical and polemical works but overshadowing them all is the direct personal experience of state-sanctioned terror against variant sexuality. The latter gave a new, and unwelcome, importance to all of the former, driving me to drastically re-appraise them, only this time from a radically different vantage point. Being transformed from a hard-working, highly skilled professional into a criminalized and reviled outsider overnight does tend to alter one’s perspective on the world; massive, compulsory stigmatization inevitably means that you have to leave the world you once inhabited behind – there can never be any way back to it.
“Like many educated, vaguely liberal, well-paid professionals, I had little time, or cause, to radically question the institutions which effectively control and structure our lives. As an employee of the State, I reasoned that if it employed, and was largely managed by, people like I, tolerant, left-leaning liberals, then it could not be all bad. There were difficulties and dilemmas, to be sure, but the institutions themselves, education, the health service, the criminal justice system, were, despite their evident flaws, in essence sound and, anyway, could be reformed in a mature pluralistic democracy. But I was forced, against my will, to see that genteel, liberal mores become wholly unsustainable when the very same State that I had supposed to be basically benevolent and neutral can effortlessly smash ordinary people’s lives to pieces – including my own and those of many thousands of others. This might be beginning to sound like melodramatic exaggeration or, at least, sour grapes, and it would not be untrue to admit that I did (and do) feel exceedingly angry about it. A moral argument founded on hate and rage is liable to lose even more votes. And yet, as I argue in what follows, it is precisely the virtues of hate – properly disciplined, politically intelligent hate – which may provide the only realistic means of overthrowing the dictatorship of a suffocating, joyless and miserly sexual morality. This morality - although moralism, the attempt to subjugate all to the rule of one point of view, is a better term – can be counted on to ensure the immiseration of children and adults, male and female, gay and straight, alike. It feeds off its own sourness; its basic premise is, ‘if I can’t be sexually happy, why should anyone else be?’ The more sexually unhappy people it creates, the stronger it gets.
“Our rulers today are less ostentatiously visible than they once were. They do not, as a rule, publicly mutilate and hang misfits and miscreants, although there is a metaphorical sense in which, with one category of offender, they continue to do precisely this. Symbolic execution may not be as gore-splattered as its literal counterpart, but the resulting death is very real, and possibly even crueler than actual biological extinction (being alive to your own symbolic death is a curiously pernicious, and agonizing, experience). But we do still have rulers. Perhaps what is most different for those of us fortunate enough to live in highly developed capitalist societies is that our conditions of dictatorship are disguised and, most of the time, rendered invisible. As Leo Bersani has noted (Homos, 1995), power in the ‘developed’ world is not invested in the person of a bloated and debauched monarch, but is mediated by law and economy. But a fundamental continuity with more ancient and supposedly unenlightened domination persists: modern power has a structure, a ‘one way street’ form, wherein those who hold it continue to discipline, marginalize and scapegoat those who do not.
“It is a fundamental part of my argument that institutional violence and domination are alive and well in our present-day, gentle, well-healed pluralistic democracies. Whilst the image of power has had a makeover – it has dropped its monarchical pretensions and has become tutelary (i.e., it has substituted ‘you’ll do anything I want because I’m the king’ for ‘We will regulate your private behavior in minute detail because we are here to protect you.”) Naked coercion and intimidation have largely been reserved to those living at the margins of our good and great social order, the wretched, the abandoned poor, the mentally ill, and the sexually different. They can be sent to our liberal Gulags and concentration camps without a murmur of protest from the ‘general public’, another preposterous fiction manufactured by our largely unelected rulers.
“To the comfortably liberal, these opinions can only sound like the deluded ranting of a paranoid fruitcake, the kind of person you see ambling along the pavement hurling incoherent abuse at passing cars, or furiously chiding invisible demons whilst sitting on park benches smelling of urine and cider. As I was once such a comfortable liberal myself, I am aware of the danger of sounding like a swivel-eyed loon; and yet, I cannot think of an alternative to rebutting the far more dangerous and powerful delusions of our contemporary strain liberal democracy than a plain-speaking articulation of its deceptions, evasions and denials in the field of human sexuality.”
Go to Chapter 12
Back to Start
Created on 03/24/2010 11:42 AM by Editor
Updated on 03/11/2011 12:19 PM by Editor
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