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Notes from Another Country
Notes from Another Country: Personal Reflections on a Modern Witch Hunt
Preamble
Brian Rothery
This book is produced under my name, but it has not been written by me. The post-confinement conditions, which the real author is forced to endure, make it impossible for him to publish it or attempt to publish it. These conditions demand that he reveal any pseudonyms he might use to the authorities, thus shutting off that possible avenue of publication and effectively silencing him. This is Great Britain in the year 2010.
I am therefore publishing it under my own name and making whatever provisions I can for my executors to reveal the identity of the true author should that become possible for him in his lifetime and if not after his death. Why am I doing this? Because I believe that this is one of the most important works I have ever read and it is being suppressed by the state.
The author has not asked me to do what I am doing here, so this is entirely my own idea for which I take full responsibility.
I also offer the full manuscript to any publisher with the courage to publish it. I will act as agent for the author. Meanwhile, the chapters as they are written are being published here if this appears to be the only way to get it read. I appeal to all who sympathize with what they now read to promote it as widely as possible. Google has already de-listed this web site once at the request of the IWF so time may not be on our side.
Notes from Another Country: Personal Reflections on a Modern Witch Hunt
“[T]he major enemy, the strategic adversary is fascism … And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini – which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively – but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior [sic], the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
Michel Foucault, “Preface”, Deleuze and Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia London, The Athlone Press, p. xiii.
“But thought is one thing, the deed is another, and the image of the deed still another: the wheel of causality does not roll between them.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of the Pale Criminal”, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Introduction
To declare at the beginning of a project that one of its principal motivations is a refutation of love, a repudiation of egalitarian moralising, 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 melange 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 criminalised and reviled outsider overnight does tend to alter one’s perspective on the world; massive, compulsory stigmatisation 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 crueller than actual biological extinction (being alive to your own symbolic death is a curiously pernicious, and agonising, 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, marginalise 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 behaviour 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 [1] 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 rantings 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.
Edmund White’s quasi-autobiographical novel of 1982 [2] virtually opens (page 14) with a scene of ‘underage’ sex between two boys – one fifteen, the other twelve. What is extraordinary, scandalous even, about this scene is not merely that it quite obviously isn’t a ‘one-off’ experiment – the boys are at it every night for the remainder of the younger boy’s stay (he is the son of the fifteen-year old’s father’s business acquaintance who, with his wife and two boys, has been invited for a short vacation). It isn’t even that the older boy is having anal intercourse with a younger boy: this scenario can be (and just about everywhere else, is) rendered as a depiction of sexual abuse. Our culture presently insists that this is the only form in which sexual activity between minors can be represented – a bigger older person, invariably male, using his superior strength to sexually dominate a smaller, younger person. It is rather that the abuse narrative is conspicuously and joyously absent from the boys’ sexual encounters with each other: the sex is initiated by the younger boy. It is a scene of simple, innocent sexual enjoyment, mutual pleasure-sharing, in which the boys make no demands on one another other than to experiment with reciprocally thrilling penile fun together. They do not become lovers, they do not enter a long-term monogamous relationship, and they do not renounce or denounce their sexual experiments later in life in favour of compulsory chastity and abstinence for the young. Against the grain of our culture’s symptomatically coercive scripting, they are not subsequently destroyed as adults as a result of their ‘under-age’ sex. They do not self-harm, develop eating disorders, or become alcoholics. Clearly, this is not meant to happen.
In other words, these boys cannot be truthfully represented in mainstream narratives of love and morality. Their innocent intimacy can only be represented as a sexual crime; if they were to be discovered during their libidinal explorations, even more so now in our age of near-psychotic sexual paranoia about children, one or both of them would be placed on the Sex Offenders Register and forced to undergo compulsory ‘treatment programmes’, which are indistinguishable in fact from the psychological bullying and vulgar brainwashing that dissidents from Stalinist ideology were subjected to in the Soviet Union. It would come as little surprise to find one, at least, of them yielding to the overwhelming institutional pressure they would inevitably be subject to (couched, of course, in terms of adult ‘concern’ to ‘protect’ children); quite possibly, the younger of the two, despite actually being the initiator, would feel impelled to adopt the abuse narrative being offered to him as his only escape route, and impugn the older boy.
White’s novel is enlightening largely because, insofar as ‘abuse’ features at all, it appears in the form of pre-emptively disgusted and narrow-minded adults, from horrified parents to deeply worried mental health professionals, rigorously suppressing non-normative expressions of erotic pleasure in the young. In Normotopia, the world of sexual normalcy, deviance is a disease contracted from an external source (invariably, a pervert/paedophile). But in Freud’s intelligent analysis of the sexual status quo, normality itself is a tyrannising regime aimed at coercing a universal, originary pleasure-seeking, innocent and experimental, into the straight-jacketed, joyless world of conventional moralism.
To return momentarily to the question of statistics: one would expect that, in a rational society, governments would carefully weigh up the social science data, including health and clinical research, pertaining to troubling phenomena, and formulate social policy guided by these findings. Whist this may be true of some phenomena - although I hesitate to isolate any particular social subject – there is one socio-political matter whose investigation not only routinely and resolutely abjures necessary analytical qualities, such as neutrality, proportionality, and refusing to rush to judgment on the basis of inevitably incomplete data; it also routinely ignores comparatively rigorous research data which fails to support its own preconceptions. All we humans can aspire to is fractional, partial truthfulness; only the Almighty can know the whole Truth. In a nominally secular society we might wonder who has endowed those who regard themselves as our Authorities with the stature of God when they claim to be acting on behalf of such capitalised Certainties. True scientists, at least ideally, seek intelligent, informed efforts to disprove their discoveries; only then, when such efforts fail, can the provisional label ‘truth’ be applied. Ideally in science, truth is never above contestation and even revolution; it is, or ought to be, a radically democratic and reasoned project. But fascists – ideological and moral fascists, fascists with a small ‘f’, not merely jackbooted neo-Hitlerites (as Foucault, I think, would concur) - seek only agreement with preconceived credos and received wisdom, no matter how injurious and murderous these belief systems turn out to be in practise. It is perhaps superfluous to add that these two perspectives – true, open scientific enquiry and fascism (with a small ‘f’) – constitute radically irreconcilable perspectives.
The small ‘f’ may offend some; there is an impressive critique of fascism, largely from within the Marxist tradition, which delivers an incisive and wholly plausible analysis of historical fascism as an extreme option chosen by deeply threatened capitalist states to discipline and crush insurgent working class opposition. During my youth, the term ‘fascist’ was used indiscriminately by people of my generation to refer to anyone they didn’t like very much, from embarrassingly un-radical parents to professors who were tough on you in seminars, to mainstream politicians. To the true socialists of that generation, people who had directly fought and defeated the vile forces of horribly real Fascist states, such laxity was an insult to all who had sacrificed their lives in the struggle against bloodthirsty dictators such as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Spanish Generalissimo, not to mention the many later Latin American and Indonesian mass murderers so beloved of the rulers of North America during their war against commies. I have much to agree with in these analyses; to accuse the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) of being a fascist organisation is being more than a tad sloppy with one’s vocabulary (although I remain to be persuaded that ‘authoritarian’ is an altogether inapt term). And yet I am still interested in why ordinary, intelligent people can be relied upon by ruling elites to abandon their material interests and throw their weight behind pernicious political hysterias. It was never in the interests of the German working class to support Hitler, or the Italian working class to support Mussolini, or the Spanish working class to support Franco. And yet they did, in sufficient numbers to ensure the secure domination of these genocidal monstrosities for long enough to persecute and, ultimately, exterminate large populations of ‘unacceptable’ human beings (today, the deathword might be ‘inappropriate’).
At the time of writing, it remains impossible to conduct anything that comes close to a rational public debate about the issue that has engulfed and professionally destroyed me, as well as literally thousands of others in the UK alone. Even I can tell that my particular life is relatively insignificant in the scheme of things; what has been inflicted on me only gathers significance by its multiplication – by the terrible fate of thousands of men and their many loved ones in the UK alone whose lives were demolished by the vicious witch-hunt known as ‘Operation Ore’, which the British police force proudly trumpeted as the brave beginning of a campaign to ruthlessly flush out armies of hidden child sex abusers. Countless paedophiles, they believed, were lurking in every school, every community, every internet chat-room, probably in every family (no one could be above suspicion). In my direct experience, far from netting dangerous child rapists, the police were merely destroying mild, ordinary, middle-aged men, many of whom (like me) were merely chronically sad, mired in intractable, insoluble mid-life problems about debt, cash-flow, strained intimacies and professional stagnation. For these men, seeking distraction from these intractables via impossible erotic fantasies was to cost them their livelihoods, frequently their homes and families and, ultimately, their lives; it should come as little surprise that men who have been hysterically branded as monsters in the local and national media, juridically stigmatised as society’s most despised and reviled scapegoat – the ‘sex offender’ - all too often, choose to end the agony by ending their lives.
These words are the unfinished, possibly uncompletable, product of massive trauma and stigmatisation, personal breakdown and inchoate, faltering regeneration. I have chosen the word regeneration carefully; ‘recovery’ implies a restoration of former health and vigour, returning to ‘normal’, the ways things were. The forces which converged to produce my ruination, and that of the other men I mentioned a moment ago (not to mention the thousands of others who were destroyed or massively traumatised as a by-product, such as partners, brothers and sisters, parents, children), mean that there can be no going back, no return to normality or even ordinariness. One finds oneself in another country, a ghost among the living, no longer a member of that great fictional entity, the ‘general public’, but a rejected and despised ‘it’.
Even though these scribblings may never be read by anyone else in my lifetime, it somehow seems important that they are set down, that a chronicle of the social hysteria and violent moralism surrounding – perhaps ‘manufacturing’ would be a more accurate term – this issue is recorded somewhere. Inevitably, this means that I am addressing an imaginary future readership, one that I fear barely exists at present and, to the extent that it does, may wish to keep its silence in order to avoid the howls of execration that will assuredly accompany any dissent from the new establishment’s views. One does not court personal, social and financial ruination lightly. But as this has already happened to me, I feel more inclined to articulate a dissident perspective, one that at present will be decried and caricatured (if it is not ignored) as a pervert’s charter, the deluded ramblings of a twisted sicko.
The issue, if my imaginary future reader has not already guessed, is that particular form of variant sexuality we like to term – which means, we like to rigidly and unambiguously nail down as - ‘paedophilia’. It is a term which has been taken up by zealous campaigners: zeal on this issue, in fact, is a compulsory person specification in the job description of any who seek positions in the new establishment, such as law enforcement officers, probation officers, social workers, NGO workers, even judges, doctors and nurses – to mean “evil monster.”
Lest anyone be under any illusions, these are not the writings of a brave man; like most people, I am weak, flawed and prone to opt for comfort rather than combat. But, like most people, I find it hard to walk away from an unjust, vindictive act of social scapegoating with a shrug of my shoulders, especially as I was not the only casualty. I can only speculate about the agony inflicted on the thousands of people who were sacrificed in Operation Ore alone; but I do know more immediately about how one of Ore’s progeny affected those very close to me – my wife and children, who suffered a degree of distress and dislocation which I cannot even begin to describe or quantify, save to say that it was incalculably immense. Ironically, it was the Guardians of Child Protection themselves who inflicted these traumas on my children (unless you count a middle-aged man’s private, undisclosed, personal erotic fantasising as a legitimate reason to smash two children’s lives to pieces). Even so, I write not in a spirit of rebellion or trail blazing: I do not envision publication in my lifetime. My wish, my dream, is that these pages may be of assistance to historians of the future – perhaps they are my imaginary readers – and I write more in the spirit of Winston Smith, Orwell’s ultimately tragic ‘hero’ of 1984, who attempted to immunise himself from the corrosive lies and violent coerciveness of Newspeak by keeping a personal journal, than of a Visionary, Leader or Politician (all of which now seem to me to be rather questionable occupations).
Writing is an attempt to preserve an area of sanity and freedom of thought in a time of mass paranoia and compulsory submission to torrential propaganda. The British psychoanalyst, Christopher Bollas, once wrote an intriguing essay called ‘The Fascist State of Mind’, which directly addresses the small ‘f’ fascism in us all. Bollas believes that this ‘little f’ fascist, the parts of ourselves which hold that (social/racial/sexual) purity and innocence is always being threatened by diseased or perverted outsiders (Jews, blacks, immigrants, paedophiles, in chronological order), can be recruited by charismatic demagogues in times of social dislocation to make mass fascism, the kind that carries a capital ‘F’, not only possible but inevitable. Before its ascendancy into cultural orthodoxy, Bollas suggests that it is an ethical obligation for all who can detect the fascist impulse, in ourselves and others, to critique it, to speak about it openly in the radical, Freudian sense of ‘free association’ (i.e., I will allow myself to entertain thoughts that simply occur to me, without deliberation, perhaps the personal dissent from received wisdom, rather than follow the path laid down for me by some Leader or Authority). Should this fail, should fascists become Fascists, in charge of society (or important parts of it), such dissent would become suicidal; only a careful, private chronicling of the Fascist State becomes a (dangerous) possibility. I think that a form of ‘F’ascism is now in our midst, and it relates to the predominant symbols of purity and danger in our times (children and adults respectively, particularly adult males). I feel a need to record some of this; I can only hope that Winston’s fate does not become my own.
(1) At the time of writing, our horrifically overcrowded UK prisons are bursting with despair into suicide, self harm, violence and obscene hopelessness.
(2) Edmund White (1982) A Boy’s Own Story London: Picador (1983)
Go to Chapter 1. Perverted Predators and their Venomous Victimologists
Go to Chapter 2. Marketing Revulsion and Making Up People
Go to Chapter 3. Analysing animosity
Go to Chapter 4. Deviant Desires
Go to Chapter 5. An Ethic of Sexual Autonomy: Toward Sane Sex.
Go to Chapter 6. Disgusted Decency: the Case for De-Meaning Sex.
Go to Chapter 7. Sexuality in 2D: Cartoon psychology and problem of human complexity.
Go to Chapter 8. Vile Bodies and Enigmatic Signifiers: The Sexuality of Gods with Arseholes
Created on 04/10/2009 08:30 AM by Editor
Updated on 01/16/2010 11:31 PM by Editor
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