There's No Such Thing as Feminist Missiles

Wearing the badges of liberation whilst you plunge your population into untold suffering and cruelty is one of the oldest tactics in the book, it might work for a while but after some time the public will catch on to your grift.

Introduction- Part of the Problem

Scuttling forwards with a look of desperate sadness, Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada addressed a questioning media in what seemed to be an aircraft in Halifax, Canada. He was being questioned based on his previous flirtations with ‘brown-face’, an obviously bigoted practice which evokes deep historical hurt for much of Canada’s minority population.

“In 2001, when I was a teacher out in Vancouver…”, Trudeau spoke with the lifelessness of a sharply dressed fossil, “…I attended an end of year Gala where the theme was Arabian nights and I dressed up in a uh Aladdin and put makeup on, I shouldn’t have done that, I should’ve known better and I’m really sorry”.

Justin Trudeau and the hawkish con artists that carry his doctrine are frauds, devoid of principle and clinging onto a political niche meeting it’s imminent collapse in the face of an emboldened far-right tapping into the resentment it conjured and a weakened but radical, leftist alternative hoping to combat both parties.

This act of moral ignorance and calamitous delusion and the sputtering, childish apology which followed 18 years later demonstrates the moral emptiness at the core of the global centre-left. The stark moral abjection presented by the far-right and the often shunned principality put forward by disorganised groups of political outsiders are both unexhibited by the Trudeau brand as both would be contrary to the Neolithic world view of modern liberals.

The centre left as a whole needs to decide for themselves whether or not they want to take on the moral righteousness of political outsiders or sacrifice your integrity and join the insiders in the thrones of power, it’s time to stop this slimy grift and come clean.

Putting a pretty pink bow on the politics suffering and oppression has worn out of its effectiveness.

Part 1- Trudeau and His Subjects

Throughout his life, Justin Trudeau has lived in relative luxury, he along with his brothers were given shares in a numbered trust fund, by 2011 Trudeau’s company had amassed over 1.2 million dollars.

Justin Trudeau is the absolute embodiment of the rot at the heart of liberal of politics, the false morality, the lack of principles, the façade, the sickeningly upper-middle class back story and the way in which hordes of your adoring supporters will rush to your command.

There are 4.9 million Canadians living below the poverty line, when Justin Trudeau flaunts his compassion as he poses for a photo-op encompassing a refugee in a coat and then gleaming as if had been directed to, these are the people he is stepping on. These are the masses who suffer to maintain Justin Trudeau, his gender balanced cabinets, his dinner parties.

Throughout the lifespan of modern liberal politics there has been a sickening hesitancy to confront morality and the inevitable conclusions that it brings with it. Masking it in the illusion of morality and then posturing around your support for various downtrodden minority groups. It is almost entirely impossible to remain conscious and intelligent whilst ignoring the suffering that takes place everyday before our eyes, the Trump supporter blinds themselves with a worldview that seems as if it came out of the equivalent of the passages of a poorly written Abrahamic holy-book scribbled down by a coked up Steve Bannon.

Liberals are not so easily fooled, they have often been college educated and are often well-read, the narrative they construct is more sophisticated but no less complicit. They peer out of the windows of their newly-cleaned Volvo’s and watch their society ache. They watch the remnants of the part of society they once sought to ignore now suffering in plain sight, begging for justice and a decent stake in society. They watch foodbanks scattering throughout an alienated Western world, they watch towns and cities, sometimes their own, overtaken with addiction. It is no longer viable to dismiss this suffering.

The obvious moral course of action in this situation is to recognise your complicity and dissent against these power structures, become an outsider. But to do so would be to smash apart the very basis of the reality they exist within. So instead they must wash their guilt away with their own narrative, a narrative in which they are the vanguard of the oppressed. They watch Rachel Maddow and Trevor Noah and fantasise about how it must be like to stand with the oppressed. Political organisations like the Liberal Party in Canada and the Democratic Party in the US allow liberals to perpetrate this narrative by presenting dissent and resistance as, as simple as ticking a box and tuning in to a cable news show. Real dissent, is more than that, it leaves you as an outsider, often without a neat box to fit yourself in, often without approval from the crowd. Fake dissent can delude you into justifying your complicity but it can never challenge systemic immorality.

You cannot brand yourself in the flags of opposition to the forces of oppression whilst continually crippling your constituents. Those who claim to support the struggle against climate change cannot continue to participate in the existential crisis, Trudeau approved an unthinkably destructive crude oil pipeline.

Part 2- The Gaping Moral Hole

“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession...Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor and anti-Nazi dissident. A vocal opponent of Hitler’s genocidal policies he was imprisoned for 1 and a half years in Tegal prison. He was later executed in Flossenbürg concentration camp in connection with the 20^th July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

In his 1937 classic ‘The Cost of Discipleship’, Bonhoeffer laid out the concept of ‘cheap grace’ (as demonstrated in the quote above). Whilst written in the context of Lutheran theology and it’s place in secular society, ‘The Cost of Discipleship’ outlines the necessity of the discomfort and strength of will required to achieve morality. Cheap grace, is morality without the hard bits left in, it’s the delusion that you have little to no moral obligations to those below you and are therefore free to live a life of ignorant luxury, free from the unrepentant nagging that comes from even the slightest realisation of the scope of suffering within your society. It seems evident to me that in many ways modern liberalism in the existential crisis it finds itself within is very much subject to the concept of ‘cheap grace’.  

They want to experience the feelings associated with rebellion without the perspective-changing realisations that comes with it. Cheap grace is the easy way out, instead of challenging the oppressive structures that hide behind society they paint themselves as being in opposition them whilst driving through their agenda. Opposing fossil fuel companies and their plundering of Earth’s natural resources but supporting expansive oil pipelines. Opposing the untold suffering taking place in Yemen but ignoring that it is a result of a relentless bombing campaign by an unfeeling Saudi theocracy and continuing arm sales. Opposing the oppression of Canada’s indigenous population but defacing them by unequivocally lying to them time and time again.

Bonhoeffer, on the other hand, excepted the fact he would be relentlessly shunned, mischaracterised and eventually executed for his integrity and righteousness but this cost was minimal in comparison to the moral fulfilment acquired through dissent. We should all try to be more like Bonhoeffer.

Part 3- The Bloody Hands

“You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong no matter who says it or does it”

― Malcom X

The countless examples of hyperbolic bloodshed that has taken place because of countless lifeless, eloquent, liberal war hawks selling a concerned population on a pack of murderous lies are too numerous to count. The foreign policies of Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Barrack Obama have systematically dismantled the livelihoods of untold civilians, desecrating homes, wrecking businesses and places of worship and replacing governments with soulless puppet regimes. Their domestic policies have caused a mercilessly brutal carnage, lines of opioid pills lodged into the throats of the working and middle class. Austerity policies which stripped communities of an adequate safety net and trade deals which have torn apart the fabric of working class communities replacing their factories with large rusting corpses and replacing their moral purpose with an endless flow of plastic garbage.

The charade passed down from hawkish fraud to the next was quite simple, they would clean the reeking blood from their hands through a carefully designed theatre production, cobbled together by an assembly line of neoliberal con-artists. Complete with awkwardly performed musical numbers, gender balanced cabinets, performative speeches and a persistent mirage of progressive patriotism this production has distracted many liberals for decades now.

A missile which implodes on the house of Yemeni family is not any moral if it is ordered by a gender-balanced cabinet, the parents of a teenager who dies rationing insulin do not mourn any less if the administration that denied them that right is getting rid of Columbus Day and a family separated and detained by unfeeling state institutions does not suffer any less if they are segregated and degraded by a liberal.

But as the columns of power crack under the threat of an emboldened populist rebellion, the rose-coloured glasses are being torn to pieces.

The abject immorality of society is on full display and as the two remaining options rear their heads to a sector of society often content with shutting their eyes and ignoring the suffering around them, it is time to make a choice.

Part 4- Break from the Ranks

Just as the Conservative rids the nagging guilt and alienation built from the foundation of a vastly immoral society by cloaking themselves in a flag and saying the pledge of allegiance, the Liberal finds a comforting burlesque in an artificial cloning of resistance. There is no longer any credible way to shut your eyes from the suffering of yourself and the people around you. Society is in agony.

This seems obvious to a leftist movement which has been attempting to ring alarm bells for a potential existential crisis for decades but despite this we continue to bow down to the harsh will of a Liberal order equally complicit in the life-threatening charade as the political right, rationalising it through mathematically accurate but soul-crushing utilitarian ethics.

Not to long from the time I am writing this article former Democratic candidate for president and icon of the democratic-socialist left, Bernie Sanders took part in a mind-numbing interview with hyperbolically artificial talk-show host Jimmy Fallon.

‘One of the things I admire about you,’, Fallon began, ‘is that you support Vice President Biden, although you disagree with him on many issues’. Sanders waited for Fallon to finish and then began to state numerous correct criticisms of Donald Trump, then complementing Biden on his ‘down to earth’ nature and recalling the first time his wife met Biden.

Let me first state that I am no way stating that voting for Biden is necessarily ill-justified, but voting for a less-evil sector an of a undemocratic machine as a means of harm reduction is entirely different from stooping yourself to the level of defending the hawkish perpetrators of suffering and oppression.

Sanders, despite his progressive politics, often degrades himself to an unequivocal henchman of the Democratic machine, despite his numerous rebellions he folds under the pressure of an opponent with complete contempt for him and his movement. He seems permanently overcome with the spectre of Ralph Nader. For Sanders, despite his anti-establishment politics is under the pacifying drug of complacency and a violent aversion to the role of the political outsider.

Sacrificing moral integrity and honesty in a bid to prevent the admittedly awful prospect of second Trump term may be consequentially helpful in the rejection of harm but without strictly held and affirmed principles (even if they aren’t immediately convenient), the moral compass of political movements becomes rampantly degraded and enveloped by a spiritual malaise.             The cost of maintaining the moral compass of the left without erosion and degradation is being confined to the role of political outsiders. Finding scorn and intimidation from the establishment but hope and moral affirmation from the underclass we seek to uplift.

Both leftists and liberals must learn: there’s no such thing as dissent without rebuke, there’s no such thing as redemption or hope without constant action and there’s no such thing as feminist missiles.