Dehumanisation.

No, it’s not about smokers. It goes far deeper than that.

This article was the catalyst. It’s just another load of crap about a bunch of opportunists looking for easy cash from a bank by claiming past abuse by someone who is now dead and can’t defend themselves. Ho hum.

No, it’s the wording in the headline that caught my eye.

Doctor who carried out medicals for Barclays ‘sexually assaulted hundreds of females during unnecessary examinations in the 70s and 80s’

Females. Not ‘women’, not ‘girls’. Females. Might as well be talking about mosquitoes.

It’s something that went into my head just over a year ago and has been looking for a reason to exist ever since then. That headline made the connection.

When I started at Local Shop, my boss, and most other staff, referred to the toilets as ‘male’ and ‘female’ toilets. Well, I thought, they’re young and have been indoctrinated by political correctness. So I doggedly stuck to ‘ladies’ and ‘gents’ until it took hold, and that ‘male’ and ‘female’ nonsense is pretty much gone now.

I have so far refrained from getting them to refer to the toilets as ‘the bogs’ but I can feel my resolve weakening on that one. I am no longer the only one who refers to ‘cleaning the toilets’ as ‘mucking out’ though. Oh, I know it sounds terrible, a Doctor cleaning toilets, but when I was in agricultural research full-time I was handling big bags of pigshit and delving around in slurry and warm guts. Honestly, cleaning toilets is a piece of piss by comparison to that lot. I am not required to dissect and dismember the customers (although I have not been expressly and specifically forbidden from doing so as yet).

But I digress. Insidiously and quietly, men and women are being reduced to mere male and female. Just another species. Nothing special. No different from, say, trout. Or deer. Or pheasant. Or anything else the elite like to hunt for fun.

It goes way beyond the dehumanisation of smokers or drinkers or chubbies. The drones are too busy thinking they are immune to the hate to notice, but they are all using the terminology. They are dehumanising themselves and they won’t see it.

Male and Female. Black and White. Asian and Eastern European. This is a taxonomist’s dream, a species categorising itself into subgroups of its own volition. The species even pigeonholes itself based on non-biological criteria: Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Pagan, Atheist, Jain, whatever, and will voluntarily separate into easily-targeted geographical areas. You want to wipe out one or other group? Easy, they all live in this area over here…

More than that though. The means to wipe out a group has always existed. All you need is hate. It’s a centuries-old trick, you don’t need to push them into ghettoes first. No, there’s more than that this time.

Segregated. Classified, stacked and pigeonholed, and this time there were no stormtroopers and no cardinals doing the enforcing and rounding-up. This time people did it to themselves. Differences that don’t matter, matter now. Anyone different is subhuman and it does not matter which side of the line you are on, everyone on the other side is subhuman.

It’s almost subliminal in suggestion – no, it is subliminal. Hell, I was looking for it more than most because I’ve been trying to write a book about it and it is already in there. I didn’t see it even though I’ve written it in!

The main character doesn’t yet have a name. I have ‘coded’ him 10538 (ELO fans will know why) and can search and replace on that string when I have the perfect name.

10538 is in an interview with a woman from Services (they dropped the ‘social’ part a long time ago) and he is not seeing a woman. He is seeing a female. Hell, he even refers to her as ‘female officer’ and even when writing that part, I honestly didn’t see it. When he’s with the outsiders he does not ask why there appear to be no women, he asks why there appear to be no females.

It seems like such a small thing, a trivial thing. Just a little detail. A bit of political correctness, a word change here and there. One more word change among many – but this one raised no cries of ‘PC gone mad!’

This one passed unnoticed into common usage. And yet this is much bigger than a difference between referring to people as ‘coloured’ rather than ‘black’ and then switching to the opposite demand. Far, far more important than the earnest Lefties insisting that ‘Romany’ is now an insult and these people want to be called the ‘Roma’ (and no doubt, eventually, the ‘R’). Have you met any? They don’t give a flying fuck what you call them. They have much more imaginative things to call you.

Beneath all these silly banned words and goalposts-on-hovercraft things it’s safe to call someone these days, something far more sinister has lurked. Something linked to the destruction of religion (I know, the conditioning goes deep there too, but hold back on the anti-religion thing for a moment).

I am still an apathist. I don’t care if there’s a God or not and I don’t care what anyone wants to believe in. That is my position on the matter.

There is one thing religion does that science does not do. Religion considers humanity to be above the rest of nature. Science considers us as just another animal species. Both have dangers, but the science view has the bigger danger.

We hunt ‘lesser’ animal species for food and for fun. Science does not, in its pure form, deny us hunting each other for the same reason.

Religion, well, each religion still allows for those not of that religion to be considered fair game but even so, there is a feeling instilled (except in the most nutty) that they are hunting God’s creation, maybe not as perfect as they are but still capable of salvation. Even the most devout (again, except the nutters) would consider the hunting of those of another religion as a very different matter to hunting a deer or a partridge.

When you reduce people to the ‘male’ and ‘female’ of the dispassionate word of real science, the distinction between species as game vanishes. Humans are made of meat. I have suffered a deep cut or two and know this. I have seen my own potential steaks and had to have them stitched back in. In pure science terms, eating you is no different to eating a pig. It sounds horrible, doesn’t it? But in pure science terms, eating an animal which already contains all the nutrients your body needs makes perfect sense. It’s cold, it’s heartless, it’s a level of logic that would make Spock blanch but there it is.

If there is one good thing religion does, it’s to keep science in check. Many Trekkies think the world of the Vulcans is great – all pure logic and science – but if the Vulcans decide you are a liability they will kill you at once and think no more of it. It is the logical way to proceed. If you are disabled and need looking after, well, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few so off you go. Do we really want that world? That is the world of science.

The world of religion is no better, it’s just as bad in the opposite direction. Burning people at the stake because they discovered a herbal remedy for something. Just think, if the religions hadn’t done that, a mediaeval witch might have discovered penicillin. They had, in fact – they called it ‘mouldy bread poultice’ – but they never knew why it worked.

I’m still not sure where this is going. It’s just a feeling at this stage, a feeling I’ve missed something important and I’m inflicting my ramblings while I attempt to work it all out on you. Sorry if it’s a little confusing in your head now, but be assured it’s a maelstrom in mine.

Religion is control. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are ironically correct in that assessment – ironically, because they are one of the most tightly controlled religions of all.

Ooo, right, has anyone read Michael Moorcock’s ‘Eternal Champion’ series of books? Elric, Hawkmoon, Jherek Carnelian, Count Brass, others I can’t recall etc? He was churning out a book a month at one stage – but then he had built the fantasy worlds, he had interconnecting stories and his books were short. They were good stories though.

In those books he had the forces of Law and Chaos battling for control of the world but never allowed either to win. Law means order and predictability such as ‘the sun will rise’. Chaos means creativity and random thought but also includes the rider ‘the sun might rise’ which could be dodgy.

The world needs both. If law is all there is, we have a dull grey world with no innovation. If chaos is all there is, we have a world so fluid nothing could live on it.

This is how religion and science mesh. Both are parts of being human. Science in its pure form is poison. If I am hungry, the logical course is for me to eat your arm because that contains all the nutrients I need.

Religion in its pure form is poison. If I am hungry, it is because God wills it and I must remain hungry until food arrives or I die, whichever is God’s will.

Science demands action, even if the action is horrible. Religion defers action to a higher power and waits for that action even if it never comes. Somewhere between the two lies human survival.

The ‘powers that be’, for want of a better term, have  used religion as a means of control for a long time. If they are now abandoning religion, there must be a reason. If they are now pushing the taxonomic male-female thing, there must be a reason. It is a sea-change in their methodology.

What can it mean? I cannot pretend to know but I can pretend to guess.

Agenda 21 requires a massive reduction in world population. Religion, the control system of choice for millenia, cannot achieve this. Every religion demands that its followers propagate the message through children, each tries to out-breed the others. If you want a massive decline in global population then you have two choices. One global religion with no competition, or no religion at all.

Angola has declared one state religion. Saudi has another. Other countries have state religions, all different. Sorry guys, that does not fit the agenda, all for fuck’s sake and fuck you all.

So. Religious control is being dumped. People are put into little groups. all of which are convinced that all other groups are inferior. Then they are convinced that all other groups hate them. All other groups are male/females of another species. Subhuman.

Then the groups get shoved between countries and… friction and resentment and…

…population reduction. Big time. No state oppression, we are going to cull ourselves.

I have to admire the execution of this horrible scenario even while despising its intent. It is so subtle, so gentle in its subversion. So hidden in plain sight, as a trivial detail of political correctness while being their main weapon. The gun behind the smile.

There is more behind this, there are more gentle persuasions to find,  I am sure.

And no – Romeo was wrong about words. V had it right.