The first group to be exterminated needs no introduction: you all know that homophobia has been moving up the list of the most serious crimes for years.
Unlike other serious crimes, this one is defined broadly, covering the whole range between physical assault and simply quoting Leviticus or Romans in public. At either end of the range, the offender can expect no mercy – he’ll definitely lose something: his job definitely, his family probably, his liberty possibly.
Nor can such a villain expect to remain undetected. If he quotes St Paul at his most offensive in public, at least one listener will shop him to the authorities. That’s what civic virtue demands – we must all protect society from those seeking to undermine it.
But I bet you’ve never heard of gumphobia, and I don’t blame you. I’ve just coined this word for the same reason words are ever coined: new concepts, in this case forensic ones, demand new words.
You may be perplexed: ‘phobia’ means inordinate fear, and you’ve never heard anyone scream with horror at the sight of chewing gum. Wince squeamishly, maybe, but not scream.
Let’s kick etymology into the long grass, shall we? Someone citing Romans 1: 18-34 isn’t necessarily scared of homosexuals either, which doesn’t prevent him from being tarred with the homophobic brush.
Now that, following the advice of great rhetoricians, we’ve established the terms, let’s see the context.
John Wright, 54, spent 10 years teaching physics at Marlborough College, one of our top public schools. His professional record was spotless, which is probably why he was chosen to accompany his pupils on a school trip to Singapore and Malaysia. (You understand that parents able to pay school fees of £60,000 a year could afford the airfare.)
Both countries have laws that don’t exist in Britain: Singapore bans chewing gum, while Malaysia criminalises homosexuality. Commenting on those laws, Mr Wright summed them up in a terse alliterative phrase: “No gum, no gays”.
That blatant display of gumphobia (you can thank me for learning a new word) and homophobia (not to mention racism) couldn’t go unpunished. You’ll be relieved to know that it didn’t.
One pupil identified the offence for what it was and, doubtless with his parents’ blessing, dutifully reported Mr Wright to the headmaster. The transgressor was summarily sacked, with no elaborate inquiry deemed necessary.
According to a colleague, the racist gumphobic homophobe had some previous: “He said some other things, but none as bad as that. John was a lovely teacher and friend. He was known for making flippant comments and would often do that in front of pupils and senior teachers. But he didn’t mean any offence, it was just him being cheeky and silly.”
How naïve can one get? Britain is rapidly turning into a Marxist state, and in such countries joking is no laughing matter. But it’s good to know where the line is drawn: none of Mr Wright’s “cheeky and silly” wisecracks had been as bad as his seemingly innocuous “no gum, no gays”.
So it was for that verbal crime that he lost his job and any prospects of getting another one. He also lost his life: unable to handle the blow, the teacher hanged himself.
I’ve seen it all before in the country I left, hoping never to see it again. Not only did I observe it in the Soviet Union, but I myself suffered a similar fate, although self-evidently without killing myself.
Before emigrating, I had taught English literature at a specialised school and, part time, the art of translation at university. I lost both jobs because some of my charges did their civic duty and reported me to the administration.
The literature course included the Angry Young Men, English novelists of the 1950s. John Braine’s book Room at the Top was the flagship of that movement, and I recommended it for the reading list, as the curriculum required. Alas, that novel contained a few sex scenes, mild even by the standards of that time, never mind ours.
Still, when the parents of one pupil espied him reading that capitalist filth, they informed the administration that I was purveying pornography. Since I had already been reprimanded for making sly anti-Soviet remarks, the headmistress kindly gave me the option of resigning, so that she wouldn’t have to contact the KGB.
At the university, a student asked me about Finno-Ugric languages, and I explained that the most prominent users of that group were Finland and Hungary. They must have been the same people in the distant past, I said. But then they split up, and today one half lives God knows where, and the other God knows how.
Since Hungary was a fellow communist state, that little bon mot was reported up the line, spelling the end of my academic career. In Marxist countries, words are deeds.
It also works the other way, just about. When jokes are criminalised, we know we live in a Marxist state or, if you’d rather, a fascist one – distinction without a difference.
Marxist states may be carnivorous like the Soviet Union or relatively vegetarian like Britain, but both can kill. Back in the old country, not everyone of the millions murdered by the regime was executed, starved to death or sent to the uranium mines. Many died of strokes or heart attacks caused by public persecution and vilification, or fear of becoming an unemployable pariah.
Informing on friends, family and colleagues wasn’t just encouraged – it was demanded as a sacred civic duty. Failure to do so was itself a crime — the Russians referred to the appropriate law as “knew but didn’t tell”.
People responded in their millions, denouncing anyone uttering an incautious word or simply rolling his eyes when a sanctified name was uttered. Semiotic irreverence was as bad as the semantic kind.
Those denounced would be shot at the nearest wall under Lenin, tried and either executed or imprisoned under Stalin, turned into non-persons under the subsequent chieftains. Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Pasternak all died before their time as a result of public demonisation.
(Of the Big Four of Soviet pre-war poetry, only Mandelstam died in a concentration camp. Tsvetayeva killed herself after her husband and son perished in the purges; Akhmatova was silenced for decades; so was Pasternak, who died to the accompaniment of thunderous attacks in the press.)
Parallels with today’s Britain are screaming to be heard. Is anyone listening?
The differences from the Soviet Union are receding into the background, whereas the similarities are moving into the forefront. Our list of punishable offences isn’t exactly the same, but that’s immaterial.
Marxist regimes are glossocratic, using words to bully the population. What kind of words doesn’t really matter – they are simply the wires pulled to move the puppets. In the Soviet Union, one could get in trouble for implying that communist countries are impoverished; in Britain, the mandated code is different.
But the primary reason for it is exactly the same: the ruling elite putting its foot down on the throat of a supine populace.
Neither the little scum who denounced Mr Wright nor his parents, who probably egged him on, were truly offended by that “no gum, no gays” comment.
Nevertheless they felt obliged to act that way because totalitarian glossocracy demands not only benign acquiescence but active demonstrations of loyalty. Once glossocratic simulacra of ethics are accepted as real, those on the receiving end leave actual reality and enter a virtual world, one in which old certitudes no longer apply.
But our despots who use wokery as herd-controlling bullwhips will end up whipping themselves. As their scourges crack all over the land, people are fleeing in horror and disgust.
Last year, 257,000 people fled the country, and this year we may expect double that number. Those fugitives are the kind of people who generate much of our tax revenue, use private medicine – and pay exorbitant fees at public schools, such as Marlborough.
I suspect that most of those people have left for strictly economic reasons, but many also cite their revulsion at emetic wokery and the climate of fascistic tyranny it produces.
Public schools are struggling to find pupils, and most they do manage to recruit come from places like China. And, during my current tour of London’s private hospitals, I’m amazed to see empty waiting rooms. Squeezed by Marxist despotism, Britons can no longer afford private education and medicine, and those who can are running away in droves.
Things are only going to get worse – they don’t call Left-wing tyranny progressive for nothing. People who today lose their jobs for disloyalty to woke glossocracy, may lose their liberty tomorrow, and their lives the day after.
Or, as John Wright so tragically showed, we may not have to wait that long. RIP.