by Scott Masson
The death of Fidel Castro marks the end of an era. With the Cuban dictator’s death the last icon of Marxism is gone. Like all international socialist regimes, Castro destroyed myriad lives and deployed an apparatus of oppression, torture and death to maintain his grip on power.
Under his reign of terror, the truth also died, and not by accident. The Communists’ zeal for group rights for the oppressed not only entailed displacing the rich and powerful. It meant rejecting the sort of transcendent justice understood by wise individuals in the West since Socrates, and repealing and replacing the edifice of personal rights and freedoms built upon it.
Social justice for Communists like Castro was the justice of groups, not individuals. This is precisely what rendered it so oppressive. Individuals were deprived of equality under the law; as a consequence, the Cuban people suffered equality under the government. The need to preserve its standard of fairness was the pretext for an easily ‘triggered’ eternal dictatorship.
Truth cannot survive in a society where free speech is punished, any more than justice can. The Roman historian Tacitus noted that ‘fear is not in the habit of speaking truth; when perfect sincerity is expected, perfect freedom must be allowed.’
At the 2016 PEN Literary Awards, J.K. Rowling warned: “If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent simply on the grounds that they have offended you, you have crossed a line to stand along tyrants who imprison, torture and kill on exactly the same justification.”
Rowling was speaking to the rainbow coalition of identity group forces that had been seeking to silence then Presidential candidate Trump for offending identity group rights with his speech. Cultural Marxist defenders of these group rights had infiltrated the ranks of the literati, the media, and the legal and political establishment for decades.
In advancing group rights ahead of individual freedoms, Canada’s truth decay is now so far advanced that its freedom is being forcibly extracted by the government. University of Toronto Professor Jordan Peterson’s protest at Federal Bill C-16, which would criminalize those who offend the identity group rights of the transgendered, has just been matched by a similar motion by the Federal government defending Islam from criticism.
The plight of its citizens is more advanced in Ontario. The violation of the religious freedom of a father protesting the sex-ed curriculum, Steve Tourloukis, has just been excused by an Ontario judge because it served the greater good of groups protected under group rights’ activist Premier Wynne’s 2009 ‘Equity and Inclusion Act’.
But the prize for constructing a brave new world void of truth and freedom might have to go to Bill 28, which is on the verge of passing through the Ontario Legislature. It bears an Orwellian name: the ‘All Families are Equal Act.’ This Bill unsurprisingly scrubs all reference to distinct individuals in family law, i.e. mothers and fathers, to achieve equality for all parental identity groups.
It is unsurprising because in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, children are raised to regard the language of sexual promiscuity as normal, and terms identifying the traditional family as obscene. This manipulation of the language is a primary means for the World State to control its citizens.
In the process, Huxley’s World State maintains order by obliterating individual personality. People of the same caste are identical by design, and are encouraged to be promiscuous to avoid forming strong stable bonds with other individuals as individuals.
There are no stronger individual bonds than those we bear to our mothers and fathers. It is a major factor in our self-identification as persons. And what better way to eliminate this means of self-identification than to remove legal standing from those same words?
Perhaps by removing judicial oversight over the process of adoption in instances of surrogacy, as Bill 28 does. Governments seeking to protect the rights of individuals would probably legislate to get rid of surrogacy altogether as France, Germany, Finland, and Iceland have. Surrogacy contravenes countless International and European laws. That is because it inherently exploits women and children, and leaves children as commodities vulnerable to trafficking.
Huxley’s World State secured absolute loyalty by genetically engineering its citizens to be happy at its manipulation. Families were no longer necessary, because people were no longer born, they were decanted in surrogate hatcheries; and medically and psychologically manipulated so that they have just the right abilities to fill the social and economic positions the state conditioners required.
It was Aristotle who remarked that “the worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.”
Aristotle was free to say that.
Dr. Scott Masson teaches English literature at Tyndale University in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Romanticism, Hermeneutics, and the Crisis of the Human Sciences (Routledge, 2016) and numerous articles, including an entry on Romanticism for The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (Oxford, 2007). His convictions about Classical education led him to found a Classical school in Toronto. His commitment to cultural apologetics has led to a wide range of media appearances and speaking engagements. He also served as an Associate Pastor for seven years.
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