What has all the activism then proved? Well the argument is that at least women are free to choose. This is a rather limp argument given that the subtext is that it is only the vigorous oppression of women pursued by evil, prejudiced men which has kept women down. In fact, the overt discrimination practiced against women has been a ‘post-facto’ discrimination. Recognizing that women don’t want to enter, or have no aptitude for, certain vocations, in the past, rules have been laid down that women shall be excluded. This rule is itself not the reason why women have not ‘advanced up’ the social scale. Women have not dominated simply because it is not in the nature of women to aggressively take on a leadership role, and it is the nature of men to do so. But this of course does not lend itself to political activism!

Consider the following: A poll conducted by the magazine Cosmo found that 68% of 3000 young women said they would stop working if they could afford to. Now one might retort that 98% of young males might say exactly the same thing. [‘After feminism, it's back to the little woman’, Maureen Dowd, The Age, 9 June 2000]. But this finding amounts to a huge rebuke for feminism. Why?

Because the goal of women advancing up the corporate ladder out there in the world of industry and commerce is the very battleground which feminism has marked out for itself. The feminist fantasy is that all these newly liberated women, formerly imprisoned in the home, are now champing at the bit to achieve upward mobility This is what women really want, the story goes, but they have been pushed down by men. The desire of a significant number of women to simply remain homebodies hardly sounds like a recipe for a social revolution. So, except that many women in our society must work because in today's socio-economic climate families need two incomes to survive, what really has fundamentally changed? A statistic like that quoted above demonstrates that the whole thing is being driven by elitist women for elitist women, not women per se. This is my whole contrary thesis in a nutshell.

After decades of strident feminism men still, as they always have done, dominate even in areas of particular relevance to women such as fashion design and cheffing. During the 73 year history of the Soviet Union, state ideology dictated that women were equal to men, and there was official encouragement for women to participate in traditionally male domains. The Russians were the first to put a woman into space. Women were highly represented as engineers and doctors. (Doctors actually had a somewhat lowly status in the former USSR due to the fact that, according to principles of egalitarianism - which in Soviet parlance meant that everyone should suffer equally! - they only received the same pay as factory workers.) And yet for all that, women have played practically no role in political leadership of the country. There have been few if any women in high positions of power either in the former Soviet Union or post-Soviet Russia. This is where real equality between men and women would show itself if it had any valid basis.

This vast panorama of so-called ‘change’ is actually so much ideologically endorsed window-dressing. Advocates of this thinking confuse external appearances with reality. People will point to a vast array of machinery for bringing about social change and portray this as change itself. Accordingly, the argument is that there has been a huge improvement in the status of women, a tremendous increase in the participation of women in all areas of human achievement. The reality is a little different. Women are really no more in the position of controlling our society than they ever have been. What people are seeing is not a fantastic leap forward for women, but only a leap forward in the ways we have thought up to try to bring this result about - whatever those ‘results’ may be, and this is usually the stuff of waffly, nebulous rhetoric! This is all so much rationalization!

The rationalization consists of any half-baked scheme dreamt up on behalf of some supposedly put upon minority group. The rhetoric and intellectual theory are considered to be ends in themselves, since reality is always subservient to PC ideology. The actual advancement itself is not the issue. In the case of Aborigines, the approach has been that if you throw vast amounts of money in the general direction of Aborigines this will lead to their social advancement. What happens though is that the government builds a house for an Aboriginal extended family and they proceed to trash it. No matter though the money has been spent and that is taken to be the object of the exercise.

Likewise, a whole raft of racial and homosexual vilification laws are seen as the cutting edge of campaigns to end ‘racism’ and ‘homophobia’. These laws are not going to change anything, except freedom of expression. They are considered to be a huge leap forward because society is seen as an essentially rational organism which will inevitably conform to ‘right thinking’. Unfortunately, this ‘right thinking’ exists solely in the realms of abstract theorizing.

Imagine a society where you walk around and see factories all over the landscape, producing planes, boats and cars. You would consider this society to be awfully productive and forward moving. Now imagine a society where you are told that this factory makes the tools we will use to make the planes, and this factory is producing the tools we will use to make the boats, and that factory is making the tools we will use to make the cars. In fact the tools are no good, and they are not going to make anything at all, but they give the appearance of progress. All the paraphernalia of social engineering which political ‘progressives’ employ to achieve their much touted ‘outcomes’ - consciousness raising, political platforms, affirmative action programmes, government funding, think tanks, politically correct speech, and all the rest, is just so much machinery which stands in place of, and itself comes to signify, the actual achievement of real social change.

THE ‘ME-GENERATION’ AND FREEDOM FROM REALITY

A left-wing friend of mine - yes, I have had one or two in the past, though I try to make sure I don't have any now - once tried to improve my mind (an impossibility!) by plying me with books by Rousseau, Voltaire and the like. Rousseau’s works are full of invocations of ‘the common good’ and the ‘general will’. One of the things Rousseau said was that ‘Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains’. His ideas about the Noble Savage were combined with the curious belief, completely confuted by history, that man is essentially good. This erroneous estimation of human character led him to formulate ideas of a ‘general will’ to which we all might be subject and, in his words, be ‘forced to be free’. Of course, it is all very convenient that the intellectual elitists who are the ones ‘forcing us to be free’ are also the ones who are defining for us what is the ‘common good’ and the ‘general will’ to which we should all be subjected. All this is typical of contemporary ideas of political activism and ‘progressive thinking’.

‘High-minded, idealistic concern for the oppressed’ was actually just another bauble of the baby-boom generation. This was the famous ‘Me-Generation’ whose chief characteristic was, and remains, total self-indulgence. They have a world view which reflects this self-centred attitude. Theirs was a philosophy of no constraints. Just as they had a philosophy of materialism and no constraints regarding morals and sexual conduct, so there would be no constraints in how they would choose to interpret reality. For the baby-boomers everything was always so easy. (It is a wonder Monty Python didn't do a skit on the 'ideological lolly shop'. "I'll have some peace please, and justice - I'll have two of those. Oh, and you'd better throw in some equality!". "That'll be two shillings and sixpence please.") The spiritual side of the baby-boomers consisted merely of the rhetoric of outward concern for humanity. The baby-boomer’s world view was both egocentric and egotistical. It was egocentric because the baby-boomers lacked a sense of personal meaning to their lives. It was egotistical because it all came down to pretensions to moral and intellectual superiority.

Our shallow materialistic society worships youth. The story during the sixties, and since, has been that young people have some ineffable wisdom not possessed by their elders. Now where this stemmed from is an intriguing question. It is apparent on the face of it that, given their limited experience of life, young people basically know nothing about anything (the sixties' era would seem to be a prime illustration of this). And why should they? They have had precious little exposure to the many and varied experiences of life and human relationships. What they have had in abundance is book learning. This education in political rhetoric and ‘brave idealism’ is casually and very superficially equated with wisdom.

This was the first generation of people in human history which had never had to struggle to survive. Even the parents of the baby-boomers had lived lives of struggle and deprivation. They had lived through world wars and depression. The pampered baby-boomers of the fifties and especially the sixties had all their basic needs for food, shelter and clothing met. The economic status of the fifties generation gave rise to the phenomenon of rock music, driven by the teenage dollar. The kindergarten revolutionaries of the sixties - the first generation of young people in history who had more or less complete economic freedom - were just spoiled brats expressing their angst at having no overarching purpose in their lives. When people are striving to survive - the natural state of affairs - the meaning of life comes down to where does the next meal come from. After all the material needs are met, then sets in the spiritual emptiness which manifests itself in a desperate quest for inner meaning, and not finding it, necessarily a deep-seated self-loathing. This was combined with contempt for the society which had failed so miserably to supply them with any real purpose in life. This included parents, institutions, the whole of western culture. The logical result - a complete and total rejection of authority. It follows that if you take a revolt against authority far enough you will end up with a quest for freedom from reality itself.

If progressive thinking cannot solve a problem it will simply be interpreted out of existence. ‘Juvenile delinquency’, for example, no longer exists. How was this achieved? The term is simply no longer used. Instead, we are now dealing with misunderstood ‘street kids’ whose quest for individual freedom is to be applauded and encouraged. They are in effect rebels against child abuse, which is to say parental discipline. Has this stopped kids throwing bricks through shop windows? No, but it has enabled us to reduce a social problem to intellectually understandable terms which allows us to chatter endlessly about supposed ‘solutions’.

Of course, sixties apologists deflect these charges by constantly bleating about the ‘selfless concern for others’ supposedly demonstrated by the protest generation. The basic line is: ‘Who are you to question my motives if I am doing good?’ But what good was done? The answer is a highly rationalized recitation of events. They were really working in their own interests. Marching down the street with a peace sign was just a lot of awfully good fun. It was straight out self-indulgence to be purporting to change the world, even if it involved character assassination of various people falsely demonised for one’s own purposes. One renegade from that era reflected that ‘we might not have changed the world but we got a few racists and right-wingers going’. Yes, that was it, wasn’t it? This was roughly equivalent to shooting twenty people dead on the basis that you are pretty sure that one of them was a child-molester. (Yes, I know, the politically correct don’t believe in capital punishment, least of all for the scum who especially deserve it!). Bob Santamaria used to accuse anti-war protesters of being paid by the Kremlin. Whilst I never believed that, in a funny sort of way what he said had a kernel of truth to it. Protesters got a buzz out of their activities which was better than mere monetary reward.

The ‘racist, right-wingers’ (so-called) were probably in the main entirely reasonable people labeled as such for reasons of convenience. So what that you have shot twenty innocent people dead! In Mao’s China many were killed on the grounds that they could be labeled so-called ‘right-wing, capitalist roaders’ - people who were otherwise committed communists. What this term actually meant, who knows, but for the victims it was a life and death issue. I call this the ‘broken window’ analogy. Which is easier: to put a brick through a shop window, or to be lumbered with the job of cleaning up the mess, and paying for it? The politically correct tirade against any and every traditional, moral value without regard to the justness of their assertions. Just so long as you can rationalize some half-arsed scenario of injustice and inequality no matter how whacky it might sound. This is like unjustly pointing the finger at someone and labeling them a child-molester. You walk away, and the innocent victim spends the rest of his life trying to clear his name.

Is all this selfish or selfless? Are you selfless if others have to pay the price for the edification of your ego? Take the biggest lefto-liberal cause of the postwar era - the Vietnam War. I recall ABC presenter Maxine McKew speaking of people who supported the Vietnam War as being on ‘the wrong side of history’. Now by what mental gymnastics do you arrive at the point where you can look at the outcome of this war and conclude that this country and its long-suffering people are on ‘the right side of history’? Of course Ms. McKew refers to the ‘glorious struggle of the people’ for national self-determination. The plain fact is these people are simply living in an oppressive communist totalitarian police state - a state of affairs chardonnay sipping, croissant nibbling, western liberals like Ms. McKew would not personally endure in a purple fit! Of course, the Vietnam War was supposed by communist sympathizing left-wing fellow-travelers of the sixties to have been all about ‘nationalism’, not communism. So, the millions who fled Indo-China in the wake of the communist victory there were fleeing from ‘nationalism’?? Apparently yes! Here we have one of the more flagrant contradictions of left liberalism. These types are forever obsessing about ‘racism’ and yet the subtext of anti war philosophy was basically that whilst no western middle class left-winger would tolerate living under communism - this was quite OK if you were one of these little yellow-skinned south-east Asians! In any other context this kind of thinking is supposed to amount to a racist mindset.

The story of the Vietnam War, in passing, conforms to the old story that victory has a thousand fathers, whilst defeat is an orphan. Anti-war philosophy in those days proceeded on the basis that communism was not the bogeyman that it was made out to be by more pedestrian thinkers. The fundamental argument against Vietnam was ostensibly a moral one, but it was basically founded on objections to the so-called Domino Theory. This was a geopolitical assessment of the situation - an entirely reasonable one, in view of the fact that practically every country in South East Asia had been under direct threat of a communist takeover at this time. There were five star generals in the Pentagon - not exactly heroes of the protest movement! - who might have agreed. But they would not necessarily have equated the rightness or otherwise of the Domino Theory with a moral assessment of the Vietnam War. Those who were out on the streets covered in sheep’s blood were making a fairly pointed moral statement which would ultimately stand or fall on the question of whether a war against communism was a war against evil - not just a judgment about geopolitics. The real reason why left-wingers took the moral view they did was because they shared the political philosophy of the communist side. They had the most benign view possible of communist ideology, especially if it was someone else but them who had to suffer under a marxist regime. Wherever possible, they downplayed any idea that communism was evil or dangerous. It would be gnawing at the vitals of their own world view to do otherwise. The philosophical tendency which says that you can bring about a world of peace, justice and equality through a workers’ (or peasants') revolution is the same mentality which says that you can bring about ‘women’s equality’ and ‘racial equality’ etc. through consciousness raising and political action.

It hardly need be said that had the Americans won a quick decisive victory in Vietnam before the protest movement of professional agitators got going, the war would have been remembered as a great triumph for western democracy. Who can seriously deny that a western orientated South Vietnam would today be a vibrant economically prosperous society, whose citizens would be able to live a half-decent life, if it had been kept out of communist hands. A point of crucial significance too is that subsequent history has revealed that the war was hatched and prosecuted by the Hanoi regime. The principal article of faith which drove the protest movement - which was manifest twaddle even back then - was that the war was all about a spontaneous uprising of the people of South Vietnam. The war was a conventional case of international aggression by the communist North against South Vietnam. (go to an article published in the Economist, February 26, 1983 'We lied to you') This alone justified American intervention. (By virtue of this being the official US government line on Vietnam, this essentially sound interpretation of the situation was simply ignored.)

Despite all the conventional wisdom about how we are supposed to remember the Vietnam War as a completely pointless exercise in keeping a people out of the grip of communism, commentators with a liberalistic political bent, routinely look at Vietnam today and look longingly for ‘economic reform’ ie. a movement towards creating a capitalist - a capitalist! - economy. They look hopefully for signs that the country is ‘moving forward’ towards economic liberalization, which is equated with prosperity and well-being for the people. In the meantime communism in the nineties has collapsed in a screaming heap. In the face of all this an ABC commentator looks at a world where capitalism is triumphant and communism is dead and smugly pontificates that friends of the latter are on the ‘right side of history’! Well the ‘glorious people’s revolution’ has landed a people under the heel of an oppressive political system when they might otherwise be free. If that is ‘the right side of history’ I give up!

And what was supposed to happen if Vietnam became a victim of so-called 'American imperialism' anyway? Would it become a colony of the U.S.? Would all its natural resources be hauled away by its American rulers? Would rich Americans move there and be pulled around in rickshaws by Vietnamese coolies? Would Vietnamese be shipped over to America to work as slaves on the cotton plantations? Did anything like that happen to the Germans or the Japanese after World War 2, to the South Koreans, the Taiwanese? Who? All those nations have remained independent prosperous countries as everyone knows.

In reality, the anti-Vietnam types knew all along that the people there would wind up living in a communist totalitarian police state. They were just crossing their fingers and hoping that it would only be mildly repressive - something like, the allegedly moderate communist regimes of Yugoslavia and yes, would you believe - Cuba! (despite evidence of mass killings by Castro and Che Guevara). This latter fact never seems to come into play when leftists rant about other Latin American leaders such as Pinochet! In fact, commensurate with the sublime conceit and self-absorption of these people, I really believe that the Indochinese communist leaders were expected to curb their worst political excesses when they came to power, in recognition of the support western 'college kids' and other 'brave idealists' had given them during the war.