WARNING : EXPLICIT CONTENT - NOT FOR THE SENSITIVE!
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The Price Of Orthodoxies
They can blind us to uncomfortable reality, hideous crimes, and powerless victims.
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The first response of most human beings to news of irredeemably evil acts is to ask who committed them. And if the answer makes us deeply uncomfortable, we tend to move on pronto. You see this most obviously on social media with news of an atrocity. Was the shooter white, a Democrat, a Republican, Muslim, MAGA, woke, trans? And where did the victim fit into these categories?
Our priors instantly color our moral judgment, and even our sense of the seriousness of the offense. And the temptation simply to deny what seems to be in front of our nose can be overwhelming.
As a passionate enthusiast for the Iraq War, I remember very, very distinctly when I first heard the rumors about alleged war crimes by US forces during the occupation. I assumed they were enemy propaganda and didn’t look into it any further. In November 2003, I even described Robert Fisk as “nutty” because the Spectator reported that he had “haunted the prison of Abu Ghraib ... exclusively searching for American brutality.” My view of the ethics of the US military simply precluded such barbarism. But more importantly, I didn’t want it to be true because it would destroy the entire moral rationale for the war, in which I’d invested a huge amount. It took the images of Abu Ghraib many months later for me to wake up.
The more intense the horror, the more powerful the instinct to doubt when you first hear of it. The sex-abuse scandal in my own church first numbed and incapacitated me. It took some time for me to see the totality of what had happened, and how deeply it had destroyed Catholic moral authority. Again, when I first read about, say, the Catholic school for deaf children where a priest had picked his victims among those whose parents did not know sign language, the feeling of horror was almost too much to process at all. And as with the Bush administration’s torture policy, it took even more time to grasp how this moral rot had been enabled by the very top.
This is why, I think, the scandal of Britain’s Pakistani rape-gangs, and the institutional negligence toward tens of thousands of underage victims over several years, has had a second burst of life. A serious national inquiry on the scandal was conducted years ago (its recommendations not yet implemented). But several towns with the worst records were omitted from that inquiry; and the sheer scale and depravity of what happened has finally begun to sink in. The precipitant was Elon Musk pontificating about the scandal on X, as part of his campaign to bring down Keir Starmer.
The details are hard to absorb. Think of the hideous abuse suffered by that extraordinary French woman, Gisèle Pelicot, sedated and raped by dozens of French men, organized by her husband. Now think of that kind of organized gang-bang — but make it close to ubiquitous in some towns and the victims under-age girls: raped, brutalized, mutilated, beaten, their lives destroyed. Yes, it was that bad. Tens of thousands of rape victims across the country. This is how one British judge addressed some culprits at sentencing:
You coerced her into providing sex to vast numbers of strangers. Up to four or five men would be invited to addresses so they could have sex with her ... Threats were made to kill her ... If she resisted, she would be coerced. Customers would become angry … If oral sex was required, her head would be pushed down, her hair pulled and she would be slapped. Strangers would burn her with cigarettes. A stranger almost throttled her. One deliberately scratched her vagina with his nails. One inserted a hairbrush into her vagina.
The victim was just 13 years old. And she wasn’t unconscious. In just one town, a “conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited” between 1997 and 2013. And in communities dominated by men of Pakistani origin, largely from the Mirpuri region of Kashmir, who held huge sway over the police and local community — just like the Catholic Church in Boston — cover-ups were routine.
Among the abuse concealed: gang-rapes of a single minor by 20 men; putting a pump into a girl’s anus so more men could penetrate her at once; and constant threats of murder of the girls or their families if anyone spoke up. In one case, a minor was arrested and charged with prostitution for having oral sex in a car with a john. When she attended her trial, she discovered that the magistrate in charge of her case was the man she’d fellated. No one knows the full number of minor girls affected, but it is in at least the tens of thousands, and possibly in the six figures.
Why was this allowed to go on for so long? For the same reason the Catholic Church covered up child rape for decades, and Dick Cheney covered up torture. Because the orthodoxies of Catholicism, of the American military, and, in this case, the multicultural experiment were respectively involved. These orthodoxies were sacred, their cultural power extreme. Catholic Boston, conservative America, and elite liberal Britain therefore defended their own orthodoxies for a very long time. And with every successful deflection of responsibility, the number of victims increased.
The truth damns the multicultural project in Britain. Rather than integrating these men of Pakistani heritage, insisting that they adopt the laws and mores of the native population, and treating them like everyone else, the UK elites celebrated cultural difference, enabled the siloing of these populations, bemoaned their own white working-class populations, and forbade any criticism of Islam. So if you called out this stuff, you were instantly called racist. After all, to accuse a non-white minority of raping white girls was a trope right out of white-supremacist fever dreams. And yes, it is a hideous racist trope — from the depths of the American South. But sometimes the trope is the truth.
In all the major cases, I’ve found no reported evidence of Pakistani or Muslim girls being groomed and raped — only poor, white natives. The justification among the rapists, moreover, was that these non-Muslims were sluts who were asking for it and beneath contempt. Racist insults were common as these girls were brutally abused. These were not just rapes, but hate crimes of a grisly sort.
It’s not true that the Brit media ignored the scandal. But it is also true that the space they gave it was trivial compared with, say, coverage of the George Floyd murder, thousands of miles away. And ask yourself: if it had been discovered that there were gangs of white nationalists singling out Pakistani-heritage girls for rape and abuse, with racist and Islamophobic slurs added for good measure, what would the media response have been? The question answers itself.
And if a white Brit had been found guilty of organizing the brutal gang-rape of a Pakistani 12-year-old girl, it’s hard to imagine him receiving a sentence of just three years. To get a sense of why the British public is pissed, it’s worth noting that last year, a white Brit was sentenced to a longer 38-month sentence for writing a social media post. More punishment for a white man’s inflammatory speech than for a non-white man’s gang-rape of a child: a near definition of wokeness. And you wonder why they call him Two-Tier Keir.
I think it’s the accumulated frustration at these things that has led to the new outburst of attention. Musk’s rescue of Twitter from woke control and censorship has allowed the story to gain new oxygen. Trump’s re-election and the collapse of woke credibility (if not power) has disinhibited many. The “racist” accusations have lost their power to silence dissenters, as the consequences of that silence have played out.
And this is a good thing for two reasons.
The first is that we haven’t had real accountability at the top for any of these atrocities. No one in the police or local government has faced legal consequences for their enabling of the gang-rapes. Many have gone on to have new careers in government. Just as the entire Catholic hierarchy escaped any legal punishment for their crimes of negligence and complicity in child abuse, so too did Dick Cheney and George W Bush bust open the Geneva Conventions only to be protected by Obama. One of the key architects of the torture regime, Gina Haspel, even became CIA director.
The second is that in all these cases, the victims were among the least powerful in the world: dark-skinned prisoners accused of terrorism, young boys whose word was usually dismissed in favor of the priest’s, and white, uncouth girls of the British underclass. I also cannot stop thinking of the countless gay and lesbian children with gender dysphoria who have been recklessly experimented on these past several years, fed lies by their doctors, and abandoned by gay and lesbian adults: all to sustain the orthodoxy of critical queer and gender theory. And you know full well that none of these cowards and quislings will ever be held to account.
So let it rip. Expose it all. After all, 76 percent of the British public want the new, more focused inquiry that Starmer just denied them: 91 percent of Reform voters, 84 percent of Tories, 71 percent of Liberal Democrats, and 65 percent of Labour voters. And don’t balk at legal prosecution of the enablers. It takes time to absorb horror, and hold it properly to account.
Orthodoxies are not without their legitimate uses. We need them to make sense of the world at times. But they need to be held loosely, and be capable of adjusting to new facts. When they become ways to deny reality, to exculpate criminals, to censor dissent, and to take the souls and bodies of the least of our fellow humans, we need to re-examine them too. Before they consume more victims.
